

Hypothes.is: Taking peer review to the Internet - tilgovi
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dwhly/1239089754

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10dpd
This is a great idea, however there is fundamental flaw in their hypothes.is,
a flaw that is inherent in all comment-based sytems (Hacker News, Digg, Redit
).

The flaw is to score people based on past comments, thereby creating a
meritocracy that will lead to those voices that need to be heard the most
being lost in the noise.

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tilgovi
That's only true under the assumption that popularity is the only factor in
visibility. On hacker news that's not even true entirely because there's a
temporal factor: new postings remain visible for at least a short time.
However, there may exist other possible ways to artificially increase
visibility in order to promote diversity. Some of these methods are the
research subject of Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan who is listed
as an advisor.

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TheBiv
I enjoy the spirit of this idea!

I simply fear that clout will ultimately drive it's growth, rather than the
desire to correctly inform!

Maybe impart a "prick" score (for lack of a better term) that people can rate
a comment based off of how accepting the author is at discussing their
viewpoint rather than denigrating the person who has a "wrong" answer!

Best of luck!

-Ben

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tilgovi
My understanding is that attempts will be made to algorithmically promote
diversity and to reward/punish social behaviors in such as way as to
discourage discursive protectionism.

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keeptrying
The founder previously founded GetThere.com which sold to Sabre for $757
million.

Wow.

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keeptrying
Initially I thought this would be a free system for paper publishing which
would let all new papers published to be available in public domain.

Why doesnt such a thing exist by the way?

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mtraven
Well, there's <http://arxiv.org> .

And of course, anyone can put anything they want on the internet, which is a
form of publishing into the public domain. If you mean, publish in such a way
as to get read and become part of the academic literature, that's another
story.

~~~
keeptrying
I'm talking about fully peer reviewed with conferences and the whole shebang
... Its really the only way to get that knowledge out into the public domain.

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kandu
It's a great vision, but their website does not disclose how will they
implement it better than existing similar projects.

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CarlBeckel
Their response to this concern on the FAQ at Kickstarter is as follows:

"No one has yet made an effective attempt to leverage the strengths of the
Internet to improve the quality of information we consume, at the place that
we consume it. In essence, we are bringing crowd-sourced peer-review to the
event horizon where information is produced—the thousands of news sites and
blogs on the Internet. To encourage quality, we will employ a reputation
framework.

We’ve closely researched over 20 current and previous online projects such as
ReframeIt, SpinSpotter, ThirdVoice, Stickis, Fleck, ShiftSpace, WebClipper,
zBubbles, and others – as well as offline efforts such as FAIR and Media
Matters. All have key conceptual flaws which ultimately are or were fatal
limitations on their effectiveness and scalability. Hypothes.is is a direct
result of our conclusion that previous efforts have missed the essential
ingredients of success, and has been designed to address each of them."

~~~
mtraven
Or http:://marginize.com , whatever happened to that?

