From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 17:40:05 MST
> (Hal Finney <hal@finney.org>):
> There's a review of Cory Doctorow's novel in the New York Times at
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/review/009ANTRIT.html.
>
> As far as "whuffie", we do have a variant via the web interface to the
> list at http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=67. As you read
> the messages you see not only a picture that the poster has chosen to
> associate with himself (a very big one for Lee Crocker!), but also the
> poster's "karma" score. Anyone can vote positively or negatively for
> another person when reading their posts. The postive and negative
> values are apparently totalled separately.
Hey, I'm a graphics guy; I don't like low-res tiny images :-)
> The karma scores seem somewhat counter-intuitive. It's not surprising
> to see Anders Sandburg at +235/-1 or Eliezer Yudkowski at +123/-1.
> Amara Graps seems to be the champion at +273/-4. And apparently Harvey
> Newstrom hasn't gotten anybody mad at him, at +157/-0.
>
> But Spike at +4/-213? That seems a little harsh. Lee Corbin at +4/-305,
> Lee Crocker at +1/-52, John Clark at +5/-224? These are some of the
> people I find most informative and stimulating. Rafal Smigrodzki at
> +1/-296, Robert Bradbury at +17/-187? I don't really get it.
Well, I guess the big picture does evince a /bit/ of ego...
But Spike? Who has Spike every annoyed, except possibly a few
folks utterly devoid of a sense of humor?
> Hopefully the database is keeping track of who is voting for whom.
> It would be interesting to use the data in more sophisticated ways,
> such as looking for clustering effects. Maybe all those negative karma
> points were applied by a relatively self-contained group. It would be
> interesting to see more about how the scores have evolved.
I'll go ahead and give away a device of Doctorow's that Michael only
alluded to, but that shouldn't really detract from the story: the
people have both "left-handed" and "right-handed" whuffie; the former
is the esteem of those folks who are unknown or not particularly
esteemed to you; the latter is the esteem of those to whom you have
accorded esteem. It would be interesting to see if that -52 is from
people whose opinions I don't care about, or if I'm really ticking off
my intended audience.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Mar 11 2003 - 17:50:56 MST