From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2003 - 17:34:28 MDT
Having observed this going on for several years now,
and having myself started quite a number of both the
major discussion threads and also several truly
spectacular flame wars, my only real gripe is how long
it takes to dig thru all this mess to get to the
interesting news and thoughts.
Having said that, I would like to point out one
overwhelming fact: most of the flame wars are
recursive and self-sustaining. Most of them appear to
start out with someone making some statement that
offends someone else. The someone else then escalates
to claiming that the statement in question is SO
OFFENSIVE! that it has no business being there. Then
the first person - or perhaps a third party - comes
back with a further escalation to - "Who are YOU to
say what should be posted?"
So, a minor issue that could have been simply ignored
or commented on in a neutral, non-offensive tone as
being inappropriate to the EXTROPY list triggers a
whole passionate, often vitriolic series of
escalations to the point of name-calling and
not-so-vieled threats of exclusion or expulsion.
This clearly has a chilling effect upon people who
might have something interesting to say but have no
desire to be drawn into such silly contests. When
you're expending energy dealing with one of these
useless epiphenomyna, then that's that much less
energy you have to put into something productive. One
shouldn't have to worry that much about what other
people will think, especially on the EXTROPY list,
which is by definition concerned with what is new,
exciting, controversial. If we're going that route,
then we should just appoint a censor, and submit
everything to him/her.
With regard to the problem of filtering, ISIL has
taken over a libertarian news group recently which
uses a rating system for posters, based on the ratings
that other readers make for their posts. Perhaps a
dual rating system might work even better. I'm
thinking about a cumulative rating system for authors
of posts, together with a rating of individual posts.
This might cut down on the wasted time.
However, often it is the very people who are most on
the cutting edge - almost by definition - who will get
the lowest ratings. So, a possible third element
would be the flatness or spread of ratings. If a few
people like some post a LOT, then that itself may be a
noteworthy fact. If someone is so far out that NO ONE
can appreciate them, then what is the point of the
post anyway, except for saying it for the record,
perhaps, which I do occasionally, knowing that no one
will agree with me (but I know that I will often get
to say years later "I told you so!").
The best method, of course, would be that employed
first by FIREFLY, before the Borg ate them and their
work disappeared or got patented away from public use.
FIREFLY's system asked you your preferences over a
wide range of fields and then, when you were looking
for a book, movie, restaurant, date, whatever, it
would look for profiles otherwise matching yours and
assign weighted ratings to the choices it returned, as
in, "People similar to you in their prior choices
liked this book."
Amazon uses a similar system, as in, if you liked
this, then you will probably like ....
(In the early '80's, I designed a much more
sophisticated system that encompasses both what Amazon
and FIREFLY did and would be a thousand times better
as a filter, but so far no one has been interested in
even hearing the details on it. But that's another
subject. NIH uber alles.)
Perhaps someone who is into JAVA or SQL or some other
server-side programming could either write or find an
open-source model for this that the EXTROPY news group
could use?
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