A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
1) logged in users can vote for what they like, both up and down. A profile is built identifying other users who vote like you, and so your vote influences the post prominence for those others more than for other users who have different voting patterns
2) anonymous users get post prominence based on a smattering of different group votes
Its a bit like movie recommendations. In this way, trolls will quickly be grouped with other trolls and those who consistently vote up articles they like will see post prominence from like-minded devotees, and a single board can have a wide range of subjects that end up not needing categorization because they are self-organising.
(Would this work for, say, HN?)
My thinking on Hubski has been guided by the idea that groups should form and dissolve as people wish, and that Hubski become a multitude of overlapping and ever-changing groups. As user following-relationships are color-coded (http://hubski.com/about), you tend to build a familiarity with a number of people that are connected with you this way.
IMO it's not just content that should be the result of choice, but also how familiar you want to get with members of the community. I'm currently doing more work to this end.
In a nutshell, I feel effort is best spent enabling users to build and break boundaries and groups as they are wont to. -It's not as important that you behave as I would like you to, if I can easily avoid you.
This implies that free speech is less about the content, but about the freedom to assemble and exchange information. That is, freedom manifests itself in self-selected groups of peers, who can then moderate the content of their communities.
"Free speech" is not a guarantee for a platform for any particular message, but rather a promise (by political powers) not to suppress free private exchanges of information; while public spaces (streets, squares, airwaves) may still be moderated.
I think the tendency is to make the enforced rules light; we like to tip the balance in the favor of more freedom as much as possible. That said, this works best if individuals make an effort to be genuinely concerned about the interests of others in the group and therefore draw much more conservative boundaries around their own behavior.
In other words, groups need lots of social restrictions on behavior to work well, but it works best when each individual has a lot of room to decide what those boundaries are. Only the egregiously bad behavior is formally addressed as a group.
Sometimes people don't realize there are two boundaries going on and rationalize rude behavior under the umbrella of freedom or free speech.
Scoop was the original code base for The Daily Kos if I remember rightly. I took a swatch at the sources but no signs, its probably been boiled down to bones now.