- Articulating the problem and its causes very well, better than what I did in the footnotes below. If you have an interest or expertise in the business models of the Internet, content publishing, economic analysis of advertising, or the promotion of "commons" approaches to human betterment (e.g. Wikipedia, open source, creative commons), talk to me!
- Designing a internet-wide, independent collaborative filtering layer that let's people share negative feedback with a single click. Imagine the satisfaction of hitting a trash can button when you are presented with garbage, and knowing that there is now a cost to publishing garbage. This adds a much needed negative feedback loop to the web[3]. I have a unique (as far as I know) idea that both solves the problem of "One person's garbage is another person's gold" and makes the system un-gamable. If you have interests or expertise in cluster analysis, statistical classification, collaborative filtering, talk to me!
- Promoting what I call the "Users First" covenant": A list of principles that internet sites and services adhere to.
- Promoting other solutions to the problem, work being done by other teams, such as
-- a consumer-friendly web browser that puts privacy first. No need to install any extensions. Open source, non-profit and in no way tied to advertising revenue. Adheres to the Users First covenant.
-- A way for publishers to get paid by their readers rather than advertisers. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009959
I actually have more than a half a year of free time to work on this, because I quit my job (and my cushy life) to work on this. You in?
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[1] It's bullshit that advertising gives us stuff for free. In fact, it makes everything way more expensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
[2] Since advertisers pay for much of it, sites and services are incented to trick us into clicking on links, to show as many ads as possible, and to invade our privacy for the benefit of advertisers. Users do not come first, advertisers do. We are the product, as they say.
[3] Viral dynamics rule! The web only has a positive feedback loop (people linking to pages, sharing URLs) and lacks the dampening effects of negative feedback. This let's good things as well as crap spiral to viral popularity. What we need is a way to downvote or flag garbage on the web in general (not just within communities such as HN), and this certainly can't be owned or operated by a business that takes advertising money (see [1]). It needs to be ungamable, and take into account that one person's garbage is another person's gold.