Post in Participation Inequality

2007 Aug 14 05:53 UTC

Thanks for your posts, Richard and Steve! I really appreciate the level of
thought that has gone into this topic!

Richard nicely summarised both my points
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/6gPpYFMezpW6vxzIOmVXTo

  1. I fear that any recommendation system will become an
     agreement system.
  2. I think blogs will overcome this situation.

There were three methods proposed to overcome my apprehension about
recommendation systems:
  1. Limiting choice,
  2. Rating individuals, and
  3. Downplaying the users' voting effort.
I favour 3 the most, as it comes closest to my ideal of dropping the idea ☺ The
first two options still have the problem of votes being the same as agreement
rather than interest; even in the simplest option the vote is either agree or
disagree (ignore).

The problem with getting someone to blog is a major one, but it is one that
(should) fix itself. The groups that will have the problem of too many posts
are large ones, where there is a lot of activity. (We are all assuming that
activity is correlated to interest). As the group is large, there is a large
number of people who could potentially write the blog. Because there is a lot
of interest in the group, the writer will get a heap of attention, so we can
rely on Adam Smith to pull us out of the mess. (I do not have the right Smith
quote to hand.)

Trust networks were suggested by Dan, and criticised by Richard
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/74D0D5PjZfQ9mIyC5vZpn3
I would add another nail into the coffin: most users do not post.

Steve suggested counting the number of replies to a post.
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/4U1xGnhiZ7AO96G5XNnenI
There are huge problems with this:
  * People do not understand threading,
  * People do not understand threading, and
  * People do not understand threading.
For this reason, GroupServer does not have a threading view of a topic, and
does not use threads to determine if posts belong to a topic!

The rest of Steve's suggestions *mostly* focus on one thing: giving the user a
better idea of what is going on. That is a *M*A*J*O*R* goal of mine ☺ The
recent changes to search and the topic lists
  http://groupserver.org/r/topic/6CDpVzg8RLNt9nFFVdRRfu
were made so this was possible. By providing information, we feed the best
pattern-recognition and summation engine we have available to us: the user.

There is plenty of information that we could provide but either do not collect,
or do not display. In the former category is view-information. While this would
only be applicable to Web views, it would still be worth displaying. In the
second category is the number of unique authors in a topic: it is
computationally expensive to calculate this for every topic-list.