A Vision For Better Content on The Internet
or what content is a great fit for YouTiki
This is one of several posts I am planning to write about the current bad state of social media and how it can be improved. If this topic is specifically interesting to you, please
The Internet is a big place with lot of great information about everything. But you can try and find almost anything, you almost always wonder: how reliable is this really? The scourge of unreliability is bad enough that the proper name for today's day and age is "Post-Information Era", as i have remarked previously.
The vision I have for a better Internet is a place where every piece of content comes bundled with context that helps gauge it's reliability and congruence to you.
So I have built YouTiki because a lot of content feels like it's missing from the net, or, if it's present, it would vastly benefit from either TruskRank or the kind of organization that YouTiki provides. YouTiki is not yet the full vision of how the internet needs to evolve, but it is a big step. There are many examples of content that could benefit from YouTiki.
1. Various personal health and biohacking related content.
"Biohacking community" is a somewhat confusing term. This does not mean people brewing potions in their basement, rather a community of people interested in improving their health and longevity in various ways, frequently using newly available technology. Biohacking used to be more associated with nootropics, but then it became clear that nootropics are not as strong of improvement as they promised, although this varies quite a bit based on a person. When I have been to biohacking meetups (mostly around 2018-2019), they have had a wide range of ideas. From my favorite of paleo diet to salt tank floating, from structured water and to even presentations about up and coming gene editing technologies. The community casts a wide net. However, it's quite hard to get the sense of which ideas really work and are cost effective. Many people have products they sell with various levels of celebrity endorsements for them. This is all complicated by the fact that these ideas can be solving specific problems which may only exist for some people. In addition to "biohacking" community, there is also a lot of recent interest in posture, trauma, meditation and related issues, which are likely very significant to a number of people. There doesn't seem to be a good central place for building up people's knowledge about this.
A lot of this information does get posted on other platforms, but they are frequently ephemeral and are not good for a discussion that might span a few months as people try out some new life hacks. So, a biohacking community needs to create both a distribute and authoritative source of knowledge and could specifically benefit from YouTiki.
2. A place to discuss projects.
A multi-month long project or a company is frequently built on a interesting core idea along with many decisions that have to be made along the way. Many times, a project can benefit from a persistent place to discuss it's inclinations or philosophical stances. Ephemeral websites lack a consistency. The closest current example today, is each major software company having their own forum, which sometimes have good ideas among a pile on not-so-great complaints or out-of-scope features. Most game companies likely maintain a advisory group of committed players and content creators to help with more complex game issues. This once again underscores a need of identifying experts automatically based on community like patterns, just like YouTiki's TrustRank does.
3. Tracking general opinion on a topic over time.
Occasionally, a gimmick Twitter account such as "COVID one year ago" pops up and reminds us that the media's opinion flipped back and forth on many aspects of this topic. Such gimmick accounts do a good job pointing out the situation, but the fact that they exists seems to point to many limitations of the existing platforms. YouTiki has a structure of topics. If a particular topic has a consensus opinion on it, it will rise to the top of "Global Ranking" and potentially to the top of many people's "Default Ranking." If the opinion on the topic suddenly flips, the new opinion will need to gather enough upvotes to defeat the old one. This is possible, though may be tricky depending on how entrenched the previous opinion was. The previous consensus becomes the second top post. This creates a natural record of what the consensus *has been* in the past on this topic, which helps puts the history of the opinion in context. The ability to change one's mind in the face of new evidence is good, however it's important to acknowledge what one's opinion actually was in the past, instead of lying about it or hiding it from view.
4. Reviews of the everything which are not so easy to game.
I recently was in a need of an electrician. A legitimate looking paper pamphlet came in the mail with "verified" and "best picks" recommendations for all home improvement services. I looked up one these "best picks" companies. Tons of reviews on Google with 4.5 average stars. Looks great. I look them up on Yelp, they have 2 stars. Reading the extremely mad Yelp reviews, several people theorize that they pay to get lots of Google reviews and this can somehow fool the third party "best picks" company.
As the social fabric decays, a number of businesses cross into a borderline scam territory with aggressive sales tactics and questionable hidden prices. Yelp is a decent tool, but I doubt it's going to win the battle against scams in the long term. On the other hand, many perfectly honest businesses suffer because they don't have enough reviews on all the sites. I ended up going with a recommendation from a friendly neighbor. The fact that I had to resort to offline questioning is a pretty big fail for online informational organization.
On youtiki, your community or it's nearby communities may have lots of very useful information about local services, so you can make an informed decision based on very little reviews if you trust the people making those reviews.
5. Actual aggregation of personal experiences regarding a particular broad idea.
You want an answer to the question: from your friends about how bad has covid or vaccine side effects been for them, really? Each person may share their views on this when they encounter it, but there's no easy way to aggregate this. Search sort of does a trick, but it's not stable. Polls can do this in a very limited sense, but if you want complex answers they will not suffice. Bots may be extremely prevalent on many free to use sites. Complicating this issue is the problem that a lot of personal experiences or questions regarding these issues get heavily sensored. At Youtiki, you might create a topic "covid experiences" or "covid vax experiences" and have some sense of what the situation is either in your friend group or globally.
6. Complex and on-going debates on scientific topics.
Let's say you are a researcher in a complex up and coming topic, such as AI, crypto, the future of governance and you wish to advance the state of knowledge in this area. You want to primary have a conversations with other researchers and perhaps occasionally field questions from the general public if they are important enough. You want to uplift content that advances the field as well as the people who built this content. If your primary community is built around your research topic, then one way to think about TrustRank is that it is automated peer-review. It can both identify your peers based on your interests and aggregte thier opinions in a coherent manner. Of course, this will be easier to do if you have a number of like-minded people in your group or tribe.
The topics above, among many others, is what Youtiki is built for *right now*.
However, it is a stepping stone to something even greater. What i imagine is a glorious internet future where you can actually Trust the information on it. You don't simply see a parade of hot takes ever disappearing into the void of "last current thing." Instead content needs to come with data that can easily bring up overall context on the topic - what do people close to you think on it, what has been the opinion of the poster in the past, what is the actual consensus on the subject. "Official context" is a horrible substitute which ends up perpetuating the bias of the platform itself and doesn't scale. Much of this context will be handled "under the hood" through TrustRank ranking content, however some context will be brought to the end user.
Once I have started to look at the internet this way, i almost can't unsee *how* everything needs this. Reviews of businesses? Important to surface ones from people you trust. Complex research topic? Let's bring up multiple competing viewpoints. In addition to worrying about trustworthiness of information, the underlying *social cohesion* of our relationships and groups needs to be considered. In other words, merely having trust in online information is not enough, it's important for people to have trust in each other as well.
The Big Problem is Trust. Let's solve it.