Fixing Trust Online
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Where do you go to find reliable information on Internet? Wikipedia is a good source but only for the most general overview of the topic. It is still subject to political infighting and many occasionally funny edit wars. It also does not cover situations where people's original research is ahead of the official sources. This is the case in many topics such as fitness or relationship advice, cutting edge theories or simply when the narrative lags far behind what many people realize first, as was the case with all things Covid. There are many sites which gather information from your friends or people you follow or a topic-based community, however most of these sites are very news centric and recent events centric. This makes them bad for the continuous accumulation of wisdom and knowledge or even understanding what the news was saying a year or two ago. Moreover, the algorithms underlying many of the major sites tend to be engagement driven which frequently runs counter to having reliable or even polite information. These sites have attempted to solve this problem by hiring massive teams of moderators and filtering away content they consider to be wrong as well as by banning users. This has been a massive disaster. In addition to alienating many of its users, the censorship on these sites has stifled discussions on many important topics. These challenges have been pointed out many times. Many people have raised concerns about negative mental health effects of social media use that are likely a direct consequence off engagement driven algorithmic optimization.
The question however still remains: if not engagement then what? what is the right way to filter information from the main sources you might be interested in? Is the news centric structure a correct way to mediate our relationships with each other? Is everyone attempting to become a micro celebrity a right way to structure our society?
I believe I have good answers to this to these questions which is why I've started YouTiki. YouTiki is a social wiki where you share information on a particular topic and then upvotes and downvotes. Each community’s upvotes and downvotes decide which comments rise to the top for them in the default ranking. You can also see what’s globally popular, filter only by comments in your community or look at most recent things if you really want.
YouTiki’s social structure is new and different from many existing sites. Instead of adding friends or follows you join a group. This is more important than a group on other sites because you can only be part of one group. You can also start a group, thus you can only be associated with at most two groups. These are meant to represent your primary community, your main tribe. Groups can only be at most 150 people and the creator of each group acts as an admin or moderator for all the comments made by the group members anywhere on the site.
YouTiki’s group structure is meant to encourage responsibility from the group creator for the conduct of their group members. It is also meant to encourage a tight knit community with formal membership that is not dependent on will you post a lot or not. Many online products claim to want to create a community but there is not enough support for the structure of groups as one would like.
Groups are not tied to topics. You can imagine that one week your community might want to make comments on childcare and another week they could have a discussion on programming languages. Those discussions however have a separate place instead of being piled into the same group chat.
All these discussions and comments are public and take place on their particular topic. A topic on Youtiki is a cross between a Wikipedia page and a Reddit subreddit where comments are ranked based on upvotes and downvotes feeding into TrustRank, YouTiki’s innovative ranking algorithm. Importantly there is no built-in time component for comment ranking. If someone's comment is a great explanation of a topic or subtopic then it could just stay at the top indefinitely. There doesn't have to be a need to revisit old ideas or to keep posting them if they work perfectly well. You can also filter by most recent if that what you really want.
Trust Bank really is the super-secret sauce all of you ticket that makes it all work together. Overtime it identifies both global and local community trusted experts based on them being upvoted by many people and other experts. An expert’s upvote are going to be worth more than upvotes of a person with no history. Also, people who have a similarity to you will be seen by you as people worth trusting as well. Overtime this will algorithmically identify people, groups and comments which are considered generally more trustworthy by the whole community or your local community, creating a much more reliable base of information that currently exists anywhere else in the world. TrustRank is personalized and is the default ranking option. If you wish to see what the globally popular comments are (or what a logged out user sees), you can use global rank.
I believe the Trust Bank will remove the need for heavy-handed moderation that has come to define the current social media landscape. However, as a secondary measure not meant to be used often there is an ability for group leaders to remove content by the group members that they considere to be unproductive. The size of the groups being under 150 people means the work of the moderator is very manage-able. Also, the appeals of removed content are done to a person one knows instead of a FaceLess bureaucracy.
It's the idea of helping to create a place on the Internet where trustworthy ideas win out seems like a good idea to you then join YouTiki. Joining early has lots of benefits such as a reduced subscription price or even a free one if you are one of the first 300 people. You can also get a head start on building up your group of community and increasing your global power (one of the components of TrustRank). It's similar to getting early on Bitcoin, except you collect social coins that can be useful for promoting one's ideas instead of currency.
This is especially useful to you if you have your own project, company or writing that you want people to know about. Promoting yourself or your projects is encouraged. You can make a single post on a relevant topic and let Trust Rank figure out the rest. Of course, your own rank would be higher if you make other contributions elsewhere.
What kind of content is worth posting on YouTiki? What do you know about that your friends might benefit from? You might have your own book that you don't necessarily want to keep reposting on news-centric social media, know a number of lifehacks, or want to discuss a complex research question with your peers. Reasonable and nuanced content that you don't want to be drowned out over time belongs on YouTiki. Of course, if you want to post memes, you can post memes, as long as they are dank.
Joining has a couple steps however. In order to establish a good foundation in culture on the site, YouTiki right now is invite only. It is an exclusive club, but it has the capacity to grown bigger. I, as the founder, will be giving out invites to people I know and trust. Once you get an invite and create an account and join the appropriate group you can create your own group and then you have 149 of your own invites. You can send them to whoever you want, however it's worth remembering that inviting people who post hostile or anti-social content would reflect badly on your own score as measured by TrustRank. Of course, inviting reliable people improves your score as well. Use your invites wisely to build your tribe!