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Request for comments: design sketch for sofiechan profiles and vouch graph

anon 0x43b said in #2528 1mo ago: 77

It's time to talk about the next two big features of sofiechan: profile pages, and the vouch graph. This stuff isn't built yet, so I'm sketching it out to get the vision clear.

The idea with profiles is your nyms (both anon and face) will have profile pages listing your posts under that name, and any other details you reveal about yourself. Your profile page is like your miniblog, with your little slice of the public conversation.

For anons, that won't be very useful. But we're also going to add persistent named face profiles. That way you will be able to have a persistent identity, and group your posts under that persona in one place. Of course you will at any time still be able to post as a fresh anon, or run multiple faces in parallel on the same account, either way carrying over your reputation and privileges.

So far this is still just basic 2003 tier social media technology, so why bother? The other half that makes sofiechan hopefully interesting is the anonymous vouch graph and social inference engine.

You are going to be able to vouch for your friends and posters you think will contribute well, and also to blackball people you think will be bad. With profiles and faces, these will start to have actual meaning. This will at least strengthen the ability of a core community to make sofiechan its social territory and defend it from bots and hostiles. But ideally it will also actually identify people we respect in a relatively consistent way, identify people we should not respect, and make it possible to rapidly pull people up who deserve it.

You will be able to do this with anons too. Does a vouch on an anon mean anything separate from post votes? We'll trust you to make them meaningful. It's your job to have good taste, and our job to be able to tell that signal apart from noise.

But general vouches are just the beginning. In the longer run, it will be a much richer set of traits. For example "is this person really an expert in X" "does this person really have this virtue" "are they really as smart as they claim" etc. That is, vouching on profiles become the basis for a rich set of crowdsourced certifications about anons which can be revealed at the discretion of those anons, on any of their nyms. Do you see where I'm going with this? "Anonymous verified X says Y" "This anon is certified good for their word in business", etc.

The general vision is a social inference engine, where we can certify all manner of facts about each other and thus run a very high trust social network with a consistent shared view of these social facts, while maintaining a high level of privacy and anonymity. The best use for such trust is of course philosophical and political, but I suppose it could be good for business, too.

If anyone has thoughts on this direction, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise I'll go ahead and build the next piece and we'll see how it plays in practice.

It's time to talk ab 77

anon 0x43d said in #2530 1mo ago: 33

A very big change. With profiles I imagine it'll feel very different, more like pseudonymous than anonymous, and of course it becomes possible for people to attach their irl names too. Right now there's technically a "profile" on the backend that tracks reputation but it doesn't feel that way, at least to me, it feels like the free-for-all of truly anonymous posting.

The new version could be cool. I use a few pseudonym accounts on other forums and I have no objection to doing that here too. Let's see where this road takes us.

referenced by: >>2531

A very big change. W 33

anon 0x43b said in #2531 1mo ago: 33

>>2530
Thanks for the support. To be clear, anonymous posting will still be the default and always an option. I imagine pseudonymity/facefagging is for when you really do want your posts tied together. Or you really want to have a funny name for this set of posts, etc. You will be able to have multiple face identities and an infinite supply of anons on the same account, still.

I started with anonymity because that's what I think the long term bedrock of the community should be. This is first and foremost an anonymous social network. But some of the features I want, like being able to post as a "verified anonymous Xer", or import your off-platform social capital as anonymous clout here, or the bigger vision of the social inference engine, require at least some level of persistent faces.

Thanks for the suppo 33

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