Great idea. To add: I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean. Also maybe it would be great to have a voting system where one could downvote as well! But only after a certain number of upvotes I think.
Maybe a really unintuitive system for ranking too? Like make it unclear why some posts are ranked higher than others, and why some are somehow greyed out even though there isn't an obvious way to downvote or report content. Also make it so you have to manually minimize the top reply in order to see the second most popular topline reply because there should be absolutely no limit to seeing the amount of subreplies.
The thing that gets me about the unintuitive system for ranking is that you have zero idea how long something will be on the front page. It could be 3 hours old, #4 on the page, with a few hundred upvotes and more points than almost all of the votes on the front page, and then just disappear an hour later.
And once something drops off the front page, it gets seen by almost no one. I keep trying to stop myself from spending too much time on comments (editing them for clarity and grammar, finding sources that people can follow instead of just relying on my claims, rereading the person I'm responding to in order to make sure I actually got what they were saying), because it's easy to spend 30 minutes trying to make a solid comment only to find out that the whole discussion has now disappeared and no one is likely going to read it.
I have no interest in what quantity of people end up reading my comments. What difference does it make to me if it’s a popular thread or an unpopular one?
Zero notifications, if such a thing existed, would help an online community stay constructive since the default behavior would be to forget conversations. This would help folks get some distance and perspective rather than being constantly reminded that they have an argument to win.
Another nice thing about zero notifications in our new social media app is that the development effort for that feature is very low.
> I think the site would also need a rock star moderator who diligently checks every comment and keeps the site clean.
My idea was to give people IP-like addresses like the early internet. And start off (until we find something better) with the ol’ Class A, B, and C networks of sizes roughly 16M, 64k, and 256 respectively.
The value I think is in having groups as small as 256 and each group has an admin/moderator. Why are we ‘automating’ people out of a job in the tech space when we could be ‘automating’ them into one.
Keep in mind, the existing IP networks stay. This is just a logical layer.
There are better ways to do it but I think this is an interesting start. There’s even a planned obsolescence built in as the world has more people than the 4 billion or so that a 32 bit address space gives.
Which to me is perfect. A chance to try some new things but a built in expiration date so nothing becomes too entrenched.
