Playing with an idea for a communication platform

hApps
#1

Trying to make my notes more public lately:

I recently started using Twitter, I’ve basically never used it until now, and it’s actually a really interesting sense-making tool. I’ve been a long time Redditor, so Twitter is quite foreign, but I’ve noticed by only following people in the Intellectual Deep Web that you can get some pretty interesting conversations and curated content.

Things I think work and don’t work about discussion platforms:

  • Reddit places emphasis on communities around topics, helps focus related content. Downvotes clean up garbage content, for the most part.
  • Twitter inverts Reddit in it being about individuals in disjointed networks, not communities. If there are people you really trust to help you sense-make, Twitter is a great way to discover useful memes, content and participate in dialogic rationality.
  • Topics discussed within Twitter networks can be more diverse, but for most users it is more memetic than actual sense-making going on.
  • Twitter can easily lead to echo chambers with tag-driven tribalism, while Reddit enables more diversity of perspective on a particular topic. Abuse of downvotes on Reddit will typically only kill extremely unorthodox opinions.

More thoughts soon, these are just 2 platforms

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#2

while reading your post i realized another way to frame it is that all that is different between today’s sense-making tools is that they are essentially user created contextual knowledge/information generation systems that use very different filtering and/or ranking systems between them (in holochain these filters would be public metadata in the form of a multitude of tags or links), and that these filters are straightjacketed onto the masses by the monopolistic companies that steward these centralized platforms

in a holochain/distributed knowledge ecology, these sorting/filtering functions would mean people looking at the same information with their own lenses/priorities based on the sorting algorithms they chooses themselves. e.g. i might choose to read and participate in a reddit-like thread using a twitter-like UI

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