MetaVote™ - Part 1: A Brief Outline Of A Potentially Revolutionary New GUI Data-Input Form (A tool for more quality information and profoundly deeper, stronger applications - including STABs management.) [Without images or animation to illustrate how simple it can be.]

submitted by JasonCarswell from self.PhoenixForum

Among other images I found this thumbnail from the pre-existing very different concept than mine, https://MetaVote.netlify.app. My MetaVote™ concept is different and obviously needs a new name with strong branding. Feel free to suggest ideas.

 

MetaVote™ - Part 1: A Brief Outline Of A Potentially Revolutionary New GUI Data-Input Form

A tool for more quality information and profoundly deeper, stronger applications - including STABs management.

Without images or animation to illustrate how simple it can be.

 

The technocracy is collecting our data to use against us. Humanity NEEDS better information tools, like search, wikis, etc. Just because most people are simpleminded doesn't mean we should give up and only have 2-option vote systems.

Note: If you are curious but find this technical outline as tedious as I do, then please ask for me to illustrate it in another post. Without interest in it I'm not going to bother.

 

MetaVote™ v0.0 - Intro

I had an epiphany a regarding a completely revolutionary forum voting and metatag interface. It's so simple and clear and qualitative that if I believed in patents I'd register it in hopes to make some money - but the ugly truth is that intellectual properties are the ruling class' rigged game defended by armies of lawyers and corrupt justice systems.

Since I joined SaidIt I've had various ideas about how to improve the voting. I don't like the 2/1 insightful/fun point system, and I've personally fallen into very inconsistent habitual usages. I thought there should be a downvote to count unpopularity - but NOT have it affect the points (like the YouTube ratio). I thought we needed more qualitative information about the vote ie. 0-10 (like Amazon or IMDb). My new concept is VERY uniquely different and could be as revolutionary and commonplace as the tag clouds of words you see everywhere.

This voting system would help tame vote-pooling, abuses, and inaccuracies rampant with the basic 2 option limitations of too many forums. A 0-10 vote system would be marginally better, but also has huge limitations. There's nothing to stop a few asstrolls from trying to manipulate the qualitative results - as is evident on IMDb for some controversial movies, yet most IMDb scores are a very good measure. Facebook still has their "like" button but now offers many more emojis to choose from.

My proposed system is not better or worse, is similar yet different, and much more qualitative. As for manipulation by numbers of different thinkers (asstrolls, tribalists, etc.) they can be spotted, filtered, and isolated as necessary with their metadata.

Problematically this outline pales by comparison to the clear simplicity that can be illustrated with some graphics. Words are not the way to present this. Neither are images. Short animated examples are the best way. If this concept is well received I can better convey with some images or even make vaporware animations to inspire coders to co-develop it further into modules that can be implemented in countless scenarios on countless platforms.

This can apply fare beyond just metatags and votes. This is a revolutionary new kind of GUI (graphic user interface) data-input form.

 

MetaVote™ v0.1 - Inspiration

Everyone was (and still are) always going on about wanting a downvote. I don't mind a downvote as long as it doesn't influence the upvotes. A score of 0 is not very accurate if 20 liked and 20 disliked. IMDb's 0-10 scores with the number of votes clearly indicate that 10/10 with 5 biased voters is not nearly as good as a 9.2/10 with 97,542 voters.

For a LONG time I was stuck on the idea of a Y shaped voting thing with up-left to insightful, up-right to fun, and downvote - AND with some in between spots on the Y branches for "levels of intensity" and thus more qualitative information. This Y was always irritating to me. What if something was insightful AND fun? What if it was just meh? How would we avoid abuses? There's no end to the questions.

Mid-January it suddenly occurred to me - and now it just seems SO DAMN OBVIOUS. It came to me when I realized we needed more than just a downvote and more than just the opposite(s) of "insightful" and "fun". It's so fucking simple! And, in part, a version had been staring us all in the face. Yes, by comparison it's a little bit bulky - but the QUALITATIVE INFORMATION TO BE GAINED from it would be a RADICAL GAME CHANGER. Remember how "different" not having a downvote was? Up/Down is mono-dimensional. 0-10 is barely 2D. This extends way beyond just three dimensions. This opens up vast wide arrays of possibility.

Currently on most forums the points-voting is on the left in a squarish graphic block. If we were going to add metatags/hashtags to content it seems obvious it should go to the right and/or below the title and other extant information - but if, rather than text, it were a graphic block interface it would make more sense to simply be on the right, bookending the post title and/or comment info.

[vote] [title, details, content] [tags]

 

Opinion

Users could only submit a SINGLE vote in the left-vote section. This is qualitative information is their OPINION about how they feel about the content.

 

Topics

Users could select or deselect as MANY votes right-tag section TOPICS as they think applies to the content.

If users have stronger or different feelings about their left-vote or need more topical right-tag options I have some VERY simple ideas to hugely and dramatically increase their options. This is a whole other conversation with deep and wide GUI ramifications, better served with illustrations than verbose descriptions.

 

Other

Besides "Opinion" and "Topics" this interface input-form has no end to the different scenarios, applications, and things it can be used for.

 

MetaVote™ v0.2 - The Universal 5x5 Interface

Opinion Left-Vote

With text instead of icons here are two examples:

wisdom clever witty punny fun
insightful smart good like amused
informed obvious neutral okay appreciated
skeptical dislike weak meh disappointed
outrage distressed annoyed tedious bored

The example above has the emotions of "fun" and "outrage" at a diagonal, mixing it up more.
The example below has the extreme emotions on the right side.

wisdom clever witty punny fun
smart insightful good amused like
informed obvious neutral okay appreciated
meh disappointed weak skeptical dislike
bored tedious annoyed distressed outrage

The same example with only the main points:

wisdom ... ... ... fun
... ... ... ... ...
... ... neutral ... ...
... ... ... ... ...
bored ... ... ... outrage

A first pass at the words, but you get the idea. Admins and/or the community can help determine the best descriptors and/or emojis/icons. Of course users would soon grow accustomed to what the variables are, but most important are the corners in this grid (other grids may differ). Because there is so much information in this 5x5 grid I would insist on having cursor hover descriptions come up, among several other animations and options. The mobile interface would face different hurdles too. I've got MANY variations and solutions to propose. There is no single version that stands out - yet.

To help understand how you and others vote each corner would have it's own colour (green, blue, purple, red) and the mid-boxes would naturally fall between on that colour spectrum. The colours would be muted to start and with more and more votes the saturation and brightness would increase showing the general "tag cloud" of people's opinions. The strongest should "glow" brightest. Your own selected squares would be outlined in orange and other indicators could be in yellow. I'd also like to indicate how the original poster chooses to tag their own content. I also have GUI ideas for endorsing/challenging others' opinions.

 

Most important is the quality of the information to come from this.

A stupid /s/meme can get a like just as many points as a well produced /s/A+++ post - but with 5x5 options to chose from people need not be stingy with votes nor too liberal. The quantity of votes would matter less with this new quality of votes.

I know coming from only 2 votes into 25 options may seem like too much, but folks would soon get used to it. When voting here, it's not about collecting points or the big number of 25 options, it's about the corner fields and how you rate between them for qualitative results.

Any more than 5x5 and it's too much. Any less and you loose the balance, the power of 1-25, and the efficacy. Also, you could choose to have only 3 corners filled and they'll each still be equally separated by 3 between them. You could have MANY variation patterns to vote with in the 5x5 grid if needs arise, all conveniently in batches of 25, a quarter of the round number 100. (50 US states would fit on 2 grids.) Illustrations could easily show many of the possible variations for other uses beyond just opinion votes and topical tags.

 

Original Poster Info

The only person who might want better ratings on their post/comment would be the person who made it and thus may be tempted to exaggerate its value, consciously or unconsciously. Their self-assessment votes could either be not counted or just blend into the counts, but I think critically, distinctly marking their votes helps indicate their intentions and where they're coming from - and I see no reason why not to show this.

 

Topic Right-Tags... And Beyond

One click for the left-vote 5x5 opinion grids.

Select as many as apply for the right-tag 5x5 topical grids.

Tagging is generally not about feelings within the corners and fields. I wouldn't expect everyone to participate in properly categorizing every post, but those who do will provide a great service to researchers. Obviously the admins and/or community could help determine the best tags for each 5x5 grid.

Grids, plural.

For example below are topic-tag tables for an alphabetical general topics (which could branch off to other tables), a political compass, and a truthiness scale-ish table.

Ads & Class Arts & Ent Corruption Culture DIY
Economics Health History Ideologies Images
Info Internet Home Music Nature
NSFW Politics Science Social Media Technology
Transportation Tyranny Veracity Video Work

 

... Communism (SJWs) Totalitarianism Fascism (Nazis) ...
Faux-Progressives Democrat Establishement Republican NeoCons
Far Left Left Status Quo Right Far Right
Progressive Liberal Centrist Libertarian Alt-Right
... Anarcho-Socialism Voluntaryism Anarcho-Captialism ...

 

True More True Mixed Facts More False False
Reliable Based Debatable Biased Unreliable
Well Sourced Needs Citations Neutral Propaganda Fake News
Red Pill Truth-Seeking Skepticism Gaslight Psy-Op
Exceptional Rational Complex Disinfo Misinfo

As I said there are many variant options. With ergonomic designs, other functions, and illustrations these numbers could be affected. These examples are obvious and simple to explain (especially with images).

5x5=25 + 25x4=100 + 25x4x3=300 (total = 425) is a first way beyond.

5x5=25 + 25x8=200 + 25x8x7=1400 (total = 1625) is a second way beyond.

5x5=25 + 25x16=400 + 25x16x15=6000 (total = 6425) is a third way beyond.

By "beyond" I mean what's at your finger tips but not all visible. The default 25 in a grid is good, but more options are better. Just as you can scroll up/down left/right in other apps I would want the ability to flip/swipe to another grid for more options.

The first simplest example, above, has 25 in a 5x5 is the default grid. Outside this grid on each side would be 4 short wide clickable arrows in 4 directions to other grids, then those grids would have more directions - minus the one direction it came from. This could go on forever but IMO beyond 2 degrees of separation goes even too far for me and this for general purpose usage.

The second example is for sides and corners.

The first two examples are simplistic and good for what they are. My fave for tagging is the third...

The third example would have 12 short wide arrows around the 5x5 grid of 25, 3 on each side, plus 4 more corner arrows. These 16 arrows would lead to more detailed topical grids related to the topics in the default grid around the edges. The 9 squares in the middle of these grids would not have "children" grids. Colour coding could distinguish those with children and those without. This concept would be made clear in an illustration.

For example, the 16 edge squares could include politics, science, and music, and you could just select those or you could select the arrow outside the grid to scroll over to a dedicated politics, science, or music grid - and deeper still if necessary. Having a political compass now seems obvious (staring us in the face), but I hadn't even thought of it for at least a week or two after I came up with MetaVote™.

Political compasses are not the only things that can fit in grids. Just as I mentioned above that many voting variations could be employed, Venn diagrams and others could be employed too, within the 5x5 limitations. Importantly, I think it would be great to also offer customizable grids for users to add their own opinions and topics/tags. Of course both users and admin could benefit from a simple GUI to input all of the 5x5 fields.

 

Conclusion & Feedback

I hope this was clear and makes sense. Illustrations would help but I'm convinced it needs some vaporware animating to showcase how simple, powerful, and awesome it could be.

Please provide feedback, good, bad, or ugly - or even if it's just something banal like my typos. Without interest in it I'm not going to bother making illustrations or explaining my deeper ideas about database arrays and practical applications including MASSIVE ramifications to OUR data/information in this cyber/info-war.

 

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[–]zyxzevn 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Your system seems to become more complex, usually does not work in my opinion.
But it is great to have far more voting options to (1) give some feedback to the poster, and (2) rank the post in the list or category.

My new idea of ranking to rule out back-STABbers:
You have trusted people, like the friends option on saidit.
And the posts are ordered by how much points my friends gave the posts.
Additionally you can have friends of friends.. etc.
You can even share block-lists, so you will not see certain shills/trolls.

Additionally the admins have certain friends and they determine the ordering of the default list.
(A bit like "editor's choice" on Rumble.com )
This will make the site easier accessible for new people, and guide the site into the way the admins want. I think that a site needs some guidance to keep it from turning into a chaos of information.

This way STAB will not be visible on the site, even if they work together massively.

With keywords and categories, the information can be structures in a nice way.

With your voting you grade the quality of the information, but people put bias in the voting.
Like I think that most news is a psyops, misinfo and gaslighting.
And it can be rational, well sourced, reliable gaslighting.

Let's check some simple single-event subjects:
1. Gas attack in Syria
2. Julian Assange
3. Astronomy: Black hole image.
4. Physics: Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Here are my answers, but you will not find many mainstream "reputable" sources that confirm this.
1. Hoax by White Helmets, many whistleblowers, researchers openly threatened by US.
2. Journalist, all charges are false and made up. Doom for real journalism.
3. Faked via maths, there is too much noise.
4. Complex topic, but it is not fractional, even though it seems fractional.

[–]JasonCarswell[S] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

We can't expect to get miraculous information from binary data, so yes it's more complex than upvote/downvote. But a 5x5 input grid is not really that complex. Get that working and we can add all the extra bells and whistles to the GUI. More critically is how the data is utilized. THERE is the complexity. There is where it can be screwed up, depending on how you use it. Yet even still, the original input data is just the original input data and should not be corrupted. It's the use of the data to generate other data that could be the problem if the expressions are wonky. Nothing complicated will ever be perfect on the first try. There will be hurdles.

But it is great to have far more voting options to (1) give some feedback to the poster, and (2) rank the post in the list or category.

I would love to have more stats available to the poster and for ranking too. For example, how many people even look at the post/article/image/video? How many look at the comments? For how long? How many folks vote on the title alone without even looking at it?

With this MetaVote thing and the data it would produce it wouldn't matter who was a STAB or not. There'd be no need for filters besides reporting something illegal. Users would be classified, stereotyped, and tribalized by their actions, their opinions, and how others view their content. Echochambers would form - but critically the site admins and/or the users would decide how much content they want to see that's not within their statistical scope. Say 75%-90% could be what's expected, but that remaining 10%-25% could be mixed content that's outside their norm. By marking it they would contributing to the auto-curation process by strengthening the definitions of their circles of interests. Obviously not all rap fans will like country music, but some will and they will form an overlapping sub-group.

I would like about 10 options like friends with different colour codings.

And the posts are ordered by how much points my friends gave the posts.

I like this idea a lot. Of course this kind of thing could be done with MetaVote data too.

Additionally the admins have certain friends and they determine the ordering of the default list. (A bit like "editor's choice" on Rumble.com )

I guess I'll have to check that out as I don't understand it.

This will make the site easier accessible for new people, and guide the site into the way the admins want.

What/however that is/works I'm all for it.

I think that a site needs some guidance to keep it from turning into a chaos of information.

Indeed! That's why since I arrived (from wiki) I wanted to improve the sub categorization and organization process.

This way STAB will not be visible on the site, even if they work together massively.

Sounds good but I don't understand how.

With your voting you grade the quality of the information, but people put bias in the voting.

Indeed and that is to be expected, and maybe even embraced. Everyone will have their own voting style. Some people will hypervote and some will barely vote and everything in between. If someone is an extreme voter their votes should be weighted to have less influence - IF it's a point system. I would reject the point system. Amazon has a simple 5 star voting system and you can see when there are polarized votes and when there's a consensus and when there's a variety. Based on that alone you may tell if you'd like the book or not depending on your politics and the topic, and even more by the pro/con reviews.

Also what if 3 people really like some music and 100 hate it. Who's opinion is valid?

I say let everyone express themselves and vote as they like. Even STABs. Their natures will reveal themselves and thus be filterable.

I think problems may arise with too many users (including new and STABs) and/or not enough adequate input to gauge and sort them properly. And/or not coming up with algorithms to sort them adequately. But again, these would be expected.

Like I think that most news is a psyops, misinfo and gaslighting. And it can be rational, well sourced, reliable gaslighting.

That's why the opinions are 1 click and the "Topic Right-Tags" you click as many as are appropriate.

Your statements are more than just keywords or metatags.

 

Here's something I always intended to show in GUI illustrations: manual metatag input. Why be limited to 25 2525 or 25 million squares? Also, if there are 6000 squares (I don't think there are even that many subs on SaidIt), IMO it makes sense for a big chuck (2000?) to be custom user tags - and for users to share and trade grids. Yes it's huge process to learn and a huge GUI to develop, but the data ramifications are profound.

Also, if we really had our shit together we could tie it all into https://www.WikiData.org. Sure the sister companies are corrupt and maybe even WikiData is biased in ways, but it would be a huge leap forward by just adopting their classifications, categories, and hierarchy systems until they could be unbent.