[jwarden]

Hi Aviv, thanks for replying and for the additional links. I think this work is so important.

I'll also add a link to some work I and some colleagues are doing on designing social algorithms that promote collective intelligence.

https://social-protocols.org

[patcon]

Oh hey, I came across your Social Protocols groups while doing my regular rounds for Polis-related projects a few months ago, when I found Propolis! Was trying to figure out why your name was familiar-ish :)

I've got you in this spreadsheet that I share around quite regularly, in case you're curious: https://link.g0v.network/pug-resources

There's also a Polis User Group discord: https://link.g0v.network/pug-discord It's pretty low-key lately, but high density of potentially-aligned ppl. I am hoping to restart the weekly open calls for prospective Polis facilitators and self-hosters, in case you're interested to log in.

Thanks for your posts by the way! I am jealous of your output -- I tend to have a few calls/meetings about Polis per week, but am not so great at producing clean artifacts like this :)

[manx]

GitHub link to propolis: https://github.com/social-protocols/propolis

We stopped working on it in favor of https://github.com/social-protocols/social-network

(We should mention that on the website, I guess)

The reasoning was: coming up with (and answering) yes-no questions is more effort and a higher entry barrier for participation than just posting anything and having up/downvotes - like in a social network. Requiring this formalization of all content on a platform creates an entry barrier, e.g. people need to formulate what they want to post as a yes-no question. At the same time, it disallows content, which does not fit the yes-no question model.

Our big insight was: We can drastically simplify the user interaction and allow arbitrary content, but keep the collective intelligence aspect. That's achieved by introducing a concept similar to community notes, but in a recursive way: Every reply to a post can become a note. And replies can have more replies, which in turn can act as notes for the reply. Notes are AB-tested if, when shown below a post, change the voting behavior on the post. If a reply changes the voting behavior, it must have added some information, which voters were not aware of before, like a good argument.

For more details, see the global brain algorithm: https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/