Dear information,
we create you in abundance. We absorb you. We spread you. We crave you and we distort you.
There are uncountable ways to inform yourself nowadays. The average user of mass media — including the World Wide Web — has become merely a snowflake in the digital avalanche of information, marketing, science, facts, stories and propaganda. Aggravating this situation is the constant duel between net-neutrality, freedom of expression, monetisation and political interests.
Still, participation on the Web is largely beneficial and so far self-regulating. This manifesto presents freed, a brand new concept that offers a solution to the challenge of maintaining the positive aspects of user generated content while keeping the crowd focused on a specific goal/topic. It will not affect as much the highlighting of positive information, but present a solution to minimise negative information.
Can we avoid negative information?
Since everyone should be able to contribute, we have come to accept deliberate misinformation, manipulation, trolling, name-calling and mobbing as unavoidable in online conversations. Prevention of such behaviours through post-publish moderation like flagging/reporting (e.g. online forums, Twitter Trends) and down-voting by crowd knowledge and opinion (e.g. Stackoverflow, reddit, Hacker News) is not always efficient. Depending on the crowd and the topic, a malicious post may just be annoying, but it can also cause great damage. In any case it will be misleading and distracting.
Other approaches tame the data-flood through pre-publish filtering, like automatic scripts fed with statistical social and private big data (e.g. Facebook stream, Google), filtering and correction based on specialised knowledge and opinion (e.g. Reuters, Nature) and personal white listing (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest).
All of these filtering concepts are very dependent on error-prone expertise or personal opinions of a few admins, moderators or users. They are also vulnerable to distortions by chance and exponentially evolving mainstream trends. Which is why we propose a novel approach to mass information management: the freed.
What is a freed?
A freed is a concept that consists of any kind of an information exchange channel, combined with a common goal and some kind of pre-publish, randomised and anonymous evaluation. In order to motivate and strengthen the freed, we additionally propose some kind of reputation or trust management.
freed = info feed + manifesto + anonymous evaluation + trust management
As stated, the basis for a freed is always some kind of user group with an interest on a specific topic. This could be a forum, an information feed/stream or a hashtag on Twitter. It is essential to accumulate a sustainable minimum amount of users who are interested in actively contributing by posting on the freed.
The focus and efficiency of a freed is determined by its manifesto, which defines and communicates a mission statement for like-minded or knowledgeable people. Each manifesto defines in a few words why (What is the goal of this freed?), how (What tools/freeds will we use?) and what (What is specifically necessary for a valid post?) the freed is about. It needs to be objectively evaluable so that all evaluators have a similar understanding and are able to vote on its validity in a repeatable manner. This means that a good manifesto should avoid the evaluation based on personal views and opinions. It should mainly work as a guide for acceptable posts.
In order to give meaning to the manifesto and keep the freed alive, the platform needs to automatically appoint evaluators. They have to decide, whether a draft for a post is valid in the context of the manifesto as agreed upon. Nowadays this is often aspired by a full democratic vote. But a 100 per cent participation of a known group of evaluators/voters not only calls for a lot of engagement, but also means that the outcome of the evaluation/vote can potentially be predicted, arranged and manipulated. For these reasons, only a randomised subgroup of users is able to evaluate the validity of a post based on the manifesto. If you do not know who else is evaluating the post and manifesto, you are less likely to agree on a subjective outcome. The single common ground shared by the evaluators must always be the manifesto. Also, only the evaluator group will be exposed to a malicious post and not the whole freed’s user base. The group from which the evaluators are selected (e.g. all users, all contributors, freed contributors, experts, trust values et al.) and their exact number (e.g. as a percentage of contributors) need to be carefully defined based on the nature of the freed.
The last crucial and most controversial component for a freed is an automatic and objective parameter to hold users accountable. Based on the validity of their post or evaluation the user may lose or gain trust. This mechanism reduces the quantity of bad posts and increases the importance of the manifesto for the evaluator as common base for his decision. The consequence of lower trust could be to restrict the ability to participate on this freed or on other freeds.
Praise the freed?!
The concept of a freed is not a general solution for all our digital needs and it may feel too restrictive as a form of freedom of expression. It is not intended to guide the discussion of the users, but merely give them a common framework to work focused on the common goal. Freeds are designed for specific scenarios in which the users can and want to agree on a common manifesto.
The combination and balancing of all these well-known techniques through the concept of a freed may well lead to novel forms of social media and content management systems. It enables larger and smaller groups of users to conduct real and fruitful debates on specific topics. Freeds offer the potential to lower the amount of misinformation and misbehaviour. They empower the common user while reducing the amount of curation necessary through crowd curation/moderation.
So, what is a freed exactly?
A freed is a place for users to contribute on a defined topic with topic related rules. It is not a tool to enforce crowd decisions or opinions, but the basis to facilitate such through minimising disturbances.
+ Pros:
- No top-down curation (e.g. through admins, moderators, experts)
- Proactive crowd curation instead of reporting curation
- Anonymous, but still focused on topic
- Scalable
- Supports objectivity through anonymous evaluation and trust management
- Can be a plugin for existing media channels (e.g. Twitter, Facebook groups)
- Good base for gamification
- Cons:
- Still hackable through outside communication
- Complicated, especially in the starting phase of a freed
- Needs higher degree of participation
- Slower than non-curated media for the main user
- Complexity of manifesto limited by users
A freed is a place for users to contribute on a defined topic with topic related rules. It is not a tool to enforce crowd decisions or opinions, but the basis to facilitate such through minimising disturbances.
This blogpost was deliberately phrased very abstractly. In the following weeks we will elaborate how to specifically use freeds:
- freed curation/aggregation with freed.li
- freed manifestos (contributors can propose and evaluate manifesto changes)
- freed twitter (interconnectivity of publication channels)
- freed polls (crowd created polls)
- freed page manifestos (don’t hide behind your terms and conditions)
- freed peer evaluations (implementation of trackable user expertise)
There are many more possible freed concepts out there. Feel free to create your own freed concept and please let me know about it.
