The 4 stages of Media Sifter’s critical news consumption— Part 2
Last week, we published the first part in this series where John Ferreira, my co-founder at Media Sifter, presented our vision and provided more information on how the platform works. The purpose of this series of articles is to show you what to expect when Media Sifter launches in 2018.
Together with exclusive screenshots of our prototype — due for release in fall (sign up for early access) the last piece covered the news aggregator, one of the two core components of Media Sifter, and the first two stages of the user journey.
In today’s post, we will go deeper into the second core component of the platform, the SIFT Protocol, and the last two stages of the critical news consumption journey: Investigation, and Validation.
The SIFT Protocol:
A community-driven network to source information from the crowd and qualify it through blockchain-powered user-consensus.
Today, narratives are often created and controlled by central authorities behind closed doors. We want to change this by empowering and giving control back to consumers of that information. To achieve this we are developing the SIFT Protocol.
The SIFT Protocol is a community-driven network that allows participants to source information from the crowd and qualify it through blockchain-powered user-consensus. It is a decentralised and self-governing system that is resistant to censorship and abuse by powerful entities.
We are building the SIFT Protocol as a stand-alone, decentralized tool.
Media Sifter will be the first application for the protocol, but we want the community to embrace the tool and develop further applications for it.
To better understand the protocol, I have outlined below an elementary overview of how it works. We will first describe how it will work as a stand-alone platform and then show its application within Media Sifter in the last part of this post.
It is important to consider that the SIFT Protocol comes into place after the creation or aggregation of the original content.
1) Request for information
When a user wants to investigate a topic or a particular piece of content, they will be able to specify the information required in a pre-defined format, categorize it and assign a reward to their request. Once finalised, the request is published on a public ledger and the system notifies individuals likely to be able to respond to it.
Other users can contribute by adding to the pledge before the request is resolved. The higher the pledge, the higher the incentive for individuals to respond.
2) Delivery of information
Once the initial stake has been confirmed, community members who can answer this request will start sourcing the required information and present it according to guidelines and a pre-defined form. In this case, these users act as investigators.
Relevance and verifiability are the two decision criteria within the Media Sifter guidelines and it is the investigator’s responsibility to convince the reviewer (see next section) of both. Following these guidelines increases the objectivity of the evidence, which is imperative to the review process.
Once presented in this defined format and staked with a fixed amount of SFT Tokens to pay the reviewers, the information enters the independent review process.
3) Qualification of information
As the SIFT Protocol is fully decentralized, it operates under a set of incentives that reward or punish an individual’s contribution accordingly.
Now that the investigators have presented their information, another group of users are asked to analyse the evidence. These users are now taking the role of reviewers.
The protocol will select an uneven amount of reviewers anonymously and, to prevent collusion, show these only a very limited amount of information prior to accepting the review.
After being selected, accepting and staking a fixed amount of SFT Tokens, each reviewer is presented with the information and votes yes/no on verifiability and relevance. A combination of the reputation involved, paired with reviewer-consensus, decides on whether the information delivery was successful, leading to a payout to the investigator, and a score to it that affects its presentability in the application.
The SFT Token
All of the incentives and bounties mentioned above are settled via the SFT Token, a central element of the protocol. The token allows participation in all stages of the information sourcing and qualification process.
It allows us to build a system that incentivises contribution to the community, like for example the delivery of useful information or participation in the review process. It also acts as a security mechanism to prevent spam and makes malicious activity on the platform economically pointless. By designing the protocol as an open-source and free to use system, redistribution of proceeds will be done according to contribution and without us taking a cut.
There are countless applications that could be built on top of the protocol — think of it as an information marketplace, a tokenized, on-demand wikipedia; a niche community wiki; sports information communities; investing forums; or even political tools to control and investigate public activities.
Reputation
Category-specific reputation is the second critical part for the set of incentives and the information quality. Every user of the SIFT Protocol will have a reputation score in the categories they participate in (e.g. Environmentalism) this is what drives their influence on the platform.
The higher their reputation, the more likely it is that their information will make it to the platform or the more weighted a review vote will be. Reputation is gained through positive contribution to the platform, like successfully delivering information or voting with the consensus.
Reputation can not be bought from the outside, but we are toying with the idea of allowing to transfer reputation between users.
— The last 2 stages of critical news consumption:
I hope that the information above helped you get a better understanding of what we want the SIFT Protocol to be and how it will work. As I mentioned earlier, the SIFT Protocol will be built as a stand-alone system that will hopefully fuel applications other than Media Sifter and go beyond news.
We at Media Sifter believe that it is not just publications and journalists who should increase the quality of the news industry, but also active and committed readers.
This is why Media Sifter is the first application for the SIFT Protocol and what will power the last two stages of the critical news consumption process of the platform: Investigation and Validation.
Let me walk you through them.
Investigation { Stage 3 of 4 }
In the investigation stage, readers will have the opportunity to scrutinize and critically analyse articles. By challenging statements, marking potential manipulation and unmasking hidden agendas embedded in the content, this stage will instigate deeper examination within the community.
Users will have tools developed with professional journalists and linguistics to point out techniques of media manipulation such as labeling, misrepresentation, preemptive assumptions, framing, and so on.
The investigation stage is where the SIFT Protocol is applied to request information.
This scrutiny, and its proper validation by the community, will later be shown to other users whenever they visit that article, helping inform the less instructed readers.
Validation { Stage 4 of 4 }
The final and most important part of Media Sifter is validation. Here the platform will source evidence from the crowd that will then enter the consensus-driven review process to assure its verifiability.
The validation stage is where the delivery and qualification of information aspects of the SIFT Protocol take place.
Users are incentivised to deliver valid information to the platform and prove its verifiability. The better they can make their case that the evidence is verifiable, the more likely it is to pass the consensus-driven review process and reward them.
The reviewers are chosen anonymously and independently and are incentivised to assess relevance and verifiability of the evidence with regards to the guidelines provided. Their consensus will decide whether and how information is added to the platform’s validation layer.
Wikipedia is a great example where crowd-sourced content created something much better and reliable than the knowledge of a single individual. Over time, we will be able to improve the system by asking the right (read: knowledgeable and reputable on a given topic) users to contribute and verify information.
The complete integration of the SIFT Protocol with the last two stages of the Media Sifter user journey will be thoroughly explained in our upcoming whitepaper. Join our email list now to get notified when it’s published.
← Read part 1 of the series
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We would like to thank projects such as Gnosis, Augur, Steemit, DNN Media and Curation Markets, that inspired a lot of the SIFT Protocol development. Without a lot of their ideas and contribution to the development of the blockchain this project could not be possible.
Note by the author:
To preserve the best functionality for the application, Media Sifter will run as an app with Ethereum-network integration and, initially, we will only keep the value exchange in SFT Tokens, links to the added information (stored decentrally) and the review/verification logic on-chain.
Blockchain technologies (and particularly Ethereum) are still in its early years and would currently pose a challenge to efficiently run Media Sifter.
However, we are confident that the community will continue to innovate at a rapid pace and will allow for efficient, stable and scalable on-chain transactions in the near future.
In the MVP that we are releasing in early fall, we will simulate the review process to gather a maximum amount of data on user behaviour, before we develop and launch the first live version of Media Sifter and the SIFT Protocol.
In the meantime, we are hosting a limited SFT Token Presale for handpicked investors starting next week. If you support our cause and are interested in investing at favourable terms, please get in touch here.
Edit: The early pre-sale through direct reach out to investors was not as successful as we expected. We are currently working our way through non-crypto-financing until we launch our main funding event (ICO). Stay tuned for updates.
— Join the Community:
- Get on our Slack or Telegram channel
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- For 0pen positions, see angel.co/media-sifter
For more information, visit MediaSifter.co
