I don’t think forum communities suffer from the problems the article addresses. For instance, here are two problems the article suggest the system will solve:
Of course, none of this would be interesting if it didn’t actually address the issues with today’s social platforms that I mentioned above. So let’s take a look at each of them and why DK addresses them at their core:
- Follower-Based Distribution - Unlike the traditional follower model, here distribution is based on the short term perception of the quality of a user’s content.
- Accumulated Advantage - No one is able to sustain their distribution benefit for long without continuing to create high quality content.
(“DK” is the name of the fictional network.)
These two problems aren’t particularly relevant to most (all?) Discourse communities because the way ideas are distributed has nothing to do with followers or artificial systematic advantages. Instead there are two main paths:
- Search engine traffic based on queries people are actively using.
- Views from organically browsing the forum—latest, pinned posts, scrolling through topic lists, bookmarks, notifications, suggested/related posts, etc.
The way to “win” in the forum system is to write lots of high-quality content. It’s still possible for bad ideas to circulate, of course. But the solutions tend to be activities such as flagging or responding with better ideas. More generally, solutions can come from the culture of the forum. A community has defenses against the problems this article references that aren’t technical.
Not that I think the solutions would work particularly well for social media either. It’s not an algorithm problem, but a scaling problem. When you have a global chat system where people can (and are even encouraged to) wade into a discussion that’s happening in some other community, ordinary cultural defenses don’t apply. Systematic solutions fail too because there’s always an incentive to find the loophole. A version of Goodhart’s law applies:
All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused.
So with the decay system, there’s an incentive to continually post. One method might be to post new content. But another solution could be to recycle content. Sure there might be algorithmic protections built in, but some users will find ways to skirt the safeguards if there’s some incentive to do so. Humans are much better at cheating (and detecting cheating) than systems are at keeping everyone in line.