david on Nostr: Yes, you could do personalized PageRank, set an arbitrary cutoff, weight everyone ...
Yes, you could do personalized PageRank, set an arbitrary cutoff, weight everyone above the cutoff equally, and ignore everyone below the cutoff. Crude but easy.
Here’s what I want us to be thinking about: using scores as ranking vs using scores as a weight. These are two very different purposes. Ranking means placing items in order. Using scores as a weight means you’re tallying votes or calculating weighted averages and you want to decide how much weight to give to each pubkey.
How much weight you want to give to each pubkey will depend on the context. Sometimes, I may want to give each “verified real nostr user” a weight of 1, and a weight of 0 to everyone else. In this case you could calculate pPR (personalized PageRank), select and arbitrary cutoff as discussed above. A step function, in other words. Of course the problem here is that the cutoff is arbitrary. What do you do with the 100k pubkeys who have a handful of high quality followers? They’re *probably* not bots, but you’re not 100 pct sure? They’re in-between. GrapeRank allows you to scale up the weight as your level of confidence increases that the pubkey in question is not a bot. You could do that with PageRank except replace the step function with some sort of curve. In which case, you’re halfway to reinventing GrapeRank.
What about the more complicated case where you want a context specific weight which is proportional to someone’s skill? Not set to unity for each normal user? Not clear to me how pPR could accomplish this. Unless you modify it and probably end up inventing GrapeRank.
I should reiterate: my point is not to say that PageRank is worthless. I’ve said many times I’m excited to see it being put to use, like at zap.store (npub10r8…t2p8). I think it will add value to the nostr ecosystem.
I’m ALSO looking beyond PageRank, bc I believe we need to optimize it for freedom technology, not just for Google. Measures of popularity are useful but sometimes we’d prefer to measure quality and merit, not popularity.
Here’s what I want us to be thinking about: using scores as ranking vs using scores as a weight. These are two very different purposes. Ranking means placing items in order. Using scores as a weight means you’re tallying votes or calculating weighted averages and you want to decide how much weight to give to each pubkey.
How much weight you want to give to each pubkey will depend on the context. Sometimes, I may want to give each “verified real nostr user” a weight of 1, and a weight of 0 to everyone else. In this case you could calculate pPR (personalized PageRank), select and arbitrary cutoff as discussed above. A step function, in other words. Of course the problem here is that the cutoff is arbitrary. What do you do with the 100k pubkeys who have a handful of high quality followers? They’re *probably* not bots, but you’re not 100 pct sure? They’re in-between. GrapeRank allows you to scale up the weight as your level of confidence increases that the pubkey in question is not a bot. You could do that with PageRank except replace the step function with some sort of curve. In which case, you’re halfway to reinventing GrapeRank.
What about the more complicated case where you want a context specific weight which is proportional to someone’s skill? Not set to unity for each normal user? Not clear to me how pPR could accomplish this. Unless you modify it and probably end up inventing GrapeRank.
I should reiterate: my point is not to say that PageRank is worthless. I’ve said many times I’m excited to see it being put to use, like at zap.store (npub10r8…t2p8). I think it will add value to the nostr ecosystem.
I’m ALSO looking beyond PageRank, bc I believe we need to optimize it for freedom technology, not just for Google. Measures of popularity are useful but sometimes we’d prefer to measure quality and merit, not popularity.