david on Nostr: Would you use a measuring stick without knowning what it measures? Would you use a ...
Would you use a measuring stick without knowning what it measures? Would you use a tool without knowing what it does?
Empirically, PageRank is a powerful tool. It’s great at solving a very real problem: spam. With PageRank, you calculate a score for various sources of content (URLs, pubkeys) and rank them from top to bottom. Spam tends to sink to the bottom, leaving non-spam at the top.
Although PageRank is imperfect — not immune to manipulation — I enthusiastically support its application to nostr. Surprising we haven’t seen more of it already. Nostr.build started using a variation of PageRank long ago. zap.store (npub10r8…t2p8) will use it soon.
Here’s the question: how does PageRank work? what does the PageRank score mean? What does it measure? The answer is simple: POPULARITY. Which explains its utility: spammy content sources tend to sink to the bottom of popularity contests.
But we need to beware the corrosive attributes of putting popularity on a pedestal. The last thing we want to build with nostr is another influencer/attention economy that values popularity above all. I advocate the use of PageRank, but I also advocate that we should look beyond at how we can do better.
If PageRank measures popularity, I propose we make a concerted effort to ask: if not popularity, what SHOULD we be measuring? What do we WANT to measure? And for what specific purposes do we want to use these measures?
Here are my answers: we should measure context-specific Value. Merit. Skill. Expertise. Quality. Things that reflect fundamentally intrinsic attributes of people, places, things. Objective truth, as judged from trusted perspectives. And the scores we come up with should be suitable for use as weights for weighted averages and weighted sums.
We should start with PageRank, use it, play with it, all the while asking: how can we modify it so that it measures value and merit over popularity? How can we make it contextual? And are our scores suitable — better yet, optimized — to be used as weights?
GrapeRank is what I come up with when I follow this thought process to its logical end. But I really don’t care what anyone calls it, or if my thought processes are followed to a tee.
Let’s just make sure we don’t blindly reproduce the mistakes of legacy fiat social media. Truth >>> popularity. We’re building freedom tech, goddam it.
Empirically, PageRank is a powerful tool. It’s great at solving a very real problem: spam. With PageRank, you calculate a score for various sources of content (URLs, pubkeys) and rank them from top to bottom. Spam tends to sink to the bottom, leaving non-spam at the top.
Although PageRank is imperfect — not immune to manipulation — I enthusiastically support its application to nostr. Surprising we haven’t seen more of it already. Nostr.build started using a variation of PageRank long ago. zap.store (npub10r8…t2p8) will use it soon.
Here’s the question: how does PageRank work? what does the PageRank score mean? What does it measure? The answer is simple: POPULARITY. Which explains its utility: spammy content sources tend to sink to the bottom of popularity contests.
But we need to beware the corrosive attributes of putting popularity on a pedestal. The last thing we want to build with nostr is another influencer/attention economy that values popularity above all. I advocate the use of PageRank, but I also advocate that we should look beyond at how we can do better.
If PageRank measures popularity, I propose we make a concerted effort to ask: if not popularity, what SHOULD we be measuring? What do we WANT to measure? And for what specific purposes do we want to use these measures?
Here are my answers: we should measure context-specific Value. Merit. Skill. Expertise. Quality. Things that reflect fundamentally intrinsic attributes of people, places, things. Objective truth, as judged from trusted perspectives. And the scores we come up with should be suitable for use as weights for weighted averages and weighted sums.
We should start with PageRank, use it, play with it, all the while asking: how can we modify it so that it measures value and merit over popularity? How can we make it contextual? And are our scores suitable — better yet, optimized — to be used as weights?
GrapeRank is what I come up with when I follow this thought process to its logical end. But I really don’t care what anyone calls it, or if my thought processes are followed to a tee.
Let’s just make sure we don’t blindly reproduce the mistakes of legacy fiat social media. Truth >>> popularity. We’re building freedom tech, goddam it.