R07 Yawp
"I too am not a bit tamed... I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
- Walt Whitman
Strategic Intent​
Social Media channels are choked. They distort both posting, and reading.
On posting, posts are liable to penalities, take-down and censorship, with very little by way of appeal and no sight of the decision makers or the accountability of those decision makers.
On reading, they're choked by fake news with little or no way to judge the veracity of the posts you're reading. Moreover, the posts that are being presented are not under your control, they're under the control of the platform's algorithm, which is opaque and subject to change.
Social platforms could be a force for good. Currently they're not. E.g. they have demonstrably distorted democracy, more than once, and at the extreme end have been proven to be a powerful tool in aiding acceptance of genocide.
This App is intended to provide a trusted method of harnessing social media by providing permanence, context, provinance and cross-examination.
It aims to provide a window out of the echo chamber.
Tactical Intent​
The App would have the following characteristics:
- Run on Interblock, thereby inheriting the benefits of Interblock as a platform.
- Allow the editting and broadcasting of social media posts to existing channels through a single dashboard.
- Keep an on-chain copy of the post and the meta data around each post, including which channels it was posted to, when, on which accounts, and whether it was taken down or published. As far as external APIs make this available, it also shows where it was published.
- Provide a means for others to view those posts regardless of whether they were taken down by the social media channels.
- Provide a 'deadman' facility, where posts are logged, but not submitted, but will be submitted if there is no command to stop it.
- Provide a timed facility, where the timing, context, location etc is stored indelibly, but is not published without express authorisation from the owner.
- Provide a method for adding context to a post such as supporting material, that in itself can have a deadman or timed trigger.
- Provide a method of anonymous posting, where the other posts put up by that anonymous user can also be searched for and seen, but where the real world identity remains hidden.
- Provide a method for users to group together in 'circles of trust', where the veractiy of posts from group member to group member is heightened, and where the group as a whole can post out as a single 'user'.
- Provide a method of generating a 'reputation' score for each user, based on 'witnesses' willing to fact check, verify or back that user. This includes after-the-fact witnessing, e.g. when a post is later shown to be fake, or accurate.
- Provide a method of verification based on reputation, nested reputation (groups of groups, groups of users, association), and weighted verification (designating a trusted witness or source e.g.)
- Provide a method of analysis of a post, including who viewed/liked it, aggregation of their reputation, aggregation of their supporters' reputation, aggregation of the reputations of the private groups to which they are a member, and so forth. (This differs from verification as it may not necessarily be aimed at telling what is true, but analysing the network around that post.)
- Provide a method for others to comment, dispute or support a post, with their reputation giving weight to their comment.
- Provide a simply method for setting filters on which posts to display. I.e not a single algorithm. These filters can be in any direction, e.g. showing only posts from trusted sources based on what the user considers as trustworthy, or showing only posts from untrusted users, or users from certain groups. Each user should be able to change these filters at will.
- Provides NFTs for each post, each witness statement and each comment, with ownership linked to the user or group who generated it.