I wonder if they would be interested in implementing ActivityPub?

Awesome! Ping me when you’re done, if you like. Happy to chat more.

I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I’m not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there’s a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.

Thanks, I saw that flohmakrt link in another comment too. Excellent!

Does that yrpri site work well?

Also:

• gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle)
• buying/selling (e.g. like ebay)
• local community/bioregionalism networks (e.g. what nextdoor should be)

These seem kind of ideal for a federated network, IMO.

I actually think Lemmy would be a pretty decent format for something stackoverflow like - just maybe needs to UI tweaks to minimise the visual space that replies take up, plus maybe answered post flair

Me too, but I’m not paying enough attention to reddit to make me a useful moderator…

I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.

But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.

There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%2Fjost.000051 (Open access, about 50 pages)

For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.

I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).

I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.

What was the picture?

Maybe we need a shitRedditBans community here to repost all the stuff that get banned for bad reasons there? Could be risky, I guess, but could be great with some good moderation.

Not a bad set! I would add something related to “funny”.

Also, separating agree (opinion) from accurate (factual) would be nice. But I guess you gotta keep it somewhat simple.

Right, thanks. Still a super useful system, IMO, though I’m sure better versions are possible.

That’s true, but it’s gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users

It doesn’t accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?

Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.

Slashdot used to have a multidimensional voting system that would allow you to up or down vote something based on whether it was funny/insightful/correct, etc (can’t remember the dimension). I wish we had something like that. Sometimes it would be useful to mark a comment as “funny, but also wrong”

There ate multiple algorithms, but I don’t think any of them account for both votes and comments… I might be wrong though.

Tangent: the "scaled* algorithm, which normalises post ranks by the popularity of the community they’re posted to, is excellent. I recommend everyone use it as their default.

Most by number of users, I’d guess.

I’m on mastodon.social, and basically never see threads posts.

Most of the core mastodon servers haven’t blocked threads…

I work in the risk assessment space, so they are kind of critical to be aware of, for me :)

Adding my own explanation, because I think it clicks better for me (especially when I write it down):

1. Pick a door. You have a 66% chance of picking a wrong door, and a 33% of picking the right door.
2. Monty excludes a door with 100% certainty
3. IF you picked a wrong door, then there’s a 100% chance the remaining door is correct (so the contingent probability is p(switch|picked wrong) = 100%), so the total chance of the remaining door being correct is p(switch|picked wrong)* p(picked wrong) = 66%.
4. IF you picked the right door, then Monty’s reveal gives you no new information, because both the other doors were wrong, so p(switch|picked right) = 50%, which means that p(switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17%.
5. p(don't switch|picked wrong) * p(picked wrong) = 50% * 66% = 33% (because of the remaining doors including the one you picked, you have no more information)
6. p(don't switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17% (because both of the unpicked doors are wrong, Monty didn’t give you more information)

So there’s a strong benefit of switching (66% to 33%) if you picked wrong, and even odds of switching if you picked right (17% in both cases).

Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.

Thanks for the help, it was easier this time 😅

It’s extremely useful, because it’s an index to all the known things that might be useful in a given situation. The point is not to assess all of them, the point is to not miss ones you’re unfamiliar with that may be important in your situation.