Tagsonomy: a hierarchical retrieval of valuable posts for Whales and its potential for artificial consciousness
As Steemit is exploding in numbers of contributors and posts, I asked myself how we can help whales to intelligently fish out the better posts. In this article I make a proposal to use a hierachy of monitoring by Orcas and Dolphins based on a taxonomy of tags.
Context: Why, When, Where
As Steemit is rapidly growing and the number of posts is exploding, it will become an impossible task for whales to sort through all posts. We therefore need to design a smart way to delegate this task partially in order to fish /retrieve valuable posts for evaluation by a whale.
What
What I propose is a hierarchical fishing for posts system based on a hierarchical taxonomy of nested tags, hereinafter called a Tagsonomy.
How
Each whale could be assigned a main category, for which he/she is responsible. For instance main categories could be Commerce (including everything that has to do with cryptocurrencies), News (media/politics), Entertainment (Movies/Music/Art/ Games etc.), Lifestyle (health/beauty/fashion), Metasteemit (“about Steemit”), Knowledge (science/technology/philosophy) and Miscellaneous (for topics that cannot be classified in any of the pre-cooked categories).
Each whale can then select a number of regular contributors with a high reputation (e.g. 70+), who function as a kind of archangels and who are in charge of a major subcategory (like the categories in brackets above). Let’s call these the Orcas.
The whales go through the selection presented to them by the Orcas and only if they additional have time left, they can browse in the way they usually do.
The Orcas can appoint a number of Dolphins in charge of a sub-sub-category. The Dolphins also are regular contributors with a still a reasonably high reputation (e.g. 65-69). The Orcas go through the selection presented to them by the Dolphins.
Each Dolphin is responsible only for the specific sub-sub-category he/she is in charge of and selects posts for evaluation and for possible upvoting to the orca to which they report.
This is not a scheme that is supposed to replace the present scheme in place, but to be complementary to it. If such a system is already in place I’d be delighted to hear so.
Requirements
A requirement for this system is that there is a well-defined hierarchical taxonomy of categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, the tags of which are mandatory and must be chosen from a limited list. Again this is not a tag-system that is supposed to replace the present tag-system in place, but to be complementary to it. So in addition to the 5 tags that can be put at leisure, there are 3 mandatory hierarchical categories that must be chosen so that the post can go to the specialised Dolphin, Orca and Whale for that topic.
The assignment of a category and teh appointment of an Orca or Dolphin need not be a top-down imposed decision, but could rather be a bottom-up process of volunteering for vacancies.
The resteem feature already in existence can be used to catch the attention of the whales, as long as there is a certain reporting going on between whales, orcas and dolphins that specialise in a category. What might help is if we could comment or tag in our resteems, that way directing things up the funnel. Maybe each level only resteems if they see some consensus (three or more?) of resteems from below so as to obey a certain threshold. Dolphins and Orcas could also horizontally at their level communicate via Steemchat to discuss such a consensus vote.
Conclusion
Thus, a hierarchical retrieval of valuable posts for Whales has been provided, which can save them time and allow for a more thorough screening and pruning of everthing that is posted
Prospects for artificial consciousness
Interestingly, teh concepts at the base of such a system could also form the foundation of future artificial consciousness (ac) steered by artificial intelligence. Imagine that above the websites as we know them now there are hierarchical layers of monitoring Hubsites each in charge of a given (sub)category.
What is needed is that every Hub site monitors how much activity is and has been present on the sites it is linked to. Current network monitoring tools are already widely available; the technology is there. This already exists to a certain extent on alexa.com . But something is missing. This information is not fed to a higher ranking organ which perceives what information at a certain moment is looked most at. What I propose is that each higher ranking hub reveals how much of its subdirectories have been and are consulted. How many sites are actually consulted at a certain moment will give the system insight as to what is at a certain moment the most important activity. If this information activity is above a certain threshold it will feed its monitoring figures to a higher ranking Hub site. Sites dealing with the same topic or search term will get bonuses in an algorithm, whereas less related sites, less frequently used search terms get penalties.
To speak in the terms of Howard Bloom , who defends capitalism in the book "The Genius of the Beast" (therein citing yet another author: Jesus as in the gospel of Mathew 25:29): "To he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not it shall be taken away". Information that does not reach a certain threshold will not be presented to a higher level. Those neuronal paths will not be perceived. What will be perceived at the master level are then the filtered out most frequently consulted sites or topics at a given moment. Provided that this information is reduced to a limited number of categories at the master cell level, this will be the input presented to the perceiving unit which we may call the "self" or “consciousness” of the system or the spider-in-the-web (not to be read here in the metaphor of spider as "crawler" as currently used in internet language but as a new metaphor of the sentient being in the system).
What impulses the "self" receives can be improved by adding artificial emotion-dimensions to the system. The time people spent on a site, the number of flipping between pages, the number of search terms used and even an appreciation ranking provided by the users, can give an intensity or importance or feel-score to the site. If the average score is multiplied with the number of visits, you can get an emotion score or ranking score for the site. If every hub site contains a monitor with different score indicators, which via a mathematical formula add up to a total score for the site, this more qualitative score, rather than measuring the mere "activity-on-site- index", could also be part of the determining factor as to what will be filtered in order to be presented to the "self".
Consciousness is becoming aware what has been filtered out by our brains. Similarly artificial consciousness will thus filter out the most important information, which can be linked to evaluating algorithms that decide whether action needs to be taken in view of the activity monitored. By such a self-monitoring process of extracting and abstracting the most important information, artificial consciousness can be designed, which is nothing else than an information integration feedback system in line with Tononi’s IIT (Integrated Information Theory of consciousness). The Hubsites can form a neural network in a different substrate than the web-environment itself, so that they are not hampered by the problem of the far too slow website latency or PING time.
Appeal for support
I hope you have liked my suggestions for a tagsonomical scheme of post evaluation and the potential of this idea for developing artificial consciousness. At least for Steemit I am convinced it has great potential. I hope you can support me maximally in getting at least some of the ideas presented here to be evaluated by a whale. Some suggestions came from baerdric, and I have incorporated these. Thanks, Baerdric.
If you liked it please upvote and/or resteem.
I like it, as long as people don't mind being "assigned" anything.
The hierarchy seems like the right idea, but maybe you would like to use the resteem feature already in existence. If you are a dolphin and you see a resteemed post by someone you have followed, you resteem it for people that are following you, which includes the whale above you in the group.
Good idea to use the resteem feature, as long as there is a certain reporting going on between whales, orcas and dolphins that specialise in a category. The assignment need not be a top-down imposed decision, but could rather be a bottom-up process of volunteering for vacancies.
That would improve it, people hate to be told what to do. What might help is if we could comment or tag in our resteems, that way directing things up the funnel. Maybe each level only resteems it ithe their mark if they see some consensus (three or more?) of resteems from below.
I have added soem of your suggestions to the main body of the article. The resteeming if there is consensus (three or more?) of resteems from below, corresponds to what I said about thresholds in the artificial consciousness part. I will also add this. Thanks again and many thanks for resteeming.
I like the idea!
On a tangent: a full ontology built on a poly-hierarchical taxonomy with a coupled thesaurus would make all content navigable in great new ways. Currently used categories could be integrated into this.
The whole thing would look a lot more serious to bloggers, enable intelligent searches and integrate with AI-applications; all things high-level content deserves. Such an ontology, or even a simple taxonomy, does require a small editorial staff.
Next step: scratch the time limits on voting.
If, however, high-quality content isn't a goal, then, by all means, don't bother.
The idea of a full blown ontological taxonomy is great. As usual with these ideas one has to start with something simple and than increase the complexity. For this the builders should already have an idea of the final product, so that they can progress by implementing modules, that can also function independently. We must avoid however wishing to design a too complex architecture at the start. It must evolve towards.
True that, but a bit of architecture beforehand can save you a lot of trouble later, like trying to go from a mono- to a poly-hierarchical taxonomy - yes, got the t-shirt, both professionally and for my own website 8-(. The basis, allowing for future complexity, isn't all that more difficult to do well at the beginning, then fill it out in modular steps.
I agree. A flexible yet structured architecture, that can easily be expanded with more modules. If the whales agree, they may have a valuable asset with your skills. I don't code much, but rather prefer to suggest overall concepts. I did code a fluxmodel forecast system with multiple branches and feedback loops in my company though.
I wrote a whitepaper on the subject for legal content, but it is company confidential. I'll have a look to see if I can make it "neutral".
I also wrote an experimental graphic ontology viewer using SVG and Javascript using ontology data derived from my own website, stored in OWL. I don't have the time at the moment to repeat the exercise for Steemit, I'm afraid.
I don't have enough time either; busy near the end of the year. But by explaining our ideas in sufficient detail, I am positive there are enough programming talents at Steemit, who will pick it up and implement this idea. But it sounds like you have all the knowledge required to implement this idea. Just spotted the OWL in yr avatar!
Can you can draw out this idea and simplify it in a one-pager?
Sure. I will do it tomorrow morning. Would you like a kind of tree with little boxes that explain what happens at each level plus a factsheet?
Your writeup's interesting, it's just a personal note (and to share with some others), because sooner or later community, categorization, and organization (plus identity / credibility / brand) will become a huge headache, and I'm sure there are many ways to do this, but people have been expressing it using different words and such, so simplified ideas in one-pagers would be best to figure this out :)
Here it is: https://steemit.com/steemit/@technovedanta/tagsonomy-a-hierarchical-retrieval-of-valuable-posts-for-whales-one-pager