What Makes Hyperlogues Unique?

 

 

 

Numerous attempts have been made to create online platforms for collaboration, yet none have “cracked the code” for conducting granular, high-performance, ad hoc collaboration on the web. What makes hyperlogues unique is that it integrates the key elements of group brainstorming and deliberation to create an entirely new collaborative method.

  

Eliminates the “Tragedy of the Comments”. The standard methodology for group collaboration today is the use of comment strings for organizing user feedback. As useful as this is for general interactivity on the web, it’s a terrible method for facilitating large-scale collaborative dialogue on the web. In the early days of the Internet, it served as the online representation of one-on-one conversation. Today, comment strings are used even when the number of participants makes coherent dialogue impossible. A better solution would use the natural tendency of fragmentation within group dialogue as a core element of collaboration. Instead of producing one monolithic string of comments, Ideologi facilitates private tangential discussions during a hyperlogue to maximize the coverage of the conceptual terrain for the topic at hand, regardless of the subject matter or number of users.

  

Reputation-Free Evaluation. Even though users formally register to participate in Ideologi, all of the interaction among participants during a project is anonymous. Biases such as user reputation or size of a participant’s social network are simply not allowed to skew the evaluation process. Most of the valuations attributed to content submitted by users of other collaborative systems rely heavily on social networking. The problem with that reliance is what social theorists call reputational or information "cascades,” more commonly referred to as groupthink.

  

“Coopetition”. Ideologi uses gaming theory to loop the motivations of cooperation and competition into each other. For example, giving a glowing review to the proposal that receives the highest score raises the final ranking of the evaluating participant in a project. Even the decision to punish or even purge abusive users is determined by those participants who will benefit the most by passing sound judgment.

  

Explicit Comparative Evaluation. Allowing users to evaluate any piece of submitted content they want—independent of any requirement of comparing it with other submitted content is the standard mode of most systems today. But this creates an inherent problem. Since users are not formally comparing one piece of content versus another, what do their scores really mean?

  

Should a user be able to review only one piece of submitted content (e.g. blindly giving a score based on a social networking request from an acquaintance) or should they be required to compare it to at least one other piece of content before making an evaluation? If the collectively perceived value of submitted content is purely relative to the value of other pieces of content, then the real value of content that isn’t based on comparative judgement is unclear at best. The content displayed on systems such as these that have the highest value could very likely be nothing more than accidental (manipulated?) groupthink. Like a feedback loop between a microphone and a nearby speaker, any content could become the “most valued” for no other reason than the momentum of its popularity at the beginning of a collaboration.

  

The best current example of exclusive comparative voting (made made famous by the notorious web site "Hot or Not") is the Pairwise comparison methodology. Here's how it works: Users are presented with two pieces of content (typically a line of text or a picture) and are asked to decide which one they like the best. It has an impressive amount of analytical grounding. However, there's no facility for submitting commentary for consideration by content originators and/or subsequent evaluators. In other words, there's almost no feedback loop. It's called a "rank reversal" problem.

  

Evolution through upgrading. By making the upgrading of proposals in a project a full feature, user content is never dated, unless it looses its relevance to the community of participants. This reduces the "post-and-forget" problem with most online collaboration. It makes Ideologi as different to other online brainstorming systems as Amazon.com's e-commerce platform is to eBay's auctioning system.

  

Fully-Decentralized & Community-Owned. The full realization of Ideologi's capabilities, as outlined in this whitepaper, is only possible as an application running on Ethereum. The protocol that makes Bitcoin work—the blockchain ledger—turns out to be a core technology for creating secure multi-party computing environments. This offers the possibility of a new class of shared decentralized application platforms that run trusted decentralized applications across the public Internet. The first of these platforms to be announced is called Ethereum. It contains a fully-functional programming environment that can create new blockchain-based cryptocurrencies in less than five lines of code.