I’m ready to work with other people’s money to get stuff I’d like to see built get off the ground. This one is Boxtag.
BoxTag
BoxTag is an open comment management system with advanced reputation management for integration with blogging and social networks. It aims to be a competitor to current external comment systems like Discus and Gravatar. The IP is in the presentation and management of scoring mechanisms and in the database design and implementation.
The pitch is simple. It expands on ‘Like’ to add four dimensions of reputation management for more serious bloggers and discussion groups. These primary four dimensions are:
Authority
Agreement
Emphasis
Relevance.
These four dimensions can be expanded to more than four, and I expect that such matters will be configurable, but we’ll start with that. It’s not enough to simply like a comment, but to rate a commenter so that commenter reputations may rise.
What is the point of Boxtag?
The point of Boxtag is to enable a new confidence in social media by providing users a richer karma system than a simple thumbs up and down.
What is the value of Boxtag?
Use of Boxtag will give commenters more skin in the game by encouraging them to do more than 'first' posts, and actually contribute towards incentives of the different kinds of rewards available to them as commenters and boxtaggers.
What are your expectations of Boxtag?
That certain publications will adopt it on top of their comment systems.
What is the market for Boxtag?
Everyone who uses Gravatar, Discus, Keybase, Wordpress Identification.
Will people pay for Boxtag?
Individuals could pay, but the primary cost would be borne by publishers.
How permanent are Boxtag ratings?
Boxtag will recycle reputations on a seasonal basis. You can only accomplish a high reputation over time by continued contributions. Seasonal history will be recorded.
Boxtag Idea #058 - The Greylist
I just attended the Bellingcat / Persuasion / RDI webcast and a perfect extension to Boxtag occurred to me. Right now I'll call it the greylist.
There's a battle against ad spam and spam in general. But right now the corpuses built are strictly black and white. How about a greylist? What if we added Boxtag karma components to OPs and comments and attached those metadata to corpuses of email addresses? Well that's the basic idea. This means that there needs to be a backlink to certifiably credible documents in some evidentiary chain, but once this is established it would only grow. The first customer for this will be organizations like Bellingcat, but also the circle of independent journalists and NGOs and ex-officio individuals associated with doing all of this.
A good model might be a different way of parsing out IMDB as a test corpus. I've done it many times - you look to find what movies a particular star, or even a particular second unit director is associated with. Wouldn't it be cool to do the same thing by adding their critics into the mix. Well David Denby said X about this film. An easy tangent would be to connect these up to Golden Globe and Academy Awards. So that's the basic idea. Expand the reach of Boxtag karma components to various corpuses and establish gradations of credibility that reach beyond a single website's comment section and trace back to registered dimensions. (Ultimately these registered dimensions will be the IP, rather like Pantone registers colors. We can have many shades of the dimensions of credibility and interest).
Boxtag Idea #059 - Highlights
Hat tip to Alok on this piece. This feature is all about parsing through the text of a comment or an OP that allows a critic / commenter to be more specific about his votes in the Boxtag. It should work like the highlighting function of the Kindle app that allows that. It makes sense that extended annotations can generate new content and that can be established in a proper UI. However there should be some limit. I'm happy to make the limit along the lines of whatever it might have been in Nelson's Xanadu.
It occurs to me as I visualize that the inheritance of 'subtexts' can be navigated through on a left-side panel which resembles the pages of a PDF file as a multipart entity. The way this displays in Mac Preview (several versions up to and including Big Sur) is illustrative. So the new OP, which is a comment, displays front and center. Annotations are on the right-side panel and mousing over them highlights the highlighted text. This would be similar to how such annotations are done in Google Docs. The point is that we extend the critical range beyond the OP into the comments. But we also extend the critical range of the OP itself by allowing people to highlight its strong, weak and off-topic points.
Boxtag 060 - Lurkers, Scribbling & Proxy
There are three edge cases to end of life exits of a named member on Boxtag.
The first is **lurking**. A member may choose to go dark or participate at a low level with a limited number of weigh-ins on a comment. If they volunteer to do so, it should be indicated in their profile and perhaps visually with their visible votes / weigh-ins on comments. Six months is a reasonable period for them to be inactive without changing their status. Lurking periods may be recorded if it can be done efficiently.
The second is **proxy**. A proxy is a high level change of ownership of the member. In order to preserve the anonymity of someone who wishes to disown their prior comments and votes, they may elect to proxy to an anonymous identity. In this case, in order to preserve the integrity of conversations, the ownership of those comments and votes is turned over to the system. An anonymized account is given as the pseudonym of the member and all PII associated with the original member is erased and delinked. While someone might make a screenshot of an original comment or a person might become notorious for a comment attributed to them before the proxy, the system will not allow that to be proven.
The final is the **scribble**. A scribble essentially is a non-reversible disconnection of OPs, comments and votes from their contexts. (Votes? box-votes? ). In the case of a scribble, the original content will be preserved, but all comments are delinked from OPs and votes given and received are deactivated from tallies. Essentially the system will have to recalculate the dimensional scores of all entities. This recalculation is something done regularly so those associated with scribbling should not be taxing on the system.