[Comment] Before now was a clearer open thing...

[@TiddlyTweeter]

I'm old and worn out.

In the early days of the emergence of the net there was a whole sub-culture exploring "qualitative" data. What happened was that Google and other "Net Machines" took that work and implemented it as "quantative". 

Google makes no differentiation now. Your qualitative it makes quantative, whatever it is. That is part of its brilliance. And its horror.

The residual issue is that the "open edge" gets closed. But that is exactly what should not have happened.

Few people now understand the impetus towards "text-bases" (TW can be thought of as a "text-base") which recorded "EXPERIENCE", rather than "data-bases", which recorded the STATS of DOINGS.

IMO, this issue is still alive, but muted in the avalanch of SERVER SAYINGS which are actually very partial. But DRIVING too much. Smothering the still live issue.

No technology is innocent now.

Josiah

In deep(ish) thought 

[@TiddlyTweeter]

repeat for email users ...

[Mark S.]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but in the beginning Yahoo's search engine was based on actual humans organizing things by semantic terms.

As the number of websites grew into a riotous horde, this approach became impracticable. Eventually the big G won out with robots searching

for new sites and algorithms to look for "relevant" search terms.

The problem is that the quantitative can be gamed. So you do a search and you get several thousand very similar websites, all of which have lifted

their information from some original website that you can't find because the thousand sites have applied SEO techniques to boost their quantitative

assessment and the original site did not. If you visit those sites, you will get a chiding note admonishing you how the web will collapse if you keep

using an ad-blocker. They don't mention that it's their manipulations that make it impossible for you to find the actual source site that may deserve

your support.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Mark 

I believe you get it. That struggle "in the beginning"; the march to scale that lost "the other thing" (that bit is understandable).

Then the "gamed" quantative (a box of sins?) that cuts legs off and makes an innacurate world of misrepresentation (motivated dysfunction we should fight).

TT

[h0p3]

I am very interested in this problem. Technology is a double-edged sword; it is only ever a means. What ends do you prescribe? TW does something valuable in this space. What should it be? Where ought we go?

[@TiddlyTweeter]

I think its a difficult problem. But an interesting one. 

At least, being human, we can cognise its an issue. I mean its not totally determinate. If it were we'd not be having this conversation.

The Machine would, however, not know that. By which I mean we are not determined by the tech, but the consequence of informational blockage (good things are often not seen, low on the Machine Food Chain) do skew the perceptional range of what we can actually get to see. 

Of course the whole idea of "ranking" in search tools is both central and a nest of vipers.

Its a very important issue.

IMO it was a big mistake to get to the point that we now routinely accept private companies are running the biggest informational system in history (net search).

They should have been run as common cause outside any financial framework.

Something like that.

My thoughts, TT

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Regarding what do WE do with our tech.

1 - we interlink it better so that we form a community of connected equals

2 - we better optimize tools for optimal auto-recognition by The Machine

I have to say that TW is one of the most amazingly evolved wikis in history that nobody sees. 

That is partly a consequence of its design. Perhaps unintented.

J

On Thursday, 1 August 2019 18:27:47 UTC+2, h0p3 wrote: