It will be important to capture the potential energy of information consumption
Authored By:: Rob Haisfield
How do people tacitly annotate information? People are lazy, so if we can really leverage tacit annotation by enriching the choice architecture with options that add value, then we can perhaps fill in metadata and generate discourse. This could be interpreted as a response to the question: How do we increase the frequency of social tagging behaviors. These people can verify information, agree with it, disagree, and connect it to other information. We must leverage this- imagine if Readwise was ubiquitous, people more frequently commented and tagged information, and people could reply to each other?
What community roles are necessary in a decentralized knowledge graph? Most people will primarily consume information, so they need something valuable to do. That valuable thing could be commenting on claims and building up RDF relationships between granular parts of the content on the page and other stuff. Social tagging, or social relationship description.
We want to capture the potential energy of information consumption because of problems associated with the question: How can people maintain a decentralized discourse graph with a high quantity of information in it. It will be crucial to be able to improve the signal to noise ratio.
Perhaps people annotating information could put stake behind their annotations and get rewarded if others believe their annotations to be valuable.
Incrementally processing notes is a key user behavior to promote synthesis, and capturing the potential energy latent in people’s annotations will be crucial.
People need a way of promoting and demoting knowledge in a decentralized knowledge graph. Specific sets of emoji reactions could facilitate this, as could quadratic voting as implemented in Knovigator! If we can harness people’s ability to react with commentary and allow that commentary to carry metadata, then the many eyes on it will result in highly queryable and malleable data structure. If it is structured in a way that’s abstract enough to be recursive (e.g “It’s turtles all the way down”), then that enhances composability. I wish I could freely add metadata to each block, so I could drag a slider indicating a belief score
The claims made in this page are different from There is a wealth of creative exhaust generated by researchers that is going to waste primarily in the sense that creative exhaust refers to content that is created that does not make it to publishing. In the titular page, we are making the claim that there is exhaust to capture from consumption as well.