Advogato blog for rw2

9 Aug 2000

Wed, 9 Aug 2000 00:00:48 GMT

Signing off. The trust metric doesn't work well enough to suit me. The only way that you can get bumped up, it seems, is to maintain a diary. A laborious and boring process. Who the hell wants to read the details of what I do, yet, some must as they have bothered and then certified me.

4 Aug 2000

Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:56:45 GMT

Ha! Just found the 'projects' area here. Now I won't look like such a fuck nut listing my projects in plain text.

Added everybuddy, the ace orb and cetus-links.org to the projects page.

We get LOTS of ad hoc help on the cetus-links project, so go add yourself to the list of helpers if you have chipped in!

4 Aug 2000

Fri, 4 Aug 2000 15:56:16 GMT

Worked on packaging for dsay. The gui still isn't working quite right, but that'll get fixed.

Someone posted a patch for EB to do IM with encryption. Cool shit.

Posted on EB concerning TTS and generally just seeking feedback as to what people might like to see.

1 Aug 2000

Tue, 1 Aug 2000 21:04:25 GMT

Thinking some more about the trust thing I've decided that the whole scheme using 'open source contributions' as the basis for certification is completely orthogonal to the problem of keeping the signal boosted on a message board.

After all someone with a Masters in English (and I have someone in mind who fits this example perfectly) might be able to comment quite well on technology issues, or even open source itself. They would, should the certifications be accurate, be unable to post though.

OTOH, I, which would most fairly be called a 'Master' in this system by virtue of the amount of time I spend on cetus-links.org and other open source projects (easily 40 hours a week both paid on non), am not always to most interesting guy to listen to rant on a given topic.

1 Aug 2000

Tue, 1 Aug 2000 15:29:14 GMT

I'm reading a couple threads today and was caught by the one on the old boys network. As someone who has been contributing to open source for a long time in one form or another I too am concerned by what I see here.

Specifically, the trust here seems more like viral marketing than 'real' trust. I see the path of least resistance to being able to post here to be getting a few friends who are familar with my work to log on an cert me because I haven't a good way to associate with the folks already online.

An interesting way to build traffic, but not quite to the sweet spot yet.

Which brings me to the article on /.

A lot of the folks seemed to think that it was simply too big. I disagree. As a moderator I'll switch to -1 for the good of the community, but otherwise switching to 2 or 3 filters out the cruft quite nicely. If a thread looks interesting then pop the filter down and see more. The scaling that means every topic recieved 200 posts also means that I can delve deeper when something catches my eye.

That sweet spot?

Something in between the two sites. Let everyone post, but rate people and posts. Not just people. Not just posts.

This way the cruft gets filtered out on a topic by topic basis, but over time the human cream rises to the top and I can filter that was also.