Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.
i guess that could help improve the results by a lot. maybe some decentralized ranking or reputation system could be in place where these "fact checkers" could gain more rank so their votes could have more meaning compared to others.
hope to see it in action soon.
Yea, still plenty of work to do in the meantime as well for the verifiers/fact-checkers platform. But we'll need more participation at the lower level now with the news voting. Tough days
If you have voters and verifies it means you will have two or more voting levels, and someone's vote worth more than others. Then it is not decentralised, right?
Also, you need a really big number of participants to get a more precise result, how do you think to attract people to vote every day, plus they need to research something to be sure what is right.
How do you plan to keep this community active? If you check here on Bitcointalk for example, even if here so many active users but pools haven't too many votes.
I'd say the decentralised part is focused on the verifier role, where verifiers can have their opinions on articles, but only valid when backed by majority. But that is on the later part after this MVP.
I agree with you on the big number of participants, and this is something I hope to achieve at this phase, to lay a foundation with voters. Assuming we get 1000 authentic voters who'd vote actively and contribute articles for voting, we can promote 5-10% of them as verifiers at the end of this current phase, and invite 3rd party fact-checkers out there as verifiers as well. Ultimately, as this platform scales, 90% of normal members, will participate in voting and contribution to earn RNT, RNT can be used to stake on verifiers to do the work. And when revenue starts coming in in future, members who stake on verifiers, and verifiers themselves, can get incentivised. But we're still far away from there so I wouldn't want to say much about this incentivising part now. The normal voters, will not make any decisive impact, but indirectly incentivised by staking, or becoming outstanding enough to become a verifier themselves one day, as the need for verifiers will definitely increase as more members start coming in. Hopefully this would be an indirect way to incentivise normal users to keep up their activity here. We still need a detailed metric for incentivising verifiers, taking into consideration their contribution, activity such as contributing to fact-checking, and backing other fact-checkers, which leads to a potential reputation or credibility rating.
Even though the focus of this platform is mainly on fact-checkers/verifiers working to get the facts out, and debunk fake or misinformed news, but without a base community, it might look like we're having artists(fact-checkers) performing, but without much audience (90% of community). That's why I'm keen to build up a community of performing artists now. Some of them might make it as the first batch of verifiers, some of them might take slightly longer and remain as audience, or even some who'll never be verifiers, but stakes their RNT on verifiers who are active and provides quality fact-checking. But as community grows, more verifiers will be promoted, or even sourced from current 3rd party fact-checkers, which the community can stake their token on as well.
Going back to being decentralised, I think the definition in being a decentralised app is, without the continued effort of founders and devs, the decentralised platform can still run by itself. And in this case, even though normal members do not have much say in deciding if a news is fake or not, but normal members hold the power to stake on verifiers. Verifiers might hold a stronger say if a news is real or fake, but eventually, verifiers not up to standard, will lose relevance over time, and be taken over by others in the community. Every role is fairly important in this role, and I don't think one is more important than the other when it comes to roles in the platform. But as a collective community, the agenda is still the same, which is accurate information delivery. Similarly in any organisation, a manager will suffer when workers are not convinced of the manager's capabilities, a commander might lose his troops, if he makes bad decisions all the time. But it doesn't happen that much in the society, because, workers get paid, regardless working under a incompetent person, or a good manager. Troops who disobey superior, get punished for insubordination. In the case of this platform, normal members have a choice on which verifier to stake on, if verifiers are not performing actively, they lose support of normal members to other fellow verifiers. The challenge here would be, to prevent a small group of verifiers consolidating too much power, when all normal members start staking for a small group of verifiers, but these things can be adjusted by introducing systems where, normal users have to stake their RNT on a few verifiers, instead of 1 sole verifier.
