basically, use the privacy features of monero to somehow fix some of the problems in contemporary science.
from my experience, some of the fundamental problems with modern science is the peer review process - many journals function as gatekeepers, rejecting the publication of certain articles they feel "aren't worthy" of publication in that particular journal. this kind of crap grinds science to a slow tumbling pace. Article submissions can take 6 months. Then it gets rejected. THen its another 6 months. So, something you figure out a year ago still hasn't made it out to the community. Frustrating.
To counter this, open access (somewhat free for all) journals such as PLOS have cropped up -the idea being that the scientific community will eventually determine the worthiness of a publication simply based on its influence on the field - i.e., others will reference it. I.e., it will undergo peer review for its scientific merit only, as opposed to some ill-defined (and often reviewer-interpreted) journal specific merit.
The problem here of course is that there is soooo much published, it becomes impossible to separate the interesting stuff from the other stuff.
And if this # of citations index is the measure of a publications worth, this takes time - years to do additional research in order to write an article to cite the original article and thus increase its standing in the literature. And if you go the non-PLOS route, add another year for the journal process.
Thus, it'd be great if there was a way for the scientific community to go "yeah, i agree with that article" for whatever reason - they've observed similar phenomena, etc. It would be a way for consensus to form within a much shorter time frame to guide the field more efficiently.
once could imagine that a system such as reddits upvoting may work, but there's no economic cost for exploit. Hence, monero.
this app could also potentially benefit from monero trust and monero ID.
Just throwing out my first thought and not worrying too much.
It could use a system where you are awarded a certain number of vote credits. But let's say that someone is particularly good at picking good material, then once a certain vote threshold is reached, then the votes could be redistributed to all who upvoted the article. You could also use a system that had field specialization (nuclear scientist voting on nuclear materials, botanists voting on botany work, ect.) which would take out the non-specialist who have little insight in other fields. Would be awesome to have a pro-reddit and not have to fish through endless comments to get at the heart of an issue.
hrm, not sure im pickin up what you're putting down here.
it would all be done anonymously, thanks to monero. The potential influence of non-specialists may be mitigated due to the cost of voting.
of course, one could "buy" influence if this works directly off the monero main chain. I guess it could also utilize a daughter chain.
"pro-reddit" - yeah, thats the idea,.... create an economic cost for voting / posting content. I'm sure it any forum implemented a per-post cost, there'd be a significant signal-noise ratio increase.