4-19-05 - 3

4-19-05

The response I'm getting to requests on 4-17 is awesome; people coming together to help each other is a beautiful thing. I wish everyone could help each other in a similar way; of course the reason we don't is you say, "who is this douche, why should I take time to help him?". It reminds me of an old idea I had - there needs to be an international "cool person's club". Basically this is just a collective of people who want to be nice to each other and have indirect approval of each other. So, when you're travelling you could look up the club and see other "cool" members in whatever town. People could rate each other, so if someone in the club visits you and trashes your house, you just go put a bad review on him on the site and people won't like him any more. Ideally this would be a rating using the "Network of Trust", so each person doesn't have an absolute rating at all, but rather a rating *for me* through my taste & trust network. So, for example, if I trust person B, and he likes person C, then C is rated well for me. You might trust person D, who hates person C, so then C is rated poorly for you. If someone else trusts both of us, then they'll see that person C is rated mediocre on average, with a huge spread (very low confidence in the rating). In my original conception I thought the club would have to vote people in & ban people who are bastards, but that makes it like an exclusive clique, I don't like that idea. Rather, let anyone join, they just have no rating. Also, anyone who's a bastard would get rated way down. It would be interesting if the club could become a social mini game, where people start being nice to each other in real life in order to get points in the game. That could actually be easily encouraged by giving prizes semi-randomly to people who are well rated (like subsidized parties for club members).