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Does SN have to solve the problem of producing one global ordering for posts as a social choice function?
There is only one president after the election (or one MVP in the NBA), but must SN produce one post at the top of a single list?
If every user has a different preferred post ordering, can't each user get their ordering, for themselves?
That's an interesting question.
If every user has a different preferred post ordering
This may be a little closer to what SN was like before trust was removed in December. I'm no engineer, but it seems like you couldn't achieve personalized ranking solely by using sats.
Currently on SN, if you zap a post and refresh the home page, you can see it move up the rankings. Whatever else it is, this seems like a transparent system.
I think that personalized front pages would necessarily be more opaque as to what kind of posts reach the front page.
I wonder if it is a necessary side effect of money as the moderator that it produces global ordering.
@SimpleStacker may have mentioned it in that post, but when you introduce money and side payments, you can solve some of those impossible problems.
That's very theoretical though, and it usually requires that all the possible outcomes can be listed and ranked and assigned values over. For something as nebulous as "what a user wants to see on social media, and how that affects the rest of society", it's not obvious how to implement the optimal set of side payments to make everyone better off.
But that being said, just because it's impossible to meet a certain set of optimality criteria, doesn't mean we can't meet a weaker set of optimality criteria.
I guess my point is more that, absent payments, how to order content is an impossible problem because there is no meaningful intersubjective comparison of utility.
With payments, there is an actual optimal point that we can think about our distance from.
My fear is that SN is trying to solve an impossible problem. If there's anything thing worse than a Brand Age, it's an Impossible Age.
Perhaps markets are the best approximate solution to such a problem, but I wonder if markets, within this domain, improve upon the dictatorships and communism of other solutions (at scale), and improve them enough to earn a golden age. We'll find out.