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Community Defined
In the context of the ratings system, a community is a group of users who collaborate with each other. They generally have a broad agreement to follow certain rules, conventions, and norms. In some ways it is nothing more than a contract but a contract implies a straightforward give and take economic transaction, and hard economic obligations on both sides. A community is more than that and is less formal although it implies a type of governance, values, perhaps even a culture. It is still a contract, in the sense that members *agree* to abide by the community's standards and the community agrees to give the member certain benefits. But it is more than what a contract normally implies.
We use the word community alot because it is necessary for what we are trying to do. A ratings system can only work amongst a group of people that are trying to accomplish something together. This would seem to become more true the more significant the goals of the group are. A truth-seeking ratings system, one that can really improve society, lead to better governance, etc. needs to be a significant community. Our ratings system is doing much more than helping people decide which product to buy or restaurant to eat at.
The loosely libertarian crypto community that our ratings system is, at least initially, directed at probably sees the individual as the basic unit of government. There's plenty of good reason for this since it is individuals that comprise the groups and individuals who do the thinking to make governance possible. But here we take the presence of individuals as a given and see communities as the basic building block for any worthwhile experiment in social improvement. This is not a value judgement, not a right or wrong thing. It is just why we refer alot of community.
A community might not have its agreements written down. It could be just a set of norms that are implicitly followed. Note how the word "norms" suddenly found its way into our vocabulary when Trump came to power and started violating them. We realized very quickly that we are governed implicitly by alot of informal standards. Most people in a community agree, for instance, to be reasonable and respectful to each other. It is only when this doesn't happen regularly that we might decide to write it down as a rule.
In many cases community norms come from the surrounding culture. In a sense, this just means that communities influence each other and that there may be larger, more encompassing communities that envelop smaller ones. We understand that in our ratings based community system that members may be in many communities and that alot of overlap will exist.
The subjective and community-based ratings system
Let's begin by stressing that first we are building a [[subjective ratings system]] in the context of a peer-to-peer network. Everyone would have their own network of contacts, choose their own categories for ratings, algorithms for aggregation, weights for aggregation equations, etc. Individuals would identify themselves to their peers of choice with a public key or similar methodology. Their opinions would be encrypted and signed with their private key and decipherable by only their direct peers, those given the public key. With this, individuals would have a tool for tracking and judging the opinions of their immediate peers. They would also have the ability to access someone they are not directly connected to through someone who is. If A wanted an opinion from C but C is not in A’s direct peer network, then A would have to find someone, say B, who was known to both C and A.
Each shared public key would be different, by default, for everyone that received it. Tom can give his public key to Mike and Alice but they would each receive a different key. Tom would know that he gave one public key to Mike and another to Alice. Then when he communicates with Mike only Mike can decipher what he said. Alice wouldn’t be able to decipher it unless Mike gave her the key intended for him. Thus all communication is, by default, completely private. Tom can, of course, choose to use the same key for both Mike and Alice but such a choice is one step removed from the envisioned default. Such a step would be one way to begin moving toward a public node.
In a system like this, individuals remain as anonymous as they like, aside from any minimal identification needed for communication (eg public key). Those who already know each other can reveal their public keys and then communicate through the ratings system. The system could build, over time, mechanisms whereby people can communicate directly but the base protocol would not include this layer.
As an extension of this idea, we can envision a public version of the ratings system where people maintain an identity that anyone can get access to. If a writer wanted to publish for the whole group of users he could do so by identifying himself publicly through his IP address (or other addressable mechanism). The only change here is that the public individual has an address known to everyone. Otherwise, the system is based on the same private peer-to-peer network envisioned earlier.
A further extension of this idea involves a public rating system (or community-based ratings system). This is where the entire community agrees to use a standard ratings system with pre-agreed rules for privacy, aggregation, etc. One way this could be done is to agree to use the ratings system of a public person on the network because the community happens to have a high regard for that individual. The public ratings system is then simply a publicly addressable node on the network that everyone agrees is the community’s rating system. But individuals, barring any community rule against such, would be free to use their own private ratings system as well.
Both the private (subjective) and public (community-based) systems are likely to be useful. The community-based system will grow out from the subjective system depending on the needs of members. As communities become more cohesive and do more projects together, they will probably gravitate toward a common ratings system. This will be especially the case for developing a sophisticated economic system where production standards, for instance, are judged in common.
But it is unclear how this will unfold. Perhaps the subjective system will be able to handle a wider range of interaction and make a formal community-based system unnecessary. This will all no doubt depend heavily on the community and its goals.