Feature recommendation: Marked Posts (name intentionally bland. Any variant of “private” (ie, secret, sensitive, classified) would attract attention and partially negate the point) (alternate names: permissioned posts, declared posts)
This feature prevents leaks, without sacrificing openness.
A marked post will only be seen by members in good standing. They’ll be able to see the title and abstract in their feed, but before they’re able to read it, they have to click “I declare that I’m going to read this”, and then they’ll leave a read receipt (or a “mark”) visible to the post creator, admins, other members in good standing. (these would also just serve a useful social function of giving us more mutual knowledge of who knows what, while making it easier to coordinate to make sure every post gets read by people who’d understand it and be able to pass it along to interested parties.)
If a member “reads” an abnormally high number of these posts, the system detects that, and they may have their ability to read more posts frozen. Admins, and members who’ve read many of the same posts, are notified, and you can investigate. If other members find that this person actually is reading this many posts, that they seem to truly understand the content, they can be given an expanded reading rate. Members in good standing should be happy to help with this, if that person is a leaker, well that’s serious, if they’re not a leaker, what you’re doing in the interrogation setting is essentially you’re just getting to know a new entrant to the community who reads and understands a lot, talking about the theory with them, and that is a happy thing to do.
Members in good standing must be endorsed by another member in good standing before they will be able to see Marked posts. The endorsements are also tracked. If someone issues too many endorsements too quickly (or the people downstream of their endorsements are collectively doing so in a short time window), this sends an alert. The exact detection algorithm here is something I have funding to develop so if you want to do this, tell me and I can expedite that project.
Note: Someone who reads and understands a lot of posts within a community will, if those posts are correct, end up being aligned with the community. Verify that they’re actually reading the posts and not just the capabilities ones→verify unlikely to leak.
Hmm. Seems… fragile. I don’t think that’s a reason not to do it, but I also wouldn’t put much hope in the idea that leaks would be successfully prevented by this system.
Re the “Why?/Citation?” react: I don’t know if this is what Nathan was thinking of, but trivially a would-be leaker could simply screenshot posts as they read and pass the screenshots on without this being reflected in the system.
Indicating them as a suspect when the leak is discovered.
Generally the set of people who actually read posts worthy of being marked is in a sense small, people know each other. If you had a process for distributing the work, it would be possible to figure out who’s probably doing it.
It would take a lot of energy, but it’s energy that probably should be cultivated anyway, the work of knowing each other and staying aligned.
Of course this would shrink the suspect pool, but catching the leaker more easily after the fact is very different from the system making it difficult to leak things. Under the proposed system, it would be very easy to leak things.
On infrastructures for private sharing:
Feature recommendation: Marked Posts (name intentionally bland. Any variant of “private” (ie, secret, sensitive, classified) would attract attention and partially negate the point) (alternate names: permissioned posts, declared posts)
This feature prevents leaks, without sacrificing openness.
A marked post will only be seen by members in good standing. They’ll be able to see the title and abstract in their feed, but before they’re able to read it, they have to click “I declare that I’m going to read this”, and then they’ll leave a read receipt (or a “mark”) visible to the post creator, admins, other members in good standing. (these would also just serve a useful social function of giving us more mutual knowledge of who knows what, while making it easier to coordinate to make sure every post gets read by people who’d understand it and be able to pass it along to interested parties.)
If a member “reads” an abnormally high number of these posts, the system detects that, and they may have their ability to read more posts frozen. Admins, and members who’ve read many of the same posts, are notified, and you can investigate. If other members find that this person actually is reading this many posts, that they seem to truly understand the content, they can be given an expanded reading rate. Members in good standing should be happy to help with this, if that person is a leaker, well that’s serious, if they’re not a leaker, what you’re doing in the interrogation setting is essentially you’re just getting to know a new entrant to the community who reads and understands a lot, talking about the theory with them, and that is a happy thing to do.
Members in good standing must be endorsed by another member in good standing before they will be able to see Marked posts. The endorsements are also tracked. If someone issues too many endorsements too quickly (or the people downstream of their endorsements are collectively doing so in a short time window), this sends an alert. The exact detection algorithm here is something I have funding to develop so if you want to do this, tell me and I can expedite that project.
Note: Someone who reads and understands a lot of posts within a community will, if those posts are correct, end up being aligned with the community. Verify that they’re actually reading the posts and not just the capabilities ones→verify unlikely to leak.
Hmm. Seems… fragile. I don’t think that’s a reason not to do it, but I also wouldn’t put much hope in the idea that leaks would be successfully prevented by this system.
Re the “Why?/Citation?” react: I don’t know if this is what Nathan was thinking of, but trivially a would-be leaker could simply screenshot posts as they read and pass the screenshots on without this being reflected in the system.
You can’t see the post body without declaring intent to read.
But someone who declared intent to read could simply take a picture and send it to any number of people who hadn’t declared intent.
Indicating them as a suspect when the leak is discovered.
Generally the set of people who actually read posts worthy of being marked is in a sense small, people know each other. If you had a process for distributing the work, it would be possible to figure out who’s probably doing it.
It would take a lot of energy, but it’s energy that probably should be cultivated anyway, the work of knowing each other and staying aligned.
Of course this would shrink the suspect pool, but catching the leaker more easily after the fact is very different from the system making it difficult to leak things. Under the proposed system, it would be very easy to leak things.