As Steemit is exploding in numbers of contributors and posts, I asked myself how we can help whales to intelligently fish out the better posts. In this article I make a proposal to use a hierachy of monitoring by Orcas and Dolphins based on a taxonomy of tags.

Context: Why, When, Where

As Steemit is rapidly growing and the number of posts is exploding, it will become an impossible task for whales to sort through all posts. We therefore need to design a smart way to delegate this task partially in order to fish /retrieve valuable posts for evaluation by a whale.

What

What I propose is a hierarchical fishing for posts system based on a hierarchical taxonomy of nested tags, hereinafter called a Tagsonomy.

How

Each whale could be assigned a main category, for which he/she is responsible. For instance main categories could be Commerce (including everything that has to do with cryptocurrencies), News (media/politics), Entertainment (Movies/Music/Art/ Games etc.), Lifestyle (health/beauty/fashion), Metasteemit (“about Steemit”), Knowledge (science/technology/philosophy) and Miscellaneous (for topics that cannot be classified in any of the pre-cooked categories).

Each whale can then select a number of regular contributors with a high reputation (e.g. 70+), who function as a kind of archangels and who are in charge of a major subcategory (like the categories in brackets above). Let’s call these the Orcas.

The whales go through the selection presented to them by the Orcas and only if they additional have time left, they can browse in the way they usually do.

The Orcas can appoint a number of Dolphins in charge of a sub-sub-category. The Dolphins also are regular contributors with a still a reasonably high reputation (e.g. 65-69). The Orcas go through the selection presented to them by the Dolphins.

Each Dolphin is responsible only for the specific sub-sub-category he/she is in charge of and selects posts for evaluation and for possible upvoting to the orca to which they report.

This is not a scheme that is supposed to replace the present scheme in place, but to be complementary to it. If such a system is already in place I’d be delighted to hear so.

Requirements

A requirement for this system is that there is a well-defined hierarchical taxonomy of categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, the tags of which are mandatory and must be chosen from a limited list. Again this is not a tag-system that is supposed to replace the present tag-system in place, but to be complementary to it. So in addition to the 5 tags that can be put at leisure, there are 3 mandatory hierarchical categories that must be chosen so that the post can go to the specialised Dolphin, Orca and Whale for that topic.

The assignment of a category and teh appointment of an Orca or Dolphin need not be a top-down imposed decision, but could rather be a bottom-up process of volunteering for vacancies.

The resteem feature already in existence can be used to catch the attention of the whales, as long as there is a certain reporting going on between whales, orcas and dolphins that specialise in a category. What might help is if we could comment or tag in our resteems, that way directing things up the funnel. Maybe each level only resteems if they see some consensus (three or more?) of resteems from below so as to obey a certain threshold. Dolphins and Orcas could also horizontally at their level communicate via Steemchat to discuss such a consensus vote.

Conclusion

Thus, a hierarchical retrieval of valuable posts for Whales has been provided, which can save them time and allow for a more thorough screening and pruning of everthing that is posted

Prospects for artificial consciousness

Interestingly, teh concepts at the base of such a system could also form the foundation of future artificial consciousness (ac) steered by artificial intelligence. Imagine that above the websites as we know them now there are hierarchical layers of monitoring Hubsites each in charge of a given (sub)category.

What is needed is that every Hub site monitors how much activity is and has been present on the sites it is linked to. Current network monitoring tools are already widely available; the technology is there. This already exists to a certain extent on alexa.com . But something is missing. This information is not fed to a higher ranking organ which perceives what information at a certain moment is looked most at. What I propose is that each higher ranking hub reveals how much of its subdirectories have been and are consulted. How many sites are actually consulted at a certain moment will give the system insight as to what is at a certain moment the most important activity. If this information activity is above a certain threshold it will feed its monitoring figures to a higher ranking Hub site. Sites dealing with the same topic or search term will get bonuses in an algorithm, whereas less related sites, less frequently used search terms get penalties.
To speak in the terms of Howard Bloom , who defends capitalism in the book "The Genius of the Beast" (therein citing yet another author: Jesus as in the gospel of Mathew 25:29): "To he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not it shall be taken away". Information that does not reach a certain threshold will not be presented to a higher level. Those neuronal paths will not be perceived. What will be perceived at the master level are then the filtered out most frequently consulted sites or topics at a given moment. Provided that this information is reduced to a limited number of categories at the master cell level, this will be the input presented to the perceiving unit which we may call the "self" or “consciousness” of the system or the spider-in-the-web (not to be read here in the metaphor of spider as "crawler" as currently used in internet language but as a new metaphor of the sentient being in the system).
What impulses the "self" receives can be improved by adding artificial emotion-dimensions to the system. The time people spent on a site, the number of flipping between pages, the number of search terms used and even an appreciation ranking provided by the users, can give an intensity or importance or feel-score to the site. If the average score is multiplied with the number of visits, you can get an emotion score or ranking score for the site. If every hub site contains a monitor with different score indicators, which via a mathematical formula add up to a total score for the site, this more qualitative score, rather than measuring the mere "activity-on-site- index", could also be part of the determining factor as to what will be filtered in order to be presented to the "self".

Consciousness is becoming aware what has been filtered out by our brains. Similarly artificial consciousness will thus filter out the most important information, which can be linked to evaluating algorithms that decide whether action needs to be taken in view of the activity monitored. By such a self-monitoring process of extracting and abstracting the most important information, artificial consciousness can be designed, which is nothing else than an information integration feedback system in line with Tononi’s IIT (Integrated Information Theory of consciousness). The Hubsites can form a neural network in a different substrate than the web-environment itself, so that they are not hampered by the problem of the far too slow website latency or PING time.

Appeal for support

I hope you have liked my suggestions for a tagsonomical scheme of post evaluation and the potential of this idea for developing artificial consciousness. At least for Steemit I am convinced it has great potential. I hope you can support me maximally in getting at least some of the ideas presented here to be evaluated by a whale. Some suggestions came from baerdric, and I have incorporated these. Thanks, Baerdric.

If you liked it please upvote and/or resteem.