...texts should be sorted according to the length of time the discussion has been ongoing. This could be based on an average, so recent exchanges wouldn't change the status of a very long old post too much. (There would be no such thing as necromancy.) I don't think any site does that. So oldness, length, average length of posts (verbosity), and average span of time between posts (slowness). (I think this is a useful way to categorize texts and their discussions). Furthermore, old content should be stored for posterity.
Chats are different in that you don't have to respond directly to people, however I'm not sure that's a behavior that should be encouraged. In a sense forums do this (if they're not IMDB forums). (I like quotes in that you can respond to people anywhere in a thread and it orders the thread chronologically. IMDB doesn't do that, strictly. On the other hand if messages are short, just respond to the message, a là message boards.) Similarly, it would be more like natural language scenarios but I am not sure simultaneous messaging should be allowed. This would show overlap between the times of different posters texts/utterances. However, it could become like a party line.
In all of these, the real difference between natural conversation becomes the delay and the lack of FaceTime, and there's no real getting around that unless you use Skype. But then there's no record of anything, or helpful info. This is all about data management.
It would be cool if there were a word checker to suggest translations etc. while writing something, but that seems like a little much, especially if the focus is on dictation. Otherwise it would be very useful for encouraging grammaticality and conscientiousness.
The other thing I wanted to get into is the issue of anonymity. I encourage its use, but I think people should still be kept track of like Wikipedia does ISPs, but do it privately for admins to see. Forums don't do that enough, cloak their users ID if they so choose, and I see no problem with it. The only thing is, you shouldn't be allowed to double post or respond to your own posts. That should clear up a lot of problems with sock puppets and pseudo-ostension, the rest will just require a smart admin. Also if you just find someone annoying you can block a cloaked user but not someone entirely anonymous. Alternatively, they can change the name of their "cloak" to something besides anonymous, so long as no one else has it. There should be an option for partially registering names so that several people can go by the same name e.g. Anonymous, but Anonymous would be the only one no-one could partially register. Once you stop using a partially registered name it's up for grabs, and you can only partially register one name at a time, so that one person doesn't start hoarding names. Blocking/ignoring someone would not depend on their name at a given time, so that they couldn't avoid ignores. Similarly, you should be able to look in that person's backlog of posts, although they could block access to certain times/names. In the computer, they would be associated with one user. I don't know how to avoid snoopy people in that regard. Maybe the only use for the actual user info would be for statistics about the corpus? I'd have to think about what that could be. Otherwise, other users could only search for the posts affiliated with a given public name, so they couldn't connect a user's names. The only way they could do that would if they played tricky games with their ignore list, but it would have to occur over a long period of time.
This would all mean people start talking to their smart phones again.
No comments:
Post a Comment