The tracker is a program that is meant to save the user time by automating away unnecessary effort asked of participants on traditional forums. This is done by recording preferences of things the user would like to see, and proactively alerting them to their presence. Unlike most recommendation/fetcher systems in this vein the tracker allows the user to access its control panel. Further, the tracker may play a role in helping users maintain healthy use of time in relation to Civilization by allowing users to figure out how much time they would like to spend on various activities and helping to make those happen.
Contents
Rationale
The original idea for the tracker came when Hypothesis realized that effective people avoid web forums. This is largely because they have a reputation for being a way to waste your time. A reputation well earned, given that the average web forum has a similar mission to giants like Facebook, grow and engage. Civilization would like to shake off this reputation by taking users time seriously. This means keeping track of any time users have to refresh repeatedly, wait on load times, find themselves fighting addiction, and other "time suck" behavior and actively fighting it rather than encouraging it like most designs do.
What does the tracker do?
There are a handful of core things the tracker may or may not do in the final version of Civilization.
Learn user preferences
Learn user preferences and then use them to build a personalized report of what's changed since the last login that a user may find of interest.
Example #1
Jane clicks through on 90% of threads in the bitcoin board, often refreshing to see if new ones exist. The tracker notices this behavior and offers to simply let Jane know if a board has a new thread for her to read by eg. email.
Example #2
Jack often looks at the page of a specific prediction. The tracker recognizes this and asks Jack if he would like an update feed for some aspect of the prediction. (eg. A new opinion is offered on chances related to the question.)
Example #3
Jack likes to visit the computer security board first thing every time he tries to log in, but it's always about halfway down the page and he has to scroll. The tracker will offer to change the position of the boards so that computer security comes first based on this observation. (Jack may do this himself of course, but we often get into habits without realizing we do them. The trivial inconvenience of accommodating ourselves results in plenty of lost time.)
Provide control of the "attention engine"
We often call something in the tracker's ilk a "recommendation engine". That's fine for movies and books, but the tracker is both broader than that and more represents an attempt to harness the neutral technology used in other products to control peoples attention and turn it towards productive ethical ends. As part of this users should have complete control over the tracker and what data it collects, excepting data which might be collected for site security purposes.
Example #1
Jane is annoyed be the tracker, so she turns off its notifications. Jane should have fine grained control so that she can turn parts of the tracker off selectively, it should not be an either/or proposition. Products that:
- Force people into uncomfortable data collection.
- By providing benefit along with tangentially related skeevy surveillance.
- Under a unilateral package are.
Are usually unethical.
Example #2
Jane would like the tracker to know she is especially uninterested in threads about bitcoin mining, and goes to its control panel and inputs this information manually to use as part of its evaluations.
Example #3
The tracker has inferred Jack enjoys threads which are outrageous based on his revealed preference for clicking on them. Jack finds this revealed preference unhealthy and decides to change it. As part of that he tells the tracker not to show him anymore threads it has detected as being particularly outrage inducing.
Google Alerts Style Notifications
When documents are added to certain tags or new things enter the database which correspond to certain search queries, the user should be alerted by the tracker.
Example #1
Jack is interested in threads which have the word "suggest" in the title. He adds an alert in the tracker and it provides him notification when new threads are created that have the word suggest in them.
Example #2
Jane wants to know about new threads matching the complex search query '(bitcoin OR ethereum) AND NOT "mining"'. She provides this to the tracker and it alerts her to new threads matching the query.
Example #3
Jack would like an update any time a thread is tagged with "psychology" AND has the word "autism" in the title. He constructs the appropriate search query and the tracker provides notification of matching threads.
Example #4
Jane is interested any time a new document is made that has the tag "effective altruism", this is made known to the tracker and it provides them.
Helping the user manage the time they spend on Civilization-based forums
This idea is based on Tristan Harris's recommendations in a recent podcast with Sam Harris (archived). In it he talks about 'regret minimization' where users rate how much they regret the time they spend using certain apps compared to others. He also talks about the concept of having the phone track what users spend their time on and then reviewing it with them. I think that how the latter concept should work is that reviews become less and less frequent as time goes on and preferences are solidified. Much like the supermemo algorithm used for flashcard memorization.
Hypothesis September 03, 2017, at 09:56 PM
Example #1
Jane spends time on FortForecast. She doesn't particularly pay attention to how much but she loves the content. The tracker notices she spends 150% more time than usual on the forums browsing threads and casually notes this in the next report. Jane didn't realize she was spending 8 hours a week on the site and considers cutting back.
Example #2
Jack would like to spend more time on tagging documents to help the site out, but finds he always ends up not doing it. Instead he reads threads the minute he logs in and forgets about the less salient tagging. He tells the tracker during one of its reports that he wants to spend 45 minutes a week on tagging things, and the tracker reminds him explicitly while using the site later that now might be a good time.
Example #3
Jack is interested in what figuring out if FortForecast is really a good use of his time. So he switches views to have the tracker show him summaries of what he's read and searched for in the last three months. (This kind of data is quite sensitive, so it must be user configurable whether to keep it at all and for how long.)
