Design Sketches

The following are design sketches for various proposed features for Civilization.

Artifact Sketches

A user takes a completed forum thread and creates a wiki page from it. The portions of the thread which comprise the wiki page are associated with pieces of the resulting artifact. (This is a very rough draft of the syntax and it's probably suboptimal, everything subject to change.)

Hypothesis September 03, 2017, at 04:13 AM

Tracker Sketches

A user is presented with the trackers summary of how they spend their time on Civilization. I'm not 100% sure how to collect this data but I'm sure at least a rough estimate is doable. From here the user can go into any individual activity tracked and modify their preferences on it.

Activity preference modification. The idea is that the software can nudge users into doing some things more than others, but rather than this be some kind of freaky voodoo algorithm we control, we let the user decide how they would like to be helped in spending their time. (Or perhaps turn the feature off entirely.) This is based off Tristan Harris's idea of regret minimization on phone apps. One question raised in his interview with Sam Harris is how often to bug the user about this sort of thing. I think it might be best to use something like the SuperMemo algorithm for memorization. You bug the user about it at least daily the first two-three days using the software, then you bug them progressively less as their preferences solidify and you're fairly sure the user knows what they want and can go into preferences to change it if something sudden happens to disrupt them.

Hypothesis September 02, 2017, at 07:24 AM

Board Sketches

Board listing concept, very basic. Inspired mostly by the concept of having the threads listed along with the boards so you're not wasting as much space, slightly more 'fancy' way of having the threads trail off from the board title. Can easily elaborate on this or decide it's not right and do something else.

Hypothesis September 02, 2017, at 09:17 AM

User Profile Sketches

Basic VBulletin-esque user profile with the extraneous crap removed. The interesting concept in this sketch is the idea of using wiki markup on user profiles. This ties into the notion of needing to have personal space for people to express themselves. Using the wiki markup allows the possibility of using the wiki itself to manage peoples user profiles, and automatically rewards users for gaining advanced mastery of the wiki features. (Though in fairness, the wiki is simple enough that there might not be all that much to learn to start editing.)