Veritula – Meta
Discuss Veritula itself. For feedback and suggestions.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.Now that there are user profiles (#408), each profile can have a tab for unproblematic ideas. Among all the ideas a user has submitted, those are the ones he can rationally hold. And another tab for problematic ideas, ie ideas he has submitted that he cannot rationally hold.
Then people could occasionally check the second tab for ideas they think they can rationally hold but actually can’t. And then they can work on addressing criticisms. A kind of ‘mental housekeeping’ to ensure they never accidentally hold on to problematic ideas.
Diffs should omit unchanged lines. Maybe just leave up to three lines around changed content for context – that’s how git does it.
Done as of cc8e3e9. It now says ‘x unchanged lines collapsed’. See eg this activity.
Now that diffs are formatted, they don’t omit unchanged lines anymore.
Now that there are notifications, people should be able to @mention each other.
Mostly done, apart from some polishing, as of 5f5c545. Eg @dennis-hackethal.
Veritula deserves to scale to the size of Wikipedia.
But it never will, unless its users innovate.
How can the global success of Wikipedia inspire Veritula?
I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.
Looking through the history of Wikipedia, I see that its core concept is that of “compiling the world's knowledge in a single location […]”. To be clear, I think the core concept of Veritula is to be a programmatic implementation of Popper’s rational discussion methodology; it then becomes a dictionary for ideas as a result. It’s also less about listing facts and more about listing ideas and their logical relationship (though criticisms do provide built-in fact-checking mechanisms). That said, with enough users, Veritula could become a place with a lot of knowledge.
The linked site traces some of the success of Wikipedia to volunteers: “The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia.” So early adopters such as yourself are crucial.
In addition, 9/11 apparently played a role in making Wikipedia famous:
The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.
Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them. An urgent story would draw a lot of users to the site, too.
Something like Wikipedia’s arbitration process could be interesting, too.
Something similar to Wikipedia’s page-protection feature to combat “edit warring” and “prevent vandalism” could address the issue of people posting criticisms in rapid succession to protect their pet ideas.
Your suggestion to look to Wikipedia for inspiration is spot on. Thanks.
To prevent edit warring and vandalism, maybe Veritula could have a reputation system similar to that of Stack Overflow, where you need to earn enough reputation before you can edit someone else’s post, say.
Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology? Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia) has said that he now thinks Wikipedia should have competing articles on the same topic to allow for the fact that people disagree.
The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.
I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.
Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology?
Yes, sure.
The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
We ‘just’ need to get more users. As I wrote in #628, posting a breaking news story could work. If users submit ideas on events as they unfold and then criticize those ideas, visitors see what’s happening at a glance. It could be easier for them to know which ideas they can adopt than on conventional news channels or even Wikipedia, IMO.
There are also ‘timeless’ debates that have been going on for decades where Veritula can offer clarity. Like on the abortion debate. People shouldn’t have to keep debating that over and over when it’s a matter where objective truth can be found and then acted on.
I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.
I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
One thing that Wikipedia articles are very good for is providing well-structured information on a given subject. Discussion threads are not so well structured (the order of information is not based on how high-level or foundational it is, like an encyclopedia entry would be, but rather on the nested chronology of whatever discussion happened to take place.)
Top-level ideas can be structured any way you as author want them to be. (Any idea at any level can, but top-level ideas are presumably where articles could live.) The structure of any particular idea can be different from the structure of the discussion as a whole.
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
Veritula emphasises making one point at a time for ease of criticism and discussion, which is useful in a forum but makes absorbing the totality of an idea a little more tedious compared to a quick glance at an encyclopedia article. (It is possible I have misunderstood some aspect of Veritula here.)
Veritula cautions against making multiple points at once so as to avoid ‘bulk criticism’. But people can write as much as they want in a single idea. For example, you can find several long-form articles in ‘How Does Veritula Work?’. It just depends on how confident people are in their ideas, and how much they have practiced using Veritula.
As much as I dislike LLMs, I’m thinking of using them to show summaries of discussions at the top of the page. Summaries would reflect ideas without pending criticisms.
My vision is for an online encyclopedia that contains complete articles describing the totality of a perspective, with articles for alternate explanations readily available. I see many problems with this idea but I think it is worth exploring.
I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?
I believe I came across it while exploring your blog. My ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea was particularly sharp in my mind in that moment, so I was very excited to see how you had set things up here. I think a tremendous amount of it is transferable.
I’m happy to have you and for your contributions, but I have to ask: do you see yourself building a Veritula competitor at some point in the future?
No, I think the ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea is too different to Veritula for it to be a competitor. Veritula is primarily a discussion tool. I envision more of an encyclopedia of competing ideas presented independently of each other, with no (or very little) discussion functionality.
For example, on the topic of addiction, this site would contain different articles explaining different models of what addiction is, how it works, etc. Each article would explain the given model from within its own framework, rather than from some pre-approved framework and set of sources (as is currently the case at Wikipedia).
I realise “methods of criticism” in my reply above may have confused that somewhat.
I think my idea could be made within Veritula, if you would be interested. Different explanations could be cataloged in Wikipedia-style articles (with versioning), which could then be referred to and discussed in threads here. Maybe we should open a discussion for this potential feature?
At the end of the day, I think something like that should exist in the world, and I am indifferent to how it might come about. It wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t involved. I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.
I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.
I’m interested. Let’s continue this discussion privately for now. Email me: dh at dennishackethal.com
The red ‘Criticized’ label shows how many outstanding criticisms an idea has. For example ‘Criticized (5)’ means the idea has five outstanding criticisms.
But if there are lots of comments, including non-criticisms and addressed criticisms, it’s hard to identify outstanding criticisms.
There should be an easy way to filter comments of a given idea down to only outstanding criticisms.
The red ‘Criticized’ label could be a link leading to a filtered version of ideas#show.
There could be a separate button to filter comments down.
Bug: when cycling through ‘filtered’ revisions (meaning there are more revisions that don’t lead to the highlighted idea), the criticism badge can change count for the same revision.
Any filtered idea should always display only the count of shown criticisms.
That could mislead people into thinking a revision has no pending criticisms, which would be bad for error correction.
For all ideas, the total number of pending criticisms (if any) should always be shown, even if they are not all being rendered.
If no criticisms are being displayed, yet the label says an idea has n pending criticisms, that might confuse people. More generally, any mismatch between rendered vs counted criticisms could confuse people.
Any filtered ideas should show a criticism label displaying n / m for the count, where n is the number of rendered criticisms and m is the number of total criticisms.
An explanation could accompany the n / m display, like a title on hover.
That way, there should never be any confusion as to a mismatch between the total vs rendered number of pending criticisms.
In addition, when looking at a deeply nested idea on ideas#show and submitting a criticism on a parent, I need to make sure the updated badges take into account that newly submitted criticism, even though the new criticism would not show after refreshing the page.
Veritula should have some way to indicate agreement; some way to indicate that a particular thread of a discussion is resolved, at least for the time being.
How about emoji reactions?
People could wrongly think they have epistemological relevance. For example, they might adopt an idea that has pending criticism just because it got positive reactions.
Reactions could be limited to the recipient of a comment.
That limits the scope of the problem but doesn’t eliminate it. A single recipient could still react in a distracting way.
There’s value in reacting to top-level ideas, too.
There’s value in others being able to react as well. Maybe an idea affects them in some way or they want to voice support.
The red “Criticized” label is far more prominent than reactions would be.
Reactions can be ambiguous. It wouldn’t always be clear which part of an idea someone is reacting to.
I could implement reactions on a per-paragraph basis.
It isn’t clear what would happen during a revision. A paragraph might be changed or deleted. Too complicated.
But presumably, the same is true for reactions to ideas as a whole. Reactions would have to be removed for revisions.
For reactions to paragraphs, at least you could tell if the content someone reacted to has changed, and only then remove the reaction.
Why should reacts persist through revisions?
Then what does somebody do who wants to react to an idea as a whole? Do they react to the last paragraph?
The way I picture it, as you hover over different paragraphs, a reaction button appears and moves between paragraphs. So it would always be clear that reactions are on specific paragraphs. The user would pick whatever paragraph they most wish to react to.
The purpose of the reaction would be to record a kind of agreement or acknowledgment.
That way, Veritula could show ‘pending’ criticisms to users, say – ‘pending’ in the sense that they haven’t responded to those criticisms. So in addition to revising or counter-criticizing, they get a chance to accept a criticism without it remaining in a ‘pending’ state.
Posting arbitrary emojis doesn’t achieve that purpose.
This is a good idea.
I often receive criticisms that I have no counter-criticisms for, and it would be nice to be able to acknowledge those, both as a way to display gratitude, and as a way to indicate that I think something is tentatively settled.
Revisions are complicated. Too many options (superseding a previous version, ‘Is criticism?’, unchecking comments). It might help to have a more guided processes over multiple screens.
I notice that when I amend a criticism I have made, I’m not able to see what I am criticising. It would be good if the edit screen showed the comment I am disagreeing with similar to how it does when I first go to write a criticism.
Feature idea: pay people to criticize your idea.
You submit an idea with a ‘criticism bounty’ of ten bucks per criticism received, say.
The amount should be arbitrarily customizable.
There could then be a page for bounties at /bounties. And a page listing a user’s bounties at /:username/bounties.
How do you ensure the criticism is worthy of the bounty?
I’m not sure yet, but I’m playing with the idea that the criticism can’t have any pending counter-criticisms by some deadline. Each counter-criticism could reset the deadline to give everyone ample time to respond.
But then bad actors could always submit arbitrary counter-criticisms just before the deadline to avoid paying.
The timeframe to address the criticism should start counting down from the moment the criticism is made, rather than the original post. So it would be a continuous thing rather than a single deadline for everyone.
The OP could end the bounty if there are no outstanding criticisms and he no longer seeks a solution.
I suppose that would make it a bit harder for bad actors because they’d need to monitor multiple deadlines, but they could still submit arbitrary counter-criticisms just in time to avoid paying. Or is there something I’m missing?
I would have it that each criticism and counter-criticism resets the countdown on the bounty deadline. This means everyone involved is given fair time to respond at each turn.
If you submit a criticism, you won’t want to wait indefinitely to get paid just because others are keeping the discussion going in a different branch.
Sorry but I don’t see how that solves the bad-actor problem. Bad actors would still be able to draw out the discussion to avoid paying, wouldn’t they?
Yes, but bad actors are a separate problem to solve (as you have alluded to in #2513, where you mention “good citizens”).
The problem we are addressing here is giving people a fair time window to respond to criticisms after they are published.
Edit: after reviewing the thread, I see that you were more focused on the bad actors problem while I was more focused on giving people fair time to respond. I believe what I am saying still stands, but maybe it belongs somewhere higher up the chain.
Idea: when you create a bounty, you set the amount you’re willing to pay per criticism and a ceiling for the total you’re willing to spend (no. of crits * amount per crit).
Your card is authorized for twice the ceiling. In addition, there’s a button to report abuse. If you’re a good citizen, you’ll be charged the ceiling, at most. But if you’re found to submit arbitrary criticisms to avoid paying, the bounty stops early and your card is charged the full authorization.
Yes, that was what I was thinking. Presumably the OP could set their own deadline timeframe too.
Feature idea: private discussions only the creator and invited people can see. This could be a paid feature; $2 per discussion, say.
Feature idea: page at /ideas/:id/guide which shows you an idea and helps you address all pending criticisms one by one, if any. At the end, it shows a message ‘You’re all set!’ or something like that.
When copying a box quote from Veritula, the box quote formatting (>) is lost.
To be clear, if you copy the entire box quote and paste it into a textarea, it will start with the > sign. I just double checked.
You’re saying you’d still want the > if you only copy/pasted part of the box quote, right?
To be clear, if you copy the entire box quote and paste it into a textarea, it will start with the > sign. I just double checked.
This doesn't work for me the way it does for you. I tried copying the entire quote, and also in a separate attempt, copying extra stuff above and below the box quote, and neither gave me the > sign.
I have tried on my windows computer and my iPad.
I tried copying the entire quote…
Cannot reproduce. If I triple-click a word in a box quote, then copy/paste, I get the > sign.
Ah, but I can reproduce when I manually make the selection by clicking and dragging to cover the entire quote.
… copying extra stuff above and below the box quote, and neither gave me the > sign.
Cannot reproduce, neither on iPad nor macOS.
‘Veritula’ is a difficult name, people don’t know how to spell or pronounce it. They can’t easily remember it.
Idea: ‘The Second Renaissance’, ‘2nd Renaissance’, ‘2R’ for short.
‘Renaissance’ isn’t exactly easy to spell either.
Idea: ‘Reason Arena’, ‘RA’
I like something with ‘Arena’ because it would imply action, some ideas winning out over others, and has a Darwinian aspect to it. Our best ideas are the tentative champions in the arena of ideas, waiting for the next challenger.
I have largely inexplicit criticisms of the word ‘arena’ in this context, but one that bubbled up to the explicit level is that the word reminds me of Pokemon for some reason 😅
Idea: ‘Conjecture Arena’, ‘CA’
Feature idea: pay people to address criticisms (either revise an idea and check off criticisms or counter-criticize).
Idea: Activity feed should track when you last visited it, take you there when you open it. Currently, someone like me who likes to see everything happening on Veritula needs to go back through pages to find the last thing they saw.
As the site grows and there is more activity, there would be too much going on for any user to be interested in all the activity on the site, so it would eventually become irrelevant
The site isn’t at all big enough for this to matter yet.
That’s what notifications are for. You’d want to hit the bell icon for each discussion and at the top of the page listing all discussions. Then you’ll be notified of every activity on existing discussions, and of new discussions. The notification page keeps track of read vs unread notifications.
Idea: Discussion specific activity feeds
Done as of a12ffb3, see eg https://veritula.com/discussions/veritula-meta/activities and the new link to ‘Activity’ at the top of each discussion.
Idea: Veritula Articles
Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia and Grokipedia do, but better.
A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.
An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.
Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.
‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
Every idea (including every top-level one) has a separate, linkable page. You can reach it by clicking the link starting with the # sign.
These are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.
Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)
A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the first line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.
As far as search engines are concerned, every idea page is already a standalone page. Not an SEO expert but I cannot imagine search engines penalize URLs containing an ID.
‘page’ status
What is a page status? How did you determine that an idea’s page status is not the same as a Wikipedia article’s?
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out.
While this is true for most existing discussions, it’s not a fundamental limitation of discussions in general. For example, ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ has several long-form posts without much discussion. It just depends on what kinds of posts people want to submit.
See #2777.
While it is true that discussions don’t restrict people from posting long-form content like what is on the ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ discussion, that is not the intuitive function of a discussion thread. I believe the long-form content in that discussion is much more natural to an article format.
I think it is worth noting that I am much more excited to publish standalone articles than to drop top-level ideas into discussion topics.
I am not marking this as a criticism, as my personal desires in this respect may be irrelevant to the goals of Veritula.
Top-level ideas need to be published to a specific discussion, which will cause some amount of silo-ing or similar dynamics.
Didn’t you want competing articles on some topic? In which case the same criticism applies to articles as well, unless I’m missing something.
I used to think that articles would need to be grouped in some way, but I no longer think so. Articles will often compete, even if they aren’t about the same or even similar topic.
E.g. an article ‘Easy-to-Vary Explanations’ would compete with an article ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’
Users would be able to point out and connect conflicting articles, but that wouldn’t cause them to be connected by topic, but rather by conflict.
I think so. If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains. Which is just what Veritula has already.
If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains.
I agree, and I think here you have inadvertently pointed at a key difference between discussions and articles. In terms of implementation, articles would be a near clone of discussions, except that the articles themselves can be criticised by users, including all the functionality that articles being criticisable may one day come with, like entire articles going dormant if they don’t answer criticisms within a certain period.
A couple of examples: If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.
It also favours this articles idea that implementing it would be fairly straightforward, due to how much could be carried over from the discussions implementation. It makes it low cost to try.
If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.
Just because something feels unintuitive or unnatural to you doesn’t mean it isn’t the right way for it to be done in the grand scheme of things.
If a goal of Veritula is for it to eventually be widely used, it should cater to at least some of what people are used to. The articles and encyclopedia formats are the most standard way for high-level information to be presented in written form, and internet users expect different kinds of content in articles vs discussions.
If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic.
You already don’t have to do divvy it up like that. Nothing is stopping you from creating a discussion called ‘Karl Popper’ and then posting a single, long-form, top-level idea where you present information in a hierarchy.
Since discussions themselves are criticisable, is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section? That is functionally identical to what an article would be, but I am interested if you would prefer discussions not be used that way.
Note: Discussions with outstanding top-level criticisms do not render a 'criticised' pill like ideas with outstanding criticisms do.
Continuing on from #2882, would it make sense to enable users to criticise the discussion/entry/topic, such that it would render a criticism pill?
… is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section?
Yes. About sections can’t be part of criticism chains.
… is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section?
About sections are for context or background info, not content.
I just realised that it is possible to publish a top-level idea as a 'criticism' in a discussion, in the way I have advocated an article would be criticisable. I am struggling to understand what it means to criticise a discussion. @dennis-hackethal may you please explain this?
I am struggling to understand what it means to criticise a discussion.
Top-level criticisms don’t criticize the discussion as a whole. They’re just criticisms of something. Anything. It depends on context.
For example, top-level criticisms in the Veritula – Meta discussion are often bug reports. So they’re criticisms of Veritula.
If ‘discussions’ take on a broader form, like we have discussed up to #2880, would this change? What if a user wishes to express that they take issue with something written in the entry/topic body text? I suppose they would quote it in their top-level criticism.
If ‘discussions’ take on a broader form, like we have discussed up to #2880, would this change?
Maybe. It could depend on which term Veritula adopts.
What if a user wishes to express that they take issue with something written in the entry/topic body text? I suppose they would quote it in their top-level criticism.
Yes.
Maybe about sections should themselves be criticizable… In which case they’re just regular top-level ideas. So maybe I could just remove about sections for future discussions. I’ll mull it over.
Forget the term ‘article’ for a second. It sounds like you want the ability to post ideas without having to associate them with a discussion, is that right?
What if somebody wanted to post something related that isn’t a comment or criticism? Where/how would they do that?
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.
I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.
Note: This has led me to the idea that links within Veritula could be bidirectional. Each idea could have an option to display all other ideas that refer to it. I will submit this as a top-level idea in this thread.
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
Posting a sibling on an existing discussion is far easier.
Interview published today, with one of the founders of Wikipedia:
https://youtu.be/8-0vUZ0hTK4
He argues, like I do, that Wikipedia should allow multiple competing articles on each topic.
I partly agree with him on other problems he identifies, but unfortunately he doesn’t come at it from a Popperian angle.
I still think that Veritula already offers what you want – posting a single, top-level idea that is structured any way you like, to a new discussion whose title can be as open-ended as you like – but I’m sympathetic to your motivation.
Not every user is always interested in starting a discussion. Maybe they just want to put some information out there. And although others should still be able to discuss that information, criticism chains and all, that may not always be their primary motivation for posting the information in the first place.
So I’m open to replacing the word ‘discussion’ with a more general word. It should still communicate a sort of ‘grouping’ of ideas but need not be as narrow as ‘discussion’. Would that help?
ChatGPT suggestions:
Topic, thread, subject, space, entry, note / post / piece, context, cluster.
It’s also worth considering what each word would sound like in terms of UI elements. For example, ‘Start a new topic’, ‘Share a space’, etc.
So I’m open to replacing the word ‘discussion’ with a more general word. It should still communicate a sort of ‘grouping’ of ideas but need not be as narrow as ‘discussion’. Would that help?
Certainly. I think this makes a lot sense.
I think ‘entry’ is my favourite of the ones you mentioned (and of some others I explored with Gemini). ‘Topic’ is also alright, but seems more leading than ‘entry’. I like ‘entry’ because it seems the most agnostic to user intent, while also working fine with UI elements.
Idea: Links within Veritula could be made bidirectional. While viewing an idea, users could see all the ideas that refer to it. This could be displayed as a list of backlinks at the bottom of the idea’s page.
This could lead to a cool knowledge graph feature down the line, where users could see how ideas might relate across discussions, and which ideas are referred to the most.
Since users are able to revise other users’ ideas, why is it standard practice on Veritula to submit trivial improvements to ideas (such as correction of typos, poor grammar and redundancies) as criticisms, rather than directly revising the idea itself? Example: #2865
Perhaps I have misunderstood the intention of enabling users to revise other people’s ideas.
There are a few reasons people might send criticisms instead of revising an idea themselves:
- You get a chance to disagree.
- Submitting a criticism is easier.
- A criticism is a written record explaining why a revision is necessary.
Because of the third reason, you may see people post a criticism and then immediately revise your idea to address it.
Maybe I’m wrong but I’m sensing a bit of frustration between the lines. Please note that Veritula pursues a higher standard of error correction than other platforms. Some criticisms may be unexpected; discussions could go in a direction you did not anticipate. You may receive criticisms that would be deemed nitpicky on other platforms, but they’re not meant to be. They may go beyond what’s strictly socially acceptable. I intend criticism to be a gift to you. For ‘small’ criticisms, it’s usually best to revise accordingly and not counter-criticize.
Your idea reads more like a question than a criticism. But since I’ve (hopefully) answered it, I’m marking this response a criticism to neutralize it.
Thank you for clarifying this. The idea of submitting a criticism and also immediately revising makes sense.
The criticisms you shared today (that inspired me to post #2884) are valid. This question came out of confusion as to how Veritula is intended to be used, rather than frustration directed at you.
I am currently unable to zoom out to the full width when accessing Veritula on mobile.
This change is on purpose. The zoom feature was buggy. After zooming out far enough, the navbar and footer got cut off on the right. So I replaced it with proper scrolling.
Would you say zooming was indispensable or just nice to have?
It means that I have to scroll sideways to see the end of each line in a paragraph, which makes it more difficult to read ideas. It feels quite bad to use, compared to using Veritula on my computer, where the entire width of a paragraph is visible at all times.
A solution might be to adjust the mobile site dynamically to fit the user’s phone width.
‘Discussions’ are too narrow a term for a collection of ideas. See #2878.
While ideas should always be ‘discussable’, that doesn’t mean everyone who wants to share an idea always wants to start a discussion. Maybe they just want to put some information out there.
This makes me think of “discussion topic”.
Why is similarity a bad thing in and of itself? It can be reminiscent of discussions as long as it’s less narrow.
Similarity is fine if it is less narrow, but ‘thread’ doesn’t seem any less narrow than ‘discussion’ to me. A ‘thread’ usually means a reply chain.
Sounds like a voice chat (like Twitter spaces)
I can’t decide if this communicates a grouping of ideas. Seems borderline.
Doesn’t communicate a grouping of ideas.
Doesn’t communicate a grouping of ideas.
Doesn’t communicate a grouping of ideas.
“Go check out the Karl Popper context on Veritula” would only make sense if you are already a Veritula user who is accustomed to using this terminology.
This actually seems anti-discussion. Sounds like a grouping of ideas that are only related by conceptual proximity, rather than building on each other.