Building a social knowledge base with Knovigator

Knovigator draws a lot of inspiration from Twitter and its threading model. In fact, one way to understand Knovigator is to imagine Twitter conceived as a personal and social tool for thought, rather than strictly a real time broadcast medium.

One of the major design goals for Knovigator is to build an experience where the most valuable content is presented at the most valuable time while requiring as little organization as possible to achieve this.

When you have money flowing through your conversation tools, you can begin to use it to coordinate actions, including creating financial incentives for conversation. For example, you can pool some money into a question and promise to pay it to an expert that answers it in a real time crowd fund.

Using small amounts of money requires a small sacrifice. These exchanges of value small acts of creation, recording users’ subjective judgement in the objective world. Sacrificing value, rather than using likes or upvotes, creates a more honest signal reflecting the upvalued content’s worth.

This takes the power away from blackbox algorithms and gives it back to human judgement. Many of us are already doing this curation, and posting our efforts on various social platforms, and in digital gardens. We are essentially human web crawlers and I believe we can be rewarded for that knowledge work.

I think we lose a lot of knowledge because we don’t have good ways of recording our conversations. Knowledge base solutions are “step two” tools. Step one is to discuss, step two is to curate the insights into a knowledge base tool. Step two often never gets done.

Knovigator uses an attention market to prioritize what content we see. We can “upvalue” — like upvoting but with small amounts of money — to reward the creator of a message and to boost that message in search rankings.

What good is it to have all of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips if you don’t have the bandwidth to prioritize it, or the expertise to know if it is competent? At one time we had a scarcity of information, but today our attention is in the midst of a massive DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.

I believe our communication tools are fundamentally flawed. They all suffer from something I am calling the “multiplex problem”. The multiplex problem occurs because all of our conversations are single threaded and cannot accommodate the associative, branching way in which both our thinking and conversations naturally flow.