Core Tenets:
- You get one account – that’s it.
- There is no “one” algorithm
- There are no community moderators, only sherpas (this post!)
- It’s all attribute tags
- AI acts as a helper, NEVER as a creator
- A centralized platform
Tenant #3: There are no community moderators, only sherpas
In a nutshell, you can consider a sherpa as someone who creates filters for consuming content on the a social media platform. Consider the following:
- George is a sherpa who focuses on creating a filter-list that is only long-form content, specifically focusing on Gaming, with no politics.
- Jerry is a sherpa who focuses on creating a filter list that only shows images and memes, specifically around Joe Biden.
- Elaine is a sherpa who focuses on discussion threads focused on entrepreneurship, specifically in a post-college age group.
Each of the sherpas above takes in the global corpus of community content, and filters, sorts, and ranks the content according to what they think the users that are “following” them as sherpas like.
To this end, you can consider sherpa’s filter lists similar to Ublock’s filter lists: community curated block / filter criteria that if you don’t like, you can easily clone and modify yourself to make the filter criteria your own.
This has the following benefits:
- Even if one Sherpa gains dominance as the premiere “filterer” on a social media platform, if they ever do something the community hates (let’s block all Memes), it’s easy for the community to migrate to a new Sherpa that curates content in a way they like.
- This avoids the “moderator” problem where you can be “banned” from /r/AnnArbor and have no realistic alternatives in talking with your community
- Crowdsourcing the filtering / ranking of your platform means that it can perhaps do a better job than a team of data scientists could do on your engineering team
- Content consumed across different subjects / interests can become consistent – if the Sherpa filters only for content posted by post-college graduated persons, you don’t have to worry as much that the comments in any discussion thread will be edgy teenagers, but perhaps people actually involved in the space in question.