You sort and filter based on numbers which you’re using as a proxy for trust. The act of calculating and using personalized PageRank means you are ranking.
Discussion
I am talking design and UX.
It’s easy for us to underestimate how much work it takes for devs to integrate these scores into their clients. Sure, a dev could roll out a new feature using the scores to sort content. But step 1 is simply to import the scores, make sure they’re being imported correctly, and educate the end user that this new tool is available, here is what it is, here is how it works.
The whole point of sovereignty is to put you in charge of your user experience. Which means putting you in charge of the algos that sort your content. Which means users need to be aware what algos are available and how they work. If we just sort content and say “trust me bro, we’re sorting it in the best way possible, please don’t examine the numbers or ask for details about how it works or look under the hood” — that’s the opposite of what we want to achieve.
Also: there are use cases that go beyond filtering and sorting in the background.
Suppose someone you don’t follow DMs you. How do you know whether this DM is worth your time and attention? One method is just to hide the DM if the WoT score is below some cutoff. But what should be the cutoff? There will never be one right answer. So a better method is to show the WoT score next to the author, obtained from Trusted Assertions as the 0-100 rank metric, like Amethyst is doing. The end user can decide whether a score of 10 or 50 or 95 is worth looking at. Maybe I have a lot of free time today, so I’ll read the message if rank is above 10. But tomorrow I’m busier so it’ll have to be 90 to catch my eye. And in the case of personalized GrapeRank, a 50 for me may not be a 50 for you, because you and I may have selected different GrapeRank parameters. My “rigor” parameter may be set to a low value (by my choice), so when I see a score of 50 on amethyst, it means “this user is followed/trusted by 5 moderately trusted users”, whereas your “rigor” may be set to a high value, so when you see the same score of 50 on amethyst it carries more weight, bc it means “this user is followed/trusted by 100 highly trusted users”.
We can’t give users control over their user experience if our philosophy is to hide the number crunching and make all the decisions for them.
At the same time, we ALSO need to make it super easy for the end user. If they don’t want to look under the hood, they don’t have to. Which is why GrapeRank comes with default preset parameters. But showing turn numbers, like I described here and like amethyst is doing, will oftentimes be better than simply filtering and sorting under the hood.
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