From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Sun Aug 03 2003 - 04:00:57 MDT
If the CoV is to flourish (something which I think should happen), we need to expand our membership. Which brings us back neatly to where I began.
There are at least two viewpoints here, which are utterly at odds with one another, but as other contributors to this thread have observed, not central to sharing the goals of the CoV, avoiding our 'sensless sins' or adopting our 'Virian Virtues'. What these groups are called is not particularly relevent, as I think that the existing labels have become so meanless as to be nearly indistinguishable. The appelations I used were intended as identifiers, not characterizations.
Both perspectives may have appeal to the wider community on their own, and perhaps, when dealt with in a civilised fashion (as I consider Jonathan Davis to have done in his latest post) joint discussions may be of interest to a small number of people. Trying to stick to the point, in the main, I doubt if a literally interminable discussion holds much of a draw for the CoV. Unfortunately, civilised discussion, as Joe Dees has once again made apparent, is not the norm and I would suggest that the resulting mess has no appeal to anyone that the existing members wish to see sharing membership in the CoV.
As stated in our founding introduction http://virus.lucifer.com/about.html, we are an evolving and memetic organization, and in order to increase our ability to propagate our memes effectively, we are proposing and implementing a number of steps in the hope of increasing the appeal and marketability of the CoV.
As announced by David Lucifer, we have a mechanism in beta which will allow us to implement a 'sumocracy' [From sumous: respected or revered and -ocracy:a system of governing] which will recursively and adaptively provide weight to those members of the community who are recognised by the community as being respected. This mechanism is proposed to allow the community of the Church of Virus to "self-moderate" the image which it presents to the world.
The proposed mechanism will work as follows:Rated members [Refer http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=;action=foo ] will evaluate one another's 'Reputations', which vary from a 1 (should be banned) through a 7 (A pillar of the community)]. A computer algoritm converts this assigned 'Reputation' into:[*]an 'Influence' which is a determination of how much weight a member's opinion carries, calculated from the Reputation such that in a community of N members one level 7 member will have as much influence as N level 4s, and one level 4 will have as much influence as N level 1s. as well as[*]'Equity', being the percentage of the total influence wielded by a member.For the purpose of evaluating 'Influence' and 'Equity', unrated members are allocated a 'neutral Reputation' of 4. The upside of not being rated is that you cannot receive a low rating. The downside, aside from possible accusations of apathy, is that an unrated member cannot rate others, nor can they receive higher ratings. The choice as to whet
her to be rated or not is left to the individual members.
Posts made will be assigned a 'Visibility score' which is determined by the 'Influence' of the poster. Other rated Virians may 'applaud' or 'smite' a post, upon which, the 'Influence' of an 'Applauder' will be added to the 'Visibility score' and the the 'Influence' of a 'Smiter' will be subtracted from it.
We will be replacing our current method of establishing whether a Virian is a 'neophyte', 'acolyte', 'congregation', 'vector' or 'archvector' with one based upon the "Equity" of the Virian. In addition, a category will be established for the 'Uninfected' which will include those who are not members of the BBS (the outside world).
We will establish score thresholds for posts which will determine who is able to see the posts. In this way, only posts which achieve a sufficiently high 'Visibility score' will be available to 'Uninfected', allowing us to determine how we present ourselves. Naturally any Virian will be able to affect the visibility score of any post, in such a way that a post made by somebody with great influence can be reduced below this threshold by a number of Virians 'smiting' it, and that made by a low 'Influence' Virian may be boosted to be visible to the 'Uninfected' by a number of Virians 'applauding it'. Similar mechanisms will be used internally, to the extent that a sufficiently low score will relegate material to 'The Pit' while a sufficiently high score will boost material to 'The Best of Virus'. Material which has a sufficiently high score will be sent out on the mailing list interface. The same mechanism will apply to mail being received from the list.This approach we hope, will solve many of our current 'ima
ge' problems, and do away with claims of the nature of "I'm a better/more important Virian than you" something that never has been, and hopefully never will be a part of our paradigm. Unfortunately, there is, if my surmises are correct, a drawback. And that is that little or no material of the kind that I characterised as "conservative", "NeoCon" or "knee jerk Republican" is going to be visible to the outside world. Which, I think, is going to annoy no-end those members of the CoV who support this perspective. It also precludes the CoV as being seen as desireable by those who enjoy such material (no matter how little appeal I think the CoV is likely to hold for the majority of such people).
The proposed schism was designed to eliminate these potential drawbacks. It does so by allowing the "Joe Dees' America First" (merely an identifying label until somebody suggests another, seeing the strenuous objections to the characterizationsused previously) to establish their own "perspective" of the CoV, and for the "liberal group" (which in my opinion does not include knee jerk Democrats - or knee jerk anythings for that matter - although it does of course include democrats (note the capitalization)) to establish their own perspectives of the CoV. Indeed, as previously intimated, other groups may choose to form and present still other perspectives. These groups will maintain their own memberships and ratings (although nothing precludes a Virian from joining multiple groups), and more importantly, their own BBS boards which will allow them to present their perspectives in as an attractive a format as they choose to their chosen demographic. Each group benefits in that their prefered memes are not diluted
and their forums are not disrupted by viturperation. The CoV as a whole benefts, because we increase the number of demographics to which we appeal and because, hopefully, members will be less reluctant to advocate the CoV to others due to the reduction in the possibility of embarrassment.
The "liberal group" has been working on what and how we should be doing things in order to achieve a broader appeal and greater degree of attractiveness to new members and in so doing, greatly increase the total CoV membership and revenues. Revenues that we need to be able to develop the CoV. The question is whether the "Joe Dees' America First" group wishes to establish their own project to do the same, or if they would rather operate within the consensus of the evolving Church of Virus.
As you can see, a schism is not being forced on anyone, a choice is being offered. The one thing which is not going to happen is that we continue with the current unhappy situation. Anyone wishing to discuss this further is welcome to do so formally, on this thread, or join the ongoing discussions on our channel, #virus either through IRC at irc.lucifer.com:6667 or via the web at http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=chat.
Hermit
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