Why hive minds might work
I watched a video on hive minds.
I found it interesting, I’m going to try and capture why I found it interesting and try and do some research later. I’d be interested in any research articles people might know about it. There is a wiki page, I’ve not dug into the articles linked yet.
I suspect it is overblown but it has some interesting facets to it compared to other ways of aggregating knowledge (such as prediction markets or voting or meetings). My initial thoughts were:
Continuous feedback. You can get an idea of what other people think. If people are dead set against your first option, you might choose to put your weight against your second option, updating your knowledge.
The updating is anonymous and risk free, so you don’t have to worry about losing face or money.
You can see how many people are updating, so you can gauge the strength of their beliefs and update your own.
It lacks any form of reputation or weighting on past accuracy. I’m not sure if that is a positive or negative.
Part of the purpose of this post was to see if posts to personal blogs could get discussion about something likely to be contentious. The evidence gave in the videos surprised me so I could either dismiss the evidence or try and explain it. You ignore lots of new things if you dismiss everything, so it is worth trying to explain things sometimes.
I’m guessing it got downvoted because you can’t visually tell blog posts from frontpage posts on the all posts page. So people thought I was trying to spam up frontpage with this kind of thing (which I wasn’t). I’ll try again for this sort of thing when they are visually distinct.
I share your concern that users are not yet able to distinguish between blog posts and frontpage posts. I’m not sure how to tell either, aside from going to your blog and seeing if i can spot it there.
I’d be interested in reading a more complete post on these concepts.