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2024-10-31 16:06:11Nostr and its ecosystem present a novel and unique possibility for digital self sorting. Discoverability has long been one of the main issues of the internet, this issue has to this point been solved through centralized entities. These entities or firms collect data and then present “useful” information to the individual user. It is important to note the subjectivity of what is considered “useful”. In today's world, what is useful is determined by large corporations that have their own agendas that are specifically related to you, your behavior, and your purchasing habits. The data collected from us and presented to us is the front line attack in the war in which anyone who uses a digital product or services finds themself. The process of discoverability - data collection and presentation - has become blatantly manipulative and harmful to everyone that interacts with the digital world. Self-Sorting Thomas Sowell in “Discrimination and Disparities” talks about the importance of individual choice resulting in the formation of groups of people based on similar interests or wants. Governments and regulatory bodies often use the disparity in the outcomes resulting from this self sorting and claim that process to be unfair and harmful. The next step is to intervene and enforce, through threats of violence, rules and regulations to alter the outcomes so they appear to be more similar, or more fair. Self sorting is a natural process and the resulting disparity in outcomes resulting from self sorting is also a natural process. A society built from the natural self sorting of individuals will lead to a more productive, healthier, and happier, collective. Equality of outcome is the result of sovereign interference and thus assumes the subjectivity of the sovereign body responsible for enforcement. Digital Sovereign The digital world is still very young. Just as past societies in the real world went through (and are still undergoing) a maturation process, that digital world is ruled by the Monarchs of our past. Twitter, Meta, Google, the Kings of the digital realm. Make no mistake the digital world is a feudal world and it does include the ability to self sort and thus form productive and healthy communities. Self sorting is a result of the application of work to express and represent personal choice and preference. Is it possible to take that work and collect it in an open-sourced and transparent manner and then voluntarily display it to the Nostr network? Can we take control of our own freedom in the digital world and use our very own, very unique preferences and desires to create an identifiable and readable signal allowing us to navigate towards other individuals that share similar values all the while respecting and empowering individuals who have conflicting values. Imagine a self sorted internet. Where individuals share data of their choosing with the network allowing other people to identify a general quality of values and group together. Allowing companies to see this quality and indicate the possible interest in a good, product or service. Communities or even individuals will create a quiz. The quiz for a community will need maintainers and the questions that it contains should be determined by the community itself. For quizzes created by individuals the process is less complex as it would be decided by the individual alone. Every quiz and every quiz question would be public. Most quizzes would utilize only multiple choice or agree/disagree statements. For example lets say that the all of the current 7.2 million members of the Bitcoin community on Reddit took a standard and open sourced quiz on specific thoughts or opinions related to Bitcoin The questions along with each individual response are put through SHA-256 hash and then that hash could be publicly displayed to the community. Seeing as how the questions are included in the hash it should be possible to compare everyone's individual hash to determine the similarity of the responses that were provided. It is likely that these quizzes would need to be paid for. Cost coupled with the actual time and effort required to complete the quiz generates a proof of work for each quiz taken. People would take many different quizzes and each one would be concatenated into a single hash that over time becomes a unique fingerprint of the individual. Hashes could then be compared and based on the quizzes any person chooses to pay for and take coupled with their individual responses it would be possible to see each individuals hash with a certain quality, almost like a color, that could be used to signal to the entire network the quality of personal values that person has.