Patent Application
20220309594
Social network systems have conventionally been run by a company, such as Facebook, or Twitter. The company has a management, and the management sets rules. The rules are used to what items that are posted to the site, herein referred to generically as “posts”, are acceptable and what items aren't.
In some situations and circumstances, this is quite appropriate. For example, if a social network system is intended to be “family-friendly”, then most reasonable minds could agree on whether the platform should include pornography, or other non-family-friendly items. However, when it comes to political issues, things aren't so straightforward.
Some of the large social networks have prevented certain points of view from being advanced on their platform. Many argue that this is a political decision, and that many of these large social network sites are advancing their political agendas when they allow certain points of view and don't allow others.
The inventor recognizes that a content neutral system should still have rules about what can be posted. However, the rules on what can be posted are inherently political. When management makes decisions such as this, they are inherently taking a political stand. That stand will be agreed with by some, and not agreed with by others.
According to embodiments, a database of information is formed for a social network system. The social network system can be any kind of system that accepts posts of any type including person's opinions, photos, videos, multimedia items, and any other kind of information from users to be shared with other users. The database forms, in general, all of the posts.
The database is shared with the users, and each user, in general, receives a subset of this database. The subset of the content that is received is based on filters set by the user, and adaptively modified by the system as the operation continues.
In one embodiment, the database is a blockchain that uses a distributed ledger system to share the blockchain among multiple different sources, and mirrored among many users using a distributed ledger to maintain its authenticity.
In another embodiment, the system uses various techniques to determine a diversity setting for a user. The diversity setting is based on information obtained from a number of different sources including sources outside the specific confines of the social network system. The diversity setting represents, among other things, the user's race, socioeconomic class, background, and political views.
The user can carry out judgments of different content on the system. Those judgments are associated with the user's diversity setting. The judgments are thus correlated with various diversity settings, rather than being correlated with users individually. A judgment may be used to set parameters of content that is provided to different users. A judgment can also be used to ban content entirely from the site, or to mark the content as being less relevant and thus either harder to retrieve, or more “expensive” to retrieve. The term “expensive” is used to represent the renumeration provided by the user in return for receiving the data. This renumeration may be an actual fee paid, an advertisement viewed or otherwise perceived, or any other way that the user can provide something in return for the data that was served.
In one embodiment, both the users and the posts are evaluated. The users are evaluated to determine their diversity characteristics, that is who they are, where they are from, what they like and dislike, and other personal characteristics. Each person is unique, however each person will be characterized in a way that fits them into a specific category of diversity.
In one embodiment, the users can ask to be provided information which is appropriate to their diversity characteristics.
In addition to the users being evaluated, the posts are evaluated. Different users can evaluate different posts for like and dislike, and to provide additional information about the post.
A post is “demoted” to be put in a condition where it is seen less often by users or made less relevant. A post is demoted when it is found distasteful or not liked by multiple different parties having multiple different diversity characteristics.
In the Drawings:
the figures show aspects of the invention, and specifically:
and
The present application describes a system for using a computer-based system for creating content that can be used to effect a social network system, which allows people to view and obtain other's views of content according to the system described herein.
As one embodiment, the content is included in a blockchain that is stored among multiple different parties using a distributed ledger, and users receive some content of this blockchain based on filtering characteristics which are both set by the user and also determined by the system based on actions of the user.
An embodiment is of the hardware is shown in
The multiple servers can be cloud servers or any other kind of servers storing this information. The information in the blockchain is provided to client computers, who can also be servers in the sense that each client computer is also storing some subset of the blockchain locally. Each client, such as 120, is shown receiving and hence storing this subset of the blockchain 125 and hence can serve some or all of the subset that it has stored to other client computers. The client computer also includes a display 130 and a user interface 135, through which the data is displayed.
The data is obtained and displayed in a special format as described herein, which, as programmed, renders this a special-purpose computer carrying out special functions as described herein. These functions cannot be carried out by a general purpose computer without the techniques of the present disclosure.
In order to carry out the functions, an initial operation as shown in
In addition to entering the information at 200, other information is also automatically collected at 205. The collection of information is carried out both from the user's actions on the site, and from external sources. Each time the user take some action on the site, their personal information may be affected by the action on the site, shown as 206. The external sources may be monitoring publicly available sources of information, or other social networks, or any action a user is taken that is available on the Internet.
At 210, the user sets preferences, for example what things they might be interested in. The user can later change these. The system also infers other preferences, from actions taken on the site, shown generically as 211.
At 220, the user is assigned a diversity code. The diversity code can just be a number or an alphanumeric sequence that represents a category that the user falls into, or can include the information itself for example a feature vector which takes into account many different aspects of diversity.
The aspects of diversity may include socioeconomic class, race, political affiliation, and other information. In an embodiment, at least one aspect of the diversity code is automatically determined by the system through actions of the user, and/or through actions the user takes on other sites.
All of this information is stored at 230, and can be stored as part of the blockchain, or can be stored as the user's personal information/profile.
When the user chooses to view items, the user is viewing content that was obtained from the blockchain 108. What this means is that the viewing software on the users client 120 is parsing the information in the blockchain and deciding how it should look when displayed. The information in the blockchain is in essence the database, and the display is controlled by the software that is interpreting the information. The displaying software or app can in essence act as a stylesheet for the information in the blockchain. In many ways, this can be analogous to a sort of open source system. Anyone who gets the information 108 can display it using their own personal client form. This means that the information 108 can be displayed in various different ways, based on a personalized stylesheet determined by the user.
In an ideal world, a blockchain system would be completely distributed, and no one would get any money for doing anything. In the real world, however, different parties within the blockchain system obtain bounties for doing different things.
In this embodiment, the blockchain storage people may obtain certain fees as bounties for serving the information to others. For example, the system may require that a user watch an advertisement for every predetermined data packet of information they receive. As described herein, however, different data packets may have different expenses, some data packets may be more expensive than other data packets. A standard cost data packet may require the user to watch a 20 second commercial for every 20 MB packet of information they receive. However, other data packets, and especially those which have been marked less relevant and hence are more difficult to obtain (because they are stored by fewer servers), may require the user to watch this 20 second commercial for only a 1 Mb packet of information being received.
In other embodiments, since the client is also storing information, the client can send that information to others, and may receive credit for sending that information, which credit is applied against the expense that they incur for getting new information.
Alternatively, users can be billed directly, it being understood that a debit and credit system can be assigned, where the more information the client stores, the less of the information they need to download, and the more of that information that the client can serve to others, and therefore the less renumeration that they may need to provide. Moreover, some data is more expensive than other data. The term renumeration is used herein to refer, in general, to something paid as a bounty to some other conveyor of data information. Again, this renumeration can be cash, advertising participation, or data provision, as well as any other way of providing renumeration.
At 310, the client connects to the distributed server, to receive the blockchain information. The filter settings are used to filter the overall information so that the client only receives filtered information at 320. Filtering can include, for example, recipients or sender, such as users who have sent the information, time that the information was sent, subject of the information, machine determined relevance of the information, popularity globally, and/or popularity by my diversity rating.
Initially at least, the user may receive filtered content for people they “follow”, within a certain time period of having been sent (for instance a month,) and also may receive the machine determined relevant most relevant information based on the preferences and diversity code for the user.
At 330, the user views the content. Each item of content may be referred to as a post, although it may not be a post in the usual sense, it is still an item of information.
Once the item is viewed, is marked by the system as read. Posts which are read automatically become less relevant to the specific user. In addition, the amount of time that the user views the post, the number of times the users returned to the post, the number of forwards or replies, are monitored at 335 as additional fine tuning for the relevance of the post both to the user, and globally.
Users can comment on posts. The comments can include like comments and dislike comments. The like, shown generically as a {circumflex over ( )}, represents the user signifies that they like the post. Once so signifying, with different opportunities to say why they like it, and uses that information to help decide which other kinds of posts should be deemed relevant to the user (as well as, as described herein using this to set the users diversity characteristics).
For example the user can say that a post is interesting, or ‘on point’ to add to a like, or that they like the author, or that they like the style, or that they like the colors or that they like anything else about the post. For thumbs down or v, the user may be given the option of 2 thumbs down ∨ ∨, meaning that this is very bad information, that it is porn, deceptive, don't like it, not true, or others. That is, the user can use the thumbs up and thumbs down to indicate that a post is something they want to see more of, or opposed to something that they want to see less of. The filter characteristics are automatically changed at 342 go along with this. When the user likes a post, characteristics of that post are used to figure out more things the user might like. For example, other users who have the same or similar diversity characteristics to the user likes a post, at 341, the system determines posts that other or determined characteristics of other users who have liked that post. Similarly, when a user dislikes a post, this is compared with diversity characteristics of other users who disliked the post.
Based on this the system learns from the post information, and the user's likes and dislikes, reasons for likes and dislikes tries to determine how to modify the users diversity score based on the users action. That is, the users diversity score may also be modified by their likes and dislikes, to make their diversity score closer to diversity scores of other users who have liked and disliked similar posts.
The user can of course be deceptive when they post information about themselves. This may be intentional deception or unintentional deception. However, the user will not typically say that they like and dislike things that they do not like and dislike. And if they do, then they are playing the part of someone that they are not, get an appropriate diversity score for the part they are playing. Based on all this information, changes to the personal information, the diversity score, and the blockchain are provided at 350.
In embodiments, different posts can be modified, or set to be less relevant, if multiple people having diverse diversity scores all dislike the post. For example, if people from 10% of all diversity scores all say that there is something wrong with the post, this can be used to lower the score of the post, for example to put it in the less relevant category, to lower the score for the user, or to lower the score for everyone, so that the post becomes harder to get, and hence more expensive to get.
As described above, bounties are paid to the system. In one embodiment, posts which are more relevant are stored by multiple different categories, and hence there is a lower bounty. Posts which are less relevant are stored by less people, and hence may be require a higher bounty. When posts become less relevant, like a lot of them are flagged as being irrelevant, incorrect, by a wide diversity of people, then they are made less relevant, and require more effort on the part of the user to be viewed. If something is even worse, however, it could be banned entirely.
Other features are as follows:
Many apps can use their own stylesheet to display the information because in essence the information is open source.
In one embodiment, some or all of the information can be stored in an encrypted or encoded form, and users may be forced to watch and and before the data encrypts or decodes.
In one embodiment, the judging tools 335, can include one different option saying I thought I had already asked not to receive this stuff. This is an indication that the step should be used to set the preferences even further, at 211.
The previous description of the disclosed exemplary embodiments is provided to enable any person skilled in the art to make or use the present invention. Various modifications to these exemplary embodiments will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, and the generic principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments without departing from the spirit or scope of the invention. Thus, the present invention is not intended to be limited to the embodiments shown herein but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and novel features disclosed herein.
This application claims priority from Provisional Application No. 63/165,599, filed Mar. 24, 2021, the entire contents of which are herewith incorporated by reference.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 63165599 | Mar 2021 | US |
