This would incentivize people coming up with very specific tags that have a very high chance of being related to people's interests.
It would also incentivize them to post the same stuff repeatedly, each time with a different tag. And use different descriptions, if you give lower rating to identical messages. And use different user accounts to post each message, if you give lower rating to multiple posts by the same user.
The duplication could be stopped if we had some kind of "attention economy", where each person would receive e.g. one attention token every day, and they can use it with any message they think deserves attention. It would be possible to split the token for multiple messages (which most people will not see), collect multiple tokens for one extremely important message, and even adding your own tokens to support someone else's message. The idea is that attention is a scarce resource, so it should be bought using a scarce money.
But even this system would probably fail, because... well, in real life the real money is scarce, advertising costs money, and yet we don't exactly feel like advertising is the best source of information we would like to have. So even if we could introduce a world-wide attention economy that most people would use, there would gradually appear markets for buying your attention tokens for real money, and the real messages supported by a few real people could not compete with advertising supported by thousands of sold attention tokens.
However, these attention tokens in theory don't have to be anonymous. They could be tracked to their original owner, even if the owner sells them. You could create your own filter and say that you only accept attention tokens by these specific people. (Presumably ones that don't sell them.)
And now the last step is to somehow combine the scarcity of the attention tokens with the specificity of the tags given to a message. (Including the complicated details like: The same message can be supported by multiple people, but each of those people has a different opinion about the proper tags.)
I don't see why that's a problem; duplicate events could be detected by checking event locations and times. Events that seem to be occuring very near each other and at similar times could be 'flagged' for further investigation by moderators. The community could also help filter out other forms of abuse.
The title is the best name I could come up for a problem I have had for years, and have been waiting for someone else to come up with a solution.
There is a lot of awesome content on the web. Some of it is about events you could be at, right now, that you really want to be at, and could. If only you knew.
An example: I think Roger Waters is one of the most brilliant people alive, and I would like to witness every single concert of his, every time he is less than 100km away from me. Yet, I have only been to two of those, because I was only notified of those.
So I wish I could know if events I love are taking place. But I do not want to know about Meetups not even close to where I live. And I don't want to know at what time Roger went to the toilet, or if his T-shirt collection for groupies is out, or anything else that people responsible for his (hipothetical) rss feed or email list want me to buy.
Two questions are relevant here:
1) How can you in general have access to the information you want about events, without drowning in an information ocean or getting web addicted.
2) Do you know ways to get access to info about events, in particular of the following kinds that I happen to want to be notified? (in SF bay or in some city independent way)
Feel free to post your own interests in the comments.
Here is how I noticed the problem: Looking back into my life I began wondering what were the main determinants of whether I did or not go to some kinds of events. And again and again the result was "because I had a friend who used to tell me about that kind of thing back then".
Even now, most of what I do is basically determined by other people's tastes. It's simple. I've locked all possible advertisement away - I'm a serious anti-ad freak, it takes me less than half a second to switch radio stations if a person talks instead of music playing, and I block the front chair video away in airplanes in which it can't be turned off, I feel pain when any advertisement reaches my senses - but I did not block people away (yeah, I don't punch people's faces when they tell me about cool future events). So I'm left with the intersection between what interests me, and what interests them enough that they tell me about it.
This can't be right. The alternative, having to, as they say at MIT, drink from a fire hose, doesn't sound any good either.
One of the things people say to startup minded people is that they should start by noticing a need they have, something they'd be willing to pay for, and create something to satisfy that need. I'm usually not eager to pay for stuff, but here is something I'd pay for:
I'd be happy to pay $200 to someone who solved this problem somehow. Pointing an app, creating a system, summoning a submissive gnome... I don't mind. As long as there was a way for someone to get news of things they care about without having their brains stung by the atrocities of voracious marketeer capitalist addiction systems. And I don't think I'm the only anti-ad freak out there who'd pay some money for this, ADblock is, after all, the most used browser app in the world.
It is basically the reverse of the Groupon concept. Instead of stealing your attention to make you more interested in things you don't need and causing you to feel an emotional void for not having things while your pocket empties as well - yeah, I really don't like ads - the idea would be to inform you of things you already think you need, giving you a warm feeling inside of being served of all those delicious potential hedons you've been eagerly waiting to purchase.
I'm no entrepreneur, so who's up?