Sorter is a social media platform, but a retro one, closer to an email list or a bbs forum, than instagram. Sorter is about to be presented to you in an extremely sincere manner, one that might be off putting. Sorter is a syntax, backwards compatible with normal English prose, which enables more precise thinking. Let's begin by sorting the alphabet.
Because the first character on the above line was #, it was interpreted by the system as special. The specialness was such: we are now in the context of #alphabet. All subsequent items will be catalogued in the index under this context.
We are in a tag, now let's declare an item.
The prefix character / denotes, when the first character on a line, the beginning of the title of an item. Now we have two discrete, addressable items. Imagine two dots floating on a 2d plane. Now let's draw a line segment between the two dots.
We have asserted that /a wins over /b, winning 66% of that matchup. From this assertion we derive the ranking:
1) /a 2) /b
If we were to send this email right now, we could view the ranking at https://index.sorter.social/hashtag/alphabet Easy enough.
Now the ranking is
1) /a 2) /b 3) /c
Notice how we never compared /b and /c. Both lose to /a, but /b and /c’s relative ranking is determined from the ratio. /a wins 75% over /c, and only 66% over /b. This is enough information to construct an accurate ranking.
Lets sort some properties about sorter itself.
We are now in the body of the item titled /transitive, because of the open bracket. We could write an entire essay here. Transitive is the property I just demonstrated above. The ranking between /b and /c is inferred from the other two rankings. In general, with precise ratios, you only need N-1 votes for N items. Just enough to connect all the dots together.
As you can tell, sorter forces more precise thinking. More precise in that your prose needs to conform to syntax, but also more precise in that you need to discretize your thoughts into titled blocks, and put ratios to judgements.
Sorter’s primary interface is email. You email vote@mail.sorter.social to submit your items/votes/prose. All emails are public once sent, indexed on the website verbatim, and also deconstructed and compiled into the consensus graph. Asynchronous means that emails can come in at any time. The accumulation of consensus happens at the speed of contemplation, not the speed of a social media feed.
Sorter is multiplayer. Anyone can add to #sorter-properties, just by emailing in a syntax-conforming snippet. Anyone can vote on what they think the ordering should be. Sorter is a collaborative project. Nobody owns the rankings. Everybody owns the rankings.
Sorter is completely original and nothing like this has ever existed before
Sorter is proprietary, trying to become a venture scale business.
Now we have six dots swimming around. Lets order them.
All equally, absolutely true.
In sorter, there are no binaries. Everything is a spectrum, including truth.
The most important thing, in my mind, about sorter is that it’s collective.
Any other person could add to or vote on #sorter-properties, this is just my opinion.