Ranking by :truth · 5 votes
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’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.
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.
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.
Sorter is completely original and nothing like this has ever existed before
Sorter is proprietary, trying to become a venture scale business.
Sorter is certainly asynchronous. There have been many explorations of the core sorter idea. Pairwise comparisons have been studied for decades. Conjoint analysis. HotOrNot. Sorter is just one iteration of the human desire to rank things collectively
There are some new things about sorter. The backwards compatible with prose syntax. The synthesis of email-first, rank-centrality, and social platform. So there is a hint of truth to /new. But sorter is absolutely not /proprietary. Sorter is open source. github.com/sortersocial/index Therefore, /proprietary is banished 100:1 to the false end of the spectrum.