Egalitarian gem
Description & Purpose
The Egalitarian gem applies a unique system to forum-based applications in order to better combat meaningful content being buried from traditional democratic voting systems.
To better understand the underlying problems with current systems, this video by the PBS Idea Channel explains the inherent issues that arise from traditional forum democracy:
Traditional democracy is a fair system in theory but not necessarily egalitarian due to the bias of voters, and systematically appealing to specific user bases with content that is likely to be upvoted. Content that is likely to be upvoted is what people want to see, but not necessarily what people need to see, there could be piles of content that people didn't even know they wanted to see, or discussions that they could have a crucial voice in, however these posts sometimes never see the light of day.
Another issue that arises from forums is the sensationalization of posts that cater to the largest demographic. It is undeniable that users are drawn to imagery rather than long blocks of text, often you will see comments like TLDR (too long didn't read), because an idea wasn't summarized into an easily digestible format. To combat this, text posts need to stand out to compete with the sensational nature of image/video posts, something that goes beyond the scope of a sensational title. One possibility is when posts are displayed an algorithm chooses a random sentence from the content body that will display in a larger, more unique font on the post listing page.
