Community building is the most noble project on the Internet, and this is a unique attempt to organize it further. Communities, not software or commerce or entertainment, is what the Internet was motivated from in the 90's and will be the most remembered aspect in 50 years, so it is important to create experimental community harbors like these to possibly incubate future massive projects.
However, I am curious why you chose two features from which to derive your community software.
Voting: This has been demonstrated by major websites to form "mob opinions", hide individuality, and discourage of unpopular/unoriginal ideas. It is somewhat agreed by Hacker News members that voting should represent quality of comments. But as the size of a website approaches infinity (like Reddit, or Facebook comments with "liking"), this type of culture breaks down, so voting is eventually only used to game the system to promote comments that follow your personal opinion. Differing opinions are a beautiful aspect of humankind, and they are lost when a comment's score is used to make it visible in an unequal manner to other comments. Additionally, voting has little correlation with the effort that goes into a comment. A one-word reply is just as likely to have the same score as a wiki-like hand-typed article and will therefore be artificially promoted to the same level. I believe that if you're running an online news website, sure, absolutely promote "top" content. If it's a community forum, give people an equal voice.
Threading/hierarchy: Human conversation has not and will not change as a result of Internet community software. Hierarchy is unnatural, chronology is natural. If the goal of a community is to generate "answers" to "questions", sometimes this unnatural feature is necessary, but use caution and don't over-hierarchy-ize the organization. Having a "Support" and "Not support" feature like in your video demo adds to the paperwork of posting an answer while not offering much benefit, and it seems a bit O(n^2) to me.
Thank you for your very intelligent, thought provoking and inspiring comment. Building a great community around knowledge is the dream. And I really appreciate your curiousities!
About voting: we really thought really hard about this very hard thing and it is a very hard problem to solve. As you said earlier, we need more experimental communities to really be sure as there may be limited unadulterated evidence as to its effectiveness currently. But we looked at review sites as a guide - they seem to work pretty good. So the argument is: if people can help each other choose products or services they could theoretically also help with choosing ideas. But we know its not as easy as that.
We are starting by catering to the good members, those with only good intentions and not to game the system, and then to worry about how the bad or unsuspecting ones can spoil it for everyone. So given such a group of good members we thought it more beneficial for everyone if each person could make it easier for the next one by making a good choice and voting up. It would be better to use their time and efforts. This is contrasting to where no one is trusted and each person has to start from the beginning and go through all choices thus not benefitting from the time and thoughts spent by those who went through the same thing before.
But you hit at a deeper problem here which is really really hard to answer: how do you make something popular while giving equal importance to every other thing. By giving something precedence, e.g. calling it a better apple, aren’t you by definition making all the other apples worser? And if you call all of them equal then do you do justice to the already ripe ones?
But this problem really kept us up at nights: what will happen to the the poor and specially bright genius who can achieve transcendental insights but is against huge hoards who simply “don’t get it”. Because it is indeed a beautiful aspect of humankind. And that brings us to your last point - namely the supporting, conflicting feature. That one was designed with this very thing in mind. So that the inspired can create a conflicting idea to what has been accepted by the majority - and those who see that there is a conflicting answers to the prevailing accepted one, will hopefully take a closer look then and then spend more time deciding. Those who voted earlier on the prevailing one can change their minds and vote on the new insightful one and slowly the acceptance rating will sway to the new one as will the ranking and medals (it is all implemented already). A big part of Quetree is identify what is the popularly accepted so that we at least know if that needs to change and have a shot at changing it. Quetree is incepted to may be help change what is popular to take us closer to a world where the majority is wiser and more adaptive.
But the supporting and conflicting feature is not meant to quadratically complicate answering - it is served as an extra feature to be used when needed as exampled above but is safely tucked away hidden, and have to be expanded to use.
To address your other good point about hierarchy, that one is truly experimental. The idea is to encourage the path towards hierarchy-izing ideas and may be even over-hierarchy-izing them over over-hierarchy-izing men and kings that us humans have been doing naturally for eons. If we can have a hierarchy of ideas we can constructly move them around (ideal mobilization vs social mobilization ;), they won’t mind nor fight back, unlike the kings or authoritative figures who hold on for dear life.
I like how your brain thinks and I suspect we could’ve hung around and have long philosophical conversations that would be both enjoyable and inspiring. Please keep in touch, thanks and have a great day!
However, I am curious why you chose two features from which to derive your community software.
Voting: This has been demonstrated by major websites to form "mob opinions", hide individuality, and discourage of unpopular/unoriginal ideas. It is somewhat agreed by Hacker News members that voting should represent quality of comments. But as the size of a website approaches infinity (like Reddit, or Facebook comments with "liking"), this type of culture breaks down, so voting is eventually only used to game the system to promote comments that follow your personal opinion. Differing opinions are a beautiful aspect of humankind, and they are lost when a comment's score is used to make it visible in an unequal manner to other comments. Additionally, voting has little correlation with the effort that goes into a comment. A one-word reply is just as likely to have the same score as a wiki-like hand-typed article and will therefore be artificially promoted to the same level. I believe that if you're running an online news website, sure, absolutely promote "top" content. If it's a community forum, give people an equal voice.
Threading/hierarchy: Human conversation has not and will not change as a result of Internet community software. Hierarchy is unnatural, chronology is natural. If the goal of a community is to generate "answers" to "questions", sometimes this unnatural feature is necessary, but use caution and don't over-hierarchy-ize the organization. Having a "Support" and "Not support" feature like in your video demo adds to the paperwork of posting an answer while not offering much benefit, and it seems a bit O(n^2) to me.