I was thinking about this when I saw how many developers have come onboard granting their badge and responding to concerns and I was wondering.
We have people in here like Louis Rossman [Though he’s verified for FUTO] who is a content creator but then we also know around 5 blog writers here, @micdan, me and the person calling themselves nihilist with also @rottenwheel and @soatok. Though I know I probably missed others and if so don’t hesitate to let me know so we can count out the total of CCs and Writers we have.
I feel this will have the following benefits:
This tells that a user tends to or writes (mostly) privacy related posts or makes videos independent of PG, It’s the idea where we can have 10s if not 100s or more of different perspectives to the public. Just like how a developer gets granted a badge for getting their app in the forums and comes forward. And if some kind of direction Change somehow happens at PG which I wouldn’t pray nor hope on it (meaning a bad one but as I said), At least people will know different Creators they can elude to but as always there’s also the options the users will have.
With that like what happened to Soaktok’s Session blog getting viral, Having him grant a status like this would’ve looked great so if something say was to happen with my blog (say for example my post about the state of gaming privacy was posted here and concerns were raised I could answer with the status that I own the blog site)
This mostly applies to me rather than others but it’s what I would call basically put: “Peer motivation”, if someone else benefits from it, great, otherwise it’s just me I guess.
It would look like the developer badge but making the site visible, eg. For me
pfp with Pencil icon badge GorujoCY
below it or the username below it if I would set a display name: blog.gorujokun.cy (maybe make it a different color from the developer one, this adds variety for both writer and content creator badges, same with content creator icon obviously) [Maybe make it clickable that leads to the site but if you don’t want to that’s fine, at the team’s discretion]
One or two cons I can think of is the following: PG would need to verify the domain somehow, I guess by doing it kinda like what discord does. The domain owner (say me as an owner of gorujokun.cy domain) adding a TXT record, Staff verifies the record is here and approves it? (Unless Discourse does support automatic domain verification than then gets send to the staff as verified and then gets the badge of writing but I doubt). And for content creation, honestly it’s a whole other different beast of verification.
Third con: The added Moderation for PG team as stated by @anon29374801
Then again I’m going with this knowing that this probably won’t get approved for a variety of reasons, However if the team thinks this is a reasonable request and something can be done, Fantastic but otherwise I can see why the team may not want to, especially with the cons I mentioned.
I don’t see the benefit to users. Devs serve a purpose of informing users about their tools that come up in discussion. It is useful for the community members to know who they are.
Whereas a user can just put their blog / channel/ etc in the Name field. I am not sure its appropriate for PG to have badges to advertise users personal content. Especially when that content may be filled with unverified information or misinformation.
That’s an interesting proposal. Of course, @jonah can share a more detailed explanation of PG’s vision for our community and the technical aspects of verification.
As for my personal two-cents: since we are shifting gears to content creation and journalism, it would be great to recognize community members share their own works as well. Who knows, perhaps some members can even contribute an occasional blog or op-ed to our articles section! That way, PG isn’t just an open source knowledge base, but also a community of investigators on its own.
The misinformation among other things I thought honestly is a common sense to kind of like moderate
that’s why I’m thinking that Unlike developers, PG team would have the right to revoke the status where necessary.
But this can be added as a con for sure.
I do like the idea of maybe PG having a page or forum area for user generated content and possibly highlighting different user generated content every so often, maybe a community spotlight type of deal.
Not a bad idea, I can see where not all people liked my style can have a PG written version of my privacy blog posts, And kinda like Twitter(X) except voluntarily and more private I guess.
also wanna add, this is why I suggested a verification basis not voluntarily putting it in.
However as I said I understand if the team doesn’t want to go through it right now or never, again mentioned the cons I’m aware of.
We do verify content creators on our forum, like Henry Fisher from Techlore or Yael Grauer from Consumer Reports for two examples on that list.
We don’t really have an exact criteria on when this happens, but I think it’s generally just based on a vibe-check and whether their audience is similarly sized or larger than Privacy Guides’ own audience already, which is the case in those examples.
Ultimately there is not significant harm in not verifying authors though. We verify all developers who are being discussed on the forum because people are actually using their tools already and inherently have some trust in them, and because since we recommend various software products there should be a clear conflict of interest indicator in discussions.
On the other hand, written content that is published here should generally speak for itself.
Writing articles and making videos is what we do here ourselves, and frankly we do it better than probably 90% of people out there, IMHO. If your content is independently posted by someone else — like soatok’s blogs for example — then it probably belongs in Privacy as a real on-topic discussion. If your content isn’t notable enough to be independently posted here by the community already, then it probably doesn’t meet our standards in the first place, no offense.
Ultimately, this is not really a community for self-promotion. I am more than happy to have community members who also happen to post their work and talk about it, but I am less happy with people who join the community to post their work. These are distinct things and I think a self-promotional category would only encourage the latter.
There is no rule against posting your own work to Privacy either. However, if it doesn’t add any new information to the world then it will likely be removed, and it’ll be a pretty bad look if someone is overly self-promotional. I trust our community members to use their best judgement and know the difference between posting something like a blog post that does unique and novel research into Session’s encryption, and a blog post that covers information essentially already covered on privacyguides.org in a slightly different way
We do have a program where guests can post an article to Privacy Guides directly, and this has the benefit of being edited and approved by an editor of the site.
I was honestly gonna add reading your genuine answer, this isn’t about verifying and then self promoting right because if they dare do that right then yeah you would get them out and revoke their status as verified author. (or repeatedly anything that doesn’t add value).
And I hope to god it feels genuine too but I don’t want to be just for myself as much as I will wish upon it but also equal to all other authors getting the same treatment as I would or other authors.
Other than that like, genuinely, Spot on response.
