Voting and popularity is evolving..

...yet again 🙄

In trying to get something right, sometimes you first have to get things wrong. Sometimes you might get things wrong several times before you finally get it right. However, it is far better to keep changing in the pursuit of excellence than to leave something less than perfect.

Such is the popularity feature on the Reality of Illness website.

Its purpose is to let new users to the terrain perspective (or those who already follow it) know about who and what is considered worthwhile. It could also introduce our website users to someone or something (person or resource) they had never previously considered. In this way it extends the depth of knowledge and appreciation while showing there are many worthwhile people and resources to learn about within this health and wellness paradigm.

Weekly?

We chose to make it a weekly thing because anyone or anything might surface in a given week. A person might release a new book or a video and, as a result, come to greater prominence, or the new book or video itself might get some plaudits giving it an instant ranking. The impact of such a thing, reflected in votes, can then be judged.

Reality of Illness has seen voting increase as a direct result of things or people we have featured so we know it is both a potent and useful tool. It is, however, equally vulnerable to abuse.

Despite occasional ‘blips’ we suspect the voting we see is from only a few users who are active and are engaged sufficiently to return to our website week after week. And these website visitors invariably vote for the same few notable people and more rarely for resources. These then regularly fill the weekly top 20.

But some notable people might ‘sit in the shadows’ having once done brilliant work but are not currently being active or promoting themselves. Accordingly, they might not come to the attention of others as they should.

And some of the notable people we list are not particularly enthusiastic about our system because of these shortcomings.

Another new problem

We recently had another issue when we reinstated Unbekoming.

He publicly asked for votes on his well-followed Substack platform where he has lots of followers many of whom duly obliged by voting for him.

Note: This is something Unbekoming is totally at liberty to do and those who rate him are equally at liberty to vote for him.

As a result he instantly shot up to the top spot gaining huge numbers of votes over two weeks until he chose to no longer ask for votes.

Blessing, curse and fairness

This has superbly illustrated what a difference can be made when people such as Unbekoming get behind our project. But it also highlighted a problem because he became somewhat disproportionately ranked when considering the overall numbers of votes ever given since voting began.

His huge support in just a very short time skewed things placing Unbekoming above people who had quietly and diligently got on with promoting and advocating the terrain perspective in many ways, on many platforms, over many years but who didn’t ask for votes as an acknowledgment of their efforts.

Needed

What is really needed is to ask just those who are able to be totally objective perhaps by virtue of having been around the terrain paradigm for quite a while. These are likely to be people who would not place a vote against just one notable person but would more often place votes against several of those they consider deserving. Such users are likely each to have a mental ‘personal collection’ of the people that they rate ...and likely they have personal collections too of the resources they applaud or books they have read.

We need these people to be our voters. And when such people can deliver a spread of votes across several notable people these would then paint a far more sensible picture of the terrain landscape for those arriving with scant knowledge of anyone.

Another potential problem

We have a further worry when someone such as Unbekoming chooses to remain anonymous as he is perfectly entitled to do. His anonymity means it is not clear or certain what people are lending their support to?

You would never vote for an anonymous politician or support and donate to an anonymous charity.

An anonymous person could be fronting a small team of people and in these days of clever tech ‘an anonymous person’ could even not be a person at all but a computer bot or an artificial intelligence creation capable of engendering support in some new and mysterious way.

We are not suggesting Unbekoming is not a completely legitimate person but his anonymity could cloak anything at all. This is not a reasonable state of affairs when comparing his efforts to some terrain medical professionals who run the gauntlet of being discredited, ridiculed or de-banking by being outspoken and going against the mainstream.

Obviously such things are a massive incentive to stay anonymous. So while it is understandable it nevertheless does not place these people on a level playing field with the others who do put their heads above the parapet. Viktor Ardens Frei is also a ‘pen name’ for a person who does splendid work but who chooses anonymity.

We could make anyone who wishes to remain anonymous ineligible for votes or we could remove such people and only feature their work.

What are we actually doing?

We are suspending voting for the time being while we make some changes to fix these issues and we will be using our record of historic voting to present everything more objectively ranked. We have also removed the popularity page but overall popularity can still be chosen as a sort order (ie a records sequence for display).

We had already been considering a better way to manage presenting users with people and resources via an app.

But this situation has also changed our thinking in regard to the app.

We were going to develop something that would be engaging with almost what you might call fun and entertaining features. As such it would have widespread appeal and perhaps enable it to become more mainstream along with the terrain perspective.

But on reflection, we feel that these features could potentially trivialise this extremely serious and grounded scientific view of medicine. After all you can’t gamify science!

Much as we would wish it to be otherwise the terrain perspective is unlikely to be a view that is ever sufficiently mainstream to make much of a dent in the indoctrination and dogma surrounding the erroneous beliefs of germ theory.

It is a David and Goliath battle where billions of dollars are continually invested worldwide in order to prop up a health care system that is in reality an illness for profit system.

Our app will now be prioritised in development and will now be aimed purely at the solid, educated advocates of the terrain paradigm. These ardent and informed followers are those who would think nothing of spending a couple of dollars to download an app that cements this solid scientific view and challenges the millions of doubting normal folk.

Having great numbers supporting a particular view has never been an indicator that the view is correct.

The app’s perspective

Our app will allow a select number of people to consolidate the terrain paradigm for the benefit of others by using our formidable database. It will build on solid foundations rather than being something jazzy.

We don’t need such an app to have mass appeal. We need it in the hands of those who wish to influence and make a difference for the greater good of furthering the real understanding of health and wellness while demolishing the germ theory nonsense and pseudoscience.

Before we build, we have to get the foundations right.