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This document gives an overview about the Hollowverse product.
Note: this document is not intended as the source of truth or a technical spec. It is always a work-in-progress and may be out of date.
It's interesting to know what ideas and values are important to famous and influential people. What values are important to someone like Bill Gates? Does he believe in secular, Christian, or Buddhist values? Is he a Republican or a Democrat? Is he an environmentalist, or maybe an animal rights advocate? Is he more of a capitalist or a socialist?
Hollowverse was started to answer these questions.
The goal is to create a platform where people can easily contribute this information about notable individuals.
In a way, Hollowverse is like Wikipedia, but it is dedicated to this niche and we want to go deeper into it.
We asked for name suggestions on a forum and somebody came up with this name. They had an explanation for why this is a suitable name--I think they said something about hollow universe. But we picked the name because we thought it sounded cool.
The goal and the challenge is to ultimately not have any manual human editorial oversight. Content should be fully generated and moderated by the community with the support of the platform. Each and every piece of content should be contributed and voted upon by members of the community. A ranking algorithm will determine how content is sorted and displayed.
Hollowverse.com has been live for several years and receives more than a million page-views per month. Once we've built the new platform, we'll migrate whatever is suitable from the old Hollowverse to the new one.
Below are some of the main concepts of the platform
Currently, there are two user types: contributor and reader. We use the term "user" or "users" to refer to all user types.
A reader is a visitor who doesn't have an account. They can read and vote on content.
Is a person who has an account. They have all the privileges of a reader and can add content and edit and delete their own content.
The main attraction will be the pages of notable persons. A notable person is someone whose beliefs may be of interest to others. It could be an entertainer, a scientist, a business person, a politician, or anybody.
Each page of a notable person would have some or all of the following items:
- Name
- Picture
- Labels
- Summary
- Events
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│┌──────────────────┐ Religion, politics, and ideas of...│
││ │ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ │ │
││ │ |M|i|c|h|a|e|l| |J|a|c|k|s|o|n| │ │
││ │ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ │ │
││ Picture of │ │ │
││ Michael Jackson │ ┌────────────────┐┌────────┐┌─────┐ │ │ Name, picture, and labels
││ │ │Jehova's Witness││Musician││Black│ │ │
││ │ └────────────────┘└────────┘└─────┘ │ │
││ │ ┌─────────────┐ │ │
│└──────────────────┘ │Non-political│ │ │
│ └─────────────┘ │
│ ┌───────┐ │
│┌─┤Summary├─────────────────────────────────────────────┐│
││ └───────┘ ││
││ Michael was born a Jehovah's Witness but upon ││ │
││ reaching success, the church rejected him for being ││ │ The highest ranked summary.
││ too "worldly." His subsequent religious beliefs are ││ │
││ highly speculated ranging from Kabbalah to Islam to a ││ │ The "See more summaries..."
││ New Age spirituality. ││ │ link takes the user to a
││ ││ │ page where they can view
││ Michael was not political, never making any political ││ │ more contributed summaries
││ contributions or...etc ││ │ and vote on them.
││ ┌────────────────┐││ │
│└─────────────────────────────────────┤By: Awesome Gal ├┘│
│ See more summaries..└────────────────┘ │
│─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│
││ ║ Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love ││
││ ║ from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth ││
││ ║ at the heart of all creation ││
││ Source: link.com/to/some/webpage ││
││ ││
││ This shows Michael was blah blah blah... ││ │
││ ┌──────────────────────────┐││ │ Events.
│└───────────────────────────┤Added by: John Fantastico ├┘│ │
│ └──────────────────────────┘ │ │ These are events relevant
│┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ │ to the notable person. They
││ ║ Michael was very concerned about the wellbeing of ││ │ consist of a quote, a
││ ║ every creature ││ │ source, and a brief comment
││ Source: link.com/to/some/michael-authority ││ │ by the contributor.
││ ││ │
││ Michael's long time friend said that he ││
││ cared about animals. He was an animals ││
││ rights advocate. ┌────────────────────────┐││
│└─────────────────────────────┤Added by: Mr. Incredible├┘│
│ └────────────────────────┘ │
│┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│
└┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴┘
Labels are an attempt to categorize notable people. Labels can be about a notable person's ethnicity, profession, nationality, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or any interesting labels that can be applied to them.
We do not yet have a concrete criteria for what a label may or may not be.
An event is anything that happened that is relevant to the notable person's politics, religion, or values. It can be something they said or something an authority said about them. It can be an action they took, like making a donation to a cause or appearing at rally.
For the event to be posted on Hollowverse, it must be first documented on an external website and then cited as a source on the event.
Each event contains the following items:
- a quote from the source
- a link to the source
- the date on which the event took place
- the name of the Hollowverse contributor
- image of the Hollowverse contributor
For the time being, we are thinking that any external web page can be a valid source. It's up to the community to up-vote and down-vote events.
When a Notable Person's page has enough events, contributors can add a summary. A summary is a couple of very short paragraphs summarizing the person's religion, politics, and values.
Anybody can add a summary, and the ranking algorithm determines what summary is displayed on the main page. But there should be a page listing all summaries.
Picture, name, label, summary, event, and each item should have its own unique URL with a Facebook comments box dedicated to it.
For example, an event on Michael Jackson's page would have its unique URL, e.g. http://hollowverse.com/michael-jackson/event/23894239, which lists the event as will as a Facebook comments box below it where users can discuss the particular event.
Currently, there are two main pages: homepage and a notable person's page.
The homepage only contains a search box. When the user submits a search we either take the user to the page of the person for whom they searched or we show feedback on the homepage itself.
A notable person's page is, as described above, contains information about the person's politics, religion, and values.
There would need to be a "Create a Notable Person's page" page to allow us to create new pages. We would also need an admin page where we can create UI for administrative tasks.
We may eventually add a Contributor's Page, which would be a Contributor Profile page listing their contributions. It may or may not be public.
This document is still developing. We don't really know what the final Hollowverse is going to look like. We'll try to update this document as our ideas crystalize so that anyone interested can get an understanding of the product. For now, this is what we have :)
If you need help or wanna get in touch, you can:
Post a message to our public message board, email us, or chat with us.