Seeking help for MVP fake news voting platform

[neowenyuan]

Realnot Platform

Description :

Realnot Platform is a project that allows community to vote, if a news article is real, or fake. The general public can share news articles, where the rest of the community can vote, if the news is a fake news, or a legit news article.

Realnot do not decide, or conclude, if a news article is a fake news, or not. Users who have doubts over certain news, can take the article into the Realnot platform, and look at what other users think and feel about the news. This can help the community to be aware if a news article is potentially fake or inaccurate, which will greatly reduce the impact of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Through such voting, we can look at the opinion of general population regarding certain news. At the end of current phase, we will introduce fact-checkers/verifiers into the platform as the community grows bigger.

Aside from this, Realnot hopes to develop further into a news curation platform in future, where active members can become verifiers, alongside third-party fact-checkers. Verifiers will need to provide fact-checking results to verify facts or false claims in news articles, and results need to be backed by other verifiers. Verifiers with different sentiments can provide their fact-checking results as well. The role of other verifiers not providing any fact-checking results, will need to assess the results posted, and vote on the most accurate result. Top results backed by verifiers will be the default answer, which will be taken in reference to award normal voters(non-verifiers) who voted on the news article as well.

Currently, myself, and Nasir is working on this project. With Nasir taking care of development, and my role as founder to continue improving the idea of this project to make it better and more helpful on the long run.


Overview :

At this moment, we have a MVP on Telegram, using voting channels and bots for article submission. The aim of this MVP is to see the viability of this idea, before we move onto further development, such as fact-checker sections, where fact checkers can comment and debunk fake/misinformed news.
During this period of uncertainty, we hope that the MVP can serve some local communities by allowing users to vote on news articles. Perhaps a user can show their friend or family that, they might have shared a fake news online, and Realnot community has voted that it might be a fake news.

This can serve as a way to educate the public about fake news, with participation from users for news article submission and voting.

There is also a RNT token in place, to reward users for contributing to the platform. RNT of users will be used to determine if a specific user should be promoted to a fact-checker in future, as we need fact-checkers to be active in platform.


Development timeline :

March 2020 -
- Realnot idea formed and put in writing (idea was around since 2018, but was expecting facebook to do something serious about it)
- RNT token (rewarding community for posting articles and voting)
- Forming of english and bahasa indonesia voting channels
- MVP completed

Future development :

- Fact-checker platform development.
- Mobile app development
- Blockchain integration for voting sessions, and voting details/results. (details can be used for studies in future if anyone is interested in studying the growth of fake news and reactions in different years)
- Promoting fact-checkers within community when necessary development is ready.
- Incentivising fact-checkers through non-disrupting ads revenue  
- Engaging 3rd-party fact checkers to enter and contribute to the community.


Help needed :

Before we can go into future developments, it will be good to have a small community around and gauge the interest of the community before moving ahead.

- a respectable size of voters (with more individual voters, results can be more convincing)
- volunteer fact-checkers working as admins
- participation of users, from submitting posts for voting, to voting.
- community supporting more language for voting channels (currently only english and bahasa indonesia)
- website development - potentially building curator platform onto it as well, but more importantly, would love to have a beautiful site some time down the road.


Related links :

As we do not have a site yet, we're more active in telegram community group.

Our bot : @R_N_T_Bot

Users can submit articles via our telegram bot. Articles will go into relevant channel for voting.

Our community: https://t.me/Realnotcommunity

The community is very quiet now, having less than 10 active users. Please feel free to interact there.

Our voting channels : https://t.me/realnotenglish    https://t.me/realnotindonesia

Please feel free to vote on articles that are open for voting. If there is nothing available, feel free to post articles using our bot, and articles will be there for voting.

If you need to know more about this project, feel free to interact at our community listed above, or even via this thread.

Thank you!

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[bitmover]

I don't get how is this decentralized.

If you were running this on a dApp, on ethereum blockchain for example, it could be decentralized.

But as you are doing, it doesn't look decentralized because you can just remove the entire voting pool from the centralized website or from the centralized App.

A dApp is decentralized because it cannot be stopped. It runs in a world computer, a computer which no one owns. It is an dApp which is owned by no one.

[examplens]

Fake news investigator is for sure good idea and it is required. Community voting is not the right way to determine if something is false or not.
Every form of voting is subject to manipulation. I am not sure how you think to prevent paid voting or using telegram bots farming. Plus, for example, by voting directly depend from where I am informed, did I'm read real or fake content and how it's affected my opinion.
Fake news and feedbacks It's all around us, simple check bounty section here on the forum, you will see many "paid" action, even claps on Medium.
It is better to gather a group of people who will research and post analytics about some news and explain if they found the news to be fake.

[neowenyuan]

I don't get how is this decentralized.

If you were running this on a dApp, on ethereum blockchain for example, it could be decentralized.

But as you are doing, it doesn't look decentralized because you can just remove the entire voting pool from the centralized website or from the centralized App.

A dApp is decentralized because it cannot be stopped. It runs in a world computer, a computer which no one owns. It is an dApp which is owned by no one.

Hi there,

I have plans to shift it to a standalone blockchain in future if we can get past this MVP and get some good response. This will not be 'decentralised' yet in the near future. Sorry for the misleading subject title. I will change it.

In any case, in future, users will be represented by an identity, like bitcoin address. Voting will then be conducted by users via their identity.

At this moment, there are more question marks than answers for the blockchain deployment, and I'm hoping the MVP phase will get us more answers as we move forward.

A few thoughts I have:

- Users should have only 1 identity, but at this moment, a decentralised environment will not effectively ensure that, not even at current MVP stage, unless we start doing KYC for all users, which shouldn't be the case as well.
- Users with multiple identity can game the system, and even if KYC implemented, there is a possibility of users gaming the system as well with multiple accounts, but it will be slightly more difficult.
- Implementing random polls to random users(different set of voters voting on article A, another set voting on article B), so that gaming of the system is minimised.

[neowenyuan]

Fake news investigator is for sure good idea and it is required. Community voting is not the right way to determine if something is false or not.
Every form of voting is subject to manipulation. I am not sure how you think to prevent paid voting or using telegram bots farming. Plus, for example, by voting directly depend from where I am informed, did I'm read real or fake content and how it's affected my opinion.
Fake news and feedbacks It's all around us, simple check bounty section here on the forum, you will see many "paid" action, even claps on Medium.
It is better to gather a group of people who will research and post analytics about some news and explain if they found the news to be fake.

Yes, voting can be manipulated.

On the long run, paid voting will not be feasible for most, when fact-checkers are introduced. The fact-checking community has to be wide, with people of different backgrounds, as it is inevitable that human possess bias as we've seen in the world. If fact checkers debunk it as a fake news in future, even if the community gets paid to vote for certain outcome, in this case, real, or fake news, it is what fact checkers conclude, which counts.

May I direct you to the group, and perhaps you can take a look at some document I've written so far, because it might answer your question. https://telegra.ph/Whitepaper-Realnot-03-25
The document/whitepaper is far from completion. But it might answer some doubts that you have at the moment  

As for fact checkers, the curation platform to be created, will allow fact-checkers to have the platform to agree and disagree with one another. As you mentioned above, if votes can be bought, fact-checkers, might lose integrity in future one day. And I'm not sure if you're aware, but authorised 3rd-party fact-checkers for Facebook, is pretty monopolised across the world. In any case, the curation platform can allow fact-checkers/verifiers to provide research and evidence for articles, and will need to go through the approval of other fact-checkers as well to ensure minimised bias and integrity of the platform.

I'm not saying, current fact-checkers cannot be trusted, but I think there is a need for readers like us, to not develop any trust issues with fact-checkers in future as they become more important  

At this stage of development, I'm more interested in seeing, if community voting is attractive, as I feel that users will be more informed and knowledgeable through experiencing them, and having their opinion voiced through voting.

[o_e_l_e_o]

On the long run, paid voting will not be feasible for most, when fact-checkers are introduced.

What's to prevent an individual or company from either ranking up enough of their own accounts to be "fact-checkers", or buying off existing "fact-checkers"?

If fact checkers debunk it as a fake news in future, even if the community gets paid to vote for certain outcome, in this case, real, or fake news, it is what fact checkers conclude, which counts.

Then what is the point in the voters at all then? If fact checkers can overrule them completely, then they serve no purpose.

I also agree with examplens points above. Whether an article is factual or fictitious is not down to a consensus agreement. It is down to facts. A fact is a fact regardless of whether people like it or whether people vote for it. The majority of people at the time thought slavery was fine. The majority of people at the time thought blood letting with leeches was an effective treatment for most medical issues. The majority of people at the moment think that USD is both safe and stable. The majority can't be trusted, and consensus doesn't make something true or false.

[Theb]

Every result is only based on general consensus of the members in the voting channel of Realnot on Telegram.

This kind of system would render a totally inaccurate result. If people's votes all weigh the same then people who just wants to promote fake news and make it "credible" based on votes would really benefit from this system or they could also make real news "fake" if it will also be favorable to them. If you want a more accurate way of voting or screening the news if it is real or fake I would suggest that you have a weighing system or credibility system that gives credible users have a bigger weight on voting. This system can be achieved based on voting accuracy, credibility of the user, or even if the user is based on the country where the news is from and he has additional local information in hand he can be more credible and add more weight in the voting system.

[BrewMaster]

it is an interesting concept in my opinion but i have a concern about the validity of its result. the manipulation and paid voting was already mentioned but that was not my concern. mine is about people falling for the false information and believing it. for example even today a lot of people think that bitcoin is banned in some countries that have never banned it actually like China or India. or like the news these blockchain analyzers keep releasing with fake statistics about illegal bitcoin usages.

when a news comes out like that where a large group of people believe it they may vote on validity of it and make some others believe it too because of that rating.

you see the biggest problem is figuring out what news is fake and which one isn't and that is not something regular users can do at least not without spending a lot of time researching on the internet. and i don't know that many people who would bother putting that kind of effort in.

[neowenyuan]

On the long run, paid voting will not be feasible for most, when fact-checkers are introduced.

What's to prevent an individual or company from either ranking up enough of their own accounts to be "fact-checkers", or buying off existing "fact-checkers"?

If fact checkers debunk it as a fake news in future, even if the community gets paid to vote for certain outcome, in this case, real, or fake news, it is what fact checkers conclude, which counts.

Then what is the point in the voters at all then? If fact checkers can overrule them completely, then they serve no purpose.

I also agree with examplens points above. Whether an article is factual or fictitious is not down to a consensus agreement. It is down to facts. A fact is a fact regardless of whether people like it or whether people vote for it. The majority of people at the time thought slavery was fine. The majority of people at the time thought blood letting with leeches was an effective treatment for most medical issues. The majority of people at the moment think that USD is both safe and stable. The majority can't be trusted, and consensus doesn't make something true or false.

Within the fact-checkers platform, fact-checkers require the support of other fellow fact-checkers with their response. The possibility is there, where somebody manage to buy off enough 'fact-checkers' to keep quiet, or to behave manipulated. I don't think there is a way to stop this completely, or to prevent this from happening, even though it'll take a long time for tracking 'enough' fact checkers.

Another way fact-checkers can be supported, is by the existing community(non-verifiers/non fact-checkers), as they get to stake their RNT on fact-checkers. If somebody do manage to 'buy off' most or all fact-checkers, and the existing community does not sense the 'buy off', there really isn't much that any of us can do. But, given current social media and online environment, such as platforms and forums like this, everyone have their own opinion on many different topics. I can buy off more than half of bitcointalk users to post good things here, including legendary and hero members like yourself, but it doesn't necessary mean, all users will follow suit and post good things here. So long as there is a voice, and the voice reaches the people, it doesn't really matter what the crowd say sometimes. So, to answer your question, if the unlikely event where fact-checkers are all bought out, I'm confident, somebody will do the right thing, be it fact checkers, or even members who stake their RNT on the fact-checkers, and we can only hope, the minority can make enough noise to change things. One very good example is what we see in Steemit on January and February, and that's why a community is very important, which I'm sure all of us agree here. I think we still have plenty of work to do here in this department.

I do agree that, consensus agreement is not effective, as what people feel in general, may not depict the truth. That is why, we need to have a community of fact-checkers, to debunk news articles which is simply not true. If somehow, this platform appeared a few hundred years earlier, we would be able to study about human thoughts at the point, such as allowing leeches to suck off your 'toxins' as an effective  treatment, and thinking slavery was fine. There might also be a chance where, 20% of the population thought it was fine, but not the remaining, and they just kept quiet without voicing any concerns and follow through with their life. Things might have turned out differently then, or at least now when we're puzzled by people in the past.

A current example would be, social media users debating on these platforms. Sometimes, we read them without commenting, because there is no winning over keyboard battles sometimes, and you have better things to do. But when you look at the comments, it is mostly filled with unconstructive comments, does that mean everyone is stupid just because too little people said something smart over there? However, with this platform, the more 'informed' users can make their votes count, and they have a group of fact-checkers that they can count on, and if that is not the case, they can be a fact-checker themselves to make a difference. But ultimately, it shows numbers in votes, facts and evidence provided by different fact checkers, things can become more transparent in future I believe by showing 2-3 general opinions backed by other fact checkers in an article that was voted in future.

Honestly, I'd like to see someone post an article saying, USD is both safe and stable, fact-checkers from this platform like yourself, putting up evidence and facts stating its a 'fake news', and the general consensus get a jaw drop when they learn of it as a fake news, and more would wake up from their sleep. Even though this period might be a start of a wake-up call as well.

Ultimately, what I want to achieve with this MVP is, for a community to start voting on news article. Without a community who can agree with this act of initial voting, there is no way to effectively introduce fact-checkers within a fair/decentralised environment, and no way for the general public to learn about why certain article is fake or misinformed news.

Thanks for bringing up the flaws here, I believe I have more to work on for the whitepaper moving forward. Have a great day, and keep yourself safe! 

[neowenyuan]

Every result is only based on general consensus of the members in the voting channel of Realnot on Telegram.

This kind of system would render a totally inaccurate result. If people's votes all weigh the same then people who just wants to promote fake news and make it "credible" based on votes would really benefit from this system or they could also make real news "fake" if it will also be favorable to them. If you want a more accurate way of voting or screening the news if it is real or fake I would suggest that you have a weighing system or credibility system that gives credible users have a bigger weight on voting. This system can be achieved based on voting accuracy, credibility of the user, or even if the user is based on the country where the news is from and he has additional local information in hand he can be more credible and add more weight in the voting system.

Thank you for proposing the weighing and credibility system. I am keen to add this system for verifiers/fact-checkers and accuracy of such users can be an important factor as proposed by you. However, there are many factors to consider, especially for giving 'credible' users or fact-checkers a bigger weight on their votes.

Instead of adding more weight to their votes, fact-checkers who are based on the country of interest in the article, can place facts, such as photos taken, or evidence known by fact checkers, to convince other fact-checkers to back his opinion. But I feel that, if someday by any chance this platform is up and running, we might need to change the dynamics of this system regularly, as human behavior can change when we introduce systems like weighted votes, and credibility.

Some facts that we believe today, might be debunked in future, from tomorrow till the end of mankind. This platform can be seen as more of a way, for educating people in current times with regards to ridiculous fake news, that can bring inconvenience to major disaster to people. I don't think it is possible to carve anything voted here in a stone, saying it's a fact and it can't be changed.

Thanks again for your input on the credibility system, that is definitely one good way to move forward for this platform.

[neowenyuan]

it is an interesting concept in my opinion but i have a concern about the validity of its result. the manipulation and paid voting was already mentioned but that was not my concern. mine is about people falling for the false information and believing it. for example even today a lot of people think that bitcoin is banned in some countries that have never banned it actually like China or India. or like the news these blockchain analyzers keep releasing with fake statistics about illegal bitcoin usages.

when a news comes out like that where a large group of people believe it they may vote on validity of it and make some others believe it too because of that rating.

you see the biggest problem is figuring out what news is fake and which one isn't and that is not something regular users can do at least not without spending a lot of time researching on the internet. and i don't know that many people who would bother putting that kind of effort in.

From my experience and interaction with people, there is this herd mentality that most people possess, which leads to them believing crypto being banned in China or India, which is not true, but due to misinformed news by a finance sector writer or news anchor in finance channels, the misinformed news becomes a real news, because it was 'reported'. I would love to correct them, but it's going to take a lot of effort, and nobody wants to get brushed off and get told, you don't know what you're talking about. Some would of course, learn from the correction provided, but that's not the case if you ever tried discussing crypto with a guy in finance sector for 20 years. 

With the introduction of verifiers/fact-checkers, who can be any crypto enthusiast, or just a more 'informed' finance guy, or basically any crypto influencer on Twitter, this story can be debunked 'easily', which gives the public a chance to be educated based on facts. This is probably the only application where countries with fake news law can step in and clarify things nicely for the people. With justified evidence provided by fact-checkers, it feeds 'fact' into people, which can make some people feel uneasy. But at the same time, more people get educated indirectly, and the ones who feels uneasy about the facts, are probably the ones who'll react violently, and passing off remarks like bitcoin is dead later, but through this education, chances are, lesser people would be affected by the comment 'bitcoin is dead'. Although this is only one example, but it can be applied widely in many issues if we think about it.

Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.

[Theb]

~snip~

Thank you for proposing the weighing and credibility system. I am keen to add this system for verifiers/fact-checkers and accuracy of such users can be an important factor as proposed by you. However, there are many factors to consider, especially for giving 'credible' users or fact-checkers a bigger weight on their votes.

Instead of adding more weight to their votes, fact-checkers who are based on the country of interest in the article, can place facts, such as photos taken, or evidence known by fact checkers, to convince other fact-checkers to back his opinion. But I feel that, if someday by any chance this platform is up and running, we might need to change the dynamics of this system regularly, as human behavior can change when we introduce systems like weighted votes, and credibility.

You really don't need to adjust the system entirely since the system itself will be adjusted based on the credibility rank/score the user will have each time they vote. Also to add it should also not be plainly about voting only and each voter everytime they vote should always add in the factual checking they do on why they have voted what is real and fake. This would make your system much easier to see who are credible or not when it comes to fact checking.

Some facts that we believe today, might be debunked in future, from tomorrow till the end of mankind. This platform can be seen as more of a way, for educating people in current times with regards to ridiculous fake news, that can bring inconvenience to major disaster to people. I don't think it is possible to carve anything voted here in a stone, saying it's a fact and it can't be changed.

Thanks again for your input on the credibility system, that is definitely one good way to move forward for this platform.

That's why voting on each news should never be closed since we have cases where news we believe to be true would turn out to be fake/hoax in the coming months/weeks or even years. So everytime there is a new update about the news voters have the time to either switch their both or withdraw their findings in light of new information.

[neowenyuan]

~snip~

Thank you for proposing the weighing and credibility system. I am keen to add this system for verifiers/fact-checkers and accuracy of such users can be an important factor as proposed by you. However, there are many factors to consider, especially for giving 'credible' users or fact-checkers a bigger weight on their votes.

Instead of adding more weight to their votes, fact-checkers who are based on the country of interest in the article, can place facts, such as photos taken, or evidence known by fact checkers, to convince other fact-checkers to back his opinion. But I feel that, if someday by any chance this platform is up and running, we might need to change the dynamics of this system regularly, as human behavior can change when we introduce systems like weighted votes, and credibility.

You really don't need to adjust the system entirely since the system itself will be adjusted based on the credibility rank/score the user will have each time they vote. Also to add it should also not be plainly about voting only and each voter everytime they vote should always add in the factual checking they do on why they have voted what is real and fake. This would make your system much easier to see who are credible or not when it comes to fact checking.

It may not be efficient for fact-checkers to provide fact check results. But if there is a need, fact-checkers are encouraged to submit their results of fact check in order to prove another fact checker having inaccurate information, and the remaining fact-checkers can choose to back the respective fact-checkers. A fact-checker can also add on additional results from fact-checking to support existing results from others, like a branch off a tree.

Some facts that we believe today, might be debunked in future, from tomorrow till the end of mankind. This platform can be seen as more of a way, for educating people in current times with regards to ridiculous fake news, that can bring inconvenience to major disaster to people. I don't think it is possible to carve anything voted here in a stone, saying it's a fact and it can't be changed.

Thanks again for your input on the credibility system, that is definitely one good way to move forward for this platform.

That's why voting on each news should never be closed since we have cases where news we believe to be true would turn out to be fake/hoax in the coming months/weeks or even years. So everytime there is a new update about the news voters have the time to either switch their both or withdraw their findings in light of new information.

I think in this regard, votes have to be closed anyway, but a new vote can be opened regarding the previous topic, with supporting evidence or update of news, allowing a correction of community opinion. We do not need to cover up mistakes, because the world lacked evidence at one point of time. But when new evidence is present to debunk a previous fact, we give the community another try to correct a previous misconception due to the lack of factual evidence before.

Information travel extremely fast these days as well, if we cannot get a conclusion on a news being real or fake, it might start creating damage to the society if the news is fake, and intent on stirring the negative emotions and reactions of readers, which is something we want to prevent, and see lesser.

[BrewMaster]

Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.

i guess that could help improve the results by a lot. maybe some decentralized ranking or reputation system could be in place where these "fact checkers" could gain more rank so their votes could have more meaning compared to others.
hope to see it in action soon.

[neowenyuan]

Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.

i guess that could help improve the results by a lot. maybe some decentralized ranking or reputation system could be in place where these "fact checkers" could gain more rank so their votes could have more meaning compared to others.
hope to see it in action soon.

Yea, still plenty of work to do in the meantime as well for the verifiers/fact-checkers platform. But we'll need more participation at the lower level now with the news voting. Tough days 

[examplens]

Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.

i guess that could help improve the results by a lot. maybe some decentralized ranking or reputation system could be in place where these "fact checkers" could gain more rank so their votes could have more meaning compared to others.
hope to see it in action soon.

Yea, still plenty of work to do in the meantime as well for the verifiers/fact-checkers platform. But we'll need more participation at the lower level now with the news voting. Tough days 

If you have voters and verifies it means you will have two or more voting levels, and someone's vote worth more than others. Then it is not decentralised, right?
Also, you need a really big number of participants to get a more precise result, how do you think to attract people to vote every day, plus they need to research something to be sure what is right.
How do you plan to keep this community active? If you check here on Bitcointalk for example, even if here so many active users but pools haven't too many votes.

[neowenyuan]

Thank you for the feedback and concern. I hope the introduction of fact-checkers and verifiers will be a solution to the potential problems we're facing these days.

i guess that could help improve the results by a lot. maybe some decentralized ranking or reputation system could be in place where these "fact checkers" could gain more rank so their votes could have more meaning compared to others.
hope to see it in action soon.

Yea, still plenty of work to do in the meantime as well for the verifiers/fact-checkers platform. But we'll need more participation at the lower level now with the news voting. Tough days 

If you have voters and verifies it means you will have two or more voting levels, and someone's vote worth more than others. Then it is not decentralised, right?
Also, you need a really big number of participants to get a more precise result, how do you think to attract people to vote every day, plus they need to research something to be sure what is right.
How do you plan to keep this community active? If you check here on Bitcointalk for example, even if here so many active users but pools haven't too many votes.

I'd say the decentralised part is focused on the verifier role, where verifiers can have their opinions on articles, but only valid when backed by majority. But that is on the later part after this MVP.

I agree with you on the big number of participants, and this is something I hope to achieve at this phase, to lay a foundation with voters. Assuming we get 1000 authentic voters who'd vote actively and contribute articles for voting, we can promote 5-10% of them as verifiers at the end of this current phase, and invite 3rd party fact-checkers out there as verifiers as well. Ultimately, as this platform scales, 90% of normal members, will participate in voting and contribution to earn RNT, RNT can be used to stake on verifiers to do the work. And when revenue starts coming in in future, members who stake on verifiers, and verifiers themselves, can get incentivised. But we're still far away from there so I wouldn't want to say much about this incentivising part now. The normal voters, will not make any decisive impact, but indirectly incentivised by staking, or becoming outstanding enough to become a verifier themselves one day, as the need for verifiers will definitely increase as more members start coming in. Hopefully this would be an indirect way to incentivise normal users to keep up their activity here. We still need a detailed metric for incentivising verifiers, taking into consideration their contribution, activity such as contributing to fact-checking, and backing other fact-checkers, which leads to a potential reputation or credibility rating.

Even though the focus of this platform is mainly on fact-checkers/verifiers working to get the facts out, and debunk fake or misinformed news, but without a base community, it might look like we're having artists(fact-checkers) performing, but without much audience (90% of community). That's why I'm keen to build up a community of performing artists now. Some of them might make it as the first batch of verifiers, some of them might take slightly longer and remain as audience, or even some who'll never be verifiers, but stakes their RNT on verifiers who are active and provides quality fact-checking. But as community grows, more verifiers will be promoted, or even sourced from current 3rd party fact-checkers, which the community can stake their token on as well.

Going back to being decentralised, I think the definition in being a decentralised app is, without the continued effort of founders and devs, the decentralised platform can still run by itself. And in this case, even though normal members do not have much say in deciding if a news is fake or not, but normal members hold the power to stake on verifiers. Verifiers might hold a stronger say if a news is real or fake, but eventually, verifiers not up to standard, will lose relevance over time, and be taken over by others in the community. Every role is fairly important in this role, and I don't think one is more important than the other when it comes to roles in the platform. But as a collective community, the agenda is still the same, which is accurate information delivery. Similarly in any organisation, a manager will suffer when workers are not convinced of the manager's capabilities, a commander might lose his troops, if he makes bad decisions all the time. But it doesn't happen that much in the society, because, workers get paid, regardless working under a incompetent person, or a good manager. Troops who disobey superior, get punished for insubordination. In the case of this platform, normal members have a choice on which verifier to stake on, if verifiers are not performing actively, they lose support of normal members to other fellow verifiers. The challenge here would be, to prevent a small group of verifiers consolidating too much power, when all normal members start staking for a small group of verifiers, but these things can be adjusted by introducing systems where, normal users have to stake their RNT on a few verifiers, instead of 1 sole verifier.