About
The Flexible Internet Treasure Map (FITM) is a tool for sharing valuable Internet content. You can use it to efficiently find key resources hidden throughout the sprawling web, or share ones you think other people should know about.
It is an attempted solution to the challenges of high obscurity and resultingly low discoverability of Internet greatness, both new and old.
Treasure is intentionally vague. This site is about sharing or discovering anything on the Internet that's worth sharing or discovering.
"But Search Engines?"
Search engines help a bit with indexing the web, but they don't think like people so they're limited as personal aides.
For example, high SEO is not always relevant to content quality. Awesome things on the web are sometimes absent in search results because they are served unencrypted or in less semantic HTML markup. Users who care more about result novelty than presentation don't benefit from this approach.
Search engines also are incentivized to promote results from high-paying bidders. Maybe this is a feature, not a bug, depending on who you ask. Do big budgets and marketing passion reliably produce high quality web content? If you're not sure about that, you may be in the right place. (You will never see ads on FITM).
Arguably, a simple enough proxy for a link's quality is the number of people who decide, for one reason or another, to upvote it. It's then trivial to find good content by sorting on like count.
But, of course, results are also usually only meant to be about a specific topic (you know, the one you searched for). In FITM, links are tagged with 1+ cats. You can stack desired cats in searches to efficiently and reliably find pages that match some theme(s).
"Reddit?"
Some might argue that this purpose has been achieved (done well, and for a long time, even) by Reddit.
Reddit is an invaluable resource and a blessing to the internet. It is an inspiration to FITM. But they are different in that Reddit is primarily a communication hub while FITM is primarily a data hub. FITM is not meant for topical discussion, only web resource sharing and discovery (with a few text submission actions in support of that goal: see Core Actions below).
FITM also aims to use cat-stacking to serve users interested in intersecting themes while Reddit is home to communities defined by a single theme. Traditional WWW searches make it hard to find sites that appeal to multiple interests at once, especially if they aren't common or obviously related.
How FITM Works
Cats?
The term "cats" is used often here. It's a shorthand for tag categories. Cats are also a historically prominent Internet symbol, so it seems fitting that they'd help run FITM.
Please don't be alarmed by mention of "stacking cats" or things of that nature. No animals were harmed in making this site.
In FITM searches, the top (most frequent) cats will be listed along with returned links matching your desired parameters. Searches with cat filters return top overlapping cats. In other words, the most frequent cats found across the subsection of links returned in your search, not including your given cat filter(s). Tentatively these are called subcats.
Core Actions
- Summarize
- Copy
- Like
- Tag
These will help you to develop valuable treasure maps, coveted across the lands.
Summarize
Every link added to FITM has a summary page where any user can submit their summary of its content. Summaries can be upvoted, making the most liked ones the most visible.
A link's top summary will be shown above its URL at all times to quickly give a sense for what it is.
Copy
Copying a link to your Treasure Map is about improving discoverability via proliferation. It allows you to easily find a link again or let others find it by reading your Treasure Map.
Like
Liking is about improving discoverability via corroboration. It's a way to vouch for the "goodness" (comprehensiveness, authenticity, hilarity, etc.) of a link without needing to pin it to your Treasure Map and take up space there.
Liking allows great content to filter to the top of searches, allowing other users—even those who don't know to check your Treasure Map—to find it easily.
Tag
Tagging a link is about improving discoverability via filtration. A tag is a list of categories, chosen by a user, that a certain link is thought to embody. It represents that user's interpretation of the link's content. Tag cats can be used to narrow searches.
Obviously not everyone agrees on preferred categorizations of various links. Each user is invited to tag any link however they see fit.
Any user-submitted tag, i.e., a user's categorization(s) of some link, dictates how that link will be indexed on their Treasure Map. By contrast, links are indexed using global tags in Global Treasure Map searches.
The Global Treasure Map and Global Tags
Each link is also associated with a global tag, which filters the results of searches made outside of any single user's map. For example, on the Top Rated (Week) page.
Global tags are calculated automatically by the age of every user-submitted tag and the frequency of each cat across them. They are shown with each link. (Unless the link is viewed from a user's Treasure Map. Then it will show that user's tag.) You can also view any link's top user-submitted tags on demand.
Each user-submitted tag shows its lifespan overlap percentage (see Global Tag Calculation below), author, date of submission, and cats, of course. Tags that have remained in their current configuration for the greatest portion of the link's lifespan are ranked highest.
Not only the cats contained in the top tag rankings may be assigned globally. If a large number of more recent tags contain different cats, it's likely that those too will be assigned and may even replace ones from longstanding tags.
The assumption is that cat interpretations that remain unedited for a long time or that reappear across tags are most likely to be good fits.
A long-unchanged tag could be bad, but if enough users disagree and submit alternative tags, their collective input will rule it out; the old tag's cats will be stripped from the link's global tag.
Additional Notes
Global Tag Calculation
Note: constructive criticism welcomed for this system. Please see the feedback page for FITM contact info.
For a cat to be added to link L's' global tags, it must have a score ≥25% of L's' highest cat score.
Scores for cat C of link L are calculated as sum of scores from each occurence of C in one of L's' tags, weighted by the number of cats in the tag containing the occurence.
Weights for tag T are calculated as lifespan overlap percentage of T, divided by T's number of cats'.
Lifespan overlap percentage for tag T of link L is the percentage of L's time on FITM that T has remained in its current state since edits.
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