Revised version of the post above:
A like count on most platforms is one number, and you have no way to know who's behind it. 20,000 likes could be bots, or fans of one influencer you've never heard of, or people whose taste you trust.
On a transparent network you can see who liked what and who follows whom, so you can take that number apart. Lay the 20,000 over your own social graph. Say 40 are people you follow, another 300 are friends of friends, and 5,000 more connect to you somewhere further out. The other 14,660 have no path to you at all. Now you know something the total never told you.
The obvious use is weighting. Fifty likes, thirty of them from people you respect, can be worth more to you than 20,000 from strangers. Closer likes count for more, but the bigger line is between connected and not connected. Someone five or six hops away is still tied to you through a chain of real people who chose to follow each other. An account with no path to you could be anyone, or no one.
It also shows you where support comes from. Bought engagement looks like a clump of fresh accounts with no ties to anyone, and a post that's huge in one corner of the network can be invisible in yours. Either way, you can see it before you assume everyone's talking about something.
And the ranking stops being the platform's to decide. If the graph is public, anyone can write their own filter: what my friends liked this week, or posts whose support isn't mostly accounts under a month old.
The cost is that your likes are public too, and some people will like less, or differently, once they know they're being watched. I don't think that cost is small.
#transparency #socialgraph #meta