IdeaOrbits Design Guide
IdeaOrbits Design Guide
Editor: Yan | Last updated: 2026-08-13T19:03:21Z
Let ideas be expressed without frustration.
This document is the design guide for the IdeaOrbits Structured Discussion and Idea Evolution Platform, primarily<br>intended to articulate the design philosophy and feature design. Each chapter opens with a brief<br>introduction or design philosophy for reference. This guide is currently a draft; the website is not yet<br>live, and both writing and implementation are in progress (currently just me working on it alone).
Repository: https://github.com/Chacka-Lab/ideaorbits |<br>Implementation progress: Writing basic user module [Early stage]
We currently need contributors to help define website design details and write code (open-source nonprofit<br>project, no compensation — sorry!).
Or do you have any feedback to share? That's great — your contributions are very welcome!
You can also email me directly: yananghelp@outlook.com (Yan)
Notes
ITPCS System: Abbreviation for the ITPCS (Idea-Topic-Point-Content-Section<br>System) Content Hierarchy System.
Community Atmosphere and Design Philosophy
This chapter needs no introduction.
What kind of contribution do you want to make?
Most high-quality communities today combat Eternal September by raising the barrier to entry and strictly suppressing<br>low-quality content — but is that truly the right approach?
Imagine this scenario: someone comes up with a brilliant idea and shares it in a mainstream community, but<br>nobody pays attention. So they pin their hopes on the "legendary" high-quality community. One community<br>says: "To join us, you need a GitHub account that is at least 5 years old." Another says: "You have to find<br>a senior member of our community elsewhere to get an invite code first (or pay for one)." Yet another says:<br>"You need to explain in detail why you want to join and what value you bring to our community (and will most<br>likely be rejected)." Then a niche community says: "You just need to read enough articles and interact<br>enough here before you can post!" "Perfect — this is the one," they say. They excitedly register an account,<br>spend hours completing the newcomer tutorial and interaction requirements, successfully post their message,<br>and sit back waiting for replies. A few hours later, the first response arrives — but just as they're about<br>to reply, the forum triggers a security check and requires them to wait 24 hours before posting again… At<br>this point, I imagine they're close to a breakdown. I think most people would have given up long before<br>reaching this point. You might wonder how I can describe this scenario so vividly — because the protagonist<br>is me.
(By the way, when I tried to post this document to Hacker<br>News, I encountered the exact same thing described above — though the specific<br>community described above is not Hacker News.)
You might think: "Okay, some communities do have high barriers to entry, but surely cracking down on<br>low-quality content is fine?" Taken at face value, yes — and I'm also firmly against low-quality content.<br>But what I question is: how exactly do we define "low-quality content"? Imagine this scenario: someone asks,<br>"Can we give AI genuine free will to make it smarter?" Most people would probably think this question is<br>worthless, unnecessary to discuss, childish. But what if the question were: "Can we have decentralized<br>ledger-keeping?" Would that also seem childish? Every fully developed idea originates from something as<br>small as "Can we have decentralized ledger-keeping?" — before deep investigation, we have no right to<br>prejudge its value. And why do we demand that the person first conduct deep research entirely on their own?<br>A single person's energy and knowledge are ultimately limited. Since we already have a platform like the<br>internet, why not be a little more inclusive and let our small, seemingly insignificant ideas be mined and<br>discussed together? Let bad ideas be eliminated faster, let good ideas no longer be buried, let<br>duplicate ideas be assessed swiftly! If IdeaOrbits truly existed, perhaps this entire document<br>could have been reduced to a single sentence… In summary, I think the problem is that many platforms have a<br>misaligned judgment of what is "low quality." Many platforms excessively pursue finished results, but in<br>today's AI era, the barrier and cost of producing results have dropped dramatically. If platforms continue<br>to stubbornly prioritize results, the loss from overlooking good ideas may far outweigh the benefits of<br>doing so (of course, many platforms simply don't care about idea evolution at all).
You might further challenge: "How do you maintain community quality without high barriers to entry?" I need<br>to clarify: IdeaOrbits has never been a "high-quality community" — the limited pursuit of quality is solely<br>in service of idea evolution. For that quality, I will explicitly list quantifiable low-quality behaviors as<br>counterexamples in the communication...