In my last article I detailed the three structural failures of modern online NBA discourse.

Those being that due to the platforms that house our discourse:

Our opinions have no memory.
The context around them doesn’t compound.
Our incentives have been poisoned — rewarding virality over substance.

This article will detail a little bit about point number 1 and how

Player Eval Artifacts helps to solve that issue.

Brief Recap of issue with modern discourse.

The containers in which so much of our discourse lives on are intricately scientifically and structurally made to give a megaphone to the loudest people, to the most divisive, to the content that creates the most rage, that creates the most emotional garner.

Most of all it treats our work, our conversations as profitable, disposable content first and foremost. Our discussions are viewed as consumables, something that we ingest once and never see again.

We don’t even know it but subconsciously we have been rewired to answer this gluttonous machine.

We not only write but some of us tend to think in shorter Twitter-like sparks when it comes to the game. With the subconscious understanding that the machine rewards divisiveness, we are slanting our observations and evaluations to be contrarian.

We evaluate the game in individual isolated moments instead of a continuous amorphous arc that grows over time. As a whole becoming more reactionary.

There’s no shared thread to even the ebbs and flow of how we thought as individuals or as the community thought as a whole about basketball at a certain time.

It’s like on Reddit, Twitter, we are talking to each other about the game but we are just taking turns shouting into the void on our own isolated islands every so often hearing another person’s shouts.

Everyone knowing that it all resets the next day.

This is what we know as collective discourse today.

@CourtShareApp Posits a Solution

A different framework for our conversations to take place. It is not another social platform but instead a home, a hub for the artifacts that power our discourse.

The mechanism that prevents takes from being forgotten isn’t any single piece of content.

It’s the architecture.

Immutability. Compounding Context.

Instead of treating your discussions or takes as consumables, we work to treat it as foundational pillars, architecture that we use to build our body of work piece by piece, brick by brick.

Player Evaluations

You evaluate Cameron Carr as a top 10 pick during conference play in November when the community believed he was a late second rounder. That evaluation lives on your profile: timestamped, tagged, anchored to that player forever.

In March, after the tournament surge, you evaluate him again. That lives beside it.

You continue to evaluate him from time to time even as he gets drafted, Summer League. Year three NBA breakout.

Each new eval is an addition to the existing ones. Nothing replaces what came before. Your thinking compounds alongside the community and the player himself.

What a CourtShare Player Eval Is Comprised Of

Your Player Eval
Time and Date of Eval
State of Play at time of posting (Conference Play, March Madness, etc.)
Standardized score of eval (0-100, 100 being GOAT Potential)
Community Average Eval Score at the time of posting
Delta between your eval and community eval at the time of posting
Timeline continuity (all your updates on that player are tracked in sequence, new evals don’t replace the old)

In March, after a tournament surge, you evaluate him again. That lives beside it.

You continue to evaluate him from time to time even as he gets drafted, Summer League. Year three NBA breakout.

Each new eval is an addition to the existing ones, Nothing replaces what came before. Instead Your thinking compounds alongside the community and the player himself.

Imagine having

@CourtShareApp

when Shai was a blue-chip prospect at Kentucky. Your evaluation probably wouldn’t be slating him as a future MVP or maybe it was and you’ll forever have that on your profile.

I would love to meet the people who actually predicted Shay and this outlier development.

As he transfers through the league, from the Clippers trade to the rebuilding years of CP3, to his first couple real big flashes as an MVP,

you would have the ability to write your evaluation and see how you’re thinking of basketball and him as a player grows alongside the community.

Unlike sending random tweets out to the void, getting engagement in the moment but back to isolation mere hours later.

Player Eval Timeline

What happens when our Evalutations Persists?

People actually talking to each other instead of around each other or in isolated nodes of the algorithm and timeline

The biggest drawback in the modern NBA discourse is that every thought is in isolation from prior thoughts and from what the community is saying and from what that individual believes.

It destroys nuance completely.

When everyone’s thoughts on any player aren’t hidden but are publicly available, the shame associated with being wrong on a player starts to dissolve.

As you can see the full timeline. You can see that the evaluation wasn’t a final verdict, it was one step in an evolution. One out of many that came before it and many that will come after

We as a community stop treating player evals as an end-all be-all and start seeing them for what they actually are: a snapshot of how we thought about a player with the information and basketball understanding we had at that moment in time.

And when you come across someone’s evaluation you’re not starting from zero context of how they think or what they’ve said before.

You’re starting with shared context and understanding.

Unlike on Twitter, where every tweet is in isolation, you in person and us as a community start in the same place of reality.

This makes for better discourse, more beautiful discourse, more productive discourse as a whole.

That shared understanding is what creates better discourse.

@CourtShareApp

isnt ever going to try to replace Twitter or Reddit

it is another hub for serious basketball creators to place their thinking in a more calm environment.

Your CourtShare profile can become your basketball resume per se.

Anyone can tweet about anything but it’s another thing entirely. To take the time and build your diary or your journal of basketball thinking, knowing that every submission cannot be deleted

In fact this will be my next article. court-share.com