Hacker News Reader

Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

The feedback of the voting system is still essential, it's just that you can't really trust the voters anymore. It's gotten ridiculous to watch the votes swing from extreme to extreme on one comment based on the follow-up discussion where people openly advocate for more or less points for the OP.

The only way to fix this I can see is either some form of meta-moderation where you hold people accountable for their votes (ala slashdot), or the system I'd personally rather see, where rather than a full-democracy the users pick whose votes they see on comments. I'd have my pool of 20-30 users whom I trust and I could see their scores vs the throng's.

Just as you hand-picked some users as moderators who you feel represent what you want HN to be, let us pick who we want to serve as our content filters.

View on HN

I agree with you about the voting swings. I think that, more than the extreme numbers, may be why voting is starting to seem such a mob thing lately.

It's a very interesting idea to have users see only the votes of other users they choose. One problem though is that it could easily lead to leaking who voted for what, which would make a lot of users (including me) uncomfortable. E.g. your pool is your 7 coworkers, and user x. One day you know all your coworkers are on a plane, and that you're therefore seeing user x's votes. Another problem is that it could be a lot more expensive to generate pages.

You could fix the deanonymization problem this way: when you pick a trusted user, you can see not only his votes, but all his trusted users' votes, too. Maybe weigh the votes differently depending on how "distant" they are from you.

Hmm. Good idea.

This is a great idea.

My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of your trusted users + the mass' rating but your solution is conceptually nicer since it adds the same noise to the vote but while extending the idea of valuing a particular user's judgement.

The big technical issue will be computing these "trusted ratings" for every comment. The trust graph could be done asynchronously so that wouldn't be an issue.

During the experiment of not displaying points on comments, was the voting less volatile, with smaller voting swings? If it was, then hiding the points until a few minutes or hours after the comment is posted (i.e. until the volatility becomes reasonable) could replicate the effect. If not, then maybe the voting swings are inherent as a statistical property of any sufficiently large community, in which case you may want to display a confidence interval of the voting score instead of the score itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com