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Comment by gunn | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before?

This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy.

Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.

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> I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before?

Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr.

Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I disagree with (mostly on such disgustingly controversial topics like "Lenovo makes better Thinkpad laptops than IBM did").

> Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.

/. tried it, did it ever work out? (Honestly no idea, I've never been deep enough involved in it.)

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr.

Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too.

I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.

I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to.

How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.

> high-quality content you disagree with

I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic?

The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views.

The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.

Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary.

On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude.

What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view.

Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?

In my opinion it is not really possible to have a good comments system when voting is simply up or down. The definition of up and down varies too much by person to really be all that useful for anything other than creating an effective echo chamber. I think we need easy, one-click ways of classifying a comment with a more specific assessment.

That's just what this is trying to fix. Currently an up means 'I think this comment is good for everyone'. I'm saying it should mean 'this comment is good for me and people like me'.

The one-click assessment would be closer to slashdot's 'interesting', 'insightful', 'funny' etc. approach, which could be an improvement but still runs into trouble because what is 'interesting' still varies too much between people.

My idea is that as you continue to vote, you teach it what insightful means to you personally.

I think it would mean I could avoid an echo-chamber of ideas because I could avoid being swept along by the status quo of group-think voting, and instead follow more thoughtful people. See my other reply to creshal for more thoughts about this.

>see also: Tumblr.

And Facebook.

/.'s moderation system sort of gives you this, but not the connection to the authors of the posts. You set a score threshold for visibility. The discussion system hides things below the threshold, but doesn't hide the thread itself (like reddit does, IIRC).

  * (Score: 5) Some stuff
    * (Score: 0) *Hidden*
      * (Score: 4) Actually, if you read ...
      * (Score: -1) *Hidden*
        * (Score: 3) Blah blah blah

Posts are also moderated by kind (offtopic, funny, insightful, etc.)

So all those crappy first post and Natalie Portman posts were easily filtered out, and good (at least better) comments were left visible.

EDIT: Other things they did well:

Moderation was based on karma, a hidden score. Karma was calculated by several things, but the two key things were:

  How were your posts moderated (better means better karma)
  How were your moderations meta-moderated.

Meta-moderation: This was a really neat concept. Basically, people went back and (anonymous to both of you) rated a post's moderation as good or bad. That is, if you posted something genuinely useful or interesting but someone gave it a negative moderation, the meta-moderation system would (in theory) catch this. It didn't change the moderation, but it rated the moderators.

They also only allowed you to moderate in discussions you didn't comment in. If you commented, all your moderation was undone. And you had limited (5?) moderation points to use at a time. This prevented anyone from going on an abusive moderation streak (fuck that Jtsummers guy, I'm going to mark all his stuff down).

At one point you could adjust your weightings for things, so you could make "funny" or "insightful" count for -1 for an entertainingly different view of the site.

Yeah, I vaguely recalled that but forgot my password so haven't confirmed it. Just got in, seems my last post was 4 years ago. Anyways, it seems that feature has been disabled (or it's well hidden). But that'd be a useful addition as well.

You can filter on comment length. Apparently right now I filter out all one-line comments that don't have +4 or better. So "+1", "this", etc. won't show up, but "Oh hey, that reminds me of <useful link>" will.

EDIT: Seems I was wrong. https://slashdot.org/my/comments lets me see and change those settings, but getting here was non-obvious so I'm not certain if this will affect anything or if it's merely a legacy page. You'll need to be logged in to see anything. But this offers score modifier options for comments by how they're moderated (troll, offtopic, funny, etc.) and friends/foes.

/. used to have a "friends and foes" feature, which is more or less as described.

I think you could set +1 or -1 for

  friends
  foes
  friends-of-friends
  friends-of-foes
  foes-of-friends
  foes-of-foes

I had a few "foes" set to -1, to attempt to filter out some frequent, crazy commenters. But I stopped reading the site when extreme opinions became the only opinions.

Oh, that's right. I'd totally forgotten about it.

https://slashdot.org/faq/friends.shtml

I stopped reading it when I couldn't find interesting articles [EDIT: 0]. I think the firehose style of HN or Reddit is, in many ways, better than the curated submission system of /.. User directed submission moderation + scanning /new is usually enough for me, paired with going to direct to certain news sources (for whatever particular topic or category).

The comments were also pretty annoying. For those not familiar: See the strong anti-Microsoft posts that periodically show up here, and imagine that as the only thing that makes it to +5 when MS announces something. A ton of rhetoric with no substance.

EDIT:

[0] There were interesting articles. But there was a period (not sure about today) where the updates to the frontpage were incredibly slow. Perhaps I could've dug more into the topic areas or set some different display options, but things changed too slowly and I'd end up seeing the same articles for most of a day, or days.

On the one hand, this is a good format for some sites (and maybe for /.) as it allows things to remain visible for extended periods. On the other hand, it wasn't good for my usecase. /. was an aggregator, I wanted to see it update frequently. If I wanted a news magazine that totally cycles its front page only once a week, I'd be on that site.

So I'm imagining a system like this, except who friends are and who foes are is decided dynamically based on the up/down voting we do currently. And also their voting on comments is weighted accordingly.

It's really strange how far most group moderation systems have regressed from Slashdot's features. The algorithms are more powerful now but users have a lot less control. It's like they used to say about ALGOL-60: it was a significant improvement on its successors.

This is a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see it tested out. Unfortunately I can't see HN or Reddit actually implementing this feature. They already have the monopoly over their respective communities, and thus have stopped toying with new features and innovating.

We do have an API for HN. I wonder if someone could create a variant of the content here. Show everything like normal, but pair it with this sort of friend-network based meta-moderation + the ability to hide individual posts (rather than just whole threads and subthreads).

Possible but potentially hard on your database as you have to poll thousands of edges per post. Doesn't scale too well.

I think advogato tried something similar with its trust metric: http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html but advogato is effectively dead - on the front page is still a poem about the death of k5.

Really the nearest thing is to get on twitter and curate who you follow.

I've been wondering for months now why something like that doesn't exist.

Here are some comments I wrote on that topic (or a closely related one):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514

As mentioned in some of the comments, there are probably some technical hurdles (keeping score of every edge in the network), but can't they be overcome?

People tend to come up with the same objection: echo chamber, filter bubble, etc. but I think they miss the point.

That's a really interesting idea. If that existed here I would subscribe to you now.

No idea how viable this would be, but as a user up/down votes, incorporate that into some kind of learning system that will, over time, be able to better select posts that that specific user wants to see. Maybe weight structure over content to avoid the echo chamber effects to some degree?

This could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.

Clever. I like that this could give the benefits of moderation without hard censorship.

Twitter's timeline shows replies of people you follow.

I think you're describing the algorithm behind the Facebook news feed (minus pay-for-play).

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