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There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it. At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me.

There are entire subcultures of people who make a game of trying to get people to see images they don't want to see. This has been happening since slashdot and goatse.

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> There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it

This is plain false. HN does it, for example.

> At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me

It's an algorithm, not a moderator. Moderators are currently employed for two things: a) censorship, b) influencing opinions. Everything else algorithms do just fine.

HN is also a moderated system, there's this guy called dang you may have heard of.

But he's not going around curating your reading lists, does he? That's the point.

In your own P2P Facebook, you'll be your own dang.

HN's algorithm for deciding what gets on the first page is not totally trivial. Is it published anywhere?

I think it's tweaked periodically, and unpublished to make manipulation harder.

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