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Comment by laretluval | Hacker News Reader

A serious problem with this idea is that people have no incentive to tell the truth about their political leanings. Everyone has an incentive to identify as Neither, and thus appear unbiased. It's interesting to think how you might create incentives for true self-identification here.

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Yes I agree. The potential for lying about your affiliation is in my opinion the biggest problem with this concept. I'll have to see how much of a problem this is in practice, and whether there are ways I could incentivize users to be truthful.

If it does become a problem, one thing I'm considering is using voting behavior as a way to try and identify and ban "false-flaggers". So if a user has classified themselves as left-leaning, but their voting behavior and the way other users vote on their posts/comments looks a lot like a right-leaning user, they could be banned or forced to change groups.

You can give the user the option to self-identify, and then basically ignore it and use an internal index for the actual determination based on their voting patterns, etc. I think that's better than punishing people for "being open-minded", i.e., identifying as left-leaning but playing devil's advocate for the right, or finding their political leanings beginning to shift.

If you're interest in incentivizing honesty, check out these papers on the Bayesian Truth Serum:

https://nel.mit.edu/bayesian-truth-serum/

Actually, more than just no incentive to tell the truth, people have a strong incentive to create false accounts that "identify" and largely vote (on the site) in opposition to their true identity, but selectively upvote high-value propaganda from their actual side. If the site becomes popular, I guarantee this will become a popular abuse.

dragonwriter is spot on, but there is also the other side of the coin. A lot of people identify themselves one way, but actually, in action, lean one way. This is where a lot of the trust in certain media outlets goes out the window. Journalists declare themselves neutral observers but actually lean. There will be people doing the voting manipulation as dragonwriter suggests, but also those that lean without thinking they do.

Plus, what we think we are is a bit problematic these days. The extremes of both sides of the scale take up some of the room we thought we had on the sides. If you are honest with yourself, there is a lot of self examination going on.

Even if you haven't changed, things around you have. Hell, relatives I once supported have sold their integrity and feel justified in it, but I have had my own questioned because of them. Its just a weird world.

As to the site, the default front page was basically all "left" outlets when I looked. If you actually want both sides to compare, then you probably need to look at source as much as people.

Looking back at past threads, dragonwriter and myself don't agree often, so take it for what its worth.

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