Hacker News Reader

Comment by libertyEQ | Hacker News Reader

As the topic has been discussed on HN over the years, I've often thought it might be cool to create a browser extension that only shows reviews from HN users with the option of specifying a minimal karma threshold. Perhaps the HN community is too small, so substitute reddit where appropriate. Anyone have thoughts on such a thing?

View on HN

Are sites like fakespot not sufficient (or any other popular meta review sites)? HN/reddit review writers would be such a tiny subset of purchasers that you probably wouldnt get much relevant data.

The goal would be to seek out the signal instead of trying to identify the noise.

That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though? Could be challenging to reach critical mass.

Why tie it to only HN and/or reddit? It could be a choice for users to make, about which sites to correlate with which review sites.

In any case, interesting idea, thanks for sharing!

Something like what keybase does with e.g. reddit should work.

As def_true_false mentioned, the way keybase handles things would be what I was thinking, but the crypto doesn't have to be as strong, nor the workflow so elaborate.

And for those mentioning gaming, HN does pretty well against all but the most sophisticated and motivated. Browse with 'show dead' on you can see there are plenty of attempts. A link to their profiles on HN and reddit would allow for review of their comment histories in order to determine authenticity/ how closely tastes align.

Even Amazon could allow us to filter reviewers by review history, or other such criteria.

Edit: You are probably right about allowing other identity providers, but the idea was to minimize the addressable market in order to study the dynamics of such a platform. Your comment definitely made me think of it as a possibly viable idea, thanks!

>That's a neat idea, how would you confirm identity, though?

I am surprised there is not a Bitcoin-inspired "solution" to the problem of fake reviews.

That would just destroy HN , :-)

reddit is constantly being gamed, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com