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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

That's a stunningly bad idea; it amounts to rating how well articles feed into public (or, rather, the sites users) preestablished biases, which is the only basis most users will have to rate the “core truth” of most news stories.

At best, it's useless, at worst it contributes to further suppressing any news story that challenges widely accepted narratives.

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While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic.

I'd see this as a useful tool for smaller local newspapers.

> While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic.

That's true of most topics; having the lay public vote on credibility ratingd does nothing to address this, though (and probably makes it worse on issues where the truth clashes with the popular misconception.)

I had a similar first thought: it is going to drive us even deeper into an echo chamber.

The pretty clear motivation for this is recent negative (but factually true) news about Tesla, and Musk's desire to either end negative news about his company, or else get people not to trust such news.

An echo chamber may be exactly what he wants. And, well, there's precedent for this strategy working to an extent.

I think that, as always, the important is the implementation. People are mentioning Facebook's attempts to check fake news as an example of how this is a bad idea, but Facebook is a system that has trained hundreds of millions to just thing in terms of "thumbs up/ thumbs down". Wikipedia would be a better example of a collaborative system meant to distill some shared truth out of the work of faceless crowds, and while it has serious issues, it's also been a remarkable success. And Wikipedia basically lacks tools for structured discussion, and the bureaucratic processes in place seem all built on on the most basic hypertext technology. Let's not underestimate Musk's logical thinking and ability in executing.

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