A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others | Hacker News Reader

A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

argoledo.com

51 pointsFlorensio47 comments

I'm really glad that people are experimenting with commenting systems. There have been better systems in the past than Reddit or HN (such as Slashdot & Kuro5hin). Some ideas which could be explored again:

* Whether you should be allowed to both post comments and vote on a single article.

* Whether you should have a limited or unlimited number of votes per day or per article.

* Whether established users can apply multiple up/down votes to a comment.

* Should votes happen along other axes than up/down (eg. "Funny", "Interesting", "Relevant"<->"Off-topic").

* How could meta-moderation be made to work without it seeming like a slog to review other people's voting?

* Can we see who voted on a comment?

* Can we display comments in a more relevant order? At the moment the highest voted top comments are spread down the page, mixed in with lower voted replies.

* Should there be a limited or unlimited range of voting? Is a -15 comment substantively different from a -20 comment, probably not.

Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

> Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

I've no idea what it's like now, but in its heyday you could set your comment threshold to +3 or +5 to read the dozen or so most insightful comments on each topic. That was a great reader-friendly time-saving device. As far as I know that's not possible on HN.

Even better, they had custom multipliers for different kinds of upvote reason. This let you do things like set "Funny" to -1 if you didn't like Slashdot's sense of humour.

You can also tag people, and have their score weighted accordingly (and they can see how you tag them in their profile)...

I fear the astroturfers have gotten their claws in, as i constantly see conflicting, and downright asinine, comments hovering at +5 (insightful).

I read it on no filter. It's the best way to fully absorb the community.

How about ranking posts by latest submitted comment? Excluding people that have already commented on the post and the submitter themselves.

Well, what is the ranking based on? It would be refreshing for a platform to be completely transparent about how post rankings are established, but then I guess you'd have spammers gaming it to get their crap at the top. The alternative is you have spammers paying money to get their crap at the top.

Damn, that is one hell of a condensed font. Nigh-illegible on the 72dpi monitor I use at my desk.

It is surprising how much discomfort a badly-chosen font can create.

Also, their ads currently look rather intrusive. I wish them well in this "off the beaten path" endeavor. Maybe they'll try out other fonts and better ad placement strategies.

I'm guessing they're going for a newspaper cram-in-as-many-characters-as-possible-in-a-narrow-column aesthetic. In my opinion, that was never a flattering look and it isn't now either.

So posts get “to the top” based on time posted? Maybe the submitted title should be changed into something less click-baity, like “A message board”

can't pronounce the name easily; maybe/probably noneglish based?

reading one of the posts about ads, the admin writes:

> We are going to have to implement ads at some point anyway

oh that sounds like a fun rollercoaster to ride again.

> I know ads can be annoying, that's why we try to use them in an non intrusive way that can benefit both us and the users.

total wanker. ads do not benefit users, and saying they do means they take users as idiots; or are able to lie to themselves.

So, that right there kills any interest; let alone the site itself being in no way novel or interesting. There isn't an interesting community of folks, or a meaningful platform to engage across.

Actually, this post, and entire posting history of this user(24 days old), are just marketing efforts for the site.

I don't like ads either, but you can argue that ads benefit the user by paying for the service that they want to use. Until we have some viable micropayment system that allows me to pay the fraction of a cent that the website would otherwise receive by showing me an ad it's hard to finance popular services.

You can argue it, doesn't make it right! Nor are micropayments the only solution. Nor do sites make a fraction of a cent - it's usually at least a few.

With ads comes everything from annoyance, tracking, data theft, and malware. All things I am not a fan of, nor are they worthwhile tradeoffs for visiting a site.

But i'll agree - it's not as easy to do other things as it is to serve ads. You have to be creative, and also provide actual value that people are willing to pay for. But trying to romance the idea of serving ads - that it's good for users - is insulting.

> total wanker. ads do not benefit users

So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill.

One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is no generally accepted solution for this yet, ads are the only way to keep the net free.

> ads are the only way to keep the net free.

Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall and ad supported sites took over everything.

I don’t know if it’s the usual “back in my day things were better” thing happening or whether they’re correct, but a web full of content produced by people who are hobbyists and do so because they enjoy sharing their passion sounds way better than a web full of garbage that is clickbaited solely to maximize the amount of money coming in from ad support. In my experience hobbyists sharing a passion is almost always more enjoyable and of a higher quality.

I do recognize there is a middle ground in there somewhere, but I’m not at all convinced the web would somehow disappear without obnoxious ads. People would still create content just like they did before ads and before tracking had infested everything.

For most people the web is "better" now, because they can use it. Back in the good old days it was mostly enthusiasts and academics. To people in those groups the old web was a wonderful place gone forever. For regular folks, it bypassed them and the current state of affairs; walled gardens, huge centralised behemoths and adverts everywhere is the norm and has been since the early 2000’s.

Everything was better in the good old days, harrumph!

Ads are fine if they actually individually curated by the website without JavaScript bullshit tracking. Until that day happens again, I am going to aggressively block ads and occasionally turn the filters off and randomly click ads to waste their money.

Tell me more about how I can waste their money by clicking random ads. I have blocked all ads since adblockers were invented, but if I can actively create a disincentive by wasting their money, I want to do that.

AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/)?

A website about reading things with a font choice that discourages it.

How does it get to the top then?

It looks like its just chronological, could be wrong though.

Also, I'm not sure it's a scalable solution.

There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments - C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable.

Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.

There should be a dictionary of common scoring systems and their flaws. So

- Scoring on comment count :: Flame wars.

- Scoring on forwards :: Chain letters.

- Scoring on sum of "likes" :: Memes and simple jokes.

- Scoring on five-star ratings :: hides important issues.

And so on. This way, we can make an informed business decision on what kind of junk we can best defend againt.

I feel like there's a connection to Goodhart's Law lurking behind the scenes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Moderators can lock such threads/posts or even delete them. With this rating system, they're highly visible.

I wonder whether that's what https://news.ycombinator.com/active uses.

How about just showing comments sequentially by post date :V

Metafilter has been organizing their parts this way forever!

My eyes are bleeding, please use a non-condensed font.

The font hurts my eye.

Is it ironic that the site didn’t survive the “slashdot effect”, showing the 500 error now.

This is how we do it on http://www.rubyflow.com/ - a Ruby community link site. No voting, just in order and we delete/edit the items if they're not any good. Basically took the whole idea from MetaFilter.

I like the spirit of the discussions. Good luck to you with your site.

The old joelonsoftware boards were like that as I recall.

I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user.

Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since everyone is dead set on their opinion already, and because of the limitations in the commentning system discourages it.

What about a system based on NLP / ML where users can flag the truthfulness or speculation? (For the UI part, I'm thinking something similar to Medium, where you can select a favorite passage from a blog-post)

If you rank posts by how objectively true they are, and the amount of truth/false-votes they get, you should be able to bootstrap posts in, while also dynamically adjust to the popularity of it (number of votes received).

I know this is still a stretch with current machine learning technology, but I think we (the internet) really need a place where we can more easily filter out the bullshit, and discuss the things that really matter with people who don't already agree.

This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can only give you a stochastic truthiness.

The only people who haven't given up on the approach of a massive symbolic reasoning database to work out what's true and false are Cyc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

You might be able to have a system which auto-flags known bullshit statements, but people will get outraged by that.

Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :)

However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which might be enough for a better system.

Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank more objectively than an upvote/downvote system can?

I think we should be vary of being bound by everything that happened in the 70s due to the differences in resources for solving the problem, although I'm not in any way saying this is easily solvable or even solvable in our time. I do think it's not provable that we can't achieve this at some point.

Some sort of minimum-effort or relevance filtering may be possible; after all, that's what spambayes achieves. You could probably feed it a human-approved list of "good" and "bad" posts and get a first cut at removing simple spam.

But really you have to define "good" "objective" and "structured" first. Or even "effort". Is the system good if it promotes high-effort well-structured calls for genocide?

Yeah any kind of community "tagging" system is fertile ground for trolls and whatsnot. Just check out the mess that is steam tags, where soft-core visual novels gets mixed in with just about anything thanks to troll applied tags.

We are simply asking for another racist AI or gorilla moment.

I think we would need more than the 'truth' dimension to make this work. Writings can have great value even if what they say is not directly 'true' - think poetry, motivational writings etc.

... and the first 10k digits of pi might be 'true', but are neither educational nor entertaining.

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