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Comment by worldsayshi | Hacker News Reader

We could supercharge word of mouth. I've been thinking about an alternative upvote model where content is ranked not primarily based on aggregate voting but by:

- ranking content that users you have upvoted higher

- ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.

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> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...

Oh, interesting!

Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm.

For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers.

I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)

As long as there are big companies making money off their products, you can be sure they'll find a way to advertise them to you.

I've had similar ideas recently. Especially niche content (or shared research) would probably be notoriously hard (WRT false positives) for machine learning to decide whether it is relevant to you, people with similar interests know that much better.

I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.

> people with similar interests know that much better

Yeah, I wonder if there is a cheap way to test this. Actually! There could be! Like using favorite's here on hacker news. That could be mined and visualized in various ways. (Although a quick sample shows me that it's a rarely used feature)

> I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.

Yeah there are a lot of interesting optimization challenges if you really want to utilize upvote graphs for ranking.

Not to echo a R&M quote on purpose but that just sounds like targeted advertising with extra steps.

> ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher

That's how you make echochambers

All social media have echo chamber characteristics. You have to counteract it with transparency and opt-in/out.

So, basically Facebook?

This sounds so much like Facebook.

Any "social" ranking algorithm is going to sound at least superficially similar to what's already out there.

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