Ask HN: An Alternate Solution for "The Hacker News Problem"?

(This is a response to Alex Payne's thoughtful essay "Solving The Hacker News Problem": http://al3x.net/2011/02/22/solving-the-hacker-news-problem.html)

Ok, so let's imagine a "perfect" HN-style Home Page. What does it look like?

It only has submissions (and comments?) that might be of some worth to you personally, and it omits anything it anticipates you actively dislike.

Alex believes the way to create such a view would be to "fork" the HN community into something new, aligned with his interests (deeply technical news and discussion).

But the community he's looking for already exists as a sub-set within HN. It's just hidden; with no filter to bring it to the surface.

So, here's an alternate solution (and I'm not alone in proposing this).

Hacker News has a wealth of historical data in the form of prior up- and down- votes from users.

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537607
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680

Imagine that each item on a (personal) HN Home Page was sorted using criteria like:

  - how have you personally ranked similar items in the past?
  - was the item added to HN by a user you trust?
  - among users you trust, how has the item already ranked? and items similar to it?
  - how have influential users (high in reputation/"karma") ranked the item? and similar items in the past?

I mean, sounds great, right? What would be the downside?

Well, for one thing ... echo chamber, much? ya digg?

You'd be losing the "discovery" factor. As Andy Baio put it recently: "software scoped to friends-only favors intimacy over serendipity" (waxy.org/links).

But, maybe that's good. Like, let's say you're tracking some deep technical news and discussion - an informed echo chamber might be exactly what you need.

So couldn't bloomfilter.org be simply a way to filter raw Hacker News into personalized home pages based on historical data? It seems like an experiment worth conducting, doesn't it?

What's the hurdle that prevents such a service from existing?

Well, here's one hurdle: Hacker News does not expose any user voting history (and probably for good reason). Users do have access to "saved stories" when signed in, and their prior submissions and comments are of course public, but that's about it.

So, I think HN would have to be modified such that a user could elect to make their voting history accessible (if not publicly, then perhaps via OAuth?)

Once users' voting records become available, experimental services could be built for any who would like to participate.

And from there, we could see the sub-communities Alex mentioned spring up, without "forking" the HN community entirely.

TL;DR: Why can't we get access to HN user voting data, so we can make our own ranking/recommendation/prediction engines, and then everybody could subscribe to a little echo chamber of their own choosing?