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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I've thought of doing something like this. The computational load wouldn't be a problem, because weights could be calculated asynchronously and wouldn't have to be especially up to date. Maybe I'll try calculating but not using it, and see for myself if it produces better frontpage rankings than we'd have otherwise...

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I'm thinking out loud here and this has been mentioned before (although not really discussed) how about allowing people to spend their karma?

ie If I think something is worth 20 karma I give it 20 of my karma. If I think something should lose 10 karma I have to pay 10 karma to remove it.

It sounds scary as it could introduce a lot of volatility. The main benefit however would be that people are a lot more judicious when voting as it comes at a price.

I'm not saying it would work but it would be bloody interesting. Obviously there would have to be a source of new karma or else we would experience deflation. It could be trialled for a month or two with an agreement to go back to the previous system and to restore previous karma levels should things go tits up.

Thoughts?

Edit: forgot to say that removes the need for any potentially large amounts of computation to calculate weightings.

Allow karma transfer here and we have the beginnings of a reputational economy...

Exactly. Do you think it would work? I do. I'm happy for the users here with the strongest reputation to have the largest influence.

What you would need to commit to is a frontpage that is personalized, which might not be exactly what you are really looking for. There is some benefit to having a "shared" sense of community. The most recent design struggle I have wrestled with related to this is preventing an echo chamber of sorts from developing. A few quick observations related to how HN works now is that you would probably need to make the downvote more readily accessible to every user and might gain some benefit from "seeding" the network a la Advogato's initial trust sources.

Ideally it should be a front page personalized for PG, and we all should share his experience :)

Pagerank sets global weights; you won't get a personalized homepage if you implement just that.

Strict pagerank does set global weights (necessitating the "seed" values that I mentioned in another comment), but this is not a requirement of flow-based weighting systems. If you implement a canonical pagerank algorithm then you will get a global view based upon what certain people feel is important/worthy, and as you expand the set of seed users you will end up with complete personalization. There is a continuum here and deciding where to reside within this range has some pretty large effects on the nature of the site.

Google determines global pagerank because they lack the computational horsepower to do otherwise and because web pages and users are not similar entities, but on a site like this where the links between users and articles are effectively a single measurement this sort of individual pagerank is possible.

I ran some experiments with this. The results are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232882

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