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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

On reddit, we created a bellwether award. It was basically for the person who was most accurate at upvoting things that got popular and downvoting the things that did not.

The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.

My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you've described your platform, the most "profitable" thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you'll think the most people will upvote. So you'll need to adjust for that.

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Exactly. This in turn devolves into a race to the bottom where you are basically speculating on the speculations of others. Content then becomes popular for no other reason than people thought that other people would find it popular. So basically like the real stockmarket. We don't need more things to be like the stockmarket.

Ah, the Wall Street Bets paradox

A Keynesian beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

this isn't how the stock market functions at all however. you described how a nonpro/retail participant on /r/stocks or wsb believes the stock market works.

This is actually a very plausible explanation for the valuations of Bitcoin and Tesla and, to a certain extend, this is exactly how the stock market operates right now.

Maybe it didn't work that way in the past, maybe it won't in the future, but the current environment seems to be very much like how the parent poster described it.

One aspect that is often forgotten is that the quality of a social platform is a product of the quality of its constituents.

If you make a platform 100% free and open, it will encourage low quality participants. The network effect often stops paid sites from starting, but the rewards are there if you can somehow otherwise select only for a mature audience.

Maybe the majority of the users wanted to read memes and blogspam. Who are we to say what good content is?

Memes and blogspam are like junk food. They aren't good for you but they are easy to consume and everyone likes them.

Representative democracies were invented to solve the "junk food policy" (i.e., passing out all of the money in the treasury) problem of direct democracy. Maybe there could be a representative link aggregator where annual elections determined who was allowed to vote on links.

A variation on representative democracy would be to have a recommender system identify demographics, and then to weight each demographic equally. So, for example, the votes from the "blogspam fan" demographic would be normalized to one, to fairly compete for representation with the much smaller "long thinkpiece fan" demographic.

Another solution would be quadratic voting, where you can vote once for free, but the nth vote would cost (n-1)^2 reputation points. That would allow established community members to express their intense dislike of certain content, to balance out the larger population's mild preferences.

It would be pretty cool if there was Reddit, but each subreddit could implement a different voting system. We might see a lot of progress and experimentation.

Oh geez, this metaphor between representative democracies and social media sites clicked for me really well, and I very much don't like that because I'm interpreting this as a strong argument in favor of user-sourced moderators (who I think cause more problems than they solve).

You've made me uncomfortable, so... thanks, I guess?

Wait until you read about Monarchy... I suggest Plato's Republic: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497

This is brilliant you should publish this in a paper just like the OP did above.

https://danielbetteridge.com/musings-on-consensus/

I wrote some thoughts in this vein a while ago funnily enough

One of my instructors way back at Cornell was a grad student named Kevin Walsh, now an associate professor at Holy Cross, who had solved this problem in a bit of a radical way. Context was that back then you had Gnutella, LimeWire etc.—peer-to-peer types of networks—and you wanted to be able to enable people to rank media a certain number of "stars" for its quality because otherwise people post not-safe-for-life content with nice endearing names and others mass-download that content and then get grossed out. But you publish this and then people immediately use the anonymity afforded by the Internet to spam the upvote button as they distribute their garbage.

My understanding from Walsh was that the problem was essentially an economics problem—you want to incentivize good behavior and deincentivize bad behavior—and once you understood this you could use the network to correct itself, essentially saying “if you use your upvotes like the typical user does then the typical user will trust you, if you use your upvotes like the typical spammer does then you’ll instead end up in a clique with typical spammers.”

Some googling reveals that the page is still alive on cornell.edu [1].

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/

It seems like they distinguish between "recommendation making" vs "verifying correctness of content" and Credence is meant to solve the latter: "Since Credence is not a recommendation system, your thumbs-up and thumbs-down decisions should be based on an objective evaluation of whether a file's description matches its contents, not on matters of taste." https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/faq.html

Yeah it's definitely a huge risk. It's really a question of whether the expectation of the Schelling point is around quality of meme-worthiness.

I think the shorting will help with this, but I think the more critical thing is getting the initial community right to set expectations of what's upvoteworthy. Kind of how y'all started reddit around a programming community.

That is fascinating! I love these stories of people optimizing/gaming the system in ways you maybe didn't account for or didn't predict.

Allow people to vote and follow different bellwether classifications.

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