Hacker News Reader

Comment by f38zf5vdt | Hacker News Reader

Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset.

This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.

View on HN

It’s probably not popular, but I always thought that Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was at least on the right track.

SD has, for lack of a better term for it, a time problem.

If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.

Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.

I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.

I haven’t visited /. for years so maybe out of date, but IIRC this was largely helped by separating voting from type - so even if a comment gets a lot of upvotes for being funny, my personal settings of “ignore funny comments” means I still get a decently high-quality signal, which is something I’ve not seen anywhere else

I know why people don't like them and I get that you are correct that it got pretty absurd on /. around the time period you mentioned.

But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.

Good the main issue with jokes is they're the text equivalent of a Meme pic or "look what I did" type post. Easy to consume content with little actual meat. They attract upvotes easily when accepted because of that lack of substance.

Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.

No way, that guy is the best.

> hn down votes jokes so aggressively

"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."

In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering).

I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.

It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.

The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.

The problem with whitelisting users or even attenuation is that you would be able to determine the vote counts of individual users. But perhaps votes being publicly ascribable to users is not a problem. I think they're public by default on twitter.

Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.

There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com