Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with much of this.

I believe the antidote to this is simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content, so essentially marry many small decentralized communities on a searchable platform. Anonymous but karma/identity weighted profiles, curating and debating lists of their favorite things around a single topic.

Aggregate them into a single master index with nice UI, then pay out equitably based on performance.

There’s a lot of questions on preventing spam and fraud, and I think the further away you get from “high ticket products” the more you avoid that problem, but it can’t be worse than Google: in one you’re relying solely on magical AI and links, the other you can have as much magical AI and links as you want, but you also have user accounts which maybe invited each other and can vouch for each other at a cost, votes that can be weighed by all sorts of factors, and basically a much richer graph of self-moderating people to back the index.

Working on something like this at the moment!

Part of the spam is clearly condoned by Google, probably for a mix of reasons.

An example is Pinterest, Google can drop or deprioritize their properties, like they do with other actors. But for some reason they do not. Maybe they are scared of litigation.

>... simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content

This is true for some things. But for reliability reviews, for example, there's a certain power in large numbers. I'd much rather see reviews for common appliances from 200k people (or more) than the same from a group of 2000 appliance-centric folk. That's true even though the 2k set will likely know and care a lot more than many of the people in the 200k set.

On the other hand, with large numbers of people, it's much harder to deal with "95% of reviews are complaints" problem, which tends not to be so much of a problem with "enthusiasts".

Why not both? Rotten Tomatoes gives the critic score side by side with the audience score, as does Metacritic.

There's arguably value not just in both scores, but also both being presented side by side.

Rotten Tomatoes is the epitome of why trusting expert ratings on their own is a bad idea. The number of times that the tomatometer is wildly off the general perception is insane, enough to make the tomatometer largely useless for myself at lease.

It certainly does seem, though, that a company with Google's prowess in search, NLP, ML, algorithms, categorisation and the like should be able to do a lot better, even if the problem is incredibly difficult.

My only explanation is that it doesn't suit the business needs of Google to do so.

> acknowledging small communities curate the best content

Agreed. The problem is that Facebook and Google more or less successfully disintermediated those small communities of old, namely newspapers, magazines, websites based on region or interest which had a vested interest in their constituency. In doing so, the tech giants swallowed up the advertisement dollars going to those old media, and made a few people insanely rich while destroying the entire ecosystem.

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