Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My argument was based on the premise that votes from power users are more valuable as they better at judging the quality of the content. While the quality is partly subjective, it is not entirely so. Meaning power users, having more experience, know better what casual users should watch and would like then the casual users themselves. It is in the interest of the casual users for them to not be able to vote/their vote to count less.

I later suggested ways to make the hurdles for voting higher, which would fix the problems you mentioned. Required account age, maybe even how much content you need to have watched. Honestly, we could just filter out the people that only do 1/5 star votes. (With niche content of course there would be the issue of having no/just a few votes but voting would not be the only metric anyway.

I am very heretical towards common held UX believes and think trying to design for the lowest common denominator just results in all around awful experiences for everyone. We should rather strive to empower users.

> My argument was based on the premise that votes from power users are more valuable as they better at judging the quality of the content.

That is quite unlikely. What you call power user is someone distinguished by willingness to rank. It does not make that person better representation of all users or be more knowledgeable off quality or more experienced. Just more judgy.

It means you will be recommended based on tastes of special minority and likely alienate the rest of users in the process.

> My argument was based on the premise that votes from power users are more valuable as they better at judging the quality of the content.

As someone responsible for designing and incorporating end-user activity/feedback into ML, I have to tell you this is exceedingly unlikely.

The number of power users, especially on a large consumer app like Spotify, is dwarfed by the broad userbase (I estimate ~1% of Spotify users at most qualify as "power users").

Would I rather have power user-only feedback, or 100x the feedback? Definitely definitely 100x the feedback from all users.

I don’t think counting there vote less is useful. Low quality signal that is plentiful is very often better than sparse higher quality signal. My past experience is working on recommendation systems at tiktok/snap. Having a lot of weak signal from casual users is extremely helpful for power users. Recommendations are often based on large amount of basic engagement data. I think a large aspect to TikTok’s system being considered strong at recommendation is because Ux is designed for very frequent simple signals.

I can also say working at companies like that generally any system changes require an ab test and long running back test. I’ve generally seen companies move from 5 star to simpler like/dislike system and those changes would have been ab tested and found that user experience is overall better. I don’t know for specific systems whether overall better was across all users or some users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com