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Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

The problem with RSS [in the context of the OP] is that you can't see other subscribers.

This is what adds a lot to the social feel of SM, everyone can see who follows who.

This social feel is part of the reason why non-tech folks use SM over traditional Blogs to post online. If the goal is to move people back on to the more traditional web, then it is necessary to create this social feel.

Now, the anonomity of RSS also has advantages, but similar to how the OP added "Webrings" to RSS, social proof could be added to RSS with another tool. So that all subscriptions can remain anonymous if wanted, while still providing the social feel.

Disqus is a little bit like that for comments. Disqus is also proof of concept for the OP that such "organic" additions to the standard blog concept.

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I am building https://linklonk.com and I think it adds a social proof to content discovery while preserving anonymity. Here is how it works:

- When you upvote an item, you connect stronger to users that also posted that item and to RSS feeds that posted this. For example, if you upvote "Post 43: Intentionally Making Close Friends — Neel Nanda"(https://linklonk.com/item/827619236936941568) then you will get connected to 6 users that upvoted that article and the RSS feed https://www.neelnanda.io/blog?format=rss

- The recommendation algorithm shows you other items upvoted by users and feeds you are connected to.

- At the top of you recommendations you see content from users and feeds that you are most strongly connected to (ie, those who have posted more useful content for you).

With this mechanism you discover users and feeds that post great content just by rating content, without having to know the users personally. Yet, when you see your recommendations you know that they are coming not from random people, but from people who found useful for you content before. I think, that is a more meaningful version of social proof than the aggregate counts of likes in the traditional social media.

I wonder how scalable this is - I seem to remember reddit started out with this initial idea, and when starting member.cash, it was in my mind, but maybe at the back of my mind. I guess at minimum it requires users*users rows, and an increasingly large number of updates for a well liked post for example. Also I guess you'd need to differentiate a user who indiscriminately likes/follows everything from a user who likes just the things I like.

LinkLonk does "differentiate a user who indiscriminately likes/follows everything from a user who likes just the things I like". Every time someone that you are connected to likes something, your connection to them becomes a little weaker. If you ignore recommendations of that user then you will not see what they liked in your recommendations. Very roughly, you can think of the connection strength from user A to B as "size(set of items both A and B liked)/size(set of item B liked)". So someone who likes everything increases the denominator a lot.

You are right, to keep track of user to user connections is more expensive than only to keep track of the number of likes each item has received (Reddit).

But ultimately someone has to track how trustworthy each of the users is to every other user.

Either every user has to track it for themselves in their head. Or we can try to offload some of that work to the computer. LinkLonk is an experiment to do just that. So yes, this computation is expensive, but it is also the main value proposition.

Can any of the downvoters on this comment enlighten me about what they are seeing in this comment that those like myself don't see? It seemed like an otherwise normal comment, it just contradicts what some of the rest of us might think. That's not something that is wrong or worthy of being silenced.

Can we give this person another chance and maybe, in the spirit of the weekend, allow a contradictory opinion to appear in this discussion?

HN downvotes are not different from any other social media platform. It doesn't matter what the rules says, people will downvote things they disagree and that's it. It always comes to this and I personally don't see how it could be any different, even if I myself don't do it

I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I just did brings the comment back into discussion rather than just brushing it aside. No need for leveraging rules that may or may not be followed, sometimes an impartial and rational third party inquiring buys enough 'hang time' for an otherwise okay comment to reach more people before it is returned to the gallows.

If I may, for a moment: filter bubbles are a useful but also dangerous thing, and if we allow ourselves to silence small irritances eventually, like with opiate dependency, we will find ourselves in the situation where the smallest pains are now grave and world-ending issues that stop everything and must be addressed/stopped immediately. I often disagree with the downvoted comments as well, however still upvote and vouch when they're rational yet contradictory.

Two sided discourse is one of the most important things to me, and in a way I think that we are losing the ability to disagree with each other, and that is a suboptimal outcome of our heightened ability to filter our data streams to weed out opinions we don't like. It's not enough for some people to disagree now, you must pursue the dissenter until you've destroyed their will to continue.

Surely it does not need to be spelled out how this can result in a chilling effect of outside thought and rational debate.

I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I just did brings the comment back into discussion

It doesn't, it just starts a pointless offtopic meta discussion. The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that because it's boring. The votes, on average, tend to sort themselves out without such 'interventions'.

Forgive me for challenging you, but if the rules for downvotes are not applied evenly, where is the bar for which other rules must be applied evenly? It is saturday, and presumably with the exception of Dang and a few others, none of us are 'on the clock' so to speak when we are here, despite what our procrastinations during the week may indicate. If a topic on the front page list is boring, you pass it up, and all is right with the world. Why is this different with comments? (this is a rhetorical question, but I'll receive the response if you'd like to add one)

Just a friendly observation from a third party that this particular thread has in fact gone meta about HN, commenter behavior, and the site rules. Which are pretty clear.

I wonder if it may be the case that these rules have good reason to exist, and if so, then the discussion you are looking for seems to have happened at least once before, a long time ago.

If the point keeps coming up, perhaps it needs to be addressed rather than being modded into oblivion.

It has been addressed many times and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way of further addressing it beside doing exactly what the receipts-for-downvotes people want. Neither the mods nor most HN users want that, though and the arguments against it remain compelling.

Because the goal of the site is things of intellectual curiosity and repetitive things are not that. Repeated stories are usually duped off the front page and meta about votes is far, far more repetitive than the occasional story dupe or story that's not interesting to some person or another. It would absolutely eat the place alive. If you're interested, though, there is years upon years of moderator and user commentary on this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The only rule regarding downvoting is to not complain about being downvoted. Aside from that, everything is fair game, including downvoting for disagreement.

> The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that because it's boring.

Is it not possible that the "forum guidelines" are wrong?

Downvoting should cost something. Half a point, say. Or you only get a limited number of downvotes per week. Something.

Also, you should be required to give an actual reason other than "I disagree".

I know that's not what "the rules" say. "The rules" are wrong.

Indeed. I don't actually agree with the original commenter.

But that doesn't mean I want to shut him or her up.

I think you're right. It doesn't mean it's the healthier way, because with social comes the whole social-feedback system attached to it (upvotes, dogpilling, etc), but it is indeed the mechanic that seems to drive user engagement.

It's also what's leveraged to keep users consuming content and to return for more.

You see who follows who, who has many followers that might be worth following, etc etc... the closest the web had to that was the visitor counter? Or like you said the comments box like Disqus?

As an anecdote:

Many years ago I used to visit a "technews site" that used spread theories/inside info about the tech industry (mostly just copied from forums in the form of "leaks"), very mediocre with no basis for 80% of the content, and the whole thing about it was fanboyism around AMD vs NVIDIA vs INTEL and PC vs CONSOLES, all the engagement happened in Disqus comments - spreading memes, making fun of eachother, insults, etc.

I stopped visiting that site because it was trash, sometimes they got things right though. A few weeks ago I was watching some game trailer, and in the part of the Tech Reviewers quotes, there they were - WCCFTech! "I thought, wow, how the hell did they get to be side by side with the big boys?" And I knew the answer, fanboyism + FUD and a comments section to let people vent. Good for them.

RSS is good because it removes people and behaviour, not because it attracts people.

Benefits of RSS:

+ Removing people who only read and discuss titles.

+ Removing reactionary first comments.

+ Removing posts that try to engage.

+ Removing people who come clicking trough Fb and Twitter.

RSS is good because it is an open web standard and not owned by a single entity.

The other reason is that using RSS involves copying and pasting URLs.

Why does everyone overlook this?

With an extension (or native browser support, which used to be common) this is not the case.

Sites with feeds can link to them in their metadata using <link rel="alternate" href="...">. This would cause a subscribe button (usually the orange RSS logo) to light up in the user's browser. Clicking it would automatically submit the URL to the user's preferred feed reader (or if there were multiple linked feeds, let the user choose one).

Yeah, when that feature was removed, it spelled the beginning of the end for RSS

I think you are on to something. But is t that was hn is?

I think google tried this and failed

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