Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote (assuming you managed to even get that data). And such a search engine needs a literal army of users providing signal to evaluate the quality of content as it is released.

View on HN

>What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap?

You would use ranking algorithms meaning you should crawl, scrape and analyse YouTube videos which would make YouTube probably unhappy.

Ranking based on what though? Number of comments? Number of references made to each video in other video descriptions?

Backlinks linking to the video on the web, number of views, likes, comments, NLP analysis of the title and the description of the video and yea references made to each video in other video descriptions is also good idea.

It's an interesting idea. But my gut feel is that only a minority of content actually is referenced elsewhere. It would be an interesting idea to test though!

> There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote

I don't get that. It should have the exact same incentive to down-vote, unless you think Google no longer collects or uses that information as opposed to just hiding it.

Downvotes are used by google to suggest content. If you downvoted something, you engaged with it, which google loves and wants more of.

The incentive for users/viewers to downvote something has always been to give other viewers a heads up. This doesn’t work anymore

Is "downvoted count as engagement and this boost the video" a documented result or just a rumor?

People respond to feedback mechanisms. If you hid comments on videos, do you think people would be as inclined to add their own comments as much when it is literally going into the void?

Previously, disliking would increment the global "dislike" counter and users got immediate visual feedback that their dislike was counted, even if that state may take minutes for Google to reconcile and store.

Now, clicking the dislike doesn't do much and users have no indication whether others disliked the content too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com