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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of looking at how long people spend on a site, we would encourage users to give explicit feedback on rankings and use this to improve our ranking system.

While they're not wrong about how the way Google determines ranking has its issues, this way has its own set of problems. If you explicitly use user ratings as part of your rankings in some way, people can punish sites they don't like, ala review bombing on Yelp, Steam, etc.

Not saying it's necessarily a bad idea because of that, but I hope they don't fall victim to the mentality of, "let's just trust the users" as an ironclad rule, because that doesn't always work out well.

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Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings.

The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.

What if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?

I've always wondered if you could combat via referal-only sites. To get in you need to achir your humanness on someone else's account. If an account is found to invite too many spammers, robots, or otherwise it is banned or disallowed to invite more accounts.

I'm sure you could still manage to make "fake" accounts but it would be much more difficult, and linking them together would be much easier.

Of course starting a site like this would be very difficult. But maybe you could start without it then add it in once you get to a decent popularity such that many people can find a referral if they need to.

Afaik that's how https://lobste.rs works.

Of course it is a much smaller site so it isn't clear how effective this strategy would be at a large scale. Even a referral-based site approaching HN levels would be very interesting to see.

> What if you limit accounts to real people and

In China, all social accounts must be associated with a phone number, and phone numbers are tied to government identities. It doesn't stop any manipulation of scores and rankings.

> then keep track of their credibility?

It is very likely China will do that too soon. I think you can already imagine the ramifications.

You can’t limit to real people. If you managed to, I would make a service where people can sign up and I’ll pay to use their account. No cost to them and they make some money from it, seems totally reasonable.

That's just another group of people with reduced credibility. At some point, the price to incentivize the next person to offer their account is more expensive than the benefits of link manipulation. Every corrupted account can be discovered because the manipulated content stands out and will be reported.

The internet-should-be-anonymous crowd wouldn't like that. But it's no worse than Google tracking everything A-Z.

I'm very much part of that community but I could see verified moderators using it.

However it could just be reputation based like on Wikipedia

if this becomes popular, that same industry will recruit gangs to manipulate this new system.

source: worked in ads and search for decades, incl google.

Also let's not forget Reddit. There's a lot of bullshit on top.

I went back to Reddit a week back after a 1 or so year, and what I saw was just disgusting on the main feed. One click, a bit of scroll and I was watching people calling republicans terrorists and being praised/upvoted/gifted. It's not just about bullshit at the top, it's also about echo chambers and the online equivalent of mob-behavior.

> it's also about echo chambers and the online equivalent of mob-behavior.

This particular example might be about the Republican party-wide support of echo chambers and offline mob behavior that led to an invasion of the building containing politicians certifying the vote of a newly elected leader and fueling disinformation about elections to weaken the trust and integrity of the system?

Regardless of this particular example, there has always been a pretty strong bias towards one side of US (and Australian, for that matter) partisan politics on the front page of Reddit; with over-the-top accusations towards the Republican Party as well as the LNP both receiving thousands of upvotes despite their poor quality.

Good point, this is not going to be easy to get right.

Good point, especially on the internet

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