Hacker News Reader

Comment by dabluecaboose | Hacker News Reader

>In the future, we could use ML to offer options to sort comments in more useful ways, such as by sorting by "most insightful". We could determine based on your upvote history the type of content you'd be most likely to enjoy

Honestly, you lost me here. I am so sick of algorithms trying to serve me what they think I want. I'd much rather be able to just say "Give me X" and get X, not "But also you might enjoy Y". It also seems ripe for abuse further on down the line whenever money begins to be a problem and advertisers are breathing down the site's neck.

Additionally, as long as I'm just giving kneejerk personal opinions, I hate that all these reddit clones are copying the new-reddit "centered" setup with huge amounts of blank space on either side. I think you're right to be inspired by HN, especially when trying to foster more high-quality discussion-oriented content. Emphasize the text, let it take the whole screen!

View on HN

I don’t mean to overly uncharitable to OPs work but the “AI” stuff jumped out at me too. Especially in the context of their previous post about building a “web3” Reddit alternative:

https://jsavage.xyz/2022/07/28/im-building-a-web3-reddit-zsy...

Now that “web3” isn’t in vogue that’s de-emphasised and AI is emphasised instead. I’m wary of anything that chases buzzwords to this degree.

That's because all the web3 grifters jumped ship to AI when the future of crypto became clear.

I didn't even say "AI" in the post, I said ML. And the ideas I proposed are basic ML 101 stuff. Nothing revolutionary, just basic common sense features that would drastically improve Reddit if implemented. Do you have any objections to the actual ideas proposed, or you just want to ad hominem?

Yea I built this last yea when the term "web3" was still in vogue. I agree that buzzwords tend to be overused and especially "web3", but in any case I'd appreciate if you'd actually address the ideas proposed instead of focusing on the terminology.

For every hype there’s an equal and opposite reaction to the hype. Proposing ML to sort comments is a totally valid suggestion, but might be difficult to get right

I should've clarified that these algorithms would all be completely optional and could be opted out.

Currently Reddit by default sorts comments by "best", which uses whatever methodology they've decided (idk how that works, but clearly it doesn't work well for me). Other options they have include "top", "new" / "old", and "controversial".

I'm simply proposing having "best" be more accurate, and/or adding other options (eg. via clustering) like "insightful" - which is really the only one I care about for this kind of site. Then people who want the most quality, well-researched, thought-provoking comments can find those, while kids who just want memes and puns can find that. Everyone gets what they want and lives happily ever after.

The problem with personalized recommendations on other platforms like Facebook and Youtube are that you can't opt out of or customize them. I agree with you that that's a crap experience as a user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com