Hacker News Reader

Comment by dun44 | Hacker News Reader

>The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior

I wonder if it would be possible to split HN (or any other HN-like site) into two halves: one would handle the actual storage of posts and comments, and another would handle the scoring, ie the order the comment tree branches appear in. Then we could have multiple of the latter, competing with each other on the scoring alone, with the actual content being common.

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The reddit open source code was basically this. The whole thing was open, including the scoring, but all the spam functions were just stubs that returned True or False as appropriate, without all the logic. Then we would override those functions with a private library that had all the spam logic.

I find your idea interesting about having a service that stores the links and comments (and presumably does spam controls too) but anyone can put their own scoring/sorting algo on it.

There's an interesting less granular pooled approach worth exploring .. seeing the aggregate scoring of {people you follow} | {friends} | {Dev community} | {carpentry fans}.

It's the "crowd I find of interest" also found "this stuff to be interesting".

Except in this case you still don’t have any accountability, so the site (eg HN) can still shape the narrative by slightly altering the scoring.

Hacker News has an API[0], awkward as it is (but not rate-limited) and Algolia does as well[1]. It isn't difficult to build a basic reader client.

[0] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/api

Funnily enough, you're basically describing Bluesky/AT Proto: https://atproto.com/guides/overview

Kinda like how reddit has "hot", "top", and "best"?

More like with Usenet where every user would have their own scorefile, which determined the order they would see posts. Except without having every user to manage it for themselves, instead choosing which "frontend" to use.

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