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Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."

With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".

Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?

It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...

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With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".

No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.

Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.

the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance.

So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.

While I'm being extreme, in practical application it would be a simple reduced weighting of negative correlation users. e.g. if five people I correlate heavily with liked a /r/programming entry, that will rise above a post liked by one hundred people I have a poor correlation with. Rinse/repeat.

Heavy math/statistical analysis that can be tuned to create a productive enjoyable experience, with the side benefit that it reduces gaming and exploitation.

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