Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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It occurs to me--I don't think there's any real "social site" focused on making lists. The closest things we have are social bookmarking tools--but those have a ranking algorithm that highly weights novelty, causing the front page to resemble a stream of ephemeral content mixed with periodic reposts of evergreen content.

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How could we improve on this?

[Anyone who wants to do the following is welcome to; I've too many startups on the go already.]

Imagine something like Reddit--with each list being a "subreddit"--but:

A. there's no time-weighting in the front-page algorithm (though there is a "new" page); and

B. there are robust mechanisms in place for preventing duplicate entries from being created, and merging duplicates (along with their votes and comments) into the canonical versions.

Additionally, since the lists created will be far more static, you might want to give people greater influence over the ranking system--using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting_systems, for example.

I love this idea. Currently my search for, say, a new IRC client is likely to end up on Wikipedia of all places because they're the only people that have a comprehensive list of what's available. There has got to be a better way to do this.

That's an interesting idea. One of the things we are building is a "reddit like system"[1], and so I could see building a feature like that. Our current focus is on enterprise usage, though, not building something for the public web. But the code is all Open Source, ALv2 licensed and it's done in Groovy and Grails. If anyone is interested on hacking on something like that with us, just shout.

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

It seems like it would be hard to find additional content after the easier targets are taken up. Once people have put up lists of what they find useful, new lists or useful additions to the list wouldn't appear every day. It might be a good curated reference, but I have a hard time seeing an active community based around it. Maybe you need to expand the scope of the site idea?

Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

> Letter grades from A - F would be a good idea. Their meaning and use has been ingrained since childhood.

In many countries A - F grading system is not commonly used. For example in the country where I was born they use 1 - 5 grading system and A - F means nothing. I think rating with stars is much more widespread and would be wiser choice for any project with global ambitions.

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