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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has really gone through a transformation in the past few years. It's painful to see interesting discussions turn to memes and viral marketing. Just seems to be inevitable. I had an idea for how to limit the influence of the masses and bots by giving trust to known high quality "trusted" users. When a high quality user votes on something, he spreads his trust trust around. Effectively it means that people who post cat pictures have no trust and therefore no influence with their votes, and the admins have a simple way of steering the content by picking and choosing the trusted and non-trusted users. Trust could be computed similarly to how you calculate pagerank.

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I'm not sure why they haven't used karma in a similar way. Why not make up or down votes cost one karma point? In order to shape the content stream you would need to spend your social capital.

You would still get people gaming the system, find a popular cat picture and repost, gain 2000 karma, profit. It really isn't hard to get easy karma with lowest-common-denominator content.

It's more or less the pagerank algorithm except with karma. I think it'd work. Pagerank is totally game-able and yet big G has managed to keep the upper hand year after year.

only after spending enormous effort fighting those who are gaming it.

Because that would make karma worth something.

As long as karma is only for vanity, they don't really have to worry about people gaming the system or not -- it doesn't do anything.

it does not anything for the single user. gaming can get stuff on the frontpage though, and that is $$$

No, upvotes get an article on the frontpage, and also give you karma. But that karma doesn't help you in the future.

I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions. What I'm essentially saying is that the Reddit staff should pick a few thousand people by hand that they think embodies what they want the perfect redditor to be like. Everybody else starts out with minuscule influence. Now those ambassadors will go out and up-vote other good users and down-vote bad ones and will in that way spread their influence to other people. Some users might even have negative influence. Can you imagine a user who keeps up-voting cat pictures that is in effect down-voting those submissions without realizing it? It would be beautiful. Obviously it would be important to keep users' influence a secret.

In essence, it would give the Reddit staff much needed control of the content and discourse. If they one day wanted to steer the site towards only cat pictures, they can easily do that by selecting those users to be the ambassadors.

Right now it seems that Reddit is suffering from Eternal September x 1000, and they're at the mercy of the masses. But the geeky, thoughtful content that brought people to the site to begin with is nowhere to be found anymore. It's being drowned in memes and cat pictures.

I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions.

I disagree. IMHO it can be accomplished with the correct structure. The problem you identify is that subreddits are shared spaces, and the primary signal that they rely on is the sum of all users. As subreddits grow, the signal becomes worse. Weighting the votes of users could help, but then you are implementing a moderator bias, and not being honest with people about their input would almost certainly lead to blowback.

One of our goals with http://hubski.com was to avoid this problem. Our approach was to avoid shared pages, and instead allow users to build a feed by following other users or tags. That way we don't have the problem of 'keeping bad content out' to begin with. Instead of voting a story up a page, users share the post with those users that follow them. Posts propagate from user to user. Therefore content cannot be 'buried' by competing with other posts in a shared space. Of course, we are not anywhere near the size of Reddit, but it has been working well so far for us. Each user is their own moderator.

I like it. Have been looking for an alternative to Reddit for general discussions, so far HN has been my inadequate replacement.

Thanks. Feel free to send feedback along after you kick the tires. It's always useful to get a fresh perspective. We always consider Hubski to be a work in progress.

Aside from the initial Reddit launch hustle I'd say that reddit got to where it is by not steering content.

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