Rigging any vote-based social website to keep the “early spirit” | Hacker News Reader

Rigging any vote-based social website to keep the “early spirit”

alimony.github.io

Readers will hopefully notice the semi-sarcastic sub-tone of the text :)

> For example, any user could ask for content weighted towards an arbitrary date, like “Show me content to the taste of people who registered in December 2008” or “What do the 1,000 newest users like?”

That sounds like an incredibly interesting way to navigate a social news site.

Why do we have to be afraid to simply admit that, in a social news setting, the majority community gears content toward their own likes and interests? I actually wholly agree with the premise you dismiss as "semi-sarcastic".

I don't dismiss it, I actually wrote the text so that would be a bit harsh on myself :) I find it truly interesting as well, but at the same time want to express that some internauts are at times overly conservative about these things.

>> For example, any user could ask for content weighted towards an arbitrary date, like “Show me content to the taste of people who registered in December 2008” or “What do the 1,000 newest users like?”

> That sounds like an incredibly interesting way to navigate a social news site.

Except that votes aren't stochastically independent events - on the contrary, exposure to the first page, which is determined by any vote (not just your chosen cohort), determines most of the votes of a story.

I guess that with that kind of weighting you could perhaps have a different order of the stories that went to the home page, but the stories would still be the same - ie, you wouldn't find all the stories that would have come to the home page in the old days, and were instead pushed out by some kitten-stories.

Better yet would be to rig the vote based on usage. So if you have 500 comments your vote is worth more than someone with 10, you could even scale it precisely on a curve. This way, rather than having a static seniority-based system the site can still develop based on who uses the site the most. You'd still have herd mentality, but there would be more insulation from it.

Spammers would love that ;)

Wouldn't it be better to simply scale people not on the amount of things you do, but on how many upvotes you have received over the last 18 months (discard the last six to prevent a set of newcommers from fundamentally changing the vote distribution), that way you are encouraging good postings (according to the local norms, anyway) over just posting things.

You have to be careful, though. Some people post things that are uniformily well recieved (patio11 comes to mind) whereas I have had posts anywhere from -20 or so to +34.

Not sure I buy that people who make lots of comments are better qualified to pick good content.

This idea would naturally develop into personally curated site based on your voting preferences, i.e. Amazon for news.

HN has something like what the article proposes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Although I think it just filters by account that are older than a couple of years, obviously becoming less useful over time.

Didn't know about that, cool feature. For more discussion on this, also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

unfortunately this wouldn't work very well because generally speaking there is attrition involved and the original "early users" base will slowly deteriorate as people die, retire or change interest, etc. and are replaced by newer users

so like it or not, under a weighted voting scheme, the site will still migrate away from its "early spirit" because the exact same people won't be around but replaced by newer people

with the inevitable march of time, the complete userbase will be replaced several times over and the site can completely change its tone and "early spirit" in spite of such measures

Try an additional weight or graph based on your elections.

I think this is a fantastic idea. It's worked out really well in America with the way we've treated each new wave of immigrants...

Don't forget about congress too! I always look forward to what old man such and such has to say about modern law

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