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Is there value to maintaining this site yourself? I agree that you shouldn't spend the time to fix this issue yourself, but couldn't a contractor fix it for pocket change, at a low cognitive burden to you? Hasn't this issue been surfaced repeatedly by users, wasting the time of a good many people (including you)? Doesn't it hurt your reputation as a thoughtful and detail oriented organization?

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I'm not the only person working on it anymore. For the past year or so we've also had Nick Sivo (kogir), who handles all the systems stuff. And we also have a moderator who is a hacker and has written a bunch of code for identifying voting rings, sockpuppets, and so forth.

I just want to put my hand up against the selection bias in this thread and say that I totally don't care about the broken links, and that rock-solid moderation is a far more important issue for any online community.

I would say that the site should actually be opened up to the whole community to add to it. Hackers may be able to help in ways never imagined before. Some examples:

1. Auto assign upvotes to new stories using machine learning algorithms that use older, already upvoted, stories for learning. This can fix one of the issues often encountered where good stories go ignored because too few people have time to screen new stories.

2. Instead of using ad hoc rules for ordering stories and comments, use machine learning engines again.

Some stories get flagged. These would also provide good data for supervised learning.

I understand some control would need to be exercised to prevent gaming of the system.

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