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Two thoughts about this. First, this gives facebook a huge database of the Internet. Essentially, if they wanted to release a stumbleupon equivalent, they coul
by johnfn 17y ago
Two thoughts about this.
First, this gives facebook a huge database of the Internet. Essentially, if they wanted to release a stumbleupon equivalent, they could. Or if they wanted to target ads even closer to your interests, they could. This makes me feel (more) nervous about facebook.
Second, I've always been really interested in finding the best webpages on the Internet. Unfortunately, this is another one of those metrics that conflates popularity with quality. If we assume that X% will press the like button (where X is different for every website), and Y people visit the site, then we have a total number of likes = X*Y/100. But since X only goes from 1-100, it's pretty easy to see that popularity has a much larger affect on how many likes a site will get than how good it actually is.
Essentially, the number of likes is a meaningless statistic (except to measure popularity).
- gojomo 17y agoThose cases where 'likes' deviate from visits/popularity, or where 'likes' vary among certain kinds users, will be the most interesting signals.
- johnfn 17y agoTrue, but I feel like a rating system would be almost universally more telling.
- aaronbrethorst 17y agoThe average rating system is horribly broken: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina... edit: to clarify, no YouTube is not "average." But the fact still remains that allowing users to rate a piece of content on a graded scale is 5 stars of FAIL.
- johnfn 17y agoI wouldn't be so fast to dismiss ratings. In the right community, a rating system is really telling. Example: www.rateyourmusic.com. Great website, good ratings, and the peak is usually atound 3-4.
- tokenadult 17y agoScoble seems to be thinking about this problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1220266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1220266