5 ms·

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've

by gunn 10y ago

I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy. Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.

creshal 10y ago
> I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I disagree with (mostly on such disgustingly controversial topics like "Lenovo makes better Thinkpad laptops than IBM did"). > Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise. /. tried it, did it ever work out? (Honestly no idea, I've never been deep enough involved in it.)
- gunn 10y ago
  > Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.
  - creshal 10y ago
    I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.
    - gunn 10y ago
      Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary. On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude. What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view. Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?
    - pjc50 10y ago
      > high-quality content you disagree with I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic? The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views. The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  >see also: Tumblr. And Facebook.
andai 10y ago
That's a really interesting idea. If that existed here I would subscribe to you now.
Jtsummers 10y ago
/.'s moderation system sort of gives you this, but not the connection to the authors of the posts. You set a score threshold for visibility. The discussion system hides things below the threshold, but doesn't hide the thread itself (like reddit does, IIRC). * (Score: 5) Some stuff * (Score: 0) *Hidden* * (Score: 4) Actually, if you read ... * (Score: -1) *Hidden* * (Score: 3) Blah blah blah Posts are also moderated by kind (offtopic, funny, insightful, etc.) So all those crappy first post and Natalie Portman posts were easily filtered out, and good (at least better) comments were left visible. EDIT: Other things they did well: Moderation was based on karma, a hidden score. Karma was calculated by several things, but the two key things were: How were your posts moderated (better means better karma) How were your moderations meta-moderated. Meta-moderation: This was a really neat concept. Basically, people went back and (anonymous to both of you) rated a post's moderation as good or bad. That is, if you posted something genuinely useful or interesting but someone gave it a negative moderation, the meta-moderation system would (in theory) catch this. It didn't change the moderation, but it rated the moderators. They also only allowed you to moderate in discussions you didn't comment in. If you commented, all your moderation was undone. And you had limited (5?) moderation points to use at a time. This prevented anyone from going on an abusive moderation streak (fuck that Jtsummers guy, I'm going to mark all his stuff down).
- pjc50 10y ago
  At one point you could adjust your weightings for things, so you could make "funny" or "insightful" count for -1 for an entertainingly different view of the site.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Yeah, I vaguely recalled that but forgot my password so haven't confirmed it. Just got in, seems my last post was 4 years ago. Anyways, it seems that feature has been disabled (or it's well hidden). But that'd be a useful addition as well. You can filter on comment length. Apparently right now I filter out all one-line comments that don't have +4 or better. So "+1", "this", etc. won't show up, but "Oh hey, that reminds me of <useful link>" will. EDIT: Seems I was wrong. https://slashdot.org/my/comments https://slashdot.org/my/comments lets me see and change those settings, but getting here was non-obvious so I'm not certain if this will affect anything or if it's merely a legacy page. You'll need to be logged in to see anything. But this offers score modifier options for comments by how they're moderated (troll, offtopic, funny, etc.) and friends/foes.
pjc50 10y ago
Possible but potentially hard on your database as you have to poll thousands of edges per post. Doesn't scale too well. I think advogato tried something similar with its trust metric: http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html but advogato is effectively dead - on the front page is still a poem about the death of k5. Really the nearest thing is to get on twitter and curate who you follow.
Bjartr 10y ago
No idea how viable this would be, but as a user up/down votes, incorporate that into some kind of learning system that will, over time, be able to better select posts that that specific user wants to see. Maybe weight structure over content to avoid the echo chamber effects to some degree?
username3 10y ago
Twitter's timeline shows replies of people you follow.
JDiculous 10y ago
This is a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see it tested out. Unfortunately I can't see HN or Reddit actually implementing this feature. They already have the monopoly over their respective communities, and thus have stopped toying with new features and innovating.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  We do have an API for HN. I wonder if someone could create a variant of the content here. Show everything like normal, but pair it with this sort of friend-network based meta-moderation + the ability to hide individual posts (rather than just whole threads and subthreads).
jonathansizz 10y ago
This could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.
- gunn 10y ago
  Clever. I like that this could give the benefits of moderation without hard censorship.
davidivadavid 10y ago
I've been wondering for months now why something like that doesn't exist. Here are some comments I wrote on that topic (or a closely related one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514 As mentioned in some of the comments, there are probably some technical hurdles (keeping score of every edge in the network), but can't they be overcome? People tend to come up with the same objection: echo chamber, filter bubble, etc. but I think they miss the point.
daveloyall 10y ago
I think you're describing the algorithm behind the Facebook news feed (minus pay-for-play).

by gunn 10y ago

creshal 10y ago

> I've been wondering: would it be practical to build a reddit/HN like system where the comments you see are by authors you've upvoted before, or authors they've upvoted before? Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I disagree with (mostly on such disgustingly controversial topics like "Lenovo makes better Thinkpad laptops than IBM did"). > Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise. /. tried it, did it ever work out? (Honestly no idea, I've never been deep enough involved in it.)

gunn 10y ago
> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.
- creshal 10y ago
  I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.
  - gunn 10y ago
    Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary. On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude. What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view. Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?
  - pjc50 10y ago
    > high-quality content you disagree with I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic? The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views. The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.
curiousgal 10y ago
>see also: Tumblr. And Facebook.

andai 10y ago

That's a really interesting idea. If that existed here I would subscribe to you now.

Jtsummers 10y ago

/.'s moderation system sort of gives you this, but not the connection to the authors of the posts. You set a score threshold for visibility. The discussion system hides things below the threshold, but doesn't hide the thread itself (like reddit does, IIRC). * (Score: 5) Some stuff * (Score: 0) *Hidden* * (Score: 4) Actually, if you read ... * (Score: -1) *Hidden* * (Score: 3) Blah blah blah Posts are also moderated by kind (offtopic, funny, insightful, etc.) So all those crappy first post and Natalie Portman posts were easily filtered out, and good (at least better) comments were left visible. EDIT: Other things they did well: Moderation was based on karma, a hidden score. Karma was calculated by several things, but the two key things were: How were your posts moderated (better means better karma) How were your moderations meta-moderated. Meta-moderation: This was a really neat concept. Basically, people went back and (anonymous to both of you) rated a post's moderation as good or bad. That is, if you posted something genuinely useful or interesting but someone gave it a negative moderation, the meta-moderation system would (in theory) catch this. It didn't change the moderation, but it rated the moderators. They also only allowed you to moderate in discussions you didn't comment in. If you commented, all your moderation was undone. And you had limited (5?) moderation points to use at a time. This prevented anyone from going on an abusive moderation streak (fuck that Jtsummers guy, I'm going to mark all his stuff down).

pjc50 10y ago
At one point you could adjust your weightings for things, so you could make "funny" or "insightful" count for -1 for an entertainingly different view of the site.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Yeah, I vaguely recalled that but forgot my password so haven't confirmed it. Just got in, seems my last post was 4 years ago. Anyways, it seems that feature has been disabled (or it's well hidden). But that'd be a useful addition as well. You can filter on comment length. Apparently right now I filter out all one-line comments that don't have +4 or better. So "+1", "this", etc. won't show up, but "Oh hey, that reminds me of <useful link>" will. EDIT: Seems I was wrong. https://slashdot.org/my/comments https://slashdot.org/my/comments lets me see and change those settings, but getting here was non-obvious so I'm not certain if this will affect anything or if it's merely a legacy page. You'll need to be logged in to see anything. But this offers score modifier options for comments by how they're moderated (troll, offtopic, funny, etc.) and friends/foes.

pjc50 10y ago

Possible but potentially hard on your database as you have to poll thousands of edges per post. Doesn't scale too well. I think advogato tried something similar with its trust metric: http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html but advogato is effectively dead - on the front page is still a poem about the death of k5. Really the nearest thing is to get on twitter and curate who you follow.

Bjartr 10y ago

No idea how viable this would be, but as a user up/down votes, incorporate that into some kind of learning system that will, over time, be able to better select posts that that specific user wants to see. Maybe weight structure over content to avoid the echo chamber effects to some degree?

username3 10y ago

Twitter's timeline shows replies of people you follow.

JDiculous 10y ago

This is a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see it tested out. Unfortunately I can't see HN or Reddit actually implementing this feature. They already have the monopoly over their respective communities, and thus have stopped toying with new features and innovating.

Jtsummers 10y ago
We do have an API for HN. I wonder if someone could create a variant of the content here. Show everything like normal, but pair it with this sort of friend-network based meta-moderation + the ability to hide individual posts (rather than just whole threads and subthreads).

jonathansizz 10y ago

This could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.

gunn 10y ago
Clever. I like that this could give the benefits of moderation without hard censorship.

davidivadavid 10y ago

I've been wondering for months now why something like that doesn't exist. Here are some comments I wrote on that topic (or a closely related one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514 As mentioned in some of the comments, there are probably some technical hurdles (keeping score of every edge in the network), but can't they be overcome? People tend to come up with the same objection: echo chamber, filter bubble, etc. but I think they miss the point.

daveloyall 10y ago

I think you're describing the algorithm behind the Facebook news feed (minus pay-for-play).