18 ms·
Avoiding the Fark Effect
By the Fark effect I mean - at first a social news site is really cool, then over time there are more and more political posts, top ten lists, nsfw links, and pictures of cats. Inside their algorithmic brains, every social news site wants to turn into Fark.
In the wake of being linked on techcrunch a lot of people seem worried the same thing will happen here.
Here's a suggestion - build a bayesian filter specifically to prevent Hacker News from turning into reddit / digg / fark. Positive training data can be hacker news articles before today. Scrape the contents of each link before it goes live. Negative training data can be the current top n articles from those other sources. Don't apply this filter in a boolean way; instead do something like
score *= similarity-to-classic-hacker-news
By making it non-boolean, we will still get articles like "Google announces huge new product". It will just cost you a 0.1x in score whenever the article mentions Ron Paul.
Any other good ideas out there?
- martianpenguin 19y agoThat's the point of the voting system. The articles that the most people want will be voted to the top. Unfortunately, the minority can't stay a minority if their site gets too popular.
- cstejerean 19y agoIf and when necessary I'm sure HN can leverage the seniority of the current users (time since registered and karma points).
- jackdied 19y agoFark isn't in the same ballpark as reddit and digg. The only users that get to vote on stories are the core users who have ponied up $50/year for a totalfark membership and I believe only the admins can put a story on the front page. All the filtering is done by the core group who has incentives to keep the links on topic (if fark can be said to have a topic). /farker but not a tf'er