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> All websites eventually die (or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive" All this makes me think that maybe community forum s

by dant 19y ago

> All websites eventually die (or, at least, all that I have observed); you can't "keep a community alive" All this makes me think that maybe community forum software should be taking reddit's recommended page to the next level and only showing me posts/discussion from people who have similar voting habits to me or even based on some social networking style "proximity". Having all submissions in one pot and giving everyone an equal vote averages everything out so the only way to maintain whatever niche the site caters for (in this case thoughtful and interesting posts/discussion) is to maintain the niche of users. I bet Gnome-theme-designer forums have it easier because not everyone wants to be a part of that niche, but forums based around interesting and intelligent discussion are going to continue to slide gradually towards digg no matter how well they start because (a) everyone thinks they're more interesting and intelligent than they really are, and (b) lots of people want to join an online community filled with people "just like them". If only I had the time to develop a prototype.

dreish 19y ago
That sounds pretty computationally intensive, if each page load is going to result in recalculating all scores for a relatively large universe of objects, but maybe "people who have similar voting habits to pg (or some small, select set of trusted quasi-moderators)" would be feasible. I'm not so sure a technical, mathematical, and purely self-organizing solution exists -- I think at some point, standards have to come from the top. In the past, I think pg has exerted his influence by commenting on things he likes to see and doesn't like to see. He continues to do this, but either his comments will continue to occupy a diminishing share of the site as its user base grows, or he'll spend too much of his life commenting -- even lecturing and nagging. I like the idea of giving each user a weight, calculated from how similar their votes are to some trusted set of voters. Each user's vote would then count for some fraction between 0 and 1. Scores could be updated periodically en masse to reflect new weights instead of with every page load.
- dant 19y ago
  I like that idea, pg and friends would be the founders of the community and would moderate it simply by voting on submissions. Maybe such a system could also give people the ability to "found" new communities within some sub-domain and have all the posts from the main site submitted to their site but ranked differently based on different voting weights.
anthonyrubin 19y ago
While it isn't exactly what you describe, I found this to be rather interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495

by dant 19y ago

dreish 19y ago

That sounds pretty computationally intensive, if each page load is going to result in recalculating all scores for a relatively large universe of objects, but maybe "people who have similar voting habits to pg (or some small, select set of trusted quasi-moderators)" would be feasible. I'm not so sure a technical, mathematical, and purely self-organizing solution exists -- I think at some point, standards have to come from the top. In the past, I think pg has exerted his influence by commenting on things he likes to see and doesn't like to see. He continues to do this, but either his comments will continue to occupy a diminishing share of the site as its user base grows, or he'll spend too much of his life commenting -- even lecturing and nagging. I like the idea of giving each user a weight, calculated from how similar their votes are to some trusted set of voters. Each user's vote would then count for some fraction between 0 and 1. Scores could be updated periodically en masse to reflect new weights instead of with every page load.

dant 19y ago
I like that idea, pg and friends would be the founders of the community and would moderate it simply by voting on submissions. Maybe such a system could also give people the ability to "found" new communities within some sub-domain and have all the posts from the main site submitted to their site but ranked differently based on different voting weights.

anthonyrubin 19y ago

While it isn't exactly what you describe, I found this to be rather interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495