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Agreed re voting systems. I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with g

Agreed re voting systems. I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

jamiequint 16y ago
I agree with this and have been saying it for a while. Quora could avoid inaccuracies like this one by weighting a person's answer on a topic based on their endorsements in PageRank fashion. e.g. I endorse you on Google, which has more weight if I am myself endorsed on Google with the weight increasing based on the number of times I am endorsed and how many people have endorsed the people endorsing me and so on. I'm relatively sure Quora will do this eventually.
joe_the_user 16y ago
That's an interesting idea. The problem is preventing this leading a site dominated by a group of people who share a set of extreme opinions of one sort or another. There's no now site where you can't get karma for reinforcing some commonly held group opinion and if Karma became self-reinforcing, the problem would get harder. It might not be impossible - maybe you could have secret algorithm for rewarding people only for making well-respected non-polarizing posts. But it would be quite tricky.
- resdirector 16y ago
  Ah, yup, there's ways around that. The Q&A PeopleRank idea will probably be my next start-up, if Vark doesn't beat me to it. Reading http://blog.vark.com/?p=352 http://blog.vark.com/?p=352, it seems that they're on the right track. (Although their UX is a little clunky). However, even if Vark builds a kick-ass product, you can still apply the PeopleRank idea to news-sites like HN. Anyone interested in building a Q&A/news site feel free to message me.
mleonhard 16y ago
I started building a site that works kind of like that. It is essentially a reddit clone that will rank articles by how likely you are to vote them up. I put it on hold and decided to first build a product that users would pay for. But I would still like to build this site someday, or use it if someone else builds it first.

jamiequint 16y ago

I agree with this and have been saying it for a while. Quora could avoid inaccuracies like this one by weighting a person's answer on a topic based on their endorsements in PageRank fashion. e.g. I endorse you on Google, which has more weight if I am myself endorsed on Google with the weight increasing based on the number of times I am endorsed and how many people have endorsed the people endorsing me and so on. I'm relatively sure Quora will do this eventually.

joe_the_user 16y ago

That's an interesting idea. The problem is preventing this leading a site dominated by a group of people who share a set of extreme opinions of one sort or another. There's no now site where you can't get karma for reinforcing some commonly held group opinion and if Karma became self-reinforcing, the problem would get harder. It might not be impossible - maybe you could have secret algorithm for rewarding people only for making well-respected non-polarizing posts. But it would be quite tricky.

resdirector 16y ago
Ah, yup, there's ways around that. The Q&A PeopleRank idea will probably be my next start-up, if Vark doesn't beat me to it. Reading http://blog.vark.com/?p=352 http://blog.vark.com/?p=352, it seems that they're on the right track. (Although their UX is a little clunky). However, even if Vark builds a kick-ass product, you can still apply the PeopleRank idea to news-sites like HN. Anyone interested in building a Q&A/news site feel free to message me.

mleonhard 16y ago

I started building a site that works kind of like that. It is essentially a reddit clone that will rank articles by how likely you are to vote them up. I put it on hold and decided to first build a product that users would pay for. But I would still like to build this site someday, or use it if someone else builds it first.