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I would love for that to work but I'm skeptical that there would be a lot of signal in that sea of noise. We're talking about well over a billion monthly active

I would love for that to work but I'm skeptical that there would be a lot of signal in that sea of noise. We're talking about well over a billion monthly active users; for every HNizen annoyed with the state of the modern web, there are thousands of ordinary people that probably don't mind J. Peterman-esque recipes laden with product placement and somehow incorporating a listicle - as long as they get their recipe. And once you open the floodgates of allowing user feedback to influence search results, the arms race begins, with every major news site checking the referrer for Google and begging you via popover to upvote their search result, and armadas of malware-controlled botnets being launched to generate authentic-looking feedback, and so on.

dheera 7y ago
You could do a couple of things: * Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer-vetted results on technical help. You know they are a programmer from their search history. * Sites begging to upvote get a massive SEO hit of -10000 downvotes. Google's NLP should be good enough for this already.
- vntok 7y ago
  What you are describing is a literal filter bubble, where very soon your only exposure to content will be seeing content you are already liking, ideas you are already adhering to, people you are already looking to. A bubble where ideas and people that you and people like yourself don't like automagically get hidden from you so that you never get exposed to them. A nightmare.
  - dheera 7y ago
    I think this can be done a little more intelligently. Up/downvotes should be based on the structure of the site and more so than the meaning of the content. An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites. We're looking for a spam filter, basically.
    - brianpgordon 7y ago
      > An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" How would you tell them apart? If you could identify abusive site formats mechanically anyway why even solicit votes?
      - dheera 7y ago
        It's still relative. I hate paywalls, some people may prefer to just pay. I hate popups with a passion, so much that I will leave the site, but Average Joe probably just clicks them away.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      What you're proposing in this comment doesn't even work on Reddit/HN. People don't even agree what each star represents in 5-star rating systems.
      - dheera 7y ago
        That's because those rating systems naively apply the ratings across the entire population. The average of the star ratings should be weighted by the normalized dot product of each rater's style and your rating style, or the similarity between each rater and you. A 0-star rating from someone whose preferences are orthogonal to you should not influence the average rating you see.

dheera 7y ago

You could do a couple of things: * Make your upvotes only influence your own search results, and other users like you (similar search history, similar geography, similar past upvote pattern). The fraudster upvoters would just improve SEO for their own fraudster circle. They would see their fraud-upvoted site as #1 within their own circle but it wouldn't change the ranking for me. The programmer circle gets programmer-vetted results on technical help. You know they are a programmer from their search history. * Sites begging to upvote get a massive SEO hit of -10000 downvotes. Google's NLP should be good enough for this already.

vntok 7y ago
What you are describing is a literal filter bubble, where very soon your only exposure to content will be seeing content you are already liking, ideas you are already adhering to, people you are already looking to. A bubble where ideas and people that you and people like yourself don't like automagically get hidden from you so that you never get exposed to them. A nightmare.
- dheera 7y ago
  I think this can be done a little more intelligently. Up/downvotes should be based on the structure of the site and more so than the meaning of the content. An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" or "I derived no information from this site because it threw 5 popups in my face". Or if I downvote a bunch of paywall sites it should stop showing me paywall sites. We're looking for a spam filter, basically.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    > An downvote should not mean "I disagree with this author" but rather "this site was useless spam" How would you tell them apart? If you could identify abusive site formats mechanically anyway why even solicit votes?
    - dheera 7y ago
      It's still relative. I hate paywalls, some people may prefer to just pay. I hate popups with a passion, so much that I will leave the site, but Average Joe probably just clicks them away.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    What you're proposing in this comment doesn't even work on Reddit/HN. People don't even agree what each star represents in 5-star rating systems.
    - dheera 7y ago
      That's because those rating systems naively apply the ratings across the entire population. The average of the star ratings should be weighted by the normalized dot product of each rater's style and your rating style, or the similarity between each rater and you. A 0-star rating from someone whose preferences are orthogonal to you should not influence the average rating you see.