My idea is a lot simpler and doesn't need any ML. Think of it as the linkedin feed: if you upvote a post, it'll be shown to your contacts, but if you upvote too

My idea is a lot simpler and doesn't need any ML. Think of it as the linkedin feed: if you upvote a post, it'll be shown to your contacts, but if you upvote too much junk posts, your contacts will unsubscribe. This idea is relatively trivial to implement as an alternative UI of HN. That site would show the very same html, but will hack the upvote and downvote buttons. You upvote to subscribe to someone and downvote to unsubscribe. If someone in your watchlist upvotes something, that something gets shown in your feed. You'd still use the main HN feed for discovery. Eventually this would form a network that propagates information in some way. That network could be even visualised in some way to see how certain posts travel thru it. The topology of the network, its dynamic properties and whether it'll remain connected are interesting open questions. The entire thing can be written as a one file python script with a sqlite db running on a 5 bucks vps. The biggest challenge is getting enough folks on hn to use it.