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I think there are a couple reasonable assumptions about high-karma users that we can work to our advantage: 1. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" q
by dfranke 20y ago
I think there are a couple reasonable assumptions about high-karma users that we can work to our advantage:
1. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" queue than average, because they spend enough time on the site to exhaust "top" and want to read more.
2. They're more likely than average to be open-minded about controversial stories as well as less tolerant of inane ones. If they spend more time on the site, then it's more to their advantage to promote interesting stuff rather than promote an agenda. It's dumb to piss in your own pond.
Here's what I propose: high-karma users get more voting power over *young* stories, to enable them to police the "new" queue and out-muscle spammers and voting rings. After stories are a few hours old, high-karma users no longer get a boost if they haven't voted on them yet. If high-karma users have already voted on a story when it reaches the aging threshold, the boost goes away for upvotes but not for downvotes. That way:
1. Bad stories never see the light of day, because high-karma users bury them and they stay buried.
2. Controversial stories will make the front page, but they don't stay there long if the rest of the community doesn't like them.
3. Good stories make it to the front page slightly faster.
- pg 20y agoWe have some software for dealing with spammers and voting rings. It's not that visible, but it's there.
- dfranke 20y agoDang, already? Sounds like Arc is working out well. Still, though, any statstical approach (which is what I assume you're using) is going to have some lag because you have to wait for a statistically-significant sample. You can catch any given offender after he's caused an O(1) amount of trouble, but if the offenders don't correlate with each other, you can get overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of them. Spammers certainly do correlate with each other, but it's not obvious that voting rings do.
- notabel 20y agoI'm prone to think that pg's algorithm is, to some extent, content based. I have no real evidence to support this, just the evangelism in "A Plan for Spam."
- dfranke 20y agoRight. That's what I meant by "spammers correlate with each other". I'd be very surprised if content-based filtering were useful for catching voting rings. You can use graph-theoretic metrics to catch them, but unlike spammers, identifying one doesn't obviously help you identify others.
- danw 20y agoPerhaps they use highly advanced computers called 'humans'? :D