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I guess I’m all in favor of having better search engine results, but the pretentious tone and outright naïvety of this piece is astonishing. > a ranking algori

by WA 5y ago

I guess I’m all in favor of having better search engine results, but the pretentious tone and outright naïvety of this piece is astonishing. > a ranking algorithm that is immune to SEO Counter point: Voting rings. > An object with a higher market value is probably better Counter point: Pricing psychology, Tesla stock. > They are willing to bid up the price by spending their upvote on it. Nobody spends anything. This sentence alone is a deal breaker. There is no downside to upvoting and I can upvote everything. Makes no sense.

DeathArrow 5y ago
>Nobody spends anything. This sentence alone is a deal breaker. There is no downside to upvoting and I can upvote everything. Makes no sense. I just upvoted your comment.
darkerside 5y ago
I'm not a fan of the tone either, and I don't think the author did themselves any favors by comparing taking about academic papers early on, because this is very much not one. I still think you're missing the forest for the trees here. Your counterpoints are not wrong, but disagreeing with three sentences in the post and deciding that invalidates the whole thing is even worse than what you are saying the author did.
- pksebben 5y ago
  I'm kind of with WA; I think they're just being terse. The basic assumptions that underpin this whole concept are fundamentally broken. upvotes != market value market value != value votes are very gameable It's also inviting dismissiveness to be dismissive of the algorithm that created one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, because it's dismissive.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I didn't find it to be dismissive of PageRank as an innovative at the time, but I think it's fair to say it has not been thoroughly gamed out. Saying we shouldn't do this because it will eventually also be gamed doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. I do think people generally upvote things they find valuable. I'm curious what the disconnect is there.
tbran 5y ago
I agree. The article says: "MarketRank is built on the analogy of the market. An object with a higher market value is probably better." This is already how SEO works: if you get a link from another website to your content, it's like a "vote" for your content. A vote from a website with lots of votes is worth more. The result: This system is intensely gamed. People and businesses buy high-ranked domains and create private blog networks to set up backlinks to content that companies want to rank. Billions of dollars are at stake. It'll take a lot of effort to come up with something that can't be gamed. I appreciate the effort, but I don't think this is it.
ankit219 5y ago
I was shocked looking at the market rank algorithm giving 0 to the Zero to One book review on Goodreads (which shows up as a second result on Google). > We do not think it is much of a leap to say that the Farnam Street and Slate Star Codex articles are higher quality than most of the articles on Google’s first page of results. The author was like, I haven't heard to these blogs from other people, so they aren't quality. But hey, I know of fs and ssc, so they must rank higher because they are quality. The biggest mistake you can make in tech is assuming everyone else would like what you like or think of that as quality. I mean even techies can't agree on quality or approaches, let alone the rest of the world. The other paradox is that they compare the results on Google's first page to their marketrank score. If they could give us a top 10, we would be able to figure out better (subjective really) as to which set to 10 results do we want - when we know a lot about the search term, and when we know nothing about the search term.
- rchaud 5y ago
  ironically, a post like this may get more upvotes on HN simply because the prominent examples of sites shown all happen to be sacred to HN: slatestar, paulgraham and waitbutwhy. It's almost akin to a Reddit post referencing Marvel, Minecraft and Keanu. Playing to the crowd!
denton-scratch 5y ago
I do actually "spend" my votes on HN; I very rarely downvote, and I only upvote if I think an article or comment is too far down the list. HN is the only online forum in which I participate at the moment. My vote isn't really "spent", because I don't have a vote budget; but I do have an attention budget, and I'm certainly not going to vote on an article I haven't read.

by WA 5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

>Nobody spends anything. This sentence alone is a deal breaker. There is no downside to upvoting and I can upvote everything. Makes no sense. I just upvoted your comment.

darkerside 5y ago

I'm not a fan of the tone either, and I don't think the author did themselves any favors by comparing taking about academic papers early on, because this is very much not one. I still think you're missing the forest for the trees here. Your counterpoints are not wrong, but disagreeing with three sentences in the post and deciding that invalidates the whole thing is even worse than what you are saying the author did.

pksebben 5y ago
I'm kind of with WA; I think they're just being terse. The basic assumptions that underpin this whole concept are fundamentally broken. upvotes != market value market value != value votes are very gameable It's also inviting dismissiveness to be dismissive of the algorithm that created one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, because it's dismissive.
- darkerside 5y ago
  I didn't find it to be dismissive of PageRank as an innovative at the time, but I think it's fair to say it has not been thoroughly gamed out. Saying we shouldn't do this because it will eventually also be gamed doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. I do think people generally upvote things they find valuable. I'm curious what the disconnect is there.

tbran 5y ago

I agree. The article says: "MarketRank is built on the analogy of the market. An object with a higher market value is probably better." This is already how SEO works: if you get a link from another website to your content, it's like a "vote" for your content. A vote from a website with lots of votes is worth more. The result: This system is intensely gamed. People and businesses buy high-ranked domains and create private blog networks to set up backlinks to content that companies want to rank. Billions of dollars are at stake. It'll take a lot of effort to come up with something that can't be gamed. I appreciate the effort, but I don't think this is it.

ankit219 5y ago

I was shocked looking at the market rank algorithm giving 0 to the Zero to One book review on Goodreads (which shows up as a second result on Google). > We do not think it is much of a leap to say that the Farnam Street and Slate Star Codex articles are higher quality than most of the articles on Google’s first page of results. The author was like, I haven't heard to these blogs from other people, so they aren't quality. But hey, I know of fs and ssc, so they must rank higher because they are quality. The biggest mistake you can make in tech is assuming everyone else would like what you like or think of that as quality. I mean even techies can't agree on quality or approaches, let alone the rest of the world. The other paradox is that they compare the results on Google's first page to their marketrank score. If they could give us a top 10, we would be able to figure out better (subjective really) as to which set to 10 results do we want - when we know a lot about the search term, and when we know nothing about the search term.

rchaud 5y ago
ironically, a post like this may get more upvotes on HN simply because the prominent examples of sites shown all happen to be sacred to HN: slatestar, paulgraham and waitbutwhy. It's almost akin to a Reddit post referencing Marvel, Minecraft and Keanu. Playing to the crowd!

denton-scratch 5y ago

I do actually "spend" my votes on HN; I very rarely downvote, and I only upvote if I think an article or comment is too far down the list. HN is the only online forum in which I participate at the moment. My vote isn't really "spent", because I don't have a vote budget; but I do have an attention budget, and I'm certainly not going to vote on an article I haven't read.