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> Instead of looking at how long people spend on a site, we would encourage users to give explicit feedback on rankings and use this to improve our ranking syst
by TulliusCicero 4y ago
> Instead of looking at how long people spend on a site, we would encourage users to give explicit feedback on rankings and use this to improve our ranking system.
While they're not wrong about how the way Google determines ranking has its issues, this way has its own set of problems. If you explicitly use user ratings as part of your rankings in some way, people can punish sites they don't like, ala review bombing on Yelp, Steam, etc.
Not saying it's necessarily a bad idea because of that, but I hope they don't fall victim to the mentality of, "let's just trust the users" as an ironclad rule, because that doesn't always work out well.
- whoknows2 4y agoAlso let's not forget Reddit. There's a lot of bullshit on top.
- zo1 4y agoI went back to Reddit a week back after a 1 or so year, and what I saw was just disgusting on the main feed. One click, a bit of scroll and I was watching people calling republicans terrorists and being praised/upvoted/gifted. It's not just about bullshit at the top, it's also about echo chambers and the online equivalent of mob-behavior.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> it's also about echo chambers and the online equivalent of mob-behavior. This particular example might be about the Republican party-wide support of echo chambers and offline mob behavior that led to an invasion of the building containing politicians certifying the vote of a newly elected leader and fueling disinformation about elections to weaken the trust and integrity of the system?
- AussieWog93 4y agoRegardless of this particular example, there has always been a pretty strong bias towards one side of US (and Australian, for that matter) partisan politics on the front page of Reddit; with over-the-top accusations towards the Republican Party as well as the LNP both receiving thousands of upvotes despite their poor quality.
- dieselgate 4y agoGood point, especially on the internet
- daoudc 4y agoGood point, this is not going to be easy to get right.
- kolinko 4y agoBombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings. The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.
- closedloop129 4y agoWhat if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoThe internet-should-be-anonymous crowd wouldn't like that. But it's no worse than Google tracking everything A-Z.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoI'm very much part of that community but I could see verified moderators using it. However it could just be reputation based like on Wikipedia
- RL_Quine 4y agoYou can’t limit to real people. If you managed to, I would make a service where people can sign up and I’ll pay to use their account. No cost to them and they make some money from it, seems totally reasonable.
- closedloop129 4y agoThat's just another group of people with reduced credibility. At some point, the price to incentivize the next person to offer their account is more expensive than the benefits of link manipulation. Every corrupted account can be discovered because the manipulated content stands out and will be reported.