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> The trouble is that this is an intensive manual process. And the other problem is that even when it works perfectly, this process as described can only produ
by lisper 3y ago
> The trouble is that this is an intensive manual process.
And the other problem is that even when it works perfectly, this process as described can only produce non-lameness at best.
I have a suggestion based on something I did at Google 20+ years ago: compute Page Rank on commenters. I did this 24 years ago in the Google Translation Console, which was a (now long-since-retired) public interface for volunteers to translation Google's site content into other languages. Translators would not just input their own translations but also rate the translations submitted by others. Translators whose translations were upvoted more often were deemed more reliable raters, just as links from highly ranked web pages are weighted more highly when computing Page Rank. This successfully prevented any translation spam from ever making it through to the public site (as far as we could tell). It never reached the scale of HN, but it's a lot easier to implement such a thing nowadays too, so I think it might be worth a try.
- freedomben 3y agoThis is an interesting idea, but some of the lamest commenters have tens of thousands of karma points, and many of the best commenters have relatively little karma because they don't spend all their time on HN. How do you structure this to avoid that problem? How would the system work for a new account just created to get established?
- lisper 3y agoIt has been over 20 years since I wrote the the TranslatorRank code so I have forgotten a lot of the details. But as a first cut, I would divide the raw score by the age of the account, and maybe weight more recent activity over older activity. Brand new accounts would probably need to be handled as a special case. Just out of curiosity, who would you cite as an example of a lame commenter with tends of thousands of karma points?
- intended 3y agoWhy was it retired?
- lisper 3y agoIt happened after I left so I can't say for certain, but my guess is they decided to hire professional translators instead.