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This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people. The potential

This seems like a great idea designed for well-intentioned people. Unfortunately, the internet is running a bit short on well-intentioned people. The potential for abuse here is enormous. I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity.

bee_rider 2y ago
This seems like maybe a good use for some federated social media or web of trust methods? Like I don’t trust the internet in general to curate these links. But one could surely find networks where the average voter could be trustworthy…
- eykanal 2y ago
  Was thinking that when I wrote the comment. Unfortunately, spammers have gotten very good at gaming web of trust techniques (see amazon product reviews). This is a Hard Problem™.
  - arkh 2y ago
    Invite only networks were you're responsible for the people you invite à la what.cd : your invitee does something against the rules? They get banned and you get banned.
    - onlyfootnotes 2y ago
      like this idea too!
    - ansible 2y ago
      That is basically the idea behind https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ . There's approximately zero spam or other bad behavior. You can look at the full user tree (https://lobste.rs/users https://lobste.rs/users) and see if there's anyone you know who might be willing to invite you to join.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Very little spam, but also very little engagement. The same post on hn might have 100 comments and on lobsters it has four.
        bee_rider 2y ago
        As long as the growth rate is positive and it isn’t too expensive to host, a small stable growing site could be fine.
        ryandrake 2y ago
        I think we need to stop using "engagement" as a measurement of anything related to quality and usefulness.
        EasyMark 2y ago
        Quantity has a quality all of its own.
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Sure. But the odds of finding an insightful comment on HN is much higher than finding one on lobsters, merely because there is more content.
      - realo 2y ago
        Hey! I have been a good citizen of Hacker News for fourteen years now... Anyone here would want to throw me an invite to lobste.rs? :)
        Multicomp 2y ago
        Haha that's my line! I would guess that those people who are already on the seafood website know other technical people in their day-to-day workspaces like silicon valley or Palo Alto or wherever, so it's easy for them to get a link. Meanwhile for those of us on the opposite side of the US or, barely in the Anglo-Sphere at all, we are on the outside looking in and are not likely to get a link just by being mostly lurkers and occasional contributors. At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from his knee if the woods like hackaday.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Maybe some percentage of invitees? I can definitely see the need to disincentivize imprudent inviting, but one mistake is pretty rough. Surely you’ve met somebody in real life who’s revealed themselves as a jerk after initially appearing ok.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Yep it’s quite easy for a moderately talented spammer to undo the good work of a million people if they have a fast connection and mission to sew chaos and try to make $5
onlyfootnotes 2y ago
Yeah this is definitely a fear.. hopefully we can attract the well-intentioned people and put some nice automations in place for keeping spam to a minimum. Let me know if you've seen any similar projects do this well.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Maybe you could apply the web of trust concept? Tag submissions with a key, and then let people only see links that from keys they’ve trusted, or from keys that have been trusted by (some number of) keys that they’ve trusted.
  - onlyfootnotes 2y ago
    Yeah I was considering that idea too, like a trusted circle feature. But haven't done any user management yet as this is purely an experiment. Agree automation can only go so far, but at least that can catch the low hanging fruit.
- Ragnarork 2y ago
  I want to love this idea but I'm extremely skeptical you can automate "keeping the bad stuff out of it". It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human involved if you want to do it properly.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Is it actually moderation? Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder. * There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation * People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness * People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?) Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech. The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets. And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet. In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Yeah, this whole genre of products is an example of the Happy Path fallacy. There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites make people both dumber and angrier. So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally problematic. Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my site.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Most of the comment sections I’ve seen on news sites(for example) are filled with vitriol and are virtually useless except for trolls who demand to be heard. I always block them with ublock
dcow 2y ago
Just let the community downvote inanity. Why does everything need moderators? Honestly moderators would kill an idea like this. Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Unfortunately scammers have an interest in automating down votes for anything that shows them bad, and automating increasing their own ranking. Note that otherwise legitimate companies often become scammers against their competition.
- chucksmash 2y ago
  > Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations. How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?
arkh 2y ago
> I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity. IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and reddit place which is... meh.
- ClaraForm 2y ago
  I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the seriousness of life. Now it’s as bland as all the rest of it. I realize I’m doing the same in this comment , pontificating on the merits of humor. But I’m not like the rest, I swear! I remember when it was fun!
- bloopernova 2y ago
  That anarchic mosh pit of silliness is unfortunately very vulnerable to manipulation by extremist groups or nation states.
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    Worth the risk.
bschmidt1 2y ago
[flagged]

bee_rider 2y ago

This seems like maybe a good use for some federated social media or web of trust methods? Like I don’t trust the internet in general to curate these links. But one could surely find networks where the average voter could be trustworthy…

eykanal 2y ago
Was thinking that when I wrote the comment. Unfortunately, spammers have gotten very good at gaming web of trust techniques (see amazon product reviews). This is a Hard Problem™.
- arkh 2y ago
  Invite only networks were you're responsible for the people you invite à la what.cd : your invitee does something against the rules? They get banned and you get banned.
  - onlyfootnotes 2y ago
    like this idea too!
  - ansible 2y ago
    That is basically the idea behind https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ . There's approximately zero spam or other bad behavior. You can look at the full user tree (https://lobste.rs/users https://lobste.rs/users) and see if there's anyone you know who might be willing to invite you to join.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Very little spam, but also very little engagement. The same post on hn might have 100 comments and on lobsters it has four.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        As long as the growth rate is positive and it isn’t too expensive to host, a small stable growing site could be fine.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        I think we need to stop using "engagement" as a measurement of anything related to quality and usefulness.
        EasyMark 2y ago
        Quantity has a quality all of its own.
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Sure. But the odds of finding an insightful comment on HN is much higher than finding one on lobsters, merely because there is more content.
    - realo 2y ago
      Hey! I have been a good citizen of Hacker News for fourteen years now... Anyone here would want to throw me an invite to lobste.rs? :)
      - Multicomp 2y ago
        Haha that's my line! I would guess that those people who are already on the seafood website know other technical people in their day-to-day workspaces like silicon valley or Palo Alto or wherever, so it's easy for them to get a link. Meanwhile for those of us on the opposite side of the US or, barely in the Anglo-Sphere at all, we are on the outside looking in and are not likely to get a link just by being mostly lurkers and occasional contributors. At least for me, I'm the only HN user I know except my dad who doesn't even post, he just got lurk links from his knee if the woods like hackaday.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Maybe some percentage of invitees? I can definitely see the need to disincentivize imprudent inviting, but one mistake is pretty rough. Surely you’ve met somebody in real life who’s revealed themselves as a jerk after initially appearing ok.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Yep it’s quite easy for a moderately talented spammer to undo the good work of a million people if they have a fast connection and mission to sew chaos and try to make $5

onlyfootnotes 2y ago

Yeah this is definitely a fear.. hopefully we can attract the well-intentioned people and put some nice automations in place for keeping spam to a minimum. Let me know if you've seen any similar projects do this well.

bee_rider 2y ago
Maybe you could apply the web of trust concept? Tag submissions with a key, and then let people only see links that from keys they’ve trusted, or from keys that have been trusted by (some number of) keys that they’ve trusted.
- onlyfootnotes 2y ago
  Yeah I was considering that idea too, like a trusted circle feature. But haven't done any user management yet as this is purely an experiment. Agree automation can only go so far, but at least that can catch the low hanging fruit.
Ragnarork 2y ago
I want to love this idea but I'm extremely skeptical you can automate "keeping the bad stuff out of it". It's basically moderation, or a subdomain if you will, and I'm not sure there any place or product that currently has fully automated moderation that works. There's always a human involved if you want to do it properly.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Is it actually moderation? Moderation of, say, a comment section has some problems that seem (to me at least, I don’t actually work in this area, so maybe this is a naive take) to make it much harder. * There’s a desire to preserve continuity of conversation * People have different expectations of the types of content they find to be outside the domain of reasonableness * People have different expectations of what the job of moderation is (curating productive discussion or just banning truly odious stuff?) Like if I say I’m going to only host technical discussions, we will get a spiraling argument about where exactly the line is between tech and political policy around tech. The easy solution is for users to just mute people that they don’t like, but them you have a conversation where some participants can’t see eachother, they managing back-and-forth a between people with different muted subsets. And there’s still the issue of managing the general vibe, if it becomes conventional to throw around unpleasant or hyperbolic language, that could ruin the discussion for everyone, even those who’ve blocked the main perpetrators. Or the vibe could become toxic to new users who haven’t curated a blocklist yet. In this case, there’s no need to preserve the continuity of conversation. And the users have less ability to continuously change the vibe, since it is just a collection of links. And the entry point could be trusting a single user, so the overall vibe is less relevant.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

Yeah, this whole genre of products is an example of the Happy Path fallacy. There are studies showing that comments on articles erode the trust readers have in these articles. Given the quality of the average comment, it's likely that comment systems on most sites make people both dumber and angrier. So I think the idea of forcing comments (or user-contributed links) on sites that don't want comments is fundamentally problematic. Personally, I don't want random people on the Internet putting links on my articles. If you want to discuss what I write, or provider additional context, or disagree, then do it on your own site, or in a public place like Hacker News, not on my site.

EasyMark 2y ago
Most of the comment sections I’ve seen on news sites(for example) are filled with vitriol and are virtually useless except for trolls who demand to be heard. I always block them with ublock

dcow 2y ago

Just let the community downvote inanity. Why does everything need moderators? Honestly moderators would kill an idea like this. Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations.

bluGill 2y ago
Unfortunately scammers have an interest in automating down votes for anything that shows them bad, and automating increasing their own ranking. Note that otherwise legitimate companies often become scammers against their competition.
chucksmash 2y ago
> Let people flag NSFW and downvote bad faith annotations. How many users will take the thing for a test drive and then patiently click through and downvote every goatse link they find versus simply uninstalling it when they get goatse'd?

arkh 2y ago

> I have a difficult time seeing this becoming anything other than a cesspool of ads, 4chan-style joke links, and general inanity. IMO this is the kind of content which made early 2000 internet fun. Not the bland, moderated to hell and back social media sites are. Just compare what happened with the million checkbox experience which got a secret ARG made by users having fun and reddit place which is... meh.

ClaraForm 2y ago
I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the seriousness of life. Now it’s as bland as all the rest of it. I realize I’m doing the same in this comment , pontificating on the merits of humor. But I’m not like the rest, I swear! I remember when it was fun!
bloopernova 2y ago
That anarchic mosh pit of silliness is unfortunately very vulnerable to manipulation by extremist groups or nation states.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Worth the risk.

bschmidt1 2y ago

[flagged]