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You should add the simpler, deeper issue of upvoting mechanically filtering out good long form content. Say I found a link here and it's a really good long for
by gbog 13y ago
You should add the simpler, deeper issue of upvoting mechanically filtering out good long form content.
Say I found a link here and it's a really good long form story, I really got into it, even had a coffee break while reading it. Then I want to vote for it, but the link has fallen down and is hard to find back.
It is even worse on Google, Facebook or Twitter, because of the infinite scrolling. I always open seemingly interesting links in the background and continue scrolling, but then hardly ever even try to like, plus one or favorite good content.
It's like a perverse filter, selecting cat pics and crash gifs over really nice content that require more than a few seconds to digest.
The one who will fix this will actually revolutionize content selection and probably kill curation.
- jzwinck 13y agoOne simple change would be to replace time-based "gravity" dragging items down as they age. Instead, gravity could be based on the number of users who have "finished" consuming the content. Perhaps by just clicking "Back" to the aggregator, or by explicitly acknowledging the completion. There could be three buttons: Like, Dislike, and Saw But Don't Care. In the algorithm to drive items downward, time would be replaced by the count of all three actions. Long-form content would then not be penalized so much (but would still be disadvantaged by users who dislike or don't care about long-form content, of course). A New page might also need to be sorted differently, e.g. by putting items with zero count at the top, and ignoring time as with the front page.