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Can you honestly see yourself joining a knitting community? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry

DanielStraight 17y ago
That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities. People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go through some of the complications of this system?
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down votes like on HN and reddit?
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    If so, then that would be really cool. I'm just saying I don't think the average user will do it on their own.
  - JoachimSchipper 17y ago
    For a user of which you have voted on many posts, we can define "interesting" directly. If we use I(you, u) to denote our proxy of the chance that you find user u interesting, we define I(you, u) = (number of upvotes to this user) / (number of total votes on all users). For any user u on which you have not cast a lot of votes, calculate I(you, u) as the sum of I(you, u') I(u', u) over all users u' (other than you or u), plus the above formula. There are some issues with this: it'll take some work to make it perform, and it strongly favours established accounts. But if you can solve the first issue, you can probably live with the second - karma has the same problem.
- alan-crowe 17y ago
  You are not asking when and why. Why? Forums have a life cycle. They start small, full of interesting people. Hoi polloi find them and join, to spectate and snark and lark. The signal to noise ratio falls and the interesting people leave. Forums self limit by drowning in mediocrity. If some mechanism could prevent this a forum could grow larger and have more interesting people on it. There may well be a critical mass of interesting people that no forum has reached yet. Failing that it would still be a big win if a forum could persist. Having to move on and find somewhere else is a pain and people would use a complicated system if it actually delivered on the promise of keeping the signal to noise ratio up. What is at issue is the individual signal to noise ration, what you see given your white list. It doesn't matter if the forum as a whole goes down the tubes as long as the interesting people never find out. It also doesn't matter if people disagree about what is signal and what is noise, each to his own white list. When? Outer Circle starts small. So participants can simply use the ALL option, and not bother with rating. However, the Outer Circle client should offer each user vote up and vote down puttons. These are private. As the forum grows and ages, two things happen: there is plenty to read, the signal to noise ration falls. Each participant has a breaking point at which he asks the system to use the his personal voting tallies to auto-build him a white list. Perhaps it should include those with positive totals and leave out those with negative totals. That could be done with putting all the positives on level zero, but if the forum is thriving the list will be thousands long. No. It is important that the auto-build takes some time to discover some structure so that it can build a hierarchical list. There is a social science hypothesis lurking here. Outer Circle assumes that the authors you rate very highly will read authors that you rate highly and that there is a clustering of preferences sufficiently tight that hierarchical sharing of white lists becomes an efficient way of constructing and managing large white lists. There after rating is pain-driven. When the signal to noise ration that you experience drops too low you think to yourself "Outer Circle is dying, where do I go to instead?" Then you remember your white list. You have continued to upvote and downvote, it is a habit, even though it doesn't seem to do anything. Now you can ask your Outer Circle client why the forum has become crap and it can tell you the paths by which you see the articles and suggest deepenings, shallowings, and directings to improve your experience. I think that there is a threshold effect. If the rating system is elaborate enough to keep the forum from dying it is worth the hassle, but a slightly simply system, which merely slows the decline and thus prolongs the agony is worthless.

DanielStraight 17y ago

That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities. People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go through some of the complications of this system?

stcredzero 17y ago
Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down votes like on HN and reddit?
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  If so, then that would be really cool. I'm just saying I don't think the average user will do it on their own.
- JoachimSchipper 17y ago
  For a user of which you have voted on many posts, we can define "interesting" directly. If we use I(you, u) to denote our proxy of the chance that you find user u interesting, we define I(you, u) = (number of upvotes to this user) / (number of total votes on all users). For any user u on which you have not cast a lot of votes, calculate I(you, u) as the sum of I(you, u') I(u', u) over all users u' (other than you or u), plus the above formula. There are some issues with this: it'll take some work to make it perform, and it strongly favours established accounts. But if you can solve the first issue, you can probably live with the second - karma has the same problem.
alan-crowe 17y ago
You are not asking when and why. Why? Forums have a life cycle. They start small, full of interesting people. Hoi polloi find them and join, to spectate and snark and lark. The signal to noise ratio falls and the interesting people leave. Forums self limit by drowning in mediocrity. If some mechanism could prevent this a forum could grow larger and have more interesting people on it. There may well be a critical mass of interesting people that no forum has reached yet. Failing that it would still be a big win if a forum could persist. Having to move on and find somewhere else is a pain and people would use a complicated system if it actually delivered on the promise of keeping the signal to noise ratio up. What is at issue is the individual signal to noise ration, what you see given your white list. It doesn't matter if the forum as a whole goes down the tubes as long as the interesting people never find out. It also doesn't matter if people disagree about what is signal and what is noise, each to his own white list. When? Outer Circle starts small. So participants can simply use the ALL option, and not bother with rating. However, the Outer Circle client should offer each user vote up and vote down puttons. These are private. As the forum grows and ages, two things happen: there is plenty to read, the signal to noise ration falls. Each participant has a breaking point at which he asks the system to use the his personal voting tallies to auto-build him a white list. Perhaps it should include those with positive totals and leave out those with negative totals. That could be done with putting all the positives on level zero, but if the forum is thriving the list will be thousands long. No. It is important that the auto-build takes some time to discover some structure so that it can build a hierarchical list. There is a social science hypothesis lurking here. Outer Circle assumes that the authors you rate very highly will read authors that you rate highly and that there is a clustering of preferences sufficiently tight that hierarchical sharing of white lists becomes an efficient way of constructing and managing large white lists. There after rating is pain-driven. When the signal to noise ration that you experience drops too low you think to yourself "Outer Circle is dying, where do I go to instead?" Then you remember your white list. You have continued to upvote and downvote, it is a habit, even though it doesn't seem to do anything. Now you can ask your Outer Circle client why the forum has become crap and it can tell you the paths by which you see the articles and suggest deepenings, shallowings, and directings to improve your experience. I think that there is a threshold effect. If the rating system is elaborate enough to keep the forum from dying it is worth the hassle, but a slightly simply system, which merely slows the decline and thus prolongs the agony is worthless.