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A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

argoledo.com

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#22
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total wanker. ads do not benefit users So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill. One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is no generally accept…

> ads are the only way to keep the net free. Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall and ad supported sites took over everything. I don’t know if it’s the usual “back in my day things were better” thing happening or whether they’re correct, but a web full of content produced by people who are hobbyists…

For most people the web is "better" now, because they can use it. Back in the good old days it was mostly enthusiasts and academics. To people in those groups the old web was a wonderful place gone forever. For regular folks, it bypassed them and the current state of affairs; walled gardens, huge centralised behemoths and adverts everywhere is the norm and has been since the early 2000’s.

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#23
post #12

I'm really glad that people are experimenting with commenting systems. There have been better systems in the past than Reddit or HN (such as Slashdot & Kuro5hin). Some ideas which could be explored again: * Whether you should be allowed to both post comments and vote on a single article. * Whether you should have a limited or unlimited number of votes per day or per article. * Whether established users can apply mult…

How about ranking posts by latest submitted comment? Excluding people that have already commented on the post and the submitter themselves.

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#24

There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments - C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable. Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

I wonder whether that's what https://news.ycombinator.com/active uses.

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#25

There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments - C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable. Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.

Moderators can lock such threads/posts or even delete them. With this rating system, they're highly visible.

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#27
post #17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total wanker. ads do not benefit users So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill. One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is no generally accept…

> ads are the only way to keep the net free. Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall and ad supported sites took over everything. I don’t know if it’s the usual “back in my day things were better” thing happening or whether they’re correct, but a web full of content produced by people who are hobbyists…

Everything was better in the good old days, harrumph!

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#28
I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user.

Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since everyone is dead set on their opinion already, and because of the limitations in the commentning system discourages it.

What about a system based on NLP / ML where users can flag the truthfulness or speculation? (For the UI part, I'm thinking something similar to Medium, where you can select a favorite passage from a blog-post)

If you rank posts by how objectively true they are, and the amount of truth/false-votes they get, you should be able to bootstrap posts in, while also dynamically adjust to the popularity of it (number of votes received).

I know this is still a stretch with current machine learning technology, but I think we (the internet) really need a place where we can more easily filter out the bullshit, and discuss the things that really matter with people who don't already agree.

Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

#30

I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user. Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since everyone is dead set on their opinion…

I think we would need more than the 'truth' dimension to make this work. Writings can have great value even if what they say is not directly 'true' - think poetry, motivational writings etc.
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