Is it ironic that the site didn’t survive the “slashdot effect”, showing the 500 error now.
A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#42can't pronounce the name easily; maybe/probably noneglish based? reading one of the posts about ads, the admin writes: > We are going to have to implement ads at some point anyway oh that sounds like a fun rollercoaster to ride again. > I know ads can be annoying, that's why we try to use them in an non intrusive way that can benefit both us and the users. total wanker. ads do not benefit users, and saying they do me…
> 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 fine if they actually individually curated by the website without JavaScript bullshit tracking. Until that day happens again, I am going to aggressively block ads and occasionally turn the filters off and randomly click ads to waste their money.
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#43I'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…
This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can only give you a stochastic truthiness. The o…
Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :)
However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which might be enough for a better system.
Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank more objectively than an upvote/downvote system can?
I think we should be vary of being bound by everything that happened in the 70s due to the differences in resources for solving the problem, although I'm not in any way saying this is easily solvable or even solvable in our time. I do think it's not provable that we can't achieve this at some point.
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#44Earlier 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 fine if they actually individually curated by the website without JavaScript bullshit tracking. Until that day happens again, I am going to aggressively block ads and occasionally turn the filters off and randomly click ads to waste their money.
Tell me more about how I can waste their money by clicking random ads. I have blocked all ads since adblockers were invented, but if I can actively create a disincentive by wasting their money, I want to do that.
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can only give you a stochastic truthiness. The o…
Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :) However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which might be enough for a better system. Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank more objectively than an upvote/downvote system c…
Some sort of minimum-effort or relevance filtering may be possible; after all, that's what spambayes achieves. You could probably feed it a human-approved list of "good" and "bad" posts and get a first cut at removing simple spam.
But really you have to define "good" "objective" and "structured" first. Or even "effort". Is the system good if it promotes high-effort well-structured calls for genocide?
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.
There should be a dictionary of common scoring systems and their flaws. So - Scoring on comment count :: Flame wars. - Scoring on forwards :: Chain letters. - Scoring on sum of "likes" :: Memes and simple jokes. - Scoring on five-star ratings :: hides important issues. And so on. This way, we can make an informed business decision on what kind of junk we can best defend againt.
I feel like there's a connection to Goodhart's Law lurking behind the scenes.
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#47I like the spirit of the discussions. Good luck to you with your site.
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads are fine if they actually individually curated by the website without JavaScript bullshit tracking. Until that day happens again, I am going to aggressively block ads and occasionally turn the filters off and randomly click ads to waste their money.
Tell me more about how I can waste their money by clicking random ads. I have blocked all ads since adblockers were invented, but if I can actively create a disincentive by wasting their money, I want to do that.
AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/)?
Re: A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.
> Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting. I've no idea what it's like now, but in its heyday you could set your comment threshold to +3 or +5 to read the dozen or so most insightful comments on each topic. That was a great reader-friendly time-saving device. As far as I know that's not possible on HN.
I read it on no filter. It's the best way to fully absorb the community.