Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 587 posts

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#461

Post by avainlakech »

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

I find the Reddit moderator scheme both necessary and also toxic. I deleted my Reddit account a year ago and I feel my life is all the better.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#462

Post by tprice7 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #459
tprice7 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may go on a tangent, I’ve thought a bit about the problem of link farms and how it might be addressed. The problem is essentially this: since pagerank is basically the probability that a random walk through the link graph will end up on your site, linking back to yourself, and no other websites, gives a big boost to your pagerank because a random walk will get stuck on your site. Of course it’s easy to just igno…

Tangents are disallowed. But I'll grant you a hyperbolic trajectory. Link graphs remind me of lightning descending leaders. If you can have a sense of charge potential between cloud and ground, there might be a circuit equivalent which drains largely self-referential link-farms. Or is that rephrasing your description? My circuit physics / EE-fu is exceedingly weak.

"Or is that rephrasing your description?"

I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#463

Post by ClayM »

ansible wrote: post #159
basch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me fr…

I feel that Costco is worth it just based on bulk-buying toilet paper, dish detergent, and such.

we spent enough there that our rebate pays for the membership heh

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#464

Post by wozniacki »

simias wrote: post #339
cortesoft wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons that reddit can avoid 'blog spam' is because as a centralized service, they can control user registration and take measures to prevent bots from signing up for thousands of accounts and upvoting their spam. How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.

Reddit doesn't really avoid anything as far as I can tell. A lot of the content in the big subreddits is more or less well concealed "organic advertising". The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxi…

   The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these
   days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of 
   etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips 
   while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely 
   dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
This.

I don't know what the rest of the people praising reddit's redesign are talking about. My experience has been that its so heavily sanitized that unless you say something saccharinely in-tune with the consensus view, your comment risks being banished to the nethermost regions of the thread.

Most of the comments are rehashes of the same groupthink, echoing the same banal and glib points over and over till they choke out any real thought provoking, refreshing and original insights.

If the cost of having a system that surfaces original and thought provoking viewpoints means living with _some_ borderline hate speech subreddits, I dont mind paying that cost.

The alternative is just feel-good insanity and a thousand times worse, in import.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#465

Post by dredmorbius »

tprice7 wrote: post #462
dredmorbius wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangents are disallowed. But I'll grant you a hyperbolic trajectory. Link graphs remind me of lightning descending leaders. If you can have a sense of charge potential between cloud and ground, there might be a circuit equivalent which drains largely self-referential link-farms. Or is that rephrasing your description? My circuit physics / EE-fu is exceedingly weak.

"Or is that rephrasing your description?" I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).

The notion of a potential & sink seems to be key, and the idea that if you identify a collectively chained circuit, it cannot be both source and sink to itself. Which is what link farms (self-referral) or "mutual admiration societies" are. The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness. Since DNS obscures true ownership relations, that's a challenge.

Cluster analysis generally shows such relations though.

(I'm pretty sure these questions have generated multiple PhDs at Google.)

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#466

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

avainlakech wrote: post #461
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

I find the Reddit moderator scheme both necessary and also toxic. I deleted my Reddit account a year ago and I feel my life is all the better.

It's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it.

Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#467

Post by will_pseudonym »

"Prestige" and quality of a social network that you have no connections within, don't matter one iota. The product is the website and infrastructure of the network, married with the users and their connections within. See: Google Plus. They (stupidly or naively) thought that using the cachet of exclusivity and invite emails would work in its benefit just as it did with Gmail, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the product and the entire marketplace they were trying to succeed in.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#468

Post by ranger207 »

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #466
avainlakech wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the Reddit moderator scheme both necessary and also toxic. I deleted my Reddit account a year ago and I feel my life is all the better.

It's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what…

> leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.

Unfortunately this leads to meme cesspools lacking any major discussion. reddit's ease of discovery backfires here: it's difficult to keep a subreddit's content focused and meaningful if any random person who isn't invested in keeping quality content can wander in. Moderators, and their removal of "too shallow" content, dedicated days for memes or discussions, and creation of dedicated low-quality subreddits, are a necessary evil.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#469

Post by fishingisfun »

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

the redesigning of of our internal corporate website is just as dumb. I dont know what it is with this "web 3.0" design aspect but if something is stuttering with simple text input with 8 cores riding on 16 gb of ram, I am afraid to know what the future holds for web apps
Post reply on HN