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Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

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Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#11

Post by 999900000999 »

wpietri wrote: post #10

As long as we're talking about redoing this, let me suggest letting authors see the names of upvoters (and only upvoters). Quora had this and it did a fair bit to create positive community feelings for me. It also let people signal agreement/support without having to create a comment to do so, which I would find handy.

I actually wouldn't like this, it would make me afraid to upvote unpopular opinions I agree with. As is hacker News falls into the same trap as Reddit where there's a bit of a hive mind effect.

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#12

Post by jwarden »

PaulHoule wrote: post #5

When my RSS reader shows me an arXiv paper about ML with ‘fair’ in the title I hit the reject button. What is ‘fair’ is subjective and what I want is a feed relevant to my interests (also subjective.) This is 2023 and text classification problems that I struggled with at a startup 5 years ago are now easy and the power of transformer models is obscured by the ChatGPT hype. It is time that we turn our back in the coll…

Yes we understand taking issue with the word fair. But we should say we mean fair in a very specific way. We would say our algorithm is more fair in the sense that it, in some ways, it more fairly reflects the intent of the HN community as revealed by their upvote behavior. We talk about this more in the Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#13

Post by luckylion »

wpietri wrote: post #10

As long as we're talking about redoing this, let me suggest letting authors see the names of upvoters (and only upvoters). Quora had this and it did a fair bit to create positive community feelings for me. It also let people signal agreement/support without having to create a comment to do so, which I would find handy.

Wouldn't that lead to you seeing a pattern in who upvotes you which would make you more likely to upvote their submissions or comments, slowly guiding you towards bubble-forming?

And if someone doesn't upvote your "let's not eat babies" comment, do you go after them for being pro-baby-eating?

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#14

Post by jwarden »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #6

I'd like to see these alternate algorithms implemented. The API exists - and isn't that really the only way to ultimately judge if it's better or worse? Another random idea: have the parameters affecting rankings be visible and adjustable with interactive sliders- so you could customize the various weights to try to attain the ideal mix of stories for you. Or does that defeat the purpose. Is the joy of HN in knowing…

One thing that prevents us from actually implementing the algorithm is that there is some "secret sauce" to HN rankings that is not publicly available. There are flags, vote ring detectors, domain penalties, the second chance queue, and other means by which HN moderators change the rank of stories. And these make a *huge* difference. Our initial implementation of an alternative ranking algorithm was not an improvement over the existing HN home page for this reason.

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#15

Post by PaulHoule »

nico wrote: post #8
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

When my RSS reader shows me an arXiv paper about ML with ‘fair’ in the title I hit the reject button. What is ‘fair’ is subjective and what I want is a feed relevant to my interests (also subjective.) This is 2023 and text classification problems that I struggled with at a startup 5 years ago are now easy and the power of transformer models is obscured by the ChatGPT hype. It is time that we turn our back in the coll…

> It is time that we turn our back in the collaborative filtering algorithms that made social media a hellscape and embrace content-based filtering. Except people deeply care about what other people are doing. That was the whole point of Google’s Pagerank algorithm. So, it might not be what you personally want. But to a lot of people, it’s more important to read/consume something popular (ie. that a lot of others car…

A good system uses both but it's not trivial to blend them. My system is right now showing me maybe 30% of what it ingests, if I was seeing just 3% I'd have to cut back more harshly and a popularity score would help. Fundamentally a popularity score has a much larger dynamic range than a relevance score.

Google has both a document-query relevance score plus a document quality score.

I've heard from a lot of people who like reading HN from a comment-centric point of view and I tried feeding all the comments into my system and it was really too much. When I fed in high-scoring comments, however, I like the results. I had somebody suggest comments from Metafilter and I think that could be a winner but of course comments have a network structure of relatedness to other comments and the submission that a comment-oriented reader could take advantage of.

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#16

Post by PaulHoule »

petercooper wrote: post #7
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

When my RSS reader shows me an arXiv paper about ML with ‘fair’ in the title I hit the reject button. What is ‘fair’ is subjective and what I want is a feed relevant to my interests (also subjective.) This is 2023 and text classification problems that I struggled with at a startup 5 years ago are now easy and the power of transformer models is obscured by the ChatGPT hype. It is time that we turn our back in the coll…

it is well calibrated and just today my RSS reader told me a story I thought was a nothingburger would succeed on both metrics and… It did! I was originally going to joke that maybe you should turn your script on to the stock market, but I'm guessing with your background you may have some experience in that regard!

I've tried that and failed but I was using a crappy commercial sentiment analysis engine.

These guys succeeded though and wrote a great book about it

https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Sentiment-Power-Markets-Finan...

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#17

Post by abecedarius »

Idea: if you know all of a user's votes, you can estimate that they at least glanced over the items up to the lowest-placed one they voted on on the same page. This is a bit more information than "users tend to read higher-placed items following a known distribution" like the formula from your readme. I guess you'd have to be HN to implement this.

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#18

Post by manx »

PaulHoule wrote: post #5

When my RSS reader shows me an arXiv paper about ML with ‘fair’ in the title I hit the reject button. What is ‘fair’ is subjective and what I want is a feed relevant to my interests (also subjective.) This is 2023 and text classification problems that I struggled with at a startup 5 years ago are now easy and the power of transformer models is obscured by the ChatGPT hype. It is time that we turn our back in the coll…

Just looked up your profile. There's some super interesting stuff you worked on. We'll get in touch!

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#19

Post by unethical_ban »

I would like the HN UI to have a "favorite" button equally accessible to the "upvotes" button.

I know favorites are a feature, but they require clicking into the comments. I end up using upvote as a bookmark function, not as a method of approving of a post, because that's easier.

As it relates to this post, the HN UI encourages the feedback loop this submission is trying to fix.

Put a bookmark icon next to the upvote icon. Provide a unified view of upvotes+bookmarked for a user so they can see everything that got their interest.

Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News

#20

Post by jwarden »

abecedarius wrote: post #17

Idea: if you know all of a user's votes, you can estimate that they at least glanced over the items up to the lowest-placed one they voted on on the same page. This is a bit more information than "users tend to read higher-placed items following a known distribution" like the formula from your readme. I guess you'd have to be HN to implement this.

Interesting idea. Yes that's probably true. One issue is that a story could appear on multiple pages (top, new, show, etc.), and we don't know where the upvote came from. But I think we could deal with that issue and we might be able to use that as a datapoint to refine the upvoteRate calculation, and we could experiment with adding that to our model.
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