Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>So, it might not be what you personally want. But to a lot of people, it’s more important to read/consume something popular... Count me in the "don't care" group. Which is why I always browse HN by "New" [0]. I neither know nor care which stories have been voted to prominence on the default frontpage, nor how this ranking has been determined. I just want to see what's new and select for myself what looks interesting…
I would suggest that one of the reasons you find the submissions on the New page valuable is that submitters are actively seeking out stories they think the HN community would upvote. So the content of the New page indirectly reflects popularity within the HN community.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#53When 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…
Further in community like HN, it’s not just about collaborative filtering to find things that you as an individual will like. It is about focusing the collective attention of the community on a small set of topics to drive rich discussions.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#54I think it would be interesting if users could spend their karma on performing moderator actions, perhaps with some sort of algorithmic exchange rate that converts acquired karma into modcoins. For example, it might cost 1000 modcoins to pin an article to the top of the page for ten minutes. Or perhaps more of a bold change: 2000 modcoins to make the text of your comment glow with a golden hue to make it more noticea…
Interesting idea, but this reminds me too much of Tinder.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#55I like https://hckrnews.com/ as an alternative front page
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#56Lots of discussion here about this approach and alternatives. Not sure how feasible this is but I think it would be even cooler to turn this into a site where users can define their own custom ranking algorithm and/or select from a set of available algorithms (including the one you're currently using). Maybe even provide a meta-ranking of the most popular ranking algorithms?
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#57I wonder how long this project will run. So many Hacker News interface reimplementations have gone dark over the years. Success to you!
Thank you! We built a lightweight page on purpose (server-side rendered go templates), to never involve a big hosting cost. In fact, right now, it's hosted on a fly.io free tier. But it's open source and anybody could host it, if we're deciding to shut it down.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#58Would just increasing the number of posts on the front page be an improvement?
I think so. The first page gets much more upvotes than the second page. There is a visible step in the data: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#upvote-share-by-ran...
Once a story drops to the second page, it receives fewer upvotes and can't sustain any growth anymore. Having a longer front page (we're showing 90 ranks), smooths out that effect.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#59This is interesting, but it would even better if I could see it sorted by descending upvoteRate.
That's a great idea! Similar to the hacker news /best page, where stories of the past 7 days are sorted by their upvote count, we could provide a page where those stories are sorted by their upvoteRate. Should be easy to do.
Re: Show HN: Quality News – Towards a fairer ranking algorithm for Hacker News
#60I guess I don't understand what the problem is with the current way of doing things? Like, HN is one of the few communities online now where the content and the conversation seem interesting, varied, and polite. Whats the core problem you're trying to solve here?
The only problem I have with HN is the endless content. I wish you could say, 'Show me stories that reached the front page', then hide or watch each story as you deem. That way I could clear out the front page like I do my inbox.
Sounds like https://hckrnews.com/ would be perfect for you.