The flaw in HN/reddit votes, Twitter faves, FB likes, etc is that not all persons who see a submission will use them. Every silent observer contributes to that illusion of assent that helps entrench deviant behavior.
Timelines are great tools for skimming content, but while we can aggregate content easily enough ("scan the room"), we have no tech solution for returning the social feedback that meatspace society relies on ("the room fell silent"). You could force that feedback by turning the timeline into merely a historical lookup, and delivering new posts to the user individually and not letting them return to the rest of the app without interacting with it in some way. Also, block unregistered users entirely, unless they can be locked into the same use pattern by some means that escapes me at the moment.
(If we split off into sci-fi dystopia land, measure the user's emotional state as they scan each post and accumulate those scores back to the author. This is terrible, please no one ever implement it.)
Facebook has said that they don't want to put in features that would discourage participation. If someone updates their status and lots of people "dislike" it, they might not want to update their status next time.
For HN, I'd like to see a "track it" button - I don't want to upvote a lame article but often the HN community has a lot of interesting things to say so I'd like to keep track of those article's conversations.
Actually instead of counting down-votes HN software could just count how often a post was up-voted and then that vote regretted (reversed) and adjust the visibility to boost or silence. But that is still susceptible to misuse so there should be a limit on how often that would count.
Yeah, the buttons get out of hand, but the information they would represent is greatly needed. And how do you encourage people to rate what they read and interacted with? Based on the stats people post about the amount of traffic driven by an HN or Reddit submission ... the vast majority of users don't interact via any sort of voting mechanism at all.
I am working on a site now that is heavily based on passive activity voting, users have no idea how their actions are being used by the site to rank itself. Their inputs have much less weight than purposeful actions where both parties are aware of the event.
It is almost like you need an agent that votes in certain public ways (sentiment analysis,summarization,etc) to decide if comments snarky, funny, off topic, etc.
> if HN/Reddit or other platforms brought in a quality score to peoples upvotes to negate people who do tend to upvote catchy headlines.
Slashdot pioneered this AFAIK and it helped.
Perhaps HN could track clickthroughs and allow upvoting after a specified time - e.g. 3 minutes - has passed (after clicking), to prevent upvotes when the user hasn't really read the article. Downside: if you know the article already from elsewhere, you'll be prevented from voting too.
If upvotes were public (or at least available to you when logged in), it could just trawl HN's history at some set interval (one year past?) and feed you anything you upvoted that day.
edit: or rather, a few intervals to allow for reposts even after that year period
the only thing worth voting for would be a recommendation engine based on previous upvotes. i come on HN to explore articles, i'm not looking for specific keywords usually. but, my past voting history shows what type of articles i find interesting and getting notifications based on those would be nice. pricing would be a major factor as well, since HN works perfectly fine without a watcher.
There has to be some way to register negative feedback so that you can find out what is widely unpopular. The key is to lower the power of individual down-votes so that an idea can’t be easily trashed to the point where most visitors won’t even consider reading it. (I find myself doing this sub-consciously in review sites and app stores for instance, where once something falls to about 3 stars I don’t even want to see what the fuss is about, I just skip it.)
One thing I’ve never seen is a vote that accounts for the number of unique visitors, or the total time that visitors spend on a page, or even contributor status, before weighing feedback. An issue that isn’t immediately important to a lot of people should require some time to decide popular/unpopular status.
A page shouldn’t show up/down status to anybody* until a significant amount of feedback has been collected, either. This would prevent knee-jerk down-votes of ideas that seem unpopular to everyone based on a few early down-voters. A proposal should stand on its own, at first. After a certain time period, the page could reveal whether or not an idea has really turned out to be popular, and at that point the cost of up-vote/down-vote could change (e.g. maybe only comments are allowed at that point, and no simple clicks).
There are people who I find I trust to make smart submissions and smart comments. However, with the increasing popularity of HN it's all too easy to miss a submission or comment by them. Sometimes by fluke of timing or something an otherwise worthy submission gets missed, un-upvoted, and sinks without trace.
I'd welcome a system that finds items it thinks I'd find interesting and brings them to my attention. the occasional false positive will mean that I see things I otherwise might ignore, and I would get the chance to upvote things I think deserve it.
The fact that there are so many people doing or thinking about something similar shows that there is a need. Or at least a want.
Privacy issues aside, I'd love a co-occurring votes / collaborative filtering based approach to HN. The problem here is that a fixed threshold of votes is a coarse estimation of quality and relevance.
Imagine a system where each HN vote is weighted according to your similarity to that voter. That way a vote by people with whom I have very little in common would also be worth very little to me.
I'd love to view a HN where I don't see the highly-voted Gruber/Apple/Facebook posts but I still see the stuff about Clojure, Steve Blank, and patio11.
How about having the scores show up after a week (or X amount of time). Practically nobody votes on week-old posts, but I often use -- for example -- searchyc.com's average points per post to get a feel for a user's contributions.
That would balance the elimination of mob voting with being able to ascertain (historical) credibility.
Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset.
This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.
Maybe a solution could be weighting the vote according to the user history: a user leaving a single vote on a single movie shouldn't be as influential as an user that voted on a wider range of movies over time
I think utilizing another method besides "votes" could help increase traction for more submissions. For example, if I could easily discover users who share my interests, I'd love to receive an update (RSS) whenever that user submitted, voted, commented, etc. on an article. Instead of receiving a stream of content that may not interest me (I therefore only scan the page), I would know the content I'm seeing is somehow pre-vetted (at a minimum, by the submitter).
Ironically, I've felt this way for a while and created a website to test this theory.
I agree with you. If only HN admins could release the (user, post) upvote tuples, we could do some ML and filter the content we're interested in. I know I'd do so much with this.
HN has taken such a hard-right turn these past few years I've begun intentionally optimizing my karma-motivated behaviour for fluctuations in karma. Which is to say, I mentally overlay my actual karma score with a shadow score that increases whenever someone engages with something I write, either by replying, downvoting, or upvoting. A GOP downvote pile-on is now pretty good evidence of having said something truthful, especially when it's accompanied by an equally strong (or stronger) updraft of upvotes from other tendencies.
I've had half a mind to produce a browser plugin to do this for me, and apply it to everyone else as well, making the posts with the most engagement grow in `font-weight` and `font-size`, but the project is stymied by the number of snapshots and the amount of scraping I'd have to do; plus, there'd always be the possibility of missing an interaction.
Reddit does this pretty well, they often feature a submission with a dot instead of the number of votes. Perhaps HN could randomly put a thread at the top without showing votes.
Timelines are great tools for skimming content, but while we can aggregate content easily enough ("scan the room"), we have no tech solution for returning the social feedback that meatspace society relies on ("the room fell silent"). You could force that feedback by turning the timeline into merely a historical lookup, and delivering new posts to the user individually and not letting them return to the rest of the app without interacting with it in some way. Also, block unregistered users entirely, unless they can be locked into the same use pattern by some means that escapes me at the moment.
(If we split off into sci-fi dystopia land, measure the user's emotional state as they scan each post and accumulate those scores back to the author. This is terrible, please no one ever implement it.)
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