There is a different solution to the reddit one, one that discourages block voting.
Perhaps there should be voting groups, essentially a cap on the population of voters.
Each time you hit a threshold, you randomly split the voters in two and then the articles you see only get the votes of the people in your group. So one site has multiple groups on the go at one time, all to stop the overwhelming nature of popularity drowning out the minority.
It stops block voting as all you can do is influence the group you are in rather than the community as a whole. There's a good chance on a big site you're not in the same group.
On the otherhand you could end up with groups that have wildly different front pages that don't suit your tastes. Perhaps to solve that there could even be something intelligent about it in that it switches you into groups with voting tendencies like your own, improving your perceived quality of the site.
Comments are a little troublesome, do you include them in the group voting or not? In one group a comment could be negative, while popular in another.
A random thought that occurred to me, I generally hate these regular meta threads of 'HN has got bad'.
Do you know what I saw today on HN? DHH and Joel Spolsky duking it out in the comments. Two of my favourite internet personalities arguing.
Wow. I tried to build a voting-based news-to-your-personal-taste site, but never did I think of this "groups" idea. I'm intrigued.
Idea: do it to HN as an A/B experiment: see how the content of the sites diverges. Actually the "/classic" url does this, sort of, by ranking articles not by total votes but by votes from users older than one year.
Yea it suggests really interesting experimental hypotheses: would the content in the different groups diverge or would it stay more or less the same? And would the degree of divergence change over time?
Comments
There is a different solution to the reddit one, one that discourages block voting.
Perhaps there should be voting groups, essentially a cap on the population of voters.
Each time you hit a threshold, you randomly split the voters in two and then the articles you see only get the votes of the people in your group. So one site has multiple groups on the go at one time, all to stop the overwhelming nature of popularity drowning out the minority.
It stops block voting as all you can do is influence the group you are in rather than the community as a whole. There's a good chance on a big site you're not in the same group.
On the otherhand you could end up with groups that have wildly different front pages that don't suit your tastes. Perhaps to solve that there could even be something intelligent about it in that it switches you into groups with voting tendencies like your own, improving your perceived quality of the site.
Comments are a little troublesome, do you include them in the group voting or not? In one group a comment could be negative, while popular in another.
A random thought that occurred to me, I generally hate these regular meta threads of 'HN has got bad'.
Do you know what I saw today on HN? DHH and Joel Spolsky duking it out in the comments. Two of my favourite internet personalities arguing.
That rocked. HN is still the best place to go.
Wow. I tried to build a voting-based news-to-your-personal-taste site, but never did I think of this "groups" idea. I'm intrigued.
Idea: do it to HN as an A/B experiment: see how the content of the sites diverges. Actually the "/classic" url does this, sort of, by ranking articles not by total votes but by votes from users older than one year.
Yea it suggests really interesting experimental hypotheses: would the content in the different groups diverge or would it stay more or less the same? And would the degree of divergence change over time?
I wonder how strong the correlation would be.
Now I think about it in the light of day it doesn't solve the problem of too many articles getting submitted.