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Comment on Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

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It probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. -> k5 -> reddit -> HN.

At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.

Except a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!

You say that jokingly, but spam filters would probably work if someone was willing to slog through the digg front page long enough to build up a decent set of training data.

lisp? you mean arc good sir. I'm not sure how effective a bayesian filter would be at classifying news stories as interesting/non-interesting though. Has anyone tried this?

Yes, it looks like pg built something to recognize good/bad stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213951

Arc is a Lisp.

This is why hacker news has a collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click.

Don't underestimate the power of mass stupidity. It's killed many sites in the past. Even with a "collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click."

I don't understand; are you implying that there will simply be too many stories for editors to kill them all? The particular defense HN has against people voting up mind-candy is that editors can (and do) kill those stories. What makes you think this strategy won't work?

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