This post makes the mistake of assuming that reddit and similar sites actually implement "wisdom of crowds". They don't. They don't because you get to see the 'most popular' answers and choose from those to vote on, if you really wanted WoC to work you'd need to present people random stories to vote on. (This is part of what I attempted to do in my <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/wildfire-has-launched.html">Wildfire</a> Facebook application).
He also proposes Bayesian filtering as a suitable technique for presenting the recommended page. Despite that fact that I'm a Bayesian-head (see <a href="http://getpopfile.org/">POPFile</a> for example) I don't think that's a total solution. You can do ML for news (it's an old idea, see the 20 newsgroups test set for example) and I have a private 'reddit' which I use as a feed reader that does ML.
But I think if you want to solve the 'reddit problem' you actually need to give people the chance to control the 'crowd' that they are getting recommendations from. I'd like to see (actually, I am building) an application that's reddit-like, but uses a combination of ML and social aspects to get a better view of interesting stories.
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This post makes the mistake of assuming that reddit and similar sites actually implement "wisdom of crowds". They don't. They don't because you get to see the 'most popular' answers and choose from those to vote on, if you really wanted WoC to work you'd need to present people random stories to vote on. (This is part of what I attempted to do in my <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/wildfire-has-launched.html">Wildfire</a> Facebook application).
He also proposes Bayesian filtering as a suitable technique for presenting the recommended page. Despite that fact that I'm a Bayesian-head (see <a href="http://getpopfile.org/">POPFile</a> for example) I don't think that's a total solution. You can do ML for news (it's an old idea, see the 20 newsgroups test set for example) and I have a private 'reddit' which I use as a feed reader that does ML.
But I think if you want to solve the 'reddit problem' you actually need to give people the chance to control the 'crowd' that they are getting recommendations from. I'd like to see (actually, I am building) an application that's reddit-like, but uses a combination of ML and social aspects to get a better view of interesting stories.
Some of this I wrote about <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht...">here</a>.