In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while.
I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.
Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.
I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.
It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.
Simply making a bot to submit articles based on the home pages of some technical news web sites through screenscaping the external link URLs would be sufficient to increase the Karma score to unnatural numbers. So, some solution may be needed to stop this.
Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.
That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)
I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.
same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons.
With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here!
Systems similar to this have been proposed in the past -- probably repeatedly. For example, although you probably wouldn't want such a system to be purely karma-based, you could still implement it by selecting a handful of the users that you thought represented the kind of community you wanted.
You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.
However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.
Comments
In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while.
I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.
Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali...
Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.
I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.
It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.
Simply making a bot to submit articles based on the home pages of some technical news web sites through screenscaping the external link URLs would be sufficient to increase the Karma score to unnatural numbers. So, some solution may be needed to stop this.
That's easily solved by divorcing submission karma from comment karma, which pg should do anyway.
That sounds more complicated that Google's page ranking system. That said, it sounds like fun to program.
Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.
That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)
I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.
same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons.
With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here!
Great job btw pg.
I doubt we will ever have lolz cats on here. They would be flagged immediately.
Systems similar to this have been proposed in the past -- probably repeatedly. For example, although you probably wouldn't want such a system to be purely karma-based, you could still implement it by selecting a handful of the users that you thought represented the kind of community you wanted.
You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.
However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.
So in the end it's all a waste of effort.