That fails if you do a first-order implementation because you have no way of knowing whether the person voting/sharing had already read the article, but not necessarily shared it at the time of reading. As a simple example, I subscribe to The Economist and prefer reading the paper version. If I see a story from there cited by someone else, I don't need to read it again to recommend it.
Also, depending on the content and source it may be possible to infer the value or significance of something from the headline alone, eg when one has specialist domain knowledge and sees a headline one knows to be an accurate summary of recent developments in that field.
> That fails if you do a first-order implementation because you have no way of knowing whether the person voting/sharing had already read the article, but not necessarily shared it at the time of reading.
It might still hold for a large group of people, though, and be valid in a statistical sense? Which is what they're really after.
I wonder how it'd work if people with high karma (or HN score whatever it's called) had more than one upvote.
So people that the community trust would have a larger say in what the community saw on the front page. Say for every 1K karma they get an extra 0.1 to their vote... I think mine would be about +1.3
I think the same could work in democracy but on a more fine scale. At the moment my local MP has more of a say in government than I do. Rightly so. But we could make those levels more interesting, if we said that if twenty people endorse you, your vote becomes twice as powerful. I bet someone has thought this through better than me.
Also, depending on the content and source it may be possible to infer the value or significance of something from the headline alone, eg when one has specialist domain knowledge and sees a headline one knows to be an accurate summary of recent developments in that field.