[ibgib]

Do you believe that a completely in-the-open forum would be manageable? By this, I mean things like:

  - Everyone gets to see...  
    - who does the up/down votes.  
    - what any moderators' decisions/actions are  
    - what the algorithms for viewing real estate  
    - etc.  

Some other aspects:

  - The "forum" (and all inter-user communication) lives on a block chain-like merkle-DAG.  
  - The real estate algorithms would be customizable, i.e. you have varying views on the same data.  
  - The "forum" would also act as chat rooms, todo lists, picture galleries, and more...

[sillysaurus3]

This is a fascinating topic worthy of several blog posts. I've spent many years thinking about why HN and Reddit managed to succeed when all other communities failed. Much of it has to do with inertia, but part of it is design.

One of the central aspects of HN is that humans control it, and they have good taste. I don't think you can take either of those qualities away without sacrificing what makes HN good.

And part of that implies that any HN competitor needs to have those qualities in abundance – which means allowing them to wield real power, and not being constantly second-guessed by the community.

It's a tradeoff, and it's the "good king" problem. You want someone in power who wants to do the right thing, and who is capable of doing it well. But that's extremely rare.

Dan is close, and we're all lucky to have him. Scott is a close second. But their weakness is that they don't really participate on HN anymore. Neither of them post here, and we don't get to feel connected with them like we felt with pg in the early days.

I think I'm not alone in missing that connection. So my theory is that if another site springs up with similar characteristics to HN, but with actual humans running it – people you can actually strike up a conversation with – then those who are interested in good conversation will flock to it.

That requires being capable of executing that plan, which is the tricky part.

[ibgib]

Thanks for the extensive response. There are a couple points I'll break it down (I'm also loquacious on occasion):

> One of the central aspects of HN is that humans control it, and they have good taste. I don't think you can take either of those qualities away without sacrificing what makes HN good.

What if the user could "control it", i.e. could pick and choose algorithms of how to present views of the same data? Since everything is in the light, you could also share these algorithms - just like you share a collection of browser extensions or editor color schemes, etc. So you could have the "HN algorithm" which has the characteristics you mentioned with the slow-ban, and upvote/downvotes.

Heavily weight certain user's tags (think of voting up/down in terms of raw tags, and the repercussions of voting as an interpretation of those tags). These users would be who "HN" is - in this case the two that you're mentioning. You could also incorporate AI/ML opinions: Sentiment Analyzer A/B/../N, Some Other ML Analyzer, Bob's Analyzer. The main thing is that you have a way of associating identities with opinions, and then creating a projection algorithm that projects stories based on those identities and opinions.

So interestingly, it would be humans running the platform, but enabling each individual user to create his/her own projection algorithms.

> I think I'm not alone in missing that connection. So my theory is that if another site springs up with similar characteristics to HN, but with actual humans running it – people you can actually strike up a conversation with – then those who are interested in good conversation will flock to it.

At some point, won't the volume of interaction with any individual human exceed the ability of that person to respond? Won't the mentions, responses, etc. eventually be too much to handle? Also, isn't the up/down voting what determines in this site what the definition of what the "good" in "good conversation" is?

> That requires being capable of executing that plan, which is the tricky part.

Darn skippy. The characteristics I mentioned above I've already got well grounded with ibGib and it's taken quite awhile. It's a merkle DAG-based open-data design that I've created. Only I didn't create it to be a blockchain, as I didn't know how blockchains worked and was only vaguely aware of Bitcoin's existence. I created it to be a distributed microservice architecture (again, I didn't know the term microservice...I came up with "autonomous service" 15 years ago - still have the whiteboard). I wanted a SuperMemo-like learning algorithm, but the ability to have all of the aspects of the algorithm measurable (not an easy thing), to maximize the learning process. I've been shaving the yak ever since and it turns out to be like some understand blockchain graph data stores to act.

[sillysaurus3]

It's not that your idea doesn't have merit. It does. I went down this path myself, in the beginning.

But if you game out the implications of this, the conclusion is that everyone will see a different front page. And that has a bunch of subtle implications.

Reddit tried it. It could work. But it makes for a divided community, or set of communities. You see this with the various subreddit wars.

Do you have an email I can chat with you more about this? Hit me up if you're interested.

[ibgib]

We can "chat" in this ibGib:

https://www.ibgib.com/as-chat/pic%5E6F40CA17107671491E64DB0B...

I've started to respond a little bit to your conclusion of seeing different front pages. Note that the site seems to be a little slow at the moment (I'm not much of an optimized coder, as the underlying tech is hard enough - premature optimization and all that).

[sillysaurus3]

This was quite unexpected, and incredibly cool. This is your chat project, right? Are there desktop notifications? Can I read more about it somewhere?

I'm a bit busy tonight with hacking, but I'll keep the tab open and check it periodically.

[ibgib]

Oh, and also, I should say anyone interested can join that "chat" (not that there will be anyone, mind you)...

And it's especially slow today - not seen it like this before. Barely possible I'm hitting the extent of my small instance's capabilities.