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by pathseeker 1742 days ago
Those are based on the assumption that votes are equal. There are a lot of people I just don't have any interest in hearing from.

No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems. And before you suggest that I could simply follow the groups I'm interested in, that's still not the same thing because the people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by the people I'm not following.

2 comments

How about this way to automatically address the Eternal September problem:

When you upvote an item - you connect stronger to people who upvoted that same item.

When you downvote an item - you connection to those who upvoted it becomes weaker.

The content is ranked based on how strongly you are connected to people you upvoted each item.

That way when a lot of clueless/uninformed people come in and start upvoting useless to you content - they don't create noise in your personalized content list.

The content you see comes from people who have proven to find useful content for you.

This is how my hobby project https://linklonk.com works.

I did a Show HN a week ago and that post has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405659

On the surface this seems reasonable, but in reality I think the users would end up inside echo chambers very quickly.
Yes, an echo chamber is a concern. But unlike other systems, you are in total control of who you get your content from. You are responsible for what you see. Which I think is the best place to have this responsibility. This does not work for everyone (e.g., kids don't know what is better for them), but hopefully many people will find it useful.
> Those are based on the assumption that votes are equal

No, absolutely not. Voters can be categorized, clusterized and ranked, already as part of voting systems theory (one single example in the latter: election of electors), and more beyond it.

> No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems

And why not. One example: views filtering contribution by score.

> people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by

Not necessarily, if they are given the option to avoid that.