[Zamicol]

How about just a meritocratic rating? Even here on HN I would appreciate some sort of weight on expert/experienced opinion. Although in theory I like the idea that every thought is judged on its own, the context of the author is more relevant the deeper the subject. That's one of the reasons I still read https://lobste.rs. It has a niche audience with industry experience.

[Karrot_Kream]

Lobsters is a great example of the benefits _and dangers_ of expert/experienced opinion. Lobsters is highly oriented around programming languages and security and leaves out large swaths of what's out there in computing. That's fine of course, but it creates a pretty big distortion bubble that's largely driven by the opinions of the gatekeepers on the site rather than a more wide computing audience.

[skinnymuch]

Nothing is meritocratic. I think the term came into our lexicons because of a sociologist satirizing society and writing about how awful a “true” meritocracy would be.

[marginalia_nu]

> meritocratic rating

That is literally PageRank.

[skinnymuch]

Pagerank was mostly based on inbound links. A popularity contest with some nuance is just that. Nothing is meritocratic including any Google algo.

[marginalia_nu]

It's not merely a democratic vote, where the most links wins, but what the algorithm does is evaluate the links based on the popularity of the originating domain. In other words, meritocratic rating.

You can apply the algorithm to any graph, and what it does is find the most influential nodes.

[skinnymuch]

Meritocracy isn’t a thing. The person who coined it was rightfully mocking society. The recent 2019 Meritocracy Trap book goes further into this.

Your explanation is not “meritocratic”. The wealthy and powerful largely stay on top with the nuance you provided. The popular have more popular. are able to make what they link to more powerful and thus more popular. There is no meritocracy there.