[interblag]

There might be some value in opening these algorithms up but, also, the moment you reveal how they work you will immediately start to see them gamified. Aspects of content recommendation/moderation will always be adversarial, and there are many good arguments in favour of some opacity in these types of systems.

[photochemsyn]

I feel they're already being gamified, but by people with an inside line to Twitter, i.e. shareholders and advertisers. If you mean something like search engine optimization on Google by random people wanting to get their content on the front page, I believe there are ways to prevent or minimize that. Of course Google has just gone and pumped advertiser content to the top of search rankings...

[HWR_14]

> search engine optimization on Google ... there are ways to prevent or minimize that

If that was true, I'd imagine you could get quite a nice payday from Google.

[moduspol]

HN's algorithm is open source, right?

That's not to say it's never been gamed, but it doesn't seem notably more "gamed" than Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Gamifying HN doesn't provide anywhere near the return that gamifying Twitter would.