[mg]

The next hurdle to create distributed social media seems to be distributed likes and follows. Those are the social currencies of today's generation.

In a centralized system, you trust the central authority to show the correct number of likes a post got and the correct info who liked a post. Same for number of followers and who follows whom.

Do any of these 3 protocols have an approach to do the same in a decentralized world?

[saurik]

It is not obvious to me at all that this problem needs to be solved or that it is even a good thing for social networks to provide such stats; but, if it actually somehow is important, it is also a problem that is trivially reduced to the same problem as spam: likes and follows are simply signed messages, not pre-aggregated counts, and if you balk at sending someone a list of a hundred thousand signatures they are trivially compressed using zero-knowledge proofs. Now... how to prevent people from making up a million real-looking bot accounts? That is harder (though I absolutely believe is tractable), but you have to solve that anyway lest rather than inflating likes and follows people just flood the system with replies (and it is also a problem the centralized system will also have to contend with, though it might have more strategies available to it).

[kstrauser]

I wholeheartedly believe that those are anti-features. They're metrics that drive antisocial behavior and make the world a little worse.

[mg]

You say so on a website that displays the number of likes (here: "points") for every post right on the front page.

[saurik]

This is just such a strange thing to point out when the more relevant thing is that the comment itself does NOT display the number of likes even though that USED TO BE how the site worked because the people who maintain it decided doing so was actually a bad idea and actively removed the display of display of like counts one day, and while some people momentarily whined pretty much no one does anymore as it absolutely did turn out to be better to not have that mental clutter in the user interface as, in practice, it was irrelevant information for how people use the website.

[Klonoar]

This take is so tired. They’re stuck posting where engagement is because there’s nowhere near the level of discussion elsewhere.

Participating in something and trying to discuss how it could be improved when you disagree with it is normal human behavior.

[akoboldfrying]

Why do you think the engagement is here, and on other sites that do keep track of imaginary internet points -- and not so much on sites that don't?

Begin with "this take is so tired" if you want, but then I want to hear actual reasons.

[krapp]

Karma and voting are ruining Hacker News as well, just not as quickly because the algorithms here are not as aggressively tuned to maximize engagement.

[prmoustache]

That doesn't mean he agrees about them being good.

[mg]

Regarding whether it is "a good thing for social networks to provide such stats":

It's a central part of social media, even here on HN.

Look at the front page. Each post shows 6 pieces of information:

    Title, Domain, Points, Author, Time, Comments

2 of them = 33% are numeric indicators we trust because we trust HN.

Likes and follows are probably two of the main reasons that centralized social media sites have displaced websites, rss, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups etc.

[saurik]

And yet, Hacker News long ago removed the ability to see vote point counts on comments, and there is no mechanism for people to follow other users at all.

And, hell, while "author" is the most trivial feature of all to get right as it simply can't be forged in a signature-based system, it is incredible to me how many people on Hacker News actively try to ignore who wrote a comment (not me! the first thing I look at is your name as I think it is actively asocial to dehumanize the people you are communicating with).

I honestly think you will be surprised at how usable the Hacker News feed would still be if you remove everything except the URL itself, and had your client generate a URL preview, and encourage you to try hiding some of these fields for a while using a local browser extension / script / stylesheet.

The real magic of Hacker News -- both of the feed and of the comment thread -- is the algorithmic sorting that makes sense of the cacophony of submissions, not the silly indicators (which are likely serving more as distractions than as beacons) it is bothering to surface to you: those are merely serving the purpose of making its decisions seem credible (and if you go hunting you will realize there are many posts you likely didn't see for many reasons despite having gotten many likes or even comments).

The question then is really: "how can I algorithmically rank content on a decentralized network", and I think that phrasing of the issue unlocks tons of doors that myopically insisting on a scant handful of specific statistics that are merely one of many many inputs to the current system that actually rules your usage of the website uses precludes.

Sometimes, information the user might actively be using to argue with the recommendations is even best hidden from the user: TikTok notably will happily recommend a post from years ago and hides the timestamp from you as people doing manual mental filtering incorrectly deweight the value of old content and/or find it awkward to interact with.

Now, is sorting and filtering in a decentralized system for sure solvable? I don't know... I think it is, and have tons of ideas for how to do it! Yet, I would not be shocked to try really hard and fail, or even to discover some "trivial" (in retrospect) proof that it is impossible. But, either way, one thing I am very confident of is that likes and comments isn't it, as real world systems -- including Facebook and TikTok -- manage to surface tons of interesting content to me that have low numbers of likes: the world simply isn't best sorted by thumbs up.

[mrkramer]

>The question then is really: "how can I algorithmically rank content on a decentralized network"

An interesting thing would be if you could write your own ranking algorithm and then apply it to your followers' content or if you could at least tweak the algorithm e.g. "I want 70% of content to be from let's say cybersecurity and 30% from gaming) or (I want 70% of content to be from my friends and family and 30% of content from "Internet people" that I follow).

Edit: Custom ranking algorithm would be hard to design and implement but not unfeasible.

[stonogo]

My friend runs an activity pub instance, but the software he uses is called snac2. One of it's stated features is that is does not report follower counts. It also only reports likes or boosts on the home instance (not on federated feeds). The atmosphere on this instance is markedly different than elsewhere in the fediverse.