

Ask HN: An Alternate Solution for "The Hacker News Problem"? - edburk3

(This is a response to Alex Payne's thoughtful essay "Solving The Hacker News Problem": http://al3x.net/2011/02/22/solving-the-hacker-news-problem.html)<p>Ok, so let's imagine a "perfect" HN-style Home Page. What does it look like?<p>It only has submissions (and comments?) that might be of some worth to you personally, and it omits anything it anticipates you actively dislike.<p>Alex believes the way to create such a view would be to "fork" the HN community into something new, aligned with his interests (deeply technical news and discussion).<p>But the community he's looking for already exists as a sub-set within HN. It's just hidden; with no filter to bring it to the surface.<p>So, here's an alternate solution (and I'm not alone in proposing this).<p>Hacker News has a wealth of historical data in the form of prior up- and down- votes from users.<p><pre><code>  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537607
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680
</code></pre>
Imagine that each item on a (personal) HN Home Page was sorted using criteria like:<p><pre><code>  - how have you personally ranked similar items in the past?
  - was the item added to HN by a user you trust?
  - among users you trust, how has the item already ranked? and items similar to it?
  - how have influential users (high in reputation/"karma") ranked the item? and similar items in the past?
</code></pre>
I mean, sounds great, right? What would be the downside?<p>Well, for one thing ... echo chamber, much? ya digg?<p>You'd be losing the "discovery" factor. As Andy Baio put it recently: "software scoped to friends-only favors intimacy over serendipity" (waxy.org/links).<p>But, maybe that's good. Like, let's say you're tracking some deep technical news and discussion - an informed echo chamber might be exactly what you need.<p>So couldn't bloomfilter.org be simply a way to filter raw Hacker News into personalized home pages based on historical data? It seems like an experiment worth conducting, doesn't it?<p>What's the hurdle that prevents such a service from existing?<p>Well, here's one hurdle: <i>Hacker News does not expose any user voting history</i> (and probably for good reason). Users do have access to "saved stories" when signed in, and their prior submissions and comments are of course public, but that's about it.<p>So, I think HN would have to be modified such that a user could elect to make their voting history accessible (if not publicly, then perhaps via OAuth?)<p>Once users' voting records become available, experimental services could be built for any who would like to participate.<p>And from there, we could see the sub-communities Alex mentioned spring up, without "forking" the HN community entirely.<p>TL;DR:
Why can't we get access to HN user voting data, so we can make our own ranking/recommendation/prediction engines, and then everybody could subscribe to a little echo chamber of their own choosing?
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nkurz
I think it's a fine idea, and certainly it wouldn't hurt to start collecting
opt-in's. While the 'serendipity' argument is frequently presented, I think
this is just a matter of coming up with a better recommendation algorithm.

This proposal is already on the "Feature Requests" thread linked from the
bottom of each page. It's a pretty low traffic thread, so even a few votes
might help to make it happen: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878800>

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EgeBamyasi
One thing that would increcea the overall experience for me would be the
possibility to tag a post with a small set of simple tags(like Programming,
Startup, Other etc) and on my memberpage be able to specify what tags are
relevant to me and enabling /mytags to only show post with the appropriate
tags.

