

Convert Facebook newsfeed into Reddit-style trending stories - usaif
http://apps.facebook.com/additback/

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Esifer
Is it me or there is serious astroturfing going on in this thread? There are
bunch of new accounts with no submissions, 1 comment and 1 karma posting one-
liners like:"Awesome","Pretty cool", "Looks interesting"... Just check last 10
accounts on bottom of this thread.

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fmax30
Meh, probably the author should not have categorically asked everyone at plan9
(an incubator he heads) to up-vote this story and make comment like awesome ,
cool etc .

Umar Saif probably thought that he could use his position of power to get all
the up-votes he want , what he didn't know was that HN has specific filter to
counter the just the karma gathering activities like this one.

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danso
Yeah I hesitated to even comment on this story, knowing it would be flagged
almost immediately. How could someone put a bunch of time into an app related
to social ranking and networking and not be savvier at astroturfing?

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blackdivine
This is a bold step, I must say, Facebook is known to raise issues with app
that provide something that Facebook is already providing but in a better way.

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adilsaleem
Interesting concept, the ranking is definitely different from that of
Facebook, its cool to get a different view of the same feed

~~~
blackdivine
Yes, that's what we are striving for. Not only a different but a BETTER view

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usaif
Do you know that around 50% of your friends' updates are never seen by you?
Why: Stories are buried deep in your newsfeed; facebook also only shows
stories of the friends who regularly interact with you on facebook. Additback
digs deep in your newsfeed to find the most interesting stories

No more endless scrolling of your newsfeed to find interesting post by your
friends. Get a ranked list of trending stories every couple of hours

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usaif
The app basically goes around the facebook EdgeRank algo and finds trending
stories -- as opposed to only showing the stories from friends with whom you
have a good edgeRank.

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danso
the first premise of this app is flawed:

> _Around 50% of the updates by your friends are never seen by you_

Well yes...I suspect that's the same ratio of HN posts that are never
read....because no one liked/upvoted them...and if thhe algorithms are right,
that's a _good_ thing. I'm not saying there isn't room for a new way to rank
posts (in either FB or HN)...but it's a _good_ thing to not see 100% of all
the drek that gets posted to your news feed.

* edit: What would be useful is to see a comparison of how the OP's rendition of the feed compares to the status quo. I've been mostly satisfied with FB (though how do you really know how good it could be?) two of my best friends recently got married. Their friends are also close friends of mine. Theoretically, my newsfeed should be absolutely swamped with notes and photos of their wedding, and a constant circlejerk of likes and comments (I've posted scores of photos and tagged them myself, which creates a mass of FB notifications in itself)...but I've been pleasantly surprised to see that FB has still kept up an interesting variety in my feed.

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blackdivine
I totally agree, that it's a good thing not to see 100% of posts from either
HN or FB

But the updates that you miss are also some which have a lot of
likes/shares/comments on FB. That's what we do, we don't dig out crap posts,
but only those posts that outrank others.

So we have found out that you also miss those high ranked posts, almost as
much as 50%

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usaif
You need to take a look at Facebook's EdgeRank and how this circumvents it:
[http://mashable.com/2013/05/07/facebook-edgerank-
infographic...](http://mashable.com/2013/05/07/facebook-edgerank-infographic/)

