
A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others - Florensio
https://www.argoledo.com/
======
rwmj
I'm really glad that people are experimenting with commenting systems. There
have been better systems in the past than Reddit or HN (such as Slashdot &
Kuro5hin). Some ideas which could be explored again:

* Whether you should be allowed to both post comments and vote on a single article.

* Whether you should have a limited or unlimited number of votes per day or per article.

* Whether established users can apply multiple up/down votes to a comment.

* Should votes happen along other axes than up/down (eg. "Funny", "Interesting", "Relevant"<->"Off-topic").

* How could meta-moderation be made to work without it seeming like a slog to review other people's voting?

* Can we see who voted on a comment?

* Can we display comments in a more relevant order? At the moment the highest voted top comments are spread down the page, mixed in with lower voted replies.

* Should there be a limited or unlimited range of voting? Is a -15 comment substantively different from a -20 comment, probably not.

~~~
megamindbrian2
Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

~~~
rwmj
> Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

I've no idea what it's like now, but in its heyday you could set your comment
threshold to +3 or +5 to read the dozen or so most insightful comments on each
topic. That was a great reader-friendly time-saving device. As far as I know
that's not possible on HN.

~~~
pjc50
Even better, they had custom multipliers for different kinds of upvote reason.
This let you do things like set "Funny" to -1 if you didn't like Slashdot's
sense of humour.

~~~
digi_owl
You can also tag people, and have their score weighted accordingly (and they
can see how you tag them in their profile)...

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craftyguy
Well, what is the ranking based on? It would be refreshing for a platform to
be completely transparent about how post rankings are established, but then I
guess you'd have spammers gaming it to get their crap at the top. The
alternative is you have spammers paying money to get their crap at the top.

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egypturnash
Damn, that is one hell of a condensed font. Nigh-illegible on the 72dpi
monitor I use at my desk.

~~~
disqard
It is surprising how much discomfort a badly-chosen font can create.

Also, their ads currently look rather intrusive. I wish them well in this "off
the beaten path" endeavor. Maybe they'll try out other fonts and better ad
placement strategies.

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danso
So posts get “to the top” based on time posted? Maybe the submitted title
should be changed into something less click-baity, like “A message board”

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meesterdude
can't pronounce the name easily; maybe/probably noneglish based?

reading one of the posts about ads, the admin writes:

> We are going to have to implement ads at some point anyway

oh that sounds like a fun rollercoaster to ride again.

> I know ads can be annoying, that's why we try to use them in an non
> intrusive way that can benefit both us and the users.

total wanker. ads do not benefit users, and saying they do means they take
users as idiots; or are able to lie to themselves.

So, that right there kills any interest; let alone the site itself being in no
way novel or interesting. There isn't an interesting community of folks, or a
meaningful platform to engage across.

Actually, this post, and entire posting history of this user(24 days old), are
just marketing efforts for the site.

~~~
dmortin
> total wanker. ads do not benefit users

So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of
sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for
all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill.

One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly
bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is
no generally accepted solution for this yet, ads are the only way to keep the
net free.

~~~
toofy
> ads are the only way to keep the net free.

Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back
in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall
and ad supported sites took over everything.

I don’t know if it’s the usual “back in my day things were better” thing
happening or whether they’re correct, but a web full of content produced by
people who are hobbyists and do so because they enjoy sharing their passion
sounds way better than a web full of garbage that is clickbaited solely to
maximize the amount of money coming in from ad support. In my experience
hobbyists sharing a passion is almost always more enjoyable and of a higher
quality.

I do recognize there is a middle ground in there somewhere, but I’m not at all
convinced the web would somehow disappear without obnoxious ads. People would
still create content just like they did before ads and before tracking had
infested everything.

~~~
petepete
For most people the web is "better" now, because they can use it. Back in the
_good old days_ it was mostly enthusiasts and academics. To people in those
groups the old web was a wonderful place gone forever. For regular folks, it
bypassed them and the current state of affairs; walled gardens, huge
centralised behemoths and adverts everywhere is the norm and has been since
the early 2000’s.

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mixmax2
A website about reading things with a font choice that discourages it.

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hartator
How does it get to the top then?

~~~
gitgud
It looks like its just chronological, could be wrong though.

Also, I'm not sure it's a scalable solution.

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FrozenVoid
There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments -
C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable.

Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of
replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

~~~
Strilanc
Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.

~~~
kqr
There should be a dictionary of common scoring systems and their flaws. So

\- Scoring on comment count :: Flame wars.

\- Scoring on forwards :: Chain letters.

\- Scoring on sum of "likes" :: Memes and simple jokes.

\- Scoring on five-star ratings :: hides important issues.

And so on. This way, we can make an informed business decision on what kind of
junk we can best defend againt.

~~~
aaron-santos
I feel like there's a connection to Goodhart's Law lurking behind the scenes.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

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pram
How about just showing comments sequentially by post date :V

~~~
sdenton4
Metafilter has been organizing their parts this way forever!

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boraalparat
My eyes are bleeding, please use a non-condensed font.

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mrtest002
The font hurts my eye.

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flatfilefan
Is it ironic that the site didn’t survive the “slashdot effect”, showing the
500 error now.

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petercooper
This is how we do it on [http://www.rubyflow.com/](http://www.rubyflow.com/)
\- a Ruby community link site. No voting, just in order and we delete/edit the
items if they're not any good. Basically took the whole idea from MetaFilter.

------
ohiovr
I like the spirit of the discussions. Good luck to you with your site.

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ams6110
The old joelonsoftware boards were like that as I recall.

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NegatioN
I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are
prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user.

Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact
that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most
likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since
everyone is dead set on their opinion already, and because of the limitations
in the commentning system discourages it.

What about a system based on NLP / ML where users can flag the truthfulness or
speculation? (For the UI part, I'm thinking something similar to Medium, where
you can select a favorite passage from a blog-post)

If you rank posts by how objectively true they are, and the amount of
truth/false-votes they get, you should be able to bootstrap posts in, while
also dynamically adjust to the popularity of it (number of votes received).

I know this is still a stretch with current machine learning technology, but I
think we (the internet) really need a place where we can more easily filter
out the bullshit, and discuss the things that really matter with people who
don't already agree.

~~~
pjc50
This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can
be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let
alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in
propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but
ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can
only give you a stochastic truthiness.

The only people who haven't given up on the approach of a massive symbolic
reasoning database to work out what's true and false are Cyc.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc)

You _might_ be able to have a system which auto-flags known bullshit
statements, but people _will_ get outraged by that.

~~~
NegatioN
Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :)

However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it
would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well
structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which
might be enough for a better system.

Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank
more objectively than an upvote/downvote system can?

I think we should be vary of being bound by everything that happened in the
70s due to the differences in resources for solving the problem, although I'm
not in any way saying this is easily solvable or even solvable in our time. I
do think it's not provable that we can't achieve this at some point.

~~~
pjc50
Some sort of minimum-effort or relevance filtering may be possible; after all,
that's what spambayes achieves. You could probably feed it a human-approved
list of "good" and "bad" posts and get a first cut at removing simple spam.

But really you have to define "good" "objective" and "structured" first. Or
even "effort". Is the system good if it promotes high-effort well-structured
calls for genocide?

