
The trouble with social news - metajack
http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/trouble-with-social-news.html
======
noelwelsh
I agree with this post but I'm more optimistic than the author that a solution
will be found.

Let me use HN for examples, as that's the site I'm most familiar with.

The author correctly identifies that HN does a poor job of selecting new items
to display. Technically, HN exploits too much (gives existing high ranking
stories too much front page time) and doesn't explore enough (give new stories
a chance). I also expect that the population who reads the "new" list behaves
differently to that who read exclusively the front page.

We can fix both problems! We know of algorithms to balance exploration and
exploitation -- they're known as bandit algorithms. Instead of displaying a
fixed front page to everyone, choose the stories to show to balance
exploration and exploitation. This way new stories get a fairer chance and the
population observing both is the same.

There are some technical issues but they are solvable. I work on this stuff in
my day job (Myna -- mynaweb.com -- go sign up now! ;-) and we have an
algorithm for handling preference data. It would need some adjustment but it's
doable.

Next up is voting rings and so on. Also solvable -- stop using votes as the
only input signal. Observe what people actually do -- do they actually click
the link? Come back and comment? These are strong indications of interest. How
much text do they write? It's just a few words it's more likely to be a spammy
"ata boy!" comment. How long do they spend on the link (maybe we can track
this by using an iframe?) and do they scroll? The point is there are a whole
heap more signals that people give to indicate real interest. Start using
these and it becomes much harder to forge interest.

This area is known as implicit feedback, and again there is a decent body of
work available.

~~~
jamesmiller5
I have noticed that when the comment count surpasses the up votes the article
is usually very confrontational but isn't necessarily authoritative or
insightful on the subject matter.

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metajack
I always thought Advogato's trust metric[1] was really interesting. It was
part of Raph Levine's (of libart and Ghostscript fame) PhD thesis, but he
later switched topics. As I recall it worked fairly well, but Advogato was a
small community and probably wasn't yet susceptible to most of the problems of
simple voting.

ku5oshin also had a unique peer-review style system that seemed quite well
thought out.

Slashdot had meta-voting, which was pretty neat.

It amazes me that after a decade of this, there is very little innovation. At
least the communities back then were trying hard to find novel solutions.
Instead of trying to figure out new mechanisms that are resistant to common
abuses, everyone seems to focus on finding and punishing the cheaters. You can
never catch them all, and it doesn't seem to scale well.

[1] <http://advogato.org/trust-metric.html>

~~~
jacques_chester
While reading the post, I too was thinking of the Slashdot / K5 / Advogato
examples.

It's weird to me that there are millions of professional nerds for whom this
trifecta is not a critical historical influence. Or even in their mind. At
all.

Anyway; the cycle of blooming and decay is as old as people. I don't think
there is a "solution". Just gotta accept it.

~~~
nwzpaperman
To accept something less than potential is a cop-out.

Solutions materialize, but it's never an all-at-once event. Printers evolved
substantially from Gutenberg's such that we have personal high-volume color
laserjets sitting near us with WiFi connections and AES encryption.

~~~
jacques_chester
Some problems can't be solved.

------
biesnecker
Regarding karma, this is one place where I think HN's implementation gets it
right (or at least more right than others). You can see your own karma, and
the votes of things that you've submitted (I'm talking about comments not
stories here), but you have to go look to see anyone else's, and you can't see
the karma they've gotten from their comments (except as a relative number
versus your own comment at the same level within a thread).

There are surely still karma whores (I'll admit to liking seeing the little
number next to my name go up) but it's not quite as in-your-face as somewhere
like Reddit.

~~~
onemorepassword
Personally, I'm not such a fan of the lack of transparency on HN, because it
makes the manipulations of the moderators very opaque and shady. My previous
account got slowbanned despite the karma accumulated over years.

If you're going to run a place like that, overrule the community and keep them
in the dark, you might as well ditch karma altogether (or make it 100%
invisible and just use it as an internal aid). Otherwise you're just
encouraging behavior you clearly don't want. I'm not arguing the right or
wrong about the way HN is run, I just don't see the point in having karma at
all here.

~~~
nwzpaperman
Transparency is key and the structural goal of a news platform should be
building trust corporately and incentivizing individuals to build TRUST...not
karma.

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eldavido
Re: gaming the system, voting rings and other tit-for-tat behaviors are very
much alive and well down here in the Bay Area. Without getting into specifics,
many groups here have strong if unwritten "upvote your friends" policies
encouraging promotion of each other's commercial interests, irrespective of
the quality of the articles. It's rather like special-interest politics, where
the damage done to the community is large but dispersed (from upvoting trash),
whereas the benefits are localized and perceptible.

My social network is also the best source of news I have, but most of the
information exchange takes place in private, often offline -- added plus that
face-to-face is the only way to get access to a lot of quasi- or truly-
confidential information.

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iuguy
One of the things that lends itself to abuse of things such as karma is a lack
of cost. It costs nothing to vote something up or down, therefore we associate
little value with giving karma (as you're not losing anything), whereas the
accumulation of karma typically requires some effort, so the cost of
acquisition is higher.

------
prawn
Solution for the one-vote problem could be a box at the top of the front page
with "Which (if any) of these five new stories are front-page worthy?" Does
potentially provide a lot of visibility to crappy posts though.

------
nwzpaperman
Some of us are building a real solution to the industry's problem. karma, as
demonstrated by reddit and HN, is subject to the hive mind phenomena. there is
a way to integrate peer voting, but it most be up-down, to start, and it goes
beyond that for a scalable solution. can't say more...

the best factor is paid subscriptions.

