
Ask HN: Curating the internet? - hsikka
Would love to get your thoughts. What if there was a chrome extension that allowed you to upvote any link you run into over the internet. This way you have a meta layer of human curation over the internet, giving contextual clues as to whether something is really useful or not!
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greenyoda
The simple upvoting system you described would only be useful if you happened
to like the same things as the average internet user. For example, I'm
probably not going to like something just because a hundred million teenagers
liked it. (An upvoting system doesn't even work very well for me on a fairly
narrowly focused site like HN - I only read a small fraction of the items on
the front page.)

A more effective approach might be for the system to learn what users like
based on the correlations between their upvotes and other users' upvotes. For
example: "people who liked X also liked Y". (Kind of like how Amazon suggests
merchandise to people.)

However, I already get more interesting stuff than I can ever finish reading
just by following links from sites that I already find interesting. So I'm not
sure what value would be added by having a curation service.

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hsikka
That's a fantastic point. I actually was thinking about building it and seeing
what happens, just as an experiment. Also, it would be a lot of work to upvote
after viewing the article

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bdcravens
Yahoo and DMOZ tried the human curation model. The extension is interesting
given you have sufficient funds for infrastructure and the substantial effort
you'll need to put into fighting spammers and those gaming it.

