

The vicious cycle of reputation systems - osamet67
http://www.signifyd.com/blog/?p=13

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Jarred
I don't think communities should directly rate the content. With more people
the general consensus on what is good and what is bad becomes so subjective,
to the point where it's what the user's that just happen to see it end up
defining it as either "good" or "bad". Instead, the webserver should simply
watch the activity levels of all content, including things like whenever a
user hovers over a link and for how long to things like replies. And based on
all of the available information it should give it a numerical value defining
it's influence on the community. It probably can't be 100% accurate, but it
can be pretty close and most likely better than what is in place in most
communities.

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osamet67
This is along the lines of what we're trying to do. Interesting ideas!

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Jarred
Thanks

Another big problem with both publishers and general discussion forums is that
the type of content changes at certain times of the day, and more
specifically, it changes whenever anything new is published. Why that's a
problem is because it means that the community is different at different times
of the day. In order to fix that the simple solution is to only enable
publishing in intervals. The problem with that though is that people like new
and interesting stuff. By giving a lag to new content it will increase the
chances of the user's being bored. So, the next step would be only showing
content that interests the user based on what's interested them before, and
having that content be constantly updated. That just went from a reputation
system to an individualized search engine. It's just a thought though.

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osamet67
Yeah, that's more of an internal community thing. What we're trying to do is
create an abstraction layer above all taht, that will either be agnostic to or
be able to understand these kind of trends. Semantic analysis of content, for
example, is one rabbit hole we're not planning to venture into.

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Jarred
Why not? Context/Individualized searches, or rather searchless searching has
the ability to make Google Search irrelevant, amongst all other "players" in
the search engine market.

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osamet67
Yes, but it's solving a different problem than the one we're solving.

