

Uberfact: the ultimate social verifier - byrneseyeview
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfact-ultimate-social-verifier.html

======
iamwil
It took a while to get there, but here's the relevance, I guess:

"Paul Graham's design for Hacker News tries to avoid the degringolade by
actually using an oligarchy of human editors, including Paul himself, who will
tweak hidden reputation scores. While this will certainly be an improvement on
Reddit, I find it excessively algorithmic and antisocial. It has gotten past
democracy, but it's not yet unapologetically medieval.

What I'd like to read at Hacker News is simply the set of links that Paul
himself finds cool, or would if he had 80 hours a day to surf the net for
links. Paul does not, in fact, have 80 hours a day to surf the net for links.
But perhaps he has fifteen minutes to rate would-be toadies and henchmen, of
whom he has I'm sure a large supply, who could then rate submitted
contributions, and so on, producing a kind of ersatz impression of a massively
overclocked Paul."

It's an interesting premise. What are my opinions if I had all the time in the
world to figure out my opinion?

~~~
asdflkj
Opinions are computationally cheap and good-enough approximations of facts. If
you had "all the time in the world", you wouldn't need to approximate.

------
chaostheory
interesting: "Factions are self-constituting - they are responsible for their
own reputation algorithms. Anyone can start a new faction for any reason, but
generally they form by the usual process of human group formation - one group
gets too large and quarrelsome, and splits into parts."

From what I remember of social psychology, the perfect faction size is about 8
members. Once you go over that number new factions will form inside the
original one... then again i think this only applies to people that meet face
to face

