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On that point I disagree because counting people, determining with 100% certainty that one zap = one human, is impossible today and will be more impossible tomorrow. Trust/reputation can be used to make better guesses about who is human, but it makes the system opaque and unfair. As is, it may be unfair, but it's transparent.
I wonder if the answer isn't user configurable weights. The raw data is in the zaps table, but users can decide their own methods of aggregation and ranking.
Obviously, that's information overload for most people. But maybe some human-friendly names for a handful of baseline configurations (Wild West Mode, Trust Mode, Default, etc)
Beyond information overload and engineering overload, it'd fracture everyone's experience on SN.
Under high variation regimes, the things I say about my experience aren't likely true of yours. e.g. this discussion we are having would be much harder to have if there were even a handful of modes of SN.
There's something special about us all playing the same game at the same time.
Yeah, it wasn't really a serious suggestion, as I think it's a "juice not worth the squeeze" feature, by any sane metric.
But I like thinking about the limits of possibility for these game theoretic systems of trust and attention.
The tradeoff between trust, transparency, accessibility to new users, robustness to bots/spam, and overall utility is a difficult balance to strike.
By fast food analogy: I like in-n-out because it serves hamburgers with little variation and has a relatively limited menu. It makes great hamburgers, and at scale, because it makes them with little variation and has a relatively limited menu.
I'm much more interested in building, and using, an In-n-out than a McDonalds.
I don't know how, but I think the number of up/down zaps (stackers) should be taken into account.