Best April Fools News should've made it onto the front page but was likely only upvoted by lowly trusted users ... I was hoping making it harder to gain trust would break some trust clusters I've seen but that probably needs more direct treatment.
Looks like we need downvotes. The main problem is some users are both occasionally good and occasionally bad actors, but our WoT implementation doesn't let you tell us when you think a user is behaving badly and should lose your trust. This lets even just occasionally good users accumulate trust when they shouldn't if they are otherwise normally bad.
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Can't the WoT pick up bad content based on how few trusted users upvote it?
In other words, can silence or a lack of upvotes be a signal of bad content?
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The problem we have now is clusters of trusted users, perhaps managed by the same person, upvoting themselves. If they behave good long enough on each account, then they could upvote their own content with trusted accounts and there wouldn't be silence. We also have no way of determining whether a user saw something and didn't upvote it - unless of course we started tracking what users see which is a no go.
The best thing to do likely is the straightforward thing: for trusted users, show a ᐧᐧᐧ (dot dot dot) next to posts and comments and let them tell us they don't like something. It wouldn't even have to de-rank the post necessarily. It could just reduce the trust between those users.
Edit: I need to think on it more and come up with some approaches ... There are likely graph algorithms that would allow me to detect clusters and reduce their significance ... I could also switch us to private WoT (ie every user sees their own feed) but it's probably too early. Lots to consider
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Ah got it. I wonder if this is a problem at this stage of the site's maturity, or if it can solve itself over time.
When there are thousands of people upvoting good posts, would a bad actor still be able to maintain thousands of trusted accounts to upvote their own stuff?
Your second point about whether or not a user has seen something also makes me wonder whether the problem is temporary or permanent.
Won't content be harder to miss as the site grows larger if users are incentivized to upvote things the community will also find valuable?
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All good points but on the last point we have no such incentive yet.
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