I think I understand the trust graph concept. How is that converted into our effect on zaprank, though? It seems like we must also have something like a global trust score.
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I figured it was something like that.
This will tie into something darth brought up, is the algorithm non-linear in such a way as to discourage trying to game it by splitting your activity across multiple accounts?
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Trust cannot be created in an isolated part of the graph. Those accounts can only gain trust by someone trusted agreeing with them. If someone trusted isn't agreeing with them, they remain isolated. If someone trusted is agreeing with them, they can gain trust, but as we downzap the content they are promoting, it effectively re-isolates the subgraph and destroys the trust of the persons agreeing with the sockpuppets.
Zapping your own content also costs money so this all is less common than it would be otherwise. We only take 10% of zaps now, but it's something we've considered increasing should this behavior become more common. It's a simple way of putting pressure on the behavior should we not want to spend a lot of time doing cluster detection in our trust graph.
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I guess what I'm asking is more like if someone who is an authentic user could increase their influence by splitting their activity across multiple accounts.
They're posting quality stuff from each (and zapping it from the other) and they're zapping all the same posts from other stackers, but with half coming from each account.
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Yes. If their multiple accounts are engaging in a way that many people trust, they can increase their influence.
This isn't something we've attempted to address directly, but this kind of behavior would most likely show up as a very well connected sub-graph, ie a cluster, and we can penalize such clusters.
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That's interesting.
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One more hack for you, if you want to guess how other stackers' trust or yours, go to the comment session to see how the comment ranked when it's only zapped by you.
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That's sort of what inspired these questions. @grayruby was making fun of me because my zap of his fun fact had basically no effect on it's ranking.
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are you guys "inside trading"? 👀👀👀
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If we are, we're doing it very poorly, so you probably don't need to worry about it.
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That's a little insulting. We could successfully inside trade if we set our minds to it. :)
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I mean technically what I did was solicitation not insider trading. We didn't game the system I said something to the effect of "hey check out the fact my kids came up with please give it a zap if you are so inclined" and I will do this every damn time my kids give me a fact for fun fact friday. If people don't like it, too bad, come up with your own fact and solicit for zaps yourself.
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I appreciate the opportunity to attempt to help.
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how high trusted they are
That's the crux of my question. How trusted they are by who?
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How trusted they are by who?
The viewer in the case of personalized ranking.
In the case of non-personalized ranking, it's how trusted they are by everyone after we've iterated on our pagerank-like algorithm a few times. We select my personal column of trust scores from the resulting matrix, ie global trust scores are what I see all time, but most columns are nearly identical.
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# A agreed with B / (# B zapped - # B agreed with A). (We construct a confidence interval so we can predict with smaller samples what this proportion is likely to be.)# A agreed with Broughly becomes# A agreed with B - (10 * # A disagreed with B).