103 sats \ 5 replies \ @kr 3 Jan 2022 \ on: [RFC] Ranking SN posts meta
I'm in favor of a Web of Trust approach.
This is how communities in the physical world have operated for thousands of years.
New members to a tribe, community, or town start off with little trust. They can either build up trust by working for it or can sometimes kick-start their trust by having a friend, relative, or other community member vouch for them.
The key with a vouched model of trust is that the person vouching for a new community member is also putting their reuptation on the line. If they make a bad recommendation, they too lose trust within a community (along with the new member).
Stacker News could implement an identical system with one-time referral links, where any user can refer their friends who will automatically get a portion of their "reputation points" to start with.
If users want to start without a referral, they can, but as mentioned above they won't have much influence from the start.
As they post good content (judged by the number of upvotes * the reputation of the upvoters), they will begin to grow a reputation score themselves.
The biggest benefit to this system is in how it eliminates spam.
Today, I can create 1,000 accounts on Stacker News, fund each account with a few sats, and brute-force my content to the top of the feed.
Under a Web of Trust model, my 1,000 new accounts will each have 0 "reputation points", so even though there are 1,000 of them, 1,000*0 is still 0.
The key with a vouched model of trust is that the person vouching for a new community member is also putting their reuptation on the line. If they make a bad recommendation, they too lose trust within a community (along with the new member).
Determining whether a post is good or bad without downvotes is not very easy to do - maybe people just didn't see it and upvote it. We likely won't implement this kind of reputation sharing to start.
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What if we reframe the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to mean 'good or bad to the Stacker News community'?
If we let go of the idea that there is an objective way to measure good or bad, we are free to design a system around what this specific community deems to be good or bad.
A high sum of reputation points from upvoters is a signal of good content, and a low (or zero) sum of reputation points is a signal of bad content.
Posts that get a certain # of upvotes backed by people with a certain sum of reputation points could confirm quality content, rewarding those upvoters with additional reputation points. Vice-versa for content that doesn’t get enough upvotes from users with good reputations.
Anyone can accrue reputation points - as they create good content or vouch for other members, but also lose reputation points - as they create bad content or upvote things that the community doesn’t like. Reputation points can also decay over time if users are inactive (similar to how your reputation in a tribe would decay if you disappeared for a year).
As Stacker News grows, the possibility of a good post being ignored approaches zero.
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Yes I think as usage increases, posts getting missed is less likely. However, it doesn’t go to zero. It’s a well know problem on HN/Reddit that good posts get missed depending on time of day or day that they get posted.
Anyhow, I just meant to say I won’t ship WoT with penalties to start because good posts certainly do get missed now. People hardly upvote new stuff as is.
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Fair enough, so maybe the ratio of viewers to posts is what determines how likely something is to be missed?
If so, Stacker News should actually get closer to zero quality posts missed than Hacker News, because under a Web of Trust system bad content is costly (to one's wallet and reputation), while there are no reputation or financial penalties on Hacker News.
People will be less likely to post random junk on Stacker News, raising the ratio of viewers to posts.
Also, Stacker News can start paying users fees generated by the platform in accordance to their reputations, so there will be a direct incentive for people to participate honestly.
Crucially, the loss of reputation points matters here - otherwise, people could just mindlessly upvote random posts for 1 sat, get a few extra reputation points along the way when one of their upvoted posts does well, and then collect additional fees with their reputation gains... even if 90% of their upvotes are junk.
Without some potential to lose reputation points, there is no incentive to vote honestly, and the web of trust model falls apart.
The reputation of any person in any IRL community goes up and down over time, there needs to be some mechanism that punishes actions the community doesn't like for this approach to work.
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I agree. There will need to be penalties eventually.
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