Idea: browser extension that notices two things: when you follow links from the HN front page, and whether you upvote that story. If you read an article and don't upvote it, it labels that article "dreck". If you do upvote it, it labels that article non-"dreck". Maybe it has some subtle reminder that you should remember to upvote the article once you're done.
People who use this extension make HN better for themselves (because they're classifying articles according to their tastes as they go along) and they're also making HN better for others (by incentivizing people to upvote good material when they may otherwise have not upvoted).
If you have enough HN karma to downvote, maybe only downvotes count as dreck. Then you're still improving both your own and others' experience.
Yo dawg, I heard you like HN, so I proposed a browser extension that lets you improve HN while you improve HN.
Two general problems with this, and they're common to many content-recommendation / filtering systems.
• Explicit rating actions are only a small part of interactions with a site. Other implicit actions are often far richer in quantity and quality -- time spent on an article, interactions and discussion, the quality of that discussion (see pg's hierarchy of disagreement, for example), and other measures. As Robert Pirsig noted, defining quality is hard.
• Whose ratings you consider matters. The problem of topic and quality drift happens as general interests tend to subvert the initial focus of a site or venue. Those which can retain their initial focus will preserve their nature for a longer period of time, but even that is difficult. Increasingly, my sense is that you want to be somewhat judicious in who you provide an effective moderating voice to, but those who get that voice should be encouraged to use it copiously. Policing the moderators (to avoid collusion and other abuse) becomes a growing concern (see reddit and its recent downvote brigades against /r/technology and /r/worldnews).
regarding the second part, the proposed scheme uses hn's built in control of making users earn a bunch of karma before letting them downvote. I agree that topic drift happens, witness all of the bitcoin related discussion over the past year or so.
So, there are two basic approaches you can make to this:
1. Delegate moderation powers only to a select group of individuals who know and will uphold the site's standards. Effectively: and editorial board.
2. Allow all users to moderate. But score each on how well the result of their moderation adheres to a specified goal -- that is, for a given submission, was it 1) appropriate to the site and 2) did it create high-level engagement? Users might correlate positively or negatively, strongly or weakly. That is: some people will vote up content that's not desirable, and downvote content that is. Others simply can't tell ass from teakettle. In the first case, you simply reverse the sign, in the second, you set a low correlation value. And of course, those who are good and accurate predictors get a higher correlation value.
With the 2nd approach, everyone's "vote" counts, though it may not be as they expected. You've also got to re-normalize moderation against a target goal.
It's more computationally intensive, but I think it might actually be a better way of doing things.
People who use this extension make HN better for themselves (because they're classifying articles according to their tastes as they go along) and they're also making HN better for others (by incentivizing people to upvote good material when they may otherwise have not upvoted).
If you have enough HN karma to downvote, maybe only downvotes count as dreck. Then you're still improving both your own and others' experience.
Yo dawg, I heard you like HN, so I proposed a browser extension that lets you improve HN while you improve HN.