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Comment by gilgoomesh | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a misidentification of the true problem.

We're dependent on voting to determine "best" or "most important". Even if the sampling were statistically valid, populism does not equate to quality.

We should have automated systems for scoring articles on vectors of likely importance, relevance, accuracy and literacy so we can apply these to aggregators in conjunction with basic populism.

Because populism is easily gamed and has many known degenerate cases that are not fixed by throwing more populism at it.

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I think you are presupposing that automated systems for articles can't be gamed . Google has to constantly update their search API to combat this .

Absolutely, it can all be gamed and any approach will have cases where it fails. That's why a balanced set of approaches using a handful of very different metrics is important – and possibly offering users the ability to browse by each metric separately.

Should HN offer to try to show us things that people with similar interests to our own found interesting? Or is that ranking style too prone to filter bubble issues and too similar to what other sites already do?

I would enjoy having a separate view that tries to rank content by what others with similar voting patterns have upvoted. Though it might not work very well with comments because I often upvote comments merely because I thought they were unfairly downvoted, not because I liked or agreed with them.

I've also tried to upvote comments that I thought made an interesting point that I disagreed with, which I suppose doesn't necessarily mean that I'm especially interested in comments by their authors.

Such a system would likely help improve quality, it's just that it'd also be extremely difficult (and potentially costly/time consuming) to implement. After all, likely importance and accuracy are also (to some degree) community specific as well as relevance. A forum based on politics might consider a Donald Trump memo leak as the most important submissions whereas one about video game speedruns might consider a TAS video as theirs. A forum or site that supports a certain candidate might (unfortunately) want articles that support their preconceptions voted up more. And heck, even the way said factors are weighted would be context dependent. A news site striving for accuracy or a skeptics community might want to focus more on the submission's accuracy or literacy while a subreddit may want to focus on the likely importance of said submission.

It's an interesting idea, and I would love to see a system which could weight factors like this in a way that's easy to tailor for different communities. But when you consider the time and effort needed for such a system, I can definitely see why most just go with typical vote counts for ranking stuff.

What you're talking about is called an "editor", and web utopians spent the last decade or so screeching about how they're all autocratic gatekeepers that should be sent to the guillotine. It was a bad idea. We should have more editors.

No, editors editorialize and leak all of their human biases into determining what the readers see.

Do you rely on expertise in any domain? Quality editors are experienced in the domains they curate and edit. Given the volume of content that's produced, it makes sense to leverage editors. There's no bias-free news regardless, just as you point out, it's part of human nature. Finding a quality editor is well worth it, as you no longer need to spend as much effort in searching for and evaluating individual articles.

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