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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I think you must have arrived since the explanation of how we're going to avoid drift.

Vote weighting isn't turned on yet, but for the last couple weeks I've been thinking it was time to.

Incidentally, the poll problem can easily be fixed by changing the frontpage ranking algorithm to treat poll votes as worth e.g. a third as much.

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Awesome!

Color me skeptical about stopping drift, though. It'll be neat to be proven wrong. I wonder how you'd prevent the system from just emulating the editors, instead of the audience. Now with YC perhaps that's exactly how you'd like it, but for a more general purpose site I'd want more of a user-focus than an external-editor-focus.

For the newer people, thank you for the link about what the appropriate topics are. I think a time or two I asked "what does this have to do with hacking?" Now that I know the larger focus, I'll be more reticent.

It does seem like a "weighted" voting system defeats the purpose of having a voting system at all. What's the point of asking everyone to give their opinions if the only opinions that will matter are those that conform to the opinions of the editors!?

Of course, in truth I might be quite happy with this system. I've liked what the editors have let through so far (though last few days less so) and I would probably rather read what they suggest than what the "group" suggests.

Weighted voting is different from merely having editors, because there are two steps. The editors don't pick the stories. They (in effect) pick the people, who pick the stories. Sort of like the president picks a Fed chairman, but does not directly control the money supply.

Sure, but you wind up with the monetary policy that the president wants, not the monetary policy that you would get by democratic vote. (Though perhaps the analogy with the Fed is a little akward because monetary policy is something most policy makers agree on, not a matter of contested opinion.)

With weighted voting, the stories that wind up on YC news will closely reflect the desires of the editors. That's fine, but it's not a democracy. It's more like a benevolent dictatorship! (very benevolent ;)

Who picks the editors?

PG, I'd be interested to know why you chose to implement a voting/rating system for stories on news.yc. That is, did you consider a "weightless" submission system like, for example, MetaFilter, where front-page postings are a privilege that every member has equally. I've been a member of MeFi for several years and the effect of "gaming" has never really been an issue there, because there is no reification of trustworthiness in the form of a "karma" score. Certain members there certainly have name-recognition based on their history, but this gains them nothing in terms of influence on the focus or direction of the site as a whole.

Before you change the ranking, are there any specific things you like or dislike thus far? I've noticed a lot of new user accounts lately, so maybe now would be good for a state of the union.

Stuff that takes less than 30 seconds to view and vote up is a bad sign. In fact, that suggests a solution...

Require a click and a five minute delay for all articles to be voted up?

Please do! news.yc seems to be veering a little off track a bit lately and it'd be nice to see it come back.

After all, if people want the full wisdom of the crouds/mob rule thing then there's always Reddit.

Not to nit, but communities like reddit aren't really following "wisdom of crowds" model anymore, as outlined in the book.

To truly obtain wisdom from the crowd, it has to be collected:

a) non-sequentially (i.e. all votes are cast independently of what everyone else cast)

b) taken from wide cross-section of the population.

Once a community has formed around particular topics (far left politics, atheism, xkcd, "vote up if ...") you may be collecting wisdom of _that_ crowd but not wisdom applicable to anyone beyond that select group.

I think one thing that might help is if the choice was a little less binary. A one to five star rating system might help sort out the difference between "a decent way to kill some time at work, so up vote" (3 stars) and "something that will actually change the way that I look at the world, so up vote" (5 stars). Something to think about.

"Maybe" is one option too many

http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/20/remove-maybe-from-invitati...

A better solution than that would probably be to add two different types of votes, "agree" and "disagree." Maybe even "interesting." That way you don't have upvotes meaning a bunch of different things.

Then you can indicate the level of agreement/disagreement on some sort of graphical/iconic bar. Having a number of points means almost nothing except that a bunch of people clicked the arrow. With an agree/disagree/interesting system, you can even do math in the background to determine the kinds of articles that certain people tend to like, and you can really figure out their personality that way.

Then again, polarizing things into three categories isn't a very accurate way of discovering what is truly popular in a community. But I do think it's better than selecting certain people to have heavier votes.

I have severe doubts about this kind of voting system, weighted by moderators or not. A post that was voted up by 100 people and down by 100 people (assuming equal weights) will look exactly the same as one that nobody ever touched. It ruins the effectiveness of voting as a ranking mechanism.

DZone, which is linked in the article, has up and down votes that they keep track of separately. That way, they don't cancel out. Instead, you get an idea of the total positive and negative sentiment.

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