Hacker News Reader

Comment by _zeo8 | Hacker News Reader

1. Got it. We'll set a background color in the body.

2. I agree. We will think about ways to handle it. As a last resort we may blacklist those kind of publishers.

3. Sign in is only needed to favorite stories (using the little bookmark icon below each line). I agree that it is not clear what the sign in is for, we will fix that.

4. Yup, we will increase the contrast a little.

Thanks for the feedaback!

View on HN

On #2, using binary block/allow lists for sites works, but long term, it can be problematic in the sense of maintenance effort (i.e. your time ;). A less common but more interesting approach is to use site-based weighting. There will still be some manual wrangling involved, but you might be able to automate some of it eventually (analysis of content on the site, dns, linked-from analysis, google page-rank lookup, etc.)

With site-based weighting, you can still block with a threshold, but you gain the benefit of adjusting rankings based on past/known site quality, and the advantage of setting with a "default weight" for unknown sites you've never seen before.

It's really just a different approach that you might want to consider to handle the webspam/blogspam problem.

We already have mechanisms like weighting, whitelisting, blacklisting, etc. in place. We generally trust a good quality source (site domain) to produce good quality content, but there are exceptions. Since our popularity scoring algorithm relies heavily on social signals, it trusts the crowd to reward good content, and ultimately good content will rank higher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com