<story><title>Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach</title><url>http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>Interesting, but with an important flaw the author acknowledges:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; The important downside of these results is that the people using the system were not aware that points are calculated in a different way.&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in that HN-meta-whining thread, you can&apos;t engineer away jerks, and social problems need social solutions.  People will naturally adapt to any sort of engineered restrictions and find away around them regardless.  Personally I think the only way to maintain a very high standard of quality in a community is strict hands-on moderation and swift ejection of members who don&apos;t match the community&apos;s goals and vibe.&lt;p&gt;(In either case I think the thread this post refers to was about the negativity in comments, not the quality of submissions.  Though I might be remembering wrong.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>People don&apos;t divide cleanly into good actors vs bad actors. Feedback mechanisms such as karma and downvoting on HN allows people to learn how to behave within the community. The better the feedback mechanism, the better people will behave.&lt;p&gt;Properly weighting the votes from each user would allow more effective moderation to be crowdsourced from the whole community. Everyone should be a moderator, but only with the degree of authority that he has earned.&lt;p&gt;That weighting can be done with a technical approach as has been proven by search* companies. How does Google deal with the fact that there is no moderation on the web in general, and a multibillion dollar incentive to manipulate their results? Google results are really clean and usable despite the above limitations. Their approach is purely technical.&lt;p&gt;This proposal is an effort to enhance the ability of the crowd to moderate HN more effectively by improved weighting.&lt;p&gt;*Note that Google is almost solely a ranking problem, and the the term &quot;search&quot; is a bit of a misnomer. If you could see the bottom ranked matches for any query I&apos;m sure you would see plenty of unsavory content, but the first results (the ones you actually see) are really clean.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach</title><url>http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>Interesting, but with an important flaw the author acknowledges:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; The important downside of these results is that the people using the system were not aware that points are calculated in a different way.&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in that HN-meta-whining thread, you can&apos;t engineer away jerks, and social problems need social solutions.  People will naturally adapt to any sort of engineered restrictions and find away around them regardless.  Personally I think the only way to maintain a very high standard of quality in a community is strict hands-on moderation and swift ejection of members who don&apos;t match the community&apos;s goals and vibe.&lt;p&gt;(In either case I think the thread this post refers to was about the negativity in comments, not the quality of submissions.  Though I might be remembering wrong.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jorleif</author><text>Why can&apos;t you engineer away jerks? I mean, we have democracy, free markets etc. and among their main contributions is to engineer away the effects of bad behavior. In a democracy, you won&apos;t get the best decision, but you will get an acceptable decision. In a free market competitors force business to serve the customer.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, a techical solution which gives jerks a smaller influence seems an excellent partial solution. Sure, you might still need policing, but it isn&apos;t either or.</text></comment>