<story><title>Ask HN: What are you working on?</title><text>Hi HN, I&amp;#x27;m curious to see what cool things everyone&amp;#x27;s building. What side projects are you developing? What are you applying to HN with?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>enjeyw</author><text>An aggregator ala reddit&amp;#x2F;hackernews&amp;#x2F;twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:&lt;p&gt;- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.&lt;p&gt;- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than &amp;quot;frontpage&amp;quot; content&lt;p&gt;- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance&lt;p&gt;- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction&amp;#x2F;stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy &amp;quot;downvote shares&amp;quot;, which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.&lt;p&gt;It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.&lt;p&gt;Draft paper here:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drive.google.com&amp;#x2F;file&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjjncxS2&amp;#x2F;view?usp=sharing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drive.google.com&amp;#x2F;file&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjj...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;p&gt;Since this is a getting a bit of traction, if you&amp;#x27;re interested in testing it out when I&amp;#x27;ve got a prototype, I&amp;#x27;ve created a mailing list here&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forms.gle&amp;#x2F;EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forms.gle&amp;#x2F;EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think initial community is critical for getting these sorts of things right, so would definitely appreciate having some HN folks to test with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>On reddit, we created a bellwether award.  It was basically for the person who was most accurate at upvoting things that got popular and downvoting the things that did not.&lt;p&gt;The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.&lt;p&gt;My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you&amp;#x27;ve described your platform, the most &amp;quot;profitable&amp;quot; thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you&amp;#x27;ll think the most people will upvote.  So you&amp;#x27;ll need to adjust for that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What are you working on?</title><text>Hi HN, I&amp;#x27;m curious to see what cool things everyone&amp;#x27;s building. What side projects are you developing? What are you applying to HN with?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>enjeyw</author><text>An aggregator ala reddit&amp;#x2F;hackernews&amp;#x2F;twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:&lt;p&gt;- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.&lt;p&gt;- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than &amp;quot;frontpage&amp;quot; content&lt;p&gt;- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance&lt;p&gt;- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction&amp;#x2F;stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy &amp;quot;downvote shares&amp;quot;, which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.&lt;p&gt;It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.&lt;p&gt;Draft paper here:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drive.google.com&amp;#x2F;file&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjjncxS2&amp;#x2F;view?usp=sharing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;drive.google.com&amp;#x2F;file&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjj...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;p&gt;Since this is a getting a bit of traction, if you&amp;#x27;re interested in testing it out when I&amp;#x27;ve got a prototype, I&amp;#x27;ve created a mailing list here&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forms.gle&amp;#x2F;EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;forms.gle&amp;#x2F;EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think initial community is critical for getting these sorts of things right, so would definitely appreciate having some HN folks to test with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickysielicki</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve had a recurring thought where you supplant upvotes with something like an ELO system.&lt;p&gt;Basically, my thought is that I know &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; can follow something like the reddiquette, or the HN rules. I&amp;#x27;m certainly not perfect, but I don&amp;#x27;t downvote when I disagree, and I don&amp;#x27;t upvote when I agree, and I try to not make unsubstantive comments. Reddit and HN maybe used to follow this when they were very small, but as sites grow the rules always fall to the wayside.&lt;p&gt;The fix would be that you as the founder, and the X amount of friends that you know and trust, serve as a baseline for the ranking system. If someone downvotes a post that the trusted group upvotes, their influence on the site goes down as a result. Likewise, if someone upvotes the posts that you vote, their influence goes up.&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t actually use &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; E-L-O system for this, as far as I&amp;#x27;m aware, because it&amp;#x27;s not a zero-sum game. But the basic idea is that you take a known group of good actors and give users voting influence based on how similar they are to the good actors, and if you can&amp;#x27;t follow the rules (by acting similarly), you basically lose all influence on the site.</text></comment>