hacker-news-digest VS news

https://hackernews.betacat.io/ here they use ChatGTP so summarize HN frontpage stories, and it says "Article discusses automated plagiarism and the diminishing value of authorship online. It compares today's internet to ancient texts, where authorship was less defined."

Looks solid, but you need to provide more stories and compress the data visually -- it is taking up a lot of space. Think how compressed the front page of HN is.

This is the AI summarizer I use for HN:

https://hackernews.betacat.io/

This is the AI summary of HN I've been using for the last couple of months:

https://hackernews.betacat.io/

It has totally revolutionized my use of HN. It saves me a lot of time each day being able to scan the summaries to decide what to read.

It has better design than the OP's site, but don't know if the summaries are better or not yet.

Source code is also available at: https://github.com/polyrabbit/hacker-news-digest/

I think so. I work with a group that was researching ways to improve the hacker news ranking algorithm. We concluded that there were "false positives" and "false negatives" -- stories often did or did not make the home page based more on timing and luck than the actual content of the story. Read more here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news

However, we concluded that the biggest problem is false negatives -- good stories that never made the home page -- because of submissions to /newest that simply don't get enough *attention*. There are too many stories and not enough eyeballs. As a result, there is not enough data to know if a story would do well if it were shown on the front page or not.

You can see this from the fact that there are many stories that are submitted multiple times, and 4 out of 5 submissions get only 1 or two no upvotes, and then the 5th makes the front page and gets hundreds. Sometimes it's due to timing factors -- the story has become relevant for some reason -- but often its just luck.

It's a short intro to raise awareness for the topic. Earlier, our research group "social protocols" published a new metric for Hacker News, but at that time, people didn't see the problem: https://github.com/social-protocols/news

Yesterday, we published our approach to improve the HN ranking algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35183317

As a follow-up, we'd like to ask if the community is interested in official experiments with this or similar approaches. We'd suggest having a second, experimental front-page on HN, which applies the upoteRate metric to the HN formula, as described here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#a-proposed-new-formula

To get a feeling, how stories with a high upvoteRate look like, we prepared a page, where all frontpage stories are sorted by upvoteRate: https://news.social-protocols.org/best-upvoterate.

What do you think?

Great to hear! We're still looking for strategies to cheaply retain more data. If you have any ideas, please jump in: https://github.com/social-protocols/news/issues/54

As a consequence, success on HN depends almost entirely on getting enough upvotes in the first hour or so to make the front page and get caught in this feedback loop. And getting these early upvotes is largely a matter of timing, luck, and moderator decisions. And so the best stories don't always make the front page, and the stories on the front page are not always the best.

Our proposed solution is to use upvoteRate instead of upvotes in the ranking formula. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to upvote a story compared to the average story, taking account how much attention the story as received, based on a history of the ranks and times at which it has been shown. You can read about how we calculate this metric in more detail here: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme

About 1.5 years ago, we published an article with this basic idea of counteracting the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659). Quality News has been created based largely on this feedback.

Currently, Quality News shows the upvoteRate metric for live Hacker News data, as well as charts of the rank and upvote history of each story. We have not yet implemented an alternative ranking algorithm, because we don't have access to data on flags and moderator actions, which are a major component of the HN ranking score.

We'd love to see the Hacker News team experiment with the new formula, perhaps on an alternative front page. This will allow the community to evaluate whether the new ranking formula is an improvement over the current one.

We look forward discussing our approach with you!

Links:

Site: https://news.social-protocols.org/

Readme: https://github.com/social-protocols/news#readme

Previous Blog Post: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659