hacker-news-undocumented VS efficientdemocracy

Post with text insted of an URL get a penalty, so it's more difficult that they reach the front page (unofficial faq with more details https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re... )

My suggestion is to repost the link in a new submission (URL only, empty text), and add your explanation as as a comment.

> it's hard to engage without understanding the rules.

On the other hand, if you fully understand them it’s easier for spammers to circumvent them and changes would have to be done way slower (because they’d have to be documented every time).

You’ll sometimes find posts by dang explaining various policies, and there are some sources which try to document the undocumented:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

It is my understanding some websites (like dev.to) are automatically killed due to a prevalence of low quality posts. But users with showed enabled can still see those and vouch for them, which brings them back alive. Posts may also be flagged by users for a variety of reasons such as the subject having been posted and discussed multiple times in the last few days, essentially making the new post a duplicate.

Hacker News is extremely strongly manipulated. What users see as popularity order is actually the order edited to the moderators' liking.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#behavi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod

Are there more?

[0]https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

[?]https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

>30 karma, same as flagging: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

More things in the unofficial feature list maintained by minimaxir https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Unfortunately it still doesn't mention "rate limited" accounts[0], which is extremely confusing when it happens to you. It's happened to me on this account, I can't comment more than 5 times per some arbitrary period - I'm guessing 24 hour UTC.

No explanation or information is given - you don't even know until HN seems broken and you go searching. dang mentioned that's something they'd like to impove, but given the slow movement of HN features, I doubt it will.

Note that none of this is meant as a slight on dang - I respect the work he does and really like the site, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue.

0. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

Post with an URL in the text are penalized and it is harder for them to reach the front page. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

Not me, because I can't yet, but I can shed some light.

That comment brings nothing to the table. An upvote would have given the same meaning. This is not reddit, and some of us would prefer it to remain different. Low effort comments tend to be downvoted, and interesting ones upvoted.

So uplift your comments, say why you are thankful, what will be your use case, where you wouldn't use the OPs icons, ... give some information, not just noise.

Here [0] is some more information about downvotes.

[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

Problem

Reddit needs moderation, but I dislike centralizing the power.

Solution

My solution is to remake Reddit but with decisions made by efficiently estimating a referendum [0].

To do this, I use a combination of tools: elected representatives, statistical samples, and referendums. Though each is individually flawed, they complement each other.

Democratic moderation

The efficiency of elected representatives lets them act as the first line of defense. They make most of the decisions and prevent a flood of requests on the community's time. I detect bad decisions with user disputes[1] and then correct the decisions by triggering a statistical sample. Similarly, samples get corrected by referendums. The efficient corrected by the accurate.

Samples

Samples are powerful:

* they scale - doubling the population size barely increases the required sample size

sample_size = pop_sizek / (k + pop_size – 1), where k depends on the desired accuracy [2]

* they encourage you to vote because your vote has a large impact

* their infrequency avoids decision fatigue

* they easily detect a clear consensus (but fail at deciding contentious issues - Eg. a 49-51% split)

* they let us estimate a referendum as if everyone had read the article by just asking samplees to read the article

The ability to efficiently estimate a referendum lets us curate content together. We don't have to do it alone. We can use evidence of consensus to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. I want to be able to trust the titles on /r/science.

Designated proxies*

Despite being more efficient, most users still won't participate. 90% of users never upvote a post. The bias towards active users is huge.

To reduce this bias, I empower users to designate a proxy. The proxy participates on their behalf. Then to keep the proxies aligned with their users, I regularly sample user opinion and compare it to the voting record of their proxy. When the difference becomes too large, I force users to reset their proxy. Once again sampling makes it efficient. I only have to bother you once a quarter.

Moderating visibility

Voters have more control over what the community sees than posters I empower the commmunity to punish bad votes[3].

Current state

That's my goal. Unfortunately, Reddit has critical mass, and any new competitor must overcome the two-sided market moat. I do this by focusing on curating hacker news posts. Currently, I have two features:

* a weekly newsletter of deeply important posts

* a sort filtering to just hot technical posts

Remarks

The code is available on Github [4]. It's a mess (cashier's first website). Some silly things I've done:

* Using ReactDOMServer.renderToStaticMarkup to replace EJS so the compiler catches view type errors

* Cache using a global object on my single webserver - no Memcache/Redis

Biggest regret:

* Not using a more opinionated framework. I've written many things three times. While it's fun optimizing plumbing, it doesn't progress user experience.

[0] https://efficientdemocracy.com

[1] Disputes efficiently estimate a referendum but suffer from a selection bias. We disincentivize abuse by empowering sample/referendum respondees to vote to punish "abusive" disputes.

[2] This doesn't take into account replacement or non-response. https://select-statistics.co.uk/calculators/sample-size-calc...

[3] https://efficientdemocracy.com/about/moderate-visibility

[4] https://github.com/evandwight/efficientdemocracy

generateSampleUserIds

source code of the project for those looking for it.