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0 pointsethbr05y ago0 comments

HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)

Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)

The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).

Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.

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pratik6615y ago

Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise.

The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")

This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.

ethbr0OP5y ago

I think the ideal system would be HN-style with ML informed analysis and user weighting.

E.g. if someone versed in cryptography upvotes or downvotes a cryptography story/comment, that counts for more than someone random

And I only care because the expertise gap is really the only flaw in HN/Reddit style ranking. In all other ways, it seems superior.

krapp5y ago

> HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)

And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.

sokoloff5y ago

Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.

scott_s5y ago

Agreed. And HN has something I associate with it specifically: the back-and-forth argument, maintaining consistency in positions and reasoning, looking like two people taking. But, upon inspection, many people are involved. That, I think, is an example of the de-emphasis on identity.

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