Oh please. Vote-based social networks are way too vulnerable to burying the truth and boosting lies.

It just takes the first 3-4 viewers to downvote you to prevent the next 10000 people from seeing what you said. There's no downside to downvoting just because you don't like what someone says, even if it's true.

And usually no amount of corrections can outshout a lie/mistake with 100+ votes.

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econ a day ago | parent | next [-]

There has to be a better formula to design this game. It seems valuable enough to explore.

It will be hard to design a formula that can only be gamed by making quality contributions.

A quality discussion requires parties who disagree, exchange of ideas and facts and ideally some kind of eventual agreement.

The hardest part is to make it enjoyable to use.

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Razengan a day ago | parent [-]

Maybe transparent AI is the only way to fairly govern masses of people?

Let people regularly vote on which prompts should be added/removed, and have the AI justify all of its decisions, show which information it used etc.

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econ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was thinking of discussion platforms but for general government I had a great idea: we know how to write and publish new laws but we are terrible at unpublishing outdated garbage laws. AI would be great for finding all laws that it thinks are dubious, impractical or otherwise undesirable in today's context and zeitgeist. There can be various manual deletion processes for different categories of absurdity.

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econ 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An automated internet trial with robot judges and lawyers nominating users for warning banners of shame.

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flancian 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe this is likely true and will become evident in time to most, but not all, carbon based systems.

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integralid a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the most dystopian thing I've read today

	▲	Razengan a day ago \| parent [-]
		Dystopia is the status quo: A handful of people controlling access for millions.

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lurk2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Vote manipulation is a non-issue here because users require a minimum of 500 karma to vote, and because the site is so much smaller than Reddit it can take months to reach that threshold. Downvoting is also capped so that you're very unlikely to get pushed back below the 500 karma threshold unless you are consistently making comments that the community doesn't like. I post things I know won't be well-received here all the time and it's quite rare for a comment to go below -2 karma, but comparatively common for these sorts of comment to get flagged despite not breaking any rules.

4chan was great in 2015 precisely because anyone could comment, but it's a young man's website in that scrolling through a 300 comment thread to find the worthwhile parts of the discussion will require upwards of fifteen minutes, whereas on Reddit or Hacker News most of that sorting is already done. This does have censorial effects, so it isn't ideal for controversial topics like politics, but it's better for almost everything else.

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ryandrake a day ago | parent | next [-]

What stops people from setting up and aging (or buying) sockpuppet accounts to the point where they control 10+ or even 100+ flag-capable / vote-capable HN accounts, and then using them as a network to deny or boost certain topics? This kind of behavior almost certainly goes on here.

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lurk2 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> What stops people from setting up and aging (or buying) sockpuppet accounts to the point where they control 10+ or even 100+ flag-capable / vote-capable HN accounts, and then using them as a network to deny or boost certain topics?

It’s a single board with a full-time moderator and almost everyone on it has a background in information technology. These kinds of networks leave very obvious signatures, and the site simply isn’t a big enough place for them to hide.

> This kind of behavior almost certainly goes on here.

Do you have any examples?

	▲	ryandrake 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course, only the site admins would be able to show you actual examples. But this kind of stuff happens everywhere on the internet where you can post for free, so there is no reason to think it's not happening here.

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Razengan a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> the site is so much smaller than Reddit it can take months to reach that threshold.

You can get there in days if you just spot a few bandwagons to hop on.

> I post things I know won't be well-received here all the time and it's quite rare for a comment to go below -2 karma, but comparatively common for these sorts of comment to get flagged despite not breaking any rules.

Yep, there's no downside to frivolously downvoting/flagging: It just takes a 2-3 people to hide your comment from the majority of the users as soon as it's posted, easy for a PR firm with paid people watching a topic like hawks.

Sometimes when I get insta-downvoted in a heated topic, if I delete my comment and repost later, the first few votes are positive. So it's clearly dependent on luck/time, which it shouldn't be.

I and others suggested this years ago: Maybe votes shouldn't have any effect for the first 12 or 24 hours.