This is a cool idea. I would install a Chrome extension that shows a score by every username on this site grading how well their expressed opinions match what subsequently happened in reality, or the accuracy of any specific predictions they've made. Some people's opinions are closer to reality than others and it's not always correlated with upvotes.

An extension of this would be to grade people on the accuracy of the comments they upvote, and use that to weight their upvotes more in ranking. I would love to read a version of HN where the only upvotes that matter are from people who agree with opinions that turn out to be correct. Of course, only HN could implement this since upvotes are private.

The RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) browser extension indirectly does this for me since it tracks the lifetime number of upvotes I give other users. So when I stumble upon a thread with a user with like +40 I know "This is someone whom I've repeatedly found to have good takes" (depending on the context).

It's subjective of course but at least it's transparently so.

I just think it's neat that it's kinda sorta a loose proxy for what you're talking about but done in arguably the simplest way possible.

>This is a cool idea. I would install a Chrome extension that shows a score by every username on this site grading how well their expressed opinions match what subsequently happened in reality, or the accuracy of any specific predictions they've made.

Why stop there?

If you can do that you can score them on all sorts of things. You could make a "this person has no moral convictions and says whatever makes the number go up" score. Or some other kind of score.

Stuff like this makes the community "smaller" in a way. Like back in the old days on forums and IRC you knew who the jerks were.

I long had a similar idea for stocks. Analyze posts of people giving stock tips on WSB, Twitter, etc and rank by accuracy. I would be very surprised if this had not been done a thousand times by various trading firms and enterprising individuals.

Of course in the above example of stocks there are clear predictions (HNWS will go up) and an oracle who resolves it (stock market). This seems to be a way harder problem for generic free form comments. Who resolves what prediction a particular comment has made and whether it actually happened?

That’s what Elon’s vision was before he ended up buying Twitter. Keep a digital track record for journalists. He wanted to call it Pravda.

(And we do have that in real life. Just as, among friends, we do keep track of who is in whose debt, we also keep a mental map of whose voice we listen to. Old school journalism still had that, where people would be reading someone’s column over the course of decades. On the internet, we don’t have that, or we have it rarely.)

I like the idea and certainly would try it. Although I feel in a way this would be an anti-thesis to HN. HN tries to foster curiosity, but if you're (only) ranked by the accuracy of your predictions, this could give the incentive to always fall back to a save and boring position.

The problem seems underspecified; what does it mean for a comment to be accurate? It would seem that comments like "the sun will rise tomorrow" would rank highest, but they aren't surprising.

Didn't Slashdot have something like the second point with their meta-moderation, many many years ago?