An aggregator ala reddit/hackernews/twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.
One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:
- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.
- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than "frontpage" content
- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance
- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.
I'm working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction/stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy "downvote shares", which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.
It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.
On reddit, we created a bellwether award. It was basically for the person who was most accurate at upvoting things that got popular and downvoting the things that did not.
The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.
My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you've described your platform, the most "profitable" thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you'll think the most people will upvote. So you'll need to adjust for that.
Exactly. This in turn devolves into a race to the bottom where you are basically speculating on the speculations of others. Content then becomes popular for no other reason than people thought that other people would find it popular. So basically like the real stockmarket. We don't need more things to be like the stockmarket.
One aspect that is often forgotten is that the quality of a social platform is a product of the quality of its constituents.
If you make a platform 100% free and open, it will encourage low quality participants. The network effect often stops paid sites from starting, but the rewards are there if you can somehow otherwise select only for a mature audience.
this isn't how the stock market functions at all however. you described how a nonpro/retail participant on /r/stocks or wsb believes the stock market works.
This is actually a very plausible explanation for the valuations of Bitcoin and Tesla and, to a certain extend, this is exactly how the stock market operates right now.
Maybe it didn't work that way in the past, maybe it won't in the future, but the current environment seems to be very much like how the parent poster described it.
Representative democracies were invented to solve the "junk food policy" (i.e., passing out all of the money in the treasury) problem of direct democracy. Maybe there could be a representative link aggregator where annual elections determined who was allowed to vote on links.
A variation on representative democracy would be to have a recommender system identify demographics, and then to weight each demographic equally. So, for example, the votes from the "blogspam fan" demographic would be normalized to one, to fairly compete for representation with the much smaller "long thinkpiece fan" demographic.
Another solution would be quadratic voting, where you can vote once for free, but the nth vote would cost (n-1)^2 reputation points. That would allow established community members to express their intense dislike of certain content, to balance out the larger population's mild preferences.
It would be pretty cool if there was Reddit, but each subreddit could implement a different voting system. We might see a lot of progress and experimentation.
One of my instructors way back at Cornell was a grad student named Kevin Walsh, now an associate professor at Holy Cross, who had solved this problem in a bit of a radical way. Context was that back then you had Gnutella, LimeWire etc.—peer-to-peer types of networks—and you wanted to be able to enable people to rank media a certain number of "stars" for its quality because otherwise people post not-safe-for-life content with nice endearing names and others mass-download that content and then get grossed out. But you publish this and then people immediately use the anonymity afforded by the Internet to spam the upvote button as they distribute their garbage.
My understanding from Walsh was that the problem was essentially an economics problem—you want to incentivize good behavior and deincentivize bad behavior—and once you understood this you could use the network to correct itself, essentially saying “if you use your upvotes like the typical user does then the typical user will trust you, if you use your upvotes like the typical spammer does then you’ll instead end up in a clique with typical spammers.”
Some googling reveals that the page is still alive on cornell.edu [1].
It seems like they distinguish between "recommendation making" vs "verifying correctness of content" and Credence is meant to solve the latter:
"Since Credence is not a recommendation system, your thumbs-up and thumbs-down decisions should be based on an objective evaluation of whether a file's description matches its contents, not on matters of taste." https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/faq.html
Oh geez, this metaphor between representative democracies and social media sites clicked for me really well, and I very much don't like that because I'm interpreting this as a strong argument in favor of user-sourced moderators (who I think cause more problems than they solve).
You've made me uncomfortable, so... thanks, I guess?
Yeah it's definitely a huge risk. It's really a question of whether the expectation of the Schelling point is around quality of meme-worthiness.
I think the shorting will help with this, but I think the more critical thing is getting the initial community right to set expectations of what's upvoteworthy. Kind of how y'all started reddit around a programming community.
Interesting concept and I think it’s definitely worth the experiment!
If I understand the premise, what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer) becuase traditionally users see messages already curated (e.g. with highest upvotes) and the idea is to replace that with an incentive for discovering new content.
Unless you have a way to define new content, wont you run into the same problem but now with $ tokens? E.g. one of the most upvoted news from HN is “Steve Jobs has died”. I imagine even on your system users would assume this would raise to the top and would buy a lot of “shares”, so it becomes more of a game of “predicting what will be further upvoted / echo chambered”. Am I missing something?
> what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer)
Coincidentally, this is a problem in real markets that the invisible hand does not solve, either. Economic success is to large degree predicated on being fastest to market, as well.
Online, the outcome is attention inequality instead of revenue or wealth inequality. In real markets, that's when government has to step in and regulate. What equivalent is there for a content aggregator? Moderators? Curators?
I would say this is likely a sign that content aggregation sites have - in democratising content curation - finally come full circle with the curated content of old in the form of magazines and the like. Maybe there is something to be said for leaving the curation to the pros after all, or considering the limitations to the wisdom of crowds.
It's definitely a risk. That said, I'd argue that a post announcing "Steve Jobs has died" genuinely should rise to the top - it's a huge piece of news after all.
This model isn't so much about suppressing existing highly upvoted content, but rather finding content that should have been upvoted but was missed.
There's still a threat from meme-worthy content though. Honestly, I think this comes down to the initial community setting expectations that meme-worthy content will be shorted into oblivion, and reinforcing that culture.
I've had a recurring thought where you supplant upvotes with something like an ELO system.
Basically, my thought is that I know I can follow something like the reddiquette, or the HN rules. I'm certainly not perfect, but I don't downvote when I disagree, and I don't upvote when I agree, and I try to not make unsubstantive comments. Reddit and HN maybe used to follow this when they were very small, but as sites grow the rules always fall to the wayside.
The fix would be that you as the founder, and the X amount of friends that you know and trust, serve as a baseline for the ranking system. If someone downvotes a post that the trusted group upvotes, their influence on the site goes down as a result. Likewise, if someone upvotes the posts that you vote, their influence goes up.
You can't actually use the E-L-O system for this, as far as I'm aware, because it's not a zero-sum game. But the basic idea is that you take a known group of good actors and give users voting influence based on how similar they are to the good actors, and if you can't follow the rules (by acting similarly), you basically lose all influence on the site.
- when you upvote an item, everyone else who upvoted the item before you earns some amount of your trust
- the more of your trust someone has earned - the more weight their other upvoted items get for you
- each time they upvote, they put some amount of your trust on that item; so if you stop liking their recommendations the amount of your trust they have will go down over time
- when you downvote an item, you take away your trust from people who upvoted it; they've shown that they are not good curators of content for you, so their upvotes will have less weight for you
In this system you end up paying attention to people who have proven to you to be good curators of content. It optimizes for high signal to noise ratio, where what is signal and what is noise if up to you to decide with your upvotes. We don't have to all agree on what is globally "upvoteworthy".
There is no global reputation system (which can be gamed). Instead, there is a peer-to-peer trust system.
If you are interested in a system like that, then I would like to invite you to my hobby project that works exactly this way. Register with a temporary account (no email required) at https://linklonk.com/register and use code 'hn'.
It is early days and we don't have many users yet. To supplement real users LinkLonk supports RSS feeds as sources of information. Each feed behaves much like a user - the more you upvote content from it, the higher ranked its other entries will be for you. I hope you will find it useful and I'm looking to hear your feedback.
I imagine that this is how social media platforms create "information bubbles". In terms of politics it won't work: people that agree with your political views would get more "trust". Is agreeing with your views an indication of good content? I'm not sure.
I feel like this would have the result of Gell-Mann Amnesia, which is essentially what "influencers" rely on prior to sponsorship. Thing 1 was recommended, and others found the same benefits to Thing 1, so when Thing 2 is recommended it is assumed that the influencer's opinion is valid. Breaks down as soon as there is a disconnect, if people are willing to accept that their chosen influencer can be wrong, but in practice most people just go along with it.
Different people have different interests, so using just one group as etalon, would leave most people unsatisfied. It would be better to let users choose their own groups of "good" actors, either explicitly or based on upvote similarity.
I don’t think this is the same. We’re not increasing influence based on the reputation/amount of upvotes of the user, but rather based on the similarity with known-good actors. The user might never post themselves, and therefore have no karma of their own.
Perhaps I didn't describe it well enough, but I believe you're misunderstanding my intent. The user's "PageRank" is based on how they vote in relation to other users.
You seed the influence system with known good actors. Users who vote similarly to these good actors get an increased influence weight and so on. You can apply the PageRank algorithm to any graph, and this case the graph is the relation between up votes of other users.
This can work better than Elo rating because you can have disjoint seed actors serving sparsely connected (or completely disjoint) regions of your influence graph.
Newsconomy [1] was a website with a pretty similar idea. It never gained much traction afaik, but the developer seemed pretty passionate about it [2]. I believe this [3] is the developer's current page, in case you wish to get in contact with him for this project.
I think gamifying it is the right way to go- I've thought of this idea, but in another context. I don't understand how the "selling shares" would work though.
I could imagine one mechanism is that you make bets on how popular content will be, and get rewarded if it is popular (number of clicks, comments, etc.) ie popularity handicapping.
What do you do with the rewards of your bets? Maybe allow you to bump stuff to the main page? Promote content? I couldn't imagine paying for this, however.
Alternatively, you could use the mechanism to identify people who are good at identifying interesting content, and having a leaderboard of people who find cool shit. That might be monetizeable.
> I don't understand how the "selling shares" would work though
Basically at any point the cost in USD/other of creating an upvote is a function of the existing number of upvotes and downvotes. Eg if a piece of content has 3 upvotes, the cost to create another new upvote might be $0.07, but if the content as 100 upvotes, that cost might be $1.40.
Equally at any point, you can "sell" your upvote at that same cost ($0.07 @ 3, $1.40 @ 100). The way the maths works out means that finances are conserved, so the investment return for selling comes from the market itselm.
In terms of rewards, I was thinking actual money, just in very small amounts. People love speculating on markets so i think it's feasible.
> the investment return for selling comes from the market itselm
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding this, but am I'm selling my shares to other users to recoup my investment? Why would other users be interesting in buying my shares of an article that was on the "front page" 3 days ago?
This is brilliant! I love the idea and would be willing to contribute if possible. I agree we don't need another social network where new content is posted. We need a way to sift through the large amount of existing content out there.
My questions:
1) How do you plan on getting content from reddit/twitter/hackernews? Are there api's for this or do you plan to scrape?
2) Would other social sites have issues with you using their content in your social stock market, and possibly profiting from it?
3) Would it be possible for a social network to cut you off and kill your business? For Example: Reddit realized that they are losing traffic because more people are going to [yourSite].com to view Reddit content so they sue you.
1) most have RSS (the three you mention all do or it's one jump to a site that enables)
2) most other social sites are themselves collections. If you got big enough, yes they'd mind, but not to start. Hopefully by the time they mind people are submitting to you anyway.
3) seems like a stretch, but ianal, given they expose RSS or APIs currently
I agree with the other comment about how this incentivizes just being a good content picker. To simulate and get the efficiencies of the stock market, I think you need a mechanism that is analogous to how a profitable company pays out dividends. Sure the speculation can drive prices but fundamentally there needs to be some intrinsic value to an investment that is actually derived from how useful the content is... how profitable the content is
Just make sure "selling" of shares can be automatic, because nobody wants to go back to a post they already read just to sell their shares or whatever.
This sounds a bit complicated, and I would naively assume that some people would upvote low-quality content that is likely to reach the frontpage (which reinforce the cycle).
How about checking algorithmically how reliable users are, and weighting their votes that way? The manual redemption of correct-upvotes and acquisition of downvote-shares seems a bit much in my view.
I think this is interesting, at least in terms of judging quality of individual posts.
I remember back in the days of kuro5hin there was reputation, you could earn reputation with thoughtful comments and then good reputation would mean more visibility for your posts. Has that proven to be a horrible approach? Are there communities that work this way now?
I think it's a good approach, but it's fundamentally not that different from existing models in that the people who judge a post as "thoughtful" or otherwise have no incentive to think carefully about their judgement.
There's some cryptocurrency communities that use some interesting incentive mechanism in that upvotes have real-world value[0], but the problem is that the content is incredibly cryptocurrency biased rather than anything of general interest
Well the point is that the reputation accrues to the author, not the post. So that a post will get a boost if the author has been rewarded in the past.
I was thinking about this very similar concept few years back. The idea was to prevent only the top 1% content surfacing all the time. My solution was to cap the number of likes/upvotes to some value like 10k.
I build agregators for my personal use. Try this: gather references cited and look for key keywords in those references like those in the citing articles title.
This is the most interesting take on realigning (micro?)blogging incentives I've ever seen. I hope it gets its chance with millions of users, even if it has incorrigible issues like our current standard.
Thanks! I think online content is the obvious place to start for this, but in the long run I think the concept could be applicable to identifying all kinds of things where quality can be hidden by the deluge of information:
- high quality scientific papers, instead of relying on the existing journal gatekeepers. Once again hopefully moving the incentive needle towards quality over volume
- emerging threats or risks that may not be obvious until it’s too late. Eg asbestos, the effect of social media on adolescent development, leaded petrol
- promising pre-investment startups
- Frankly, anything that currently uses crowdsourced rating - restaurants, accomodation, bands, services businesses etc etc
One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:
- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.
- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than "frontpage" content
- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance
- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.
I'm working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction/stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy "downvote shares", which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.
It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.
Draft paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Hc6wAXlfl8x5C0w11m7ZOEpbjj...
EDIT:
Since this is a getting a bit of traction, if you're interested in testing it out when I've got a prototype, I've created a mailing list here
https://forms.gle/EEMhkJRSUUAbwDgX6
I think initial community is critical for getting these sorts of things right, so would definitely appreciate having some HN folks to test with.