A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

https://www.argoledo.com/

by Florensio • 8 years ago

51 47 8 years ago

argoledo.com

hartator• 8 years ago

How does it get to the top then?

gitgud• 8 years ago

It looks like its just chronological, could be wrong though.

Also, I'm not sure it's a scalable solution.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Well, what is the ranking based on? It would be refreshing for a platform to be completely transparent about how post rankings are established, but then I guess you'd have spammers gaming it to get their crap at the top. The alternative is you have spammers paying money to get their crap at the top.

egypturnash• 8 years ago

Damn, that is one hell of a condensed font. Nigh-illegible on the 72dpi monitor I use at my desk.

disqard• 8 years ago

It is surprising how much discomfort a badly-chosen font can create.

Also, their ads currently look rather intrusive. I wish them well in this "off the beaten path" endeavor. Maybe they'll try out other fonts and better ad placement strategies.

kqr2• 8 years ago

I'm guessing they're going for a newspaper cram-in-as-many-characters-as-possible-in-a-narrow-column aesthetic. In my opinion, that was never a flattering look and it isn't now either.

pram• 8 years ago

How about just showing comments sequentially by post date :V

sdenton4• 8 years ago

Metafilter has been organizing their parts this way forever!

meesterdude2• 8 years ago

can't pronounce the name easily; maybe/probably noneglish based?

reading one of the posts about ads, the admin writes:

We are going to have to implement ads at some point anyway

oh that sounds like a fun rollercoaster to ride again.

I know ads can be annoying, that's why we try to use them in an non intrusive way that can benefit both us and the users.

total wanker. ads do not benefit users, and saying they do means they take users as idiots; or are able to lie to themselves.

So, that right there kills any interest; let alone the site itself being in no way novel or interesting. There isn't an interesting community of folks, or a meaningful platform to engage across.

Actually, this post, and entire posting history of this user(24 days old), are just marketing efforts for the site.

adrianN• 8 years ago

I don't like ads either, but you can argue that ads benefit the user by paying for the service that they want to use. Until we have some viable micropayment system that allows me to pay the fraction of a cent that the website would otherwise receive by showing me an ad it's hard to finance popular services.

meesterdude2• 8 years ago

You can argue it, doesn't make it right! Nor are micropayments the only solution. Nor do sites make a fraction of a cent - it's usually at least a few.

With ads comes everything from annoyance, tracking, data theft, and malware. All things I am not a fan of, nor are they worthwhile tradeoffs for visiting a site.

But i'll agree - it's not as easy to do other things as it is to serve ads. You have to be creative, and also provide actual value that people are willing to pay for. But trying to romance the idea of serving ads - that it's good for users - is insulting.

dmortin• 8 years ago

total wanker. ads do not benefit users

So would you be prepared to pay for every site you visit? I visit dozens of sites a day (e.g. by following links to new articles). If you had to pay for all of them it would quickly come up to a hefty bill.

One alternative could be micropayments, so you don't have to pay a monthly bill for the site, you'd only pay for the pages you visit. But until there is no generally accepted solution for this yet, ads are the only way to keep the net free.

toofy• 8 years ago

ads are the only way to keep the net free.

Do we really believe this? My understanding from people who were around back in the day say the web was far better before the web was a giant shopping mall and ad supported sites took over everything.

I don’t know if it’s the usual “back in my day things were better” thing happening or whether they’re correct, but a web full of content produced by people who are hobbyists and do so because they enjoy sharing their passion sounds way better than a web full of garbage that is clickbaited solely to maximize the amount of money coming in from ad support. In my experience hobbyists sharing a passion is almost always more enjoyable and of a higher quality.

I do recognize there is a middle ground in there somewhere, but I’m not at all convinced the web would somehow disappear without obnoxious ads. People would still create content just like they did before ads and before tracking had infested everything.

paulie_a• 8 years ago

Ads are fine if they actually individually curated by the website without JavaScript bullshit tracking. Until that day happens again, I am going to aggressively block ads and occasionally turn the filters off and randomly click ads to waste their money.

ams6110• 8 years ago

The old joelonsoftware boards were like that as I recall.

rwmj2• 8 years ago

I'm really glad that people are experimenting with commenting systems. There have been better systems in the past than Reddit or HN (such as Slashdot & Kuro5hin). Some ideas which could be explored again:

* Whether you should be allowed to both post comments and vote on a single article.

* Whether you should have a limited or unlimited number of votes per day or per article.

* Whether established users can apply multiple up/down votes to a comment.

* Should votes happen along other axes than up/down (eg. "Funny", "Interesting", "Relevant"<->"Off-topic").

* How could meta-moderation be made to work without it seeming like a slog to review other people's voting?

* Can we see who voted on a comment?

* Can we display comments in a more relevant order? At the moment the highest voted top comments are spread down the page, mixed in with lower voted replies.

* Should there be a limited or unlimited range of voting? Is a -15 comment substantively different from a -20 comment, probably not.

megamindbrian22• 8 years ago

Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

rwmj2• 8 years ago

Slashdot is the grim reaper of commenting.

I've no idea what it's like now, but in its heyday you could set your comment threshold to +3 or +5 to read the dozen or so most insightful comments on each topic. That was a great reader-friendly time-saving device. As far as I know that's not possible on HN.

philbarr• 8 years ago

How about ranking posts by latest submitted comment? Excluding people that have already commented on the post and the submitter themselves.

mrtest002• 8 years ago

The font hurts my eye.

FrozenVoid2• 8 years ago

There is an easy alternative to voting system. Rating=Number of comments - C*hours passed since post. where C is some site-specific activity variable.

Same could be applied for comments without time factor: Rating=Number of replies/posts in subthread tree spawned by post

Strilanc• 8 years ago

Incentivizing number of comments puts flame wars and chain letters at the top.

FrozenVoid2• 8 years ago

Moderators can lock such threads/posts or even delete them. With this rating system, they're highly visible.

kqr2• 8 years ago

There should be a dictionary of common scoring systems and their flaws. So

- Scoring on comment count :: Flame wars.

- Scoring on forwards :: Chain letters.

- Scoring on sum of "likes" :: Memes and simple jokes.

- Scoring on five-star ratings :: hides important issues.

And so on. This way, we can make an informed business decision on what kind of junk we can best defend againt.

yorwba• 8 years ago

I wonder whether that's what https://news.ycombinator.com/active uses.

danso• 8 years ago

So posts get “to the top” based on time posted? Maybe the submitted title should be changed into something less click-baity, like “A message board”

boraalparat• 8 years ago

My eyes are bleeding, please use a non-condensed font.

NegatioN2• 8 years ago

I've thought a bit about this recently, since HN and Reddit in particular are prone to have the posts sorted by how much it appeals to the average user.

Other systems such as Twitter and Facebook limit you extremely in the fact that you only converse with likeminded people, and when you don't, you'll most likely never end up in a constructive discussion, just in a flamewar since everyone is dead set on their opinion already, and because of the limitations in the commentning system discourages it.

What about a system based on NLP / ML where users can flag the truthfulness or speculation? (For the UI part, I'm thinking something similar to Medium, where you can select a favorite passage from a blog-post)

If you rank posts by how objectively true they are, and the amount of truth/false-votes they get, you should be able to bootstrap posts in, while also dynamically adjust to the popularity of it (number of votes received).

I know this is still a stretch with current machine learning technology, but I think we (the internet) really need a place where we can more easily filter out the bullshit, and discuss the things that really matter with people who don't already agree.

egjerlow• 8 years ago

I think we would need more than the 'truth' dimension to make this work. Writings can have great value even if what they say is not directly 'true' - think poetry, motivational writings etc.

burgerdev• 8 years ago

... and the first 10k digits of pi might be 'true', but are neither educational nor entertaining.

pjc503• 8 years ago

This is an absolutely terrible idea, because truth is not something that can be inferred from the text alone; epistemology is hard enough for humans, let alone for machines. The approach of decoding human text into statements in propositional logic has been tried, it was the first 70s "AI wave", but ultimately it broke down on the complexity of the problem. Modern "ML" can only give you a stochastic truthiness.

The only people who haven't given up on the approach of a massive symbolic reasoning database to work out what's true and false are Cyc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

You might be able to have a system which auto-flags known bullshit statements, but people will get outraged by that.

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

Yeah any kind of community "tagging" system is fertile ground for trolls and whatsnot. Just check out the mess that is steam tags, where soft-core visual novels gets mixed in with just about anything thanks to troll applied tags.

We are simply asking for another racist AI or gorilla moment.

NegatioN2• 8 years ago

Hi pjc, you are probably correct! :)

However, I think although this system might not be able to infer truth, it would at least be possible to infer "effort put into the post" or "well structured post" vs the obvious low effort things we see every day. Which might be enough for a better system.

Any suggestions for what you would train on to get a model which could rank more objectively than an upvote/downvote system can?

I think we should be vary of being bound by everything that happened in the 70s due to the differences in resources for solving the problem, although I'm not in any way saying this is easily solvable or even solvable in our time. I do think it's not provable that we can't achieve this at some point.

petercooper• 8 years ago

This is how we do it on http://www.rubyflow.com/ - a Ruby community link site. No voting, just in order and we delete/edit the items if they're not any good. Basically took the whole idea from MetaFilter.

mixmax2• 8 years ago

A website about reading things with a font choice that discourages it.

flatfilefan• 8 years ago

Is it ironic that the site didn’t survive the “slashdot effect”, showing the 500 error now.

ohiovr• 8 years ago

I like the spirit of the discussions. Good luck to you with your site.

A website where opinions/posts don't get to the top based on likes from others

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