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tclayborne

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Engineer of nondescript variety in the HPC industry.

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Mechatronics 2 years ago

Cheers! Not many of us out here, what are the chances two of us end up in these comments less than 60m after the link was posted in this sea of links. Gotta be abysmal odds. Were the career prospects as glamorous as expected on your end?

I don't disagree with the point that visibility = upvotes = leaderboards. It's possible it biases rankings as you outlined. That said, given the problem: "How do I monetize my rankings/listings website without introducing pay to win or relying on third-party ads?"

I think the author implemented a tasteful and respectful solution. Other sites inject sponsors atop search results, every nth result, block parts of pages, force extra navs to link-spammed pages to get the product site, or sends sponsors to the top of rankings regardless of votes. You never have to glance at that portion if you're not interested, and can find it if you are. It's good design and advertises to the user in a respectful and convenient way imo. This is a small fixture that's static, and not even in the common paths followed by users ("F" eye track)

@Author: Perhaps a voting freeze during the sponsored period or a vote expiration (votes older than a certain amount of time fall off the total or such) would address the visibility = rank boost concern. Two random examples for moderating it with zero future thought there, but I think you get the idea.

I'm not sure if this is a wonderfully "me" thing, but it's a behavior I see a lot on these types of sites. Long pressing links (for opening in background or such) doesn't seem to work on Safari (iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 18.1 dev beta 22B5054e). If it's helpful, I spend immensely more time browsing sites like this where the long pressing action does work. @denizhdzh