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fubarobfusco comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 03:39PM

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Comment author: gattsuru 08 December 2014 10:06:04PM 7 points [-]

Are there any good trust, value, or reputation metrics in the open source space? I've recently established a small internal-use Discourse forum and been rather appalled by the limitations of what is intended to be a next-generation system (status flag, number of posts, tagging), and from a quick overview most competitors don't seem to be much stronger. Even fairly specialist fora only seem marginally more capable.

This is obviously a really hard problem and conflux of many other hard problems, but it seems odd that there are so many obvious improvements available.

((Inspired somewhat by my frustration with Karma, but I'm honestly more interested in its relevance for outside situations.))

Comment author: fubarobfusco 08 December 2014 11:32:41PM 1 point [-]

I don't know of one. I doubt that everyone wants the same sort of thing out of such a metric. Just off the top of my head, some possible conflicts:

  • Is a post good because it attracts a lot of responses? Then a flamebait post that riles people into an unproductive squabble is a good post.
  • Is a post good because it leads to increased readership? Then spamming other forums to promote a post makes it a better post, and posting porn (or something else irrelevant that attracts attention) is really very good.
  • Is a post good because a lot of users upvote it? Then people who create sock-puppet accounts to upvote themselves are better posters; as are people who recruit their friends to mass-upvote their posts.
  • Is a post good because the moderator approves of it? Then as the forum becomes more popular, if the moderator has no additional time to review posts, a diminishing fraction of posts are good.

The old wiki-oid site Everything2 explicitly assigns "levels" to users, based on how popular their posts are. Users who have proven themselves have the ability to signal-boost posts they like with a super-upvote.

It seems to me that something analogous to PageRank would be an interesting approach: the estimated quality of a post is specifically an estimate of how likely a high-quality forum member is to appreciate that post. Long-term high-quality posters' upvotes should probably count for a lot more than newcomers' votes. And moderators or other central, core-team users should probably be able to manually adjust a poster's quality score to compensate for things like a formerly-good poster going off the deep end, the revelation that someone is a troll or saboteur, or (in the positive direction) someone of known-good offline reputation joining the forum.