Beyond that, in my opinion, while human dialogue might hedge confidence, disclose conflicts of interest, etc — to me, assumed the exchange is via text-based chat — there are much more efficient and effective ways to express that information than adding non-actionable text like that.
My point is cherry picking flaws won’t help improve anything for ChatGPT, Wikipedia, etc — but systematic approaches to discovering and modeling information space and related fact, queries, etc would. Wikipedia not free of issues and to my knowledge does not allow end user to see Wikipedia’s confidence in a given fact, if they have one at all.
Wikipedia said they would enable users at to be able to quickly tell what the confidence was in the facts being presented and to my knowledge never did. My understanding is that even now that linked sources are not even systematically checked to confirm they even relate to the related passage of text.
To be fair, Wikipedia also “speaks with confidence” and makes no attempt to make it easy to understand exactly how confident one should be in the facts presented. At one point they had said the would, but never did to my knowledge. Google has TrustRank, but to my knowledge it’s on a source-level basis, not fact-level basis.
Just to be clear, intentionally not responding, since you repeatedly in my opinion ignored my points and contrary to your claims, did not engage me out of intellectual curiosity.
You’re right, obviously the best way to secure the community was to obscure the votes of people that were upvoting toxic content instead of the mods/community just publicly tagging and flagging the related undesirable content and penalizing the voting weights of anyone upvoting that content.
If votes being public impacts voting patterns, listing top users, having usernames publicly associated with comments, being able to follow given user’s comments, etc — for sure does too. What’s the difference?
By “showing comments led” do you mean showing comment points/votes? Also, if comment viewable comment points are gone forever, then the “popularity” filter should be removed from HN’s search and the old voting data removed from the public API.
To me, if users have concerns about “unfair voting” to me the solution is not to hide them. Also, if comment points aren’t important, why even allow them? They are obviously important and if a users is not available to respect guidelines not to complain about them, what’s difference between that an guidelines related to comments about being downvoted?
For starters, that you only want HN to be used the way you want to use it; which for sure it not the way I want to use it and more than likely significant number of other users too. If that’s not gatekeeping, then what is?
Which would be possible if HN was API first and all data beside email for recovery were public. Otherwise, HN is simply not designed to be responsive to user system design requests — but their have been a massive amount of alternative systems built by users that built things HN would have never made.
If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password.
This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release.
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To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts and comments with high up/down votes tend to be flamewars. Mods also random boost/ding posts/comments too.
Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing users to enable them via their on interface, do analysis, etc — it broke HN’s comment search based on comment popularity.
You’re welcome to find other quantifiable sources, but to me Google trends speak for themselves. Also, less and less people not sharing answers reduces odds of new users finding it. WordleBot might aggregate stats, but it’s not them same as getting users to share on social media.
Honestly indifferent, thought Wordle was doing better, but I do believe in quantifying trends via notable significant sources; again, if you’re able to think of any, for example NYT article covering it’s grow since being acquired, I would be interested.
More likely that part of the fun of sharing Wordle was it was not prompting a huge media company, as soon as NYT bought it, my guess is people were less likely to share it, especially other news organizations.
I was honestly surprised to see it had declined, since Wordle still shows up in top ten Google trends on almost a daily basis.
Wikipedia on the other hand does clearly state its intent to maintain reliability of its content:
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_fact-checking
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
Beyond that, in my opinion, while human dialogue might hedge confidence, disclose conflicts of interest, etc — to me, assumed the exchange is via text-based chat — there are much more efficient and effective ways to express that information than adding non-actionable text like that.