Re:To Paul Graham
by presidentender on Wednesday June 02, 2010 @05:29PM
(#1399467)
The advantage here is that pg is giving an advantage to high averages, not high point totals. So there's less incentive to be a reddit/digg style poweruser looking for one upvote on thousands of comments, and more incentive to say something truly insightful from time to time.
The whole thing has a circular dependency: if ranking acts as a filter, then higher rank means more readers, and that in turn means more upvotes and so a higher ranking. It is probably not so much the top being undeserving, but that deserving stuff gets missed.
This seems to be a fundamental weakness in all similar 'ranking' systems, but I am not sure of the full character and implications...
(There is certainly a substantial component of being an automated system of 'social-proof'. And the filtering can never be entirely effective: if you show everyone only the good stuff, the filtering would not get done at all.)