Most tech content is bullshit

Re:Most tech content is bullshit by jacobobryant on Sunday June 07, 2020 @05:51PM (#23451196)

I've thought about that a fair amount also. I think the key is personalization. If bad actors downvoted a bunch of items, it would only affect people who already shared a lot of similar votes with those actors.

That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of history. So instead of just measuring ratings overlap ("of items you've both rated, 75% of items were rated the same"), you keep track of the performance of recommendations made from that user ("of Alice's items that we recommended to Bob, Bob upvoted them 25% of the time").

I haven't thought about this super deeply yet, but I think to beat that, you'd have to actually provide valuable data to the system in the first place.

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Re:Most tech content is bullshit by jacobobryant on Sunday June 07, 2020 @05:59PM (#23451251)

To generalize that a bit, I guess I'm talking about a reputation network. You could visualize it with a directed graph that has edges weighted from -1 to 1 (0 default). Recommendation + rating history is used in some way to assign those weights, and then future recommendations are taken primarily from other users who have high weights from your perspective.

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