No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems. And before you suggest that I could simply follow the groups I'm interested in, that's still not the same thing because the people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by the people I'm not following.
When you upvote an item - you connect stronger to people who upvoted that same item.
When you downvote an item - you connection to those who upvoted it becomes weaker.
The content is ranked based on how strongly you are connected to people you upvoted each item.
That way when a lot of clueless/uninformed people come in and start upvoting useless to you content - they don't create noise in your personalized content list.
The content you see comes from people who have proven to find useful content for you.
This is how my hobby project https://linklonk.com works.
I did a Show HN a week ago and that post has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405659
No, absolutely not. Voters can be categorized, clusterized and ranked, already as part of voting systems theory (one single example in the latter: election of electors), and more beyond it.
> No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems
And why not. One example: views filtering contribution by score.
> people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by
Not necessarily, if they are given the option to avoid that.
Most social media platforms are simply to big to moderate in any meaningful way, in my opinion. AI has so far show to be ineffective, as show by comments and open letters from Facebooks human moderation staff.
I could be wrong, I hope I am wrong.
Do we want to live in a sophisticated democracy as opposed to a naïve democracy? Some would.
Would you like to be part of an information exchange and debate platform using sophisticated systems as opposed to an open billboard? Some would.
It is very doable. It was done in history and it can be done technically in many ways.
Take for example HN: before you can downvote, you must have consolidated your position as contributor. Very simple - yet affecting the result, the "experience". Much more sophisticated techniques can be used.
Malicious parties could attack a system exploiting its weaknesses: yes, this is why take precautions like testing systems theoretically and practically, and implement defence systems.
> automating moderating
The point is not to automate moderation - it is not about the work of DanG. It is about reducing the noise generated by users "in development" and boosting the signal donated by "developed" users.
In the area of "ranking according to the favouring of favoured users, recursively" is a way to implement it.
There can be automated systems to fix that - to rank contributions, with the aim to boost the signal and reduce the noise, with the final aim to facilitate a lean and productive debate and information sharing; and also to connect contributions, to reduce dispersion, etc.
Such systems to rank contributions are related to the theory of voting systems (quantitative ranking of voters and options).
The aim of many big "social networks" is not «to facilitate a lean and productive debate and information sharing».