Corrupt Karma

Absrtact: In the past few years, there has been an increasingly strong idea in my mind that social networking sites have serious problems with ecosystems. That's why I deleted Reddit and Hacker News from my stream. Although I have already mentioned in many conversations

In the past few years, there has been an increasingly strong idea in my mind that social networking sites have serious problems with ecosystems. That's why I deleted Reddit and Hacker News from my stream. Although I have mentioned this in many conversations, I have not been able to write down the whole idea until today.

I was tempted to write a proposal by Yann LeCun, in which he advocated the transfer of similar social news sites such as Reddit and Hacker to academic research, and that all papers submitted would be reviewed and voted on by peers, The process is subject to the supervision of a reputable institution composed of authors and reviewers. In short, it is to build an academic Reddit, to be honest, this idea gives me a heart of fear.

Below, I will be divided into five levels to say I worry about the reason, the end of the text will also give me advice.

Corrupt Karma

Reddit's original idea was to create value for the user by exploiting some ingenious algorithms such as Karma (the number of people who like your posts or comments) to dig out important information. In Reddit or Hacker News platform, whether you publish articles, or comments, are through a specific algorithm to determine their ranking. This should be a great pioneering, but the development so far, its drawbacks also began to surface.

Human beings are essentially vanity monkeys, who have an almost instinctive desire for social status. Reddit's introduction of the original illusory social values into measurable krama points, will drive people no longer care about the quality of the content of the release, instead of doing their best to pursue higher krama. In real life, such people are often the "politicians"--their main job is to pull centrist into their own camp, to present their articles and opinions on the homepage. Hacker News and other popular social news sites are now led by this group of people, and, as all politicians say, their views are mostly predictable and rarely insightful.

Similarly, at the bottom of the food chain, there are other species that have the same purpose as politicians, who lack the highly inflammatory talents of politicians to earn krama points only through provocation and deliberate trouble.

The idea is to dig up Karma algorithms with valuable information, because of the existence of "politicians" and "bad Troublemakers", which run counter to the original ideals-really deep thoughts are submerged, controversial points of view are inevitably concealed, and all around are Karma pictures of the cat that earned it.

Unsound filtering mechanism

Hacker News more than the first two pages of the article, even if the content is good, also difficult to escape the fate of death silently, the rapid change of the flow of information, making people like Google search, in addition to the first two pages, will not be interested in continuing to look down. And the first two pages of the article, you will find the content is surprisingly poor-good content silently die, the poor content of the way, this is the status of social news sites. Here, quality is not the standard of rank.

What is the result? For example, suppose that there are now 10 accounts, and that the 10 accounts will randomly vote on the latest articles every hour, and the result is that the votes will most likely end up on the home page--that's the existing screening mechanism for social news sites. As long as the content of the article above a certain level, then decide whether it will appear on the home page, is no longer its quality, but depends on the possibility of its being read. It is noteworthy that this is not suitable for extreme cases, excellent or Daniel's article, naturally will be top, very bad article will not appear abnormal, but for the two between the majority of relatively high-quality content, will be inadequate screening mechanism buried.

This is why the existing social news sites have failed to provide an effective screening mechanism – quality content is buried and mediocre content is in the way.

Pinhole effect

On social news sites, the home page is kingly. Most users don't look over the first two pages. But the amount of information in the first two pages is very small for the daily update of countless Hacker News and Reddit. As a result, we will only look through the first two pages of the "pinhole" to see the vast flow of information that day-this is the so-called "pinhole" effect. And even with the perfect screening mechanism, what we can see through pinhole is just the corner of the gold mine. What's more, similar krama and other algorithms push the content, most of them are filtered through the consensus mechanism, not taking into account the individual needs and interest differences.

The flow of information that you can see is not tailored to you, it is the result of grinding, weakening personalization, suitable for the general public. The result is that the article that is finally presented to you is a predictable and lacking insight. The subscription system has been trying to create a community of related topics (such as r/programming) to solve the problem, even if the pinhole effect persists.

This is a game.

Social news sites are highly operational and cheating is rampant. Part of the reason is that the fate of an article is entirely in the hands of a handful of votes. If your article still has a bit of quality, you can convenor hand, first it to the home page, get a certain degree of exposure, then it will always stop on the home page. If it's nothing at all, you can simply cheat by pulling dozens of or hundreds of "praises" to make it mandatory for other people to appear on the page.

Similarly, if a similar Reddit such as not only "praise" and "step" site, you can use the same method to suppress your disagree with the point of view. Such examples abound: "Digg defenders" and "social media advisers" are examples of such bad behaviour, and the scandal that has been blown up is always rare. There is value in being concerned, how many of the things we see are the result of manipulation and careful planning? We don't know the exact amount, but it certainly has a huge share.

The point I want to make is far broader than the example I have cited. If social news sites cannot change the core of their operations, they will eventually be able to escape the fate of malicious manipulation. Such a system may well be suitable for the dissemination of "comic strip Comics", but my expectation that it can provide quality content will stop there.

Community Breakdown syndrome

The last thing I want to complain about is that social news websites have a lot of online communities, especially technical classes. We are all very familiar with the life cycle of the Technology forum, which is usually led by a group of people who can contribute high-quality content, and then as more people join in and cause quality to become water, the original Daniel decided to move to a new community. We've seen this from websites like Usenet, and now Hacker News is going through the process.

I think Community breakdown syndrome is a very important issue for us, and although we've been trying, we haven't been able to come up with a sensible solution so far. Hacker News already has a group of Daniel gone, Paul Graham is aware of the seriousness of the situation, and to take some measures to combat this phenomenon, but little effect.

We still do not have a community that is inclusive and sustainable. Open communities are bound to lead to inevitable decay, and social networking sites are no exception.

Solution

The reason I don't use social news is largely because the quality of the news streams provided by social networks is enough to satisfy my needs. Content is almost tailor-made for me: I follow this group of people who are responsible for funny; there are similar to my taste and interest, as my content filter; There are others who are my fellow villagers, I can get the news from my hometown, and some are devoted to deep and serious content. Also, I am a fan of information filters, can say that I am very responsible for them, I almost every day to find one or two I think the most important information, through Twitter to send them.

Naturally, Twitter is not perfect, it is a good platform for sharing information links, and it is a very bad discussion medium, based on the Twitter platform for in-depth discussion, the experience is very bad. When using social networking sites, I would need tools like Flipboard and prismatic to integrate content and links from my social platforms. And again, the belief that using social networks to filter information in the future is far more powerful than filtering through social news sites. If I were to solve the existing problems of social news, I would do a Flipboard in social journalism to push social news sites in a better direction.