This is a problem we have thought about, and personally I think it is quite bad, in that it causes a lot of randomness in which posts get past ~10 karma. We agree that essentially showing new posts to more people is the answer (even if they start to get downvoted).
The fairly standard solution in recommendation algorithms is to view this as an explore/​exploit problem, and to add some randomness to tune the tradeoff between then (see Bandits for Recommender Systems). This would mean each user would get a slightly different ordering of the list (stable per user) in order to make sure each post gets an appropriate number of views (based on the quality signal we have so far).
Here’s an internal doc with our plans on this. We may not get to it that soon, because of giving season and other stuff, but it is one of our priorities after that.
Hide the vote score of all new posts
I’m not that optimistic about this. For algorithm purposes the thing that matters is the number of opportunities a post gets to be voted on (~views) before dropping off the frontpage. Presumably the theory here is that seeing post has low karma makes you less likely to view it and/​or biased towards also downvoting it.
Based on my own experience I don’t think this is the case. If I see a 0 to negative karma post on the frontpage I think I’m more likely to click it out of morbid curiosity, and then if it’s at least ok I’ll upvote it because I think the current score is overly harsh. I know a lot of people apply this logic about voting (correcting the current score rather than applying a fully independent judgement), and we generally endorse this.
Some consideration should also go to engagement—some metric related to either number of votes or comment count
I think this is a good idea (thinking about comment counts specifically), although I agree it could be prone to going wrong, e.g. making doom threads even doomier. One solution I can think of is to give a boost for comments but only up to a fairly low cutoff (say, 6 comments). Thoughts on this?
For a ~20 karma post I think having 5+ comments is a good signal that its a valuable-but-niche post.
Digression but I would recommend reading about Thompson sampling :) (wikipedia, inscrutable LessWrong post). It’s a good model to have for thinking about explore-exploit tradeoffs in general.
This is a problem we have thought about, and personally I think it is quite bad, in that it causes a lot of randomness in which posts get past ~10 karma. We agree that essentially showing new posts to more people is the answer (even if they start to get downvoted).
The fairly standard solution in recommendation algorithms is to view this as an explore/​exploit problem, and to add some randomness to tune the tradeoff between then (see Bandits for Recommender Systems). This would mean each user would get a slightly different ordering of the list (stable per user) in order to make sure each post gets an appropriate number of views (based on the quality signal we have so far).
Here’s an internal doc with our plans on this. We may not get to it that soon, because of giving season and other stuff, but it is one of our priorities after that.
I’m not that optimistic about this. For algorithm purposes the thing that matters is the number of opportunities a post gets to be voted on (~views) before dropping off the frontpage. Presumably the theory here is that seeing post has low karma makes you less likely to view it and/​or biased towards also downvoting it.
Based on my own experience I don’t think this is the case. If I see a 0 to negative karma post on the frontpage I think I’m more likely to click it out of morbid curiosity, and then if it’s at least ok I’ll upvote it because I think the current score is overly harsh. I know a lot of people apply this logic about voting (correcting the current score rather than applying a fully independent judgement), and we generally endorse this.
I think this is a good idea (thinking about comment counts specifically), although I agree it could be prone to going wrong, e.g. making doom threads even doomier. One solution I can think of is to give a boost for comments but only up to a fairly low cutoff (say, 6 comments). Thoughts on this?
For a ~20 karma post I think having 5+ comments is a good signal that its a valuable-but-niche post.
Digression but I would recommend reading about Thompson sampling :) (wikipedia, inscrutable LessWrong post). It’s a good model to have for thinking about explore-exploit tradeoffs in general.