#community voting

Astronaut Or Astronot: Vote For The Hackaday Prize!

Just in case we haven’t hammered it into your skull quite yet, we’re having a little contest over on Hackaday.io. It’s The Hackaday Prize, where everyone on Hackaday.io is invited to build something cool for the chance of winning a trip to space and hundreds of other prizes. We know not everyone has the desire, skills, or the time to build a project, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still contribute. We’re holding a community voting round right now. Each week, we have a new round of community voting with a new theme. This week, we’re asking the Hackaday.io community …read more #2015HackadayPrize, #Astronaut, #AstronautOrAstronot, #CommunityVoting, #Featured, #HackadayPrize, #TheHackadayPrize

Astronaut Or Astronot? Community Voting Begins!

In case you’re not aware, we’re running a contest to send one lucky hacker into space. We’re already giving out $50k in prizes to entice the most worthy hackers to submit their project to the The Hackaday Prize. Now it’s time for community voting, and that means trotting out Astronaut Or Astronot, where you decide the best project for this week’s theme. Projects voted into the top ten for each theme will receive Hackaday Prize t-shirts. But there’s something in it for you too. Everyone who votes in the community voting rounds will be eligible to win a $1000 gift …read more #2015HackadayPrize, #AstronautOrAstronot, #CommunityVoting, #Cons, #HackadayPrize, #Slider, #TheHackadayPrize

This week, Facebook, Google and Twitter released their year-in-reviews for 2012. All of them revolved around largely the same topics- The US Presidential elections, the death of Whitney Houston and Gangnam style! This may sound pretty obvious, but it really oversimplifies the bigger picture- 72 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute, half a billion tweets are made on Twitter everyday, and 1.2 trillion Google searches in a year!!

The point we're trying to make is that it isn't just about the amount of information that's already there on the web, it's the rate at which the size of that information is growing. And the growth isn't likely to stop. There's been a 566% increase in the number of internet users since the start of the millennium, and barely a third of the world's population actually has internet access! So, to put it plainly, there's a lot of information being pumped into the internet everyday, and we haven't even hit full throttle yet.

There is, however, one tiny little detail that people forget to mention when they talk about stats like these. Most of this information is time-sensitive. Simply put, most of the content on the web that people are consuming right now, is almost useless a week from now. So then why are there so many different aggregators that are trying to make sense of this information live, and offering you the content available right now, and so few of them (read nobody) archiving all the stuff that actually is worth consuming? 

Don't get us wrong. It's not like we don't keep refreshing our twitter feeds every few minutes, in case we miss out on something, but if you had to build a little internet scrapbook of all the stuff that you'd like to keep and remember, would you really save something like this? While something like that may be interesting to a lot of people, it's not something that people would like to store in their memories. But the fact remains that most news is essentially an unfiltered narrative of what's happening around the world. It lacks value without context. And that's precisely what we're trying to avoid. We want to give you a stream that's filled with interesting stuff, one that can keep refilling itself. Not one where you're either waiting for something new or are bored enough to re-read what was on top yesterday.

And that's our motivation really. 36floors is about sharing the best links from across the web for others to discover and rate them, so that quality is an inherent part of the system.

In the last post, we spoke about how algorithms aren't very good at discovering new stuff and have a tendency to stick to a pattern. In this post, we'll talk about possible solutions to this problem. 

It's actually quite the most obvious thing in the world. You've probably even seen this method in implementation in lots of places. The idea is to use real people instead of algos pretending to be people. There. You're probably shaking your head wondering what's so smart about this method to begin with. Well, here you go. 

Apart from the big disadvantage of filter bubbling that we mentioned last time, algorithms have one other problem. Algorithms are basically incapable of gauging the quality of an article. This may seem odd, but people still haven't found a way to write a crawler that can actually tell you how good an article is. And it's gonna take a really long time for something like that to actually be possible. Quality, at least for writing, is something that is intangible, unlike say quality for factory-manufactured goods. The only way to measure this is by asking people who've read what's being rated. And by doing this on a large scale, there's a good chance that what you've measured is pretty accurate since it probably takes care of any biases that individuals might have.

Using the community to rate content is a method that's almost as old as the world wide web itself. Users submit links and other users vote them up or down into oblivion. Digg and Reddit really pioneered this approach during the 2000s , but they sorta lost their grip with the entry of more versatile social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Users soon switched from "digging" and "burying" links to liking and retweeting links. So clearly, the concept of communities rating links has existed for quite some time. So what's new about it this time around? 

The concept may be cool, but the implementation not as much. The thing is that the most liked links on Facebook or the links on top of Reddit aren't really the best articles or submissions. They're the most popular ones. Which probably explains why Reddit's front page is infested with pictures of cats, and my timeline is filled with memes. Using the same method (upvoting/liking) to express both quality and popularity leads to confusion and ambiguity and over time what results is a dilution of the general quality of content. This becomes an issue since it's now much harder to find the content that you want to read.

Separating quality from popularity is vital to segregating and organizing information on the web. Currently, only Wikipedia and Hacker News (only in the technology niche though) seem like communities that are focussed entirely on quality. Quora seems to be heading there. Sadly, there seems to be no community focussed on sharing and rating the best stuff (not the popular stuff) from across the web. Oh wait, there's one. It's called 36floors.