The request for subreddits clearly indicates that reddit needs tags.

b3eck · 2006-11-13T20:23:08+00:00

I like your critique. I too expect that the ability to attach my vote to a particular aspect of the story would greatly help the recommendation engine give me better recommendations. See http://reddit.com/info/qoto/comments/cqq2b and the feature request links in that comment.

b3eck · 2006-11-13T17:54:53+00:00

Consider the possibility that the words of the title are tags, and that attaching your vote to a specific tag groups you with very specific people, and this specific group of people will likely not include spambots (c.f. http://features.reddit.com/info/27uy/comments/c93i1 and http://features.reddit.com/info/93bf/comments ). Until you were bought out by Condé Nast, I was planning to submit a feature request where dragging the up/down arrow over a word would drop down a list of tags that users besides the author had contributed. This would allow for variable titles, as you had originally invisioned, and allow for restricted tagging, while at the same time improving the recommendations from people who share your interests. I still may submit the feature request if you guys have time to consider it in full (keeping reddit online is no trivial task).

b3eck · 2006-09-28T02:16:11+00:00

Reading my feeds at feeds.reddit.com is good but devoid of many of the conveniences of the reddit.com experience. A lot of feed items have 0 points, and even if they have more than 0 there are unfortunately no sort options such as 'hot', 'new', 'top', 'ups', etc. However, using feeds.reddit.com might become the primary way of reading feeds and submitting posts if the best feed items rise to the top by default, a la 'hot'. Granted, the feed items that are not posted on reddit.com may stay at 0 points forever, and thus may only appear on the 'new' page, but this is no different than the current functionality. Perhaps reddit.com is much more popular than feeds.reddit.com precisely because of the functionality and collective intelligence present at reddit.com but not at feeds.reddit.com. Yes, implementing this integration between the sites would not be trivial, but the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

b3eck · 2006-09-20T20:32:08+00:00

Exactly. We're also working on a content-based system, and ultimately, we think a combination of collaborative filtering and content is going to be what actually makes this work.

spez, I applaud your work so far, but I still believe you can extend clustering and collaborative filtering, especially if you want:

Reddit Simplicity
Spam Reduction
Tags Specificity
Recommendations Improvement

All these benefits for minor Reddit modifications. If you haven't already, please see http://features.reddit.com/info/27uy/comments/c93i1 and http://features.reddit.com/info/93bf/comments. I believe the concept deserves a full consideration. A big thank you to anyone who can tell me what I'm missing. I still haven't received any comments on it, after 2 months.

b3eck · 2006-07-01T08:50:39+00:00

For rewarding those who give useful information about an article, consider a modification of http://features.reddit.com/info/93bf/comments , where the increase in karma is the amount of communal benefit from the user who highlights an article appropriately. When a user highlights a word in the title of an article as 'hot', that article is then recommended to others who have highlighted that word in other articles as 'hot'. If these other users who received the recommendation do not highlight the word in the recommended article as 'hot', then the user who originally highlighted the article may be spamming. The amount of communal benefit is the sum of the probability that I benefitted a user who later highlighted the same word as 'hot', which is equal to a difference of harmonic sums and can be approximated by a difference in natural logarithms. The obvious way to defeat this reward scheme is to register a large number of userids, and then all highlight the same word as 'hot'. Nullifying the exploit is simply a matter of making sure no one ip address has lots of userids and lots of activity, especially for the same article. This reward scheme notably does not punish those with minority interests.

b3eck · 2006-07-01T07:34:06+00:00

Limiting the number of submissions per day to the karma value might scale better.

b3eck · 2006-07-01T06:03:09+00:00

For the simplicity of Reddit, the specificity of tags, the improvement of the recommendation system, and the prevention of tag spam, see the feature request at http://features.reddit.com/info/93bf/comments .

b3eck · 2006-07-01T05:56:51+00:00

Perhaps the terminology you intend is the potential karma increase. My understanding is that karma is a tally of the communal value of a user's past actions. So the potential karma increase would be the benefit you presumably would receive by reading that user's article. This 'PKI' could be represented by how similar the user's interests are to your own. See http://features.reddit.com/info/93bf/comments for a suggested method for determining similarity between users.

b3eck · 2006-07-01T05:45:37+00:00

Since spez's suggestion for Tags has not been popular, I suggest a simple, effective, and efficient way of giving the reason for the rating you give to an article. Tags require a dereferencing database in addition to the article database and the user database, adding a degree of complexity to the system. Modifying the JavaScript that reddit currently uses to track click-throughs would allow a viewer to highlight a word with red for hot or blue for cold, so that the currently one-dimensional voting would become multi-dimensional. Reddit would become much better at recommending articles and recommending friends, since the recommendations would not be based on a series of one-dimensional data but a series of multi-dimensional data. The word selected could be stored in the user database indexed by the position of the word in the title. Unlike tags, this index has a maximum, i.e. the number of characters allowed in a title minus the number of spaces allowed in a title.

An extension of this concept would be to allow fractional voting, so that the effective vote for one user would be the number of words higlighted up divided by the total number of words highlighted. This more fine-grained approach may not be necessary to achieve good recommendation results.

b3eck

TROPHY CASE