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4 votes
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Open-source developer and manager David Recordon named White House Director of Technology
14 votes -
Google employees form union
42 votes -
Neofeudalism and the digital manor
14 votes -
Do you love me?
29 votes -
LinkLonk - A link aggregator with a trust system
I built a link sharing website where you connect to users that share your interests. When you upvote a link - you connect to other users who upvoted that link and LinkLonk shows you what else...
I built a link sharing website where you connect to users that share your interests. When you upvote a link - you connect to other users who upvoted that link and LinkLonk shows you what else these users upvoted.
The more in common you have with another user the more prominently their other recommendations appear on your list.
The intuition is that the more useful your past recommendations have been for me, the more I can trust your future recommendations.
This is how trust works in meatspace - we keep track of how positive our experiences have been with other people and use that track record to decide who we can trust in the future.
Except that mechanism does not work online. It just does not scale to the numbers of users we interact with. We can remember around 150 other people (the Dunbar number). Beyond that our builtin trust mechanism breaks down. We revert to more coarse and primitive trust mechanisms such as tribalism and mistrust in everyone.
While we cannot personally keep track of every user on a platform - that is what computers are good at.
That is the idea behind LinkLonk. You don't need to remember the names of users who you can trust (in fact there are no usernames on LinkLonk). You simply upvote content that was useful to you and LinkLonk constantly keeps track of how useful every other user has been and ranks new content accordingly.
Another important part of trust is that if you misplace your trust in someone and they let you down then you need a mechanism to stop trusting them.
This is what the downvote button is used for: when you downvote an item, LinkLonk reduces your “trust” in other users that upvoted it. As a result, you will see less content from those users.
The above describes the basic idea. There are a couple more concepts:
- You start off weakly connected to all users, which means that at first you see content sorted by popularity. Rate something and refresh the page - the ranking will change.
- You are not limited to a single persona/interest. If you have multiple interests then you can create a separate collection for each of your interests. When you upvote a link you can choose what collection it belongs to. For example, if you are interested in woodworking and music then you can create two collections and put woodworking links into one and music links into the other. Then other people who liked your woodworking recommendations will only see your other recommendations from the same collection and will not get your music. This is mostly a way for you to help other users find relevant content. It’s optional. You can put everything into the “default” collection if you don’t feel like organizing.
- LinkLonk has another source of recommendations - RSS feeds. When you upvote a blog post LinkLonk connects to the RSS feed of that blog - as if it was another user. LinkLonk pulls updates from the feed and shows you the new entries using the same ranking algorithm: the more you upvote items from the feed the higher the other items from the feed are ranked. You can submit any RSS url and LinkLonk will connect (subscribe) you to it. My hope is that in the early days when we don't have many users you would find LinkLonk useful as a sort of an RSS reader.
- Moderation. When you downvote an item then you get connected to other users who also downvoted that same item. In other words, you will trust their other downvotes. If they downvote something then that item will rank lower for you.
Give it a try at: https://linklonk.com/register with 'tildes' as the invitation code. The invitation code can be used multiple times and I will keep it active for a few days. After that please DM me to get a fresh code.
I’m posting this on Tildes in part because I like the group of people that Tildes has attracted. And I also feel the topics of trust systems, content curation and moderation are relevant to Tildes and to its users (see: https://docs.tildes.net/future-plans#trustreputation-system-for-moderation).
What do you think?
27 votes -
New 2021 GPS accuracy issue impacting some Garmin, Suunto, other GPS devices
12 votes -
I spent a year deleting my address online, then it popped up on Bing
20 votes -
Linux for Apple Silicon effort kicks off
24 votes -
The design of the Roland Juno Oscillators
8 votes -
Thirteen tech luminaries we lost in 2020
3 votes -
The strange world of YouTube's corporate propaganda
12 votes -
Experts lay out the criteria for choosing Biden's CTO, who will be faced with using tech to tackle everything from climate change to vaccine distribution
6 votes -
National Police Association 2020 Year in Review: "Another thing furries are doing is dredging the Internet looking for ways to cancel us"
9 votes -
Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail; recommends outdated security algorithms
13 votes -
Apple loses copyright battle against security start-up Corellium
6 votes -
Internet 2021: Here's what the new year will (and won't) bring
5 votes -
Google Maps' moat is evaporating
7 votes -
Mixing reality and fantasy, computer-generated virtual influencers thrive amid the pandemic
7 votes -
Why I don't believe in encrypted mail providers anymore
14 votes -
Systems design explains the world: volume 1
10 votes -
Smartwatches monitor your health: An overview of what you get for the money
5 votes -
[SOLVED] A background process using a significant amount of CPU power stops immediately when I open task manager. Is there a way to identify what's doing thing?
It started a day or two ago. Three threads (I think?) jump from nearly 0% to 100% and go back as soon as I open task manager to try figure out what's causing it. My first thought was a virus or...
It started a day or two ago. Three threads (I think?) jump from nearly 0% to 100% and go back as soon as I open task manager to try figure out what's causing it. My first thought was a virus or bitcoin mining trying to hide itself (though isn't that done on GPU's?), but Windows' Defender came up empty handed.
I know certain OS apps, like automatic VIRUS scans behave similarly, stopping when you click or type, but this culprit seems to only react to opening the task manager. It also doesn't start again until task manager has been closed for a while.
17 votes -
Xfce 4.16 released with major changes
17 votes -
Trump promises to veto crucial defense-spending bill unless it includes a full repeal of CDA 230, the law that protects online platforms from liability
27 votes -
Voat is shutting down on December 25
67 votes -
iPhone factory workers say they haven’t been paid, cause millions in damages
6 votes -
Zach Talks Tech - Apple Watch Series 6 review
6 votes -
Platforms, bundling and kill zones
6 votes -
EFF's 2020 in review: How we saved .org
10 votes -
Best TV streaming devices for 2021
2 votes -
Federation and its consequences have been a disaster for the fediverse
9 votes -
Conversation 863
11 votes -
Inside the whale: An interview with an anonymous Amazon employee
9 votes -
Sweeping new copyright measures poised to pass in spending bill - The CASE Act and a felony streaming proposal are included
36 votes -
Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
13 votes -
Elon Musk says Apple CEO Tim Cook refused talks to buy Tesla at $60 billion valuation during 2017
9 votes -
Privacy is a collective concern
4 votes -
In 2021, we need to fix America’s internet
8 votes -
How and why I stopped buying new laptops
20 votes -
The story of 1987's Acorn Archimedes, the first production ARM/RISC-based personal computer
9 votes -
NewPipe: A FOSS alternative to classical YouTube
15 votes -
Google acquires Neverware, a company that turns old PCs into Chromebooks
13 votes -
VMware flaw a vector in SolarWinds breach?
7 votes -
US federal prosecutors accuse Zoom executive of working with Chinese government to surveil users and suppress video calls
11 votes -
Discord raises another $100M in venture capital ($480M total now) at a valuation of $7 billion
11 votes -
Preliminary analysis of the SolarWinds Orion supply-chain nation-state attack
7 votes -
When important components become scarce
6 votes -
Dutch researcher claims that he accessed US President Donald Trump's Twitter account by guessing password
21 votes -
Microsoft says it found malicious software in its systems
7 votes