Comments on: Why Reddit is broken, and how to fix it

By: Sold Out Activist

Sold Out Activist — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:13:06 +0000

I’ve just launched a site that has public user tagging that’s flavored (good/bad/neutral) so you can customize the site according to your preferences with each tag you add. When many users tag something the same way, it becomes a permanent tag of that submission. My website link will send you there. I’m looking forward to comments if anyone is interested.

By: Kari Chisholm

Kari Chisholm — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:05:42 +0000

Then recommend stuff HE likes to me! It’s like wisdom of the crowd TIMES bayesian filtering. We can call it Web 3.0!

Or, you can call it Web 1.0. Amazon worked like this from the beginning, right?

By: Tad Chef

Tad Chef — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:27:24 +0000

Btw. it’s not social bookmarking but social news. del.icio.us is for bookmarking. Aside of that reddit is the most hostile “social” site I ever encountered.

By: Aidan Finn

Aidan Finn — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:31:02 +0000

“After all, reddit-funder Paul Graham was the guy who thought up using bayesian filtering for spam.”

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/sahami98bayesian.html

By: matt knox

matt knox — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:24:21 +0000

For bayesian inference to work, you want there to be a large number of features per judgement, so that you can multiply together the probabilities of buckethood vs. nonbuckethood. So in the spam filtering case, every word is a feature. Reddit does not see the sites to which it links, so all it has as a featureset is the article title and the URL. Crawling the linked sites, though possible, would mean that they would have to store a ton of data-maybe as much as 100x the amount they presently store per article.

But let’s assume they get around that. They have a huge featureset for every article. Then they have a giant computational challenge-they have to run every article against the ‘goodness-filter’ trained by each user who views a page. Doing that at page-view time would be a disaster, so they’d have to run it beforehand and store it, which means they’d need MxN goodness values for M users and N articles.

They know about bayesian inference, but it’s not such a good fit here.

By: shestheoneforme

shestheoneforme — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:58:49 +0000

When I saw Paul Graham’s name, I thought it looked very familiar.
I’m reading Hackers and Painters right now, and I love it.
I didn’t know he had anything to do with Reddit!

By: Jack Alexander

Jack Alexander — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:17:05 +0000

I installed the ‘greasemonkey’ script to get rid of ron paul and his spambots….reddit might need more work, but you have to admit that it is better, by far, than digg and propeller.

By: Dov

Dov — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:50:18 +0000

I don’t care what the aims and objectives are of this site. There is no excuse for permitting repeated and vile anti-Semitic attacks. At some point the people who run broad-spectrum internet sites have to be put the same standards of accountability as others in the mass media.

http:/www.root-1.co.il/reddit.htm

By: quirkyalone

quirkyalone — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:25:18 +0000

The question is, whether the Bayeasian Filtering will work in this content. According my limited knowledge, BF is good at filtering out what you do not want (=spam), but not good at recommends what you want.

Some time ago, I played with one open source rss reader (sorry can’t remember the name), which used BF to filter out “interesting” RSS posts based on my votes, which is the similar principle you advocates. But it just didnt work too well…

By: pp

pp — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:18:54 +0000

But hey. You like lisp people, paul graham, and you don’t like sexprs? :)