• tal
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    2 years ago

    We’ve basically chosen which narrative is the True Main Story,

    Maybe don’t do it globally. I mean, is there one global truth? Maybe provide access to links for all communities/magazines to which there was a link, combine those as “related discussions” under a drop-down menu, but recommend, make the primary link, the appropriate magazine/community based on the subscriptions or viewing history of the user?

    Otherwise, say Donald Trump runs and wins the 2024 presidential election in the US. A link to a story about it on CNN is submitted both to a Republican-favoring magazine and a Democratic-favoring magazine. The Republican guys are happy about it, the Democratic guys are unhappy about it. If you choose One Global Truth, you dump all the Republicans into the Democratic forum or vice-versa. Either of those options kind of sounds like a recipe for infighting and trouble. Would be better to try to direct the Republicans to the discussion on the Republican-favoring magazine and the Democrats to the discussion on the Democratic-favoring magazine.

    So, like, maybe you rank the magazine priority based on how many times a user has viewed that magazine. I mean, if they enjoy reading that magazine, then presumably they’ll keep going back and automatically expose their preferences as to where to read something.

    I’m not sure that that’s completely perfect – like, I could imagine a situation where one has a general tech magazine and a more-specialist magazine dealing with a very specific piece of technology, where one uses the general tech magazine more but would prefer to see the magazine dealing with the particular technology in question if a link is submitted about that specific technology. But it seems like a reasonable heuristic to start with.

    • shepherd
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      12 years ago

      @tal I think you understand the concerns here! The devil’s in the details, and it’s annoyingly difficult to create a tidy aesthetic solution with acceptable consequences.

      Ranking based on user preference is interesting, but I suspect it eventually escalates to creating another black box algorithm? Youtube / Instagram / TokTik / etc? There’s a whooole rabbit hole here that could seem like it’s helping at each step, but easily becomes a mess of relevant factors.

      And don’t forget that people are more likely to click stuff that makes them mad!

      I kinda think this shouldn’t be fediverse policy, it would probably be best to keep it to visible (public) actions like votes and boosts.