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Ask HN: How to curate the noisy internet?

by dhirajbajaj on 11/19/17, 3:07 PM with 11 comments

Hello HN'ers,

As we all know we are living in a information abundance age, where internet content is exploding in terms of quantity. Internet is generating content every minute, in all domains beit entertainment, daily news, education, religious awareness, financial, providing opportunity and growth which is a positive side but also we are increasingly seeing fake news, news agendas, online scams which are easy money/power-traps for hackers/govt's/.

Due to this, i feel a strong need for curation of content that is quality material and promotes truth that is healthy and right. As the internet grows, a right framework/protocol is required to solve this growing issue.

An good way would be Reviews, but as seen in past reviews are also counterfeited at large scale. How do we make sure reviews aren't counterfeited? How would we design such a system?

Kindly share your views on how to solve this problem as it is a massive problem to have and we all are going to face side-effects sooner or later. Maybe some of us have wasted time and money on it.

  • by water_badger on 11/19/17, 6:12 PM

    I think something that created a graph of assertions and logical dependencies between them would be really cool! Crowdsource assertions and assumptions (dependencies on other assertions) for each article. For example: "Russia hacked the DNC" or "The CIA has the ability to impersonate Russian hackers" would both be assertions and you could browse content that depended on either of those assertions or on logical children of those assertions.

    The coolest thing is that it would actually make a distilled "skeleton of beliefs" that supported each perspective. You could quickly understand alternate points of view by skimming the assertion graph. It would encourage critical thinking about one's own perspective as well. You could even do belief "theory-crafting" by toggling beliefs on or off and seeing what the logical consequences would be for different claims credibility.

    Instead of disagreements turning into character attacks it could be a very discrete "you agree with assertion [url to assertion and evidence/counter-evidence] and I do not."

  • by ttoinou on 11/19/17, 4:22 PM

    One possible solution would be peer to peer curation where each peer curate its own content and where you can (this is a feature of the software / network) "follow" or "trust" others peers or organizations, and break this link when you find something weird about them or don't trust them anymore. It's obviously what we already do but there's no general framework to gather theses data in one place and create our own personalized search engine. This doesn't immediately solve the "fake news" or "payed reviews" issues but would let people that are concerned by it, to hide theses content in their web surfing.

    This would be also a very pro active process on the user side, and you would need people interested in that in order to build the software or network, there is a long way to convince regular people about the utility of such a tool and active approach.

  • by yorwba on 11/19/17, 4:49 PM

    The two major ways currently used for curation seem to be 1. aggregation of some measure of approval (upvotes on HN, likes on Facebook) and ranking based on that, or 2. sharing with contacts (retweets on Twitter). You could try combining them and would likely end up with something similar to what ttoinou suggests in a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15734474) [Which I have thus curated. Funny how that works.]

    I think those measures work very well. However, they apparently don't promote enough of the content you like. But that's not the fault of the curation mechanism, it's due to the preferences of the curators. Most people just aren't very interested in "truth that is healthy and right".

    It's very easy to use existing curation mechanisms to filter out most of the stuff that doesn't interest you (I have never seen an instance of the "fake news" phenomenon); but you aren't going to get everyone else to do the same.

  • by bdz on 11/19/17, 4:49 PM

    >promotes truth that is healthy and right

    Sounds like some kind of dystopian future

  • by oliv__ on 11/19/17, 4:27 PM

    Since you asked, Float[1] is my attempt at solving this problem:

    It's basically a web platform for you to save your best/favorite links and websites and the idea is that you can explore other users' profiles and see what they have saved.

    If you really enjoy their links, you can follow them and create your own little "HN" feed of links from the people you follow. You can also browse links by tags or domain.

    I just made it public so it's kinda empty but hopefully some of you like it and share your links! Here's the "about" page for more info: https://float.am/tour

    [1] https://float.am