I think you're throwing out an entire idea out based on a small semantic quibble.
Ok, so upvotes on HN and Reddit are unlimited, and therefore not valuable.
Why not limit accounts to X upvotes per day or week? Or only allow upvoting as many times as you've been upvoted yourself? Suddenly upvotes are now scarce.
These aren't impossible problems to solve. HN has implemented tons of "dark" features you don't even realize are here to prevent spamming, and is largely successful at it.
For example, if you post to "New" and send a link to your friends telling them to upvote it, those upvotes will not be counted. Similarly, there is also a wait limit on how soon after visiting HN your upvotes will be counted, without you knowing it. There's a ton of these unwritten tricks like this behind the scenes, and as you can see from the quality level here, they work!
I think ideally the search engine of the future has a combination of user feedback (with HN-style dark patterns behind the scenes to protect integrity), plus some level of human curation.
I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
OK, but you're moving the goalposts here. You're not just talking about a new search rank algorithm any more, you're talking about building a new social-web ecosystem to enforce the kind of voting rules needed to make that algorithm work, and somehow getting mass adoption of that new ecosystem.
> I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
You're attacking a much broader proposition here than anything I wrote.
I wouldn't say there's goalposts here or winners and losers, we're all throwing out ideas. Issue pops up, humans suggest fix. New issue pops up, new fix needed. This is how all stuff evolves.
I guess I'm more broadly reacting to the sentiment in most comments I'm seeing (which is itself a trope in the dynamics of how upvote-based communities work).
Based off all the recent "Google results now suck" posts that went viral, it seems there's broad sentiment that Google is now a cesspool of SEO'd-to-death affiliate marketing.
But it also seems there's broad sentiment to shut down and discourage new possibilities before they even get attempted, regardless of potential merit.
Ok, so upvotes on HN and Reddit are unlimited, and therefore not valuable.
Why not limit accounts to X upvotes per day or week? Or only allow upvoting as many times as you've been upvoted yourself? Suddenly upvotes are now scarce.
These aren't impossible problems to solve. HN has implemented tons of "dark" features you don't even realize are here to prevent spamming, and is largely successful at it.
For example, if you post to "New" and send a link to your friends telling them to upvote it, those upvotes will not be counted. Similarly, there is also a wait limit on how soon after visiting HN your upvotes will be counted, without you knowing it. There's a ton of these unwritten tricks like this behind the scenes, and as you can see from the quality level here, they work!
I think ideally the search engine of the future has a combination of user feedback (with HN-style dark patterns behind the scenes to protect integrity), plus some level of human curation.
I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.