Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You don't have to do things stupidly.

You can say "Older than X, decay", "has feature Y, decay". This is the company that makes pagerank, I'm confident they could come up with a useful ranking and rating algorithm




True that Google came up with PageRank, and have some smart people thinking up ways to rank things I may want.

It's also true that as long as PageRank has been around, there have been people exploiting how it works for their own personal gain. See: My "update every week to boost my score" example above.

Personally, I sort of like the thought that if somebody releases a crap app and gets a bunch of 1-star ratings they are likely going to stick for awhile. Harsh, I know, but it does give companies some incentive to get it mostly right at first.

Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking. Even something so simple as averaging all their apps' ratings would be helpful. Done right, it would help identify those soundalike apps, too.


>Personally, I sort of like the thought that if somebody releases a crap app and gets a bunch of 1-star ratings they are likely going to stick for awhile. Harsh, I know, but it does give companies some incentive to get it mostly right at first.

>Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking.

It would discourage releasing early and often, something that's hard enough to do already. I think I'm finally starting to get it through my head/ego that I need to just say "good enough is good enough, release it into the world and get feedback instead of spending 3 more months 'perfecting' it." Knowing a single app with bad ratings in the beginning could bring me down for years would just be another excuse not to ship.


>PageRank has been around, there have been people exploiting how it works for their own personal gain

Yeah, they change the approach to attack exploiters. The idea there is One True Way that will never need defensive measures feels a bit like "We can engineer a solution!" type approach. It seems all that's really needed is ongoing effort to fight exploitation.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: