"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." -- Yogi Berra

When I first heard that quote from Yogi Berra is crystallized for me a concept that had been developing for a while in my sub-conscious. Popularity of social institutions are intimately tied with the participants in those institutions. That evolution happens "outside" our own internal definition of quality. So when you go to a restaurant over a long time, read a magazine over a long period of time, play a video game over a long period of time, pretty much any evolving community, your internal standard of "goodness" is established in your head somewhat at the start of that experience, and "improvement" or "degradation" of that experience is measured against this internal metric which may not be changing at all.

I've most recently been dealing with this in neighbourhood meetings where "long term" residents are really upset at the city for approving the building of multi-story apartment buildings where previously single family detached homes stood. This change in urbanization is a "bad thing" for them (although its great for people moving here who need a place to live and cannot afford to rent a house!). And yet when you explain that the very house they live in was once an orchard, was it a "bad thing" that the farmers allowed the city to build homes on what had been orchard? And the answer (because this is government and governments are often good at keeping records) is Yes! people did complain about all the houses going in and how it was putting businesses that supplied those farms out of business. So when you ask someone in the present would they give up their house, and have razed to the ground and returned to orchard? They would not. But their internal standard of "goodness" was set when they moved in, and the city is evolving, as it must, and it is drifting away from their notion of what a "good" city is. So they advocate for keeping things the same, the young people advocate for affordable housing near mass transportation, and the city council has to weigh these against the long term health of the city and try to decide wisely.

Hacker News is very much like that. It changes based on the internal "goodness" metrics of its users. And as new users get added and their goodness metric is just slightly different then the incoming new users slowly migrates the notion of "good" toward their point of view.

A long time ago I proposed a compass star type voting system where the east and west points represented "less like this" (west), and "more like this" (east), with north and south continuing to represent "this is a good example of something I like" (north) or "this doesn't belong here" (south). The center button could represent "perfect".

The clever bit though, was not the voting system, rather it was to capture through vote analysis this particular user's preferences (their internal metric of "goodness") As defined as a point on an n-dimensional surface of other users, Then using something like k-means analysis to create a rank for a story given the particular user's preferences. In that way the front page would always have really great stories on it, that you like. But they might not be the front page stories that some other collection of members like.

Sadly it remains an idea I don't really have time to implement but if someone does I'd really like to participate especially in developing the system of algorithms that tune the various internal "nodes" in that n-space of likes/dislikes.