enhanced trust algo
We still use a web of trust, but we've refined how trust is established between users. In the previous version, trust was established whenever a user upvoted another user's content. This was convenient and it allowed us to reuse a user's trust to determine their share of daily rewards. No more.
In this release, trust is gained when two users upvote the same piece of content and diminished when one user upvotes something the other user doesn't. A statistical model is used, specifically, a binomial proportion interval, to determine this trust level even when the sample size of upvotes is small.
Why the change? Mostly because if I trust the content you share (by upvoting it), it doesn't mean I trust your upvotes. This release means you only gain upvote trust if and only if you upvote well according to other users.
Everyone's trust has been recomputed and this is live right now. Notably, many more users are now trusted given that they lurk and upvote more than they provide content.
rewards
Given the trust algo change, we needed to change daily rewards too - your upvote trust doesn't entirely account for the value you bring to SN. Also, the way rewards were dispersed was not obviously related to the value you provided recently - if you had shared good content, even in some distant past, you were regularly rewarded. In interviews, most users didn't know why they were getting rewarded.
You now receive rewards strictly depending on the last 36 hours of value you provided. Very good and active users are likely to see 5-20x the daily rewards.
How rewards are dispersed now:
- To users who posted the top posts of the last 36 hours, we give 1/3rd of the daily revenue. Users are rewarded based on how well the post ranked relative to the other top posts.
- Same as (1) but this 1/3rd of daily revenue goes to users who posted the top comments.
- Users who upvoted the content in (1) and (2) are given the last 1/3rd of daily revenue. Users are rewarded based on:
- how early they upvoted the content relative other users
- how much they tipped
- their upvote trust
- the ranking of the content they upvoted
reward notifications
In a prior release, in response to users saying they were overwhelmed with rewards notifications, we made it so we only showed your rewards once and then disappeared them from your notifications. Reward notifications are back to always being viewable while solving this problem for those users (we identify "islands" of reward notifications and combine them into one notification).
what's planned (barring any fires starting)
- we are going to improve discussion markdown rendering
- multiple heading sizes
- better image display
- table of contents and linkable headers
- etc
- @kr is writing a more detailed FAQ that will take advantage of discussion markdown improvements
- ~jobs enhancements given both employer and user feedback
- polls
- another yet to be determined sub
new
into a roulette wheel like place to hang out. No real downside to getting it wrong, if in 36h it's all reset.1/x
where X is 1 if you were first to upvote, 2 if you were second, and so on.