logoalt Hacker News

jwrtoday at 4:44 PM0 repliesview on HN

> depending on how best is defined in the given context

That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).

"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.