pg has noted that the fluff stories that this site's target audience might vote up (the "dangerous" stories that would attract those mentally-14-years-old people who are ruining / have ruined reddit) seem to tend to be quick to read. Is there a way HN could keep track of how long a particular story was kept open?
It'd be a pretty contrary approach. Clicking on a link would probably have to open the story in an iframe within HN. Lots of people hate that, I know. Maybe it could be made optional? Would people sacrifice that for improved link quality?
The iframe would be set below whatever amount of HN chrome at the top pg wants plus an "I'm done" button. HN could keep track of time between clicking on the story and clicking "I'm done".
A big question I had was "what about fraudulent reports." It's interesting that this is somewhat self limiting because increasing ranking this way would, by definition, take more time. Also, using the existing anti-spam heuristics (E.g., mostly new accounts upvoting a story), HN could further filter out time reports from unreliable sources.
It occurs to me also that this could be done completely transparently if HN didn't have to deal with the so called "same origin" security policy. A plug in could probably be written for HN to get around it, but bypassing the single most important security policy of the web might just be an intrinsically bad idea.
It'd be a pretty contrary approach. Clicking on a link would probably have to open the story in an iframe within HN. Lots of people hate that, I know. Maybe it could be made optional? Would people sacrifice that for improved link quality?
The iframe would be set below whatever amount of HN chrome at the top pg wants plus an "I'm done" button. HN could keep track of time between clicking on the story and clicking "I'm done".
A big question I had was "what about fraudulent reports." It's interesting that this is somewhat self limiting because increasing ranking this way would, by definition, take more time. Also, using the existing anti-spam heuristics (E.g., mostly new accounts upvoting a story), HN could further filter out time reports from unreliable sources.
It occurs to me also that this could be done completely transparently if HN didn't have to deal with the so called "same origin" security policy. A plug in could probably be written for HN to get around it, but bypassing the single most important security policy of the web might just be an intrinsically bad idea.