@dFox really loving devRant, but I feel like the site should require text with picture posts or something. Noticed a trend where people are just using this as a meme aggregator instead of rant site.

Myself and many others try to give context to memes for ranting purposes, but I'm noticing some users are clearly after up votes.

Do you have any suggestions on how to mitigate? We do require text to be entered with an image, but sometimes people have gotten around that probably by entering white space characters, so we can fix that issue, but it still doesn't do anything about irrelevant captions that don't add anything.

@dfox I'm going to think on it. I don't want to blindly complain without a solution.

@dfox initial thoughts pour in right after my first post of course. We could consider a few routes. One is reputation based privileges (i.e. You can't use images until you hit five rep). This could also reduce explicit spam account. Another route could be democratized reporting. If some number of people report a post, it automatically gets soft deleted.

It's very easy for me to say these things because I don't know the architecture of the site. Just a few thoughts.

(turning on notification)

@wmccullough good ideas, though we do already to some of them (like not showing posts that get downvoted a lot). Part of the problem is images are generally very well liked, meaning they get a lot of +1's, so you can't just go by their score, possibly. Also, many times users who post a lot of images/the ones your talking about have a good amount of points. After all, they are posting images which generally score well. That makes, IMO, requiring a specific score to post images a not-so-useful safe guard.

In general we're working on improving the voting system and there will be an announcement tonight on some changes to downvotes and functionality to mark posts as reposts and some more.

If the algo is based on a score, is it possible to tweak the weighting of "textier" posts?

@dfox fantastic news! I can see your point. Don't get me wrong, I don't think ill of the site. I'm afraid of meme posters ruining the original goal of the site.

What do you think of democratization of removing a thread?

Quality with this sort of thing is such an interesting subject, look forward to the announcement.

@chrizzle weighting for what exactly?

@wmccullough what I'm trying to say is it is democratized. If something scores too poorly it gets becomes almost invisible. The problem is the images your talking about are scoring highly so the majority has ++'d them.

Which is why we think personalization is an important aspect of the feed.

What sort method do you use when looking at the feed?

@dfox, I'm probably making a few too many assumptions.

If I was trying to give longer posts/posts without images a higher relevance in search, I would consider adding a score boost to an index record at index time. I don't know if something similar is possible?

Just spitballing, it probably doesn't apply.

@dfox I'm on the same page now! I use algo view currently.

@chrizzle that makes sense, it's a good idea.

What's hard to improve is the "recent" sort since that's just sorted by recent. A lot of times people have expected that to be weighted some how, but that wouldn't make sense.

But algo on the other hand, we can do a lot with and we're planning to. I've done some special weighing on images before, but length is a good idea. I'll put that on the list of algo improvements, I like it.

@vinerz when I talk about weighting in terms of the algo, it's usually on a per-user basis. Meaning if you like long posts a lot, long rants would be weighted higher for you. Same goes for short rants.

Maybe try an LSH comparison to avoid reposts