Community score mechanism#118

HN has a score from upvotes and it’s a great bit of signal to help tell if something has merit… Granted it’s no guarantee but it helps you get a sense of likely value

Displaying that kind of thing prominently next to the post would be handy.

The issue here is that everyone has dramatically different feeds, but if there were some generalized score, it would be handy to see. A bit like the reading length suggestion and the Social proof idea others mentioned.

Just to clarify, do you mean you’d want to see the current HN or Reddit score of a post next to the listing on Scour?

That would be nice but I think it would be hard to implement and keep current. I was more thinking some kind of metric from the Scour community

Ah, I see. The Popular Posts page is the closest thing to that right now.

To be honest, I’ve kind of intentionally stayed away from using popularity as a metric for ranking posts in your normal feed (read more about the philosophy in How Ranking Works). Popularity can be a proxy for quality, but using it also makes it harder to find niche content that either doesn’t interest other people or that others haven’t found yet.

That said, I am working on improving the signals Scour uses to assess quality, to try to surface more great reads and less noise.