HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

Why don't HN and Reddit use PageRank to rank submissions and users?


The PageRank patent has expired, so why not experiment with enhancing voting with PageRank-like algorithms?

For example, when a user upvotes/submits a url, you could have a bidirectional link between the user and the url.

You could then compute the importance of both submitted links and users using a circular notion of importance as is done with PageRank.


  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
A reputable page in page rank was one which was linked to by many other pages. The links were not bidirectional (unless in the underlying data) and there was only one node type in the graph, pages.

What is the equivalent for HN / Reddit? Are the human based methods superior for lifting interesting content to the community?