Comment by NAR8789
3 years ago
I dig this! Since you're full-text indexing blogs with an eye towards content discovery, can I tempt you towards building out a reverse link index function to enable me to browse by thread?
My use case: often times blogs will respond to other blogs, linking to the original post in the process. The nature of linking means it's very easy to follow threads backwards in time, but given the original post it's often hard to discover the responses and ongoing conversation to follow things downstream. I'd like that downstream browsing to be easier.
My hope would be that such a tool could unlock higher-quality discourse. As a reader, this would let me hijack my natural tendency to follow comment threads, and redirect that attention towards slower-paced, more nuanced, more focused writing.
Edit: hmmm... though looking further, maybe this goes against your MarketRank philosophy.
I totally agree with you on this. Being able to follow the links easily in either direction would make it easier to fall into interesting rabbit holes.
> Edit: hmmm... though looking further, maybe this goes against your MarketRank philosophy.
It doesn't at all, but curious as to why you'd think that. We're not talking about using backlinks to rank pages after all, just as a discovery tool, which I think is great.
Ah, glad to hear it's not in conflict after all! Thanks for clarifying.
As to the source of my confusion... I think I was skimming and about to turn back to work and not thinking too deeply.
At the time I wrote that edit I had just gotten as far as "pagerank values links whereas marketrank values upvotes" (heavily paraphrased interpretation of 2.1 here: https://dkb.io/post/market-rank). My reaction was "oh, maybe that means links are bad... that's an interesting perspective but I don't have time to digest it right this moment. I'll put a pin in it and return to this article later to better understand, and hey I should add an edit to my comment to signal reading comprehension."
That last thought seems pretty ironic in retrospect.