Nostr Web Client

I should clarify: I'm genuinely excited to see people start to use PageRank in various applications, like zapstore. PageRank is simple but powerful. Many nostriches may not remember, but PageRank changed the world in 1998 with google search. It was transformative. Magic. And nostr can put some of that magic to great use.

My goal is to stimulate conversation around the algos themselves. PageRank is not the only centrality algo out there. And freedom tech != google. What precisely is it that we want to measure? Popularity is the siren song. Nostr recommendation engines need to be guided by a different purpose.

Quality and merit, not popularity.

nostr: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Discussion

Chris Guida 11mo ago

I'd say Google changed the world in ~2004. In 1998 no one had heard of it haha

Leo Wandersleb 11mo ago

Any algorithm that attributes a global rank to stuff is flawed as it can be faked in a system like nostr. I don't care what people like if they are more than 2 follows away from me.

david 11mo ago

I agree with you regarding global ranking. This is why I calculate personalized PageRank, not global PageRank. My understanding is that nostr:nprofile1qyv8wumn8ghj7enfd36x2u3wdehhxarj9emkjmn99uqzqun2rcnpe3j8ge6ws2z789gm8wcnn056wu734n6fmjrgmwrp58q390rp63 and nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7ct4w35zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshsz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wshszxthwden5te0wfjkccte9eekummjwsh8xmmrd9skctcpzemhxue69uhk6mr9dd6juun9v9k8jtnvdakz7qpq76p7sup477k5738qhxx0hk2n0cty2k5je5uvalzvkvwmw4tltmeqrtmus0 are doing the same, calculating personalized PageRank.

GrapeRank is also personalized, not global. And one of the GrapeRank parameters allows you to deemphasize rankings based on number of hops away.

If you truly want to completely ignore anyone more than 2 hops away, this is why my site also calcuates your Follows Network. For any given user, you can see whether that user is 2, 3, 4, 5, however many hops away.

So that's 3 scores: PageRank, GrapeRank, and number of hops away. None are global scores; they're all personalized, meaning they're relative to you.

franzap 11mo ago

That's right, we also do personalized Pagerank (which naturally decreases rankings many hops away) and working on another service that returns amount of hops.

Breakfastman 11mo ago

and a couple of years after 1998 I was running about 170 websites to boost the ranking of one. Pagerank is responsible for the current web to be 95% crap/spam/auto-generated content.

david 11mo ago 💬 1

How’d you boost the ranking of the 170 websites?

Breakfastman 11mo ago

Back then, 'authority' was given to sites with long articles and many (interlinked) pages. This is when the first content generators/mixers were used. add in some links, bought from pages with an already established pagerank ( Google would let you see that data). the point was not to rank all your sites, you just needed to point your generated sh*t with little pagerank all to your money site and voilà... profit!

david 11mo ago 💬 1

Yup. PageRank was magic compared to what came before it, but it can definitely be gamed!

People will do what they can to game GrapeRank. But the contextual nature of GrapeRank makes it more agile than PageRank. My expectation is that in many cases, the effort it takes for the community to counter and neutralize an exploit will be less than the expense incurred by a bad actor engaged in the exploit. Exploits will become less profitable and therefore less of a burden on the system.

Breakfastman 11mo ago

yes, I guess that's the best way to go, but it does open the door to negatively influencing your competition. Ranking stuff is hard.

franzap 11mo ago

Global Pagerank will do that. Google used a million other inputs besides Pagerank

Pip the WoT guy 11mo ago

First off, GrapeRank (GP) should only be compared to Personalized Pagerank (PP). Both are personalized, or "local".

Second, I very much disagree that PP is about popularity. It depends on the graph it is run. If you would "run it on zaps", you would get something that is closer to "value" than "popularity".

Third, the mathematical properties of GP are unknown (does it converge? what's the relationship with distance? what's the relationship with flux? is it graph stable?), but I would they are not promising. Here for example:

Npubs that are 2 and 3 hops from the user, span the whole spectrum of possible values. This suggests that distance DOES NOT really play a role in GP. But distance is something the user can influence directly, by following/unfollowing!

Compare it to Personalized Pagerank where distance actually has both a theoretical and measurable impact. As you can see, the tendency is that, the furthest you go, the lower the score.

vinney...axkl 11mo ago

Why make this into a competition? We can just have both and people can use what they want.

Pip the WoT guy 11mo ago

sure. I am just skeptical of "too good to be true" algos, with no proofs

vinney...axkl 11mo ago

Why is it "too good to be true"? In my understanding, it's solving an entirely different problem. And when you accept the bounds of its problem and solution then it doesn't seem "too good" it seems "appropriate for the problem"

david 11mo ago

Correct. I am not claiming GR to be “too good to be true.”

I would counter that PageRank is likewise not “too good to be true.” It’s famous but that doesn’t mean we should blindly accept it as the only tool in our arsenal.

franzap 11mo ago

What are the two distinct problems GP and PP are solving? Genuine question

david 11mo ago

If your goal is to put pubkeys in order, PR and GR can both serve that purpose in a meaningful way. May as well do the one that is easier to calculate.

If your goal is to do anything that requires a pubkey-specific WEIGHT, such as tallying votes or doing a weighted average, GrapeRank is better than PageRank because PR is inherently a popularity contest, and most of us don’t want weight to be proportional to popularity. Most of us want weights to be proportional to merit or quality, in the relevant context.

GrapeRank is inherently designed to create contextual scores. One context might be designed to distinguish real users from bots, ie a binary outcome (this is the GR score currently available on my site). Another context (I have not yet implemented on my site) might be designed to reflect a pubkey’s expertise in some topic on a scale from min to max. Either of these scores are suitable to be used as the pubkey’s weight in the relevant context.

It’s not clear to me how to do this with classical PageRank. Unless you modify it, of course.

vinney...axkl 11mo ago

The subjective nature is key here.

My idea of pubkey N's expertise in X may be different than your idea of pubkey's N expertise. We should see pubkeyN ordered differently as a result.

This solves a ridiculous number of societal problems!

david 11mo ago

Absolutely! The Grapevine is designed specifically to reflect the values and beliefs of YOU, the end user.

If you trust zaps more than follows, or vice versa, then adjust the relevant weights accordingly. The community will need a developer to write the script to ingest follows and zaps into the GrapeRank system, but once that’s done, the average user (who is not necessarily a skilled developer) will have the power to customize his or her Grapevine according to his or her values and beliefs.

david 11mo ago 💬 1

The average GR score decreases as hops increases, as it does with PageRank. Distance plays a role with both.

Pip the WoT guy 11mo ago

The average does, but the variance is really high

david 11mo ago

A high variance does not imply GR is not useful. I’d argue the opposite: it implies the GR score conveys information that is not conveyed by the DoS score alone.

A low variance (tight correlation) between the PR score and the DoS score would imply we may as well just scrap PR and use the DoS score which is easier to calculate. Although I don’t think the correlation is tight enough to suggest we should do that.