It's a nice idea, but I have mostly stopped using/installing any software that is not open-source a long time ago. So, please open-source it, especially if you want users to truly trust it.
Even then, I would recommend anyone to install (small to mid) browser extensions by cloning and inspecting the source and just then loading it yourself - if you don't know: any browser extension can read input/password fields across all site(s) you gave it access to (yeah, it's crazy but unfortunately true).
To be fair, the .xpi is just a .zip file, and the JS isn't minimized.
I vibe-converted it to a userscript[1], but it doesn't work for me in qutebrowser because it depends on profile data fetched from `https://hn-trustspark.com/alltrust.json`, which seems to be periodically updated by the author, and qutebrowser has limited userscript support. :(
It could probably be worked around by fetching the data externally, but I don't want to depend on hn-trustspark.com. It would be great if the profile updating tool could be published as well.
Anyway, hope it helps someone else :)
FWIW, after a quick review of the script, it looks safe to me. As long as you trust that the served profile data is correct, and don't mind leaking your IP to it.
Great idea and kudos to the author! We need more tools like this to help us deal with spam, and not just on HN, but everywhere.
It's a good idea, provided nothing sketchy goes on either now or in a future update ... I'm playing about with it but will likely unload it soon enough.
One issue: New accounts with Zero submissions get a full green stack for "Submission Trust" (0 submissions in 0 days).
That comes across as three flat red lines and a singl tall green stack - not sure if that's the right message.
Submissions is an odd one ... those people that submit a story seen on the tech blogs once a day get bucketed together with habitual spammers of poor quality posts.
Wow "trust as in trust me bro", thanks for the heads-up. Only Y Combinator is allowed that level of access to HN karma metadata right now; what a gold mine.
I'm pretty sure it's based off of the configuration in the green gear in the top right of the iframe. You can inspect the ways it's calculated from karma, comments, etc etc
If you look at the config it's based on karma, comments, submission rate, comment rate (optional), and account age (that is, if you trust it actually uses the config how it says)
There are some high karma accounts which make a great contribution, and others which ... don't. I'm doubtful whether karma or account age has a significant signal beyond anti-spam.
But it would be useful to know if I had up/down voted them significantly in the past.
The only thing karma reliably indicates is participation over time, the signal is too noisy for anything else. If anything high karma should be a red flag. The very best contributors here rarely comment because they have better things to do. It shows an 8/8 score for me and I doubt anyone would consider me a top tier high quality contributor.
A plugin like HN Comments Owl would be more useful IMHO.
I think friend/foe and trust signals should come from a user's voting. So I think it should operate transparently to the user and there should be a default shade-out option of bad actors, but with the option to view. So it's set-and-forget. On the backend - could you make it so if you've never visited HN before, and you install the plugin, the experience changes accordingly?
I had the idea to setup a forum somewhere else - this sort of functionality would come in handy as part of normal operation.
Suggestion: instead of just popping in the computed graphic add a placeholder immediately - four low grey bars should work well, in the same width as the final sparkline graphics. That way the text on the page will not jump later when the final sparklines are ready.
Great idea! I've been running my own chrome plugin I made that is similar, but recently discovered this: https://oj-hn.com/ and intend to start to contribute to it as it's very good and hope it grows. Something like Sparklines would be great in oj also for us chrome users, I really like the Sparklines implementation.
I considered something like this but I find the UX of information too noisy. In practice, I much prefer simply performing a ternary block/leave alone/highlight functionality. And it's comments that bother me more than links.
Even then, I would recommend anyone to install (small to mid) browser extensions by cloning and inspecting the source and just then loading it yourself - if you don't know: any browser extension can read input/password fields across all site(s) you gave it access to (yeah, it's crazy but unfortunately true).
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