An interesting idea would be to make a submission cost 1 Karma point. So people would only submit a story if they think it's reasonable that someone might upvote it.
Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#12An interesting idea would be to make a submission cost 1 Karma point. So people would only submit a story if they think it's reasonable that someone might upvote it.
There are two issues with that. One is it makes karma into even more of a competition:
1) Keynesian beauty contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly vote up each others submissions so they always get 2 votes, and always have enough karma to keep submitting.)
Personally, I like the idea of rate limiting. Seems totally reasonable to me that until you have interacted with the community, you shouldn't clog up the news page. How do you get around people making 50 accounts a day to submit 50 stories a day? I don't think we have scale yet to worry about that sort of problem. At that point, we'll have to ban users, websites, ip addresses in some fashion
I think the issue right now though is not so much that it is overrun with spammers - just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate. Case in point: I know I have submitted a couple stories that I thought were HN worthy, but that people called me on in the comments (Alabama Fat Tax, for instance). I still thought it was relevant, but I had the self restraint to only submit occasionally anyway. Someone with similar taste to me without such self restraint is the issue that I think we need to solve, and rate limiting does that job admirably (I think).
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#13I've seen sites that solve some of the spam problem by requiring an account to have existed for at least 24 hours before submitting.
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#14An interesting idea would be to make a submission cost 1 Karma point. So people would only submit a story if they think it's reasonable that someone might upvote it.
There are two issues with that. One is it makes karma into even more of a competition: 1) Keynesian beauty contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest 2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly vote up each others…
I agree with issue #1, but the other solutions (minimum karma of 100 or something like this) would have the same problem. Regarding your issue #2, I think users with negative karmas would have to be disallowed submitting in order to stop spammers.
"just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate."
Basically my idea was that you have to prove you know about HN-culture by writing good comments, and then by gaining karma you can start submitting.
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#15Unless this is having an impact whereby the home page is filled with bad stuff, I'm afraid there's little you can do. There are only so many slots on the front page and bringing more "new good stuff" on it will only push old good stuff out faster.
This "problem" is a reflection of the fact that there's higher competition for a limited resource (front page slots) because there are more stories to choose from, rather than a problem with the submission process, imho.
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#16This is becoming more of a problem now. It is impossible for new stories to get as much attention now as when the site first started, but historically there really haven't been many good stories missed. This Ted talk failed to really make the front page twice. It must have briefly been on the front page but it takes so much more weight now to actually hold that position. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474875 and…
> What we need is some time of cultural incentive to read the new page, and pages 2/3/4 of the new page. Definitely. I'll admit that I never spend the time to go through the queue, let alone a few pages deep. How does one encourage this behavior? I don't care much about karma, but I guess if others do perhaps you could give extra karma for being one of the early upvoters?
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Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#17How many of you actually Police the new section of HN? I will flag maybe a couple stories per week, anyone with a much higher rate?
Maybe the site should encourage those with higher karma to spend more time policing (the put up or shut up method).
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#18How many of you actually Police the new section of HN? I will flag maybe a couple stories per week, anyone with a much higher rate? Maybe the site should encourage those with higher karma to spend more time policing (the put up or shut up method).
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Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two issues with that. One is it makes karma into even more of a competition: 1) Keynesian beauty contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest 2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly vote up each others…
I agree with issue #1, but the other solutions (minimum karma of 100 or something like this) would have the same problem. Regarding your issue #2, I think users with negative karmas would have to be disallowed submitting in order to stop spammers. "just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate." Basically my idea was that you have to prove you know about HN-culture by writing…
I think we are both on the same page as to what the issue is, but we disagree about the solution =)
Re: Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
#20This is usually when some blue eyed optimists calls on all the good upstanding old timers to vote up the good stories!
Bitter realists like myself suggest it may be time for a new new new social news site.