Have comments start at -1. (Or, better yet, -thread_depth).
That's kind of a "my amp goes up to 11" kind of thing, isn't it? You're just changing the label for "no votes either way."
No, it assigns a cost of 2 points to commenting.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
141–150 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#142Add more moderators, put them on rotation duty, and, instead of having them kill comments (except in the most egregious cases), have them patiently educate the people who put up the mean/dumb comments, as well as the upvoters. Write software that makes this process efficient.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#143Add "Assume Good Faith" to the guidelines; this is one of the few Wikipedia rules that I think really helps.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#144Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.
Users from non-first world countries would suffer disproportionate from not being able to participate.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#145The nuclear option: Periodically take the site down for a while and then rebuild the community (kind of like the Matrix). The quality people will likely stick around.
Perhaps only users with a certain level of karma have it roll over to the next version of HN. Everyone else gets reset (or even loses their account).
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#146A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027 politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.
Require articles about (say) economic inequality to be scholarly.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#147A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
How does that address comment quality?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about to start startups. That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.
HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.
Clearly not everybody reads the site guidelines. Perhaps enforcing that periodically would help.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#149I really like the /classic front page view. Could we try a similar comment view as well, with votes only counted from users who've been here for at least a year?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread. Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and…
>Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically. Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are lookin…
That is a great idea.