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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

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Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#661

Post by alextp »

crasshopper wrote: post #584
alextp wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that word features are not really that good predictors of quality. I have done some research on this (unpublished), and I got a really good performance on predicting hacker news votes by just counting how many new words (not stopwords, not very-high-frequency words) a comment was adding to a thread. Just using a few variations on this theme predicted better than word counts or bigram features. Fundamen…

alextp, what if you use ML on voting patterns instead of comment words? (also what if the ML only provided feedback while one is typing the comment?)

By voting patterns, what do you mean? Features like how many times the user has voted in this thread/hour/day? How many times the comment has been voted, the replies have been voted, and the story has been voted? I didn't try those; maybe they'd work, but I have no intuition saying why they should.

Using ML to provide feedback is a bad idea. Most ML techniques latch on to surface features of the text rather than the deeper structure, so it'd just make it really easy for people to reword their mean comments ("this is just stupid" becomes "What an incoherent piece of gobblydegook" or something like this, which might make things funnier but I doubt it would help).

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#662

Post by sc00ter »

Personalise the front-page? Add a weighting that pushes up contributions posted by users whos previous contributions I have upvoted, on the basis that there's a chance we share similar interests if I consistently upvote their contributions. It could also push up articles that users I've previously upvoted have commented on.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#665

Post by ig1 »

After half a day this post with 379 votes is no longer on the front page, it's barely on the second page (it's currently at position 50).

I think that suggests there's something wrong with the rating algorithm. Maybe the penalty for self-posts should be removed ?

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#666

Post by sc00ter »

pg wrote: post #507
kj12345 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I ag…

Ids are sequential, so there's a time machine at your disposal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

Hmm... so what can we deduce from the quality of the commentary here? ;-p

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#667

Post by Tycho »

Simple and easy suggestion: above the textbox on the reply page, add some guidance on tone and behaviour. Like,

    'Please refrain from making mean-spirited comments,
    we like to maintain a positive atmosphere at HN;
    and if you are planning to crack a joke, you might want 
    to think twice as jokes here are usually downvoted unless
    they're *particularly* amusing.
Or whatever you think's more appropriate. The problem to me seems that general bitchy behaviour is the norm on internet IT forums, so people come here thinking it's ok. Maybe they just need a little guidance.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#668

Post by bmelton »

phlux wrote: post #600
kunley wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody may be interested in gossip, "IT celebrities" and cheap-prediction stuff, but why they started it here? There are lots of sites offering exactly that. For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..

I have said this at least a few times and I will say it again -- a story and comment moderation model based on the way it is done at reddit truly would help. I find it really odd that you cant downvote until 500 karma, and it appears you can never? downvote stories? And then there are comments in this thread that say "its a really hard problem to figure out" -- no it isn't, you just need to have faith that moderation…

I think that a part of the reason nobody's receptive to that idea is because we've seen the community quality at Reddit.

Without trying to insult them, I know that it is a very close-knit and strong community, but the intellectual barrier is very low. The comment quality is very low. The notion that there is anything there that can help us is likely being spurned because, right or wrong, that's not what we're striving for.

While I was a little shocked to hear PG clarify that HN is a place for hackers and not startup founders (I kind of expected the opposite,) I think we can all agree that this isn't meant to be a site for the lowest common denominator.

I personally believe that quality control starts with the submissions. The higher quality submissions, the higher quality comments they'll attract. But that's just me, apparently.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#669

Post by rlpb »

gnosis wrote: post #659
rlpb wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality. Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed? If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place? Without voting, what will be left of HN? > Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments. Again: isn't that what we have right now? I'm merely suggesting a way of impr…

"Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed?" Indeed. That's why HN is struggling with this problem, because HN chose to build its system around voting. So now it has to deal with one of the inevitable downsides of voting. Namely, that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. "If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place?" Read through thi…

> I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in comment quality?

Because users who don't upvote because there's nothing good to upvote are still active users.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#670

Post by gnosis »

rlpb wrote: post #669
gnosis wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed?" Indeed. That's why HN is struggling with this problem, because HN chose to build its system around voting. So now it has to deal with one of the inevitable downsides of voting. Namely, that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. "If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place?" Read through thi…

> I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in comment quality? Because users who don't upvote because there's nothing good to upvote are still active users.

If they are active, then by definition they are involved in the site (though not necessarily by voting, they could also submit stories and make comments).

If they're not active, why should HN assume otherwise?

If there really is nothing good to upvote, then I don't see what the adoption of the system you propose will do, as the extra proxy votes won't be used (there's nothing good to upvote, remember?).

The other major problem with your proposal is that it will be very open to gaming the system. Users could just create sockpuppet accounts to give their primary account the votes of the sockpuppet accounts.

Of course, even with the present system users can create sockpuppet accounts. But at least with the present system, voting from the sockpuppet accounts has to be done manually rather than automatically being aggregated in to one account by HN itself.

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