I like it that you can change day/night mode in the top right corner of his page. Although this should probably be the part of the browser.
Name It, and They Will Come
101–110 of 116 posts
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trying to figure out what both you and the grandparent poster are getting at. Usually on HN we're criticizing people for having too much crap on their pages, hard to decipher designs, tiny text, and what not.. not that their pages are clean and minimalist. What's "weird" about a clean page that's mostly text?
It was bikeshedding. Possibly meant as irony.
Thanks, OK, I'm glad there's at least a chance it was humor I didn't pick up on :-)
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…
I feel like there was a real step-change when dang introduced a policy of requiring comments to be more positive (and I think implying people hadn't read the article was banned at the same time)? If you look at old HN comment threads you'll see a lot more caustic replies to wrong/stupid comments, and while superficially cruel I really think that was what kept the quality ratio high.
Yes, I understand the rationale behind that decision, but I've been chastised a couple of times for comparing the tone of comments to those on Reddit. Which didn't look to me as offensive :)
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…
> I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not. I've been toying with this idea. My go to would be to do a pagerank on the vote graph. The intrinsic quality of a webpage was transitive enough to make Google win the search engine war; surely people can be viewed as websites that have links indicating quality to other commenters: HN accounts and votes to someone els…
So, you would prioritise comments from those who on average made upvoted comments?
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…
There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guy…
Thanks for that great example of social dynamics.
A related example is where a town is a great place to live because of lots of walkable attractions (grocery stores, YMCA, parks, a variety of little shops, cheap rent for other small businesses, theaters, music halls, etc.). Then lots of people want to live there, driving up prices. The stores, non-profits, small businesses, etc. all get bought out and replaced by expensive housing. And then one day people who have lived there for decades realize that the town is not that great place to live anymore because there is nothing interesting to walk to there, no jobs, rents and taxes are high, and grocery shopping involves a long drive...
It can take some active planning and foresight to avoid that. Related:
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html " I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." ... So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones. He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members."
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."
Part of the challenge is that human mentality evolved in the context of hunter-gatherer tribal relationships -- growing up in a tribe of mostly related kinfolk you knew from birth. It's a huge stretch to expect the human mind (and its ability to manage social relationships) to functional well in other contexts... Frankly, it's amazing the human mind works in other settings as well as it does.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…
One man's noise is another man's signal. The reason the internet has more noise than signal is because there are many people, and they don' all want to talk about the same thing as you.
The point is that, for many years, there was a well shared understanding of what was signal and what was noise on HN - even if there were hot disagreements on the content of that signal. This is changing.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comment sections are like a bus without addressing. Everyone needs to scan the content of a message and decide if it's for them.
How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet. As someone who has only ever succeeded…
Sounds like you're describing current year social media.
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but what does that mean in practice? Almost every project posted on HN already has a name and at least a short description of why it exists or what it's trying to do (often in the title itself). They still get bikeshedded to hell, so obviously the name and story alone aren't enough. I see a ton of posts where people bicker specifically about the name or the story (half the comments are "is this actually an issu…
I wish Dan (the OP) had gone into more detail on exactly what techniques one can use to tell a story, because this is exactly what he does - very well! - as one of the most prolific voices in the React (and perhaps all of frontend) community. My personal take: (1) Marketing shouldn't be an afterthought; it must be considered in the same way one would write code. Take a page from the folks who designed a custom websit…
> To put it another way, think of "things that would distract someone from the main message" as "bugs" in your code.
This is the PR/communications industry. Once I understood this, and that a main message is one sentence at most -- a short phrase is even better -- interviews of people in politics made a lot more sense!
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#109Your site is broken on firefox
Re: Name It, and They Will Come
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not. I've been toying with this idea. My go to would be to do a pagerank on the vote graph. The intrinsic quality of a webpage was transitive enough to make Google win the search engine war; surely people can be viewed as websites that have links indicating quality to other commenters: HN accounts and votes to someone els…
So, you would prioritise comments from those who on average made upvoted comments?
You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight.
Whether it would improve the quality of the comment sections is an interesting question. I'd be interested to see that tested somewhere ...