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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#61

Post by 9oliYQjP »

pg wrote: post #24

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we c…

Most of us that have been around since the beginning (this is my second account) are too busy to participate as regularly as we once did. I'd rather spend time on my business than get hooked on discussions here as much as I did in the past. I will jump in here every so often and I still think HN is relatively great. Doesn't everybody remember the big debate over even linking to Techcrunch articles? We have always been whining about what's wrong to realize that this place has consistently been pretty great.

And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#62

Post by sachinag »

tptacek wrote: post #20
sachinag wrote: post #15

As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation. As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible fo…

What's the threshold HN crossed where it started needing active moderation? Because '08 HN threads were just better than '11 threads. Is it just a number of users, past which no set of guidelines restrains pathological conversations? Why? If you can trace it back to what thing happens when you get to your 50,000th user, maybe there's some passive moderation mechanism you can identify to keep it in check.

For me, I noticed it when people started posting things from investor blogs and the VCs and angels themselves started commenting here. I think that spurred some small handful of users to start showing off how smart they were in hopes that they'd get a response from fredwilson or whoever, and that just naturally spread the way it did. (There's a certain high when you get fredwilson or msuster to respond to your comment on their blogs; I think it's the same dynamic here.) I'm not blaming the VCs at all here - but that's when I started noticing it. (joshu and yegg are the exceptions that prove the rule because they're hackers first.)

Also, I've been told the Something Awful community is surprisingly pretty awesome, although I'm not a participant there. If there's some intersection of structure/moderation between MeFi and SA that HN could implement, I think that'd be a great place to start.

sighs We complain because we care. It doesn't mean that we have all the answers or we're pointing fingers. It means we're so invested in finding a solution to this problem that we won't just move on. Given just how good HN was (and remains), minute changes are more noticeable. I don't think a comparison of then-and-now really gives us useful data. There's just a gestalt, a feeling, you get that something's not quite the same. The closest I can think of is when you're out to dinner with someone you've fallen out of love with; your routine isn't any different, but you just know that it's not the same.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#63

Post by kmfrk »

dools wrote: post #58
kmfrk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you forget all about the "More" debacle? Gods know it was a terrible decision, but it showed some active participation by pg.

I must show my HN immaturity here by admitting I don't know what that is :)

This should get you up to date, then: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118325. :)

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#64

Post by malandrew »

jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

Just because this has been the typical website lifecycle in the past, doesn't mean that it has to be the typical website lifecycle in the future. We increasingly have better and better tools to manage how people interact with sites and communities.

Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely that we will see more and better tools for community management available in the future.

The most important thing is for "us" to define exactly what current and past features of the community we want to preserve and also decide what kind and amount of "chaos" we want to permit to allow the site to evolve and improve. It makes the most sense for PG, YC founders and very high-karma users to be responsible for defining these community characteristics, ideals and values.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#65

Post by redthrowaway »

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place, the cruft in another. Let's face it, the people who are complaining about lack fo deep tech are also likely to read and enjoy one of Spolsky's blog posts. There's no need to ban the latter to protect the former, just keep them in separate sections.

Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand.

I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#66

Post by dschobel »

How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal.

Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else.

As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#67

Post by jraines »

pg wrote: post #24

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we c…

I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy.

I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#68

Post by malandrew »

tastybites wrote: post #54
JonnieCache wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."

Let's not forget it happens in the actual cities we live in as well! Hipster-ism gives way to gentrification and then the cool kids move because there are way too many yuppies. Same things happens with suburbs - they get too crowded and people start moving to the country to make new suburbs. This is just human nature, it manifests itself in the clothes we wear, the cars/bikes we drive, the places we live, it certainl…

Rent control has been a pretty effective way of preserving the identities of communities in cities. It's not perfect, but it helps. Concepts similar to rent control can and should be applied to sites trying to preserve certain characteristics.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#69

Post by malandrew »

derefr wrote: post #52
jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

How about, instead of a single community, the site runs as a set of "cohort" communities that each only allow direct sign-ups for their first year in existence, but then run a bit like leagues thereafter? If people like you on HN/2011, you might be invited into HN/2010, then HN/2009, etc. It could also be automatic/karma-based: if you earn enough karma on HN/2011, you start again on HN/2010 with 1 karma point (though…

Pretty interesting idea. Has anything like this ever been tried with other communities?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#70

Post by rubashov »

The basic complaint is that social sites grow into mobs. The solution is rather obviously: halt growth. You have to limit the number of active users to some vaguely Dunbar-ish number or you inevitably wind up with a lowest common denominator mob.

Metafilter did this, right? For a couple years they said "No new accounts."

I think scaling a social site to a very large number of members without deteriorating badly is impossible. It's a matter of human nature and mobs.

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