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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#91

Post by mkr-hn »

groby_b wrote: post #83
jacques_chester wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. On reflection it resembles flocking behaviour. I imagine that website members can be modelled as simple agents with two rules: 1. A cool site has few, impressive members. 2. Move towards the cool sites. Given an arbitrary distribution of "impressive" members, this should cause a constantly moving flock of members to move from site to site regardless of its purpose .

It strikes me that a logical step to prevent #2 is "allow only new contributing members that have been vouched for by n old members". Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :) But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading . That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.

Do you have any examples of a site where treehousing has improved things?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#92

Post by johnrob »

Another reason HN may be boring: we've beaten a lot of the common topics to death. It only takes a handful of articles about "how to pitch a VC" to soak up most of the relevant advice on the subject. While posts often present a unique combination of previously mentioned ideas, it's becoming increasingly rare to actually find something new if you are a regular here.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#93

Post by Pooter »

The solution, ultimately, is for the site to wither and die, and be replaced by something else that will have the same fate. This is what happens to all things, and to all human social groupings in particular, from ancient Rome on down to your nuclear family.

If you're tired of it, start something else. Or hang out and jump ship when the next great thing comes along. Trying to preserve the golden age is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#94

Post by groby_b »

Mz wrote: post #79

I'm probably one of those darned newbies who isn't a real hacker and is screwing the place up. (Sorry.) So I wasn't around in 2008 (or whenever the Glory Days were). I don't feel like this article or other discussions about the issue have really given me a good idea of what HN supposedly once was that it isn't anymore. I wish I could get such info. I think that kind of information would hold out some hope of figuring…

Part of "the glory days" was a much more interesting debate. Currently, lots of HN comments are either going for the cute/snide/sarcastic joke, or argue dogmatic points.

Worse - the snide remarks get modded up. Being guilty of them myself, let me post an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202958

The discussion was about Google's two factor auth. Somebody asks for a good API, poster #2 suggests OpenID. I joke "you read the part about 'good' API". It's by far the highest-modded comment I have. (Which makes me feel guilty every time I see it). Sure, I don't have a lot of comments or karma, so it might be a fluke, but it exemplifies what's wrong with the discussion.

HN'08 would've modded me to 0 for that and moved on. HN'11 rewards playing to the audience.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#95

Post by barrkel »

bootload wrote: post #55
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…

A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries: 2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ 2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ 2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ 2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ 2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663

Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#96

Post by jraines »

mkr-hn wrote: post #72
jraines wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

The fact that HN hasn't been overrun by marketing zombies is why I'm not too worried about its direction. If linkbait titles are the big complaint about submissions, it's a good sign.

That's true I guess, but it seems like a low bar.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#97

Post by JonnieCache »

tptacek wrote: post #60
JonnieCache wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is one thing that causes an internet community to break down, its when a subsection of that community has too muh communication out-of-band in another medium that the rest of the members are unaware of. Especially if that other medium is more synchronous than the primary medium. Many forums have been driven to civil war by a clique plotting on a secret IRC channel. (Note: I am not suggesting that is happenin…

What was the point of this comment? (I'm asking seriously; I want to know what it is you're specifically trying to communicate here).

It was an innocent observation: I was sharing an anecdote about my experiences on other internet communities.

The mention of the fact that the higher-karma, "ingroup" members of HN seem more likely to communicate with each other on twitter and in private emails than the rest of the population reminded me of bad situations I had seen on other forums.

I then thought how glad I was that here on HN it seems to happen on twitter which is still largely public. You commented quickly here about private conversations regarding HN with other high-karma members. It is reassuring that you were open, and happy to be open about this.

This gives me faith in what I find to be an excellent community that the inevitable psychological group-dynamics type phenomena are playing themselves out here in a relatively benign way, due to its high calibre membership. Your later comment "I'm too high drama for that" came across as an amusingly wry confirmation that you feel the same way.

As I said, this put me in mind of situations I have seen in lesser communities where this dynamic had led to ugly scenes. I posted about them. I then felt bad that you or someone else might misinterpret this as an accusation against them. Thats why I added my parenthetical note. Perhaps I should have reconsidered the whole thing.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#98

Post by SoftwareMaven »

dschobel wrote: post #66

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…

The problem with using karma is that it is affected by the regression to the mean. As more "average" people come in, more "average" people will give them karma. Solve that problem, and you might have a solution to the whole problem (I, for one, am not smart enough for that ;).

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#99

Post by jedsmith »

cletus wrote: post #40
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.…

While I basically agree with you--I too have seen this cycle many times before--what I don't understand is why people feel the need to slap down newbies in an attempt to recapture some since-passed golden age. If I get bored of a site or simply get nothing more out of it, I just move on. If I see topics that are boring or simply have no interest to me, I just ignore them. If I see rude, insulting comments or personal…

Slapping down newbies takes on a lot of forms, too. This entire submission and the accompanying threads comprise a giant screw-you to relative newbies like myself.

I don't kid myself that I'm the kind of person that always remains civil in discussions, because I'm passionate about what I believe in. I know I'm hit-or-miss here, and often the way I communicate my point of view dilutes it and comes across as being a dick. I get that, and I've learned a lot about how to communicate with others from HN and other Web sites. If I'm the problem, though, which this submission and other comments seem to want me to believe, then I'm wondering what the solution is. Agree all the time? The burden is on me to improve, not the community to avoid me.

Every time I see a navelgazing submission like this I'm yanked right out of the community and I'm instead thinking about the community instead of the topics that I come to Hacker News to read and discuss.

What people don't seem to understand about community sites such as this one is that if you are discussing the community ad infinitum, you've already lost. A bunch of high-karma users, and one commenter in particular reminding us that "on behalf of the elites, this site sucks now due to you," is exactly the kind of thread that is contributing to the problem.

If the high-karma users here really want a walled, invitation-only garden where a circlejerk of valley gossip takes place and everybody agrees with each other, this is a pretty good way to go about it. It's really disappointing, to be honest.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#100

Post by jaredmck »

barrkel wrote: post #95
bootload wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries: 2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ 2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ 2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ 2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ 2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663

Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.

That Erlamg screenshot is hilarious. Only one story on the front page didn't have Erlang in the title, why HN had been slow...was it due to the amount of Erlang submissions?
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