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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#201

Post by arghnoname »

repsilat wrote: post #188
malandrew wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question to be answered then is "what mechanisms of reputation and combinatorial game mechanics can prevent regression towards the mean?" I don't have an answer to this off the top of my head, but succinctly describing the problem as you just did oftentimes can be half the battle.

Eigenvalue/SVD upvoting. Comments and articles are ranked for you according to their ranking with similarly voting/submitting/commenting users. The frontpage (depending on how you set it up) could look like Reddit's, based on the majority of users, but to logged-in users it'd be more refined to their tastes. Perhaps you could look at the site from others' perspectives. Defining the model, computing likenesses and fin…

The very first time I saw a site like this, many years ago, that is what I assumed all of the voting was about. I know a lot more now than I did then why resource wise it is the way it is, but I occasionally think about how one might go about doing a more customized version.

Superficially at least, it seems to be a good way to put everyone into a community whose size relates to the commonness of their preferences. I think this would occur as long as comments/articles beneath a certain threshold just weren't visible to a particular user.

Unfortunately it seems like a lot of calculating to do per hit, but in thinking about it, it doesn't seem to hurt Netflix too badly.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#202

Post by sophacles »

moultano wrote: post #195
sophacles wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation. The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this: I've grown. The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" a…

A similar effect: The average age on the internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. Think about what effect that has on the density of quality user generated content.

Haha great... I'm barely 30 and you punks are already calling me old. :)

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#204

Post by A1kmm »

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.…

If you are right, a website could automate the cycle as follows:

1) Every user belongs to at most two (or k) classes.

2) Each class can have a finite number of users n.

3) When a class fills up, a new one is opened.

4) There are always two (or k) open classes at a time, and new users join both of those two (or k) classes.

5) The classes are staggered so they don't close at the same time; e.g. if k=2, n=10000, the first 5000 people to join belong to class 1 and class 2, the next 5000 belong to class 2 and class 3, the next 5000 to class 3 and class 4, and so on.

6) Users can only post to classes they are in, and can only comment on posts in classes they are in (or maybe newer ones too).

7) By default, users only see posts to classes they are in (or maybe their classes + older ones). They can opt in to see more if they want.

The idea might work better if it is combined with some more onerous mechanism to join classes late - a fee, a requirement for an endorsement from a member or someone. Charging a fee for access to the more '1337' earlier classes might be a good way to monetise the site; the fees could either be flat, or could escalate (exponentially?) with the age of the class and / or the number of people who pay to join it late (possibly with a discount applied as active members leave).

Classes might get too small due to attrition - coalescing older classes when they get too small might be a solution to this - it might also make sense to increase class sizes (exponentially?) as the site gets more popular.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#205

Post by arghnoname »

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…

If you really wanted to make the site more like it was, you could look at the voting history of people here at some distant time in the past and find other members whose votes highly correlate with the old timers. Some people just quietly upvote, so they don't have much karma. If you want the upvoting to be more like it used to be, award people who vote similarly like how older users used to vote.

It would help take care of the effect where older uses leave due to changing interests etc.

Note: I don't actually think it's a good idea. I think just figuring out _what_ you want exactly, in vaguely quantifiable role, is sort of a hard problem. I suspect a lot of people have different 'golden ages' in mind when they think of HN.

When I came here originally it was pretty startup heavy, which was sort of remote from what I was up to at the time. I liked it when it got a little away from startup business related stuff (my perception) and toward more generic technical issues. My point is even if everyone agreed that ait has gone done hill (an open question), not everyone might agree on what it should be like. It's not a democracy of course, but even as an individual for my own preferences that seems as hard as the technology issues.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#206

Post by defen »

natrius wrote: post #139
tastybites wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (SF, LA) the rent control is there to prevent the gouging of yuppies, not to keep the poor people in. The idea is the city wants to keep rent just high enough to retain the rich people for the tax and spending base but low enough that the landlords to squeeze them out, which they most likely would do if given the chance. It might be different in places other than California though, like New York.

You can't squeeze out rich people by raising prices without ending up with empty units, which landlords don't want.

Here in SF the geniuses of the Lembi Group bought a bunch of apartment buildings on credit (something like 1 billion dollar's worth), used questionable/borderline illegal tactics to squeeze people out of rent controlled units, and then jacked the prices way up. Then the real estate bubble popped and they went bankrupt.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#207

Post by dewitt »

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…

There are plenty of cached pages in the Internet Archive:

  http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombi...

The first one saved was on Feb 22, 2007, just after the site launched:

  http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news....

Notice that the second link is to pg's announcement post.

Second cached page, Feb 26, 2007:

  http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news....

And so forth:

  http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news....

  http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news....

Bounce on the ▸ icon to page from day to day.

This one has a gem on it from paul:

  http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news....

The archive is not complete, but it does give a reasonable glimpse into the recent past of HN.

[Edit: I think I'll go crazy before getting the line breaks to look correct.]

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#210

Post by wazoox »

malandrew wrote: post #68
tastybites wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Off-topic, but rent control has terrible problems. It lead to some grave NY neighbourhoods problems from the 60s to the 80s; back in the 20s in Paris...
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