Solving The Hacker News Problem

As of now (9:10GMT) I've read every post on this page, and I think as short as it is, the parent (Eternal February) perhaps is the one that is closest to what I think has happened.

I think this is a people problem, not a technology one.

For those who haven't heard this phrase before, the "Eternal February" apes the "Eternal September". Pre-1993, each September would herald the start of a new university year and an influx of new students who would suddenly gain access to the internet. Whilst their presence was being integrated by existing on-line communities, the standard and quality of debate in Usenet was perceived to decline as the same questions got asked again and the conversation standard was forced again. The same problems came forth until such a point that the existing communities had assimilated the newbies and by October or November things had returned to where they were, just a bit bigger.

Then along came AOL, giving out free/cheap internet access to all and lowering the technical barrier to getting on-line. A good thing for the world, but a bad thing for those Usenet communities who suddenly had to assimilate an influx greater than a normal September, and also an influx that didn't subside. At some point the ability of those in Usenet to assimilate was surpassed by the people getting on-line and finding Usenet. The term "Eternal September" was coined to describe this problem and the general failure of Usenet to keep up with the flow and the lowering standards that are the result of this.

I think HackerNews has no technical problem.

The discussion around karma and mod points is a distraction, the same goes for invite only systems and "classic" view.

I'm going to speculate that the problem is purely the size of the population and the growth rate, and that the community gravity is now such that this is not going to stop.

Anyone who has been here for years, and anyone who has a shed load of karma points... those who give in time, effort... there's no questioning that we/they all want to have a place such as this, and few really want to leave it. But it's hard to see how staying is going to help, and here's why: Time is valuable to us, and our expectations have risen as our experience and knowledge increased, and we feel defeated by that influx and we sense the gravity (that if anything increases the rate of influx).

Due to the growth, the noise level is so much higher (even if only 0.1% of the population post new things or respond, 0.1% of hundreds of thousands rather than thousands is still a far higher noise level). How can we cut through the noise to find the good stuff (subjective to the individual) given this noise? I read the firehose (/new) in an attempt to not miss the good, but realise that I've amplified the volume of everything to try and not miss the gems.

The influx is such that it feels non-correctable to some degree. We can look back at the side-splitting Erlang day as a humorous attempt at a correction (which it was, but we probably didn't perceive the bigger picture then... the "Eternal February").

The thing is, most old-timers are aware there is still a lot of value in learning from new people, of passing on knowledge to new people... it's a two-way street and some good comes from growth and closing the gate isn't the desired thing. As the noise levels get higher closing the gate seems tempting, but it's silly. Shutting the gate is not going to help.

There is a natural contribution rate at which the noise levels are manageable, and there's a natural growth rate at which people can be assimilated such that the noise doesn't go above manageable levels. When either rate is crossed it can be difficult, when both are crossed we end up here.

My suggestion would be along Alex's lines... to not divide by date registered (just those with early registration dates), to not exclude by network (an invite only boys club), nor to kill HN (which still serves as a really important hub by bringing us all together, and I'm sure some would feel that anything new is a conscious threat to the old).

Instead we should create some thing (or multiple things) that is so much more narrowly focused that it doesn't have much appeal beyond a smallish number. That focus needs to be narrow enough that growth is naturally limited too.

I think that defining that 'thing' is where it gets interesting. What that narrowly focused topic is, well that is going to be different from person to person.

It's likely that many small communities would spring up; maybe one focused on devops + computer science (a bit like the ACM SIGACTS-SIGOPS), maybe one focused on purely the business side of startups, etc.

HN is rare because it encompasses all of these, but I'd suggest it may be better to not be so far encompassing and instead to have a set of communities (subreddits vs stack overflows vs unconnected sites) more narrowly focused and people would join subsets that interested them rather than have them all exist in a global scope (where the noise level is that of the whole set).

The hardest part of doing anything comes down to the people.

Ultimately it's the mix of people here that is so awesome, it's what acts most as gravity to those outside of the community. Having this calibre of people choose to invest in smaller communities is going to be the hardest thing when staying on just HN, or just opting out altogether, is so easy to do.

I too think it's time for something more focused and smaller to emerge to tackle the noise level. That this is likely to be many smaller things and that I'd miss part of the debate is kinda fine, I'm fine with missing some stuff if the standard on the bits I'm more strongly interested in can be raised and I don't miss that stuff.

Come now, I can't be the only one that finds the Hacker News quality "good to great"?

If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's good that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled.

There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied.

I think there is a vocal minority of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...)

Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a huge amount of those people visit Hacker News every day - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.

No snark intended, but I feel like you are basically describing reddit, with its subreddits and customizable front page. If you unsubscribe from main, funny, pics, politics, askreddit, and add programming, computer science, mathematics, etc to your front page, you will get a pretty high quality experience, IMO (at least no 4chan garbage). The main difference that I perceive between the two sites is that reddit seems to have a slightly younger demographic, skewing towards college students, while HN seems to be mostly older, working professionals, and silicon valley heavy-hitters. Remember when reddit was the upstream digg? Now digg is dead and HN is the upstream reddit. If there's an upstream HN, by the time I find out about it, people will be complaining about how badly the community has declined lately. :)

EDIT: Never mind, I just unsubscribed from all the default reddits and it's still mostly crap. Carry on...

What does it matter? These complaints of decline in community quality is all superficial. In the end, all that matters is how you use a site.

What is it that you want out of these sites? Expert Opinion? Helpful articles? The Zeitgeist among your peers? The analysis of the community might help you decide how to use a site to your liking, but because it is superficial, it will be of little help. Seek out the experts yourself or trim through the article listings yourself instead of basing it completely on a democratic vote system. The quality of the community will only make this process more convenient, but it is the quality of individual posters that define what is most helpful to you.

Now, I would like to compile a list of posters whom I can trust for insightful comments on a particular matter instead of posting assumptions.

So far, I know of pg, joshu...crap, I wish there were avatars here. Why was I stuck with just visual memory like a common human? Unicode avatars would have been helpful: ❤

Additionally, I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. Which I find very frustrating, and I know people say 'whining about declining quality has always happened', but I really feel that this voting behavior used to be less pronounced.