Make voting on comments cost karma. Alternately, make new story submission require at least 100 minimum karma level. I suspect the effect here would be to reduce the number of frivolous and spammy submissions. When more high quality submissions are the topics of conversation, the quality of comments will go up.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
31–40 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#32Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter with the invited person.
Thus ensuring that we don't get spontaneous comments from e.g. the UX guy at Zappos on that story about Zappos. A non-starter, I think.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#33A hard limit on the maximum upvotes a comment can get. Say, 25.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#34A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
Going after a specific topic misses the point a bit. A general ban on topics that tend to be driven by emotion would work better.
Unfortunately a lot of discussions about technology are driven largely by emotion.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#35A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027
politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#36I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments.
Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all.
I'd say:
* create some real cost to making comments
* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time
* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#37Something slashdotty -- i.e. qualitative moderation, not just quantitative moderation -- would help. If you had seperate upvote buttons for "amusing" and "informative", this could factor into sorting.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#38I was writing an open letter to HN on my blog for this topic, but this now seems a more appropriate place to reply (apology about the style which seems out of place in a comment): Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was discussed. Sadly t…
It was certainly more interesting then; I wonder if it's because the community was smaller or because the topics were more focused.
I don't value HN as a resource for entrepreneurship anymore. There are some interesting technical conversations here still; but you can find those all over the place.
(Of course there is still a lot of information of value for entrepreneurs here... it's just buried under the flood of everything else.)
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#39Rather than making the site invite only, how about some means of differentiating read and write access, i.e. the amount of times you can upvote or submit is tied to your karma.
That way the information is still accessible to everyone, and if someone new has something to interesting to contribute, that info will still surface if it's picked up by vetted users.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#40This is a separate issue, but one thing that is not perfectly clear to me is what an upvote/downvote is supposed to mean. Does it mean that I agree with the comment, or that it adds to the discussion?
I think it would be an interesting experiment to add clearly labeled agree/disagree buttons in addition to upvote/downvote.