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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

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Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#41

Post by tptacek »

pg wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #4

Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.

I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread. Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and…

Gut: anything that reduces the number of comment scores shown on a thread will to some extent reduce the number of dumb comments. It's a knob. I suggest you turn it. I'd turn it to 11, but 5 might do nicely.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#42

Post by noblethrasher »

Create positive and negative moderators but make the roles mutually exclusive.

The positive mods can promote stories and comments beyond normal up-voting and the negative mods do something similar with down-voting/flagging.

People can become 'supermods' based on karma, election, or something more arbitrary.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#45

Post by rexreed »

Sargis wrote: post #26

Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter with the invited person.

Won't it make it just an echo-chamber that would increase group-think? I like the idea that new people can join and contribute or learn from others without having to first curry favor to get invites.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#46

Post by ajju »

A community can grow only so large before it has to provide some personalization so it is not trying to be everything to everyone.

Reddit has subreddits and you can choose the ones from which stories appear on the front page. HN can start with allowing users to 'frontpage' other users aka whitelisting by showing stories from only these users on the front page. The next logical step is allowing blacklisting. Version 2.0 of this would allow whitelisting and blacklisting of content-sources (sites), in addition to users, so that I could blacklist certain blogs if I wanted to.

This will result in some fragmentation of the community, but in my opinion, it will keep HN interesting for everyone. This may also reduce the need to answer subjective editorial questions such as - we don't allow politics, but is open-source-politics politics? Is coverage of world-changing-elections allowed?

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#48

Post by pero »

Sargis wrote: post #26

Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter with the invited person.

That will certainly ensure only the acceleration of the decline. The ecosystem will be isolated and perpetuation of 'preaching to the choir' will ensue.

How would have all of the now-members of both HN and the greater 'community' have stumbled upon this resource if it was invite-only?

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#49

Post by mindcrime »

A few thoughts

A. "flag" for comments? Whether that just brings them to the editor/moderator's attention, or kills them based on some algorithm, would be an open question.

B. More moderators/editors - drawn from the pool of people who have shown themselves to share the "HN spirit" (or whatever you want to call it), who are empowered to kill stories and/or comments.

And maybe some limits on what new accounts can do? Maybe go so far as requiring new users to lurk for some period of time, before being allowed to post? Or some limit on post / comment frequency, until you've demonstrated some sense of alignment with what's appropriate here?

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#50

Post by count »

dglassan wrote: post #15

Have you considered adding a down vote button like Reddit has? I know you can flag comments above a certain karma level but I think that either giving everyone the option to down vote or having a lower karma threshold to down vote would allow the community to regulate itself. Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussio…

There is a downvote button - it too has a karma threshold. See: http://i.imgur.com/EBYAe.png
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