A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
Perhaps HN could ask the submitter to include a short justification as to why a busy hacker should take time to read this article.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
51–60 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that what downvotes are supposed to be for?
[deleted]
With an auto-flagging system, a comment might get stomped out by a small number of trolls.
I kind of like how YouTube does their voting system (showing both the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes).
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#53Stop 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…
I'd find a way to show what was a good comment with something besides points. Show that flag, but still hide the number of up votes. This flag would tell you whether it was a good comment, but not exactly how good. That's what karma points do well
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#54A 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.
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?
Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politics, I'm definitely with you. "Current events", though, is an extremely broad term -- what exactly did you intend it to mean?
The guidelines currently say "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off topic". The predicate should be clarified, and the word "probably" removed.
The problem with this is tv news is uneducated for the most part. People end up posting things to HN that don't fit well, because it doesn't get discussed in other venues. So yeah, you're right though. It's got to be a hard line.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#56Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politics, I'm definitely with you. "Current events", though, is an extremely broad term -- what exactly did you intend it to mean?
The guidelines currently say "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off topic". The predicate should be clarified, and the word "probably" removed.
Can we say use common sense? They'd cover Facebook IPO on TV. Yet it would have an impact on a lot of small startups that frequent here.
"Common sense isn't all that common"
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#58Stop 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…
>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?
How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.
Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#59Make 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?
HN would still be open for everyone to see, commenting and submitting threads would be invite-only.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#60If I had a way to improve the quality of HN but that would require a complete overhaul of the voting system, extensive testing, and slightly more work by 5%-20% of users, do you think people would go for it?
My feeling is that things aren't bad enough for radical change here yet, but if the right 5% are, it might be possible.