There needs to be a better system of moderation. Perhaps highlighting moderators and/or allowing people to apply to become one.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
71–80 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#72Limit us to N upvotes per day.
In other words - make votes precious.
That way people will think more about how to 'spend' their precious votes.
A similar thing works in poker. If you empty out your change jar and give everyone a fixed amount to start, and at the end of the game it all goes back in the jar, people play in a certain way. If you play for actual money, even just change, the gameplay does often change for the better, because their chips now have value.
At the moment we all have an infinite amount of votes to spend, so we can casually upvote anything we find briefly interesting - because our votes have no value to us.
By limiting the number available per day, we are forced to spend our votes more wisely.
Alternatively, making upvote decrement our karma will also add perceived value to the action of voting. However I think HN users care less about their karma scores so I think this approach wouldn't work as well as limiting users to N votes per 24 hours.
N can be fixed at, say 10, or increase with karma so 'better' users get more votes and thus more influence.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#73Have 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…
IMHO, that hasn't worked so well for Reddit.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#74This is more or less me thinking out loud, but why allow upvoting for new users and not downvoting? Does it not make sense to have a barrier to entry for each? Maybe the ability to upvote only happens after you've been here for 3 months and downvoting after 6 months? (I personally like tying those abilities to seniority vs. points as I tend not to comment often, but can easily identify a snarky comment that adds no value -- with no ability to downvote it).
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#75I think it is in part the comments but also very much the articles.
One very simple suggestion: an 'off topic' tab where stuff that does not fit the HN bill can be moved to. An 'offtopic' link similar to the 'flag' link for users with more than 5K karma, that answers the questions 'what do you get for karma' nicely as well too.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't see a guideline saying something has to be useful or forwardable among CEOs.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#77It's a solved problem already, a new /classic/ every two years. Looking forward to /classic/classic/, since /classic/ has really gone downhill lately.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about to start startups.
That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
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Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
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