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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?

#81

Post by pg »

gleb wrote: post #36

I'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 thi…

Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.

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

#82

Post by euroclydon »

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…

If you remove the vote count, that doesn't mean you've removed the sorting by vote, right? Isn't that enough information for people to find interesting comments?

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

#85

Post by chc »

mindcrime wrote: post #49

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? M…

You can already flag comments. Click the "link" or "reply" links by a comment to see it.

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

#86

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

I don't know but maybe get rid of Karma that caries over from article to article. This is what drove me insane about Reddit. The mean, smart ass, slightly funny but useless comments made it to the top while other more useful comments where completely ignored or buried. The problem with democracy is "Bandwagon" + "herd mentality".

I myself tried this on TechCrunch and got up into the top 5 most "liked" commenters. All I did was post snarky, rude ass, criticizing, comments that appealed to the sarcastic douche bag within us all. It was easy. My faith in humanity vanished over that time period because it was so easy to do.

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

#87

Post by pkaler »

There is no scarcity with upvotes. If I have an infinite amount of money to spend, I will spend it without prudence.

Cap the number of upvotes that a user gets each day and give explicit feedback on how many upvotes that they have left.

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

#88

Post by rexreed »

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…

I think people can figure out for themselves what an interesting or useful comment is on their own without points. We need to give people some credit. The use of points to rely on what others think is valuable, useful, helpful is irrelevant. At least for me. I can give a darn what other people think is useful. Maybe I find some insight useful where everyone else doesn't.

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

#89

Post by pg »

kwis wrote: post #78
mgkimsal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.

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

#90

Post by goodside »

"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

Find a few examples of comments that are unambiguously (a), (b), and (c) and have either you personally or someone you trust flag them as such. Next, take the set of all people who upvoted the abc-flagged comments. Their votes now have a 50% chance of not counting towards vote totals from now on, but in a way that the user isn't shown that their votes aren't being counted -- perhaps with an artificial "offset" vote that appears a few minutes later.

There's fun parameters one could throw in there too, like exponential decay on the likelihood of a vote being magically offset that spikes back up every time the user votes stupidly.

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