You might also check out this thread, which pertains to submission karma and its distribution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
111–120 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#112"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…
Unfortunately I know that won't work because I've already tried that experiment. For about a year I've been annotating such comments, but when I analyzed who upvoted them, the upvotes were very broadly distributed.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#113Have comments start at -1. (Or, better yet, -thread_depth).
That's kind of a "my amp goes up to 11" kind of thing, isn't it? You're just changing the label for "no votes either way."
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#114Make commenting cost 2 karma.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#115The nuclear option: Periodically take the site down for a while and then rebuild the community (kind of like the Matrix). The quality people will likely stick around.
That's a really clever idea, I've no idea if it would work, but that's some great sideways thinking you've got there.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#116There's one problem that's similar to reddit. Although there are guidelines (or reddiquite) you need to go out of your way to find them. Sure, clicking a link isn't that tough, but it's not automatic either.
I wonder what would happen the guidelines or some sort of one-page community code of conduct were displayed when you actually created an account. Would that give users a better set of expectations? Or would they just click throug it like a EULA?
Maybe force existing users to click through it one time as a friendly reminder when the feature is introduced.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#117A 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.
> Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.
I think that if you look at the resulting conversations on those sorts of articles, it usually retreads extremely familiar territory.
Also, 90% of that kind of article I've ever seen tends to be someone "broadcasting" a view they agree with ( "hey, this guy's right on!" ) rather than presenting actual new research in economics.
Also, any article like that tends to be something anyone can have an opinion on, tending to attract people that are more interested in those sorts of discussions than about "hacker news".
IMO, at least.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#118For (c): create a limit to the amount of votes a user can use, for example, make it impossible to vote on more than 5 items in 24 hours. Story votes, comment upvotes and comment downvotes would all count towards this limit. This would be useless if there is a large number of users who vote up negative comments, and would only work if the problem is caused by a smaller number of users who upvote a lot of frivolous comments and stories.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#119Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here). A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
To me, this is the biggest problem with HN rather than comment quality. Tons of related, and even duplicate, stories happen all the time which fragments discussion. Not to mention the duplicate posts which happen a few months later. Thankfully someone usually remembers and posts a link to the previous discussion but that shouldn't be required.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#120Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.