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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#121

Post by kwis »

mkr-hn wrote: post #76
kwis wrote: post #54

Earlier 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?

I don't see a guideline saying something has to be useful or forwardable among CEOs.

I'll go ahead and suggest, since it's on topic in this thread, that passive aggressive snark like this is one source of HN's decline.

One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.

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

#122

Post by wvenable »

pg wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #7

A 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.

I don't actually think articles on "Economic inequality" belong on hacker news. In fact, it's articles like that which are a big difference between this site in the early days and now. I'd prefer a site that stuck to technical and startup business topics but perhaps that isn't hacker news anymore. The fact that these articles get voted up implies that I must be in the minority.

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

#123

Post by pg »

tptacek wrote: post #18

A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the receiver.

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

#124

Post by kabdib »

ig1 wrote: post #22

I was writing an open letter to HN on my blog for this topic, but this now seems a more appropriate place to reply (apology about the style which seems out of place in a comment): Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was discussed. Sadly t…

So, rename it from "Hackers News" (which to me has meant "Slashdot that doesn't suck" because that's the type of posting I've observed here) and back to "Startup News." I'll bet most of the non-tech-startup-biz nonsense will go away.

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

#125

Post by apu »

euroclydon wrote: post #82
pg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the software would still know the scores, and use them to sort comments. The scores would just not be displayed.

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

#126

Post by credo »

pg wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #7

A 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.

imo the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" guideline and related submissions add a lot of value to HN.

Besides, I don't agree with the notion that mean-spirited or dumb comments or ideology-based downvoting/upvoting are limited to politics and current events. Any thread about iOS, Android, Microsoft etc. is also likely generate a lot of those comments and ideology-based up/down voting :)

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

#127

Post by ig1 »

gte910h wrote: post #20

I disagree that the quality is declining. I think you're just suffering a misapprehension of the quality of old.

Comments are certainly declining in quality. For example this thread from a submission I made a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215549

The quality of discussion was much higher than on most posts today. And that was only a year ago.

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

#129

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #18

A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

Yikes, if my name is the pronoun for that behavior, I must be doing it way more than I thought I was!

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

#130

Post by bvi »

Flag comments (essentially public shaming). Look at how Quora does it. If a user's reply is not in line with the question, other users flag it as "not helpful" (and explain why below).

So the more the people who flag stupid comments (instead of just downvoting), the more these comments should descend to the bottom, regardless of number of votes.

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