131–140 of 729 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Threat upvotes/downvotes as currency and limit the amount of coins someone has in one day. If you have only five upvotes per day, you are going to start to think about how to spend them.
Closed doors, but glass walls.
Reading should be open to everyone, participating should not. No more new sign up unless they have an introduction or they submit a request and we can have a way of letting certain users approve.
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.
Stackexchange kind of does this. You need a certain (low) amount of karma before you can post certain types of submissions.
I think it's important to let new users have a visible voice, but giving older users greater powers for moderation might help preserve the older attitude of the site.
An OP is motivated to keep their comment thread awesome: having better comments leads to more upvotes on the story. And, on a personal level, the OP would be less likely to upvote snark against their own story.
The obvious downside would be that the OP could effectively censor opposing ideas. However, I don't think this would happen that often: counterpoint comments generally do pretty well on their own, and would probably still rise to the top even without the OP's help. (Of course, the best OP's would recognize the benefit of discourse and promote these comments anyways... but not everyone is perfect)
I 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.
Not having sub-HNs is refreshing. Introducing them would be to simultaneously give up the fight and alter the nature of HN forever.
I'm not advocating 20 different subjects, just one, 'offtopic'. The place where threads go that get too many upvotes to flag (because apparently they do interest people) and that do not contribute to the topics of 'startup' or 'hacking'.
It's either something like that or much more active moderation of the content.
As long as there is an identity that people find distinctive at HN, I don't think it will die.
All of the suggestions here kind of fit into that paradigm for me....how do you control/preserve identity?
- You could give old timers more control (downvoting)
- You could give newcomers less control until they prove themselves (no account creation just to upvote your friend's post)
- Enlist help in keeping tracking/managing the pulse of the community (like reddit, which has multiple admins on the lookout for issues)
Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition. I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact t…
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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?
Aren't founders as busy as they are in part because they hope to reach the top 1 percent of income in their country? I would want to know what my country's policies are toward high-income people, and what social trends are influencing those policies, if I were pursuing a high-wealth business result, as at least some founders are.
A user who upvotes ten comments a day should have far less impact per upvote than one with very high karma and a high average score who only upvotes infrequently (and is not involved in the thread).
I realise that you're asking about comments; I think that this applies equally to story submissions.