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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?

#171

Post by ssclafani »

pg wrote: post #89
kwis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And therein lies the problem. As HN and Y Combinator itself have grown, as well as the general startup climate, HN has become increasingly startup focused to the point where many would describe it as "for startup founders" rather than "for hackers". And there are a lot of new users who like it that way (or assume it's supposed to be that way). But then you have the old guard like tptacek who would like nothing more than to see HN filled with only hard tech/science posts. That's a gap that isn't going to be filled with any algorithmic tweak or new comment layout.

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

#172

Post by pg »

b_emery wrote: post #155

3 words: Bayesian Comment Filter. Just does the opposite of what the spam filter does. Use the corpus of great comments from the past to find great comments of the present. I'm only half joking. Fundamentally, the thread is about a filtering system.

That could work, actually. Instead of focusing on discouraging bad comments, maybe the answer is to promote good ones. Plus I have some code I could use for that.

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

#173

Post by tptacek »

rexreed wrote: post #92
pg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think it's a good idea to penalize people for commenting? How does this help people new to the scene? "Thanks for joining in the conversation, here's a penalty" This only rewards people who have been around in the scene for a while, while penalizing all the new people.

Penalizing comments is also a more graceful solution than invite-only, because I doubt Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky care too much about their karma score here; the only people this dissuades are people who are commenting to game.

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

#174

Post by akkartik »

user24 wrote: post #106
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…

> Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? a vague indicator instead of discrete values. People enjoy seeing their karma for a comment tick over from 3 to 4, but seeing a little thermometer rise by 1px is less noticeable and isn't so much something you can keep track of. When you see your comment score increment, you know it's because a real human decided it was interesting…

Maybe a refinement of this idea: show me the precise number of votes on my comments, and a vague log(score) or good/medium/bad grade for everything else.

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

#175

Post by mbesto »

I think I have a simple fix:

When you hover the up arrow button a tooltip should say "This comment ADDS to the discussion" and on a down "This comment DOESNT ADD to the discussion". Too often I think people just click the arrows based on (1) the username (2) "oh ya I agree, I hate that too!".

Up/down voting should be an extension of the community's ability to assess whether someone's opinion is adding to the community thought process. We often forget that (I do myself).

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

#176

Post by pbiggar »

jacquesm wrote: post #144
eggoa wrote: post #120

Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.

Users from non-first world countries would suffer disproportionate from not being able to participate.

Well, we want something expensive to discourage people. How about we make it $100, or you can solve a problem in Lisp. Alternatives for both the cash-poor and time-poor.

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

#177

Post by tptacek »

ssclafani wrote: post #171
pg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And therein lies the problem. As HN and Y Combinator itself have grown, as well as the general startup climate, HN has become increasingly startup focused to the point where many would describe it as "for startup founders" rather than "for hackers". And there are a lot of new users who like it that way (or assume it's supposed to be that way). But then you have the old guard like tptacek who would like nothing more t…

I would strongly prefer an HN that only had startup posts. I think this part of the thread is going off the rails, though. The problem is, "how do you improve comment quality on HN". We can probably avoid debating the premise of the question, and just focus on the (plentiful) ideas themselves.

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

#179

Post by hanifvirani »

How about weighted votes based on karma? After a certain karma threshold, your vote value is doubled. The system could also have multiple levels. For e.g. at 2k karma, when you upvote/downvote a post, it gains/loses 2 points. At 5k karma, 3 points and so on. Or maybe the user can choose his vote value, limited by his maximum vote value. Perhaps we can also use the average karma somewhere in this equation.

Another suggestion is the ability to downvote submissions after a certain karma threshold. We can use the weighted vote system here as well.

Yet another suggestion is 12 hours/24 hours/1 week bans.

Another problem that I admit facing is the unwillingness to post something with the fear of it not getting upvoted and thus affecting my average karma, even though it might have added value to the discussion.

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

#180

Post by Tycho »

I know you're talking about comments, but I did a quick snapshot of the front page and color coded each submission by it's category

    blue = hardcore hacker stuff

    turquoise = industry-related light reading

    biege = acceptable entrepreneur/political commentry

    red = fluff, stuff we could do without

    black = meta (eg. this thread)
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=scw684&s=7

That's a pretty healthy mixture if you ask me. Only about 10-15% or the articles are unworthy of HN, and even that's debatable. The majority is technical stuff, with a few valuable pieces on business/economics in general sprinkled in.

So although some people seem to think the quality of comments is declining, I still believe HN provides phenomenal quality in its capacity as 'news for hackers.'

I'm not sure if changing the rules will do much good; it might have the opposite effect. I think there's pro-active measures we can take which might prove best, like: finding interesting people and inviting them to HN. Quora would be a good recruitment ground.

One last point, I think the role of the founder/leader is very important to online communities. I've been in other forums which went to absolute shit once the 'pg-equivalent-person' ditched them in favour of Twitter. More essays from Paul Graham, perhaps ones talking about online behaviour/ethos, would be a big benefit :-)

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