Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.
Users from non-first world countries would suffer disproportionate from not being able to participate.
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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
191–200 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#192There 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.
Past N votes in a day, a vote should cost a karma point.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#193I think that part of the solution may be to introduce a feature that would give users that reach certain karma thresholds the ability to give more and more points to a comment when upvoting.
For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign three points and so on. Users should be able to decide how many points they want to give to each comment.
The same should apply to downvotes. Prominent HN users should be able to make their downvotes "hurt more" if they want to.
Also, these thresholds could be used for "downvoting penalties". For example, a newbie would lose 4 points when downvoting, but a user over the first threshold would only lose three and so on. Users with karma above one of the thresholds would no longer lose karma when downvoting.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#194Some 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.
Maybe give high karma users the power to merge/suggest/link this stories, as Stack Overflow does, and make HN moderate itself better.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#195I'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…
I think you're right about mediocre comments being the real problem, and about identifying good users and rewarding them programmatically. I would take this a step further though and apply the same logic to story submissions. For example, bloggers who write insightful stuff on a regular basis should get some sort of bonus when content from their domains is upvoted early on. Maybe each upvote would internally count as…
I would strongly prefer we not add features that make HN more echo-chamber-y. For instance, I like John Gruber's writing a lot, but I'm not so much a fan of every one of his posts being on the front page.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#196I'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.
One feature of Slashdot that I did like when I still used it was the option to sort comments by point value, which usually meant excluding everything below a +4. Great time-saver, for those who are not interested in scrolling through long threads. For those who have more time or interest in reading through the discussions, they still see everything.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#197I think that part of the solution may be to introduce a feature that would give users that reach certain karma thresholds the ability to give more and more points to a comment when upvoting. For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign…
I've seen this feature in other communities and, given enough time, comments get +10 or 0 in a 0..10 scale. So in the end it's basically the same.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#198The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it. Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your…
Make flags public, and their outcomes. "16 people flagged this comment." "16 people flagged this comment, and it was tagged uncivil. User was banned for 2 days." "3 users incorrectly flagged this comment, and have lost flagging privileges for 2 days."
alex is right that automatically escalating based on #flags is a blunt instrument. You'd need to perform the escalation manually, you'd need multiple people doing it, and you'd need the decision-maker to attach their name to it ("kn0thing marked this uncivil") so the watchers can be watched in a lightweight manner.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#199Earlier 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.
If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion. Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular. It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates w…
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.
This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#200Allow us to mark certain accounts as "friends" or "favorites". Then on every comment and article, display points originating from "favorites". Like "77 points by pg / 15 points from friends." This preserves the democratic aspect of the site, while giving users valuable information they can use to skip boring content.