You may be doing this already as it seems pretty obvious to me, but you could give more weight to comments based on their length. In general the most insightful comments are longer than poorer dumb comments.
Also be more firm on the shouldn't appear on mainstream news sites rule
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
211–220 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#212I 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.
Perhaps you're right about this, but the main point was to give prominent users more power when upvoting and downvoting.
The idea was to make upvotes and downvotes of those on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders count more than the votes of newbies.
The reason why I suggested that users should be able to decide how much points they want to assign when voting is because, there may be situations when you find a comment interesting, and want to upvote it, but not so insightful that you would give it your maximum amount of points.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#213I 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…
Presumably the name changed to reflect the fact that there are many things unrelated to startups that the founding "hackers" wished to discuss. HN isn't entirely about startups now, in the same way Amazon is not purely about books any more. You seem to dislike the non-startup material, yet those older members who were around at that time must have liked the discussions sprouting from the "more generalist tech" posts,…
When the name was changed to "Hacker", the term Hacker wasn't used in the tech sense but rather in the same sense that it's used in the YC application form. As in a clever unorthodox solution to a problem.
But over time people took it to mean hacker in the technology sense of the term, and thus we now get reviews of Ubuntu on the front page, which you would never have seen a few years ago.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#214The 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…
One transition from "current" state to "flag does something" state might be to make the flag button more obvious, to make it have a more immediate effect, and to encourage its use.
My perception of the flag button now is that it's the bat-signal; it means that something is so bad that it actually warrants individual admin attention.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#215Make 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…
Would it work to make the new page longer?
Maybe give new stories space on the frontpage so the people upvoting them aren't self-selected?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#216Limit comments and/or submissions and/or votes to a few per day.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How was it passive aggressive or snarky?
Perhaps it was intended as a non-snarky, non-aggressive statement, but I still have trouble reading it as anything other than passive-aggressive snark, especially given the context of the conversation.
I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#218Make votes public.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#219Earlier 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.
People who have been around longer also know better what the community expects.