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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
261–270 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#262I think it is very likely that there are voting rings and sock puppets here on HN. If so, it would cause a distortion in the scores awarded to all the content, sometimes up or down, depending. Therefore anything that helps fight that would improve the site by more honestly gauging the quality of submitted posts and comments, which then improves the S/N ratio.
How to do this exactly? Not sure. But I'm confident that fighting it more will improve any site.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#263How about having an additional metric in terms of responses to a post? If it doesnt deserve a response, it probably doesnt add much to the discussion.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#264Decompose commenting score into a two-part system representing up-votes and down-votes:
Up-vote score = sum(karma of up-voter)
Down-vote score = sum(karma of down-voter)
Score is displayed in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute score would be the same method as we're currently using. The relative score is presented as a part of the whole.
Something like [+++++++|--] could represent the ratio of the positive score to the negative score (which are the weighted scores based upon karma).
And, as a possibly added benefit, taking this approach enables the ability to reduce the karma level before allowing of down-voting, making people feel like they're able to participate more-fully earlier.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#265[deleted]
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Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#266Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to agree with general tendencies of the site. For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "…
Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How? Minimum comment length of ~50 words. This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jo…
This reminds me of the Slashdot lameness filter, which IIRC just caused (causes? I haven't been there in a while) lots of posts ending in, "La la la la, adding some content to get past the lameness filter." and the like.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#267The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted. a) If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member, delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment gained. That is something that can only be done by someone with curator powers here, but the rest of us can be encouraged to flag such comments more, and…
After edit: another comment from another user in this thread prompts me to ask whether all new users who sign up see the site guidelines automatically or not.
That is interesting. Take it one step further: if this is set up (or if it is already), requiring them to pass a short quiz can ensure they actually read it with comprehension.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how would this help improve comments? Wouldn't the worst-behaved also be the least likely to hit such a button?
One reason comment threads get tendentious is when people think other people are commenting to game the thread and collect karma. The karma-ceiling flag tries to say "this is a good faith comment".
Ok, I see. I haven't noticed that phenomenon of gaming the thread. Is it so common that this would be the best way to fix comments?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#269The nuclear option: Periodically take the site down for a while and then rebuild the community (kind of like the Matrix). The quality people will likely stick around.
Like the Erlang "bombs" of past? I haven't noticed them in a while:
http://erlanginside.com/hacker-news-full-of-erlang-articles-...
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#270How about using the ratio of points to comments as a signal for articles, and maybe the ratio of up+down votes (i.e. number of votes, not net points ) to sub-comments for comments.
This gives you some of the effect of what I think would be the best solution -- limiting the site's scope significantly -- in that it would give you things which people found interesting but weren't so general that everyone felt they could comment on them.
I think this would work well in conjunction with some of the other ideas in the thread which reduce the number of upvotes people are likely to give (specifically, a cap on the number of upvotes and a visual cap on the display of upvotes).