Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN? • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by colinsidoti » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:32 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #172

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.

But it raises the question, do you have a way to single out the corpus of good comments from the past? If past up-votes were reliable I don't think this thread would exist.

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

#322

Post by dwwoelfel » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:32 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #160

euroclydon wrote: post #63

When tptacek flags a front page article (and tells us he did), I can't think of a single time I have disagreed with him. Yet, the story usually remains, for hours or indefinitely. So, find more people like tptacek, and give their flags more weight. In other words: Moderators who enforce the spirit of HN and have the ability to just kill stuff. I'm really surprised this isn't happening already. If I go post some derog…

Actually that's something I've already changed. A few hours ago I made flags have a lot more weight. The old weights were ok for the more engaged users we had a year ago, but now the ratio of votes to flags on a fluff story tends to be a lot higher.

Have you done the same for comment flags? I tracked my flags for a week and none of them had any effect. Here is a sample of the things I flagged:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351266

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348304

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

#323

Post by jeromec » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #266

Tycho wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And we could make it policy to immediately downvote such cases.

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

#324

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

solipsist wrote: post #283

The problem lies within the deeply nested threads that continuously go back and forth between a few select people. Most of the mean/dumb comments on the first level thread are downvoted or flagged and moved to the bottom. This makes it easy to read the high quality comments - just look at the top. The problem occurs when you start reading into a nested thread of comments. Users will sometimes argue 4 or 5 times back…

When I see a ping-pong subthread, I just scroll past it. It seems to me that UI changes will create incentives to spread the ping-ponging around to other threads.

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

#325

Post by znt » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

A turkish message board (www.eksisozluk.com) with about 200k users faces the same problem, and uses moderated user acceptance as a quality filter.

First of all if you want to create an account you have to wait for the mods to announce application submission dates.

If you can manage to create an account during that period, you are made a 'rookie' and what you submit to the message board is invisible to everyone, except mods. You are only allowed to post a total of 10 messages.

When you are done posting your first entries, you wait for mods to read and evaluate the value you bring to the platform and if you keep within the format & legal limits of the board. If so, you are made a normal user.

A similar process would especially prevent the bots spamming this place.

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

#326

Post by hugh3 » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #206

I used to be a big contributor to this site, but for the last months I've found that my interest in the site has waned. I've thought a lot about why, since I used to really enjoy HN - now it's just one of a few newssites I visit every day. It's hard to quantify but here are my reasons and my take at the decline: 1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down. The problem is twofold - there are…

I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in the quality of stories as well as comments.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some branch of human knowledge. But I just checked the first 90 stories and there's nothing matching that description. Instead there seem to be an awful lot of "gossip" and "personality" type stories. Tesla vs Top Gear! Tech CEO shoots elephant! Trollish "What I hate about facebook" stories! The interminable "Is it a bubble?" discussion!

On the other hand, it might just be my opinion... obviously somebody is interested in the current front-page stories or else they wouldn't have been voted up. Do other folks think that the interestingness of the stories has declined?

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

#327

Post by webwright » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:34 PM UTC

Moderators?

You could have people who have over X karma (or people you hand pick) have disproportionate abilities to downvote or nuke comments/stories that are mean or dumb.

It would be easy to train a small circle of people how to moderate well. It seems nigh impossible to train the entire userbase of HN to do it.

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

#328

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:35 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #18

A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

> A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature ...

I don't agree. You'll just create another incentive to game for karma and that's what I've seen at sites with karma-linked features.

I'd suggest that either

* nobody has the feature

* everybody has the feature

* only paying customers have the feature

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

#329

Post by dwwoelfel » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:35 PM UTC

colinsidoti wrote: post #321

pg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it raises the question, do you have a way to single out the corpus of good comments from the past? If past up-votes were reliable I don't think this thread would exist.

He could use up-votes from a trusted subset of users.

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

#330

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #157

pg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the receiver.

Note that this won't "fix" the comment problem, but every time it is used, more likely than not, it's going to improve the comment threads, because the alternative is publicly calling someone out. Please label it "the gruseom button".

You've called me out in public before. Shame is an effective teacher.