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

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

#371

Post by ctl » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:00 PM UTC

What would happen if people could see both the upvotes and the downvotes on a given comment, rather than just its total karma score? I've used sites (not social news) that worked like that, and I've found that e.g. seeing +6/-0 on one of my posts is more satisfying than seeing +15/-4. If you implemented downvote visibility I think the overall effect would be to discourage comments that get lots of downvotes. (The current policy, in contrast, encourages any comment that'll get a net positive karma score.)

I'm pretty sure that on the whole that would be a very good thing. Downvote visibility would certainly discourage dissent, which sucks. But I think the kinds of posts it would most strongly discourage are, in order, mean comments, stupid comments, and contentless (e.g. snide) comments -- which are exactly the things that have been dangerously proliferating recently.

And I don't even think it would much reduce the expression of minority opinion; there's a certain pride that comes with dissenting that makes it tolerable or even enjoyable when other people disagree with you. Whereas when you make a cheap joke, being able to see all the people who found it stupid or crass is a major buzzkill.

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

#372

Post by erik » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:01 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.

Have you considered Reddit's 'best' ranking for comments?

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

""" Most of the time, you won't notice that there's anything obviously different (it doesn't affect threading or anything -- don't worry!), but it should improve the quality of the top comments immensely. """

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

#373

Post by gokhan » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:01 PM UTC

Just based on observations, not numbers: Any member can upvote and HN is more popular. There will be more upvotes to be distributed among comments. Early comments seem to be receiving more upvotes than late comments, regardless of the community. So, unqualified comments will be receiving more and more upvotes.

Did raising downvote limit to 500 made any difference in unfair downvoting? If so, giving upvoting to more qualified people will also solve this for some time, means we can focus on measuring the qualification.

Maybe we should be able to mark individual comments as unfairly upvoted. Higher unfairly upvoted scores might decrease the value of future upvotes of voters on that comment.

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

#374

Post by staunch » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

pkaler wrote: post #87

There 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.

Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well.

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

#375

Post by andywood » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #359

A final thought: If you don't discriminate between the actions of the vast majority, and the actions of those identified as being aligned with your desired intentions for the site, nothing will work. I can probably "prove" that. I think any solution will require the identification of individuals whose actions are "more trustworthy," and giving them greater weight, or more powers. Anything else can and will be swamped…

Yes. Simple karma = democracy = power in numbers. That worked when the majority were exemplary. That's no longer the case, therefore democracy now works against the site. The solution is to equalize by giving asymmetric power to the exemplary.

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

#376

Post by mixmax » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

bvi wrote: post #370

mixmax wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, and other users both in this thread and in similar ones before it, are only looking at one side of the equation. The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones. Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightf…

One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number. That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.

That's actually a great idea!

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

#377

Post by dreish » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:04 PM UTC

Pick as many active users whose judgment you trust as you can find, train a Bayesian classifier on their votes, up and down, and use that to score the voting patterns of users. Set ignore for the ones with the worst scores. Even if it turns out not to help much, at least you'll have had some fun doing it.

Also, there's currently nothing reminding users of the ideals you want them to uphold just before they submit a comment -- i.e., right next to the submit button. It never hurts to ask.

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

#378

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:05 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by PStamatiou » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:05 PM UTC

Perhaps make it so that posting a comment actually costs karma (maybe based on your comment karma average for some subset of users with low averages) making people only comment when they are sure they are adding value. This makes it hard for new users to get started though.

Edit: appears I'm not the only one that suggested something like this. searched the page for "cost karma" and found a few comments.

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

#380

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 11:07 PM UTC

danielford wrote: post #313

I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the difficulty of gaining admission. One of my favorite forums put me on a waiting list for three months before they let me post. So I'd prefer the addition of some sort of barrier to entry. Either an invite system like the private file-stealing sites use, a sign-up fee like Metafilter uses, or a vetting process for potential members. Ideally, I'd lo…

> I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the difficulty of gaining admission.

There's a well-research phenomenon that people believe that a group is more valuable if it was harder for them to become a member. It pops up everywhere from YC to skull & bones to young men being ritually injured in the deserts of central Australia.