391–400 of 729 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder? Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
Number of suggestions to solve it:
1) Put a real value on user accounts. Charge $5 for them, or otherwise make them hard to get -- perhaps invite-only from users with a certain rating -- so that they are felt to be valuable.
2) Active editing. Assigning a numeric value to everything a user does only goes so far: eventually there has to be a consequence for their posts (greater than it going grey). It's OK to ban users who are all noise, after a fair warning.
More controversially:
I think threads re-ordering themselves make it incredibly difficult to follow a conversation. Because comments move around, when you return to a thread you either have to re-read or re-skim multiple comments that you've already read. The alternative is to treat threads as one-shot jobs. Visit once, don't come back. That's death to conversation, and conversation is the heart of a community.
It's this reason, I suspect, people don't often post meaty comments in threads once they already have a good few comments in them -- they know they'll never get the traction of upvotes to stay near the top, so why bother? The fix:
3) Flat threads. Don't rearrange, don't indent. Show scores if you will, but don't order based on them. The longest-lived web communities, the ones with the best conversations, from the Well to Metafilter, all have this in common.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread. Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and…
You could show a simplified indicator of Great Comment, Good Comment or Bad Comment (or a similar set of values) so that users can skim a thread effectively. It's hardly a model community, but I think Engadget used to have a system like this.
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 br…
For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..
It's something I've suggested before, getting rid of downvotes and replacing them with flags.
similar to how google looks at more than just keywords in a document before it ranks it highly, maybe you can weight each vote. a vote cast by an early HN user isn't so binary, maybe in reality it counts as 2 or 3 votes while we call it "+1" there is a weight to their vote based on how long they've been on hn and their karma?
SubHNs
Look at http://gamedev.net - they've grown their community from a few active users to more than a hundred thousand and the quality only increased. They had to go through a period of significantly decreased quality as the community grew, and faced all the same problems as HN. I believe a combination of the following changes would fix things: (from most to least important): - Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and ka…
I really agree with your last two points. I don't think there are any examples of a large community effectively self-moderating; you need someone willing to ruthlessly delete the crap.
I'm thinking about it, and I can't really see any advantage of the Reddit-style format over a traditional forum if you're trying to build a thoughtful community. In online terms, there's only been one non-forum where I've really felt part of the community, and that's a slow-moving blog with a smallish group of great regulars.
Maybe even do this in general (for up and down votes): all users cast only suggestion votes. Trusted users cast the real votes.
Or perhaps assign more weight to upvotes/downvotes from members with a high karma, than those with a lower karma.
