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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

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

#401

Post by jedsmith »

Complete the fledgling environment of selectivity in one fell swoop and explicitly say, in the guidelines, that low-karma users are no longer allowed to participate. Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma. These meta posts, the how to vote posts, the discussion here and in other threads, the lamenting about comment quality in general: all of this aggravation is dancing around the central issue, which is low-karma users turning Hacker News into something that the high-karma users do not want. Period.

Just look at this thread. One person has eight separate top-level comments on this item, and is winning popular support. A large number of them have almost the exact same number of upvotes. You might as well rename HN to Shaped in the Old Guard's Image and wall it off. Just get it overwith so people will stop:

- Writing tired farewell pieces, and calling it a good thing because they're respected and high-karma

- Then turning around and churning out blog content that is front-paged daily on the community just departed from

- Complaining about HN's slow decline towards Redditdom

- Downvoting comments because they disagree with them

I know this sounds like snark, but it's totally honest. You have a big choice to make here: either you foster and encourage new users to participate, or you wall it off and keep HN in the bubble of functionality and community that the old guard reminisces about.

As a relatively new contributor, I've never felt more unwelcome on a site than I have here at times. It's not even about me. It's certainly not about disrespect to those high-karma users who believe in this community the most. It's about the community. If you want your community a certain way, then lock it to the people who made it that way. I also intentionally set the theoretical karma limit above my karma, because I'd love an excuse to not come back.

Aside: All of this meta crap recently is setting up for HN to be disrupted by a new community. I also find it telling that in the time it took me to submit my comment and upvote the parent post -- say, ten seconds -- I was already at zero.

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

#402

Post by FirstHopSystems »

In point I don't think it's a decline, just more of a noise issue. Many of the articles are interesting but I am noticing more submissions that have only a abstract connection to qualify for "Hacker" news.

I don't have any well though out answers to the question. I do think the more questions out there that could help solve this problem.

I'm thinking the commenting is more of a symptom than the underlying issue(s).......

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

#403

Post by nyellin »

coffeemug wrote: post #387

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…

> When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off with it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other and participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.

The decay constant should also be decreased, so that interesting submissions stay longer on the homepage. I usually don't comment on old submissions, because it feels like no one reads or votes on them.

I am willing to sacrifice the number of good articles on the homepage each day for the quality of comments on each article.

(edit: added last paragraph)

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

#404

Post by trafficlight »

EwanG wrote: post #361
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…

What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do t…

What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do the research to insure that the article is what it claims it is about, and hasn't been posted 20 times in the last week under slightly different names.

Isn't this the role of Slashdot's editors? Or do they choose the stories as well? Either way, Slashdot has almost no interesting stories these days.

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

#405

Post by malbs »

The timing of this post is amazing.

I'm by no means a prolific commenter on HN. If I have something of value to add I'll try to ask; otherwise I usually abstain (but I'm only human, made a few dumb comments)

I just saw another article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404157

and the two comments on it were either bashing IQ, or talking about penis size.

I feel like maybe the reddit/4chan community has started reading HN?

I felt like posting a comment on that thread asking, nay begging, for someone to post something interesting as a followup to the kids question in the video, instead we have.. I just don't know.

And after saying that, I have no useful suggestion. Any feedback system that is implemented can still/will be gamed.

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

#406

Post by thefool »

hugh3 wrote: post #326
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 br…

It might be that the people that are reading the "new" stories and thus effectively making the decision which stories get at least a brief chance to see a wider audience, are not actually interested in the same things that the core is interested in.

This means that the community-at-large is effectively given the opportunity to vote on a sub-optimal selection of the submitted stories.

This can perhaps be fixed by briefly flashing all new stories towards the bottom of the top news page, to give them a brief chance at wider exposure. One way to do this would be to make a queue, and put every new story on the bottom of the front page for 5 minutes barring a certain number of down-votes for moderation.

This might really effect which stories actually end up on the top news page (though perhaps only for stories submitted during peak times).

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

#407

Post by jacques_chester »

danielford wrote: post #389
jacques_chester wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment. Compare the average Metafilter comment to the average YouTube comment. You'd have a difficult time making the case that there wasn't a discernible difference in quality between the two.

> This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment.

Right, but as the subject of a membership ritual I have to discount your assertion.

Sometimes membership rituals do increase value. But they increase perceived value regardless of what follows.

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

#408

Post by strlen »

mixmax wrote: post #243
strlen wrote: post #104

Cap 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., "…

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…

> 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.

Very interesting point about not discouraging high value contributions: you don't want to create a situation where users have no desire (or are afraid to) comment.

> Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.

I think we can all agree that users with high karma generally have it for a reason. However, you can't always deduce that if user A has higher karma than user B, than user A has higher karma because his contributions are always more insightful than user B's. It's not a total order.

The marginal incentive ("get more karma by writing a comment that gather N+1 up votes") is not aligned with the over all goal of the sight (produce consistently insightful content).

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

#409

Post by [deleted] »

coffeemug wrote: post #387

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…

[deleted]

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

#410

Post by anurag »

It would be a big change, but enforcing real identities could help. Very few top commenters on HN are anonymous, and people are much more likely to be rude or intellectually lazy when no one knows its them. Given HN's readership there is a big incentive for most users to appear smart and nice through their HN activity - if potential co-founders, investors and clients could dig up my mean/dumb comment (or my upvote of one), I would be less impulsive in commenting and upvoting.
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