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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?

#421

Post by jedsmith »

SandB0x wrote: post #416
jedsmith wrote: post #401

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…

> Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma. This is hardly a good example to all the aspiring startup folks on how to treat your users. Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off? Edit: Removed the accusation of trolling, apologies f…

If I were trolling, would I expound upon my suggestion as I did? If you stopped reading at that quotation, you're right: I'd be unsure if I were trolling as well.

This is about what the community wants and needs. pg and the other long-term users want the community to stay a certain way, hence this item itself; closing off that community to only those that participated in the development thereof will allow the community to remain where it is desired.

> Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?

The same thing that made them stick around when the site did not have a large audience.

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

#424

Post by trotsky »

pg wrote: post #81
gleb wrote: post #36

I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments. Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all. I'd say: * create some real cost to making comments * make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time * make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have thi…

Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.

I'd be careful of comment thresholds at least to some extent. It's pretty well known across many of these services that if you reply quickly to a new story you're much more likely to get upvotes. Similarly with replying to a top post. If they need to be written quickly they often aren't as high quality or carefully considered, or may even fall back on some of the easy bad posting styles you're trying to eliminate. If you take the existing karma whoring incentives to do this and add to it that you may never even get read if you don't get in early that might cause a lot more people to play that game. And cause a drop off in participation from people who might only be able to respond to a thread when it's hours old.

I think in general you already have most of a filter in that bad comments get pushed down and the lower sections of comments seem to be read much less often.

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

#425

Post by jacques_chester »

danielford wrote: post #413
jacques_chester wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Aren't you engaging in the genetic fallacy here though? Pointing out a possible origin of my belief does not mean that you have disproved the belief.

As developed through this discussion, my point would be that we need an outsider's perspective on the quality of a community. Perhaps a "passer by".

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

#426

Post by alextp »

pg wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #4

Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.

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…

How about adding a star to the top log(n) comments in each post?

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

#427

Post by Yana_Convelife »

How about rather than down-voting, you allow people (possibly with some minimal karma) to delete comments if they violate the terms? If a comment is deleted, there would be a trace showing that there used to be a comment that got deleted by John. John's profile could then show all the comments he deleted, just like it now shows John's submissions and comments and anyone (perhaps with the same minimal karma) would be able to revive a frivolously deleted comment. Hopefully, that would mean that people would not delete comments unless they can stand for it.

But I'm pretty new to HN, so my comment may not take into account its evolution.

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

#428

Post by bbulkow »

I think the answer is fairly clear. If you remember Digg before it got popular, and Reddit before it got popular, you understand how these sites lose focus when they increase readership. The devistation of Digg, and now the serious problems at Reddit, are forcing more general-readers to HN.

Solutions:

1) Reddit staved off this effect for a while by both re-tuning the karma ranking computation, and wiping everyone's karma back to 0. The effect of hyper-people with too much power is problematic. I don't think that will work here, but it's possible a re-tune will help.

The general idea of a redo on the karma system was stated above: the right answer is to take a look at "good comments" and "bad comments" and look at new threads.

2) HN as invite only. Anyone can read, few can vote/comment. I'm not sure I'd make the cut if you were to have certain blessed voters/commenters. I like the suggested improvement of having this calculation be hidden, and never to show karma.

3) Moderators. The community I live in with the longest lifetime is "chowhound". They don't have a voting system (or good web technology), they have ruthless monitors. Monitors are never supposed to remove for quality of post, but they do simply nuke from orbit "that's what she said" post chains.

4) Look, there's one real fact here. As someone who, myself, sells a database product aimed at people like those who read HN, I have a huge incentive to get an article into HN. It could make or break my company - no fooling. Once you incent bright people to break your system, it will be broken. Socket puppet rings will rule. Eternal vigilance - that is, a moderator-like junta charged with looking at quality every few months and ruthlessly implementing whatever solution is correct at that time, is the only way to continue HN's spirit.

5) I will guarantee you that if something isn't done, there will simply be a slow, sure slide to mob rule and ignorance.

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

#429

Post by bootload »

staunch wrote: post #374
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.

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

I always think of the Perlmonk progression as a good idea. It will require a radical departure in use/interaction and might be seen as too controlled. PM had the advantage of doing this from the start (as far as I know) PM #244776

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

#430

Post by JesseAldridge »

silentbicycle wrote: post #237

I think that having more content on the front page that isn't shallow industry gossip would have a positive effect on discussions overall - they tend to drag down the other threads, and bring in a lot of people who don't understand / follow the commenting culture here. The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is continually posted.…

One potential solution to this problem is to distribute the load of evaluating the new page among the community. Look at StumbleUpon for an example of how one might go about this. All new links go into a pool. The user clicks the stumble button and a link is selected from the pool using a weighted random algorithm -- urls with lots of upvotes are more likely to be selected, new urls are more likely to get selected, etc. The user votes on the article, then requests another.

Maybe users should have to vote on X links on the new page for every Y links they view on the front page.

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