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

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

#431

Post by alextp » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:05 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #137

psawaya wrote: post #100

Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition. I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact t…

Would it work to make the new page longer?

How about penalizing submissions by how often the title keywords and domain have been posted in the last week or so? This should push a lot of repetitive content down, and encourage the discussion to continue on the older submission.

Whenever there's some important piece of news like the japan earthquake we have highly redundant discussions on many different articles. This is wasteful.

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

#432

Post by raganwald » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:05 AM UTC

One thing I wonder about is whether accumulating personal karma is a red herring: trolls don't seem to care about their karma, and good folks may not care either.

Perhaps the most important thing about upvotes and downvotes is how they affect visibility. Everyone wants their voice to be heard, and some people want the opportunity to influence whether other people's voices are heard or not, e.g. by flagging stories or killing comments through downvoting.

If the big deal here is visibility, then I would concentrate on the algorithms that decide when a comment thread is rendered gray or invisible and the algorithms that decide the ranking of comment threads. I would look for patterns of votes or commenting that might help distinguish "popular but fluffy" from "popular and thought-provoking."

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

#433

Post by gcv » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:06 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #35

tptacek wrote: post #7

A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.

The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027 politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.

What about adding a separate "flag as politics" option to stories? That way, if enough people feel that it is off-topic for the HN front page, it could get banished to a separate news.ycombinator.com/politics area. Not deleted, just removed from the front page and easily accessible to anyone who wants it.

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

#434

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:08 AM UTC

alextp wrote: post #420

jacques_chester wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty disagreement. I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These are a problem, as they en…

> Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty disagreement.

While I agree with the general case, in my specific case I called somebody an "idiot" out of anger and tptacek called me on it. It was quite mortifying and I've tried to watch my words since.

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

#435

Post by Goladus » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:10 AM UTC

It would be nice to be able to click a button to inform the poster, discreetly, that the comment exhibits negative qualities like:

    hostility
    unclear connection to parent
    factual errors

etc.

Discretion is necessary to encourage people to address and fix the problems with their comments and style rather than provoking them to guard their reputation.

Sending individual emails is effective at this, but takes too much time and energy. Being able to click a button that gives a commenter specific feedback could be very effective.

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

#436

Post by jackfoxy » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:11 AM UTC

The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN, as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways to bubble up story submissions that otherwise get lost.

No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest. Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various projects.

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

#437

Post by alextp » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:11 AM UTC

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.

The problem is that word features are not really that good predictors of quality.

I have done some research on this (unpublished), and I got a really good performance on predicting hacker news votes by just counting how many new words (not stopwords, not very-high-frequency words) a comment was adding to a thread. Just using a few variations on this theme predicted better than word counts or bigram features.

Fundamentally, though, I disagree with machine learning- based approaches as they can only _reinforce_ present behavior, and we'd like to shape voting behavior.

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

#438

Post by decadentcactus » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:12 AM UTC

user24 wrote: post #72

Limit us to N upvotes per day. In other words - make votes precious. That way people will think more about how to 'spend' their precious votes. A similar thing works in poker. If you empty out your change jar and give everyone a fixed amount to start, and at the end of the game it all goes back in the jar, people play in a certain way. If you play for actual money, even just change, the gameplay does often change for…

Agree with the poker analogy. I played a single player poker game and just went all in repeatedly because I could just restart anyway.

In the same way I can upvote everyone in this thread even though many wouldn't deserve it.

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

#439

Post by gersh » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:14 AM UTC

I'd look at how different users respond to different articles? Do they click on the article? Do they comment? Do they come back to the site after they see the article? Do they vote for the article.

Next, you can correlate how various people voted with whether a specific person will like the article and/or comment. Finally, you should be able to tell who will like or not want something to get voted up. At this point, you can customize for everyone or weight the influence of people based on well correlated their taste is with the top karma people.

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

#440

Post by decadentcactus » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 12:15 AM UTC

sunir wrote: post #162

Idea 1. Charge for memberships like Metafilter. I believe in the Quaker rule, "Only speak when you can improve the silence." Other people think speech is like squatting on land. You have to speak to gain footing. By charging people for the privilege of speaking, you make them consciously decide whether what they have to say is worth the $5 to join. They will probably say no.

When you say for memberships, shouldn't you mean charge for comments? It wouldn't affect the site much if I could still sign in, save threads, set procrast etc. Which would still be useful to many users.