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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?

#441

Post by raganwald »

raganwald wrote: post #432

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…

Also, and this is really obvious, I would try to quantify the value of each position on the front page. Given an "average" story at #1, how many votes does it get? How long does it stay at #1? The answer is probably a curve of some sort, or a surface, but the general idea is that if you know what the typical #1 story gets, you can look at a story and determine whether it is outperforming stories in #1 position or under-performing them. You can do the same for all the positions on the page. You can determine the historical likelihood that someone looking at the front page will upvote a story in position #5

This data is interesting because now if you randomly perturb the front page, say by putting a new story in position #5 and lying about how many points it has. Show this perturbed page to a small sample of users and see if the story beats the historical averages or not.

If that kind of thing worked, it could help correct for the phenomena where a popular story stays popular just because it's popular. You can now rank stories by how well they take advantage of their "real estate" on the front page. Those that underperform the average sink, those that outperform the average rise.

One hitch. This might not work if you tell people you're doing it.

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

#442

Post by waynecolvin »

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…

mixmax' point 3) reminds me of State the Obvious. Maybe saying something in known agreement promotes consensus (with the speaker). Also anything past the first page won't get as many eyeballs so what's there will get more upvotes still.

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

#443

Post by JesseAldridge »

Looking at this comment page it's clear that there is an absolute deluge of excellent ideas waiting to be implemented. The bottleneck here is pg. pg doesn't scale. As far as I can tell, he's the one who does the vast majority of work on Hacker News, and as the site grows -- and as YCombinator grows -- pg's (already huge) workload is only going to increase. This is, of course, similar to the "Linus doesn't scale" problem faced by the Linux kernel, to which the solution was git. [1] I expect a similar distributed solution is needed for Hacker News.

Re-writing the software in a language more people understand (e.g. Python) could be a good first step here. But I don't know if pg is willing to give up on his silver bullet (arc).

Turning Hacker News into a business might help. Create a situation where exceptional people can make lots money by figuring out how to make HN great and let market forces do the rest. Although figuring out how to make money off of content could be a pretty tough problem.

More generally, I think pg should be thinking less, "How can I improve Hacker News?" and more, "How can I create an environment where other people can improve Hacker News?"

I mean... investing in startups is a full-time job, running a high traffic website is a full-time job, building a programming language is a full-time job, raising a child is a full-time job... trying to do all four at once probably isn't going to work.

[1] http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0957.h...

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

#444

Post by tednaleid »

pg wrote: post #123
tptacek wrote: post #18

A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the receiver.

I really like this idea. It'd disincentivize trolls because they're looking for a public flamewar. Turning those flamewars/disagreements private would hide a lot of the noise.

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

#445

Post by silentbicycle »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #430
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, e…

While that makes some sense, I'd rather see the firehose turned down a bit - otherwise the site is implicitly skewing itself toward the tastes of people who have time to sit and rate links all day.

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

#446

Post by strlen »

_delirium wrote: post #278
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., "…

The Kuro5hin solution of displaying averages plus number of ratings might give information in that direction, factoring out into two different numbers the average quality people thought the comment had, from the number of people who rated it. Not quite the same as a threshhold maximum, but it produces an asymptotic maximum instead. It's also, imo, useful to have them as two separate numbers, because they convey seman…

I like this idea. As another commenter pointed out, we seek out external validation (whether we like it or not). However, there's good and bad kinds of external validation: looking for popularity (total number of upvotes) vs. more direct feedback from people you respect (Kuro5hin model: a score with a name attached to it) works better. The fact that a comment would be rated rather than voted on Kuro5hin (with a maximum rating) also has the capping effect.

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

#447

Post by Mz »

jackfoxy wrote: post #436

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…

Except that HN already has a commercial purpose: It serves the needs of Y Combinator in some ways. You cannot fill out an application without including your HN handle, everyone on the app has to have one (or get one if they didn't have one already), and Paul reads a lot of the comments here and often is familiar with the person to some degree via their online participation here and that influences decisions concerning who gets into Y Combinator. So whatever gets done here probably needs to be done with an eye towards not undermining that agenda. Making it a commercial enterprise could so radically change the game as to make it useless or even counterproductive for its existing business-related agenda. How much would HN have to be worth to make it acceptable to lose that? I think only PG and the rest of Y Combinator can answer such a question, and possibly only to themselves rather than publicly.

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

#448

Post by rooshdi »

Hide the username and vote count for comments with positive votes. Show the username and vote count for comments with negative votes. Users will be able to see the profile and username of a positive user by clicking on a "see profile" link in place of the username.

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

#449

Post by Goladus »

jseliger wrote: post #348
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…

"1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down." One possible solution: depend more on credentials, and give people who have useful things to say / special background knowledge priority. Weigh their votes more and give them karma bonuses. Someone from a YC startup might be given more weight than someone who opines on large-scale, amorphous social problems from a generic position ("outsourcing:…

I disagree that credentials are the answer. Weighing with credentials doesn't scale broadly, which is what is needed here, and in fact may aggravate the problem when the expert has a bad day or their authority is applied to inappropriate subjects.

A better solution than "giving the smarter people a louder voice" would be to "give the louder people a smarter voice."

My suggestion below is to add a good way to discreetly provide feedback. Encourage people to send messages to you about what they think of your post, with the goal of encouraging everyone to improve the quality of their posting, and also to be more thoughtful about up/down voting.

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

#450

Post by [deleted] »

pg wrote: post #89
kwis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about to start startups. That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.

HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.

[deleted]
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