471–480 of 729 posts
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…
I'd suggest that there are more tiers to functionality than are currently in place. At the moment, after 500 points you're given the ability to downvote comments. Perhaps there should be additional barriers in place, such as this: 0 - Ability to comment on threads 50 - Ability to upvote comments 500 - Ability to downvote comments 1000 - Ability to submit articles/stories 2000 - Ability to downvote articles/stories et…
The problem with this approach is that then the users will instead choose to save up their points to submit their OWN stories, instead of spending them upvoting (and downvoting) threads and comments which help improve the content curation on HN (and is one of our main goals here). This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of o…
A suggestion could well be to not have threads like this one (not trying to be disrespectful!) An interesting thought is the idea that punk music was dead the first time someone said punk's not dead.
I could see that being the case with a trend/fashion, but it's not so much of a problem with other things.
In fact, there's lots to be learned from MetaFilter. Two long but useful videos containing Mathowie's wisdom:
Let us not be too hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really understood. At best they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you wouldn't be able to tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not. If this were my product then I'd try to gather a corpus of bad comments, selected outside of the vote system (because the problem is that voting might be broken). While I was at it, I'd also fi…
One problem I know is a problem because I see it all the time is people getting downvotes and not knowing why. If even a fraction of the people who have this problem complain, that's a lot of people who don't understand the unwritten rules.
This is very time-consuming to do, however. Writing a detailed response is costly and repetitive. Pressing "downvote" is easy. You punish the commenter, but don't tell him/her why; it's up to them to figure it out on their own, which is sometimes difficult/impossible from their perspective.
An idea:
If you downvote, you have to pick a reason why you downvoted from various options (e.g. drop-down list, checkboxes). If you pick something, your downvote is cast. If you don't do anything, the downvote isn't cast.
In the options, you can list ~10-20 reasons to downvote (too mean, off topic, etc...). Select one or more items from the list, and submit it. What was selected appears in a "voting stats" page/section for said comment. Then the user can then get the gist of why they were downvoted, perhaps with a generic message saying how they could improve in the future.
The downside is that it might required a re-direct if you downvote (might be annoying on iPad/mobile devices), and it'll also take longer to downvote. I don't think the latter will be an issue since downvoting is rare, and I'd imagine people would be willing to fill out a quick web-form if they really think something deserves negative karma.
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.
* posting a comment
* voting on a comment
* submitting a link / question
* voting on a submission
An interesting variant: You can 'keep' a link without paying, but if you are paying, your 'keep' is the counted as a 'vote'.
I found the site when someone submitted something and asked me to upvote it. I didn't know what that was, so came here and made a stupid comment and got downvoted. I didn't know what that meant or why it happened, and no one went out of their way to explain it.
Months later, I have almost 1k karma and still didn't know who RiderofGiraffes was, and don't find myself caring.
The real issue here is culture, and the cultivation of it. There is a culture, but it's tough to find, and it's far from discoverable. Most of the links new users need to know about, such as the top 20 list, are hidden deep in the site. There aren't any avatars, and because of the strange nicknames, I never know who I am talking to unless I click through and they happen to have listed a URL or Twitter handle.
Point being - if you want people to act a certain way, I think you need to do a better job of describing it. I say that to the entire community.
I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of that, it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort of behavior we see.
Just my .02, but this is what I'm picking up here.
I still love HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number. That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.
Others are better at commenting, and maybe there are even different classifications of commenting or different badges.
You would be able to incentivize behavior (commenting) and then narrow it down to a particular type of commenting.
One interesting badge might be the efficiency badge, and that would be generating the most points or badges per minute on the site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I think the issue is that the things that seem insightful to relatively unskilled programmers seem obvious to very skilled ones. A lot of the blog posts I see on sites like this rehash issues that I thought were settled a long time ago, but what's happening is that people understand things for themselves over and over again. And it's actually helpful when they write it up, because their writeups then lead other people to understand these things. Thus there is a steady stream of posts about the same set of ideas that are always helpful to people, but are still clogging HN.
The trouble is that there's no way for people who have already understood something to stop seeing the same old posts. I see three options: - get rid of the less-skilled people - keep the less-skilled people, but stop them from learning from these posts - somehow let people opt out of seeing posts on things they understand, but keep them around for other people to see
It seems obvious that the third solution is correct, but I don't yet know how to do it.