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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?

#501

Post by Locke »

I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable.

The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into:

    1. I have an idea!
    2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
    3. Oh, in that case we could just...
    4. But, then...
The "quality" of HN and it's community is a function of many variables. It's hard, maybe impossible, to tweak the site and expect predictable results (and, there are always unintended consequences).

It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.

Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So, let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-side css hack to make HN look even better? Do we end up with more or fewer designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?

I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while longer.

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

#502

Post by hugh3 »

1331 wrote: post #484
hugh3 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that the number of interesting stories have declined, but I think that they have become much harder to find because the number of non-interesting stories have definitely increased. Among the non-interesting stories, I often notice the same usernames over and over. Would limiting the number of story posts per day help the situation?

Uninteresting stories seem to come either from the same old accounts or from brand new accounts. I'm not sure why brand new accounts aren't banned from submitting stories until they get (say) 100 comment karma.

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

#503

Post by crasshopper »

Weight upvotes differently as they come from different people -- or, play around with displaying different "top" content to different users.

Some starting places might be:

* upvotes from someone who reads regularly but votes irregularly count more

* upvotes from IP's that have not clicked through count less

* using a collaborative filter on upvotes to guess which stories are more likely to appeal to different readers

* randomly putting a few threads or stories out of order for each user

* users who, early on, vote-up comments that are voted up later are rewarded (f''* modal version of the above, using a pagerank style algorithm to calculate the helpfulness of users

* upvotes from people with more karma are worth more (again f''* mess around with sub-thread weighting. I don't know how you do it right now but it seems like a good comment on a lower sub-thread is less likely to be seen than a mediocre comment right below the +43 top comment.

* mess around with page-placement weighting. The very top is most likely to be seen and voted on. 3/4 of the way down is very likely to not be seen -- so a vote either way means more there.

* limit the number of upvotes each user gets. Could be per time, per story, per karma....

I didn't use HN a year or two ago, but it seems to me that across such social news sites the following types of content are unjustifiably upvoted:

- confidence

- lists of books

- slams (mother###ker)

- references to high-IQ stuff

- certain lengths are preferred [must be 2-3 para's long to get hugely upvoted, 2-3 sentences has a higher prob. of just a few points]

If you do some more research perhaps you could just decide on what are "bad" kinds of comments, such as negativity, and use text mining / sentiment analysis to detect them and hold back their points.

Using any of the - ideas would force HN designers to commit to what actually constitutes bad content, rather than social engineering (* ideas).

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

#504

Post by kajecounterhack »

kj12345 wrote: post #467
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…

As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I ag…

Hmm, when I first joined, being a silly high school kid who wasn't really good at being mature online, I learned how to interact in the community via trial-and-error. It was really just that.

One specific instance was when I submitted an XKCD shortly after joining. I eventually realized it wasn't really what people here were looking for. When elections rolled around, I submitted a Wapo editorial that was really off-base, and the reaction I got in response was deservedly negative.

However, in this process of learning to be a more civil and well-reasoned person (which I do credit a lot of to the good folks here on HN), I've always found a measure of grace. I don't think the reactions I've gotten for anything I've submitted or commented with have ever been really mean. Criticism has always been positive. This is the main aspect of HN, besides being intellectually stimulating, that I've come to appreciate most. It has really helped me to grow (I'm a college sophomore now and I really am grateful to the kind people here who've taught me so much since high school).

I agree with pg's general observation that things seem to have become a bit meaner and less constructive. I'm not sure how to fix the front page, but the type of comments I find representative of the old HN are informative, well-reasoned, and forgiving comments. I entirely agree with your bit about "I disagree" comments, though I don't think it would be as much of a problem if it were done a little more nicely. It's okay to disagree with an article, but the tone that some people take, mehh. That said, I almost always read the comments prior to reading the article, because I count on the contrarians to shed some light that I might otherwise be ignorant to.

I think everything would be okay if everyone just reminded themselves to be civil and not to use downvotes to disagree.

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

#506

Post by Mz »

Locke wrote: post #501

I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable. The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into: 1. I have an idea! 2. Yeah, but that won't work because... 3. Oh, in that case we could just... 4. But, then... The "q…

The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution.

I don't agree at all. Just because many people disagree does not mean there is no answer. I think the problem is that this is a hacker site, hackers like to put together technical solutions for moderating a forum, and forum moderation is primarily a people-problem. Thus the best answers here seem to get largely overlooked while people debate endlessly how to tweak the voting system (or some variation thereof). I don't know what the solution to that issue is but that doesn't mean it cannot be done.

Peace.

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

#507

Post by pg »

kj12345 wrote: post #467
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…

As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I ag…

Ids are sequential, so there's a time machine at your disposal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

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

#508

Post by khafra »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #233
bretthopper wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is the biggest problem with HN rather than comment quality. Tons of related, and even duplicate, stories happen all the time which fragments discussion. Not to mention the duplicate posts which happen a few months later. Thankfully someone usually remembers and posts a link to the previous discussion but that shouldn't be required.

I think it's an interesting idea to be able to "group" related posts that occur within a certain time range of each other. If five posts on the new iPad 7 come in within the same three days, someone can drag them all together into the "iPad 7" thread. But this? the duplicate posts which happen a few months later Once we're up to a timescale of months , or even weeks, we're no longer being sensible. Instead we're exhi…

ISTM you're thinking of merging duplicate content as a punitive measure. I think of it as a mostly positive thing: I wouldn't mind seeing a discussion on SICM once a quarter--but it'd be nice to have all the older insightful comments on it readily available.

Perhaps there should be a "hard merge" that prevents duplicates from sharing the front page, and a "soft merge" that multiplexes comments from duplicates at any time range under any of the submissions?

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

#509

Post by statictype »

plusbryan wrote: post #103
geuis wrote: post #31

Make voting on comments cost karma. Alternately, make new story submission require at least 100 minimum karma level. I suspect the effect here would be to reduce the number of frivolous and spammy submissions. When more high quality submissions are the topics of conversation, the quality of comments will go up.

> new story submission require at least x minimum karma level This seems to have worked well for stack overflow. Just spitballing here pg, but what if you extended this to commenting as well? HN could be open to browsing, but to comment, you needed to be invited by another member with x karma? You could quantify this by requiring 10 karma to comment and 100 to post, and allowing a user to gain x karma by getting an '…

A real part of the value of HN is that you often get comments from the people involved in the story itself - whether it be the author of a post or the developer of a piece of software being discussed or Matt Cutts giving the lowdown on Google's policies.

Some of these people just create an account to make a few contributions on specific threads and then they're gone. Having an invite system would increase the friction in being able to do this.

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

#510

Post by pg »

ig1 wrote: post #240

We could penalize commenters not using their real name. Techcrunch comment quality has improved by an order of magnitude and trolls have been largely wiped out since they started requiring people use Facebook or Yahoo accounts to comment.

I'm considering that, possibly without disclosing on the site who the user is; just having to authenticate oneself at all would probably help.
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