pg, how much have you played around with simple weights of upvotes vs downvotes? Eg, making a downvote worth -1.1 and an upvote worth +1.0.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
571–580 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#572Limit 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…
This has been suggested a few times, but I don't get it. How does limiting votes impact quality of comments? Seems like it'll just cause people who have run out of upvotes to post disguised and meaningless "i agree" comments.
Theoretically "I agree" comments should be downvoted, which should provide the required disincentive.
But I do tend to agree with you. Limiting upvotes isn't as important as discouraging useless comments.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#573Moderators? You could have people who have over X karma (or people you hand pick) have disproportionate abilities to downvote or nuke comments/stories that are mean or dumb. It would be easy to train a small circle of people how to moderate well. It seems nigh impossible to train the entire userbase of HN to do it.
If we have moderators, it's preferable to disallow commenting from moderators. Moderators should act as the facilitators. Having mod power and be able to comment just giving too much powers to a few people to voice their opinions.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder? Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.
This tiff seems to highlight what's perhaps the problem: is there really agreement & understanding on what HN is supposed to be about?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a great idea.
No offence to pg, but why did this comment get upvoted 9 times? This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.
Names are important because they allow you to use your own internal karma system (I will read comments from certain people no matter what their score).
One problem mentioned is the overloading of what an up/down vote is - what about separating "good/flag" and "agree/disagree"?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#576Earlier 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…
EwanG, this seems contrary to the democratic spirit of community news sites. Who is to say what's good and bad? I don't trust a dictator (editor).
Pure democracy doesn't necessarily scale, which is why we elect representatives and have electoral colleges and such in real life. Maybe HN's reached the point where a pure vote system is not enough.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you turned off gravity for comments, then ranking would indicate their relative votes. Users could vote to create what they believe is the appropriate ranking. I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain? BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being pers…
> Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?
Yes, if and only if "good" and "bad" comments are defined (intensionally or extensionally).
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#578I think the larger problem is that comments that aren't emotive, but are reasonably insightful get ignored. HN quickly trains newcomers not to bother with them, and to go for pithy zingers.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#579Limit 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…
You could get chips (er votes) relative to your average comment score.
gridspy, I thought about this as well. But does this create an echo chamber problem?
You would give lots of chips to someone who makes cheap "mother###ker" comments and then that give that person more power in controlling the site.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#580Earlier 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…
> 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. Very interesting point about not discouraging high value contributions: you don't want to create a situation where users have no desire (or are afraid to) comment. > Most of the users that have a high karma count h…
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