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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?

#591

Post by newguy889 »

hugh3 wrote: post #326
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…

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…

Sometimes I scroll down the "new" page and vote up all the hard tech stories I can find. Often I find none.

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

#592

Post by gnosis »

ilamont wrote: post #196
pg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.

One feature of Slashdot that I did like when I still used it was the option to sort comments by point value, which usually meant excluding everything below a +4. Great time-saver, for those who are not interested in scrolling through long threads. For those who have more time or interest in reading through the discussions, they still see everything.

This doesn't really address the main problem, which is that "poor quality" comments are being upvoted.

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

#593

Post by crasshopper »

rexreed wrote: post #203

It sounds like Hacker News needs a reason for being. Who is the audience? What is the value proposition? Shouldn't the needs of the audience and the "problem" HN is solving be the answer to this question? For me, I came to HN for: * A free, online location where people can exchange ideas and commentary relevant to tech startups, that welcomes newcomers and experienced alike. Perhaps it's different for others: * A pla…

rexreed, I really like where you're going with this. Without clearly stated goals (what to achieve and what to avoid) as well as data on what has already happened, and a theory of why various groups of commenters behave as they do, a solution is unlikely.

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

#594

Post by bergie »

On Maemo News we solved this by enabling downvoting of submissions (well, aggregated feed items), and by making downvotes worth 5 upvotes.

The unpleasant side-effect has been a slight tendency to shoot the messenger by downvoting relevant-but-unpleasant news. But in general it has helped with story quality

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

#595

Post by crasshopper »

jarin wrote: post #576
crasshopper wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't want to start a political argument, but isn't the way to make democracy scale more to do with federalism? And sub-reddits do just that.

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

#596

Post by gruseom »

This feels like a demographic problem of a larger population dragging down the average. If that's the case, then some sort of curation (vote-weighting or otherwise privileging certain users' input over others) is probably necessary, because the overall level of dumbness, meanness, or mediocrity just isn't going to change that much in response to anything HN does. (I'd much prefer to be wrong about this. Any elitist solution seems regrettable.)

I wonder if this could be tested. Even something as simple as http://news.ycombinator.com/classic applied to comments would be interesting. Or let PG pick, say, a hundred users and let each of them pick an additional two or three. Could the software show us the site as it would appear if those users' votes counted for more? It seems to me it wouldn't take long to get a feel for whether it had helped or hurt.

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

#597

Post by gnosis »

tptacek wrote: post #173
rexreed wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it's a good idea to penalize people for commenting? How does this help people new to the scene? "Thanks for joining in the conversation, here's a penalty" This only rewards people who have been around in the scene for a while, while penalizing all the new people.

Penalizing comments is also a more graceful solution than invite-only, because I doubt Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky care too much about their karma score here; the only people this dissuades are people who are commenting to game.

It doesn't dissuade anyone who doesn't care about their karma, or who feels strongly enough about what they want to say.

A karma penalty is a very soft slap on the wrist, at best.

It won't stop trolls, or assholes, or anyone with an agenda.

Subtracting a fixed amount of karma also gets less effective the more karma one has accumulated. So people with a lot of karma will be able to get away with more than people with less karma.

This has an upside, in that it allows more valued members of the community to express themselves more freely. The downside is that they can act like assholes without much repercussion. If the community winds up rewarding them for acting like assholes (by, say, upvoting their assholish comment) then that's even worse.

Of course, any community that not only tolerates but encourages assholes is not a community I want to be part of, and I've left a number of communities over that sort of behavior.

But there are other solutions short of "love it or leave it". I describe one such alternative in another comment in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266

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

#598

Post by gnosis »

jlees wrote: post #232
gleb wrote: post #36

I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments. Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all. I'd say: * create some real cost to making comments * make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time * make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have thi…

Another option is to have some social cost to making comments. The easiest way to do this is to force real names - look at e.g. Techcrunch (but there are other examples) to see the impact on comment quality. I can't see it working here, for a number of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

How would you know that someone's used their real name?

That might work when there are a small number of participants and everyone has met everyone else face to face or when there's at least someone to vouch for the identity of every participant, but it doesn't scale very well to a community the size of HN.

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

#599

Post by gnosis »

jcl wrote: post #589
crasshopper wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Upvotes are sometimes used to indicate agreement.

Yes, but in this case the upvoters could have simply upvoted the parent comment pg was replying to.

Short "i agree" or "i disagree" type of comments are usually discouraged on HN, as they don't really contribute to the discussion. Usually.

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

#600

Post by phlux »

kunley wrote: post #394
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…

Somebody may be interested in gossip, "IT celebrities" and cheap-prediction stuff, but why they started it here? There are lots of sites offering exactly that. For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..

I have said this at least a few times and I will say it again -- a story and comment moderation model based on the way it is done at reddit truly would help.

I find it really odd that you cant downvote until 500 karma, and it appears you can never? downvote stories?

And then there are comments in this thread that say "its a really hard problem to figure out" -- no it isn't, you just need to have faith that moderation power will be used appropriately by the site's audience and give them the appropriate ability to do so.

Just like on quora, they seem to have blinders on to systems that work because they want to believe that only their design team could possibly come up with something novel and in that novelty find the best solution.

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