641–650 of 729 posts
Consider starting (or merely sanctifying) a HN IRC channel or webchat. I think a lot of people comment and visit HN now just for something to do; they are bored and want to do some intellectual sparing. If there was a irc.ycombinator.com with real-time chat topics, it might help separate "the wheat from the chaff," so to speak. E.G. #japan-nuclear-chat If not a chat, I'd say focus on something that doesn't fight the…
The point of downvoting a 1-point comment is usually to let someone know their comment was inappropriate. A downvote against a 60-point comment is supposed to mean "This is not that good. It's just hivemind / good placement."
Taking one point away from a 60-point comment doesn't change its position, however. Maybe downvotes should increase its gravity or maybe they should have a greater push-back, even if it's not 1.1*count(downvotes) but rather (count(downvotes))^1.1.
I 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.
The ones in which I really put some effort into explaining something, looking up some information, or explaining my point, usually get only one or two upvotes, if any at all.
Make voting transparent. Provide access to who has voted a comment up or down. The community will act differently if they know others can see their behavior. Then again this may have negative effects. I think that in general I'd be more thoughtful when voting comments up or down if I knew others could see.
I've probably voted thousands of times on various comments and articles on HN. Am I really going to care if someone sees that I voted this way or that way on some comment or other? I don't think so. I doubt many other people will either.
It doesn't much matter what the barrier is. A commenting system that crashes and destroys conversations occasionally, driving away people who are not sufficiently invested. A focused remit that drives away most people who see the site. A small group that does not advertise. But I've never seen any community sustain itself in a form that I want to be part of without some barrier to limit who gets involved in that community.
I'm not entirely clear on what the reasons are. Is it that we can only track a certain number of people? Is it that communities can only sustain themselves if turnover stays low? I don't know. But I've observed the rule in multiple places.
Given that, I've been surprised at how well HN held up. It started with a good seed. People who find pg interesting have a reasonably focused remit. The site lacks a lot of silly bells and whistles. People mostly find out about it through word of mouth. But still in the end without some barrier to entry, any sense of community is doomed. At least if my experience/opinions/etc is accurate.
Don't make submissions give the submitter karma. Currently, the fast way to gain karma is to be the first to submit a big story, and duplicates abound because everyone tries something different. If there's no incentive, there's no race. I, personally, also like the up-votes costing karma. It'd make the act much much more costly to perform, so high voted comments will be more likely to be selected on content than laug…
Regarding the "laughs" I don't really understand what the big deal is. I like a funny/sarcastic (read: not stupid) comment that shows at least some insight or understanding of the matter or just pokes fun at a particular view. This is necessary and healthy for a discussion.
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…
Slashdot does this with moderation, and I have a few problems with it. Namely, I don't know which of the comments I'm currently reading are the top 5 comments that I'll read that day. Perhaps it's a slow news day in the morning, and I spend all of my moderation points on comments that are "good enough". Later in the evening something big breaks, and insightful comments abound everywhere - suddenly I have no points to…
1) When is 'morning', exactly?
2) Allow N votes per hour instead of N per day
3) If (2) would devalue votes too much, allow N votes per 5 hour period.
1. Set up a Twitter-like directed graph of users, so users can provide HN with people they'd like to "follow". This graph need not be public. 2. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself, then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy vo…
I don't think this really solves the problem either. The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality. Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments. Only instead of having "direct democracy" ("rule of the mob"), you propose a "representative democracy" ("rule of the elites"). While there's something to be said for the "representative democracy" approach (namely, that at le…
Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed? If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place? Without voting, what will be left of HN?
> Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments.
Again: isn't that what we have right now?
I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it. I perceive that part of the problem is that the exceptional people who made HN what it is in the early days now have little say compared to the newbie masses who are dragging it down. The people in the middle (eg. myself) are a big number who increasingly become disenfranchised and are less active, thus voting less, thus exacerbating the problem.
> In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good decisions.
Here, the "follow" list would be private and only specifically there for you to nominate who you think make good decisions. This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice.
I don't see how you can separate popularity as you do. Why would I have a popular person in my list if I didn't trust their decisions? He could still be popular, just not in my list! Perhaps I should have called it a "proxy vote list" instead of a "follow list".
A user who is in the list of many other users need not even be told who or how many there are (the upvote total may need to be delayed or something like that to achieve this). People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity.
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…
Submissions should hardly give any karma. That should take care of most of the problems regarding submissions.
About the approval: It should probably be the other way around. Flagged submissions are added to a queue for review (maybe letting the community to vote once more and therefor reviving the submission) and duplicates with comments are merged.
Random mumble: I have the feeling that many discussions depend too much on the poster. Sometimes complete discussions shift because of a comment of an established poster or live and die with said poster. And it's from time to time not because of some valuable insight but rather the fact that it's him/her. I am probably the only one who feels like that and I don't have a solution (if it needs one). Hiding the username and having to do an extra click (profile e.g.) to see who's behind the post would probably minimize the problem. But it would make it harder to filter out posts (which would need another indicator karma/per comment ratio (e.g.) to make it at least a bit useful).
Look at http://gamedev.net - they've grown their community from a few active users to more than a hundred thousand and the quality only increased. They had to go through a period of significantly decreased quality as the community grew, and faced all the same problems as HN. I believe a combination of the following changes would fix things: (from most to least important): - Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and ka…
"There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations." http://news.ycombinator.com/active