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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?

#701

Post by loxs »

mcshaner1 wrote: post #672
photophotoplasm wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time. This is the biggest one IMO.

One of the problems with new stories (for me at least) is when they are submitted. I often see something interesting in the rss feed that was submitted several hours before I got to it. Upvoting on a story that old is useless, if it hasn't reached critical mass by some time threshold, no one will see it. It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.

It's the same with comments. I usually join discussions several hours late. Mostly because I live in Europe. Usually I get 1 or 2 up/down votes and almost no answers.

So I generally think that good stories shouldn't decay as fast as they do. And maybe also when there is some activity on them.

Maybe also we should have some category like "best stories of yesterday", putting some fresh attention to the good ones.

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

#702

Post by rms »

pg wrote: post #546
EwanG wrote: post #361

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…

I didn't feel like I knew what the answer was, so I was very curious to see what it would be. I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.

Yes, please do that! Reddit's turnaround from slow decline might have happened because they hired a full time community manager.

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

#703

Post by cmontgomeryb »

ElbertF wrote: post #464
nyellin wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial reaction was to disagree with your suggestion: Your method would train people to predict how well a comment is going to be received and to vote based on that. I disagreed, because I don't want to read comments rated by the hive mind, in order to please the hive mind. However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn…

Reddit does this pretty well, they often feature a submission with a dot instead of the number of votes. Perhaps HN could randomly put a thread at the top without showing votes.

I believe Reddit does this for the first X hours of a submissions life - to discourage bandwagons, and so that newer submissions that may otherwise be overlooked (due to having less initial upvotes) will get a chance. I agree that it's a good idea and something that may work well on HN's new page.

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

#704

Post by davi »

Delete humorous one-liners vigorously, especially ones that get lots of upvotes.

Lots of other good suggestions in this thread but I don't see this one.

I hope you can turn it around, I've gotten a lot of value from this site.

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

#705

Post by 6ren »

6ren wrote: post #490
pg wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

Hybrid: the first comment by hotness (as now), to give up-and-coming comments visibility.

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

#706

Post by jackfoxy »

Mz wrote: post #447
jackfoxy wrote: post #436

The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN, as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways to bubble up story submissions that…

Except that HN already has a commercial purpose: It serves the needs of Y Combinator in some ways. You cannot fill out an application without including your HN handle, everyone on the app has to have one (or get one if they didn't have one already), and Paul reads a lot of the comments here and often is familiar with the person to some degree via their online participation here and that influences decisions concernin…

There are all sorts of ways HN could be monitized (which is what I meant by commercialized) without at all impacting its usefulness for evaluating Y Combinator applicants. I just think it will take real investment to upgrade HN, and if it's not monetized it's hard to justify that investment.

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

#707

Post by abbasmehdi »

There are a lot of responses to this question and I haven't read all of them, so I apologize if somebody has said this already, but the answer is dead simple: HN has gotten more popular! That's it. If I must state the obvious, this translates to a lower average IQ because the larger the degree of separation from the original creators of the forum, the lower intellectual density gets.

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

#708

Post by JoshCole »

phlux wrote: post #692
bmelton wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a part of the reason nobody's receptive to that idea is because we've seen the community quality at Reddit. Without trying to insult them, I know that it is a very close-knit and strong community, but the intellectual barrier is very low. The comment quality is very low. The notion that there is anything there that can help us is likely being spurned because, right or wrong, that's not what we're strivin…

Your argument is that the ability to submit, upvote/downvote and deep-thread comments affects the community? I dont follow. I am saying that having a better system for your community to converse allows the community to thrive. You may think the intellectual barrier to entry is low, or the intellectual quality of what you read on reddit is low - and I would counter that maybe your looking at the wrong subreddits for y…

I find your post to be exceedingly confused.

First, you say that you don't recognize that behavior is influenced by things like up-votes, down-votes, and deep threading. In the next breath you argue that a better system has a positive impact on the community. I don't see how you can have one without having the other. Making a community “thrive” is changing it. If you disagree with this please explain to me why communities like thriving, but don't like not thriving. If they are the same than they shouldn't care either way. If things have changed than you agree that the changes had an affect. Also a better system being better is something that I find to be true by definition.

Next you argue for downvotes, by saying that reddit has proved itself in virtue of subreddits. I don't think this is the case. I think that subreddits are harder to get to, creating a selection-bias in which only the people who are interested in that subreddit end up contributing to it. In other words I think you can explain the success of reddit's subreddits with subtle elitist bias. This creates a huge amount of irony, since your post is actually arguing against elitism.

You also claim that some people think we need automated tools to weed out things that our beneath are interests. This is another point that is sort of funny. We not only need those tools, we have them [1]. They are built into our minds.

In the end you ask rhetorically: can you ask someone who doesn't know what your talking about to not contribute to your discussion? This backfires too. Plato said: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” Proverbs continually tells the fool he should shut up (I'm almost done, really). The idea that you can ask people who don't know what they are talking about to be quiet isn't new or immoral.

I'm probably misinterpreting you, but that irony made my brain happy and I wanted to share it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention

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

#709

Post by DanielStraight »

pg wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #8

The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.

That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it. Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your…

I think the idea of categorizing comments is good. I would cite as a somewhat-working example Wikipedia's article flags. Wikipedia has a serious problem with deletionism, but they have ways to mark articles in meaningful ways, like too long, or too short, or irrelevant, or excellent, etc. They can also mark individual contributions as "citation needed" (a flag I would really like to have on comments, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423582 as an example of a citation-needed comment getting, I feel, way too many upvotes).
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