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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?

#721

Post by jdavid »

pg wrote: post #547
bvi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number. That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.

I tried badges based on average comment score (the infamous orange dot experiment) and everyone hated it, including me, because it divided the community into haves and have-nots.

i know many of us Use HN Plugins for chrome. For posters that I like, I follow them and their comments are displayed in a different color.

It's not quite badges, and it is a bit twitteresque but i really feel like it ads value to the site for me.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpgnh...

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

#722

Post by jdavid »

pg wrote: post #547
bvi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number. That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.

I tried badges based on average comment score (the infamous orange dot experiment) and everyone hated it, including me, because it divided the community into haves and have-nots.

i know many of us Use HN Plugins for chrome. For posters that I like, I follow them and their comments are displayed in a different color.

It's not quite badges, and it is a bit twitteresque but i really feel like it ads value to the site for me.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpgnh...

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

#723

Post by jdavid »

hi_from_cuba wrote: post #690

(a) follows from (c), and (c) is trivial to fix by anonymizing the comments before they are voted on. Way, way, waaay too much fanboyism is going on HN and selected few users get all their comments voted up regardless of the merit. Fix this and the rest will follow. PS. I'm 3000+ karma, 3+ year HN user posting from public terminal in a hotel, hence the anon account. My apologies.

on that note, i wonder if completely anonymous would be interesting. what would it be like if there was no notion of identity at all?

what if you had reputation presented per comment, but no public identity?

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

#724

Post by jwe »

nollidge wrote: post #720
waterlesscloud wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding and submitting quality stories? My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't maintain itself." So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time. 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 . And submit stories y…

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.

Long-time lurker here. I really would appreciate that as I'd rather check a couple of new stories while at the same time glancing over the current top-stories. Reducing this by one click (I know, I'm lazy) would be great!

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

#725

Post by dpk »

tptacek wrote: post #234
strlen wrote: post #104

Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to agree with general tendencies of the site. For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "…

The blub setter/getter comment really is the archetypical "dumb comment", isn't it? Nicely done. Users should live or die by their votes on that comment. If you vote up the blub comment, you should personally get the downvotes for it too. Upvotes should expose you to the karmic downside of superficial comments. Especially because the really good comments, the ones most deserving of upvotes, don't seem to get a lot of…

I see that I'm replying to a rather old thread, so apologies in advance if I'm doing it "wrong". (It doesn't appear that is specifically outlawed in the welcome page but that doesn't mean it's kosher.)

This is similar to an idea I was toying with a while back but never got around to nailing down. Upvoting or downvoting an item should result in a change on the personal account, but rather than it changing the account's "score" up or down, the system records the vote based on the "type" of item. If a series of items are categorized as "Gossip" and I vote them down, the system learns that I don't like "Gossip" items. An item could be in multiple categories ("Gossip" and "IT") and my past voting would determine whether or not I would see the item on the page (super-roughly "the item was categorized 50/50 Gossip/IT, dpk's Gossip score is -11 and IT score is 10, result is -1, don't show"). In effect, users would themselves be group-able by their votes, so if someone in your "group" posted an item, it would get an automatic bonus. If someone in your "anti-group" (someone nearly diametrically opposed to you) posted something it would get a negative bonus.

Categorization would need to be put to the community, and would be done while the item is on what is currently termed the "new" page. Once the item is categorized the various display scores (as loosely described above) will be computed and the result could be shown to the users.

One side-effect of this is that it allows users to "shun" spammers in to their own "group". They could spam all they want but nobody would see it unless they were really excited about seeing spam.

The idea has (at least) one major serious problem: It encourages group-isolation. This could be partially resolved by always showing a "best of group" block of links somewhere on the home page, which could encourage users to branch out a bit.

As I said, this idea is not fully fleshed out, hence the overuse of quotes and its nebulous, hand-wavy nature. It's a less punitive, more categorical system. It may not scale at all.

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

#726

Post by ajro »

I've just been browsing through news page and I stumbled upon this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443089

In one of the comments on reddit ascheinberg wrote:

Like every single site like this, the problem is that the public is ready to ingest content faster than content becomes available, or rather, faster than worthy news is made, so in the lack of real gripping news, things of general interest fill the gap

So maybe we should try to slow things down by limiting number of votes/submissions per person per day?

If someone could submit only one story per day maybe he would do that more carefully?

The same applies to votes - with limited number of votes available someone would consider more carefully what to spend his votes on?

And as additional benefit making things slower on HN could have positive effect on our productivity ;).

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

#727

Post by chris_j »

crasshopper wrote: post #545
pg wrote: post #150

Earlier 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.

I upvote comments if I am interested in reading them. I'm likely to be interested in reading anything that pg writes because he runs this site. The bar is set rather lower for pg than for any other user and for good reason.

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

#728

Post by Drag0nR3b0rn »

jwe wrote: post #724
nollidge wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.

Long-time lurker here. I really would appreciate that as I'd rather check a couple of new stories while at the same time glancing over the current top-stories. Reducing this by one click (I know, I'm lazy) would be great!

If you're using Chrome (or any other Chromium based browser) - you can try this extension - http://bit.ly/dTI5Oq - it displays new & top side by side.

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

#729

Post by dpkendal »

Bayesian filtering for comments based on downvotes, with failing comments requiring moderation by a human. My guess is that most mean/dumb/ad-hominem comments use the same words/phrases as other mean/dumb/ad-hominem comments.

To prevent moderation becoming a bane on non-spamming users, the threshold could be set to .05 or .10. (or .95/.90, depending on which way you train the filter.)

It worked for email when spam was a massive problem; perhaps it can work for comments while they're still only s small problem.

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