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Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

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Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#31

Post by henning »

froo wrote: post #18
pg wrote: post #14

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

As a relative newcomer here, I sincerely hope lolcats are a bannable offense.

Eventually you will grow and you will need to start making things bannable.

What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned.

That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit.

Also, it might be desirable to extra strict during certain times when people are likely to go berzerk and act really stupid (the SA moderators call this the "banhammer" and make a sticky thread notifying users when it is in effect -- what would normally be a warning becomes a ban).

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#32

Post by jon_dahl »

gaika wrote: post #8

PG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 : "1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here. 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves. 3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments. 4. Votes on comments affect karma. 5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. Th…

I'm hopeful - but there was a time when #3 was true of Reddit, too. Now if your Reddit comment includes the word "fap", you're about guaranteed to be upmodded.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#33

Post by tokipin »

gwc wrote: post #10
davidw wrote: post #6

PG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high quality.

This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem. I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?

i wonder if performing a restart... something like what The Architect from The Matrix talks about...

i wonder if simply restarting the entire software would help a bit. in other words, deleting the entire database and starting from scratch every n years. meaning the front page would be blank, people would have to 'register' again with their karma at 1

if it takes making a new community, a restart might be a good approximation, among having other effects (eg the effect on karma whores)

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#34

Post by jon_dahl »

The most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community positive, is this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines:

Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video, picture...

The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is "Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate.

Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking site at the moment.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#35

Post by acousticiris »

I think there are a few things going on here that differentiate it from Digg/Reddit (I'll leave out Slashdot for the moment, because I think they have different concerns).

On Digg and Reddit, there is no "focus". Digg started out as a tech news site and degraded slowly until they opened up the doors to include all news, which brought what you have refered to as posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats.

On reddit, the day I stopped reading was the day I saw a post on the front page encouraging folks to not post political stories on the politics sub-site because they don't get enough attention that way. That would imply that both sites have a problem with "activists".

To me, that sufficiently explains why the front page of HN "works". What I can't figure out is why the comments on this site tend to be so civil. The HN community seems to lack the hostility that plagues virtually every other site of its kind. Is it fewer angry people? Older, or more mature audience? Maybe it's migrants from the three sites you mention who were fed up with the poor behavior exhibited there?

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#36

Post by emmett »

boredguy8 wrote: post #13

It probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. -> k5 -> reddit -> HN. At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.

This is why hacker news has a collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#37

Post by pmjordan »

PieSquared wrote: post #7
Readmore wrote: post #4

The only hope is our elitist comment trolls. Also the fact that HN has far fewer users makes it much easier to deal with the problem. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.yc...

I'm mildly pleased that HN shrank, not grew, this month. Not by a lot, but still. Hopefully that won't reverse. If the community doesn't grow, it can't turn into another digg.

Note that the statistic isn't for HN only, but also includes the rest of ycombinator.com. I suspect HN didn't shrink; instead YC got press hits in April + May after registrations and kicking off the summer cycle. Also, for that level of traffic, I'd be wary of compete.com stats. More so than usual in any case.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#38

Post by attack »

foulmouthboy wrote: post #22

I read all the answers, and I'm now convinced that there's nothing keeping this site from eventually going down that same path. Death. Taxes. Gentrification.

Yes, the majority of people here just support banning, harsher punishments, and locking out all outsiders. Those are very poor solutions!

#1 and #2 cause strong negative backlash. As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it. #3 Locks out a lot of useful expertise. For sure, HN could use a lot more knowledge about programming. So far, this site has attracted lots of people who want to learn but much less so people who already know a lot and have wide experience. We still very much need to be inviting to the latter.

Another point that very knowledgeable people are very opinionated, stubborn, and generally assholes. Linus Torvalds is the stereotypical example. This is not to excusing the behavior, but the correlation exists and we will all have to try not to get so offended and ban people like immature children.

If you try to hold onto the past forever instead of trying to improve then you will fail.

I hope this was useful.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?

#40

Post by jcl »

crazyirish wrote: post #24
tstegart wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!

lisp? you mean arc good sir. I'm not sure how effective a bayesian filter would be at classifying news stories as interesting/non-interesting though. Has anyone tried this?

Yes, it looks like pg built something to recognize good/bad stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213951

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