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

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51–60 of 78 posts

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

#51
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What's the number?

I'm not sure. But I have enough karma at 85. I think the number has changed over time, but I'm not sure. Maybe PG will share it with us or someone has recently hit the magic number?

You sure you don't mean comments?

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

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What's the number?

I'm not sure. But I have enough karma at 85. I think the number has changed over time, but I'm not sure. Maybe PG will share it with us or someone has recently hit the magic number?

I have 867 karma and can't downvote stories. At some point there were talks of letting the top X downvote stories but I don't think it's been done.

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

#53
post #38

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 mor…

The key to banning is to not notify people who have been banned. You just let them post stuff, but nobody sees it except the poster. Another approach is to make the site seem broken to the banned user. For example, when Arrington's sock puppets try to log in, just throw up a fail whale. Should also make for amusing commentary on Tech Crunch. "IS PG THE NEW BLAINE COOK???" etc.

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

#54
As a fellow Digg->Reddit->here refugee, I think we're the problem. Judging by the fact that you didn't defect from Reddit sooner, it can be reasoned that you enjoy a dash of offbeat humor, politics, and funny pictures with your programming (and in this case entrepreneurial) articles and news. In other words, you're like me, and the rest of the early majority.

We go from social news site to social news site, dragging down article quality with our penchant for less-than-total fact saturation and off-topic posts.

The only responsible thing is to get your hacker news here, and your funny pictures elsewhere. Refrain from contributing posts or articles and let the people that make this site great continue to make it great.

Wait, crap. Except for this post and that post.

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

#56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

The key to banning is to not notify people who have been banned. You just let them post stuff, but nobody sees it except the poster. Another approach is to make the site seem broken to the banned user. For example, when Arrington's sock puppets try to log in, just throw up a fail whale. Should also make for amusing commentary on Tech Crunch. "IS PG THE NEW BLAINE COOK???" etc.

Those techniques work to protect against bots and similar, but do little to help in the case of a real person.

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

#57
The main difference is very simple, yet effective: HN has a specific goal. It is not a place which will just flow with whatever is posted. Some things are allowed, and some things are not.

Hopefully, the choice of content will keep people interested in that kind of content, and remove those that don't. They already got reddit/digg/foobar for their stories.

Comments would take more time to moderate, if we think of users up/downvoting as a differential equation that slowly is moving towards the "intelligence of the masses". So in time, the level of comments will degrade. The way of keeping that from happening is, of course, to mercilessly kill bad comments and keep them out with overpowering ;)

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

#58
post #51
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. But I have enough karma at 85. I think the number has changed over time, but I'm not sure. Maybe PG will share it with us or someone has recently hit the magic number?

You sure you don't mean comments?

Yeah my bad, I'm talking about comments.

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

#59
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.

Traffic actually grew last month. It went down at the beginning of the summer though.

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

#60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. But I have enough karma at 85. I think the number has changed over time, but I'm not sure. Maybe PG will share it with us or someone has recently hit the magic number?

I have 867 karma and can't downvote stories. At some point there were talks of letting the top X downvote stories but I don't think it's been done.

Yeah it's calculated. I thought you were talking about comments. Or it was last time news.arc was released by PG

  (= gravity* 1.4 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1)
 
  (def frontpage-rank (s (o gravity gravity*))
    (/ (- (realscore s) 1)
       (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))
http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master/news.arc
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