You're working from a different definition of "good comment" than Graham is. The concern with "bad" comments isn't simply that they exist, but that they have deceptively positive scores.
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Hacker News Analysis
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#12Your plots look great; what tool(s) did you use to create them?
I used R's awesome ggplot2 package.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#13No graph of Apple in the "mentioned companies" section? I'd be very curious how they were trending.
I'd also be interested if there were any correlation between meta discussion and it's affects on trends. So I'd be curious to see ycombinator (and/or hacker news) in the "mentioned companies" section.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#14So Hacker News has probably gotten worse if you like to read every single post, but better if you only like to read the front page.
It is hard to define what a "quality" article is and not sure if I agree with his assumptions, but I personally have seen exactly this over the past year compiling my weekly Hacker Newsletter.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#15Interesting analysis. I strongly disagree that what he defines as "Quality of Posts" measures quality of posts, though.
If coming up with an objective measure of quality was feasible, the voting system could be scrapped entirely, and instead of making a site that allows users to submit links, pg could have written a web crawler.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#16Your plots look great; what tool(s) did you use to create them?
FYI (and somewhat OT), the plots produced by matplotlib[1], python's plotting library, are also quite nice looking (in comparison to, say, Matlab's.)
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#17Interesting analysis. I strongly disagree that what he defines as "Quality of Posts" measures quality of posts, though.
If coming up with an objective measure of quality was feasible, the voting system could be scrapped entirely, and instead of making a site that allows users to submit links, pg could have written a web crawler.
Sorry, I don't get your comment.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#18Interesting analysis. I strongly disagree that what he defines as "Quality of Posts" measures quality of posts, though.
Yeah, that measure was super hacky and I have no justification for it (but it was the simplest/only thing I could think of at the time). Do you have any suggestions? One thing I'm thinking of now is seeing how (# points at the xth percentile) / (# points of 10th highest rated post) changes over time. (Or maybe I should just take a closer look at how the overall distribution of points changes to get a better feel firs…
There is no way to get a handle on comment and submission quality without content analysis.
You need a list of properties that define good comments and good submissions, you need some way to quantify those properties and then you need to invest obscene amounts of work coding those properties.
All of this is hard work and full of uncertainty. Different people want HN to be different things, there can’t be one list of properties that does them all justice. Who gets to define what a good comment or a good submission is? Is it even possible to exhaustively translate someone’s understanding of a good comment or a good submission into a list of properties? Can those properties be quantified, in the best case with as little work as possible? Does the coding process scale to the amount of content that has to be analyzed?
This is a Ph.D. thesis worth of work. I wouldn’t try to do it as a hobby.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#19I've been thinking lately about running some analysis of my own, but couldn't find a data dump and didn't feel like scraping. Why has the dump been pulled?
I'm thinking of classifying entries as temporal/atemporal. Temporal are industry news, press releases, rumors and alike. Atemporal are reference materials, essays, howtos, analysis, links to libraries/frameworks/products.
Essentially, I feel that while temporal entries provide a more immediate reward and larger discussions, atemporal tend to be more technical, more interesting, have more valuable discussions, and overall are what sets HN apart of other places. I'd rather see a front page full of erlang stories than pieces about what Apple has just announced (I'm pretty sure I'll see these in many different places).
A good balance is probably ideal: a few most interesting breaking stories, and the most thought-provoking atemporal materials users have ran into lately. The perceived decline of the front page and comment quality could be attributed to a shift in this balance towards temporal stories.
As to how to classify, I'd start as marking stories with multiple duplicates in a short period of time as temporal, and the ones with duplicates spread apart over long periods as atemporal, and go from there.
Re: Hacker News Analysis
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If coming up with an objective measure of quality was feasible, the voting system could be scrapped entirely, and instead of making a site that allows users to submit links, pg could have written a web crawler.
Sorry, I don't get your comment.
I'm just pointing out that it should come as no surprise that the author of this blog post didn't come up with a good metric for judging quality. As in, if the author had come up with such a metric, he would have started a company and become fantastically wealthy applying this magical quality-quantifying algorithm, rather than writing a blog post.