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To my fellow Hacker News contributors

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#101

Post by EwanG »

Have read the article, and read through all 97 comments that had been left here as of the time of this posting. And this comes back to something I know has been discussed at least a few times before. Essentially that many good sites started with a high Signal to Noise ratio. Then more folks found out about them, and they added more signal, but variety started to creep in, and what is signal to me may be noise to you, and vice versa. Which means that there may actually be MORE signal to noise now, but for the average user/reader there appears to be less because the signal they are interested in is diluted.

There have been a number of answers to this, and each of them can be found to have evolved essentially from UseNet News and various simple BBS and/or FidoNet BBS programs. Not a one of them is perfect (obviously or the discussion would be unnecessary).

I "personally" think the best answer is to have a site where the "main" board is run by a benevolent dictator, who also has to monitor other boards off the main board but has no similar moderation on those boards. Allows the main board to develop a personality that you can rely on, while insuring that differing views get their day in the sun, and allow for the growth of new moderators over time.

I used to run a C64 BBS and wrote and ran an Amiga BBS, and so have at least some experience to validate my opinion. I suppose if I'm serious about this being the answer I should be willing to set such a place up and see if people would actually like it. One person below mentioned a Metafilter $5 to "subscribe" to post model, but I'm not sure how that would work as a long term model - though I suspect I would prefer that to having something overrun with ads.

Anyway, there's my .02 cents. <- Actually that might be an answer worth looking into too. The postal service once looked at offering e-stamps to give you guaranteed delivery and some level of authentication per message. Perhaps if folks had to pay for each post (even nominally) that would be another option. For your consideration...

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#102

Post by dasil003 »

jrockway wrote: post #98
dasil003 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm voting you up. "Fanboy" is the most destructive meme to rational discourse ever to emerge on the Internet. In a single word we reduce any debate to YouTube-style mudslinging. The concept of "fanboy" has some limited utility in that people do clearly blind themselves to flaws in products (or ideologies!) in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and protect their own identity, but any tiny value in expressing this co…

I suggest we use the word "lemming" instead. If someone is willing to walk off a cliff to obtain a new phone, it seems like the right word to use. Also, you can press that button at the bottom of the screen and they all blow up.

instead. in-stead. Okay, if you absolutely must go ad-hominem then I suppose "sheep" or "lemming" is less vapid. But seriously this sentiment is way overused.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#103

Post by kristiandupont »

I wonder how the site (or a similar one) would work where there was a fixed number of memberships, say 5000. If the max number is reached, new people can only join when others leave, like a club. If you don't use your membership for a period of time, you are automatically unregistered. Spammers and others lowering the quality will be unregistered as well.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#104

Post by adamc »

I think people expect too much from hacker news (or any similar site). Every post isn't going to be scintillating, or every comment insightful. Some of that is the posts, but a lot of it is what we bring to reading them -- we are all different, in our desires/tolerances/history. Your "funny" might be my "trivial" or vice-versa. A repost that bores you might be news to me.

So, my answer is to mostly just skip conversations that bore/irritate me. I'm not perfect; sometimes I forget and jump in. But little of use seems to come from that. It's more effective to just skip them and look for something else interesting to do.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#106

Post by wnight »

tptacek wrote: post #47
rlvesco7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that." Just thinking out loud here in terms of potential ways to stem this although perhaps this is futile. What if HN had a checkbox for ad-hominem and/or off-topic comments? Check boxing a comment as an ad hominem would add to your "ad hominem" score (separate from karma). Likewise for off-topic. This wouldn't stop a person from posting ad hominem or off-topi…

Because we're a community of geeks, these threads always fill up with random technical countermeasures. I am dubious that any of them will work. I think showing other people's comment scores was a bug and I'm glad we fixed it†, but I don't think we need more features to address the cultural issues. I do think we'd benefit from more guidance , but 'pg is pretty hands-off on this stuff. Graham could say today "no Apple…

> Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates. But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it.

Yeah, because having a bunch of righteous do-gooders flagging topics as inappropriate isn't as much of a feature as you'd think.

I think we should all have the ability to add arbitrary meta-data to other posts and to write/tweak our own scoring system to recognize the pieces of other user's rankings we saw as useful.

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