$5 registration fee that goes to the EFF. Might slow growth to a more manageable level -- give people more time as lurkers, so they learn the culture.
Why $5 and not $50?
MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.
Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#22Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof. There's no value in identifying and shaming people who are overenthusiastic about products. Just correct any hyperbole - and don't crow about the fact that it's hyperbole! - and move on. That's the most topical one, but "idiot", accusations of poor reading comprehension, and mocking interrogatives are all things I'd encourage downvo…
> Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof.
Seconded. I also believe, more generally, that the growing tendency to express negativity towards people (instead of ideas) is just as much of a problem as frequent offtopic threads. Luckily, this is somewhat easy to fix, because it may be easier to remind participants to keep a respectful tone than to define what actually constitutes a hacker-relevant topic.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#23$5 registration fee that goes to the EFF. Might slow growth to a more manageable level -- give people more time as lurkers, so they learn the culture.
Why $5 and not $50? MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.
And why the EFF? Can we just have it go to rtm's "buy more ram fund" ?
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#24Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do. By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community, strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective 'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit. The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the point of hn.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#25I recently submitted an article about lemonade stands. Most of the discussion was political. I was disappointed - I thought people could talk about ways to promote entrepreneurship or to teach basic concepts like added value. So, I apologise.
I try hard not to respond to any political posts. Now I can downvote I might consider downvoting those.
I avoid anything that mentions Apple, or MS, or often Linux, especially if they're in the same thread. These threads could be great, but often they're content free bickering. I upvote good information. I will consider downvoting flaming.
I haven't submitted many articles. I notice some people submit very many articles - 10 per day. I don't know if there's some way to nudge people into only subbing good articles. Maybe once they've got over twenty submissions they need an average score of X (for the subs) before they can sub any more??
I'd also welcome more power given to people with high karma scores (and maybe high average scores (although I realise there are some problems with average karma)) to have super downvotes, or downvotes for submissions, or some such.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#26Do what I do: whenever I see someone being rude, impolite, or inflammatory I point it out and ask them to behave. Like so:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972222
When you see that someone already pointed out misbehavior (but no more than say 5 such opinions), add your own concurring opinion rather than upvoting - the offender needs to see the public opinion and they no longer see the vote count.
Also when I see a comment that does not add to discussion I downvote it.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#27IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the requisite boulder of salt... 1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should…
> 2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in.
That's nice, but the problem is that those people then don't know just how bad the stuff they're ignoring has got.
Maybe they'll start to notice some churn in users; they'll notice that a favourite commenter is no longer around, or that there are many newer members who are creating odd posts. And then BAMN - HN is suddenly worthless.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#28Well we could bring the points back so that it would be possible to scan a long thread and find the good comments. The bad comments aren't gone, but they'll be easier to avoid.
Also, your point about upvoting certain comments will probably be moot if users can't see the result of their action. Without having seen the numbers I'll make a bold statement and say that overall voting per user has gone down significantly.
Many new users might not even know that the arrows are for voting since it isn't explained anywhere.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#29Actually all these problems have been solved in FIDO net about 20 years ago. There's usually a set of rules, updated list of off-topic subjects, a moderator, a set of co-moderators, public punishment, and ex-communication of repeat offenders. It worked fairly well for as long as moderators stayed on the ball.
I continue to be surprised that we have to re-learn all these things the hard way on the web.
Re: Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?
#30I would like to see more people linking to the original source article, rather than a blog about that article. (As per the guidelines.) Often the blog is silly or inflammatory or pointless.
Some method of de-duping might be useful.