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Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

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Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#51

Post by brudgers »

lucisferre wrote: post #35
tokenadult wrote: post #25

In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote, "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. "Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to kee…

Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well. I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes te…

Comment karma can provide constructive feedback to the comment's author. Often, but not always, a downvoted comment indicates that my point was not made clearly or that there were gratuitous remarks within the comment whose removal would improve the tone of the comment overall. Of course, sometimes comments are just downvoted because someone disagrees or because I intentionally was snarky.

Likewise, upvotes indicate that I have captured a portion of my audience's attention. Often this is because of some minor insight or extension of the conversation, though certainly on occasion I have been rewarded for snark.

In general, gamification is a viable system for influencing user behavior, and if only submissions were rewarded with karma, a great deal of undesirable behavior would be encouraged. The current system helps new HN'ers learn the ropes.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#52

Post by brudgers »

mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

Maybe seeing comment scores could be a reward for 10,000 karma points.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#53

Post by uiri »

lucisferre wrote: post #35
tokenadult wrote: post #25

In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote, "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. "Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to kee…

Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well. I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes te…

I think that it isn't about incentivizing intelligent thoughtful conversation but rather disincentivizing the dumb or mean comments. People dislike losing karma a lot more than they like to gain karma. What pg observes in his article on Trolls[1], written a year before this one, is that controversial ideas which are modded down tend to be stubbornly left up while the wisecracks which are modded down tend to be deleted because there is less invested in them.

[1]http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#54

Post by gurkendoktor »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

> I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too

I have seen familiar (absolutely not famous) handles from IRC on HN on two occasions. Made me happy. I can't turn this into a more rational point, though.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#55

Post by pasbesoin »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

I've seen a rather light gray pg comment -- not too long ago. Although I don't remember the context, and I don't know whether it stayed that way.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#56

Post by maayank »

3pt14159 wrote: post #46
pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.

Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#57

Post by Androsynth »

mixmax wrote: post #47
dclowd9901 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

It's a signal to noise problem. In a perfect world I would research each comment, do basic background checkes against stated facts, think through the implications of the comment, etc. and then form an unbiased opinion. I would do this with every comment thread. After I had done this I would be uniquely qualified to form an opinion on every comment, and I would be wise because I'd read and understood all the comments.…

or.... you could just read the comment and form an opinion based on the content.

The reason comment scores are bad is that it leads to leads to anchoring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring This is probably why dumb and/or mean comments get upvoted (as discussed in tokenadults top comment).

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#58

Post by tablatom »

pg wrote: post #45

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

This is great to hear. Growth without a corresponding decline in quality. I must admit, when I read the original article, I was a little skeptical it would work out well.

Are there any design choices you would particularly attribute the success to?

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#59

Post by bluestix »

pg wrote: post #49
NathanKP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the scaling effort gone? In the first post you mentioned that you were just rewriting code to remove bottlenecks. Have you had to make any more exotic and interesting changes to the code base since then to support the growth?

Robert has made a bunch of tweaks that improved performance. To be honest I don't remember what they were. We're still running on one core.

Why not put a banner ad at the bottom of the page?

At 1.5M pageviews per day you could make enough to afford a decent dedicated server so the site wouldn't be painfully slow.

You could use the extra to fund more startups.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#60

Post by lotharbot »

uiri wrote: post #53
lucisferre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well. I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes te…

I think that it isn't about incentivizing intelligent thoughtful conversation but rather disincentivizing the dumb or mean comments. People dislike losing karma a lot more than they like to gain karma. What pg observes in his article on Trolls[1], written a year before this one, is that controversial ideas which are modded down tend to be stubbornly left up while the wisecracks which are modded down tend to be delete…

I try to make it a point to downvote any dumb/mean comments I see, even if I completely agree with the sentiment. If it's particularly mean or inflammatory, I'll also flag it.

Unfortunately, sometimes people sabotage that effort by upvoting said dumb/mean comments. I'd like to see a disincentive applied to those upvotes somehow. Like, perhaps, if a comment is flagged to death, deleted by a moderator, or results in a hellbanning, everyone who upvoted it should get a karma ding and a "please don't upvote mean or dumb comments like [quote of comment]" message.

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