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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"?

#81

Post by politician »

breckinloggins wrote: post #63
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.

Compromise: how about showing points on comments but only after you yourself have accumulated a significant number of points?

Up-voted with a challenge: of what value is seeing comment points except stroking your own ego when your or your friends or people-you-always-agree-with comments' are voted up?

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

#82

Post by politician »

tokenadult wrote: post #13
tocomment wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there, really dumb question = me, but where would i find the best comments page?

where would i find the best comments page? From the lists that appear on the bottom of most HN pages http://news.ycombinator.com/lists to the link http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Is there an additional gate for down-voting comments? On the bestcomments page, certain comments are downvote-able while others are not. Specifically, from my account your comments cannot be downvoted. Is this intended behavior or a bug?

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

#83

Post by politician »

RageKit wrote: post #39

Great article, but i don't really understand the last paragraph about games and social media, and the correlation between usefulness and self-fulfillment. Especially the part where games = crack = bad.

This person's username is green, their comment is graying, and they are the only green name on the thread. RageKit has simply asked a question asking for clarification. Given this post is already a meta discussion, what factors influenced the downvote?

From what I see, it could be that the general nature of the comment is tangential to the tack that the general nature of all of the other comments took, that the user is new, and/or that the "games = crack = bad" phrase is atypical of sentence construction on this site.

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

#84

Post by dandelany »

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…

I'll share my own subjective observation - I feel that the overall "quality" of comments has remained high, at least in terms of writing quality and persuading arguments. That is to say, I don't often see many "dumb" comments ranked highly.

However, I have noticed lately that the highest ranked comments are almost always those which vehemently disagree with the author of the original post. I seem to see fewer comments that begin with "The author makes some great points, but he may not have considered..." or "This was a great project, the author should consider expanding it by trying..." More often, I see comments that are cynical and dismissive of the author's points. While a healthy dose of cynicism is necessary, and I love hearing both sides of the story, some of these comments definitely lean a little closer to the "mean" side of the spectrum.

I suspect that this is a subtle side-effect of not being able to see vote counts, that somehow results in fewer votes being cast by those with neutral or positive opinions, but I'm not quite sure why.

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

#85

Post by astrofinch »

joshlegs wrote: post #43

I must say, I enjoyed reading this. It seems I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks. And I suppose it's time to fess up ;) I had another account that got hellbanned recently. Because the comment guidelines were what I felt a bit ambiguous, and because I had seen other comments that I thought seemed reflective in nature that had been downvoted (perhaps because they expressed a view that is contrary to w…

Your comment was bad and you should feel bad! :P

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

#86

Post by roryokane »

sbierwagen wrote: post #73
EwanG wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?

Brand new accounts can't flag posts (~200 karma) or downvote comments. (~2000 karma) Once I hit those thresholds, the urge to grind goes away.

I still have the urge to grind karma, though I've passed the limit for downvoting. The reason is that I remember when the downvote karma threshold was raised from 250 to 500 karma, a year or two ago. I'm worried that in a year or three, PG will raise the limit again, and I'll be unable to downvote again. So karma remains an effective motivator - though I kind of resent that I don't know whether my further karma generation will ever pay off. I would feel better if PG had an official formula or schedule for the inflation of downvote thresholds, or if he said that the threshold will stay the same for the foreseeable future.

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

#87

Post by roryokane »

politician wrote: post #82
tokenadult wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where would i find the best comments page? From the lists that appear on the bottom of most HN pages http://news.ycombinator.com/lists to the link http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Is there an additional gate for down-voting comments? On the bestcomments page, certain comments are downvote-able while others are not. Specifically, from my account your comments cannot be downvoted. Is this intended behavior or a bug?

The gate is on the time of the comment's posting. Comments of more than a certain age cannot be downvoted. The age boundary is somewhere within "12 hours" to "1 day", given what I see on the bestcomments page right now.

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

#88

Post by doesitwork »

joshlegs wrote: post #43

I must say, I enjoyed reading this. It seems I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks. And I suppose it's time to fess up ;) I had another account that got hellbanned recently. Because the comment guidelines were what I felt a bit ambiguous, and because I had seen other comments that I thought seemed reflective in nature that had been downvoted (perhaps because they expressed a view that is contrary to w…

I have had 3 accounts hell banned. Each time was slightly mysterious to me, but let me relate the context and maybe someone can enlighten me. - The first ban was after I posted a comment that suggested that some venture capitalists that fund start ups may be exploiting young naive technologists. My guess was that saying anything bad about VCs or the startup culture merits a ban. - The second ban was after a post where I said that Flouride is rat poison. I understand this is controversial, but it is also an indisputable fact. Flouride is used in rat poison. I assumed that mentioning any inconvenient/controversial fact merits a ban. - The third ban was after I disagreed with someone on how the brain learns. There was nothing particularly controversial about it at all. I assumed that I had angered someone with moderation powers and was rewarded with a ban.

My conclusion is that developing a moderation system that rewards people who agree with your world view tends to be self-selecting towards that world view. Down voting or banning anyone who disagrees with you rapidly develops group think, regardless of how 'intelligent' that particular world view is. I assume that any criticism of HN or the moderation system also merits a ban, so I expect this post will not be visible for very long.

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

#89

Post by SoftwareMaven »

danwiding wrote: post #68
pg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Point of comparison, as of March 2011 Stack Overflow, which got about 2x the traffic for page hits/month, used 12 cores for the web tier and 12-24 cores for their SQL Server 2008 database(s?). Source - http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch... Does anyone know what db engine serves as backend for HN?

These are the results of different constraints. SO wants a slick, interactive interface with a lot of access to long-tail content. HN wants inexpensive and easy-to-maintain that still allows discussion of active topics that fade from view fairly quickly.

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

#90

Post by icebraining »

politician wrote: post #80
icebraining wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what bookmarks are for? Why do we need HN to recreate basic browser functionality?

Perhaps to address a limitation in browsers wherein it is not currently possible to scope bookmarks to a given site during a search for said bookmarks?

That's what folders are for. And in any case, if you bookmark the comments page, you can then search by the hn domain, at least on Firefox.
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