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Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

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Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#141

Post by jack-r-abbit »

kls wrote: post #112
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And maybe it is a bad idea. ^This. Sometimes people feel very passionate about something and they get tunnel vision. They invest hours, weeks, years on something and to them it is going to be the next big thing that will get the girl, kill the baddies... and save the entire planet[1]. But guess what? Sometimes... sometimes ... it really is just shit. Sorry to tell you this but your idea sucks... or the execution su…

If all you want to hear is how awesome it is, then go show it to your mum. I'm sure she'll tell you how special you are and that you can do no wrong. Your account was created a little short of a year ago. We are talking about how the newer crop is rude and sarcastic and how that has ruined the quality of the old HN and then you post this. There is no call for it, you could have easily worded your post to say "hey eve…

Dearest Sir or Madam, thank you for providing me with this valuable feedback. I value your opinion as a fellow HN member and Human (if I may make that assumption). However, it is with deep regret that I inform you that the very first word of your comment contains a typo. Sincerely, Jack.R.Abbit

tl;dr: *Your

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#142

Post by jedberg »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members.

To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into the hands of the older users. However, HN has a different philosophy and it might make sense here.

To say it one more time, reddit doesn't do this and never did.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#143

Post by Zak »

trafficlight wrote: post #132
Zak wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is I've actually been working on that problem with a bot that assists in moderating a subreddit using a text classifier. It's tricky, and needs more work, but it is not impossible.

Out of curiosity, what subreddit is it?

/r/ronpaul

As you might expect, a subreddit about a politician with (in)famously devoted followers attracts its share of strife. It can be difficult to distinguish legitimate arguments from flamebait, and there's no shortage of people eager to take any bait offered. I should note that I'm not actively running the moderation bot at the moment.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#145

Post by gruturo »

bdunn wrote: post #121
pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Considering it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is, I'm assuming you'll figure out whether a comment is good/bad based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and penalize those who voted against the grain. I get this, but wouldn't this lead to making HN more conformist than it sometimes already is? "Either you agree with the majority of us about X, or..."

I'm sure that the author of "A plan for spam" (introducing the idea of bayesian filtering to recognize spam) can find a way to classify nasty comments.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#146

Post by sw007 »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Thanks for your response, I appreciate you looking into it. As I say I'm a huge HN fan but with the growth of the community there has been a sharp rise in people seeking to make a name for themselves and seeking to criticse rather than critique constructively.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#147

Post by adrianmoses »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #111
ChuckMcM wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point by point: Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored ) You cannot tell if they were read or not. Exhorting users to use their 'mod points' is a challenge (yes its a slashdot reference). The community is larger and only the opinionated seem to vote. Stardom: No matter what they post some ""famous"" people around here get their post on the front page. By courtesy I won't…

You hit the nail on the head about what bothers me about HN, after 4 years of using it: "Its a place for Y-combinator folks to share links they are interested in." news.YC is biased and will always be biased towards YC-oriented stories, which means it will never be as good as it could be. The status quo doesn't mean that news.YC isn't any good - it's just suspect and you have to filter everything through that lens -…

News will always be biased, my friend. For as long as it is human generated.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#148

Post by georgemcbay »

I've only been here for a couple of years and while I recognize that online communities always basically go downhill as more people are added, I suspect there is another issue at play: startup fatigue.

Everyone and his mother's brother is launching a "like X but with Y" startup now. Unless yours is something really special right out of the gate, it just gets lost in the noise and is easy for the non-trolls to ignore, resulting in a situation where the only feedback is not helpful.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#149

Post by grey-area »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I think the cause is simply growth.

Absolutely, the more the original community is diluted, the more anonymous people feel, and the less restricted they are by perceived norms (as there are none). You can see this in extreme form on some forums like Kuroshin (remember that?) which have been abandoned to the trolls and are now overrun.

The problem with most systems to control quality is defining what is good, and what is not good. That's not a simple problem and I'm not convinced you'd ever be able to get a crowd to decide on it satisfactorily - there's a reason that mass-entertainment panders to the lowest common denominator, and a crowd's votes are likely to trend the same way and any automated system is subject to gaming and the ignorance of crowds as soon as you let a lot of people have input, however small. Another solution used by sites like reddit or stackoverflow is to segment the communities into small enough groups to be self-policing.

Another approach I wondered about recently was along the lines of 'A plan for Spam' - it'd be interesting to use the massive comment base of HN to build up some sort of corpus of good and bad comments and apply Bayesian filtering to comments. You could use this to:

Set an initial point score for comments based on their content

Weight comment votes from users who consistently scored highly

You would have to seed the corpus of course, and let it learn from trusted users' votes, but otherwise this sort of system would in theory continue to work as long as there were enough good comments being posted.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#150

Post by kafkaesque »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I'd like to make a somewhat unrelated observation as a new user and someone who is new to programming.

I've noticed a submission might get a huge amount of upvotes yet the highest voted comment goes against the article/post submitted.

I understand there are a few things that could be going on: you can learn from bad articles/posts; those who like the article/post submitted find it unfair to downvote just because they don't agree on a contentious issue; or it becomes a what side can out-vote the other side (the one against vs. the one in favour of the submission).

Is there a commonly held view on why this happens? Sometimes I click upvote to save an article I've not read yet, not necessarily because it is a great or good article. However, I also sometimes click upvote because there is a comment inside it that I find very enlightening. Would it help at all to be able to save comments like we 'save' submitted articles? My apologies if this is too unrelated and meant to go somewhere else (email). Please let me know if this is the case. Thank you!

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