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Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

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

#151

Post by mibbitier »

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…

Why not simply limit the size of the community? Heck charge a membership fee...

Making it invite only would have (IMHO) improved things a massive amount. Have people do a test to gain entry.

Any community that is free and open will just deteriorate over time.

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

#152

Post by georgemcbay »

jedberg wrote: post #142
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…

On one hand, it seems like having the value tied to the voter's karma would make more sense, since someone here from the beginning with little karma says very little about their contributions or judgement.

On the other hand, either of these solutions seems destined to increase the inevitable echo-chamber herd mentality groupthink that already tries to creep into any community.

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

#153

Post by MattSayar »

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…

How about weighting votes from veteran members more, and if new members consistently vote similarly to veterans, their votes are fast-tracked to being weighted the same?

I can see it bubbling up quality content without punishing promising new members.

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

#154

Post by danielweber »

carterschonwald wrote: post #137
dustingetz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe the new kids don't know any better? can we crowd-educate them as to acceptable comments? stackoverflow has used strict categorization of "reasons for flagging post" to great success in influencing how the crowd moderates. "-1, poor tone" "-1, offtopic" "-1, factually incorrect"

Yeah, the slashdot approach to mods might also be worth looking into. They do a sort of randomized statistical moderation thing that makes its less autocratic than other schemes, while still retaining the human nuance.

Extra information in the upvote might help a lot. Right now I can only say "more of this" when I click the up-arrow. But does that mean I like the comment? I like the user? I like the tone? Sometimes I agree with one of those but not the other.

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

#155

Post by antirez »

This is not something specific to hacker news IMHO. The "cool kids" are ruining the hacking culture, that is, there is an emerging cultural movement of programmers with big stress on critiques, trolling, culture of image (hipster-alike dressing), technology as fashion (always use the latest thing), drink at confs or you are a l00ser, no respect for other people's work, and so forth.

Resist to this guys, stay on HN and provide worthwhile comments and votes. They are their selves a brief fashion that will go away in some time.

Also my feeling is that while stupidity accounts for 99% of all this (as usually), there is a small part of it that is driven by interests about polarising social medias where there are many programmers so that technology X or Y looks cool and technology Z looks lame.

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

#156

Post by omaranto »

ucee054 wrote: post #138
wickedchicken wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Education sucks... This is my main gripe with HN right now -- the anti-intellectualism of the community. I recall an article submitted where the author claimed "Academic papers are shitloads of crap. Want to read something? Read some beautiful source code instead." Nearly all breakthroughs in computing sprung up from an academic context; why would you be so cavalier in dismissing it? You might actually find out wha…

I would guess that anyone who describes academic papers as not being full of "crap" or who describes source code as "beautiful" has read neither. To learn something, I read books , like textbooks. But maybe that's just me.

Textbooks are a great source for what little knowledge has been digested well enough and is popular enough to warrant a textbook. If your interests are a little more technical, you often don't have a choice but to read academic papers. On a very rough scale: to learn something you might learn at a university as an undergraduate, read a textbook, but to learn something usually only PhDs know, you need to read papers.

It's true that many papers are badly written, but (1) to emphasize: sometimes there is no other source for something, and (2) most books are pretty awful, too, you have to be selective with anything.

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

#157

Post by cjlars »

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 idea I've had to help mitigate this problem is to develop a sort of "intelligence" score, where you weigh votes from high scoring individuals over votes from low scoring individuals.

The easiest way I can think of to do this is to use a Flesch-Kincaid grade level test, which uses sentence length and word length to estimate reading level. A quick and dirty calculation for any post might look like: (character count / word count) + (word count / sentence count) = Writing Level.

The problem, of course, is that it's only a tiny subset of users that actually comment with any frequency so you can quickly kill the democratic appeal of the site, but I'm frankly less concerned that my vote is actually counted and more concerned with seeing quality content on the front page.

* wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...

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

#158

Post by usea »

ucee054 wrote: post #138
wickedchicken wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Education sucks... This is my main gripe with HN right now -- the anti-intellectualism of the community. I recall an article submitted where the author claimed "Academic papers are shitloads of crap. Want to read something? Read some beautiful source code instead." Nearly all breakthroughs in computing sprung up from an academic context; why would you be so cavalier in dismissing it? You might actually find out wha…

I would guess that anyone who describes academic papers as not being full of "crap" or who describes source code as "beautiful" has read neither. To learn something, I read books , like textbooks. But maybe that's just me.

There's also the possibility that they simply don't subscribe to the sort of attitude that makes sweeping generalizations about topics with vast depth and breadth.

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

#159

Post by danmaz74 »

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…

To (a) and (b) I would also add (c): The signal to noise ratio goes down, so it's more difficult to find and upvote the best comments. Moreover, when there already are a lot of comments - and this can happen very fast - new comments, even very good ones, have a very difficult time emerging, and I guess this creates a disincentive.

One solution to try could be to give more time "up there" to comments from commenters with a high karma (only considering the karma from comments, not that from stories, which IMHO is a completely different signal).

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