221–230 of 465 posts
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Hmm, I just pasted the 11kclub URL into my browser. The front page has no info on what this is about, but you still go ahead and ask for some personal info. I looked at the favilous front page. It looks pretty decent. Good luck.
11k is part of a social experiment to see if people will sign up to something they know nothing about just because it is exclusive. And thanks, appreciate it.
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…
It seems plausible that lazy voting is identifiable as a user-specific signal, and that lazy voting (contrary to the welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
"don't be rude or dumb in comment threads") is a big part of the reason why comments that don't fit the community culture stay so visible. May I suggest that it may also be possible to identify good comment voting (upvotes on comments that link to reliable sources to answer questions, or that say "I'm sorry" or "thank you" as part of a comment) as a user signal? It will be interesting to see what happens to comment scores over time if more overt thoughtfulness (in all senses of the word "thoughtfulness") is upvoted often and comment rudeness or stupidity are (net) downvoted as the software tweaks are implemented.
P.S. I have been puzzled by a downvote and upvote pattern I seem to be observing in this thread itself, with of course only my own score on my own comment being DIRECTLY observable to me as I revisit this thread from time to time.
and yet
the title of his criticism is he 'hates' hacker news.
My feedback: I like the sentiment, but try not to do the same thing your criticising in your op-ed post.
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 it's different from the existing "flag", or at least how I understand it: Currently, I'd only hit flag if something is deeply offensive / illegal / spam. And I think flag only exists on posts?
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…
1) Stories become popular despite negative sentiment in comments, or stated another way, some of the most popular stories on the front page of HN have little support in the comments. This indicates that the people who up-vote the stories in question are either not actually in support of the story's premise, or choose to remain silent in the discussion.
2) People are using up-votes as a way to bookmark stories, since that's the only flagging mechanism available to them.
The root of the first problem as I see it is that it is too easy too up-vote stories. This creates a low threshold for groups of organized users, i.e. friends of the poster, to get stories on the front page. Perhaps limiting the ability to up-vote stories in particular would have a positive impact here.
The second problem has an extremely simple solution: add a way for users to flag stories without up-voting them. Maybe a star icon that adds a story to their 'saved' directory.
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…
Also, you can't count on there being proportional amounts of activity among the earlier users currently. Any cross section of the earlier user group could have stopped being active on the site.
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 w…
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/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.
If you do ever get a moderation bot running (especially in something like /r/ronpaul) I would be eager to read a writeup of your experience. Improving the quality of discourse is a subject close to my heart, and I've never thought about how robots can help us act more human to each other.
Recently it seems like Hacker News is just a place people use for marketing and posting links to other blogs, it's truly more like a social bookmarking site by now than it is about the feedback and community. I still have Hacker News in my Google Reader feed but it's becoming more and more about people who find an interesting page and posting it, even if the post was from 4 years ago and was on Hacker News 10 times a…
I read HN in Google Reader as well. Do you use the regular or big RSS feed?
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The trend was already well established by the time you got here. If you go back three years, you do see a different site that is far more accepting and far less technical. Early in the HN world, when I read an article, my first thought wasn't "let's see how HN have dismantled this". For many things (especially raw information), I appreciate that cynicism. For launches and discussions around early products, it annoys…
The Internet is not a hugbox. People launching products and companies need criticism more than anything else, because if they get it now, they can fix the problem before a customer or a funding source spots it.
HN is not "the internet". I don't think HN should strive to be as terrible as most of the internet can be. If I want "the Internet" I can go to /r/all. That is a much better snapshot of what "the Internet" actually is. I don't see why it's a bad thing to want HN to be better than most parts of the Internet.
I also think your type of attitude really brings communities down. People who treat others with disrespect and insults like to defend their actions as "This is the internet. Deal with it." I've never thought it to be a particular worthwhile argument.