Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")
A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
11–20 of 193 posts
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#12Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")
You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid controversy (as that is not my aim).
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#13I think this lays the real issue out but buries it: > The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content. HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. I'd start…
Sorry, for clarification, do you mean get rid of users who have a high submission/comment ratio, or low?
I'm guessing high, comments suggest involvement in the community.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#14I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem:
before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment)
after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank))
another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))
EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1")
This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community.
This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life.
Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#15I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National Enquirer style headlines.
There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#16Reward users for browsing "New" This is an interesting suggestion. I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, bu…
I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average karma.
The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it.
I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively.
I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#17Reward users for browsing "New" This is an interesting suggestion. I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, bu…
I always thought it would be interesting if you're 'average karma' number was rounded (floor(avgK)) to the nearest int and then applied as an upvote (or down vote) if that would change things. It is always dangerous though to embed in the system a feedback mechanism like this.
I downloaded the source once again to see how hard it would be to implement my 'directional multi-root' sort of karma system in HN [1]. Its one of my 'spare time' projects.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#18Some things have a natural life then die.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#19What about putting front page and "new" page together into a single homepage?
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#20I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and actually reading it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim.
One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.