A Proposal To Improve Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#91

Post by btilly » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:18 AM UTC

ljd wrote: post #88

btilly wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This proposal would give a relative penalty to people like me who get into lengthy discussions, and who reply in older threads. Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of preference. (My preference should be obvious.) Though, truth be told, I've never worried much about karma.

This is true, but it is a problem that currently exists. For orthogonality's sake, I would suggest that if most of your posts come from 1:1 conversations, post by post, then perhaps there is a better medium to communicate with that person than through a board like HN.

The people that I have those conversations with are people I only know through HN, and the discussions come out of what happened here. Those discussions would not have naturally happened in another medium.

As an example I give you this discussion. In this thread I have 2 posts, both with 1 karma right now. I do not expect them to go up much if at all. Where would you suggest that I should have gone for this conversation with you?

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#92

Post by Danieru » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:21 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #51

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuf…

> By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing.

I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5 minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the end).

Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page. They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long.

Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page, readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place among their non-frontpaged peers.

The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive enough. Meanwhile people do like longer posts but reading a full essay is barrier to upvoting.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#93

Post by ljd » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:22 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #91

ljd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but it is a problem that currently exists. For orthogonality's sake, I would suggest that if most of your posts come from 1:1 conversations, post by post, then perhaps there is a better medium to communicate with that person than through a board like HN.

The people that I have those conversations with are people I only know through HN, and the discussions come out of what happened here. Those discussions would not have naturally happened in another medium. As an example I give you this discussion. In this thread I have 2 posts, both with 1 karma right now. I do not expect them to go up much if at all. Where would you suggest that I should have gone for this conversat…

That's totally fair.

Here, have an upvote. :)

EDIT: I changed the evaluation to not make the avg karma relative to total karma but instead to the median value of average karma of all users. The downside to this is that Median(AvgKarma) would need to be calculated quite often throughout the day because I doubt pg wants to pay for the resources to run that everytime someone votes.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#94

Post by DanBC » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:30 AM UTC

There are a handful of domains that host pretty shoddy content - poor research, poor writing, link-baity titles, bias, etc. Banning those might be too extreme. But it'd be nice if there was an A list and a B list and then a A and B list.

the A list would be carefully curated set of URLs proven to be of interest to the community (but a domain can easily be removed if they start getting too many bad stories); the B list would be everything else' the A and B list would be both.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#95

Post by ericd » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:38 AM UTC

hujjio wrote: post #56

Stop the censoring for a start...

This is a good piece on why aggressive moderation is necessary to keep online communities from devolving into cesspools, even though it may attract cries of censorship:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#96

Post by Dn_Ab » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:38 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #51

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuf…

Yeah RiderOfGiraffes is cool. He is still around but was sort of hostilely driven into retirement. He goes by ColinWright these days. You're most likely to find him in math related topics.

Don't have anything else constructive to say.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#97

Post by masterzora » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:39 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #51

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuf…

Just because a solution is implemented with technology doesn't mean it can't be a people solution for a people problem. There are a number of technological changes that will target the psychology of the people, guiding them toward different behaviour. I agree that the proposals in this post don't seem to address the actual issues very well but I think it would be a mistake to completely disregard technology changes as an avenue for affecting people changes.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#98

Post by finnw » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:42 AM UTC

I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but most sites (including HN) with partially-automated moderation systems make the same assumption:

  *You only need one "karma" variable, for both posting and moderation*.

That is, users who post popular content (i.e. comments that get a lot of upvotes) and those who moderate well (i.e. votes strongly-correlated with those of the admins) are rewarded in exactly the same way, that is by increasing the value that unified "karma" variable.

IMHO this is not the best approach. For every prolific poster (who probably has decent karma already) you probably have 10 "lurkers" who have read most stories posted in the last month, know what they do (and don't) want to read, and are just as well-qualified to vote on stories and comments as those who regularly post comments (and earn karma from them.)

So what would happen if you made "posting karma" and "moderation karma" independent of each other?

(sort of a trick question, since it has been done.)

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#99

Post by Kilimanjaro » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 12:58 AM UTC

Change the front page to show 30 hottest articles plus 10 new, 10 ask, 10 show, 10 jobs and 10 startups.

Run a contest to redesign the frontpage with all these sections.

As I said earlier, adding a section with upcoming startups by batch would greatly benefit us all.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#100

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:04 AM UTC

polyfractal wrote: post #41

rauljara wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, I had no idea average karma sorted people higher/lower. But you actively try to protect your karma? After my karma hit 1000 I basically stopped caring anymore. What incentive do you have to protect your karma (serious question, I'm not sure I understand why it matters)?

[deleted]