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A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

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Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#111

Post by connortomas »

I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides.

It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world experience. To me, this matters.

I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community - for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be brought front-and-centre somehow).

Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#113

Post by matwood »

FrojoS wrote: post #66
brk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck average karma. Who even looks at it (besides the owner of the karma)? I post a relatively high volume of comments on articles that get little visibility. Sometimes I answer an Ask HN type question with what ( I thik) is a good/useful answer and don't even get an up vote from the asker (but I have gotten 'thanks!' replies). Oh well, I come here to discover new things and try and return knowledge I've contributed…

I guess some people hope, that high Karma will improve their chances when they apply to Y Combinator. Actually, I vaguely remember a post or essay from pg, which suggested that one of the reasons to create HN was to assess potentially good founders based on the content they post on HN. I'm not saying YC is actually skimming applications based on user Karma. But even if they don't, people might believe it.

Actually, I vaguely remember a post or essay from pg, which suggested that one of the reasons to create HN was to assess potentially good founders based on the content they post on HN.

Hahaha. PG should be doing the inverse. If someone is spending enough time on HN to have a really high karma then they aren't spending that time building something.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#115

Post by danielweber »

connortomas wrote: post #111

I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides. It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds…

I think there is a lot of identity associated with users. I'm relatively young, and often I will see one user identifying another user by their first name, which I don't know at all. People know each other here.

This might be bad. If so, I'd say all comments should be anonymous for 2 days. Give out a pseudo-random pronounceable handle to each user for posting on each thread. People making dick comments will still have to deal with their commenting history as posts are "unmasked" in 48 hours. (This well could cause more problems that it solves.)

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#116

Post by danielweber »

evolve2k wrote: post #28

The 'more' link regularly fails to render on my IPhone 4 leading to a further long term aversion to going there. Not sure if anyone else has had the same experience? Just saying if it's affecting many devices this Is just compressing the issue further.

In my experience the _more_ link works for about 5 to 10 minutes. If you slowly scroll down the page reading things on it, by the time you get to the bottom of the page it no longer works. You have to reload the page to get the link to work.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#117

Post by cstejerean »

zalew wrote: post #72
wisty wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, I'm happy when I see a git / fabric tutorials. I'm always looking for new tips. Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency thing…

when it comes to technical knowledge on HN, I'm happy when I see a talk f.ex. how huge companies solve tech problems, or conference talks around specific technologies, because it's knowledge very hard or sometimes even impossible to acquire on my own - no matter how hard I would try, I won't have a clue how facebook handles massive deployments or how twitter scales unless somebody from the company publishes it and th…

You don't need HN to find out how Facebook handles massive deployments either.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive...

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#118

Post by SwellJoe »

rauljara wrote: post #16
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #3

Reward 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…

I suspect the average karma preference has a negative effect on quality, as you've pointed out. There is incentive for the best commenters to only comment occasionally, when they'll get a lot of karma for it.

Digg kept piling on stuff like that, making some users more valuable than others according to the algorithms, and I think it hurt rather than helped. I'm not sure it hurts on HN, but it doesn't seem to solve the core problem, either.

I think it does come down to a social problem being tackled by technical solutions. It may be that the only way to make this problem go away is to empower moderators (of which HN has more than a few) to simply remove the most negative stuff before it has a chance to alter the tenor of a thread. Hostility breeds more hostility and it spirals ever upward, until the conversants are more frustrated than talkative.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#119

Post by comatose_kid »

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…

I appreciate your observation that the emphasis on newness can discourage deep discourse.
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