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A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

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Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#131

Post by larrys »

brk wrote: post #52
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…

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…

"don't even get an up vote from the asker"

I'm actually amazed at the amount of time that happens actually. I've had the same experience. And I tend to upvote people who respond to my comments as long as they don't trash what I've said.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#132

Post by woah »

comatose_kid wrote: post #125

There is a tendency to upvote comments you agree with, and downvote comments you disagree with. This has two ill effects: 1) Witty and popular viewpoints rise to the top, creating an atmosphere of superficial groupthink 2) People with unpopular (but insightful!) viewpoints may be discouraged from posting them. Given this, would the level of comments improve with the following change? Replace the up/down vote buttons…

Do you think that the label would change people's behavior in the long term, or would they end up just thinking of it as an upvote?

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#133

Post by petercooper »

duaneb wrote: post #63
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…

Why is karma tracked at all? I know that it's used to unlock features of the site, but that doesn't need to be visible. The point of voting is for ranking comments and stories (which is great!), but it seems to have negative effects when public.

I disagree. I put a lot of effort into finding good stories and posting more useful comments when the /leaders page was a big deal, solely because I wanted to reach the top half of the page.

Not everyone is motivated by point scoring but some people are, and that's not always a bad or selfish thing.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#134

Post by ericdykstra »

polshaw wrote: post #55
zalew wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about. and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many mo…

And that every blog post must be followed by 'Why blog post A is wrong' and then 'why blog post A and B are both wrong'.

I'm surprised there isn't 3 "Can't design? Learn programming." posts on the first page right now.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#135

Post by SoftwareMaven »

georgemcbay wrote: post #110

"It would be incredibly shocking to see a vitriolic HN comment coming from community leaders like tptacek" wat

While I agree that tptacek can be blunt to the point of cruelty, his arguments are well reasoned. I've also never seen him belittle the efforts of anybody (though I have seen him torch week reasoning). Even if I've disagreed and silently wished he would walk away from a thread, his contributions to HN are worse the bluntness.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#136

Post by SoftwareMaven »

gcv wrote: post #47

How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the submissions. Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would be a bargain.

I would not blink twice at this. Few better ways to weed out the trolls. It would be interesting to devise a way to utilize money and karma in a way that basically says, "If you are provably improving the community significantly, this costs you nothing; but if you are average or, worse, a drag, you will pay."

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#137

Post by ckcheng »

Danieru wrote: post #92
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…

Perhaps votes should be weighted by the length of the submitted post. So, e.g., votes on short submissions are worth less than votes on full essays. Length of the post can be gamed, but I guess when that happens some form of information theoretic measure can be used as part of the weighting.

I don't suppose this is already being done, is it?

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#138

Post by erichocean »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #90
graue wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to call any of the post's suggestions purely "technical solutions". They all involve changing the user interface and that can make a dramatic difference in how an online community functions. (In contrast, pg's idea to assign different weights to comment votes would be invisible, leaving the site UI as is. That is a purely technical solution.)

I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution, especially in contrast to such a low-tech thing as a community manager. I didn't mean to imply that technical solutions wouldn't make a difference, even dramatic ones, just that they could not completely take the place of some manual effort.

> I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution

Because by "user interface", we mean "human interface" or "people interface". Such changes are human-/people-oriented, pretty much by definition.

pg's "solution" is purely technical, since the human interface wouldn't change at all.

Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

#140

Post by franzus »

jhuckestein wrote: post #7

I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone will not be enough though. Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?

> I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone.

Why should we set apart veteran users? Only because they are longer here doesn't mean they have a more important opinion on a certain topic.

Setting them more apart is like having village elders. Even if they talk about something they have no idea of they are still right because they are so old?

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