Shirky 2003, about habitat, 1990. Nothing new here, really. Same issues, same lines of thoughts for solutions.
A Group is it's Own Worth Enemy: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
151–160 of 193 posts
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#152While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green. PG tried that ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 ), except with orange instead of purple.
> worked to get a high karma Wow, why would anyone consider a score on any internet site so important? I certainly wouldn't "work hard" to get internet points.
[deleted]
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#153Possibly 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")
The original - Swift, 1729: A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country,
and for making them beneficial to the publick.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#154Stop 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/
I never thought about it until now, but the best IRC networks I hung out on in the 90s were ones with really good net admins who enforced the rules. Even when I was younger, I didn't belong on certain IRC networks, and I was quickly banned from them. That same rule applies to all the other communities (mostly gaming) that I was involved with.
One problem with banning users is that they're not difficult to prevent from returning. At least on IRC, you had to pay for a BNC to change your IP address because whatever your dynamic IP resolved to, the hostname was fairly easy to reliably ban.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#155Honestly, I think this is kind of much adieu about nothing. On the original thread, one commenter looked at the OP's original submission and found a lot of praise etc. Similarly, wheher I see ShowHN posts with projects that seem trivial or even frivolous to me, there are usually many well wishers offering a lot of praise.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#156While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green. PG tried that ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 ), except with orange instead of purple.
Do you know why it was discontinued?
I'd imagine the high ranking members becoming elitist and worshipped or hated by the rest of the community.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#157"there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time."
I'm of the opinion that arguments must be judged by itself, and not by the "Aristotle said" conformity method that so many problems brought to society in the past and in the present.
I'm probably one of the older people here and had like 7 different accounts or so(I keep forgetting passwords and accounts when my machines change-update).
I had a big karma on some of those accounts, but honestly I don't care the least. I have more important things in my life to do-care, and so most of the interesting people in HN. A great PhD with great things to say is going to have work to do better than collecting "karma" on Internet all day long.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#158I think a lot of new users are unaware of the HN guidelines [1]. Linking to it from the nav bar could help showing what is and isn't an acceptable way to behave.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#159No. I disagree that we need some sort of way to protect / alternatively value the old folks with valuable contributions. This is a bad idea.
At first glance it seems good, since the old & upvoted are known entities - on average, they are valuable to the community. Thus, give them something that others can aspire to, even if it's just a purple link.
I would caution that this will introduce strange, unforeseeable side-effects, not least would be that you would necessarily have to classify new users as dodgy, until such time that they have added enough data to be re-classified.
Doing that to new users might even be beneficial in the short term. But in the long run I fear that adding any frictions and subtle "you-aren't-as-valued-yet" around new users might introduce subtle behaviours and keep certain types of people away - something not easily quantifiable until it becomes too late.
I have a pet, untestable, and probably worthless theory that the tone of HN has slowly drifted toward the bitterness we see now because (a) you can't downvote links, so you have to express disagreement through the comments, thereby adding negativity to the comment thread that might have otherwise just been 'n downvote, and (b) the fact that comment scores are invisible doesn't give new adopters an idea of how strongly people agree or disagree with tone or topic in people's posts. So they don't learn by osmosis.
Both these ideas gave short-term benefit but I believe (totally unscientifically) that they slowly, invisibly, led to the tone of the site as a whole.
Be careful when changing the system, as the human part of it is difficult to manage via proxies like scoring and similar. And if we introduce a way that subtly penalises new people (or values old contributors, alternative view of the same idea) we might just change the way we attract new people - and a community needs all sorts of new people to stay alive.
Re: A Proposal To Improve Hacker News
#160This, 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…
>they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing? Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we're not throwing "technology" at the problem. But I'm glad for a selfish reason. I think adding features and modernizing the site would draw attention and users, probably the "wrong" kind.
> That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing?
Yes, and I cringe every time I see the next startup come in trying to do just that. The reality is the people putting money behind this whole movement don't see it as you and I may see it. So as long as people are making money and they continue to prey on people's cognitive biases then we will continue to see this happen.