A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post • Hacker News Board

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#161

Post by bane » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:16 PM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #153

bane wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about: - Apple in glowing terms - a LISP - how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut…

"Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments" Except this, I agree with most of your comment. Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios). Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to. It's possible that they are able to put thei…

Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios).

I do as well. I rarely pay attention to the handles on the site. There's probably less than a dozen I can remember on sight. The reason I do remember the names I recognize is because they used to consistently and always be at the top of the discussion.

Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to.

I'm certainly not saying the folks on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't deserve to be there. By and large, I think most of the folks there provide tremendous value to this community (even the ones I vigourously disagree with on a routine basis).

But I've also noticed that it seems since pg turned off the points, the names I see at the top of a discussion are more and more ones I don't recognize, and more and more ones that aren't on the leaderboard (and even if the leaderboard members aren't the topmost comment, they usually show up near the top because they provide good comments).

I like the new frothiness of HN.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#162

Post by ballooney » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:17 PM UTC

epo wrote: post #81

iand wrote: post #69

Am i missing something? If it costs karma to comment and you have no karma, how are you supposed to earn enough to start commenting again?

Well, you could acquire it with the passing of time. Say for those with a karma below 25, they get 1 point a day until they reach 25.

People (like me) often sign up initially because they have something to add on something right now (a space-flight article (my field) in my case), and rarely because they anticipate being moved enough to comment in 25 days.

This proposed mechanism would especially preclude contributions from the people whose content is being featured, which you often see ('hey, author here, thanks for the interest...' etc) who sign up just to answer questions about their blog post or the bit of software they've authored that has got to the front page.

To me this stuff has often has higher value than 80% of the comments from career commenters, just by virtue of the SNR to the discussion at hand. It would be a disservice to the community to preclude it, I think.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#163

Post by gruseom » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:29 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #136

One (major?) change I'd like to see is requiring the user to post a reason when they downvote something. This would not appear as a reply to the post itself, but rather be available for viewers in a pop-up box when they mouse-over the post. I think this would really solve the problem with rampant downvoting of things people disagree with (as opposed to downvoting low quality content, which is what it's supposed to be…

I suspect most of the reasons given would be "fdshjfdsf".

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#164

Post by crisnoble » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:30 PM UTC

WaltDaniels wrote: post #148

nkohari wrote: post #102

My Hacker News account is 1859 days old (just over 5 years). Over those 5 years, I've gone through several stages of my entrepreneurial career. HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company, and finally joining a friend's startup as C…

I feel that you are talking about an issue that is MUCH BIGGER than HN story replies. Society, as a whole has become much ruder. I attribute it to the passive-aggressive frenzy that is Social Media. All of a sudden you can call someone ANYTHING YOU WANT without fear of direct (and many times indirect) retribution. This phenomenon has saturated our daily interactions. Now, instead of a courteous phone call requesting…

Your all caps typing could be considered rude, unless you are actually meaning to shout those words.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#165

Post by zerostar07 » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

We should be able to invest on articles with our karma and get dividends when others invest. How about we add article karma options for posting to certain time windows? We could even start lending some karma, then wrap it all and bundle them as sub prime loan backed securities. Let's call it operation karmageddon

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#166

Post by jaylevitt » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:34 PM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #158

mixmax wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you. When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking about it I've realised what has changed: Me. It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeab…

Oldhead here as well. Yeah, the magic of discovering this place back then was incredible, and the discourse so intelligent. There was more of a kinship I felt with the old squad; I really cared what everybody thought and was much more engaged. I miss the old group, a very small village. There are newer posters who are just as intelligent, but the S/N ratio has definitely declined. Or maybe I've just changed.

I was thinking we could prove this with a blinded quiz: show you a post with no date or author, ask you to rate the quality, aggregate the results.

But it'd probably be too difficult to truly blind it; posts would reference startups or frameworks that didn't exist five years ago, or Obama, or other anachronistic events.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#167

Post by malandrew » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:37 PM UTC

sstrudeau wrote: post #145

larrys wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what might that "n" be that lets the last man over the bridge?

I just checked mine ... 1337 days seems like a good number :)

I'm at 730 days and I can support 1337 days, so long as I can read. I don't mind waiting just shy of two to be able to comment so long as the comment and post quality is exceptional.

TBH I'm fascinated to know how the community would differ from HN of 4 years ago, since all the older participants would be 4 years more experienced in life and hacking.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#168

Post by gruseom » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:37 PM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #75

bluedanieru wrote: post #34

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-…

It seems like there should be some sort of corollary to "endless September" - an endless parade of suggestions on how to "fix" a community and nostalgia for the past.

You've got a point. I wonder if there's a good name for the cognitive bias that is captured by the joke, "Everything has always been getting worse." I have a pet theory re why this bias is so common: having been part of something before other people joined it is valuable identity currency. It makes you feel special and better. Best of all, it can never depreciate. Some things do get worse, but the discourse around it needs to be discounted – pretty sharply, I think – for this bias.

But it's kind of fun to see an HN metathread of the sackcloth and ashes genre in which the majority of commenters are being so sanguine.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#169

Post by Alex3917 » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:38 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #92

Alex3917 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh Wikipedia is the worst. I feel like half the time I post something intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm wrong. The problem with Wikipedia is that you're not allowed to plagiarize. So if there are three reasons to believe something is true, you'll get three of them listed. But if there are 100 reas…

Heh Wikipedia is the worst. I feel like half the time I post something intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm wrong. I feel the need to point out that this is not, in fact, a problem with Wikipedia.

Maybe not entirely, but Wikipedia being wrong about lots of basic things is certainly a problem.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#170

Post by jseliger » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 4:53 PM UTC

bluedanieru wrote: post #34

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-…

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately?

Possibly. I posted some examples here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit... and here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-ha... , with the latter discussing how I try not to comment unless I have something substantive to say or ask.

Neither post is arguing that there aren't still some substantive comments on HN. There are. But I've noticed a lot of posts that aren't trolls but that don't add anything valuable. Those, in some ways, are the worst kind: not quite bad enough to ban / delete, but not good enough to add real content.