Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

slidetocode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 286 posts

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

#241

Post by bootload »

wensing wrote: post #104
edw519 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's more like this: 2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build m…

I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?

"... Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days? ..."

2024 days here @wensing, No.

Being here a long time doesn't confer any special status. All it really shows is curiosity and early adoption. Other than having seen a wider range of technology, topics, discussion and behaviour the one thing I've noted is the number of high ranking stories sans comments.

I'd really like to can articles limited to point threshold with no comments. No comments, no value & shouldn't get the chance to go up the story leader board.

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

#242

Post by simon »

calebmpeterson wrote: post #232
simon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it. As for the old days, I don't recall it being an issue, but that could be because I have a bad memory or that previous work environments were hyper-sensitive about posting to websites (or some combination of both) so I didn't get involved directly.

> Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it. I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments. This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist): "...indeed, at this moment c…

I agree. It's a huge loss.

As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and is now a young earth creationist, such conversations have the potential to be very interesting. Sadly, they end up with subtle (if you're lucky) or less subtle jabs about how believers are all anti-science and uneducated and just want to brainwash people, especially children. And that is generally considered to be the ultimate slam on creationists from which no recovery is expected.

I have a comp.sci degree, spent much of my teens getting excited about meta-physics and still love science, especially astronomy and am loving the Mars missions ... how's that for anti-science? :-)

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

#243

Post by fjorder »

This is actually a pretty bad idea because it would discourage people from commenting on anything but the top posts on the first page. Commenting on something interesting that's 3 pages deep would basically mean throwing away karma unless that post manages to get up-voted, which is never a sure thing. Of course, some good discussion is often what gets good material upvoted! This change, while it might improve comment quality, would drastically impair the upvoting process.

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

#244

Post by seiji »

simon wrote: post #223
elviejo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a leach for 2023 days :-)

Yep. I remember that when I saw the initial announcement (don't remember where), I grabbed my account name just incase I ever wanted to try the startup thing, trying to make sure that I could get my name rather than "some31337d00d_27".

It was on the reddit front page when pg made it public a long time ago. Well, 2027 days ago according to my created field. The only way to have an account older than 2027 days (as of today) is if you were in YC before news.yc was public.

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

#245

Post by mbrubeck »

wensing wrote: post #104
edw519 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's more like this: 2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build m…

I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic is a version of the front page sorted only by votes from accounts over one year old. Generally the ranking is not too different, at least for top items. (I know this is not the same thing you're talking about; it just reminded me of it. Also note that /classic was created at a time when there were far fewer accounts that old; perhaps a higher threshold would be more interesting now.)

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

Personally I've been here for 1472 days (3.5 years) and on the leaderboard for much of that time. I feel like the quality has gone through several up-and-down cycles, though some of that is probably because my tastes have changed too. Overall it feels much as it did several years ago.

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

#246

Post by timtadh »

pg wrote: post #224

You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of initial karma and cost to post you have in mind. I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a study of that type and showed that it would work. (I realize…

I think it would be good to do a targeted posting rate eg. 30 posts per hour[1] or something of that nature.

If last 20 min when regressed predict under 30 posts in the next hour it should cost 0 karma to post. However, for every post/hour over the target rate should cost the user some karma eg.

    karma_loss = floor(alpha*max(PREDICTED_RATE - TARGET_RATE, 0))
where alpha is a tune-able "cost" constant.

The posting page should of course warn the user of the karma loss and confirm that they really want to post.

[1] 30 posts/hour stands for whatever target rate you want

EDIT:

it occurs to me you could apply a learning algorithm to learn what alpha should be based on experience of what yields the closest posting rate to the target rate. you could also reward people for posting when it gets slow.

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

#247

Post by simon »

seiji wrote: post #244
simon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I remember that when I saw the initial announcement (don't remember where), I grabbed my account name just incase I ever wanted to try the startup thing, trying to make sure that I could get my name rather than "some31337d00d_27".

It was on the reddit front page when pg made it public a long time ago. Well, 2027 days ago according to my created field. The only way to have an account older than 2027 days (as of today) is if you were in YC before news.yc was public.

Arrgh, I'm two days off the maximum. Must have been getting slow in my old age!

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

#248

Post by sukuriant »

unreal37 wrote: post #173
danso wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm relatively new here so I readily admit to having a very limited perspective: I used reddit years before I came here, and now I use reddit for just a few specific subreddits; HN has more than enough technical and bigger-picture pieces to occupy me. Certainly, the discussion threads are consistently of the highest quality, so much that I have to fight to read the OP first rather than jumping to the comments. I also…

Can someone summarize what the "penalty for posting too frequently" is these days?

lower "average" maybe?

I don't actually know how average works, so meh.

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

#249

Post by tripzilch »

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-…

> Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless.

Besides, in the technology/coding oriented subreddits, comments aren't that bad, either.

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

#250

Post by tripzilch »

starpilot wrote: post #159
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…

> It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I think this is true of every "kids these days are less worldly" article and the oft heard "favorite music/newspaper/other media isn't as good as it used to be." The world hasn't gotten dumber, you've just gotten better taste, and better at spotting bullshit that has always been there.

I don't have a citation for this (maybe someone else can help out there), but apparently there's ancient Egyptian scriptures with people writing about the youth those days were going to be the end of society, or something like that.
Post reply on HN