Thanks for sharing Paul. Very insightful comments about the challenges of running an online community!
What I've Learned from Hacker News
101–110 of 126 posts
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#102I think a lot of the growth problems might have to do with the devaluation of karma. The solution to this might actually raise the quality of comments and front page stories. When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty good score. Now…
I can't agree more about the power loss of the vote. I lost the right to upvote and for a while was disturbed by it. But then I thought "Who cares, it meaningless anymore. Not even worth petitioning for. As long as I get to hear about new ideas and whats going on with interesting tech and science, that's all that matters."
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#103A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors. These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)
Ours was that initially we couldn't give it away. The first couple merchants would only agree to use the service if we gave it to them for free and did all the work of building their stores ourselves. There was also the fact that many of our most successful merchants were selling something dubious. But I wouldn't call it a secret because we didn't know it ourselves. We had no idea why the stores selling Japanese comi…
Web 2.0 runs on dubiousness.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#104Does the submitter have a script that automatically posts new essays from paulgraham.com? You've submitted the last three in a row almost instantly. Not that I'm criticising; just curious :-).
Years ago, I figured that I could get lots of karma by creating an auto-submit script to submit stories from techcrunch and paulgraham.com. Best of all, if another auto-submit script submitted the same story a bit later, they would actually be voting up your story, so the more auto-submitters existed, the better. Sure, more competition from other scripts and users sounds like it's bad. However, I calculated that the…
I'm sure someone's created a bot by now that posts all the top stories in reoccurring patterns amongst all the social news sites. With that plus your idea I'd call it the bot of infinite karma.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#105I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. I would like to remind you here of the analysis made in the book "Freakonomics" regarding the "miraculous" reduction in crime at that time. Namely, lots of individuals that would have been in the social situation leading to crime were not born. The suspected cause being an a…
I love Freakonomics, it's a large part of the reason I'm studying economics but that chapter is a catastrophic pile of wrong. Two articles picking it to pieces http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf http://islandia.law.yale.edu/donohue/Joyce%20%282004%29.pdf )
Interesting, had no idea their point had been put to such a scrutiny. Thanks for the very interesting links.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#106I think a lot of the growth problems might have to do with the devaluation of karma. The solution to this might actually raise the quality of comments and front page stories. When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty good score. Now…
I agree, and I think that the solution is simple: limit people's ability to give out upvotes. Maybe restrict people's weekly upvotes to c * ln(karma) + d or something. (Make d small!) Or have upvotes actually cost you like a tenth of a karma point. (Dunno if karma should be turned into currency, though, since then I could imagine people trying to game the system.) This solves another problem that really bothers me: a…
I think that's a good idea. When people can give out unlimited upvotes, it's like the government printing money non-stop. Karma loses its value.
I don't know if the ability to upvote should be related to a persons Karma score. That might make one group too powerful and reduce the egalitarian nature of the site. What if everyone was just limited to 10 upvotes per day? Do you really need more than that? The more you read HN, the more carefully you will have choose what to upvote.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having length as an indicator of quality intuitively (i.e. I don't have statistically significant counter-examples) seems wrong to me. It goes directly against what hacking stands for (quick, dirty and yet elegant solutions).
tl;dr
Is anyone else finding this absolutely hilarious? PG was giving a "statistically significant counterexample", which is now being voted down because in its literal sense it is anti-HN spirit.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#108What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN. The reason HN is so addictive is because it is filled with things we think might be useful someday. We're like pack rats at a flea market. The question is, what utility do we get out of what we find here? Idea: maybe there could be a second c…
Despite all the time I have wasted here, I can tell you (with 100% confidence) that it was worth it. My co-founder is nearly 3000 miles away. Hacker News single-handedly keeps my head in the startup game. Bootstrapping would be impossible without this site to act as a virtual startup town square. The stories and comments I read here motivate me better than anything ever has. I used to start projects and forget about…
"Despite all the time I have wasted here....it was worth it"
This sentiment is very common here, but I strongly question it. I also wonder why people don't label their time here a little more honestly: as procrastination. We all justify it as "oh, but I might learn something useful for my future". And some of us might have indeed tangibly improved their lives (though I'm sceptical). But surely whatever benefits you gain can be reaped by visiting say once every 3-4 days, vs 12 times in one day? More generally, out of the people who do claim to have benefited their lives, are they able to point to a specific instance or two where HN tangibly improved their lot?
I'll be honest: I resent visiting here often. I'm a worse person for it. Every minute I (or you, for that matter) spend here, someone else is spending that minute doing great work (for some definition of 'great'). In fact I am suspicious of anyone who has a ginormous amount of comments posted frequently; I do not see it as something to be proud of, but quite the opposite.
I'm sure there are people who buck the trend (pg seems to frequently post here, yet still manages to do great work. I am convinced that he has cloned himself without telling anyone).
I realise that what I'm saying might be heresy (see 'What You Can't Say' etc) given the constant optimism among this site's visitors, but I do not mean to denigrate anyone when I say that most of us (me included of course) are timewasters.
Re: What I've Learned from Hacker News
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years ago, I figured that I could get lots of karma by creating an auto-submit script to submit stories from techcrunch and paulgraham.com. Best of all, if another auto-submit script submitted the same story a bit later, they would actually be voting up your story, so the more auto-submitters existed, the better. Sure, more competition from other scripts and users sounds like it's bad. However, I calculated that the…
I know most of the highest karma users and I'm pretty sure they're not using scripts. I also have lots of code watching voting patterns (e.g. for voting rings) and though it's common for a user to submit many stories from one site, the evidence suggests nearly all of them are doing it to drive traffic, not game karma.
> most of the highest karma users
Ones who post articles from PG.