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Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

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51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you know about this? I seemed to have missed the boat on this one.

There was a post on Hacker News quite a while back about it. I wish there were another option for members over 2 years too so that "classic" remains "classic".

Or perhaps a user-settable cutoff date for a customizable classic view.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#53

One thing that can help the whole community is to look at the list of stories submitted by noobs http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic. Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.

It's a stopgap at best and more likely a no-op. The fundamental problem is that the 'community' is unbounded and prone to instability by growth. This is not the case with just HN but almost any online forum, be it USENET, slashdot, reddit, etc. The initial and early populations tend to have a lot in common, are significantly self-selecting, etc, etc. This produces 'interesting' content, which in turn fuels growth which fuels further growth and the eventual dilution of the 'community' and the quality of the content. Such forums experience only growth pressure but nothing in the opposite direction, at least not until they become so boring or insipid that people go somewhere else. Naive voting schemes like in slashdot, reddit or HN don't really help.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#54

One thing I'm seeing more of lately are internet-isms in comments like "Fail" and "2. ??? 3. Profit!" It seems to dilute the quality of the comments for two reasons - first, they themselves aren't that insightful. But more scary is that like five other people typically jump in and reply with more internetisms afterwards. The comments here have historically been the best I've seen, but seem to be slipping just a touch…

Technically "2. ??? 3. Profit!" was a South Park-ism (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park) ) And I realise that this comment was perhaps what you were complaining about - but it was worth pointing it out none-the-less.

(And for the record: "1. Collect Underpants, 2. ????, 3. Profit" seems to be a more mature business model than some that are featured here on hn.)

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#55
post #50
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not tags which would turn HN in to Reddit. It's the community. If HN's community was identical to that of Reddit, HN would turn in to Reddit (minus the tags). But HN's community is not the same as Reddit, which is why the articles which are submitted and upvoted on HN generally differ from Reddit (with some overlap, of course). I don't see how not having tags helps anything or anyone. It just keeps the article s…

HN is more like a subreddit than reddit itself. Adding tags would allow the original Startup News users to sequester themselves into the article threads they enjoyed, while new people would join the community unnoticed and uninitiated. Eventually the front page would boil over with TechCrunch and Apple gossip. Tags are bad because keeping the article space flat keeps out people with only marginally similar interests.

The question is, how much are the original Startup News users doing to keep the site pure? Clearly not enough, or this particular thread would have never been started.

The article space is flat right now, but that hasn't been enough to keep the site pure either.

I think the battle for purity has already been lost. Now it's just a question of whether the site is going to be rendered useless because the number of submissions is going to be too great to slog through with a flat article space, or if it's going to be made manageable with tags.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#56
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you know about this? I seemed to have missed the boat on this one.

I searched searchyc.com for about 10 - 15 minutes to give a link to the post where pg mentioned that he created "classic" view and that classic and regular are not much different - which means growth hasn't harmed us much. Sorry I couldn't find it. (Usually I'll obsess over it until I do find - but I have to change this habit)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607285

edit: How often does Google reply with the answer when you comment that you can't find something using their site? Now that's service right there...

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#57
hnsort.com, and the greasemonkey script for sorting, really help. I sort by comments or points to find where the interest is.

But I agree that the RSS feed can get cluttered. Maybe a yahoo pipes thing could create a delayed feed that only passed items with certain characteristics.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#58
post #9

There is a lot of noise but I prefer the classic view - http://news.ycombinator.com/classic over the existing homepage. It'd be nice to have a few features like never show me techcrunch articles again but all in all I still prefer Hacker News over everything else.

For filtering, use greasemonkey with HN Toolkit script.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#59
post #42

One thing that can help the whole community is to look at the list of stories submitted by noobs http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic. Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.

cool I can save a ton of money on a used shipping container. Do these guys not realize that HN is no-follow?

They spam with such mass they probably don't even care.

Re: Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

#60

One thing I'm seeing more of lately are internet-isms in comments like "Fail" and "2. ??? 3. Profit!" It seems to dilute the quality of the comments for two reasons - first, they themselves aren't that insightful. But more scary is that like five other people typically jump in and reply with more internetisms afterwards. The comments here have historically been the best I've seen, but seem to be slipping just a touch…

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