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

Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#61

Post by d0m »

huhtenberg wrote: post #13
simonsarris wrote: post #6

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…

Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load. This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

This.

I use HN only for the front page and I occasionally upvote or downvote comments. I'd be totally willing to have one link from the /newest in a different color on the front-page and if it's good I would upvote it. The action could be a bit more explicit [Keep on front-page?]

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#62

Post by yesimahuman »

sama wrote: post #23
yesimahuman wrote: post #4

I'd be curious to hear more about how YC companies handle voting so they get their content on the front page. From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content. Totally makes sense seeing as HN is built around YC, but in that light makes it a bit disingenuous to ask the community to not solicit help from their group to promote content.

YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

Fair enough, that's good to know :)

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#63

Post by bl4hblahblat »

gjm11 wrote: post #59
bl4hblahblat wrote: post #51

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus…

I have never written a line of Go, and have only a casual acquaintance with Haskell. I'm not a Microsoft fan but spend approximately zero HN time bashing them. I would not attempt to write any sort of crypto anything in Javascript. I am not a libertarian. I am slightly interested in crypto-currency but have never owned any. I think Hayek is way overrated. My karma score is approaching 8000, and I promise it's enough…

Well congratulations on that, and I swear I'm not trying to be snide here, but you've been on HN for 6 years.

If you are a new user and you actually want to communicate with people...and hold a minority opinion...you will be downvoted out of visibility.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#64

Post by awjr »

huhtenberg wrote: post #13
simonsarris wrote: post #6

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…

Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load. This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

Would two columns be too messy? Left one is top, right one is new?

Honestly though, having 20 green new stories at the bottom of the front page would be great and would increase my interaction with the site.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#65

Post by programminggeek »

I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites.

HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.

The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter.

The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page.

I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).

Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#66

Post by DanBC »

bl4hblahblat wrote: post #51

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus…

I like Microsoft; I think Bitcoin is stupid. I'm not particularly (for HN) libertarian.

I don't get many downvotes and when I do I can usually understand why.

Perhaps people expressing minority views are just doing so in sub-optimal ways?

(Having said that I tend to agree that any threads that are MS vs Google vs Apple are death.)

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#67

Post by TeMPOraL »

vacri wrote: post #53
rickyc091 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably better to up vote from the feed. When you click on a link from the feed, you're generally going directly to the article. You hit the browser back button to get back to hackernews; chances are if the article seemed interesting, you would then hit the up vote button. When's the last time you hit the up vote button on a comment page?

Almost all my upvotes come from the comments page. If an article looks interesting, it gets opened in one tab, followed by the comments page to see what people said about it. Look at the article, then go to the comments, may as well upvote whilst there.

I do similarly except that I just start with opening comment pages in different tabs, then go through them one-by-one, opening article from the comment thread, and upvoting there if I find it interesting. Saves me on number of tabs opened at the same time, which matters for me because in Chrome, after you hit ~ two dozens of open tabs, the favicon disappears which makes them pretty much unusable.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#68

Post by jeorgun »

bl4hblahblat wrote: post #58
vacri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd…

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts. I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people. Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about. Also..."Your own biases are showin…

If you literally couldn't see your other posts, wouldn't that suggest that your other profile was hellbanned or something, not that people just stopped upvoting you?

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

bl4hblahblat wrote: post #58
vacri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own biases are showing. I am interested in none of those things, not even the bits in your edit (and in particular, think that libertarianism is damagingly naive), yet I accrue a few votes here and there. I have plenty of karma. Seriously, the downvote mechanism is overrated anyway, and is one of the most poorly implemented features of HN - if you're using access to that as a yardstick for value on the site, I'd…

I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts. I'm not saying that I want to downvote people...I'm saying that you haven't been downvoted into oblivion because you don't disagree with people. Start commenting with a contrary opinion and you'll see what I'm talking about. Also..."Your own biases are showin…

> I accrued 188 points on my last account before it just stopped, like I was invisible...so I logged in with another account and couldn't even see my other posts.

Herein lies your problem. You don't get that from disagreeing with the group or challenging the status quo; as far as I can tell, you need to have serious problems with the form, not the content of your comments to achieve that state.

Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes

#70

Post by minimaxir »

bl4hblahblat wrote: post #60
bl4hblahblat wrote: post #51

What gets me is that unless you are really interested in GO, Haskell, dislike Microsoft, think you can write a real encrypted instant messaging system in JavaScript crypto, and have a libertarian leaning you will never have enough karma/points to downvote other people. It encourages group think in the extreme. Also, at around 180 gold stars/dingles it just stops. I mean seriously...there is a vast amount of consensus…

And so now i'm being downvoted, because you know...disagreement isn't cool. How can I save this...Who wants to talk about Rust? Huh? Anybody? Bitcoin? That god damn NSA? Amirite?

Complaining about downvotes isn't cool either.
Post reply on HN