Solving The Hacker News Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#101

Post by Mz » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:30 AM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #94

Mz wrote: post #79

I'm probably one of those darned newbies who isn't a real hacker and is screwing the place up. (Sorry.) So I wasn't around in 2008 (or whenever the Glory Days were). I don't feel like this article or other discussions about the issue have really given me a good idea of what HN supposedly once was that it isn't anymore. I wish I could get such info. I think that kind of information would hold out some hope of figuring…

Part of "the glory days" was a much more interesting debate. Currently, lots of HN comments are either going for the cute/snide/sarcastic joke, or argue dogmatic points. Worse - the snide remarks get modded up. Being guilty of them myself, let me post an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202958 The discussion was about Google's two factor auth. Somebody asks for a good API, poster #2 suggests OpenID. I jo…

A couple of real quick and dirty thoughts:

A) Meatier comments/debates require a certain level of trust that the debate is about ideas and not about pecking order. That is enormously hard to achieve in most settings. It gets harder when the community grows. A smaller group is much more able to know each other and all that.

B) My best understanding is that formality is what older cultures with larger populations moved towards as a solution for such problems. I know I find some stuff at work endlessly annoying because of the disconnect between the setting and the social behaviors/assumptions. My mom is European and my dad was career military and my ex husband was career military. Europe and the American military are both more formal cultures than the American Deep South where I grew up (and live currently). I find some of the assumptions of more 'casual' cultures to be very uncouth.

I don't know how to raise the bar on formality for a place like HN but my best guess is that would help with this particular issue. I like a good, healthy debate. I rarely engage in it because most "debates" are really fights (ie they are "arguments" in the other sense of the word -- emotional, social, ugly), not intellectual discussions.

Anyway thanks for tossing me a clue. That does help me think about the issue, unlike most of what I read in these discussions.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#102

Post by psyklic » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:31 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

I wonder how different the website lifecycle is from the cycle of nightlife hotspots.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#103

Post by mechanical_fish » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #75

It's definitely not what Alex is semi-proposing but I've been running RubyFlow - http://rubyflow.com/ - for a few years now and it totally stole the MetaFilter model, just for Ruby-only stuff. No "votes" and points scoring - just interesting posts from people in the Ruby community coupled with me editing posts for format and deleting anything that's blatantly spam or offtopic. Seems to work though I have been tempted…

So long as you have the personal bandwidth, you will almost certainly be a better editor than any algorithm you can come up with.

Thanks for the link, by the way.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#104

Post by jefe78 » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit.

Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#105

Post by peterbraden » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

I think that if you stay at any online community long enough, you begin to perceive a drop in quality - even if that drop does not exist.

IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information.

On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#106

Post by rapicastillo » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #91

groby_b wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that a logical step to prevent #2 is "allow only new contributing members that have been vouched for by n old members". Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :) But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading . That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.

Do you have any examples of a site where treehousing has improved things?

Apple comes to mind, app-wise.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#107

Post by ericbrunstad » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:33 AM UTC

If you look at the classic page he references (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic), the articles are nearly identical, with slightly different ordering. That seems to suggest the problem is smaller than he indicates.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#108

Post by mkr-hn » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:36 AM UTC

rapicastillo wrote: post #106

mkr-hn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of a site where treehousing has improved things?

Apple comes to mind, app-wise.

I was thinking in terms of communities.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#109

Post by DanielBMarkham » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:39 AM UTC

lionhearted wrote: post #32

tptacek wrote: post #8

For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.

Still my favorite site on the whole internet, but yeah, things have definitely changed. Stories, yeah, they're a bit worse but that's not the main thing. I skip stories that don't appeal to me, and you can always go a few pages deep if you want more stories. It's the comment quality sliding down that's scary to me... it's becoming much more okay to engage in standard-internet-level discussion here, which is to say, m…

Case in point: here's a thread from 2 years ago where we all talked about atheism. Civilly.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236808

You couldn't get anywhere near that today. Discussing tough and interesting subjects civilly with some of the smartest people I know wasn't what brought me to hn (startups were), but it was a big factor in keeping me here. I knew if I posted some crazy half-assed startup idea that might piss people off that the community could talk about it logically and dispassionately. That allowed each of us to open up more.

Those days are gone.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#110

Post by ypirate » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 1:39 AM UTC

The points system has been gamed. There's some organized down voting for critiquing some big players (MSFT,APPL). There's clear fanboyism that gets inexplicably upvoted. It's mutated from "slightly cynical hacker" to "astro turf public relations".