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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#111

Post by groby_b »

Mz wrote: post #101
groby_b wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is an interesting thought.. I've never looked at it from that angle, but formality is certainly a buffer against "pecking order" fights. Then again, as much as I'm happy in a less casual setting, I wouldn't go so far as addressing fellow HN posters as "Sir" or "Ma'am" :) (But maybe I should...)

It's also interesting that in the last 6 months or so I ran across a couple of sites that take your HN karma as a predictor of your geek-worthiness. Well-intentioned, I'm sure, but it encourages gaming the system. HN karma now is not only something valuable to the HN community, but outside.

It would be very interesting to see if kuro5hin/slashdot/reddit "decline" periods correlate with wider acceptance of their karma metric.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#112

Post by doron »

Gated communities are effective means of preserving the identity of communities, they all employ some bar of entry whether racial, religious, ageist, or economical.There are many social maladies that are also unique to the gated community, the insularity often breeds all sorts of creepiness. Preservation all to often morphs to Stagnation.

Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.

I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.

The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.

When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.

When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.

It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.

More people, more heat, Entropy.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#113

Post by KirinDave »

barrkel wrote: post #95
bootload wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries: 2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ 2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ 2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ 2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ 2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663

Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.

They were a joke? I thought finally people were interested in something cool. :(

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#115

Post by bootload »

"... I think HN does a crappy job with general tech news and a so-so job with content that’s specifically relevant to startup founders and employees. These days, HN does a downright terrible job with deeply technical topics; that’s the area I hear the most complaining about on Twitter and in private. Since deep tech is HN’s weakest point, let’s go after it. ..."

The weakness of the argument is that the engineer/developer/programmer view is a subset of the interests hackers, founders and entrepreneurs. I draw a clear distinction between tech guns for hire who only want depth as opposed to those who want to solve technical problems and maybe innovate which requires both depth & breadth.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#116

Post by jackolas »

dschobel wrote: post #66

How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal. Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else. As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site…

But the interesting issue here is that those who write interesting commentary may not be good at discerning good quality. (according to whatever standard we're holding)

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#117

Post by Mz »

groby_b wrote: post #111
Mz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is an interesting thought.. I've never looked at it from that angle, but formality is certainly a buffer against "pecking order" fights. Then again, as much as I'm happy in a less casual setting, I wouldn't go so far as addressing fellow HN posters as "Sir" or "Ma'am" :) (But maybe I should...) It's also interesting that in the last 6 months or so I ran across a couple of sites that take your HN karma as a predi…

I don't know that formal culture necessarily has that much to do with using titles (though that can be a part of it). I think it just doesn't assume familiarity. Informal cultures assume a degree of familiarity which you logically can't achieve with your 80K closest friends and I think that is one of the roots of evil here, so to speak. I read a story once about a young American man who had an affair with a British woman and then ran into trouble because when he met her in public, she was offended that he behaved in a familiar fashion merely because they had slept together. Her view: "We've never been formally introduced."

That may make no sense to many people here. I can't think of a better example though right now. Formality gives people a certain degree of social space that a "small town" mentality (for lack of a better phrase) fails to provide. That space reduces friction enormously.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#118

Post by achompas »

mkr-hn wrote: post #72
jraines wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy. I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the cont…

The fact that HN hasn't been overrun by marketing zombies is why I'm not too worried about its direction. If linkbait titles are the big complaint about submissions, it's a good sign.

But it's a slippery slope, right? It's easier to worry now BEFORE marketing zomboids etc. arrive and bombard us.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#119

Post by d0m »

Maybe experienced HN (read as a mix of high karma + there since the beginning), could have a bigger impact on which articles are chosen. I honestly don't mind a "dictatorship" selection where chosen members could remove useless post / select useful one.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#120

Post by mechanical_fish »

KirinDave wrote: post #113
barrkel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.

They were a joke? I thought finally people were interested in something cool. :(

What brings a tear to my eye is that, back in those days, it was hard for me to tell at first that it was a deliberate plot. It felt quite natural to have multiple discussions of Erlang on the front page.
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