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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#131

Post by yummyfajitas »

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…

The snide remarks got voted up in 2008 also. For a long time, my top rated comment (posted in 2008, 50 upvotes) was nothing but snark.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318690

(In contrast, my most valuable submission to HN ever only got 14 upvotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250027 )

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#132

Post by tianyicui »

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…

This problem applies to all communities using votes to sort user-generated contents: HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, Quora, etc.

I think something like PageRank can really help. The same need is to rank things based on a directed acyclic graph. The only difference is we have multiple kinds of vertexes: users, submissions, comments.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#133

Post by Dylanlacey »

malandrew wrote: post #46

Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost. Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product. My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, fi…

Even game mechanics have a problem.

Say your valued members have a certain mindset, ethos and style. Let's call it YC-meme. Everyone with YC-meme contributes in a manner that exemplifies YC-meme. If someone comes along and doesn't have that meme, their posts tend to not be what the memesters want. So, members use their voting powers to reduce that person's karma. Eventually they either leave, get ignored by all, or become infected with YC-meme.

Now, open up the community to everyone. At first, YC-meme is still dominant. Only 1% of people without it are able to write posts in a style similar enough to gather karma. Let's say they have RD-meme, which has about 80% overlap with YC-meme. Great.

The problem is, soon, there isn't 1% of the community with RD-meme, there's 10%. Who can (and do) re-enforce RD-meme posts, because it's what they want. People can even get lucky and simply contribute 'good' posts, long enough that they get a decent karma score, and so can re-enforce different memes.

What makes it WORSE is that what's acceptible is what's visible, so with more RD-meme posts, RD-meme posts become more likely, as the probability that they get 'punished' decreases.

End result: Community-dilution runaway.

There are a few 'cures' I can think of, but most are fairly prescriptive:

1. A concrete set of rules and behaviors that anyone can reference to moderate from. Gross. 2. A very high bar for moderation, with active participation. Given that the people most likely to have YC-meme are also likely to be busy, this might be doomed by design. 3. "Proof" required for contribution. Great way to kill off your community. 4. Invitations. Either so easy to get as to be meaningless, or so hard as to stagnate the community. 5. Close ranks to just people at/gone from YC. Sadly, that'd mean I was out. May still be the best alternative.

Maybe the community is self-aware enough to start consciously moderating better. Perhaps a post like this every so often might serve as a gentle reminder. That'd be the best outcome, but needs to be chosen by a majority of the user base. Do YOU want a stricter HN?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#135

Post by barrkel »

xentronium wrote: post #129
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.

http://news.ycombinator.com//item?id=512145

I don't know what you tried to do there, but it didn't work. Link is broken.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#136

Post by dools »

achompas wrote: post #127
dools wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical". I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the tru…

The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though. As OPs go further from tech/startups (and towards econ and policy), commenters display a poorer understanding of basic concepts. Bottom line: sure, hackers care about many problems. But that doesn't make up for the poor discussion quality surrounding many non-tech articles here.

The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though

I've seen what looks like fantastic advice and discussion on a range of non-technical topics (particularly things like venture capital/financing and laws around starting a company and that kind of thing).

Of course, not being an expert in any of that stuff I'm at a loss to make a judgement as to it's veracity ;)

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#137

Post by malandrew »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #90
malandrew wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because this has been the typical website lifecycle in the past, doesn't mean that it has to be the typical website lifecycle in the future. We increasingly have better and better tools to manage how people interact with sites and communities. Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely…

The problem is that many of those tools are affected negatively by the regression to the mean as well. An average comment, that would never be upvoted during the early elite, will be upvoted by average people during the mean. Reputation follows.

The question to be answered then is "what mechanisms of reputation and combinatorial game mechanics can prevent regression towards the mean?"

I don't have an answer to this off the top of my head, but succinctly describing the problem as you just did oftentimes can be half the battle.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#138

Post by orblivion »

JonnieCache wrote: post #28
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've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."

Big mistake mentioning future-garage, now I looked it up on Google and know what it is. Pretty soon I'll be showing up uninvited to your raves.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#139

Post by natrius »

tastybites wrote: post #78
malandrew wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent control has been a pretty effective way of preserving the identities of communities in cities. It's not perfect, but it helps. Concepts similar to rent control can and should be applied to sites trying to preserve certain characteristics.

In my experience (SF, LA) the rent control is there to prevent the gouging of yuppies, not to keep the poor people in. The idea is the city wants to keep rent just high enough to retain the rich people for the tax and spending base but low enough that the landlords to squeeze them out, which they most likely would do if given the chance. It might be different in places other than California though, like New York.

You can't squeeze out rich people by raising prices without ending up with empty units, which landlords don't want.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#140

Post by shii »

pg wrote: post #24

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we c…

There was a submission a couple of weeks ago of a site that randomly arranged previous HN submissions of a certain threshold from the past with each refresh. Was really useful and sadly neither Searchyc.com or Google is helping with finding the post.

Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?

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