Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News.. • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#161

Post by guga31bb » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

kafkaesque wrote: post #150

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I'd like to make a somewhat unrelated observation as a new user and someone who is new to programming. I've noticed a submission might get a huge amount of upvotes yet the highest voted comment goes against the article/post submitted. I understand there are a few things that could be going on: you can learn from bad articles/posts; those who like the article/post submitted find it unfair to downvote just because they…

This happens quite frequently on reddit as well. I'd imagine it's due to the fact that the set of people who vote on a story are different than the set who vote on comments. For example, people could find a title appealing and upvote without actually reading the article or any of the comments. At the same time, the people who take the time to read the article (and corresponding comments) vote up the comments criticising the article. Since it takes relatively more time to read and understand an article, the knee-jerk reaction voters cause the story to be highly rated even though the top comment is critical.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#162

Post by hnriot » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Sometimes saying an idea is pointless is positive feedback, there are a lot of people here that 'launch a startup' which basically means some half-assed website that does something utterly pointless and then expect the community to be like some kind of benevolent uncle and pat them on the back and say what an awesome idea and execution. Many many ideas really are pointless and negative criticism is very much a part of being an adult. This isn't grade school where it's all about self esteem boosting.

The OP sounds like he should find some other support group, this is a community of smart people that will quite happily - and quite rightly - rip any pointless idea apart.

If you're going to editorialize and discount any comments/votes you consider not aligned with boosting anyone's self esteem, or what you consider negative you will create an artificial community - one that is the website equivalent of the old boys network, where the old timers consider themselves superior to the newcomers. Negative comments can be as useful as all the back patting attaboys.

If you really want to do this, the simplest solution is one I am sure you're aware of. Pick a few dozen people you 'like' (their voting habits) to train a Bayesian classifier, then you can weight those those that don't fall in-line with the way you'd like to see you community behave.

Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments - possibly even learn from the? Do we really need to protected from snarky comments?

This reminds me of a comment thread I saw earlier about people getting bent out of shape by cell phone usage in restaurants! I find lots of things are annoying, loud trucks/buses, cyclists that ignore road signs, rude people etc etc, but I am not going to complain and try to stop buses or give discounts to people who drive to discourage cycling. People need to start learning to cope with the real world and not expecting 'the system' to protect us from ourselves. It's embarrassing to be part of a community that needs voting bias that only encourages positive comments.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#163

Post by danielweber » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

nonrecursive wrote: post #65

victork2 wrote: post #41

Hi Steve, I don't know if you are going to read this, but I'm going to write it for the rest of the audience too. I think the trend of dismissing critics and commenting along the lines of "sour grapes" or "haters" very disturbing. Yes I go against your commentary. The great thing about internet and communities based on pseudonyms is that you get the first reaction that people have. Very few will take a few minutes to…

With all due respect, I think you missed the point of this post. The OP is not dismissing critics with claims of "sour grapes" and "hating". He is saying that the community is no longer a "safe place" where he feels OK to share work in its early stages. In other words, he was not saying that negative criticism should be dismissed. He was saying that there is too much negativity for him to find the site enjoyable and…

Maybe we need a new headline. Instead of "Show HN" it's "Get Constructive Criticism from HN," and it's intended for products in the early stage.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#164

Post by pitdesi » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Agreed. Glad you're tackling this. While you're at it, can you un hellban me? I can't figure out why I've been banned.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#165

Post by swift107 » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #163

nonrecursive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, I think you missed the point of this post. The OP is not dismissing critics with claims of "sour grapes" and "hating". He is saying that the community is no longer a "safe place" where he feels OK to share work in its early stages. In other words, he was not saying that negative criticism should be dismissed. He was saying that there is too much negativity for him to find the site enjoyable and…

Maybe we need a new headline. Instead of "Show HN" it's "Get Constructive Criticism from HN," and it's intended for products in the early stage.

that would be awesome. maybe a hotornot for hackernews

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#166

Post by hnriot » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:10 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #126

bdunn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is, I'm assuming you'll figure out whether a comment is good/bad based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and penalize those who voted against the grain. I get this, but wouldn't this lead to making HN more conformist than it sometimes already is? "Either you agree with the majority of us about X, or..."

it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is I've actually been working on that problem with a bot that assists in moderating a subreddit using a text classifier. It's tricky, and needs more work, but it is not impossible.

it's not that hard. Those that work with classifiers, this kind of thing is pretty easy. Identifying sarcasm and irony are hard, but 'nasty comments' can be identified pretty simply using the well known text classifier algorithms. You find the training data and use it to train something like an SVM.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#167

Post by ktrgardiner » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:11 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #152

jedberg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members. To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into…

On one hand, it seems like having the value tied to the voter's karma would make more sense, since someone here from the beginning with little karma says very little about their contributions or judgement. On the other hand, either of these solutions seems destined to increase the inevitable echo-chamber herd mentality groupthink that already tries to creep into any community.

But that would only work to a certain extent. All you would need is one lucky submission (think Steve Jobs' passing) to get around this.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#168

Post by alpine » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:11 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

Why don't you charge eg 10 cents per comment?

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#169

Post by adgar » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:11 PM UTC

ewillbefull wrote: post #127

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

> So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. Why don't you automate this process? All of the people you upvote have the most credibility, the posts they upvote have a little less, and people who upvote those posts gain a little credibility too, and so on. Tuned right, voting itself becomes a function of whatever the base of t…

If the client allowed us to pick someone other than pg as the root, then people could comment however they like and more easily view the comments they value.

Given HN's current latency, though, you'd need a few orders of magnitude more resources.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#170

Post by mc32 » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 6:13 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #149

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I think the cause is simply growth. Absolutely, the more the original community is diluted, the more anonymous people feel, and the less restricted they are by perceived norms (as there are none). You can see this in extreme form on some forums like Kuroshin (remember that?) which have been abandoned to the trolls and are now overrun. The problem with most systems to control quality is defining what is good, and what…

I think those a great ideas. One question I would have is how would one prevent people from karma burning? Could enough poor comments form a high-karma person make them forfeit their karma/gravitas --thus highly discourage such behavior?