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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#171

Post by kaffiene »

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.…

Heh. Noob! Slashdot was cool in 96!

Just joking! I totally agree with you. Both in regards to /. but also with websites in general. In fact, the Internet in general. It started out (for me) idealistic and cool and slowly has got dumber and more mass market as normal people started using it. Ah well. We lost something, we gained something. The cool is gone, but there's a lot more of the typical stuff and the Internet is making some of the real world changes I hoped it would only because it is now so ubiquitous (like the change in the Middle East)

I think all discussion sites struggle to identify quality discussion. The whole Karma idea that /. created was very very cool and has worked reasonably well over the years. Certainly, their discourse is wildly better than digg's, for example, and I would submit that Karma is a large part of that. But the problem with Karma is that it promotes group-think and that's where /. is today. Alhough: you could say just the same about HN. Anyone who doesn't love LISP, Python & PG is automatically on the outer. Hating Java is cool, too.

Perhaps group-think is an inevitable requirement for communities to form? Perhaps without some level of shared unquestioned axioms, groups will not form in the first place - just in the way a Christian and an Atheist can struggle to have a conversation about right and wrong because their starting assumptions are just so far apart? I don't know - I'm not sure if there is an answer to this kind of thing, I think that maybe it is just human nature at work.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#172

Post by achompas »

dools wrote: post #136
achompas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Hence my next point:

"As OPs go further from tech/startups..."

I'm definitely no funding savant, either!

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#173

Post by JoshCole »

One thing worth noting is that reversion to the mean doesn't have to be a bad thing. For example todays mean level of education compared to the mean level of education a few hundred years ago is very different. A good question to ask might be, would submitting this increase the mean level of discourse on Hacker News? It is the same sort of thing as what is in the guidelines, but reworded for greater relevance.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#174

Post by Mz »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #167
JonnieCache wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an innocent observation: I was sharing an anecdote about my experiences on other internet communities. The mention of the fact that the higher-karma, "ingroup" members of HN seem more likely to communicate with each other on twitter and in private emails than the rest of the population reminded me of bad situations I had seen on other forums. I then thought how glad I was that here on HN it seems to happen on…

For all the newer people, I encourage everybody to come by the HN secret cabal IRC channel, #startups. I found that the term "secret cabal" really sounds much more exciting than the actual channel ;)I try to go by at least once a week, though. It's fun to be in more of a real-time discussion. I would also encourage people to look up folks' email and email them with questions and such. Great way to make new friends. M…

I encourage everybody to come by the HN secret cabal IRC channel, #startups.

Do you mean through here: http://www.ircnet.org/ ?

If so, either I'm doing something wrong or the Secret Cabal is not in session tonight (darnit).

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#175

Post by po »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #109
lionhearted wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

Those days are gone.

I blame karma. I know it existed back then too but I don't think people talked about it. There should be no "top users" page. Having a measuring stick drives competition and there should be no metric to civil discussion besides the rewarding feeling of discovery and helping people.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#176

Post by mkramlich »

My suggestions for tweaks to improve the site:

1. hard ban on purely political news ("Egyptian leader stepped down! OMG!")

2. hard ban on gender-specific things ("i'm female, went to bar during hacker conference, got groped, OMG!" -- yes it was hacker conference, but gosh subtract the 'during hacker conference' and you have real life, it's independent of tech, not specific to it or due to it, just a life thing with guys and gals)

3. particularly if hard bans (enforced by a set of trusted admins) on the above topics are not added, then allow submitters and admins to add/edit content tags for each post; then allow logged-in users to submit content filters so that when they see, eg., the front page, it can suppress all posts with certain tags (eg., pure-politics, gender, sports, religion, etc.)

4. optional for-small-periodic-fee premium accounts, which allow those users to exercise extra features like smarter content tagging/filtering, sorting, user following, user submission/comment filtering (so you can blacklist blowhards and pedants from what you see, even if they are not banned from the site overall)... I'd personally love to blacklist anybody that ever does a comment reply to me that is (a) rude, or (b) idiotic, or (c) overly pedantic (some is fine, we're nerds, goes with territory, and some precision is valuable, sometimes). Blacklists could be flat files, one user per line. We could share them among each other privately. I've bookmarked a few "ahole-or-idiot" users but I'd love it if I could have them automatically stripped from anything I see on HN in the future. Actually, I'd love to have this feature on all social/forum/news sites I visit.

5. fix the "type comment, hit submit, get error page saying something doesn't exist, so you have to go back, copy your text, hit Refresh, paste the text back in, hit Submit again" bug/feature. that drives me nuts. feels like impl side-effect rather than intentional UX

6. don't have the up/down arrows so close together when viewed on iPhone

7. don't allow just anyone to downvote any comment. or at least, they can't downvote it beyond 1 point, below which is penalty land. right now, any dumbass can downvote a comment of mine from 1 to 0, which then reduces my overall lifelong site karma by 1. Just because they disagreed with me. Or they're an asshole. Or they accidentally hit the downvote button (see 6). Instead, have a minimum karma requirement to issue downvotes, and/or only admins.

HN is great, despite it's imperfections. But I'd gladly pay up for premium features. HN Gold? HNGold.com (YC-W11)?

EDIT: added a few items

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#177

Post by suraj »

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…

What about using baysian filtering? We already have a lot of data on good and bad comment styles, baysian filtering could give us an indication if a comment is violating HN guidelines.

I am not so optimistic about submissions because the data we currently have is tainted by submissions we don't want. However by using the technique you have described, we could probably achieve better results.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#178

Post by nhangen »

I just want to speak up as a relative newcomer that feels I've learned enough about this place to speak my mind without being afraid of retribution and can do so with a basic understanding of what works/doesn't work here.

I really like it here, and it's my 1st stop after Gmail every day, and often more than once per day. Nothing is perfect, but as far as I'm concerned, this is as good as it gets.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#180

Post by sophacles »

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…

I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation.

The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this:

I've grown.

The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises.

When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments.

edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.

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