181–190 of 284 posts
EDIT: Oh yeah. 1 week comment lockout for negative karma, with a grace period for newbies to learn how to comment.
Quality of HN Comments Over Time
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N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F
'09 '10 '11
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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).
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 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…
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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…
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237127
Admittedly, it wasn't voted up, but there was some agreement with it. You're looking back wistfully at a point where another user thought HN had fallen off precipitously.
I don't see a significant difference between HN now versus about 3 years ago (when I first started lurking), and I believe the community could and (on most days) would have the very discussion you've linked. There are cycles where many of the submissions aren't interesting to me. I usually chalk those up to slow news days. And there have been situations where I've been appalled and infuriated by (what I perceived as) the poor quality of articles/comments that the community was voting up. Some of that is the community offending my own biases. Some of that is just bad days. You can't discern the climate by just looking at today's weather.
The other cycle I've noticed is these efforts at self-policing and reflection. I'm almost annoyed by them because I don't see HN as getting worse. But I'll allow that others are more sensitive to HN's quality. Perhaps these reflective posts are what keep HN's quality high enough for my tastes. Or maybe, as I suspect, they are more about the tastes and perceptions of the long-time users changing. It's more than a little reminiscent of the "golden age" thinking of older generations, where the past was simpler and more innocent because they were younger and insulated from the time's complexity and injustice.
(Sorry for rambling there.)
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…
The problem with using karma is that it is affected by the regression to the mean. As more "average" people come in, more "average" people will give them karma. Solve that problem, and you might have a solution to the whole problem (I, for one, am not smart enough for that ;).
But then people may have not like having their up-votes be so transparent..
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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.
The frontpage (depending on how you set it up) could look like Reddit's, based on the majority of users, but to logged-in users it'd be more refined to their tastes. Perhaps you could look at the site from others' perspectives.
Defining the model, computing likenesses and finding the appropriate material could be quite resource intensive if you didn't think long and hard about the implementation.
(You'd might also want to avoid up and down arrows, because "like" and "dislike" quickly supplant "good comment" and "bad comment".)
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…
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
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What was the point of this comment? (I'm asking seriously; I want to know what it is you're specifically trying to communicate here).
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…