Could this phenomenon be in any way attributable to nostalgia? Personally, I find any online community loses attractiveness after a certain period of time.
Solving The Hacker News Problem
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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#22Ah 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.…
This comes across as snide. Slashdot circa 2011 is largely unreadable. So is Digg, so is main Reddit. The cycle may be real, but so is the phenomenon driving it.
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#23For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
Did you forward those essays to the powers that be?
If there is one thing that causes an internet community to break down, its when a subsection of that community has too muh communication out-of-band in another medium that the rest of the members are unaware of. Especially if that other medium is more synchronous than the primary medium.
Many forums have been driven to civil war by a clique plotting on a secret IRC channel. (Note: I am not suggesting that is happening here! Just that I've seen it before.)
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#24I 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 can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#25Sounds like (s)he wants a Less Wrong for startups.
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#26Ah 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.…
This comes across as snide. Slashdot circa 2011 is largely unreadable. So is Digg, so is main Reddit. The cycle may be real, but so is the phenomenon driving it.
Sure. All sites experience regression to the mean[1].
Usually this starts happening about 12 months after I decide to become a regular. In HN's case I've come in halfway through the cycle, about 3 months ago, so apparently the magnitude of my destructive powers is increasing.
[1] and also the snide.
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#27IMO, a tag system like StackOverflow or Quora seems a good way to go.
Tags concede defeat, fragmenting one dysfunctional community into a whole spectrum of subcommunities. How will we handle the tag for "good enough for '08 Hacker News"?
If you can sideline all the people who want to bullshit about how the ipad2 is the future of personal computing or the quality of the writing at TC, you've already won.
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#28Ah 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..."
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#29As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation. As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible fo…
What's the threshold HN crossed where it started needing active moderation? Because '08 HN threads were just better than '11 threads. Is it just a number of users, past which no set of guidelines restrains pathological conversations? Why? If you can trace it back to what thing happens when you get to your 50,000th user, maybe there's some passive moderation mechanism you can identify to keep it in check.
I'm not sure it's number of users--- Kuro5hin's downhill slide roughly coincided with a net loss of users, and its heydey was probably also its most populated era.
'08 HN seemed pretty similar to me, though, though I was just a lurker. It was a mixture of good technical content, startup-scene celebrity watching, too many TechCrunch posts, a vaguely political thread every few days (sometimes with a weak "hacking" justification), and the periodic thread once every 3-4 weeks about how HN is dying / has too many political posts / is turning into reddit. Just fewer total comments and votes (by a good margin).
Some random examples: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179755 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105739 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109052 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80234 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437727
Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem
#30Or may be after a while our perception about something changes disproportionate to the actual change?
That's basically boredom--and it can happen even if you consume something good for a long time. That "good thing" doesn't change so much as your perception of it.