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Solving The Hacker News Problem

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#231

Post by astrange »

redthrowaway wrote: post #71
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.…

Interestingly, this isn't a problem related to any particular category of site. Hell, look at 4chan: bitching about newfags and how /b/ isn't good anymore, how /b/ was never good, different factions with different ideas on how to fix the problem (or what the problem is, or if there even is one), spinoff sites where the early adopters migrate to... This isn't an HN problem, it's an Internet problem. pg could probably…

SA has internal problems too. There's a constant slow cycle where the individual topic forums become boring and straightlaced because the users get proud of how mature they are, so they start new subforums where people are allowed to make "bad" but interesting posts as long as they pretend to be doing it ironically. Then everyone moves into those and it collapses, because they really did become bad posts.

Sometimes they move offsite instead, usually because the site admins didn't actually like the topic enough to make more forums for them, or because the admins banned all the users because they had formed secret IRC cabals conspiring against them.

The last stage is that the admins change the forum CSS so it's unreadable. I haven't figured out that part yet.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#232

Post by noahc »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #222
moultano wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar effect: The average age on the internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. Think about what effect that has on the density of quality user generated content.

Umm, what? In the limit of everyone going online the average age of internet users becomes the average age of the population at large. Perhaps younger internet users would be more active, especially on social media sites, but that's a different matter. Current estimates put the average age on the internet at about 37.

His point is that while you used to love some content (teen angst poems, political ramblings by 17 year olds, etc) as you've grown older, you're probably smarter and more mature. The quality of teen angst poem hasn't necessarily declined, but your view of teen angst poems has changed and you view them as worse because you're smarter and more mature.

I think this is a very plausible explanation, we are all at different points in the learning process and can only enjoy certain material. All but the most trivial programming articles are above my head right now, and so while I might enjoy them a lot; the HN community would say they are fluff pieces.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#233

Post by adrianwaj »

I agree with Alex, I think the success of HN has led to an overflow of people dissatisfied with HN who have made HN a success in the first place (and some with YC itself.) I posted two ideas that could be of interest to such people here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253752

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#234

Post by wazoox »

gjm11 wrote: post #224
wazoox wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, actually it's rent control that gives way to that. Landlords don't rent at a loss, and prefer keeping their apartments empty, resulting in shitty communities, then squatters, etc.

Both mechanisms seem somewhat plausible. Either of you got any evidence about how often each actually happens?

From the Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control ):

Most economists believe that a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing available.[41][42] This view is based on analysis of empirical evidence as well as the understanding generated by theoretical models.[42] Economists from differing sides of the political spectrum, such as Paul Krugman[43] and Thomas Sowell,[44] have criticized rent regulation as poor economics which, despite its good intentions, leads to the creation of less housing, raises prices, and increases urban blight.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#235

Post by astrange »

jefe78 wrote: post #104

I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit. Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.

Please cite examples. Your post is practically an example of karma-whoring without them - anyone can make this claim.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#236

Post by DanielBMarkham »

spoondan wrote: post #186
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That thread contains this comment decrying the state of HN: 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…

You're looking back wistfully at a point where another user thought HN had fallen off precipitously.

Yes, I think that's what made it a good example.

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.

Yes, it's almost an inside joke. One of the "classic" HN stories is the meta story where we all lament the decaying state of HN. The "naval gazing" stories. You learn either to ignore them or vent (politely) After watching them for a while, I think they serve to help release a lot of frustration people have.

I would note that many of the folks early on who said HN was fine are now also saying there are problems.

To me, HN's core problem was the problem you always have when speaking to more than five people: trying to anticipate reactions. You end up trying to cover every possible response, and it kills the tone. One of the reasons my comments run on so long is that I have to cover every obvious way they could be misunderstood. You're stuck either not replying to anybody, writing long comments, or getting in endless debates. All of that is distasteful to me.

One of the hard lessons I had to learn blogging was not to tease people. I used to put pictures of girls in bikinis up or joke around about making money tricking people online -- to me I was just playing. I live by my reputation: being an internet porn mogul is not on my list of future plans. But there were a heckuva lot of folks who didn't understand my posts, who thought that made me some kind of evil person. It was really sad to have to give up the playful part of my personality simply to get along with people because of the many ways things can be misunderstood. I hate that.

But the real problem is that everybody's personality will piss somebody off somewhere. I know I probably rub thousands of people the wrong way just because I'm the way I am. Others do the same. So then I end up commenting something like "Looks like it is raining outside" and I get 3 or 4 downvotes. Sure, the upvotes outweigh them, but it's just silly nonsense. Vengeance voting.

Hey now I've rambled too, so we're even :)

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#237

Post by eftpotrm »

malandrew wrote: post #137
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 core issue here (IMHO) can be summed up as:

* We all (and I'm aware I'm a pretty young account myself) vote on stories and comments to rank their quality

* Newer users vote less in line with the historic ethos because they're less aware of it

* All our votes have equal power (the downvote filter here is a crude effort to suppress that but isn't powerful enough to be fully effective)

* Network effect means a successful site's growth will be closer to exponential than linear

* With exponential growth the new who are unaware of the community standards are quickly able to overpower the existing who are aware

Hence almost inevitable degradation in quality which people here are complaining about and which I can partially see myself.

Two ways to partially address this spring to mind:

* Express vote power as a function of reputation - an upgrade to the downvote system. This has the problem that it provides a direct incentive to align with groupthink and post the easy but commonly held stories and threads so as to attract repuation and so increase one's voting power and.... It also, I think, requires floating point reputation and scoring, and so increases computational load.

* Display voting based on a similarity function - 'users who liked this also liked....'. This permits cohorts of users to work en masse without prior coordination to lower the ranking of content they find less interesting / valuable and so get what they want more easily. This means though that it increases fragmentation and reinforces groupthink again by design, which is clearly not ideal. It's also again significantly more computationally expensive.

TL;DR: Computation can be thrown at partial improvements but they're expensive to operate, open to gaming and likely to reinforce groupthink. I'm not sure it's socially or technically possible to keep the noisy brats out without severely damaging what attracted the Grand Old Users in the first place. Welcome to social groups...

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#238

Post by gyardley »

groby_b wrote: post #156
mkr-hn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be interesting to see how that model holds up to another 2-3 years. The few invite-based communities I've been a part of started to degrade as the social graph grew out and started to pick up the occasional undesirable. It was harder to get rid of them because they knew someone who knew someone, and trying to push them out had a network effect. It might be obvious to someone removed by 3+ levels that a bad elem…

I am seriously considering pruning branches, not just leaves of the social graph to keep communities healthy. I.e. if you invited a bunch of bad apples, you will be pruned too. I have no idea if it would work, but it's pretty obvious that open social graphs beyond a certain threshold are not conducive to high-level discussions.

This is how many private bitorrent sites work, or at least claim to work. You are responsible for your invite tree.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#239

Post by [deleted] »

jefe78 wrote: post #104

I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit. Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.

[deleted]

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#240

Post by allwein »

eps wrote: post #197
groby_b wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that a logical step to prevent #2 is "allow only new contributing members that have been vouched for by n old members". Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :) But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading . That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.

There is a story making rounds about hiring policies of Saint-Petersburg Mint (back in Royal Russia times). Every new hire not only needed three recommendations from current employees, but that should the new person ever get fired, those who recommended him would be let go as well. Brutal, but brilliant... even if it is not necessary true :)

I assume, of course, that this process wasn't fully recursive, lest the entire mint be fired for one unfortunate hire.
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