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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

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Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#251

Post by mncharity »

strokirk wrote: post #241
mncharity wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

I wonder how the defaults would be chosen on such a platform - especially for visitors that have no profile.

Perhaps default to status quo? So a manual moderator filter, and vote ordering?

Then there's a customization problem. "Following this blog post, I installed the hn-isnt-reddit style, added the extended-debate-is-wonderful plugin policy, and configured them to ... ".

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#252

Post by nsgi »

harryf wrote: post #43
kstenerud wrote: post #33

All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out. People come to these places for various reasons: - To debate - To learn - To engage intellectually with other people - To be heard/validated - To gain social standing The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that af…

> the initial population has been crowded out I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming. One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more" My gut feeli…

> One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"

So? With the number of people who have access to development tools it's hard to build something that doesn't already exist. I think it's a shame that when someone shares something the first reaction is to shoot them down by saying it already exists, but it's helpful to give the OP and others an idea of what's already out there

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#253

Post by mncharity »

bondarchuk wrote: post #236
muttled wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps something like the Nest thermostat approach might be best: have something that learns your preferences based on time, day of the week, and other factors. Maybe it attempts to see what kind of mood you're in?

No, please, no. It will end up like youtube: spend one evening watching chess videos, and suddenly all your recommendations are chess videos. And afterwards on a meta level there is anxiety with everything you click on and how it might influence your filters.

Adding a feature to a system, like learning, may require additional user control to preserve empowerment. What if you had transparency and control over the interest vectors/graphs used, and management of the training set? A system can learn from reader actions, both about reader preferences, and about the content. Whether that's used for empowerment, or dystopia... hopefully we don't find that design choice is so forced, that the only way to avoid the latter is to neglect the former.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#254

Post by gen220 »

RubenvanE wrote: post #32

These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy ( https://hackerdaily.io ). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits: 1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute. 2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not. It also uses an outline.com like style…

fyi, your site raises security flags on firefox (81.0.1) and chrome (85.0.4183.121) for me.

"Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized."

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#255

Post by DharmaPolice »

JohnBooty wrote: post #161
DharmaPolice wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001. Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whethe…

I thought metamoderation was a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure if it had practical benefits. It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me! Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion. Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimat…

I agree this is an interesting topic.

You're right that the pool of moderators + meta-moderators was the same, but I think there's value in a kind of "peer review" for voting. On Reddit almost everyone (who expresses an opinion) complains that people use downvotes to disagree but I suspect that even the people complaining about it do the same thing from time to time (even if they rationalise it). Sometimes it's helpful for someone not involved in the argument to judge what you've done, even if that person is quite like you. It's pretty easy to imagine excluding anyone who replied to that same thread from meta moderating (or maybe doing something more sophisticated than that). It's not really about the trolls upvoting ASCII swastikas but the people regularly downvoting otherwise OK posts because they dislike someone's argument or their name or what they said in a completely different conversation. Or maybe it's about people upvoting low effort content (but for that to work, you would have different people metamoderating like you say).

It's hard to judge based on outcomes but I always felt Slashdot made you think about voting in a slightly different way. The system as it was there wouldn't work with Reddit for a variety of reasons but it's still useful to think about.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#256

Post by godshatter »

mncharity wrote: post #223
ChefboyOG wrote: post #175

The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community. I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out…

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

I would like to see a tagging system that could be used for filtering or just viewed on the comment itself. I almost always view every discussion board I'm on as wide open as possible in order to see taboo-breaking or uncomfortable opinions and to get an idea of where the population of readers is leaning on a topic and tags by other users would also be useful. It's more information about why people like or dislike things, which I find almost as interesting as the comments themselves.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#257

Post by paul_f »

bondarchuk wrote: post #236
muttled wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps something like the Nest thermostat approach might be best: have something that learns your preferences based on time, day of the week, and other factors. Maybe it attempts to see what kind of mood you're in?

No, please, no. It will end up like youtube: spend one evening watching chess videos, and suddenly all your recommendations are chess videos. And afterwards on a meta level there is anxiety with everything you click on and how it might influence your filters.

But I only want to read comments I agree with. :-)

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#258

Post by mncharity »

muttled wrote: post #230
mncharity wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

Perhaps something like the Nest thermostat approach might be best: have something that learns your preferences based on time, day of the week, and other factors. Maybe it attempts to see what kind of mood you're in?

Or a personal assistant? As there's potential for rich interactive refinement, as well as learned inference.

As with Nest, there's an architectural privacy challenge. You'd like your pa to have insights like "oh, your interests on topic X align closely with other-person, so let's see, maybe you'd like thing too?". Ideally using local or trusted computes. But you don't in general want other-person's pa to know all your things. So perhaps an ecology of trusted visibility? Your pa can run parts of itself on a bonded site, with greater visibility than it would have locally, but with restrictions on what it can report back? But that's hairy and hard. So...?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#259

Post by aaron-santos »

xivzgrev wrote: post #228
partingshots wrote: post #220

> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS. This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well. What does this mean? Are these…

I gave you an upvote. I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks. Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally…

> I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Interesting perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain karma from comments is writing a "The article gets it completely wrong. Here's why..." type comment[1]. HN highly rewards this kind of comment. Discussion after discussion is riddled with them. It might help to exemplify taking risks in the space of possible comments. There are a number of interesting axes in this space.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JadeColoredGlass...

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#260

Post by mncharity »

godshatter wrote: post #256
mncharity wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

I would like to see a tagging system that could be used for filtering or just viewed on the comment itself. I almost always view every discussion board I'm on as wide open as possible in order to see taboo-breaking or uncomfortable opinions and to get an idea of where the population of readers is leaning on a topic and tags by other users would also be useful. It's more information about why people like or dislike th…

Hmm, neat, so sort of optimizing for people/community watching? Allow users a richer expression, not to provide the system with more insight to improve recomendations, but to provide other users with more insight into users, individually and collectively. And since the system is learning about both content and users, it too might contribute insights, modulo privacy, somehow. Intriguing.
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