I don't know, I looked at your past submission for makeusdate, and it appears that you got tons of useful feedback and encouragement. Very little of the posts I saw there were negative at all. Some were blunt, but still encouraging and admonishing you not to give up.
Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
261–270 of 465 posts
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's saying that sniping and negativity wasn't the norm for HN, but it's become that way.
That's either rose-tinted glasses or selective recall, or both.
Its neither, feedback supplied to the "Show HN" type posts would generally be positive, or at least constructive and polite. Even if there was no feedback to offer, people would still leave a congratulatory comment about launching.
4-5 years ago it felt like the only people who understood what you went through to launch were people on this site, everyone else including family and fellow co-workers at big corp were negative about the idea of leaving a "safe job" to pursue a dream.
But now with everyone having an idea about the next big app, and blockbuster movies coming out about the geeky kid who did follow his dream, everyone else is starting to "get" us, they can relate. So the feedback you get from outside of HN has become positive, and so the feedback from HN has become more of a "reality check".
I don't see why it just can't be polite but constructive though.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without c…
Ok, I'll try that too.
Not to deter you from the social standards approach, but I thought the concept of measuring comments was clever.
The problem I see is - How do you know if a comment is negative or not? Surely, you can tell, but problematically that might be tough.
Maybe swap out the "post comment" button for 2 "commit" buttons 1 that says "Positive" the other that says "negative". (This could be done a myriad of ways, but you get the point)
You could then measure a users tenancy to post useful positive/negative comments based on the average votes that type of comment receives.
posters that consistently have low average scores for their comments could lose posting rights, for a period.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#264It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…
Wasn't OP's 11kclub.com post dead'ed by mods?
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
To (a) and (b) I would also add (c): The signal to noise ratio goes down, so it's more difficult to find and upvote the best comments. Moreover, when there already are a lot of comments - and this can happen very fast - new comments, even very good ones, have a very difficult time emerging, and I guess this creates a disincentive. One solution to try could be to give more time "up there" to comments from commenters w…
I have noticed a bit that the top ranking comment will then contain a bunch of fragmented, semi-unrelated sub-conversations and the top comment almost becomes an OP of its own.
Yes, I noticed the same thing. Sometimes the first comments becomes so long, that it's almost impossible to reach the other comments - I even built a Chrome extension to be able to collapse them, but when the first comment is really too long it becomes difficult to manage anyway.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#266It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…
You could view this as a UX issue. New members don't get enough information from the HN interface to infer how to behave. Now we've got a theory, how can we address it?
(a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members
Try to make it obvious who distinguished members are, so people can emulate them. Colour-coded usernames based on age/reputation, starred 'high quality' comments, reputable upvoters (quora-style).
(b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.
Try to reduce anonymity. Tiny little grey names are fine for 100 users, but after a point they all look the same. We're visual animals - maybe we need recognizable avatars, symbolic or otherwise, so we recognize the people we're replying to. Even allowing users to choose a single unicode symbol in addition to their username might be enough.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members. To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into…
It will never be as simple as throwing in a single tweak like that. Google is the best example to learn from. Search is a misnomer, Google is about ranking. They've put many PhD-centuries of effort into deciding which of the three million matches to put first (ranking). Choosing the three million matches (search) isn't where Google adds its value. Lots of lessons have been learned there, I'm sure HN can tap into that…
...says the new guy to the old guy.
Sorry I couldn't help myself.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all you want to hear is how awesome it is, then go show it to your mum. I'm sure she'll tell you how special you are and that you can do no wrong. Your account was created a little short of a year ago. We are talking about how the newer crop is rude and sarcastic and how that has ruined the quality of the old HN and then you post this. There is no call for it, you could have easily worded your post to say "hey eve…
Dearest Sir or Madam, thank you for providing me with this valuable feedback. I value your opinion as a fellow HN member and Human (if I may make that assumption). However, it is with deep regret that I inform you that the very first word of your comment contains a typo. Sincerely, Jack.R.Abbit tl;dr: *Your
You personify the problem, this kind of valueless snark is not welcome here.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will never be as simple as throwing in a single tweak like that. Google is the best example to learn from. Search is a misnomer, Google is about ranking. They've put many PhD-centuries of effort into deciding which of the three million matches to put first (ranking). Choosing the three million matches (search) isn't where Google adds its value. Lots of lessons have been learned there, I'm sure HN can tap into that…
...says the new guy to the old guy. Sorry I couldn't help myself.
(haha - I totally misunderstood, my apologies)
EDIT: (total rewrite)
The cool thing about using metrics and machine learning is that the results speak for themselves and opinions and factions are less important. Intead of guessing what matters in advance, you get to discover what matters after the fact.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without c…
Ok, I'll try that too.
Also I should be allowed to veto at least one YC applicant per batch.