A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post • Hacker News Board

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#261

Post by wensing » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 3:08 AM UTC

bootload wrote: post #241

wensing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?

"... Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days? ..." 2024 days here @wensing, No. Being here a long time doesn't confer any special status. All it really shows is curiosity and early adoption. Other than having seen a wider range of technology, topics, discussion and behaviour the one thing I've noted is the number of high r…

Special status isn't the point. They're simply cohorts and it would be interesting to see what the conversation would be like when segmented as such.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#262

Post by anamax » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 3:11 AM UTC

One change has been an influx of people who propose improvements. Another is an influx of people who care about karma.

Who, exactly, isn't going to post something because doing so will cost them karma points? (Hmm - maybe discouraging karma-whores is a good thing,)

Or, are you thinking that folks with too little karma wouldn't be allowed to post? Since karma can be earned by clicking arrows, that's not much of a cost.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#263

Post by snogglethorpe » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 3:45 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #47

brudgers wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original definition of "hacker" before it entered the media.

But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.

This is not true, I think.

The self-identification with the term "hacker" (in the good sense) is pretty strong amongst a lot of people from "those days." The co-option by the media to mean something else was an annoyance, but really hasn't changed that a whole lot.

In other words, it's a personal issue, and nothing to with popularity per-se.

It's like you and a group of childhood friends called yourself "the bucket gang" or something, to the degree that this usage pervaded your personal communications. If suddenly the media started using that term to talk about terrorists or something, you and your friends would probably be annoyed, but it probably wouldn't affect your personal usage, because the connection is already simply too strong; you wouldn't suddenly start using this personal term more often because of the media co-option.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#264

Post by snogglethorpe » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 3:57 AM UTC

steve8918 wrote: post #233

I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards. I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum. Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen…

> 3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.

I use the HN RSS feed, with Google reader; I never look at the HN front page ever. This works pretty well for me; I can very quickly skim though all new articles, and those I've seen are gone (but I can mark those I want to come back to later as "not read").

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#265

Post by 1123581321 » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 4:45 AM UTC

simon wrote: post #211

cooldeal wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely funny how any small of hint of criticism of Groklaw's 'analysis' or the sacred PJ was met with instant whiting out of the comment, but now that Groklaw took Google's side against Apple, comments, critical of Groklaw comments get a bunch of upvotes or at least are not flagged to death. General rules I have noticed even after points stopped being show are (mostly regardless of the actual facts): Tak…

Mentioning religion is guaranteed downvotes, unless the thread is about depression or suicide. That's the reason that I am a 95% (or more) lurker rather than poster. I loved HN when it first came out, but the heavy anti-faith undercurrent is off-putting.

There are quite a few Christians here. I've made connections with many of them.

It's true that you are in a sense a guest of materialists in communities like these. I've found the only helpful thing is to make individual, atomic points or to write on a topic about which my conversant has no opinion. To say anything that is built on premises recognized and disputed by another is asking for a huge headache and yes, the CS training here greatly outpaces study of metaphysics.

Take heart and spend most of your time here talking about programming!

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#266

Post by thaumaturgy » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 5:57 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #224

You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of initial karma and cost to post you have in mind. I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a study of that type and showed that it would work. (I realize…

I was going to modify my HN natural-language search engine to try to build this dataset for you, but then http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894 just happened (the submission from uncrunched.com where Mike Arrington weighs in on the whole stupid Google Ventures tempest-in-a-teapot).

A bunch of those comments are adding absolutely nothing of value to HN. A bunch of them are just picking on Arrington as a controversial figure. And, of those, most of them are by accounts with close to 100 karma, or less.

For what it's worth, I've thought for quite a while that forcing users to spend karma might be a worthwhile experiment, mostly because of comment threads like that one. One of the big failures over at Reddit is the huge number of people who can create an account and post a completely vacuous comment in a matter of seconds; on a popular thread, there can be thousands of comments voted to 0 or less, just crowding out any good content that might be left.

On the other hand, karma-as-currency potentially encourages further gaming of the site; it could conceivably lead to e.g. fewer unpopular-but-not-wrong comments, and more popular-but-not-insightful comments.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#267

Post by Nick_C » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 6:35 AM UTC

sin7 wrote: post #130

debacle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Karma being invisible is a huge factor. While I understand the idea behind the decision, I think it prevents the community from really seeing what its broader sentiments are.

More than that, I don't want to read all the comments. I just want to read the good ones. Without knowing which comments are good, I read the first set and move on to the next story.

Agree completely. I skim the threads in each post now, which is a shame because I'm sure I miss some good points.

To fix this, I would like to see threads bubble up to the top based on total karma score for the thread. Read the top half-dozen threads and you have a pretty good synopsis of both sides of the topic.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#268

Post by apl » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 8:28 AM UTC

simon wrote: post #242

calebmpeterson wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it. I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments. This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist): "...indeed, at this moment c…

I agree. It's a huge loss. As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and is now a young earth creationist, such conversations have the potential to be very interesting. Sadly, they end up with subtle (if you're lucky) or less subtle jabs about how believers are all anti-science and uneducated and just want to brainwash people, especially children. And that is generally considered to be the ultimate slam o…

  > As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and
  > is now a young earth creationist

  > loving the Mars missions

How on earth do you reconcile this? The mind boggles, although it might just be me missing a healthy dose of sarcasm here.

In any case: No, not all discussions of this type are in fact potentially interesting, enlightening, or fostering a culture of whatever. Telling yourself that is feel-good nonsense. Sometimes, debating the merits of creationism simply means lowering the level of discourse. Debating the merits of current evolutionary science is, of course, both admissible and valuable; considering creationism (esp. of the wildly implausible kind) a viable alternative is simply misguided.

Don't waste time when there are actual problems to be solved.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#269

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 11:02 AM UTC

wonginator1221 wrote: post #252

pg wrote: post #224

You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of initial karma and cost to post you have in mind. I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a study of that type and showed that it would work. (I realize…

I think that there's also a chance that charging karma for a comment could also alter the quality of discussion here on HN. Although it may reduce comment "spam", commenters would have a stronger incentive to follow popular opinion to ensure that the cost of posting a comment is recouped. This could potentially reduce the number of dissenting (yet still intellectually provoking) comments. This hivemind mentality is a…

IMO one is trying to do with karma what Google are doing with SERP positions - reward valuable content.

If you do what they've done and personalise results then gaming the system becomes a lot harder; the only real way to win has to become producing quality content.

Metrics such as rank, average, sd, account age, up & downvotes could be combined by the reader in order to personalise story listing and comment rank/display on the story page.

That way if I want to reward a persons comments with a karma boost for average comment karma I can do so, but you could just do upvotes or just rank on inverse of downvotes or whatever.

This way the site users generate competing algorithms, algorithms will be adjusted and 'evolve' to generate the prefered ranking of comments. Those who dont want to write one can pick a recommended or default algo.

If user written algos are too expensive to use (though I'm thinking it would be client side in js) then a selection of algos could be offered by the site.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#270

Post by wamatt » Sat, Sep 08, 2012, 11:22 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #208

Any solution relying on karma is doomed to fail imo. Karma is easy to min-max. I've gotten good at it. Only ~1200 karma but I'm averaging over 10 per post. It's easy with a bit of practice. None of my comments are particularly good. They typically express a mostly safe opinion in a mild manner. I don't like to make non-root posts as they rarely get upvotes and I hesitate to post in a large thread (like this one) as i…

Yeah I noticed this too.

Sadly there also seems to be an emphasis on style and tone, instead of the content of the message.