Solving The Hacker News Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#281

Post by tokenadult » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 11:34 AM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #219

weaksauce wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This place has always been mostly good with a sprinkle of fluff pieces every now and then. The one thing that has changed a bit is the comments. Sadly the comments are being muddled a bit by the new kids on the block. Not that the new kids are doing anything intentionally bad, nor are they really bad comments, but I do remember a time where the people replying to comments were actual domain experts in a cert…

Additionally, I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. Which I find very frustrating, and I know people say 'whining about declining quality has always happened', but I really feel that this voting behavior used to be less pronounced.

I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is.

It hasn't just been new users. Rather it has been nearly everyone since the beginning. See what the founder said 1103 days ago about downvoting for disagreement:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#282

Post by jdap » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 12:08 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #182

Quality of HN Comments Over Time | . . | . . q| . . . . u| . . . . . . a| . . . . . l| . . . . . i| . . . . . t| . . . you are here -->. . y| (that's all) |________________________________________________________ N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F '09 '10 '11 (It must be that time of year again...) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871

It'd be nice to put in another curve for 'value of HN comments in shaping startups.'

Do those peaks feed periods of frenzied success (inspiring people to do better stuff faster)?

Or do they lag periods of success (pearls of wisdom come out when people are past the sweat-soaked white knuckle phase)?

Or is there some other correlation?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#283

Post by Gormo » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 6:52 PM UTC

repsilat wrote: post #188

malandrew wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eigenvalue/SVD upvoting. Comments and articles are ranked for you according to their ranking with similarly voting/submitting/commenting users. The frontpage (depending on how you set it up) could look like Reddit's, based on the majority of users, but to logged-in users it'd be more refined to their tastes. Perhaps you could look at the site from others' perspectives. Defining the model, computing likenesses and fin…

If it's too much complexity to track each user's preferences in terms of every other user's, you could also take a Bayesian filtering approach, similar to junk mail controls, and compute a custom front page based on each individual user's prior upvotes/downvotes.

In either case, the function of the voting mechanism will ultimately shift from generating the public front page to generating a custom view for each user. At that point, you could re-purpose the public front page as a selection mechanism to draw in the highest-quality users - perhaps by choosing a cohort of existing users to have public-upvote rights, or even by just applying old-fashioned editorial controls.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#284

Post by malandrew » Sat, Feb 26, 2011, 3:04 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #143

malandrew wrote: post #46

Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost. Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product. My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, fi…

both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost. I strongly disagree. Off the top of my head: XFree86/Xorg, Mozilla/Firefox, Debian/Ubuntu, Rails/Merb... these were all cases where the existing community had calcified in some key area and a fork was necessary to create a space where important work could get done. And in most of those cases, not only was the fork stronger than the trunk in (some) specific a…

I agree that there are exceptions. In the case of HN, I don't see how forking would be of benefit, especially since HN is so strongly linked to YCombinator, the startup incubator/school that tends to attract the most talented up-and-coming startups.