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Programming Is Like Sex

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Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#31

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Alex3917 wrote: post #20
pg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2. The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on i…

I've been meditating about this over the last couple of days, and I'm pretty sure there are three stages in the life cycle of social news site discussion quality. 1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments) 2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions) 3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems) Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably…

Yeah you're a fag so what do you know.

(Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form)

I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#32

Post by kajecounterhack »

pg wrote: post #16
ghiotion wrote: post #15

Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2. The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on i…

What can I say? Sex sells... Perhaps we can disallow the use of the word "sex" in the site description? That will prevent crappy threads from shooting up the list thanks to some nitwits oogling at the word "sex"

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#33

Post by Xichekolas »

pg wrote: post #22
ghiotion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the po…

Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting. Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

Maybe have the HN software go pull the page that is submitted, and assign it a weight based on number of tokens on the page. Obviously you'd remove stop words and HTML tags.

This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian filtering for post importance.

This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN, so maybe you could experiment with it here.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#34

Post by prakash »

pg wrote: post #16
ghiotion wrote: post #15

Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2. The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on i…

I guess a bit of benevolent dictatorship is required in keeping the signal/noise ratio high by one/small set of HN folks.

I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:

1. the raising competence of the current user base & 2. the wave of new users

I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#35

Post by Spyckie »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31
Alex3917 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been meditating about this over the last couple of days, and I'm pretty sure there are three stages in the life cycle of social news site discussion quality. 1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments) 2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions) 3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems) Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably…

Yeah you're a fag so what do you know. (Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form) I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.

Well, these types of threads always exist, but the real problem is that the ycnews community or the technology behind ycnews has failed to hammer it down. I'm all for democracy when the majority brings meaningful and intelligent articles to read, but in this situation I don't mind giving up equality for quality.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#36

Post by palish »

pg wrote: post #22
ghiotion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the po…

Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting. Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

Yes, both of those seem excellent. Could we give it a try and see how it turns out? You could define the acceleration of a downvote as (exp (- (* numdownvotes 0.5))) or some such, to discourage cabal behavior.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#37

Post by gscott »

Spyckie wrote: post #35
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you're a fag so what do you know. (Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form) I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.

Well, these types of threads always exist, but the real problem is that the ycnews community or the technology behind ycnews has failed to hammer it down. I'm all for democracy when the majority brings meaningful and intelligent articles to read, but in this situation I don't mind giving up equality for quality.

Any article title with "sex" in it should be harder to get to the first page, also any article title with curse words. Both are instant indicators of low quality.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#38

Post by pfedor »

pg wrote: post #22
ghiotion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the po…

Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting. Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

An ideal solution, although I'm not saying it's easy to get it right, would be to measure the weight of the story based on what portion of clicks are long term clicks, i.e., clicks after which people spend considerable amount of time (presumably reading the article) before coming back to perusing other stories on news.yc.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#39

Post by boucher »

gscott wrote: post #37
Spyckie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, these types of threads always exist, but the real problem is that the ycnews community or the technology behind ycnews has failed to hammer it down. I'm all for democracy when the majority brings meaningful and intelligent articles to read, but in this situation I don't mind giving up equality for quality.

Any article title with "sex" in it should be harder to get to the first page, also any article title with curse words. Both are instant indicators of low quality.

Curse words aren't necessarily an indicator of low quality. Plenty of cogent arguments (and plenty of great literature) have been written that included cursing.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#40

Post by derefr »

rms wrote: post #27
ghiotion wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma is variable, no? As the site gets more traffic, karma points will start to go up over the board. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak. 7 may be a good threshold now, but will it be in 6 months?

Probably not, but it's the kind of thing that could be manually or algorithmically adjusted.

How about, simply, "only the top five stories can be downvoted?"
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