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Solving The Hacker News Problem

al3x.net

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Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#31

Post by mkr-hn »

JonnieCache wrote: post #28
jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."

And Linux was so cool before the Ubuntu kids showed up.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#32

Post by lionhearted »

tptacek wrote: post #8

For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.

Still my favorite site on the whole internet, but yeah, things have definitely changed.

Stories, yeah, they're a bit worse but that's not the main thing. I skip stories that don't appeal to me, and you can always go a few pages deep if you want more stories.

It's the comment quality sliding down that's scary to me... it's becoming much more okay to engage in standard-internet-level discussion here, which is to say, much less civil than HN used to be.

Perhaps liberally killing any comment that's primarily insulting, sarcastic, pedantic would help?

For instance, I just saw a link to this two year old thread today, look how civil and friendly it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554889

The only halfway insult on there - "Dunno but she has a Twitter page. Not sure why PG would quote such a weirdo." - was voted to zero. And the 2-3 jokes/sarcasm stood still at 1, none of it voted up.

Also, I'd love to see people who just consistently left substance-less comments get put on auto-kill, but I know that'd never happen for a ton of reasons.

I'm thinking of one guy who just posts about how outraged he is about anything remotely politics related, and nothing else. Joined in the last six months. Actually, that probably describes a lot of users now, which might be part of the problem...

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#33

Post by jaekwon »

Hi, I'm taking on this challenge. Al3x, can you send me an email at jkwon.work@gmail.com?

Also, I'm taking suggestions for seed users. There will also be a HN Karma cutoff where everyone above a threshold can join. You can nominate HN users or yourself here.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#34

Post by mikeleeorg »

jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

On reading this, the Evaporative Cooling effect comes to mind.

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#35

Post by jacques_chester »

JonnieCache wrote: post #28
jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."

Good point.

On reflection it resembles flocking behaviour. I imagine that website members can be modelled as simple agents with two rules:

1. A cool site has few, impressive members.

2. Move towards the cool sites.

Given an arbitrary distribution of "impressive" members, this should cause a constantly moving flock of members to move from site to site regardless of its purpose.

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#36

Post by teyc »

Where is the data that shows HN has degraded? We aren't seeing kitten pictures. A scan of the front page shows the mix of articles being programming, startups, tech.

I'm not sure what Alex wants? More discussion around PG's hackers and painters?

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#38

Post by dools »

rudiger wrote: post #9
dools wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I got an email from him the other day telling me not to editorialise in submission titles after I posted that Nissan Leaf HTML5 extravaganza with the heading "Behold: We don't need flash for anything anymore. Ever". I'm sure that post itself rankled our OP.

Question: Why'd you give it such a sensational title?

Well, I guess because I was editorialising!! I found it sensational at the time. That was the first time I had looked at a site and said to myself "well that must be Flash(TM)", and then a second later in my head thought "well fair enough, you'd HAVE to use Flash(TM) to get that kind of experience for a major brand", then right-clicked on the page only to see the standard context menu... no "Zoom in"!!

I was really quite blown away. I could have just put it on my blog then posted that to HN (which is actually what pg said I should have done when he emailed me), but my initial thoughts, were that I really just wanted to share this with my pals on HN (similar to the way someone else had posted Ben the Bodyguard as a "Gorgeous HTML5 implementation" or something) and that putting it on my blog then linking to my blog from HN would just be viewed by the community as me jockeying for traffic and being self-promotional!

Re: Solving The Hacker News Problem

#40

Post by cletus »

jacques_chester wrote: post #18

Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…

While I basically agree with you--I too have seen this cycle many times before--what I don't understand is why people feel the need to slap down newbies in an attempt to recapture some since-passed golden age.

If I get bored of a site or simply get nothing more out of it, I just move on.

If I see topics that are boring or simply have no interest to me, I just ignore them.

If I see rude, insulting comments or personal attacks, I just flag them and move on.

I really don't understand why people need to express so much hate.

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