Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#361

Post by EwanG » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:53 PM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #206

I used to be a big contributor to this site, but for the last months I've found that my interest in the site has waned. I've thought a lot about why, since I used to really enjoy HN - now it's just one of a few newssites I visit every day. It's hard to quantify but here are my reasons and my take at the decline: 1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down. The problem is twofold - there are…

What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do the research to insure that the article is what it claims it is about, and hasn't been posted 20 times in the last week under slightly different names.

I always found the boards I enjoyed best back when I ran a C-64 BBS (yes, that was a BBS running ON a C-64 with a 1200 baud modem and two floppy drives) were the ones with appropriately benevolent "dictators" who used a light touch to keep things real and on track. I can't say I've seen anything on the internet to convince me that there's been a notable improvement on such.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#362

Post by j_baker » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:53 PM UTC

Every article from techcrunch and about techcrunch should get an automatic ranking penalty. Seriously. Techcrunch occasionally posts an article that's useful and warrants not banning them completely, but I don't think the community would lose anything by not having the average techcrunch article that gets posted here.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#363

Post by Luyt » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:54 PM UTC

dochtman wrote: post #230

pg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it. Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your…

One of the Dutch news sites I frequent also has qualitatively different forms of upvoting. E.g., you can upvote for humor, upvote for insight, upvote for new information. By applying different metrics to different kinds of comments, it might be easier to create the kind of balance you want.

What site is that? I'm curious.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#364

Post by apollo » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:54 PM UTC

1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new ranking schemes.

2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#365

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:56 PM UTC

sunir wrote: post #162

Idea 1. Charge for memberships like Metafilter. I believe in the Quaker rule, "Only speak when you can improve the silence." Other people think speech is like squatting on land. You have to speak to gain footing. By charging people for the privilege of speaking, you make them consciously decide whether what they have to say is worth the $5 to join. They will probably say no.

> You have to speak to gain footing.

I suspect that this is true, however. The earlier a comment is made, the more time it has to accrue upvotes before readers move on. I suspect there would be measurable correlation between the time of posting and the ultimate score of comments.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#366

Post by trobertson » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:57 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #137

psawaya wrote: post #100

Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition. I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact t…

Would it work to make the new page longer?

I think psawaya, boundlessdreamz and akkartik are on the right track.

To use a person anecdote, when I come to HN I immediately look to the top. I have come to expect good stories up on top, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.

This being a likely user behavior, you could game that behavior by putting 5 or so of the newest stories in a thinly bordered box, above the normal top stories. That way when people go looking for the top stories, they see the new stories, and are more likely to read and comment on the interesting ones.

This will preserve the normal UI of the site, with minor UX changes, while giving exposure to each story as it comes in. If I were to guess, most of the good stories that come in and languish do so because of a lack of exposure. I'm willing to bet that most people don't look at the newest page very often, expecting others to upvote the good stories onto the frontpage for them.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#367

Post by pama » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:58 PM UTC

How about only upvoting comments of at least DH4 [1]?

Comments that state their ranking in your disagreement hierarchy are allowed to be upvoted above a threshold (say 5 karma points) if these comments are at least DH4. The remaining comments are questions, clarifications, suggestions, or plain old mean and/or dumb comments; they would remain below the karma threshold.

You could add an optional DH tag to each new comment and only enforce the threshold rule in an alternative "view" of the HN site (until you are happy with the results).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#368

Post by ssp » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:59 PM UTC

Make a graph containing edges from each user to the comments they voted for, and from each comment its author. Then run something like PageRank on it and show the resulting ranks of both comments and users.

It would help with comment quality because it would make people compete for approval from high-quality users.

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#369

Post by blickly » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:59 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #137

psawaya wrote: post #100

Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition. I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact t…

Would it work to make the new page longer?

What about giving some fraction of the karma that the original submitter receives to the early upvoters to try and incentivize people to read the new page?

Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

#370

Post by bvi » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 10:59 PM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #243

strlen wrote: post #104

Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to agree with general tendencies of the site. For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "…

You, and other users both in this thread and in similar ones before it, are only looking at one side of the equation. The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones. Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightf…

One way around this could be through badges (a la Stack Overflow). You could automatically get badges based on average comment karma and so on, instead of tying your contributions to the HN community to a mere number.

That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.