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Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

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

#411

Post by cabalamat »

Tycho wrote: post #238
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., "…

Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How? Minimum comment length of ~50 words. This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jo…

> Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would backfire because many useful comments aren't that long, and therefore people will be forced to pad them, this decreasing the s/n ratio.

For example, my paragraph above has 24 words.

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

#412

Post by drm237 »

gleb wrote: post #187
pg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.

If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion. Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular. It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates w…

If comments cost karma, some users will just submit more stories to try to earn more karma so they can keep commenting. That could decrease the overall quality of articles. One option would be to stop awarding karma for stories so that they only way to earn karma is through good comments. That would conflict with comments costing karma though because you'd never be able to earn the initial amount.

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

#413

Post by danielford »

jacques_chester wrote: post #407
danielford wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment. Compare the average Metafilter comment to the average YouTube comment. You'd have a difficult time making the case that there wasn't a discernible difference in quality between the two.

> This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my assessment. Right, but as the subject of a membership ritual I have to discount your assertion. Sometimes membership rituals do increase value. But they increase perceived value regardless of what follows.

Aren't you engaging in the genetic fallacy here though? Pointing out a possible origin of my belief does not mean that you have disproved the belief.

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

#414

Post by garindra »

jjcm wrote: post #95

I'd suggest that there are more tiers to functionality than are currently in place. At the moment, after 500 points you're given the ability to downvote comments. Perhaps there should be additional barriers in place, such as this: 0 - Ability to comment on threads 50 - Ability to upvote comments 500 - Ability to downvote comments 1000 - Ability to submit articles/stories 2000 - Ability to downvote articles/stories et…

The problem with this approach is that then the users will instead choose to save up their points to submit their OWN stories, instead of spending them upvoting (and downvoting) threads and comments which help improve the content curation on HN (and is one of our main goals here).

This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of other users doing the same thing as that upvoter (or downvoter) too, which means his/her action is indeed valid and objective.

Users would then be more willing to vote, with the hope that other users will do the same thing as him/her too, and reap more points than what he/she spent for upvoting/downvoting. This enforces more thinking and evaluation of comments or stories before even upvoting or downvoting them.

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

#415

Post by eli_s »

Stop trying to rely on the hive to vote good stories to the top. Either the democratic approach doesn't work or HN is getting gamed - either way the site is now effectively broken.

A decision has to be made from the top about what HN is all about. If it's startups and business then that's the only type of story allowed. Everything else gets dumped. I don't need another Reddit.

Mods would need strict guidelines about what qualifies and everything even slightly outside of these guidelines gets turfed.

oh and get rid of karma. It's bs. Encourages hivemind like nothing else.

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

#416

Post by SandB0x »

jedsmith wrote: post #401

Complete the fledgling environment of selectivity in one fell swoop and explicitly say, in the guidelines, that low-karma users are no longer allowed to participate. Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma. These meta posts, the how to vote posts, the discussion here and in other threads, the lamenting about comment quality in general: all of this aggravation is dancing…

> Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma.

This is hardly a good example to all the aspiring startup folks on how to treat your users.

Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?

Edit: Removed the accusation of trolling, apologies for that.

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

#417

Post by bootload »

"... fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN ... Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here. ..."

In any group of people where the cost of joining is minimal and the freedom reins are loose, you will see behavioural changes mutate in ways resembling Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The big problem with HN is the founder assumption that we (users) will be a) civil b) willing, positive contributors and c) thoughtful. Maintaining this requires some means of natural selection. At first it was probably a combination of being curious, an early adopter and nerd-like. Some (quick & possibly stupid) ideas:

- intellectual paywall: add a penalty of a kind that selects readers/contributors

- classifier: run a classifier that categorises users by type and apply rules (behaviour modifier)

- change focus of HN to News with sub hacker focus (radical focus change)

- add a real minimal paywall sending $ to something like EFF or other hacker friendly charity (penalise by currency - bad)

- stop HN altogether (deny)

- wipe the slate clean & build a new HN like community but with http://perlmonk.org like progression of privs by tasks (enforced discipline) at start of user creation.

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

#418

Post by JesseAldridge »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #291
pg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that's something I've already changed. A few hours ago I made flags have a lot more weight. The old weights were ok for the more engaged users we had a year ago, but now the ratio of votes to flags on a fluff story tends to be a lot higher.

So that's why my submission plummeted so quickly. One person made a reasoned argument for it not belonging, lots of people piled on and flagged it, hey presto, gone. Giving flags more weight is not necessarily the answer. Punishing people for making bad comments is, I think, more important. Equally important is punishing people for upvoting bad comments. But now it's late here, and starting tomorrow I'm really not go…

> I hope you can find a way to reduce the mean-spiritedness fluff, and make HN more pleasant again.

I think this last sentence is very telling. Low quality is only part of the problem. What really makes people want to disengage is having their feelings hurt.

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

#419

Post by warwick »

jedsmith wrote: post #401

Complete the fledgling environment of selectivity in one fell swoop and explicitly say, in the guidelines, that low-karma users are no longer allowed to participate. Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below 5,000 karma. These meta posts, the how to vote posts, the discussion here and in other threads, the lamenting about comment quality in general: all of this aggravation is dancing…

Upvoted back to one point. Whether it's right or wrong, someone downvoted it because they disagreed with the premise.

HN used to be full of stubborn individualists arguing amongst themselves with excellent writing, interesting experience, and data. In the last year or so, it just feels like everyone is trying to avoid saying anything outside our little bubble.

When I used to debate, we talked about how it wasn't if the judge agreed with you that won you the debate. It was how persuasive you were and how well you said your piece. This comment made a point and it made it well. Don't try to vote it away just because you disagree with the point.

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

#420

Post by alextp »

jacques_chester wrote: post #330
tptacek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this won't "fix" the comment problem, but every time it is used, more likely than not, it's going to improve the comment threads, because the alternative is publicly calling someone out. Please label it "the gruseom button".

You've called me out in public before. Shame is an effective teacher.

Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty disagreement.

I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These are a problem, as they encourage snark and posing over effectively arguing things out, but they are very hard to treat as disagreeing with them is likely to cause knee-jerk reactions in many upvoters.

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