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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?

#461

Post by [deleted] »

alextp wrote: post #437
b_emery wrote: post #155

3 words: Bayesian Comment Filter. Just does the opposite of what the spam filter does. Use the corpus of great comments from the past to find great comments of the present. I'm only half joking. Fundamentally, the thread is about a filtering system.

The problem is that word features are not really that good predictors of quality. I have done some research on this (unpublished), and I got a really good performance on predicting hacker news votes by just counting how many new words (not stopwords, not very-high-frequency words) a comment was adding to a thread. Just using a few variations on this theme predicted better than word counts or bigram features. Fundamen…

[deleted]

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

#462

Post by gridspy »

jeromec wrote: post #323
jnovek wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the Slashdot lameness filter, which IIRC just caused (causes? I haven't been there in a while) lots of posts ending in, "La la la la, adding some content to get past the lameness filter." and the like.

And we could make it policy to immediately downvote such cases.

Sorry, your comment is too short (as is mine)

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

#464

Post by ElbertF »

nyellin wrote: post #385
tptacek wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blub setter/getter comment really is the archetypical "dumb comment", isn't it? Nicely done. Users should live or die by their votes on that comment. If you vote up the blub comment, you should personally get the downvotes for it too. Upvotes should expose you to the karmic downside of superficial comments. Especially because the really good comments, the ones most deserving of upvotes, don't seem to get a lot of…

My initial reaction was to disagree with your suggestion: Your method would train people to predict how well a comment is going to be received and to vote based on that. I disagreed, because I don't want to read comments rated by the hive mind, in order to please the hive mind. However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn…

Reddit does this pretty well, they often feature a submission with a dot instead of the number of votes. Perhaps HN could randomly put a thread at the top without showing votes.

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

#465

Post by Goladus »

pg wrote: post #123
tptacek wrote: post #18

A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the receiver.

My thought was to have a selection of canned responses that encourage this sort of feedback without allowing it to devolve into arguments.

But anything that encourages feedback and discourages defensiveness will be effective.

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

#466

Post by fleitz »

pg wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #7

A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.

The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027 politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.

Facebook / Twitter analysis, if it has 10,000 shares on Facebook/Twitter chances are we can find it somewhere else. Would any of us have missed that Color raised $41 million dollars? Probably not.

maybe ensuring the articles are at least a week old, that instantly removes 99% of the current events which are generally irrelevant and if it is relevant it will still be so in a week.

You might want to consider just shutting it down for 2 months, the great users will likely come back. It will definitely lower the dunbar number quite a bit.

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

#467

Post by kj12345 »

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…

As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I agree, and also" comments. But then I read complaints about HN and it seems some users actually want more of an always-disagree culture and not less.

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

#468

Post by donohoe »

There has been much talk of better days, better comment threads and such.

I've been here less than 2 years but I ask if anyone can spare the time and dig up some classic examples of stories and threads, and great back and fourth comment based conversations...

I realize this is difficult given the non-archival nature of HN but can anyone show a "then" versus "now" difference?

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

#469

Post by gridspy »

there wrote: post #231
pg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it work to make the new page longer?

yes, but maybe show things a bit differently as well. when items in /newest make their way to the frontpage, remove them from /newest. links with 0 upvotes and 0 comments should fall off the page faster, or rather, any link with at least one other upvote/comment should stick around longer to try to gain traction.

Perhaps a submission should only fall off the page when X unique visitors have clicked on that link.

That way good content with poor headlines still has a shot.

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

#470

Post by gridspy »

trobertson wrote: post #355
SandB0x wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it assigns a cost of 2 points to commenting.

The problem with this is new users. When you join the site, you have 0 karma, and so would go negative if you posted a comment (assuming, of course, that you can go negative. I'd rather not experiment with that). Of course, pg could make new users come in with 10 or so karma, just to get them started. Now that I think a bit more about it, this could be a really good idea. It would limit new user's ability to comment…

You'd get a lot of people creating multiple accounts to game this.
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