Idea 3. Enlarge space. There are too many people in the common agora, so split up the community into smaller, more focused spaces, akin to Reddit. For instance, there are natural categories here around news, programming, business, science, and politics.
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
481–490 of 729 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#482Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here). A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
A related problem is blogspam. If the original source material was submitted a while ago but didn't get many upvotes, there is a huge incentive for people to mirror the content or link to a site that links to the original.
I think a more useful metric than "number of votes since submission" would be "number of votes in the past hour/day/whatever." That way an item could be submitted days in the past, but still get on the front page if it had enough upvotes recently. For testing purposes, this could be an alternate front page like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Another option would be to have moderators manually de-dupe stories or fix them to link to the original source. While they're at it, the mods could ban or reduce the karma of users who submit blogspam or duplicate stories.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#483I liked the experiment of "orange" members (with >3.5 avg karma), and think it was worth more than a day's trial. The complaint of HN becoming a two-tiered society (like that blue-eyes expt) would be a benefit, if the oranges were expected to set an example. It seems harmless to try it for a week and measure the resulting quality (as opposed to the resulting complaints...).
Identifying the 10% "trusted elders" (in this way or other) makes the site easier to control, as a large corporations are easier for a government to control, and having "key influencers" and "fashion-leaders" to target make it easier to seed viral ideas. Importantly, designated "trusted elders" would be expected to act as such (and if not, their elderhood could be revoked). This control is not exactly the hacker spirit - but something is needed.
The effect would be to make the site small again.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#484I 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…
I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in the quality of stories as well as comments. Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some br…
I don't think that the number of interesting stories have declined, but I think that they have become much harder to find because the number of non-interesting stories have definitely increased. Among the non-interesting stories, I often notice the same usernames over and over. Would limiting the number of story posts per day help the situation?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#485Perhaps the karma for submitting articles should be separate from the karma for comments. I know when I was out to build karma I focused on submissions because there wasn't a downside.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#486Thanks for bringing the problem up. I never contributed too much but dropped in whenever I felt I had something insightful to say. Recently it has been getting less frequent but I think it's just that many of the front page stories aren't as interested as they have been and there is a good amount of duplicates. Since the community is large the comments tend to drop down faster as well so it's more difficult to get a discussion going.
A possible idea is to put up a dump of the HN data somewhere for users to download. Maybe the community can analyze it and find interesting patterns/behaviors and possibly solutions?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#487I 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…
I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in the quality of stories as well as comments. Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some br…
Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding and submitting quality stories?
My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't maintain itself."
So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time.
Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.
And submit stories you want to see here. Someone has to do it or they'll never show up here.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't actually think articles on "Economic inequality" belong on hacker news. In fact, it's articles like that which are a big difference between this site in the early days and now. I'd prefer a site that stuck to technical and startup business topics but perhaps that isn't hacker news anymore. The fact that these articles get voted up implies that I must be in the minority.
We could have choice, would have to be in conjunction with either a tagging system or a completely separate list like subreddits. With tagging in your profile you could have things to opt out of like politics and current events and tech gossip.
The when these submissions popup all you need is someone to tag them as one of these things. You could either assign people to do this or weight it by karma or something.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#489Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here). A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
This plays into RiderOfGiraffes' experiment with leaving comments that tied together related (or identical) discussions, which I was rather sad to see him discontinue (especially in cases where two threads were discussing different aspects of a story). I don't recall, though; was he automating that, or was it a purely manual effort?
I suspect a "closed as duplicate" system, ala StackExchange, could work well here, assuming a high enough bar were to be set for who could do (or vote for) such a thing.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#490Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread. Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and…
If you turned off gravity for comments, then ranking would indicate their relative votes. Users could vote to create what they believe is the appropriate ranking.
I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain?
BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?