491–500 of 729 posts
HN has become important. I know people IRL who will get their friends to help mod their submission. I likewise see stories that just scream, this person has friends who probably modded them. These won't stay on the front page for long at all, but they do increase the signal to noise significantly.
This would still allow everyone else to utilize HN as their source of news or as their RSS feed into the tech/startup world, while testing for the source of the decreasing quality of comment threads.
Look at http://gamedev.net - they've grown their community from a few active users to more than a hundred thousand and the quality only increased. They had to go through a period of significantly decreased quality as the community grew, and faced all the same problems as HN. I believe a combination of the following changes would fix things: (from most to least important): - Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and ka…
I've been fairly active on HN for about 6 months. A year ago, I remember submitting articles and making comments that, while at the time I thought were fitting, I am now embarrassed of. (This also may be the case 6 months from now for my current submissions).
Sure, I perused the introduction, FAQs, and other comments and articles. However, I didn't get a real sense of quality until recently. Just like with software development, the best way to learn is by doing.
Here are a few ideas:
- Enforce some sort of social contract that users must agree to before submitting articles. Describe appropriate usage to give users a sense of pride in the community.
- A combination of account age and page views could be used to ensure new users are experienced enough to participate. There are the obvious negative side effects of this.
- Allow high-karma users to send private messages (previously mentioned) to users that submit inappropriate content informing them of the reasons why it may not be best. Down-voting and public comments are too cold. A warm private message from a 5 year HN veteran explaining how I can be a better member would be welcoming.
The bottom line is that the quality decrease isn't from malicious users (rude and negative comments aren't necessarily malicious in those users' eyes) but from naive users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of a "my amp goes up to 11" kind of thing, isn't it? You're just changing the label for "no votes either way."
No, it assigns a cost of 2 points to commenting.
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.
Past political essays, e.g. by Cicero, will generally be intellectually interesting.
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One problem I know is a problem because I see it all the time is people getting downvotes and not knowing why. If even a fraction of the people who have this problem complain, that's a lot of people who don't understand the unwritten rules.
Perhaps things need to be spelled out explicitly. If someone says something that gets a downvote, they need to be offered constructive criticism. "Here's why you were downvoted, and what you can do in the future to prevent it from happening again." This is very time-consuming to do, however. Writing a detailed response is costly and repetitive. Pressing "downvote" is easy. You punish the commenter, but don't tell him…
The real reason for a karma mechanic on HN is to filter out incredibly stupid comments. So keep down-voting. Things that are down-voted should go to the bottom of the stack.
I don't think this can just be solved by tweaking karma logic.
As social sites rise in popularity, common denominator posts such as humor or common circle jerking are going to rise to the top.
The answer, I think, is to allow people to vote on multiple metrics: 'cool', 'funny', 'good idea', 'hacker porn'.
With those separate signals it would be easier to tweak the algorithm to get the front page looking 'like you want it to,' or the users could choose how they want their posts to be ranked.