631–640 of 729 posts
You could even change the 'title' field in the submission form to 'description' (with its content limited to fairly small number of characters, of course. e.g. Of course I'm just speculating about the potential value of this, but it might indirectly help a little.
Here's one you suggested to me: have people pay to comment. If this were any other website, I'd suggest simply requiring a Facebook or twitter account to log in. Worked for Gawker et al, but it won't fly with this demographic. So just charge people $1 to activate their account. It'll reduce the shite, and 99% of the commenters won't care. What happens to the edge-cases of people who don't have a credit card is an ope…
It just restricts the site to those people who can/will pay.
There are plenty of people who'll gladly pay for the privilege of trolling or posting garbage. And the more they pay the more entitled they feel to post whatever the hell they want.
The main issue seems to be that comment quality is decreasing, so you could always try my honeypot idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352247 :)
Perhaps karma should be subject to gravity. Login is required to view HN. Submitting comments and links is expensive while lurking is cheap. Perhaps 5 karma points buys you a comment or submission; 1 karma/min to lurk.
Just as we [ought to] only make things customers would pay for, we should only submit things users would pay to read. While Hacker Monthly does do this in some fashion, I don't think we should have to pay with monetary currency--but in cpu time.
Here's one you suggested to me: have people pay to comment. If this were any other website, I'd suggest simply requiring a Facebook or twitter account to log in. Worked for Gawker et al, but it won't fly with this demographic. So just charge people $1 to activate their account. It'll reduce the shite, and 99% of the commenters won't care. What happens to the edge-cases of people who don't have a credit card is an ope…
I don't think this solves the problem. It just restricts the site to those people who can/will pay. There are plenty of people who'll gladly pay for the privilege of trolling or posting garbage. And the more they pay the more entitled they feel to post whatever the hell they want.
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Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well.
"... Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well. ..." I always think of the Perlmonk progression as a good idea. It will require a radical departure in use/interaction and might be seen as too controlled. PM had the advantage of doing this from the start (as far as I know) PM #244776
We could penalize commenters not using their real name. Techcrunch comment quality has improved by an order of magnitude and trolls have been largely wiped out since they started requiring people use Facebook or Yahoo accounts to comment.
I'm considering that, possibly without disclosing on the site who the user is; just having to authenticate oneself at all would probably help.
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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…
You could make flags scale concavely.
Get rid of the whole point system. I go to HN for the community, not to collect points. It seems to provide incentives for the wrong behavior, even tho I understand that it was originally intended to do the exact opposite. A community stands or falls on the quality of the interactions. Therefore to a certain extent, you have to let it thrive or die on its own. Solely my opinion, but I see points as getting in the way…
For instance, I've seen many instances of newbies making an "lol" or "wtf?" comment only to be quickly downvoted in to oblivion.
Hopefully it doesn't take much of that for them to get the point.
Also, the downvoting provides a quick and easy way for the community to express displeasure at someone violating the community's norms, without needing to write a long post explaining just why a comment consisting solely of "lol" or "wtf?" isn't appropriate.
On the othe hand, it's clear that karma is not a panacea, that it can be gamed, that it can encourage an echo chamber effect, and that it scales poorly when a site becomes as large as HN.
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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 y…
This is the biggest one IMO.
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"... Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well. ..." I always think of the Perlmonk progression as a good idea. It will require a radical departure in use/interaction and might be seen as too controlled. PM had the advantage of doing this from the start (as far as I know) PM #244776
Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived there. Which was in the first few months.
It certainly works. I always go there ready to really think twice before I post & you learn. HN appears to be more OpEd a lot of the times.