81–90 of 284 posts
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place…
For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
Good point. On reflection it resembles flocking behaviour. I imagine that website members can be modelled as simple agents with two rules: 1. A cool site has few, impressive members. 2. Move towards the cool sites. Given an arbitrary distribution of "impressive" members, this should cause a constantly moving flock of members to move from site to site regardless of its purpose .
Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :)
But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading. That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.
Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…
Interestingly, this isn't a problem related to any particular category of site. Hell, look at 4chan: bitching about newfags and how /b/ isn't good anymore, how /b/ was never good, different factions with different ideas on how to fix the problem (or what the problem is, or if there even is one), spinoff sites where the early adopters migrate to... This isn't an HN problem, it's an Internet problem. pg could probably…
I think a paraphrase of this sentence has appeared in HN comments 100's, perhaps 1000's of times.
For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal. Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else. As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site…
Stackoverflow operates under this principle, more or less, but it doesn't seem to entirely stop the slow decline.
I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we c…
The frontpage content is fine. I'm much more concerned about the comment quality.
As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation. As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible fo…
By design (I think?) HN is not about making good posts; it's exactly the opposite. It's about posting whatever link you happen to stumble across. The hope is that maybe the good posts will rise to the top via voting, and that comments will add value to bad posts. This is a really different idea! I'm not personally convinced that it's possible to get a high volume of visible good posts using this idea in an open general-interest community, because no matter what you do, there will always be more people ready to vote for popularized, lurid, and flamebait posts than good posts.
I think that distinction has much more of an effect on content than moderation. (Although if you've decided that you only want good posts, you probably need moderation to enforce your decision.)
Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.…
Just because this has been the typical website lifecycle in the past, doesn't mean that it has to be the typical website lifecycle in the future. We increasingly have better and better tools to manage how people interact with sites and communities. Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely…