HN: The Good Parts (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#81

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #78

PaulHoule wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those scores are not so interesting by themselves in that they were calculated based on votes at the time and aren't meant for comparing comments on different articles. (The top comment on a high-scoring article will automatically beat the top comment on a low-scoring article) I would rather like to see what Dan did scaled up 1000x or so: that is, have experts pick out a few of the best comments over the very long te…

is this actually feasible - if we push it beyond HN then it becomes trying to crowd source wisdom or deep expertise across human experience. The Anti-Social-Media-Algorithm? This sounds ... tempting...

The case of Wikipedia shows that efforts like that can be scaled but it's hard to find more examples.

A counter example is the old DMOZ directory which was a continuation of the tree-style Yahoo web directory.

That was subdivided into sections that were managed by "experts" (admins appointed to the sections) but the admins were lazy, corrupt or both. Even if they had been doing their jobs they would have been overwhelmed by hardly relevant "content marketing" submissions for web pages that are "200 OK", hot keywords, and a scam.

You have to draw from a spam-free pool.

For instance there is a data dump for stackoverflow

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-th...

personally i think stackoverflow is a junk web site full of more wrong answers than right answers and wouldn't it be nice to pick just the best answer to the question and not see the code sample at the top that didn't work that the original poster was asking about?

If you are a real programmer, I mean you are shipping, you write a unit test, if it doesn't work they are gonna send it back to you, you may learn the hard way that answer #1 is not right (the compiler said so!) and scroll through a lot of half-baked discussion before you find that answer #7 passed the unit test, the acid test, all the other tests -- you are an expert and your opinion is worth much more than the "crowd".

If "Road Scholars" like us were getting our experience fed back into Stack Overflow how different would it look?

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#82

Post by lewispollard » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:53 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #76

lewispollard wrote: post #22

HN comments, by and large, are extremely polite, and people are open to discussion, criticism, etc without resorting to insults, in my experience. I don't really see the sort of complaints brought up in the post here, well, ever, outside of the rare ghostly, semi-transparent comments that have already been flagged or filtered. You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how n…

> You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how nice and non-combative it is here Let me offer a counterpoint (I'm glad you didn't mention Twitter, because I'd have to really agree that Twitter is a Hate Machine. And I'll grant you YouTube as well, to a lesser degree): I use facebook mostly for its closed, special interest groups. For each of these groups, which are relativ…

I agree, the only thing I use Facebook for these days is 2 private groups on specific subjects. While they're incredibly good for the kind of support group style 'ask a specific question, get a quick answer' type of thing, they definitely suffer from the problems in the article - mostly people getting very defensive and combative when their comments are questioned or criticised. That may be a characteristic of the type of group I'm in though.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#83

Post by meristohm » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #69

meristohm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it okay to plateau? If HN keeps going, gaining and losing people over time and not growing above X% of the population, and eventually declining for whatever reason, that seems the way of things. Change happens, and the best we can do is guide it and prepare. It’s okay to live and then die.

It's cosmically ok for things to plateau, but from a local perspective I'd be concerned if HN were plateauing. It would mean that something else was wrong. Probably a lot else. The mandate of the site is to be gratify intellectual curiosity ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ). Any website achieving such a thing will naturally grow.

Thank you for the reminder about the intentional limits of this forum:

> One important thing to realize is that we're trying to optimize HN for just one thing, which is curiosity

I’ve found it easier to practice creativity, for example, if I impose some boundaries.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#84

Post by noxToken » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:57 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #67

noxToken wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites like HN tend to plateau unless there are added features to get new sign ups. Full-length profiles, social features like chat, reply notifications and following/subscribing to users are engagement tactics to keep the community engaged with each other. These are site improvements if the goal is to grow beyond the core audience.

HN has been growing at the same rate since shortly after it began over a dozen years ago: basically linear, with a lot of swings ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). We want the community to grow—it would be concerning if it didn't. But the engagement tactics you mention aren't necessary for the kind of growth we want. In fact we consciously avoid them. Certain kinds of engagement—prob…

Late reply, but I was speaking in generalities. HN doesn't quite fit the bill for a general forum that would improve from those tactics. There is a somewhat focused expectation of submissions, and the comments typically need a certain caliber of quality. Forums like this that deviate from those core tenets converge on being a Reddit clone with fewer users and features.

It's natural for users to engage less and less over time. However, holding the community to a certain standard keeps users from outgrowing the submissions and discussions. No one is too old, too mature, or too "smart" for earnest discussion.