zlacker

>>notion+(OP)
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.

It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.

These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

>>dang+c7
Perhaps the better idea than suppressing politics would be to have a week where technological discussion is encouraged and actively highlighted?

>>COGlor+G8
But isn't there already an official "clean" version of HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

>>threat+Cc
What's the difference?

>>jagger+vh
It's the same algorithm, but it only considers upvotes by users who registered before (checking the code...) December 13, 2008. That's long ago—only (checking the data...) 1.5% of HN accounts existed back then. Yet the "classic" frontpage is not that different from the main frontpage. This was the main conclusion when pg launched the feature: >>607271 , and again in 2011: >>2073513 .

What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.

>>dang+oz
It's an interesting result - it only counts upvotes by users from before December 2008 who are still active on the site

After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.

>>michae+M41
That's a good point. But there are a lot of users from 2008 still active on the site. It would be interesting to see how the attrition rate has changed over time, but I've never looked into that.