I was just asking RiderofGiraffes if he had any suggestions for fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403449) and it occurred to me that I might as well ask everyone.
Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here.
The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted.
The only way to truly guarantee it would remain high quality would require credentials to use the site, or require invite/referrals, but then that has a whole host of its own problems.
I'm relatively new so I don't know what HN "used" to be like, but in the short time I've been here I've noticed it decline. It seems to me that more and more people who aren't knowledgable or have insights to offer are joining and people like jacquesm and riderofgiraffes are leaving. It was inevitable and has happened in every community I've ever used.
A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussions up, but I think enough people on here care about the quality of the community to help out.
Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?
Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was discussed.
Sadly that time has long gone. As I write this, on the front page of HN there are maybe 4-5 stories out of the top 30 that relate to startup topics.
Articles relevant to startups are being pushed out by generalist tech and programming articles that are better served by the many many subreddits on these topic. While it's open to debate whether these are on-topic on Hacker News or not, HN is far less about startups than it used to be.
Many contributors to HN don't even see it as being about startups anymore, even contributors who've been involved in HN for over a year are talking about it as a tech or programming site. The startup stories that reach the frontpage tend to be on technical topics, the non-startup tech audience of HN now means stories focused on the non-technical aspects of startups such as marketing and raising money make it to the front page far more rarely than they once did.
I remember complaining at one point about the number of stories about A/B testing on the front page. I wish I could complain about that now.
Take a look at Gabriel's Ask YC archive - it was created to address the startup questions that frequently turned up on HN, for many of these topics I can't recall when I last saw them discussed on HN.
There are a hundred social networking sites that serve the tech community from proggit to dzone, what differentiated HN was the focus on the startup community. That focus is dying out, and we're becoming just another tech social news site.
I don't think we can make HN be more about startups again, the audience has changed too much for that, and it wouldn't be fair to the non-startup tech community that's come to rely upon HN.
So instead I'd like propose that HN stays as it is, but pg creates a new HN called Startup News, which has startups at it's heart as HN once did.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly in the online communities that have scaled succesfully (in a cultural sense) is that the founders/owners/admins tend to take a very active role, both proactively by being role models and also by stepping in and settings things straight whenever they feel the community is straying too far from their vision. Reddit is a good example of this. Joel's forums at joelonsoftware, which fostered a very tightly knit entrepreneur community, were also heavily influenced by the omnipresence of the site owner.
Unfortunately this is not an elegant technical hack, just simple hard work on the part of administrators.
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, motivating bad behavior, and not relevant to why I come to HN.
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.
Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all.
I'd say:
* create some real cost to making comments
* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time
* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly
I don't value HN as a resource for entrepreneurship anymore. There are some interesting technical conversations here still; but you can find those all over the place.
(Of course there is still a lot of information of value for entrepreneurs here... it's just buried under the flood of everything else.)
That way the information is still accessible to everyone, and if someone new has something to interesting to contribute, that info will still surface if it's picked up by vetted users.
The positive mods can promote stories and comments beyond normal up-voting and the negative mods do something similar with down-voting/flagging.
People can become 'supermods' based on karma, election, or something more arbitrary.
Reddit has subreddits and you can choose the ones from which stories appear on the front page. HN can start with allowing users to 'frontpage' other users aka whitelisting by showing stories from only these users on the front page. The next logical step is allowing blacklisting. Version 2.0 of this would allow whitelisting and blacklisting of content-sources (sites), in addition to users, so that I could blacklist certain blogs if I wanted to.
This will result in some fragmentation of the community, but in my opinion, it will keep HN interesting for everyone. This may also reduce the need to answer subjective editorial questions such as - we don't allow politics, but is open-source-politics politics? Is coverage of world-changing-elections allowed?
How would have all of the now-members of both HN and the greater 'community' have stumbled upon this resource if it was invite-only?
A. "flag" for comments? Whether that just brings them to the editor/moderator's attention, or kills them based on some algorithm, would be an open question.
B. More moderators/editors - drawn from the pool of people who have shown themselves to share the "HN spirit" (or whatever you want to call it), who are empowered to kill stories and/or comments.
And maybe some limits on what new accounts can do? Maybe go so far as requiring new users to lurk for some period of time, before being allowed to post? Or some limit on post / comment frequency, until you've demonstrated some sense of alignment with what's appropriate here?
Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
"Common sense isn't all that common"
How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.
Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.
My feeling is that things aren't bad enough for radical change here yet, but if the right 5% are, it might be possible.
In other words: Moderators who enforce the spirit of HN and have the ability to just kill stuff. I'm really surprised this isn't happening already. If I go post some derogatory remark on a heavily moderated blog or forum, it's get's junked almost immediately.
Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your total number of comments) you'd actually get kicked off the site temporarily.
Two main problems: 1) everything is politics and current events. That is, everything touches in some way on what's going on in the world and how you feel about it. Maybe I'm applying too broad a brush, but I can see politics and current events in every post on HN -- and always have. About the only exceptions would be the driest of technical articles. If you want a board of Erlang innards, go for it. Other than that, it's always going to be Steve Jobs, EFF, which VC trashes which other, etc -- all gossip. (And gossip is just a broad term for current events and politics)
People post, comment, and vote based on emotional response. You can pretend to cut that out by banning, say, any mention of political parties or politicians, perhaps any pending legislation, and past legislation, how economics prevents or helps startup creation, etc -- but I think you'll just trade one monster for another.
2) I've been thinking about this for a while, and the key problem here is that the commenting system promotes learning how to fit into a community of hackers, not actually doing anything useful. We think of the system as being some sort of logical function to take all kinds of input and provide the "best" stuff for hackers, but it's exactly the opposite: it teaches hackers how to get votes from other hackers. In other words, spend 3 or 4 years on here, like JacquesM did, and if you're lucky you become an expert on what to say and do to make large groups of hackers agree with you. The karma system and large crowds isn't training the material to be more targeted to hackers -- it's training hackers on how to target other hacker's response with their material: how to fit in, what to post to get a rise, how to succeed without really trying, etc.
You can blame the topics for being too emotional, but I think it misses the point. We've always had all kinds of issues on here. What we're getting is a larger pool of people actively gaming the system in hundreds of ways: what kinds of snide comments might sneak by, what's the best time to run flame-war submissions, who to praise, what topics to champion or deride. That's a function of forum size, not system parameters. And that's not even getting into the fact that with a large enough audience, somebody is going to get pumped about just about anything that appears on the front page.
There's nothing nefarious about this. It's all just people being humans. After all, if you are in a conversation, do you speak in order to provide factual information? Or do you speak based on your current emotional state and to effect the emotional state of others? Why would we expect HN to be any different?
Nyah. That proposed rule -- if you could somehow miraculously define it with the precision required -- wouldn't give you the results you desire.
Obviously if the discussion on these threads is purely political then they probably shouldn't have a place here.
In other words - make votes precious.
That way people will think more about how to 'spend' their precious votes.
A similar thing works in poker. If you empty out your change jar and give everyone a fixed amount to start, and at the end of the game it all goes back in the jar, people play in a certain way. If you play for actual money, even just change, the gameplay does often change for the better, because their chips now have value.
At the moment we all have an infinite amount of votes to spend, so we can casually upvote anything we find briefly interesting - because our votes have no value to us.
By limiting the number available per day, we are forced to spend our votes more wisely.
Alternatively, making upvote decrement our karma will also add perceived value to the action of voting. However I think HN users care less about their karma scores so I think this approach wouldn't work as well as limiting users to N votes per 24 hours.
N can be fixed at, say 10, or increase with karma so 'better' users get more votes and thus more influence.
One very simple suggestion: an 'off topic' tab where stuff that does not fit the HN bill can be moved to. An 'offtopic' link similar to the 'flag' link for users with more than 5K karma, that answers the questions 'what do you get for karma' nicely as well too.
That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.
I myself tried this on TechCrunch and got up into the top 5 most "liked" commenters. All I did was post snarky, rude ass, criticizing, comments that appealed to the sarcastic douche bag within us all. It was easy. My faith in humanity vanished over that time period because it was so easy to do.
Cap the number of upvotes that a user gets each day and give explicit feedback on how many upvotes that they have left.
Find a few examples of comments that are unambiguously (a), (b), and (c) and have either you personally or someone you trust flag them as such. Next, take the set of all people who upvoted the abc-flagged comments. Their votes now have a 50% chance of not counting towards vote totals from now on, but in a way that the user isn't shown that their votes aren't being counted -- perhaps with an artificial "offset" vote that appears a few minutes later.
There's fun parameters one could throw in there too, like exponential decay on the likelihood of a vote being magically offset that spikes back up every time the user votes stupidly.
I've got no citation at all, but I'd bet that people who have N comments left in the next week will be more miserly about using them. You could also make exceptions for replying to replies and that kind of thing, so as not to artificially limit back and forth (which is sometimes a good thing; for example, tcptacek and zedshaw always have good conversations, if a bit argumentative).
It'd cut back on people who shotgun "funny" comments and have them land occasionally without disrupting people who try to only comment when they have something valuable to say.
A set of super voters would also be good, but, again, not super democratic.
0 - Ability to comment on threads
50 - Ability to upvote comments
500 - Ability to downvote comments
1000 - Ability to submit articles/stories
2000 - Ability to downvote articles/stories
etc. While this may reduce the number of incoming stories, perhaps there could be a way for power users to sponsor stories submitted by those who aren't able to submit them to the feed themselves. The more I think about it, the more I like this approach - create a queue of "pending stories" that anyone can submit to, but only those who have sufficient experience on the site can approve them (or remove them from the queue).
For those who say that I'd be pandering to myself here, note that I'm at 620 points right now - with this proposition I'd be reducing my current abilities. However I think that it's a small price to pay to improve the quality of submissions.
Anyone who's smart should be able to contribute w/o passing some sort of exclusionary bar.
Also, on the 'less democratic' idea, up-votes from users with more karma could be weighted heavier. Quality comments would rise up faster.
I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the declining quality of conversation owes to the fact that it's getting a bit stale. How many blog articles about productivity can we discuss without some decline?
I don't think we should ban political articles at all. In fact, I think less blog posts about "are we in a bubble?" and more articles on economics, science, philosophy, etc would make HN much more interesting. The median comment here is still of much higher quality than at sites like reddit. And although certain subjects can be sensitive, I doubt that banning these topics will actually reduce meanness, it will just make the change in decorum harder to notice.
Finally, a more extreme idea: why not add a second kind of vote? Perhaps we could vote comments agree/disagree in addition to up or down. These could be right and left arrows, to drive home the point that disagreeing with something ought to be orthogonal to whether it adds to the conversation. We could weigh these votes less, so that rankings more reflect how insightful we think something is, instead of how popular.
Start up and hacking are emotive subjects.
This seems to have worked well for stack overflow. Just spitballing here pg, but what if you extended this to commenting as well? HN could be open to browsing, but to comment, you needed to be invited by another member with x karma? You could quantify this by requiring 10 karma to comment and 100 to post, and allowing a user to gain x karma by getting an 'invite' from an existing user with 100 karma.
Of course, without data, it's hard to draw conclusions about the fundamental issues.
For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" in a thread discussing software projects) that is both information free and mean (perhaps Blub wasn't the author's preferred choice, but chosen for him or required in order to build an application for the iBlubber). People on this site generally dislike Blub, so the comment will get upvotes without adding any value to the discussion (an example of adding value would be saying you were able to do this in 100 lines of Flub using its cool new hygienic macros with a link to a paper on hygienic macros in Flub).
That's not to say all comment score data should be gone. Comment scores can still be kept and comments could be displayed on stories in the other in which they're displayed now (a mix of comment score and how recently it was posted). Generally, what I've found is that comments showing up _first_ tend to be of higher quality i.e., overall algorithm works more often than not.
[NB: I work at LinkedIn and we do this for connection counts-- we want users to network with each other, but we don't want to make it a "who has the most connections" game, that's why when you have over 500 connections (which is perfectly legitimate and allowed), only "500+" is displayed as the count on your profile]
a vague indicator instead of discrete values. People enjoy seeing their karma for a comment tick over from 3 to 4, but seeing a little thermometer rise by 1px is less noticeable and isn't so much something you can keep track of.
When you see your comment score increment, you know it's because a real human decided it was interesting - that's a good feeling, but it can encourage karma-whoring/playing karma like a game.
Have you ever seen a typical political debate? Those are driven by emotion. They're full of catchphrases and insults, and nothing of merit.
The comments should count as much as the articles do in determining if a particular topic is allowed on HN or not. Because the comments are just as important. To me, at least.
A big part of why I first started reading HN is the the comments in the articles. I could find the articles in half a dozen other places. Still can. But, the comments here aren't usually anywhere else.
And the best comments are typically better than the article itself. If the comments turn political and into people arguing politics with one another, thats not interesting to me anymore. I don't usually find the article being commented on to be very good, and the comments are even worse.
Seeing people argue politics just makes me close HN and find something else to use to kill the next few minutes. I've actually avoided reading articles that I likely would have otherwise found interesting just to avoid seeing the vitriolic comments that inevitably follow.
I wonder what would happen the guidelines or some sort of one-page community code of conduct were displayed when you actually created an account. Would that give users a better set of expectations? Or would they just click throug it like a EULA?
Maybe force existing users to click through it one time as a friendly reminder when the feature is introduced.
I think that if you look at the resulting conversations on those sorts of articles, it usually retreads extremely familiar territory.
Also, 90% of that kind of article I've ever seen tends to be someone "broadcasting" a view they agree with ( "hey, this guy's right on!" ) rather than presenting actual new research in economics.
Also, any article like that tends to be something anyone can have an opinion on, tending to attract people that are more interested in those sorts of discussions than about "hacker news".
IMO, at least.
One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.
Besides, I don't agree with the notion that mean-spirited or dumb comments or ideology-based downvoting/upvoting are limited to politics and current events. Any thread about iOS, Android, Microsoft etc. is also likely generate a lot of those comments and ideology-based up/down voting :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215549
The quality of discussion was much higher than on most posts today. And that was only a year ago.
So the more the people who flag stupid comments (instead of just downvoting), the more these comments should descend to the bottom, regardless of number of votes.
Threat upvotes/downvotes as currency and limit the amount of coins someone has in one day. If you have only five upvotes per day, you are going to start to think about how to spend them.
Closed doors, but glass walls.
Reading should be open to everyone, participating should not. No more new sign up unless they have an introduction or they submit a request and we can have a way of letting certain users approve.
Stackexchange kind of does this. You need a certain (low) amount of karma before you can post certain types of submissions.
I think it's important to let new users have a visible voice, but giving older users greater powers for moderation might help preserve the older attitude of the site.
An OP is motivated to keep their comment thread awesome: having better comments leads to more upvotes on the story. And, on a personal level, the OP would be less likely to upvote snark against their own story.
The obvious downside would be that the OP could effectively censor opposing ideas. However, I don't think this would happen that often: counterpoint comments generally do pretty well on their own, and would probably still rise to the top even without the OP's help. (Of course, the best OP's would recognize the benefit of discourse and promote these comments anyways... but not everyone is perfect)
I'm not advocating 20 different subjects, just one, 'offtopic'. The place where threads go that get too many upvotes to flag (because apparently they do interest people) and that do not contribute to the topics of 'startup' or 'hacking'.
It's either something like that or much more active moderation of the content.
As long as there is an identity that people find distinctive at HN, I don't think it will die.
All of the suggestions here kind of fit into that paradigm for me....how do you control/preserve identity?
- You could give old timers more control (downvoting)
- You could give newcomers less control until they prove themselves (no account creation just to upvote your friend's post)
- Enlist help in keeping tracking/managing the pulse of the community (like reddit, which has multiple admins on the lookout for issues)
Aren't founders as busy as they are in part because they hope to reach the top 1 percent of income in their country? I would want to know what my country's policies are toward high-income people, and what social trends are influencing those policies, if I were pursuing a high-wealth business result, as at least some founders are.
A user who upvotes ten comments a day should have far less impact per upvote than one with very high karma and a high average score who only upvotes infrequently (and is not involved in the thread).
I realise that you're asking about comments; I think that this applies equally to story submissions.
But look at it in a positive light - the comments on HN could never be classified in the same - or even near the same - bucket that comments on sites like YouTube and Yahoo! News.
I paused for a second at the privacy implications of this, but honestly all comments are submitted here with the assumption that they will forever be visible and subject to moderation or critique.
Naturally this would have to be kept secret, since it'd invariably lead to a potential voting ring issue.
I'm only half joking. Fundamentally, the thread is about a filtering system.
For example, bloggers who write insightful stuff on a regular basis should get some sort of bonus when content from their domains is upvoted early on. Maybe each upvote would internally count as 1.5 upvotes for the first 100. Similarly, bloggers who have a reputation for writing linkbait should get some sort of penalty.
Right now you can easily spend ten hours writing an amazing blog post and have it not even make the front page. This provides an amazingly strong disincentive for intelligent people to contribute, especially when the front page is dominated by vapid current events gossip. The heart of the problem is that the current system is set up to reward people for submitting garbage from TechCrunch and to punish people who try to make thoughtful contributions of their own.
Similarly, content that takes longer to read should stick around on the new page for longer. Otherwise the front page gets dominated by fluff. Again, there are lots of people who would be willing to spend 10+ hours writing a 3,500 word essay designed to benefit the HN community, but they don't because they know that there is essentially zero chance of it hitting the front page. Right now by the time the first few people finish reading, it's no longer on the new page so any upvotes basically count for nothing. This problem gets vastly worse as the amount of content submitted increases, so if nothing changes then we're probably only a couple more iterations away from having the front page be dominated by pictures of cats.
On the other hand, I've been ridiculously productive the last few months now that HN is basically unreadable, so maybe the decline in quality isn't such a bad thing after all.
Please label it "the gruseom button".
As far as making it longer, I usually click over to the second page of new submissions before I give up. I have no idea if that's typical, though. Perhaps you could keep track of how many pages people usually look at?
The old weights were ok for the more engaged users we had a year ago, but now the ratio of votes to flags on a fluff story tends to be a lot higher.
a) If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member, delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment gained. That is something that can only be done by someone with curator powers here, but the rest of us can be encouraged to flag such comments more, and reminded not to upvote them.
b) If the comment is dumb, make a better comment in the same thread and downvote the dumb comment, especially if the dumb comment already has significant karma accrued. Anyone who has downvoting power (and user who has made many upvoted comments) can do all of that, and anyone who can post a comment can do some of that. Again, the curators can remind users from time to time to maintain those standards.
c) All users can browse the bestcomments list
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
to search for massively upvoted comments that are still within the downvoting time limit, and downvote those that are mean or dumb. Curators can delete those comments as needed.
Example and reminders go a long way. (By the way, because I, and I suppose most users, don't read this site exhaustively, I'm not fully aware which recent comments may be the most problematic. But definitely feel free at any time to provide me or other users with advice on how to raise the quality of comments here.)
After edit: another comment from another user in this thread prompts me to ask whether all new users who sign up see the site guidelines automatically or not. That might also help a little, if it isn't already done. Posting links to the site guidelines in threads with problems might also help.
I believe in the Quaker rule, "Only speak when you can improve the silence." Other people think speech is like squatting on land. You have to speak to gain footing. By charging people for the privilege of speaking, you make them consciously decide whether what they have to say is worth the $5 to join. They will probably say no.
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 open question, but I suggest validating them some other way (solve a problem in Lisp perhaps).
I was one of those complainers. And that was then; this is now. I'm not sure I'd complain if the points went away again.
Today I find that comment scores are no longer a reliable guide to anything I care about. Something has changed -- most likely just the scale of the whole system.
Give finite invitations to your YCombinator classes and alumni. Have them pass out invites to people they know. Give out more invites when you think you need them. At least this reroots the site back in the "Startup News" seed.
* articles with disproportionately few comments per upvote are sometimes the most interesting
if you can get low-content articles off the front page faster, and more interesting non-pop articles visible longer, it would probably attract the hacker community more and the pop community less.
misc ideas:
* remove all system incentive to submit links
* change UI to increase visibility into user history, so that reputation becomes even more important, and low-quality activity sticks with you for a while
* fix the new page! incent people to upvote new links, or a creative UI hack like a single new submission at the top (e.g. "sponsored" on reddit)
You seem to dislike the non-startup material, yet those older members who were around at that time must have liked the discussions sprouting from the "more generalist tech" posts, else the name wouldn't have been changed.
Thus, I reason that it is not the range of topics submitted that is the problem, but the quality of the posts and subsequent comments. I believe the older members valued intelligent discussion on any topic (centered around tech-startups).
I think a solution should concentrate on improving the discussion of topics, promoting those that spark the "best" (for some definition of "best") conversations. Therefore I suggest:
More liberal use of the downvote button by those that have the ability (over 500). Number and score of comments should play a (larger?) factor in ranking stories. More aggressive moderation of "off topic" or vacuous submissions and comments.
When you hover the up arrow button a tooltip should say "This comment ADDS to the discussion" and on a down "This comment DOESNT ADD to the discussion". Too often I think people just click the arrows based on (1) the username (2) "oh ya I agree, I hate that too!".
Up/down voting should be an extension of the community's ability to assess whether someone's opinion is adding to the community thought process. We often forget that (I do myself).
Another suggestion is the ability to downvote submissions after a certain karma threshold. We can use the weighted vote system here as well.
Yet another suggestion is 12 hours/24 hours/1 week bans.
Another problem that I admit facing is the unwillingness to post something with the fear of it not getting upvoted and thus affecting my average karma, even though it might have added value to the discussion.
blue = hardcore hacker stuff
turquoise = industry-related light reading
biege = acceptable entrepreneur/political commentry
red = fluff, stuff we could do without
black = meta (eg. this thread)
That's a pretty healthy mixture if you ask me. Only about 10-15% or the articles are unworthy of HN, and even that's debatable. The majority is technical stuff, with a few valuable pieces on business/economics in general sprinkled in.
So although some people seem to think the quality of comments is declining, I still believe HN provides phenomenal quality in its capacity as 'news for hackers.'
I'm not sure if changing the rules will do much good; it might have the opposite effect. I think there's pro-active measures we can take which might prove best, like: finding interesting people and inviting them to HN. Quora would be a good recruitment ground.
One last point, I think the role of the founder/leader is very important to online communities. I've been in other forums which went to absolute shit once the 'pg-equivalent-person' ditched them in favour of Twitter. More essays from Paul Graham, perhaps ones talking about online behaviour/ethos, would be a big benefit :-)
Even better, deduct everybody's vote on it from their karma. So downvoters get +1, and upvoters get -1.
Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.
It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't correlate with good.
I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some that don't. See how this affects the results.
2. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself, then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy voting is the sole purpose of the follow graph, eg. "I want to vote the same way tptacek, cperciva and pg do".
Perhaps publish a leaderboard of top followed people and their voting history to try and avoid a Digg situation.
Perhaps limit the number of people one person can follow. This would help with performance as well.
Perhaps the number of proxy votes would need to affect the score of a comment or submission logarithmically instead of linearly.
Edit: there may need to be a minimum level of karma needed to proxy vote to avoid sockpuppets. Perhaps limit it to active accounts, too.
HN Karma can be retooled to give people a certain number up/downvotes as well as a rate of regeneration. Perhaps new users will get 3 upvotes a day and no downvotes. Upvotes need to be rebranded so that users understand that they are not the mechanisms of popularity contests or flame wars.
This is my vision, feel free to take from it what you will: "HN tokens are for you to use to make this is most intelligently crowd-curated site known to the English language.If you find a post or comment that helps you to solve a problem, see another point of view, or expand your thinking, drop a token in to promote it. However, if you are found among those using your tokens to add fire to flame wars or to reward comments that have no creative or intellectual value, your token regeneration rate will be reduced. Choose wisely."
For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign three points and so on. Users should be able to decide how many points they want to give to each comment.
The same should apply to downvotes. Prominent HN users should be able to make their downvotes "hurt more" if they want to.
Also, these thresholds could be used for "downvoting penalties". For example, a newbie would lose 4 points when downvoting, but a user over the first threshold would only lose three and so on. Users with karma above one of the thresholds would no longer lose karma when downvoting.
alex is right that automatically escalating based on #flags is a blunt instrument. You'd need to perform the escalation manually, you'd need multiple people doing it, and you'd need the decision-maker to attach their name to it ("kn0thing marked this uncivil") so the watchers can be watched in a lightweight manner.
This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.
There is only one real solution, which is to reduce size.
You can do that by closing new signups, which is a little bit like tying rope around a girls feet to prevent them from growing. Not great, and probably leading to rot.
Or you can do that by fragmenting up the conversations. Reddit has the rather primitive subreddit system. It works somewhat. A better system is Twitter's follow or Facebook's friend systems.
In either case, if you do this, the result would be something quite different from the old HN. The uproar would be great, and lots of people would leave.
The alternative is the slow death of online communities with scale. I just don't think that tweaks in the comment-karma system are going to solve this problem.
Good luck!
For me, I came to HN for:
* A free, online location where people can exchange ideas and commentary relevant to tech startups, that welcomes newcomers and experienced alike.
Perhaps it's different for others:
* A place to collect points to boost one's ego and sense of self-worth in front of peers.
* A paid site for members of a small community to exchange topics in a way closed to outsiders
* A place for those who have earned a role as experts or taste-makers to evaluate and/or judge the ideas of others.
Looks like there's no consensus, hence the reason for HN's decline.
Edit: I like my later thoughts on this better (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404267)
I've thought a lot about why, since I used to really enjoy HN - now it's just one of a few newssites I visit every day. It's hard to quantify but here are my reasons and my take at the decline:
1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down. The problem is twofold - there are both more bad comments, and the ones that are good aren't necessarily voted to the top. This makes it harder for me to find the nuggets that would be shown at the top of every comments page a year or two ago. As others have pointed out it sound easy but is in fact a very hard problem to solve.
2) The interaction in the comments is less interesting. I used to have great arguments in the comments. Sometimes I would convince someone of my point of view sometimes it was the other way around, sometimes there just wasn't agreement to be found. But it was always interesting and civil, and I very often learned something new. Engaging in, and watching others have interesting discussions was for me one of the main things I loved about HN. It's like when you go to a dinner party and get to sit next to this incredily interesting guy that is exceptionally insightful and has some really interesting things to say. The conversation leaves a mark on you.
3) I often find that the comments I make that I personally find insightful or interesting don't get a lot of upvotes, while the ones that state something obvious or funny get more upvotes. This isn't encouraging me to interact with people here on an intellectually interesting level. If others do this as well, which I suspect they will, then it's extremely degrading to the discourse in the comments. I often find that I don't bother to write up a response to something because I know won't get a lot of attention. Sometimes my points are totally missed.
4) Maybe I've outgrown the site. Many concepts that were new to me when I joined HN are now familiar, and many discussions have already been had. RiderofGiraffes describes it well in the linked comment.
I owe a lot to HN, and I really want it to succeed, so I stick around and hope that things will change. But for now it's from a less engaged position.
Define bad comment : A comment which has either or both of the properties 'mean' and 'dumb' and is 'massively upvoted.'
Define Hacker News Health : The ratio of non-bad to bad comments.
In previous systems this function has been addressed by moderation whereby a speaker for the culture has the authority to remove comments deemed to be 'bad' and thus by gardening the experience make it more 'good' for the participants. Not a system that scales well.
I see a number of comments "Is this just another Reddit?" which suggests that from a culture perspective there are immigrants from other groups who bring a different definition of 'interesting' which has enough support from the group to prevent them from being pruned early.
That suggests an experiment.
Add east west buttons to comments, and perhaps topics as well. Notionally the value of 'east' is 'more like Hacker News' and the value of west is 'more unlike Hacker News'. Let readers vote on what they see as being more or less what they expect to see. Track their 'east/west' karma (perhaps we could call it there 'wings' with a nod to left-wing and right-wing).
One could imagine then creating a 'fog' effect much like trending topics are moved to the top of the page we could move top left topics to the top of the page and top right topics to a new page. In the ideal world people would self select which page they were more interested in, and HackerNews could in fact develop a community much like Reddit algorithmically with their own start page and their own high karma posters.
Could provide an interesting space to explore if nothing else. Probably a publishable paper in the results if someone were so inclined to go there.
The community will act differently if they know others can see their behavior. Then again this may have negative effects.
I think that in general I'd be more thoughtful when voting comments up or down if I knew others could see.
But over time people took it to mean hacker in the technology sense of the term, and thus we now get reviews of Ubuntu on the front page, which you would never have seen a few years ago.
My perception of the flag button now is that it's the bat-signal; it means that something is so bad that it actually warrants individual admin attention.
I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."
Have you thought at all about discerning between vote value based on some metric? You'd need something that doesn't disproportionately disadvantage new users.
Karma might be worth it, but a: I don't think posters value it THAT much, and b: this doesn't prevent stupid comments that are likely to gain popular support. In fact it might encourage it.
Instead I would say that a user gets a limited supply of comments to post. Then, the user must decide if their 'lol this made my day' comment is worth giving up a portion of a limited resource.
Determining the appropriate way to limit comment supply without a major negative impact on positive replies is the tricky part. Karma, membership length, submissions and comments could calculate into the figure. Is the figure reset every day, week, month? I don't know. Hopefully this works as brainstorming food.
"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything... Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them... Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well."
So why not write an essay on how to build large online communities?
Currently it's the tyranny of majority. Suggestion for b (possibly intensive processing): Change comment display order depending on your previous voting.
A) My understanding is that "formal culture" is the historical human antidote to trying to interact with large numbers of folks they don't know all that well. Older, more densely populated parts of the globe tend to be more formal than American culture. Yet American culture is the primary influencer of many online communities, including this one. The assumptions made by a less formal culture and the practices which grow out of them start to cause problems when you don't actually know people that well and it simply isn't possible to know everyone here all that well with 100k uniques a day.
B) "Greet people warmly at the door": The general assumption that the ill-mannered newcomers are The Problem tends to promote the problem. Greeting people warmly who are new to the site and speaking with them gives them opportunity and motive to learn the culture and try to fit in. Talking trash about how they are mucking up the place and studiously ignoring them until you are ready to chew them out gives them every reason to behave badly or to assume no one really notices or cares what they do and little opportunity to learn to fit into a polite culture. They don't ever even get to experience the polite culture. All they experience is rejection, insults and such themselves. "Eternal September" isn't because there are new people. It is because the new people don't get inculcated. Hating them on sight and giving them a hard time for simply being new (which is the undercurrent of a lot of posts here) is a major fail if you want to preserve a valued culture. Culture is not preserved by just hanging on to the old folks. It is preserved by teaching it to the new people and helping it grow in a healthy manner.
I'm sure there's more but that's what readily comes to mind and, right this very minute, I'm not up to giving it more thought or time and effort.
I can't see it working here, for a number of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
But this?
the duplicate posts which happen a few months later
Once we're up to a timescale of months, or even weeks, we're no longer being sensible. Instead we're exhibiting FAQ Syndrome: The irrational fear that someone, somewhere, is saying something that isn't entirely original.
I think the cult of originality is actually a big problem at HN, and other "news" sites as well. The important things in life are not particularly original, and they do not change particularly quickly. A site that is determined not to re-discuss previous topics is doomed to discuss nothing but ephemeral trivia. The great thing about celebrity gossip is that it is always new! We can manufacture celebrities at whatever rate is needed to keep the front page fresh. But we can't manufacture Knuths as needed; we've only got the one set of Maxwell's equations; new books on the scale of K&R or SICP don't come along every day. But if we discourage the constant reexamination of these classics they will get placed on the dusty shelves and we'll see nothing but discussions of the latest gossip and bling. You know, like we have today.
I always wished HN would feel more like academia, which cycles like the seasons. Every year, you discuss all the classics again for a new audience of newbs. After a little while, you've heard all the classics and are ready to graduate, or become a professor. This is what makes me miss the days when this was "Startup News" and was more explicitly tied to the YC cycle, the time when you could tell that a new YC class was starting by watching for the influx of new people.
Users should live or die by their votes on that comment. If you vote up the blub comment, you should personally get the downvotes for it too. Upvotes should expose you to the karmic downside of superficial comments.
Especially because the really good comments, the ones most deserving of upvotes, don't seem to get a lot of downvotes; watch the scores on a 'patio11 comment closely sometime to see an example.
I think a new user should, by default, get "read-only" access. Once the account ages, so the user sees what is acceptable behavior, should you get write-access.
Another idea is to actually make good the name of the site (Hacker news). EITHER a) Show us you actually are a hacker-- do you build things, or just troll? Is your relation to technology deeper than "I read techcrunch?" This could be a simple matter of adding a text-field or a mandatory homepage/startup URL field, and asking (say) 3 longtime HNers to decide if the "applicant" is interesting enough to the HN community.
OR b) get invited by a long-time HN-er to join (There should be a strong disincentive to invite indiscriminately: for instance, everytime a person you invite gets downvoted, you lose 0.2 karma points).
I know, this scheme sounds elitist. And it is. Yet, I can't think of a single interesting HN-er this would filter out.
By requiring some karma to upvote people would probably contribute more low quality comments hoping to gain the karma required to contribute in other ways.
The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is continually posted. Many interesting posts fall off the bottom of the new page within an hour - a post has to quickly appeal to lots of people, or it's gone. This leads to lowest-common-denominator submissions.
Instead of moronic "first post!" comments, we've got a plague of "first submission!"s.
The sum of the scores on the new page divided by the oldest's age may be a good metric. Currently, the total is 217, and the oldest two say "1 hour ago" and "2 hours ago", roughly 90 minutes. That's only 2.4 points per minute, and this thread (118 points, 1 hour ago) is a major outlier; without it, it's 1.1 per minute.
Whether you make submitting articles cost karma (3-5 points?) and/or add a penalty for posting an article that was subsequently flagged and deleted, fewer dull submissions would improve discussions. (It would also help with spam.)
Minimum comment length of ~50 words.
This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer, better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.
I note that the /old experiment (a Hacker News whose voting data set was limited entirely to accounts > 1 year old) demonstrated no obvious improvement in quality.
It seems to be entirely a question of the public choice of what is acceptable content to submit.
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.
This allows you and the mods to set the tone for comments.
Of course, the weak point is - moderators bias may show up. And a worthy comment may be marked as not useful occasionally. So depending on the number of moderators you have, you could make it so that the minimum criteria is x number of moderators have to mark a comment as not useful.
The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones.
Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.
If voting on a comment gives karma to the commentator and it takes karma to vote, then people would need to comment to vote. I think this type of zero sum game would increase the number of poor comments from people who want to vote and an increase in poor comments is what we are trying to prevent.
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-Farm...
If you read that book and then look at HN, it's clear how its design encourages behaviors that are not aligned with the goals of the community managers.
The idea is to reward people who are writing good stuff but who aren't making the front page, not to reward people who already have all their stuff upvoted.
When someone points one of these issues out, I often feel bad about it. However, I usually don't edit my comment to remove or reword the offending portion because I think it's rude to the person replying and, oddly enough, those who later read it. Because they've made a good point, if I fix up my post it breaks continuity, possibly makes them sound like an idiot, and feels like I'm trying to cover up my lameness.
If I got a similar note that was private I'd feel free to make the changes without as many of those worries. Especially without concern for how they'd take it as presumably they're looking for me to shape up not score points on my misbehavior. I also think that some people that might say something are loathe to reply publicly in fear of just making it worse.
Of course it could seriously backfire if people used it just to be mean back without fear of the community observing. But it seems like it might be worthy of trying.
For A you might try making commenting cost karma in certain situations.
For B I've got no ideas. I'm thinking about how I sometimes will write an emotionally charged email and then wait a day before sending it because I know I'm unable to think clearly. Emotions will have cooled by then and the email looks like it was written by a crazy person. There's not any way to force delays on commenting that I can think of since the articles and discussions here move so fast.
When I first discovered HN, I quickly learned by various cues that this is not a place to drop sarcastic, one-line zingers, but rather a place to act as you would in a real-life business setting. The cues included both the example of the dominant commenters, and their chiding of non-conforming commenters. Over time, with the growth of the site, there are proportionally fewer commenters setting a strong example, and more commenters lowering the bar and getting away with it.
We are conditioned to feel that democracy = good, but in online communities I do not believe it is the case. Rather, when there were more "good" commenters, democracy was on your side. The "good" commenters had the power of numbers. Now, increasingly, the unconditioned, lower-quality commenters are beginning to gain the power of numbers. In order to counter this, you must provide the "good" commenters with a some other type of power.
You could hand select a number of members, based on your personal knowledge of their historical comment quality, and how much you think they reflect the HN that we want. Give them the ability to super-downvote. This status does not need to be public. It's not a status-symbol. As a bonus, this could give the exemplary members some small incentive for sticking around, by making them feel like they can do something meaningful to fight for HN, beyond just complaining.
Also, Eliezer has dealt with this problem quite a bit, rather successfully, IMO. Maybe ask him.
A slightly more interesting idea would be to temporarily ban any member that does very anti-guideline things from posting for a little while, coupled with an explanation as to why they were banned. Even an hour-long ban may be effective. The GameFAQs boards do this, and while they have their own problems, not following the guidelines isn't one of them.
How to do this exactly? Not sure. But I'm confident that fighting it more will improve any site.
Up-vote score = sum(karma of up-voter)
Down-vote score = sum(karma of down-voter)
Score is displayed in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute score would be the same method as we're currently using. The relative score is presented as a part of the whole.
Something like [+++++++|--] could represent the ratio of the positive score to the negative score (which are the weighted scores based upon karma).
And, as a possibly added benefit, taking this approach enables the ability to reduce the karma level before allowing of down-voting, making people feel like they're able to participate more-fully earlier.
That is interesting. Take it one step further: if this is set up (or if it is already), requiring them to pass a short quiz can ensure they actually read it with comprehension.
http://erlanginside.com/hacker-news-full-of-erlang-articles-...
This gives you some of the effect of what I think would be the best solution -- limiting the site's scope significantly -- in that it would give you things which people found interesting but weren't so general that everyone felt they could comment on them.
I think this would work well in conjunction with some of the other ideas in the thread which reduce the number of upvotes people are likely to give (specifically, a cap on the number of upvotes and a visual cap on the display of upvotes).
This adds a cost to upvoting just like the "N upvotes per day" ideas (which I like a lot).
I can spend all day writing a post that has no substance, garners upvotes (in today's HN climate) and is as long as the day, but that doesn't make it good, or worthwhile.
Many of my short remarks are actually more to the point, or are asking a relevant question, or are politely correcting errors. It takes considerably fewer words to do this sort of thing than it does to be mean, while trying not to look like it.
Sometimes I don't know if I am being downvoted because I am being too vicious (I get carried away from time to time) or because I am just completely wrong.
Not sure what is behind the paywall, e.g. commenting only, or commenting and upvoting. You can try a few combinations.
The difference is that to get even one or two stories a week on the front page of Digg, you basically had to devote your entire life to the site. Whereas getting 100 karma doesn't take more than a couple weeks of casual use.
The problem occurs when you start reading into a nested thread of comments. Users will sometimes argue 4 or 5 times back and forth, often becoming mean and uncivil. What results is a somewhat personal discussion among a few people that doesn't fit in with the rest of the thread. While the quality may actually increase the deeper you go into a thread, the relevancy to the original thread decreases (which matters most).
I think that this behavior is what is hurting HN's overall quality. Uncivil and deeply nested threads like these are hard to keep track of and deeply get out of control.
The solution:
- hide deeply nested threads (greater than 3 or 4 comments deep) and
let the users choose to show them
- promote commenting in higher threads (this will come as a result
of hiding deeply nested threads)
- hide or lessen the visibility of threads consisting of comments
from only 2 or 3 peoplea group benevolent dictators is needed
To add to that, lionhearted posted a comment about inevitable site decline because of open membership and equally weighted voting. What if only accounts over 1 year could vote (or diminish their vote weight)?
Wouldn't instituting a min. length requirement and taking away new user voting improve the problem significantly?
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 going to be here for a while. Good luck PG, I hope you can find a way to reduce the mean-spiritedness fluff, and make HN more pleasant again.
Also perhaps if a comment was controversial (i.e. lots of up and down votes), a list of the first users who upvoted it could be added next to the comment, e.g. "userA, userB, userC and 27 others upvoted this". That way, a stupid comment would be like the plague, nobody would want to be one of the first to upvote it (and therefore put their name next to it), and so it would quickly sink.
If this were my product then I'd try to gather a corpus of bad comments, selected outside of the vote system (because the problem is that voting might be broken). While I was at it, I'd also find out the good comments, because promoting good comments might be just as good and easier than getting rid of the bad comments. After that, I'd try to figure out what counts as a good vote or a bad vote, because the problem probably doesn't really lay with the comments themselves, but rather how people vote against them. Bad comments aren't really a problem if the vote system does a good job of spotting them.
Then I'd take a careful look at comments and votes:
- Is the distribution of good comments / bad comments even throughout the set of commentators, or are there users who are dependably good or dependably bad? If it is a lumpy distribution then you can use that. I'm guessing that everyone makes dumb comments, and there is something with the system that inflates the scores of bad comments compared to good comments as more people can vote. But I'm also guessing that only so many people are capable of leaving good comments too. Get the data and find out for sure.
- Do the vote scores that these comments get a reflection of the quality? If the votes are, then maybe the system isn't as broken as you think. If they aren't, then you've got a lead on the problem - you can look at the bad comments that get lots of upvotes and try to suss out what is going on.
- Do high-karma voters do a better job of finding good / bad comments that average? If they are better, then maybe you give them more weight. If they aren't then you'd have to shelve that idea.
- Are there people good at commenting but bad at voting, and vice-versa?
- Are there people who are good at upvoting, but not at downvoting, or vice-versa?
It's all sort of tedious, but basically I'd advise leaning on the data and make decisions based off of that. I'm pretty sure that if you dig in a bit something is going to really stick out in a big way. Once you've found that, then you can build a feature / change around that.
It appears to me that most of the URL submissions are just tech blog websites using HN as a tool to drive traffic. There are even users out there that just wait for a new blog post by jacquesm so that they can post it for free karma. I think in situations like this, karma and voting become less useful because people will up vote just so that something might land on the front page, for traffic.
This leads me to another trend I see a ton in #startups. Somebody will create a new submission and link it on IRC and ask for free up votes so that it gets more visibility. Once again, this is where up votes aren't being used properly. But, I also think it highlights a potential difficulty for valuable new submissions - it's difficult to get that initial visibility and up votes. Perhaps to remedy this, make the "/newest" section be the default section, and move the highest voted to something that you have to navigate to. This will at least highlight new entries for people just hitting the main URL.
However, I suppose you could argue that valuable content would be blocked to some extent, it a knowledgeable contributor was put off because s/he didn't have time for a longer comment. Still, 50 words isn't much, or 30, 25... anything above the average sentence length I suppose would start to have the desired effect.
1) Despite guidelines, people vote up comments they agree with. If they have enough karma, they vote down ones they disagree with. There's little you can do to change such a situation
This is inadequate — sometimes you can see interesting and informative posts up the top; sometimes interesting posts have a relatively low comment score, simply because they are controversial. The more specific and detailed a post is, the more chances they have to offend (or just not overall agreement), and the more chances they have to get a downvote/not be voted on. If a comment is very general, (eg "How awful.") it will be a lot less controversial, and thus more get more votes.
On the other hand, it can be useful to see comment scores as a barometer to popularity — which framework/language/cool solution for a specific problem is upvoted the most can be genuinely useful information.
This is a problem that many sites that implement "voting" have. I'm not entirely sure of what a solution can be. One might be that there be two metrics — one for interestingness/helpfulness/what the guidelines are for anyway. The other for whether you agree with a post(/find it funny). There are potential problems with this idea, for instance, it complicates voting (the simplicity of a vote increasing a comment's score is one that everyone can understand). However, I think that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
2) Comment threads that try to be increasingly funny, with signal to noise ratio decreasing with every increase in depth. I often find myself scrolling down past a lot of uninteresting and unimportant comments to get to the next comment that isn't part of the first thread. This is a little harder to tackle, as sometimes good comments can be revealing deep in a thread full of mediocre ones, making it difficult to just fold comments part a certain level. Perhaps only fold when most of the comments are under a certain threshold (like 5 points)?
Problems in politics have led to startups like Votizen and OpenCongress.
Where there is a problem there is a startup. And where there is a problem that people are willing to pay money for a solution there is a business model.
Note: Thanks to Incubomber.com members and Aaron Burrow for coming up with these ideas.
The specific problems that were being addressed:
1. Karma is given for link aggregation instead of content creation. Consider the user that is lucky enough to be the first to realize that you have posted a new essay on PaulGraham.com. That user will instantly post the link on Hacker News, and is guaranteed to gain a ton of karma. But aren't you more deserving of that Karma?
2. Community bias crushes the little guy. It seems that a bot is constantly running on Hacker News that matches titles against the regular expression "`YC ?[WS]?\d{2}`i" and automatically adds karma until it reaches the home page. But what makes news about a Y Combinator startup any more interesting than another startup? Some power users have a similar effect on the community. This predisposition makes it excessively difficult for unknown users to establish themselves.
3. Up votes are given where up votes are not deserved. It’s hard to blame the users, though. If someone makes a hilarious submission, it certainly deserves some recognition. Similarly, if someone reiterates a widely known fact, it still feels right to express agreement. Unfortunately the only way to communicate these feelings is by placing an up vote, which is not the proper way to place votes and detracts from the quality of the community.
The solution was Anonymerit.com (Never launched, but one of us may get to it eventually.)
Anonymerit.com Eliminating Bias While Evaluating Credibility
What is Anonymerit? Anonymerit is a new type of community where submissions earn merit anonymously. At the end of each month, the top submissions will be compiled and published with their author revealed (optionally). (Kudos to Hacker Monthly, we may have swiped this from you)
How does Anonymerit work? Anonymerit is focused on content creation rather than content aggregation. All submissions and comments are the original work of their author, but Anonymerit will withhold their identity. Submissions are kept anonymous so the community can evaluate the content's credibility without introducing bias towards "noobs" or "power users," a symptom that plagues many communities as they become more established.
To evaluate a submission, users can participate in two polls with simple plus ('+') and minus ('-') options. The first poll evaluates the popularity of a submission. In general, this is used to determine if the community agrees with a post. The second poll evaluates the merit of a submission. For this poll, a '+' is used to indicate that the submission was thought provoking, informative, and insightful. A '-' is used for submissions that focus on widely known ideas, or are simply reposted content.
This separation is imperative because it allows users to quickly express their feelings at a granular level. The total scores can reveal that a submission is generally disliked but still worth reading, or that nearly everyone agrees but the content is already well-established and does not need to be reiterated.
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A monthly publication combined with anonymous postings is awesome. The publication is required because it motivates people to post their original content on HN rather than their own sites. Entrepreneurs, knowing that investors will inevitably be reading the publications, would kill to write quality content that makes it into the publication. This same fact also serves as motivation to properly vote and comment on submissions. YC already has a huge name, but imagine how much bigger it can be with a renowned publication.
The anonymous aspect is good because it lets people post anything without the fear of being stomped on by PG. In the end, you're only really looking for the best, and you can still find that through the publication. It's a win win.
Another problem is what the comments are about. It's more a matter of Objectivity vs Subjectivity. At first the point of a comment is to give a point of view about the article and then discuss about it. I have found that now it is more a matter of who has the best point of view and that if it is contrary to the majority; it will fail. Thus resulting in multiple pointless comments, giant upvoting for the one who "blasts" the one with a different point of view and so on.
Filtering may be a solution, but if the problem can;t really be solved with an algorithm due to the human nature, it is a matter of a longer brainstorm...
The effect this has is twofold. It grants some incentive to posters who start comment threads, rather than making just single comments which are likely to strike more users' upvote chords. It also reduces the tendency to blindly upvote or downvote based on agreement or for dumb humor.
If there's no incentive, there's no race.
I, personally, also like the up-votes costing karma. It'd make the act much much more costly to perform, so high voted comments will be more likely to be selected on content than laughs.
I make a lot of lousy comments, because I don't really have a lot of respect for the quality of discussion here. But, you know, if I got private feedback a few times -- even from people who were powerless to punish me -- that my comments were bad, then I would actually stop.
So I'd prefer the addition of some sort of barrier to entry. Either an invite system like the private file-stealing sites use, a sign-up fee like Metafilter uses, or a vetting process for potential members.
Ideally, I'd love to see Paul Graham take a couple hundred of the best users and start a new forum. After they had some time to establish the community, people like me could apply for membership, which would involve submitting a written case, and waiting a week for the existing members to vote on it.
*This was originally a reply to lionhearted, who deleted his perfectly reasonable post.
I'm surprised to hear someone as experienced as you say that. I've only been online since 1997.
All successful internet communities seem follow a common life cycle:
* Early adopters seem to be good
* They attract more users
* Someone pines for the old days
* Earnest discussions start about how to "save" the community
Here things bifurcate:
* Descent into infinitely recursive navel gazing with site population following a visible half-life; OR
* Equilibrium is reached after a certain number of the early adopters leave.
I imagine this can be modelled as stocks-and-flows. It would be interesting to see if there are any predictable tipping points or at least observable, predictive metrics.
We're getting politics, in short, even if by a different name.
In this case the problem seems to be an influx of new users that don't completely understand what the site's about. It seems to me the best response is to more actively encourage good commenting from new users. My suggestion is inspired by stackoverflow. Over there, below a certain karma threshold, users must submit their edits to be reviewed by others. It might be beneficial to do the same thing for, say, a user's first 10 comments. They would submit a comment, a more experienced user reviews it and gives feedback if necessary. That way new users are forced to learn a little bit about what the community values in a comment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351266
First of all if you want to create an account you have to wait for the mods to announce application submission dates.
If you can manage to create an account during that period, you are made a 'rookie' and what you submit to the message board is invisible to everyone, except mods. You are only allowed to post a total of 10 messages.
When you are done posting your first entries, you wait for mods to read and evaluate the value you bring to the platform and if you keep within the format & legal limits of the board. If so, you are made a normal user.
A similar process would especially prevent the bots spamming this place.
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 branch of human knowledge. But I just checked the first 90 stories and there's nothing matching that description. Instead there seem to be an awful lot of "gossip" and "personality" type stories. Tesla vs Top Gear! Tech CEO shoots elephant! Trollish "What I hate about facebook" stories! The interminable "Is it a bubble?" discussion!
On the other hand, it might just be my opinion... obviously somebody is interested in the current front-page stories or else they wouldn't have been voted up. Do other folks think that the interestingness of the stories has declined?
You could have people who have over X karma (or people you hand pick) have disproportionate abilities to downvote or nuke comments/stories that are mean or dumb.
It would be easy to train a small circle of people how to moderate well. It seems nigh impossible to train the entire userbase of HN to do it.
I don't agree. You'll just create another incentive to game for karma and that's what I've seen at sites with karma-linked features.
I'd suggest that either
* nobody has the feature
* everybody has the feature
* only paying customers have the feature
The Slashdot System
- Comments start at +1 and can range from -1 to +5 only
- Mod points are limited and distributed randomly as needed
- Only members with good karma are eligible for mod points
- Mod points must be used within 24 hours
On your other point, I'm thinking that short unwanted quips can rear their ugly head anywhere along threads.
What about taking away downvoting? It would change the dynamic, at least. I suppose it doesn't solve the problem of stupid posts and comments being upvoted.
However, I don't see an algorithmic way to use flagging in such a situation. The new control mechanism would be subject to the same problems that led to the comment being upvoted in the first place.
I'd like to see the mods experiment with a more authoritarian approach. When a comment sucks, I want the mods to impose their will upon the populace, informing everyone that the comment sucks, regardless of its upvotes. Flags could play a role.
I feel like this would add some "drag" to the rate of change.
In articles: personally I only upvote only those articles that I really want to see in my "saved stories".
So one might make voting comments clutter something for the voter and I think that most hackers like to keep things beautiful, clean and searchable if possible. Might work better for articles than comments though.
I propose we have complete transparency.
PG, please start by giving 10 examples of the kind of comments you are most worried about, so that you define the problem in very clear terms. There might be disagreements and we need to surface those before suggesting solutions to a vague problem.
Extending the idea of transparency generally, make all votes public, such that everyone can see who voted what.
1)For certain high-profile domains, assign no karma to submissions. This would probably a hand-curated list of domains, but would probably include: Techcrunch, pg essays, avc.com, etc.
2)Allow users above X karma (500?) to vote to give any other user a "time out". At some threshold (25?) of votes, that user is muted for 1 week.
3)For any users that submits more than 5 articles from the same domain/subdomain, either suspend karma accumulation or suspend their ability to submit until they reach some mix of other submissions with an average score above 10
4)Create an article tagging system, and/or a way for users to ignore submissions on certain topics and/or from particular domains.
The problem with time wasters is that it's no big deal for them, they're already wasting their time. It's always going to be up to users who care like you, me and others to try to mitigate the exposure of those time wasting comments while not penalizing legitimate contributions by users who care, and that's why I don't think a hard comment length should be implemented.
Though there are meta discussions once in a while on HN too, they tend to be more general in nature, not specific to a certain comment or post.
I think an active meta discussion community would help with continuous small corrections, and eventually improve people's opinions on what kind of comments are good or bad.
One possible solution: depend more on credentials, and give people who have useful things to say / special background knowledge priority. Weigh their votes more and give them karma bonuses. Someone from a YC startup might be given more weight than someone who opines on large-scale, amorphous social problems from a generic position ("outsourcing: economic doom or natural phenomenon? Let's flame!").
I think the big thing, more than anything else, is the learning aspect. We tend to learn more from people who know a lot of stuff and have unusual experiences or abilities. Those people tend to cluster, then less smart people cluster around them, eventually leading toward decline. One way to counter that: identify those people and give them a louder voice. I don't think there's a technical way to do this that won't be gamed, unfortunately, which leads to a major scaling problem.
I mostly try to follow this rule: I mostly comment on areas related to schools / teaching / universities (I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona), books, or literature. I try to make comments that are as rooted as fact in possible; for example, when someone a while ago said there were no laptops with IPS screens anymore, I left a link to an Anandtech review of one and didn't say much else. Problem is, I don't have any good way of systematizing that or rewarding it except on an individual level.
I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.
Perhaps there should be a "best comment in thread" indicator or something as well?
I think people are mean because they get down voted a lot by people who "play" HN like WOW and everyone non-omg-erlang is a target. And lots of people here think KARMA == FREE TRAFFIC SPELL. Because spending most of your life on HN showcases how busy you are making money. Although.. nobody will ever read this comment because the thread is already two hours old and the in-crowd has already started writing meta posts that will take over the front page two hours from now.
Or maybe this is all about.. hello TechCrunch readers !
I just think that it's far too easy to game.
Another big issue with comment quality, of course, is in the general vagueness of it all. Jokes, for example, are almost always discouraged. Almost. On some occasions, it's quite appropriate.
Of course, pg could make new users come in with 10 or so karma, just to get them started.
Now that I think a bit more about it, this could be a really good idea. It would limit new user's ability to comment and influence things until they have gained community approval of their comments and thoughts. And if they don't get that approval... too bad. If they aren't adding anything worthy of some upvotes, they are adding noise, which detracts from the experience of everyone else.
What if user's had the option of investing karma into a submission/comment? If a user wants to comment or send a submission then they have to spend some of their karma points in order for other people to see it. This would bring the submission/comment more default points but would be negative points toward the submitter. That means it will appear higher on the page dependent on the amount of points they invest in the post. When/if a submitter's post is upvoted enough to pass the amount he invested, the submitter would gain karma.
I think this would work better because right now people can basically post what they want without worrying about their karma going down very much. This would do two things, firstly it would reduce the karma inflation, and secondly it would encourage higher-quality submissions and discussions.
I originally said this here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403085, but I think this would be a better place to say it.
Yeah, it's become a much bigger community and there are more of every kind of post (good/bad/ugly). Overall it's still a great site and it has been successfully maintained.
So please do tighten things up some, but avoid any drastic change for now. The system is working pretty damn well.
I think any solution will require the identification of individuals whose actions are "more trustworthy," and giving them greater weight, or more powers.
Anything else can and will be swamped by the majority, whose intentions you have no control over, and no reason to trust.
(Or at least, that's what I assume it's like -- I don't know, I've never been invited into any elite prestigious clubs...)
Even if you say "Oh, it's just a time requirement", what are you gonna do if Big Name Smart Person shows up wanting to comment? Surely you're going to let them in. So now you have an elite line and an unwashed line and you're arguing about who should be in the elite line.
I always found the boards I enjoyed best back when I ran a C-64 BBS (yes, that was a BBS running ON a C-64 with a 1200 baud modem and two floppy drives) were the ones with appropriately benevolent "dictators" who used a light touch to keep things real and on track. I can't say I've seen anything on the internet to convince me that there's been a notable improvement on such.
2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.
I suspect that this is true, however. The earlier a comment is made, the more time it has to accrue upvotes before readers move on. I suspect there would be measurable correlation between the time of posting and the ultimate score of comments.
To use a person anecdote, when I come to HN I immediately look to the top. I have come to expect good stories up on top, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.
This being a likely user behavior, you could game that behavior by putting 5 or so of the newest stories in a thinly bordered box, above the normal top stories. That way when people go looking for the top stories, they see the new stories, and are more likely to read and comment on the interesting ones.
This will preserve the normal UI of the site, with minor UX changes, while giving exposure to each story as it comes in. If I were to guess, most of the good stories that come in and languish do so because of a lack of exposure. I'm willing to bet that most people don't look at the newest page very often, expecting others to upvote the good stories onto the frontpage for them.
Comments that state their ranking in your disagreement hierarchy are allowed to be upvoted above a threshold (say 5 karma points) if these comments are at least DH4. The remaining comments are questions, clarifications, suggestions, or plain old mean and/or dumb comments; they would remain below the karma threshold.
You could add an optional DH tag to each new comment and only enforce the threshold rule in an alternative "view" of the HN site (until you are happy with the results).
It would help with comment quality because it would make people compete for approval from high-quality users.
That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.
I'm pretty sure that on the whole that would be a very good thing. Downvote visibility would certainly discourage dissent, which sucks. But I think the kinds of posts it would most strongly discourage are, in order, mean comments, stupid comments, and contentless (e.g. snide) comments -- which are exactly the things that have been dangerously proliferating recently.
And I don't even think it would much reduce the expression of minority opinion; there's a certain pride that comes with dissenting that makes it tolerable or even enjoyable when other people disagree with you. Whereas when you make a cheap joke, being able to see all the people who found it stupid or crass is a major buzzkill.
http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
""" Most of the time, you won't notice that there's anything obviously different (it doesn't affect threading or anything -- don't worry!), but it should improve the quality of the top comments immensely. """
Did raising downvote limit to 500 made any difference in unfair downvoting? If so, giving upvoting to more qualified people will also solve this for some time, means we can focus on measuring the qualification.
Maybe we should be able to mark individual comments as unfairly upvoted. Higher unfairly upvoted scores might decrease the value of future upvotes of voters on that comment.
Also, there's currently nothing reminding users of the ideals you want them to uphold just before they submit a comment -- i.e., right next to the submit button. It never hurts to ask.
Edit: appears I'm not the only one that suggested something like this. searched the page for "cost karma" and found a few comments.
There's a well-research phenomenon that people believe that a group is more valuable if it was harder for them to become a member. It pops up everywhere from YC to skull & bones to young men being ritually injured in the deserts of central Australia.
However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn to encourage creative and interesting comments.
Then again, this would incentivize upvoting comments with an existing positive score, and vice versa.
Perhaps the solution is to not display comment scores at all until you vote on a comment. (But order comments the same way they are ordered now.)
- Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and karma of exemplary members of the community needs to be seeded by you (and other exemplary members). This way cliques of mean/non-insightful users can upvote each other to their heart's content without making any appreciable difference in their karma value.
- The above would fix the quality of articles on the front page, not just the quality of comments. Our most successful blog post to date was "will the real programmers please stand up" (http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm...) which is at best a provocative rant. The actual technically insightful content isn't nearly as successful. TechCrunch mastered the art of linkbait headlines. Weighed upvotes will solve this problem.
- Anonymity breeds animosity. If I don't know someone it's much easier for me to say mean, dumb things (see: YouTube). The solution is somewhat controversial, but I strongly believe the downsides of threaded discussions strongly outweigh the upsides (ability to carry on multiple discussions at a time). Removing the ability to have threads will force people to pay attention to who they're talking to and have a coherent discussions instead of snarky oneliners.
- Moderators need to be able to lock down threads that are getting out of control.
- When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off with it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other and participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.
Number of suggestions to solve it:
1) Put a real value on user accounts. Charge $5 for them, or otherwise make them hard to get -- perhaps invite-only from users with a certain rating -- so that they are felt to be valuable.
2) Active editing. Assigning a numeric value to everything a user does only goes so far: eventually there has to be a consequence for their posts (greater than it going grey). It's OK to ban users who are all noise, after a fair warning.
More controversially:
I think threads re-ordering themselves make it incredibly difficult to follow a conversation. Because comments move around, when you return to a thread you either have to re-read or re-skim multiple comments that you've already read. The alternative is to treat threads as one-shot jobs. Visit once, don't come back. That's death to conversation, and conversation is the heart of a community.
It's this reason, I suspect, people don't often post meaty comments in threads once they already have a good few comments in them -- they know they'll never get the traction of upvotes to stay near the top, so why bother? The fix:
3) Flat threads. Don't rearrange, don't indent. Show scores if you will, but don't order based on them. The longest-lived web communities, the ones with the best conversations, from the Well to Metafilter, all have this in common.
For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..
It's something I've suggested before, getting rid of downvotes and replacing them with flags.
similar to how google looks at more than just keywords in a document before it ranks it highly, maybe you can weight each vote. a vote cast by an early HN user isn't so binary, maybe in reality it counts as 2 or 3 votes while we call it "+1" there is a weight to their vote based on how long they've been on hn and their karma?
I really agree with your last two points. I don't think there are any examples of a large community effectively self-moderating; you need someone willing to ruthlessly delete the crap.
I'm thinking about it, and I can't really see any advantage of the Reddit-style format over a traditional forum if you're trying to build a thoughtful community. In online terms, there's only been one non-forum where I've really felt part of the community, and that's a slow-moving blog with a smallish group of great regulars.
Maybe even do this in general (for up and down votes): all users cast only suggestion votes. Trusted users cast the real votes.
Or perhaps assign more weight to upvotes/downvotes from members with a high karma, than those with a lower karma.
Just look at this thread. One person has eight separate top-level comments on this item, and is winning popular support. A large number of them have almost the exact same number of upvotes. You might as well rename HN to Shaped in the Old Guard's Image and wall it off. Just get it overwith so people will stop:
- Writing tired farewell pieces, and calling it a good thing because they're respected and high-karma
- Then turning around and churning out blog content that is front-paged daily on the community just departed from
- Complaining about HN's slow decline towards Redditdom
- Downvoting comments because they disagree with them
I know this sounds like snark, but it's totally honest. You have a big choice to make here: either you foster and encourage new users to participate, or you wall it off and keep HN in the bubble of functionality and community that the old guard reminisces about.
As a relatively new contributor, I've never felt more unwelcome on a site than I have here at times. It's not even about me. It's certainly not about disrespect to those high-karma users who believe in this community the most. It's about the community. If you want your community a certain way, then lock it to the people who made it that way. I also intentionally set the theoretical karma limit above my karma, because I'd love an excuse to not come back.
Aside: All of this meta crap recently is setting up for HN to be disrupted by a new community. I also find it telling that in the time it took me to submit my comment and upvote the parent post -- say, ten seconds -- I was already at zero.
I don't have any well though out answers to the question. I do think the more questions out there that could help solve this problem.
I'm thinking the commenting is more of a symptom than the underlying issue(s).......
The decay constant should also be decreased, so that interesting submissions stay longer on the homepage. I usually don't comment on old submissions, because it feels like no one reads or votes on them.
I am willing to sacrifice the number of good articles on the homepage each day for the quality of comments on each article.
(edit: added last paragraph)
Isn't this the role of Slashdot's editors? Or do they choose the stories as well? Either way, Slashdot has almost no interesting stories these days.
I'm by no means a prolific commenter on HN. If I have something of value to add I'll try to ask; otherwise I usually abstain (but I'm only human, made a few dumb comments)
I just saw another article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404157
and the two comments on it were either bashing IQ, or talking about penis size.
I feel like maybe the reddit/4chan community has started reading HN?
I felt like posting a comment on that thread asking, nay begging, for someone to post something interesting as a followup to the kids question in the video, instead we have.. I just don't know.
And after saying that, I have no useful suggestion. Any feedback system that is implemented can still/will be gamed.
This means that the community-at-large is effectively given the opportunity to vote on a sub-optimal selection of the submitted stories.
This can perhaps be fixed by briefly flashing all new stories towards the bottom of the top news page, to give them a brief chance at wider exposure. One way to do this would be to make a queue, and put every new story on the bottom of the front page for 5 minutes barring a certain number of down-votes for moderation.
This might really effect which stories actually end up on the top news page (though perhaps only for stories submitted during peak times).
Right, but as the subject of a membership ritual I have to discount your assertion.
Sometimes membership rituals do increase value. But they increase perceived value regardless of what follows.
Very interesting point about not discouraging high value contributions: you don't want to create a situation where users have no desire (or are afraid to) comment.
> Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.
I think we can all agree that users with high karma generally have it for a reason. However, you can't always deduce that if user A has higher karma than user B, than user A has higher karma because his contributions are always more insightful than user B's. It's not a total order.
The marginal incentive ("get more karma by writing a comment that gather N+1 up votes") is not aligned with the over all goal of the sight (produce consistently insightful content).
This would backfire because many useful comments aren't that long, and therefore people will be forced to pad them, this decreasing the s/n ratio.
For example, my paragraph above has 24 words.
This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of other users doing the same thing as that upvoter (or downvoter) too, which means his/her action is indeed valid and objective.
Users would then be more willing to vote, with the hope that other users will do the same thing as him/her too, and reap more points than what he/she spent for upvoting/downvoting. This enforces more thinking and evaluation of comments or stories before even upvoting or downvoting them.
A decision has to be made from the top about what HN is all about. If it's startups and business then that's the only type of story allowed. Everything else gets dumped. I don't need another Reddit.
Mods would need strict guidelines about what qualifies and everything even slightly outside of these guidelines gets turfed.
oh and get rid of karma. It's bs. Encourages hivemind like nothing else.
This is hardly a good example to all the aspiring startup folks on how to treat your users.
Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?
Edit: Removed the accusation of trolling, apologies for that.
In any group of people where the cost of joining is minimal and the freedom reins are loose, you will see behavioural changes mutate in ways resembling Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The big problem with HN is the founder assumption that we (users) will be a) civil b) willing, positive contributors and c) thoughtful. Maintaining this requires some means of natural selection. At first it was probably a combination of being curious, an early adopter and nerd-like. Some (quick & possibly stupid) ideas:
- intellectual paywall: add a penalty of a kind that selects readers/contributors
- classifier: run a classifier that categorises users by type and apply rules (behaviour modifier)
- change focus of HN to News with sub hacker focus (radical focus change)
- add a real minimal paywall sending $ to something like EFF or other hacker friendly charity (penalise by currency - bad)
- stop HN altogether (deny)
- wipe the slate clean & build a new HN like community but with http://perlmonk.org like progression of privs by tasks (enforced discipline) at start of user creation.
I think this last sentence is very telling. Low quality is only part of the problem. What really makes people want to disengage is having their feelings hurt.
HN used to be full of stubborn individualists arguing amongst themselves with excellent writing, interesting experience, and data. In the last year or so, it just feels like everyone is trying to avoid saying anything outside our little bubble.
When I used to debate, we talked about how it wasn't if the judge agreed with you that won you the debate. It was how persuasive you were and how well you said your piece. This comment made a point and it made it well. Don't try to vote it away just because you disagree with the point.
I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These are a problem, as they encourage snark and posing over effectively arguing things out, but they are very hard to treat as disagreeing with them is likely to cause knee-jerk reactions in many upvoters.
This is about what the community wants and needs. pg and the other long-term users want the community to stay a certain way, hence this item itself; closing off that community to only those that participated in the development thereof will allow the community to remain where it is desired.
> Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around if the site were walled off?
The same thing that made them stick around when the site did not have a large audience.
I think in general you already have most of a filter in that bad comments get pushed down and the lower sections of comments seem to be read much less often.
But I'm pretty new to HN, so my comment may not take into account its evolution.
Solutions:
1) Reddit staved off this effect for a while by both re-tuning the karma ranking computation, and wiping everyone's karma back to 0. The effect of hyper-people with too much power is problematic. I don't think that will work here, but it's possible a re-tune will help.
The general idea of a redo on the karma system was stated above: the right answer is to take a look at "good comments" and "bad comments" and look at new threads.
2) HN as invite only. Anyone can read, few can vote/comment. I'm not sure I'd make the cut if you were to have certain blessed voters/commenters. I like the suggested improvement of having this calculation be hidden, and never to show karma.
3) Moderators. The community I live in with the longest lifetime is "chowhound". They don't have a voting system (or good web technology), they have ruthless monitors. Monitors are never supposed to remove for quality of post, but they do simply nuke from orbit "that's what she said" post chains.
4) Look, there's one real fact here. As someone who, myself, sells a database product aimed at people like those who read HN, I have a huge incentive to get an article into HN. It could make or break my company - no fooling. Once you incent bright people to break your system, it will be broken. Socket puppet rings will rule. Eternal vigilance - that is, a moderator-like junta charged with looking at quality every few months and ruthlessly implementing whatever solution is correct at that time, is the only way to continue HN's spirit.
5) I will guarantee you that if something isn't done, there will simply be a slow, sure slide to mob rule and ignorance.
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
Maybe users should have to vote on X links on the new page for every Y links they view on the front page.
Whenever there's some important piece of news like the japan earthquake we have highly redundant discussions on many different articles. This is wasteful.
Perhaps the most important thing about upvotes and downvotes is how they affect visibility. Everyone wants their voice to be heard, and some people want the opportunity to influence whether other people's voices are heard or not, e.g. by flagging stories or killing comments through downvoting.
If the big deal here is visibility, then I would concentrate on the algorithms that decide when a comment thread is rendered gray or invisible and the algorithms that decide the ranking of comment threads. I would look for patterns of votes or commenting that might help distinguish "popular but fluffy" from "popular and thought-provoking."
While I agree with the general case, in my specific case I called somebody an "idiot" out of anger and tptacek called me on it. It was quite mortifying and I've tried to watch my words since.
hostility
unclear connection to parent
factual errors
Discretion is necessary to encourage people to address and fix the problems with their comments and style rather than provoking them to guard their reputation.
Sending individual emails is effective at this, but takes too much time and energy. Being able to click a button that gives a commenter specific feedback could be very effective.
No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest. Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various projects.
I have done some research on this (unpublished), and I got a really good performance on predicting hacker news votes by just counting how many new words (not stopwords, not very-high-frequency words) a comment was adding to a thread. Just using a few variations on this theme predicted better than word counts or bigram features.
Fundamentally, though, I disagree with machine learning- based approaches as they can only _reinforce_ present behavior, and we'd like to shape voting behavior.
In the same way I can upvote everyone in this thread even though many wouldn't deserve it.
Next, you can correlate how various people voted with whether a specific person will like the article and/or comment. Finally, you should be able to tell who will like or not want something to get voted up. At this point, you can customize for everyone or weight the influence of people based on well correlated their taste is with the top karma people.
This data is interesting because now if you randomly perturb the front page, say by putting a new story in position #5 and lying about how many points it has. Show this perturbed page to a small sample of users and see if the story beats the historical averages or not.
If that kind of thing worked, it could help correct for the phenomena where a popular story stays popular just because it's popular. You can now rank stories by how well they take advantage of their "real estate" on the front page. Those that underperform the average sink, those that outperform the average rise.
One hitch. This might not work if you tell people you're doing it.
Re-writing the software in a language more people understand (e.g. Python) could be a good first step here. But I don't know if pg is willing to give up on his silver bullet (arc).
Turning Hacker News into a business might help. Create a situation where exceptional people can make lots money by figuring out how to make HN great and let market forces do the rest. Although figuring out how to make money off of content could be a pretty tough problem.
More generally, I think pg should be thinking less, "How can I improve Hacker News?" and more, "How can I create an environment where other people can improve Hacker News?"
I mean... investing in startups is a full-time job, running a high traffic website is a full-time job, building a programming language is a full-time job, raising a child is a full-time job... trying to do all four at once probably isn't going to work.
[1] http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0957.h...
A better solution than "giving the smarter people a louder voice" would be to "give the louder people a smarter voice."
My suggestion below is to add a good way to discreetly provide feedback. Encourage people to send messages to you about what they think of your post, with the goal of encouraging everyone to improve the quality of their posting, and also to be more thoughtful about up/down voting.
If the refresh rate was slower, or the ability for a story to get to the front page would take longer then I would visit less.
At a guess most of the dub/mean comments get made by people who visit many, many times a day and comment out of boredom.
Some method to slow down the entire system would slow down all the posters and would result in longer posts rather than a bunch of witty one liners. Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing an in depth response to anything when it will be gone in three hours.
Increase the quality of the articles and you will increase the quality of the comments.
At least HN doesn't have youtube quality comments yet. :)
It's actually based on a real comment I saw: the discussion was about migrating a 10 MLOC (iirc) enterprise Java system to git. One comment said that this system must have been "5MM getters, 5MM setters". That struck me as particularly mean and below the belt strike against the programmers who worked on this system: it's very likely there is a good reason why it had to be in Java in the first place (and other JVM languages may not have been available when it was created) and even so, it didn't mean the programmers working on it would have chosen Java as the language themselves (but they were not there when the architectural decision was made). Further more, it added nothing to discussion.
This is not unlike poking fun of somebody for wearing the wrong kind of clothes on the school yard: cheap way to score social points with the plurality of others present, mean and ignorant (may be they can't afford the right kind of clothes, may be they are going hiking right after class).
An insightful comment would have been something like "That's great that you were able to get this into Git, changing a VCS is a painful task. Have you considered using Scala in some of the modules? Functional objects, case classes and implicits could help you model your business domain better, write thread safe code, and get rid of much of the boiler plate."
Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404283, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404459
Eliminating the exciting news of the moment would make the site less entertaining for those not seeking intellectual stimulation. It would also make the site less popular. Both are good.
A ban would logically include YC company launches - revealing the conflict between YC's business interest and intellectual interest. It would be a defining moment, for what HN is.
"Startup news" could be a sister site, if important.
I can't help but think in the case of RiderofGiraffes particular case karma might have kept him in the community longer than he should have, or burnt him out. Getting to the point where your contribution to a site is the auto-posting of popular content is probably a failure of the system.
In general karma serves as an incentive to contribute, but its a fairly shallow kind of contribution, and I don't this site needs that anymore. Hopefully comment and submission score without accumulation give enough encouragement to quality without encouraging quantity.
Also, having the stories leave the front page so quickly encourages people who are just interested in getting points to throw out whatever garbage they can in hopes of grabbing a few upvotes by being one of only a few comments on a given submission.
But anything that encourages feedback and discourages defensiveness will be effective.
maybe ensuring the articles are at least a week old, that instantly removes 99% of the current events which are generally irrelevant and if it is relevant it will still be so in a week.
You might want to consider just shutting it down for 2 months, the great users will likely come back. It will definitely lower the dunbar number quite a bit.
I've been here less than 2 years but I ask if anyone can spare the time and dig up some classic examples of stories and threads, and great back and fourth comment based conversations...
I realize this is difficult given the non-archival nature of HN but can anyone show a "then" versus "now" difference?
That way good content with poor headlines still has a shot.
In fact, there's lots to be learned from MetaFilter. Two long but useful videos containing Mathowie's wisdom:
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/her why; it's up to them to figure it out on their own, which is sometimes difficult/impossible from their perspective.
An idea:
If you downvote, you have to pick a reason why you downvoted from various options (e.g. drop-down list, checkboxes). If you pick something, your downvote is cast. If you don't do anything, the downvote isn't cast.
In the options, you can list ~10-20 reasons to downvote (too mean, off topic, etc...). Select one or more items from the list, and submit it. What was selected appears in a "voting stats" page/section for said comment. Then the user can then get the gist of why they were downvoted, perhaps with a generic message saying how they could improve in the future.
The downside is that it might required a re-direct if you downvote (might be annoying on iPad/mobile devices), and it'll also take longer to downvote. I don't think the latter will be an issue since downvoting is rare, and I'd imagine people would be willing to fill out a quick web-form if they really think something deserves negative karma.
* posting a comment
* voting on a comment
* submitting a link / question
* voting on a submission
An interesting variant: You can 'keep' a link without paying, but if you are paying, your 'keep' is the counted as a 'vote'.
I found the site when someone submitted something and asked me to upvote it. I didn't know what that was, so came here and made a stupid comment and got downvoted. I didn't know what that meant or why it happened, and no one went out of their way to explain it.
Months later, I have almost 1k karma and still didn't know who RiderofGiraffes was, and don't find myself caring.
The real issue here is culture, and the cultivation of it. There is a culture, but it's tough to find, and it's far from discoverable. Most of the links new users need to know about, such as the top 20 list, are hidden deep in the site. There aren't any avatars, and because of the strange nicknames, I never know who I am talking to unless I click through and they happen to have listed a URL or Twitter handle.
Point being - if you want people to act a certain way, I think you need to do a better job of describing it. I say that to the entire community.
I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of that, it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort of behavior we see.
Just my .02, but this is what I'm picking up here.
I still love HN.
Others are better at commenting, and maybe there are even different classifications of commenting or different badges.
You would be able to incentivize behavior (commenting) and then narrow it down to a particular type of commenting.
One interesting badge might be the efficiency badge, and that would be generating the most points or badges per minute on the site.
I think the issue is that the things that seem insightful to relatively unskilled programmers seem obvious to very skilled ones. A lot of the blog posts I see on sites like this rehash issues that I thought were settled a long time ago, but what's happening is that people understand things for themselves over and over again. And it's actually helpful when they write it up, because their writeups then lead other people to understand these things. Thus there is a steady stream of posts about the same set of ideas that are always helpful to people, but are still clogging HN.
The trouble is that there's no way for people who have already understood something to stop seeing the same old posts. I see three options: - get rid of the less-skilled people - keep the less-skilled people, but stop them from learning from these posts - somehow let people opt out of seeing posts on things they understand, but keep them around for other people to see
It seems obvious that the third solution is correct, but I don't yet know how to do it.
I think a more useful metric than "number of votes since submission" would be "number of votes in the past hour/day/whatever." That way an item could be submitted days in the past, but still get on the front page if it had enough upvotes recently. For testing purposes, this could be an alternate front page like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Another option would be to have moderators manually de-dupe stories or fix them to link to the original source. While they're at it, the mods could ban or reduce the karma of users who submit blogspam or duplicate stories.
A possible idea is to put up a dump of the HN data somewhere for users to download. Maybe the community can analyze it and find interesting patterns/behaviors and possibly solutions?
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 you want to see here. Someone has to do it or they'll never show up here.
The when these submissions popup all you need is someone to tag them as one of these things. You could either assign people to do this or weight it by karma or something.
I suspect a "closed as duplicate" system, ala StackExchange, could work well here, assuming a high enough bar were to be set for who could do (or vote for) such a thing.
I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain?
BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?
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.
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.
Past political essays, e.g. by Cicero, will generally be intellectually interesting.
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.
The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into:
1. I have an idea!
2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
3. Oh, in that case we could just...
4. But, then...
It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.
Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So, let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-side css hack to make HN look even better? Do we end up with more or fewer designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?
I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while longer.
Some starting places might be:
* upvotes from someone who reads regularly but votes irregularly count more
* upvotes from IP's that have not clicked through count less
* using a collaborative filter on upvotes to guess which stories are more likely to appeal to different readers
* randomly putting a few threads or stories out of order for each user
* users who, early on, vote-up comments that are voted up later are rewarded (f''<0 or just a ceiling on the reward like 10 upvotes) with their upvotes being worth more
* modal version of the above, using a pagerank style algorithm to calculate the helpfulness of users
* upvotes from people with more karma are worth more (again f''<0)
* mess around with sub-thread weighting. I don't know how you do it right now but it seems like a good comment on a lower sub-thread is less likely to be seen than a mediocre comment right below the +43 top comment.
* mess around with page-placement weighting. The very top is most likely to be seen and voted on. 3/4 of the way down is very likely to not be seen -- so a vote either way means more there.
* limit the number of upvotes each user gets. Could be per time, per story, per karma....
I didn't use HN a year or two ago, but it seems to me that across such social news sites the following types of content are unjustifiably upvoted:
- confidence
- lists of books
- slams (mother###ker)
- references to high-IQ stuff
- certain lengths are preferred [must be 2-3 para's long to get hugely upvoted, 2-3 sentences has a higher prob. of just a few points]
If you do some more research perhaps you could just decide on what are "bad" kinds of comments, such as negativity, and use text mining / sentiment analysis to detect them and hold back their points.
Using any of the - ideas would force HN designers to commit to what actually constitutes bad content, rather than social engineering (* ideas).
One specific instance was when I submitted an XKCD shortly after joining. I eventually realized it wasn't really what people here were looking for. When elections rolled around, I submitted a Wapo editorial that was really off-base, and the reaction I got in response was deservedly negative.
However, in this process of learning to be a more civil and well-reasoned person (which I do credit a lot of to the good folks here on HN), I've always found a measure of grace. I don't think the reactions I've gotten for anything I've submitted or commented with have ever been really mean. Criticism has always been positive. This is the main aspect of HN, besides being intellectually stimulating, that I've come to appreciate most. It has really helped me to grow (I'm a college sophomore now and I really am grateful to the kind people here who've taught me so much since high school).
I agree with pg's general observation that things seem to have become a bit meaner and less constructive. I'm not sure how to fix the front page, but the type of comments I find representative of the old HN are informative, well-reasoned, and forgiving comments. I entirely agree with your bit about "I disagree" comments, though I don't think it would be as much of a problem if it were done a little more nicely. It's okay to disagree with an article, but the tone that some people take, mehh. That said, I almost always read the comments prior to reading the article, because I count on the contrarians to shed some light that I might otherwise be ignorant to.
I think everything would be okay if everyone just reminded themselves to be civil and not to use downvotes to disagree.
I don't agree at all. Just because many people disagree does not mean there is no answer. I think the problem is that this is a hacker site, hackers like to put together technical solutions for moderating a forum, and forum moderation is primarily a people-problem. Thus the best answers here seem to get largely overlooked while people debate endlessly how to tweak the voting system (or some variation thereof). I don't know what the solution to that issue is but that doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Peace.
Perhaps there should be a "hard merge" that prevents duplicates from sharing the front page, and a "soft merge" that multiplexes comments from duplicates at any time range under any of the submissions?
Some of these people just create an account to make a few contributions on specific threads and then they're gone. Having an invite system would increase the friction in being able to do this.
If there was a irc.ycombinator.com with real-time chat topics, it might help separate "the wheat from the chaff," so to speak.
E.G. #japan-nuclear-chat
If not a chat, I'd say focus on something that doesn't fight the size of the community. Personally, I'd prefer if HN was shrunk to like '08 levels, but that's not going to happen. I think adding a service that allows for water cooler talk but keeps it isolated from deep technical discussions would work better than karmic tinkering at this point.
Hang out on the front page more and vote there, like RiderOfGiraffes mentioned in his farewell post (or the ensuing discussion, can't remember). It is really important that if you are dissatisfied with the quality of HN (as I currently am) you should do something about it.
I believe Quora does rather well in this respect because it encourages longer, considered posts. The (fast) rate of decay on the front page partially contributes to the problem because it models a news site, rather than a technical discussion site, where most techniques and approaches remain timeless.
Here are some possible approaches:
1. Encourage longer answers and comments at the top level. This can be either implemented as a simple word limit, or automatically placing longer comments at the top of the comments list.
2. Recycle old posts which have good comments. This should fix the disincentive for people to provide long-lived answers.
3. Make HN a "not" news site. This means that the incubation period is longer before posts make it to the front page. Unless something has a long term value, it will less likely be voted up because the reader would have already seen and discussed it on TC, Reddit, Digg etc..
4. (option to #3). Have posters classify whether the post is a news or a technical discussion one. News links will have a different rate of decay, and will occupy limited number of spots on the front page. Furthermore, these posts will not be recycled.
5. Require a link to be submitted with some comments. This is to encourage submitters reason like hackers do. Provide some guidance - e.g. does this news contain some data? What are the insights/inferences one might draw from this? Does this article discuss a problem domain? Does the post illustrate an assumption that is subject to hacking? What is your personal take on this? It also acts as a disincentive for people to submit links without giving the topic due consideration. I recall that eHarmony was very succesful in its early days because internet dating sites usually have more men than women. By subject the men to a barrage of interview questions, eHarmony was able to maintain a balance between the male and female participants. I thought this was a great hack.
6. Implement some sort of disincentive for upvoting of inane comments. For an example, do an automatic Quora-style follow, where you will start to see this person's comments at the top of the comments page. Make it difficult to "unfollow" (say three clicks). It will encourage people to be more careful about polluting their personalizations.
Google Hotpot does something like this, limiting the number of Really Great votes you can make with unlimited +1's.
First, we've had excellent "Ask HN" submissions in the past which tried to discuss private startup-specific problems that a partner or founder was having. These discussions were timely and relevant, and we were only able to have them because the poster felt they could present their issue anonymously.
Second, I don't believe you've thought through the overhead of your suggestion. Does pg hand-approve new accounts, requiring a faxed copy of a driver's license or other state-issued identification? Or do we wait until someone flags an account as "possiblity not a true identify", and, again, burden pg with chasing that person down until they prove they are who they claim, and with dealing with the complaints it will generate?
Sooo, use facebook for auth? :)
I think HN is an ideal place for personally identifiable comments, we're all professionals here right?
I already like what HN does with the colour of posts. What if HN switched to colour only? Displaying points
* encourages "karma whoring" by posters or just makes people care about how well their comment was received
* biases the decision to upvote/not by subsequent readers. Subconscious, conscious, contrarian, consensus-seeking, whatever -- shouldn't people make up their own minds as to whether a comment was good or not, on its merits rather than on what the rest of the community thought?
The information filtering function would still be accomplished by colour and order only.
as a last resort you can always stall HN for 1 month.
I think that an initial 100 karma level for submissions will make the site more difficult to use for the not native English speakers.
I never see "nice" tellings-off. A "nice" telling-off might be: "reader123, this comment is mean. please be nicer"
Regarding your second point - tying into existing identity providers like Facebook would have little overhead beyond the initial implementation. If you wanted to go a step further, you could create an automated phone verification system, like the one Google uses for new accounts. Again, the intent would be to make it harder to comment or upvote anonymously, not impossible.
The content of this site is the average of community activities. If you want to increase the quality of content, you have increase the average quality of activities.
Moderation does this: removing low quality submissions increases the average quality. You could be more aggressive in moderation. Remove more comments. Take away commenting privileges temporarily for repeat offenders. Ban bad users.
Another option is giving trusted users 'megavotes,' worth more than 1 point. They can downvote that admittedly-funny-but-not-constructive comment to a more appropriate point value and upvote that other comment that's downvoted for no good reason. These users work to increase visibility and rewards of high quality content and decrease the visibility and rewards of low quality content. Hopefully this would work in a feedback loop to increase the natural average quality of content.
Both of these suggestions can help force the decline of mean, dumb, and inappropriately upvoted comments.
However, I think many will be wary of these suggestions because it can lead to bad things. I'm concerned too. Trusted users can abuse their power and destroy the feelings of community that have developed. Mistakes will be made and people will be upset.
But it needs to be done. Mistakes are mistakes. People find ways to get upset here everyday. Valuable members leaving already hurts the community.
Technical solutions won't cut it. Hacker News could be about coin collecting and the software could be exactly the same. The software does little to shape the community on a larger scale.
Ultimately, the average of the community is pushing in the wrong direction, so you need to push back by fixing the average to your favor. There may be better ways of doing this then what I've described, but it's time to pushing hard.
Perhaps you could give everyone a comment bot, like a green/red bar that says whether the comment looks like low quality or high quality as you're typing it. A lot of people might edit the comment to make it better, or simply delete the comment (you could design UI to encourage this ... eg RBM's can highlight which words look like they're causing the problem, or offer a Kill Comment "X" when the comment is far into the red).
You could also train the bayesian filter on (graphwise) voting patterns, rather than on comments as bags of words.
This would give comments context. The site would in effect be saying "hey, you've read four or five comments by this person and thought they were sharp." or, "don't waste your time with this comment, you haven't liked their others." I don't know how many times I've read smart comments without actually connecting that they were all being written by the same person. It is only extremely good and prolific people who I actually recognize by hnname. This would help me find more.
This is really a reputation/karma system, but scoped per user instead of site wide. You can go further and trickle votes down the follow chain, so that the people who I follow follow also are part of my personal reputation network. This would help cut down the amount of interaction I have to do to make the following system useful. This is essentially page rank.
With this in place, HN can become a more personalized aggregator wherein the links and comments that are liked by the people you like are more often presented to you. It is quite possible this could create the equivalent of subreddits organically as the site's membership creates following chains interested in different things.
Now, this is a very technical solution to the problem, which means it probably isn't merited. I think that metafilter is probably one of the right guides to watch and that for them careful moderation has been key.
Also, there are a number of real problems with this solution, the first being that it significantly increases the risk of the echo-chamber as people start to be split in to like minded groups. I've thought about some ways to deal with these issues, but I don't feel like this post is the place for them.
1) You can submit one link a day. Additional submits cost karma.
2) Costs karma to reply to any comment. Top level comments seem to already filter okay. If you get downvotes on the comment you made the karma cost is a multiple of that.
I also think some things would help in general:
1) Title/Domain Regex - Allow me to specify a regex to exclude things from the frontpage. For example /Apple|iPad|techcrunch/.
2) You have to have 10 or 20 karma to do anything besides top thread comments. It would be easy to get that with a little effort, but it would pretty much eliminate all the spam and low hanging crap.
3) Have a option to (turned on by default) to collapse comments using the common +/- interface and display the total score for that thread. I think then you would be able to focus and find the good threads quickly. Coming into this discussion 5 hrs after the fact like I am doing is where this is really needed.
4) This is a big one, but I will throw it out there. Create an API. With that I think a LOT of smart people (instead of a few) could play with all of this and maybe find somethings that no one here is currently thinking of.
If "karma whores" drive the system, then the incentives created by this change would drive them away from commenting on sub-threads. I guess "kw" probably already post something snarky right under the top comment (and probably time it).
The third of your points is your best idea (imho). Comments among just a few people are less likely to be generally interesting.
It is far more effective to have members of the community, particularly people who are representative of the ethos that HN has had to point out bad behavior, and recommend more responsible courses of action.
In so far as we are a community, we should encourage behavior as a community. Ultimately the point of writing comments and posting links is for others to see them, karma is worthless otherwise.
To that end, i think there's interesting things that could be done with average karma. If we're trying to encourage hill-climbing behavior towards better karma, why not highlight comments w/ higher average karma than you have? If we are trying to encourage leadership, then perhaps we should point out who is leading, and the behavior which we should be emulated.
If readers are willing to tag stories not just as "good" or "bad" but with categorical labels, then suddenly the news aggregator "knows" a lot more about the data its serving up. You could have categories at the top, preferential sorting for users, and more.
Everybody scrolls from the top down. Those who vote for lower-down stories are less likely to be amplifying the hive mind.
This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.
I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.
Why is seniority good in and of itself? Privileging seniority seems anti-democratic and anti-newbie.
I wish there were places to go online to teach or be taught about topics in a discussion-forum kind of way. I'd love, for example, a Lambda the Ultimate for newbs. LtU is an awesome, high-quality site, I just wish I could understand more than 10% of it.
I tend to use HN when I'm too tired to work or just waking up. Those are also the times when I'm not interested in buckling down and studying a hard subject. But surely I could do better than the kind of learning I get from HN (and other casual internet use), which is random access to shallow, scattered tidbits, as if training for a massive Trivial Pursuit tournament you never signed up for. If only there were a community where people devoted themselves to teaching and learning classic topics in a sustained way, but that still had the social and casual aspect. News as such doesn't interest me that much. I'm mostly just consuming it by default. If anyone's read this far - my apologies for adding a mostly off-topic comment to an already crowded thread.
[PS you mean a strong _positive_ correlation, right? ;) ]
- Give more karma to votes on new stories to compensate the extra effort to leave the front page.
- Display one or two random new items on the front page to increase exposure.
- UI change on front page. When mouse moves over the random new item box, display a popup overlaying page containing the new items to allow for upvotes. When mouse moves away, hide the new item page. It's more complicate to implement and might not work too well on phones but should remove the mental barrier to go to the new page.
Why are mean comments upvoted? Answer: I don't know.
People learn how to act on HN by watching what gets upvoted, listening to the tone of discussions, and reading the submitted articles. Presumably, the unwanted comments are being made by new members of the community. Somehow, these new members were not properly taught by the community. In which step were they not properly taught?
I would like to submit three possible problems, along with three possible solutions.
1) The problem is in the voting system. Mean comments are being upvoted, and the senior members of the community are largely powerless to stop these comments. Sure, they can downvote, but they are just one vote, and there are still many more junior members who will upvote the mean comment. If you believe that: Senior members know what's best for the community, these members are senior because they have high karma, these members have high karma because the community has voted that these people know best. Weighing a vote by the karma of the user who made that vote would solve the problem of mean comments being upvoted.
2) The problem are the stories that make it to the front page. Mean comments and the votes they receive are a symptom. The users who upvote are getting their social cues from the stories they read on the front page. Broad requirements on stories that are HN worthy allow for a wide variety of stories to get posted to HN. This is good for somebody who sifts through the 'new' section, but it also means that the only stories that get massively upvoted are stories that have general intersections between all of our interests. Evidence seems to show that the most common shared interest is gossip, which is conveniently unwanted by the community. The solution in this case, is to make stricter requirements about what stories are allowed.
3) The problem is that bad apples will always exist no matter what you do. At the moment, the easiest place for bad apples to exist is on the front page of HN. Unfortunately, this is also the place a lot of normal users like to exist. Perhaps a sandbox could be made for the bad apples to hate each other, and allow the normal users to exist in separate but equal lives. Unfortunately, this seems to go against the HN spirit, and I can't think of any useful ideas on how to implement such a sandbox without it sounding like a subreddit.
Finally I would like to add: I like that HN takes the time for these self analysis every now and then. But, I think it's important to remember that we don't know what's best for us. The mere fact that we will upvote the type of content we don't want shows this.
This leads me to reiterate a comment best stated by idoh: "Let us not be too hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really understood. At best they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you wouldn't be able to tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not."
Started logs. [f(x) = log(x+1) or log(x+3)]
1) When newbies first see the karma system they begin (like in any game) to work hard to raise their numbers. They watch closely to learn what kinds of comments will get them points. Ways to address this: -Make new users read the guidelines and address this issue more directly there. -Make Karma look less like a competition.
2) Like other comments have said, figuring out who upvotes bad comments requires data-mining. A serious question here is whether democracy is a viable option any longer. What is the site meant to be: a mob, or a tight community which a mob may watch? Do we educate the problem-voters, or do we dis-empower them?
It seems like a lot of the comments on this thread are asking for more information -- or at the very least working from very different personal experiences.
This is a radical idea probably without merit but small incremental steps to improve the quality of submissions & comments are short term fixes to deeper problems. What are the root cause(s) of poor quality responses?
Identity
Good behaviour in any group is important if you encourage identity. I tried hard in any sites I've joined to stick by the spirit of the group because my identity is tied to anything I say. What would joining HN be like with no identity and zero reputation. A place where there is high competition for submissions and few examples of what is really expected of you? The only sign post I see is karma some FAQ's on behaviour - but who reads those? My behaviour is effected by those around me who in all reality want to improve their standing through karma. Progress is measured by a score that is derivative of what I do, who cares about the outcome. Make identity meaningful. SO does this well. Users are recognised and rewarded. The hard bit is HN isn't binary.
Utility
I join sites like HN because of the quality gap on the web. The only other way I can do this is directly interact with fellow entrepreneurs. HN fulfils this purpose. HN also is about things that interest hackers. That was the intent, discuss new ideas, intelligently. HN is a lot like the LME discussing the effects of X on Y, substituting copper for ideas, effects of conflict on price for execution of product. What happens when the purpose is subverted or unfulfilled?
Audience
Who reads and contributes in HN matters. I don't recognise the readers I started with. As the audience drifts the early adopters leave as the utility of HN drops. A lot of good hackers started here but will probably leave or have left. This is a real problem. Hackers leaving is a signal that things are broken or that the usefulness has been reached. Hackers are really sensitive to certain types of audiences, especially non-technical. Like frogs, Hackers leaving HN might be a sign the audience is polluted with the wrong type of users.
Broken
HN is fundamentally broken. We already know this. It's not a new problem. But something has to fundamentally change to address user identity and utility. Encourage good behaviour by looking at [Identity]: the need to fit in, contribute, improve and [Utility]: the reason users contribute and not get bored or get up to mischief, leave.
Induction
Entry needs to be set higher than it currently is. Where else of value is entry a handle, email and time enough of a measure of worth? I would put a concrete intellectual challenge in the form of some writing, say 500 words in their profile. For extra credit a link to a site the post exists. The purpose is twofold. Create a baseline set of information that can be classified through code and used to judge the quality of the HN user. Users could game this if they wanted but a quick check against a post on a users website could avert this. This benchmarks each user.
Evaluated
All subsequent posts are measured against their score. Submission scores are scored against their benchmark.
Purpose
Make a real purpose for staying on at HN. Encourage interested HN users to also submit to apply to YCombinator, even if they think they don't fulfill the criteria to make them improve. Tie identity to purpose by making contributing to HN a part of submitting to YCombinator. Give some real purpose. Make being on HN way beyond just submitting links, making stupid comments and watching your score.
But I do tend to agree with you. Limiting upvotes isn't as important as discouraging useless comments.
Yes, if and only if "good" and "bad" comments are defined (intensionally or extensionally).
You would give lots of chips to someone who makes cheap "mother###ker" comments and then that give that person more power in controlling the site.
Emotionally charged rants get attention. Careful reasoning gets eviscerated by pedants. So people are learning to write for the audience.
In other words, what gets 500 votes isn't much better than what gets 300 votes. But what gets 100 votes is much better than what gets 5 votes.
(also what if the ML only provided feedback while one is typing the comment?)
Any time any two users vote on the same comment, the HN system should create a number representing the "affinity" between the two users.
This affinity should increase if the users voted the same way on that particular comment, and decrease if they voted differently.
Then, instead of displaying the number of upvotes or downvotes next to a each comment, what should be displayed should be the number of upvotes and dowvotes weighted by the affinity of each user who made that vote.
Comments should rise or fall using the formula HN uses now, except it should use affinity-weighted upvotes and downvotes.
In effect, in this system the other users are making "recommendations" on the comments they vote on. And their recommendations are weighted by how similarly their previous votes were to the votes you made.
This scheme results in every user seeing comments customized in a way that automatically infers their preferences.
So, if you prefer deep, insightful comments about technology, you'll presumably upvote those comments, and the affinity between you and the other users who upvoted those comments increases, and when they upvote future comments, the comments they upvote will be more likely to show up on your radar as they'll probably be closer to the top of the page and have a higher numerical score.
Conversely, those people who prefer brief, funny comments would similarly have the comments they see be displayed in a way that caters to their preferences.
Instead of trying to please everyone in a one-size-fits-all top-down approach, this is a more distributed approach which "recommends" to each individual user those comments which are likely to be preferred by that particular user.
Of course, this scheme is more computationally intensive than having the current system of simple, unweighted upvotes and downvotes, or even of manually curated/moderated comments. It also requires active upvoting and downvoting of comments by users for it to work well.
But the advantage of this is that the more users upvote and downvote, the more accurate the system gets in "recommending" comments to them. So implementing this system would provide an incentive for active participation.
It's also an automated, algorithmic system which should scale much better than proposals that require manual human intervention, such as implementing moderation/curation of comments.
A similar scheme could also be applied to articles, such that the HN backend would weigh articles based on the affinity between the user viewing the article list and the users who've voted on those articles.
I humbly suggest that for the conversation to lead to HN's doing even better than HN has so far will require the participants in the conversation to verify that they are referring to the same thing when they write "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb", e.g., by the participant's providing actual examples (with the author's name removed) of comments they consider mean or dumb.
The best place to start is read pg's essays ~ http://paulgraham.com/articles.html I got the feel for HN before HN existed through reading.
"... I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of that, it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort of behavior we see. .."
One quick hack I use is every time I comment, find a good comment or story I background check the user, find their twitter id, follow them and add them to my contact list. I'll twit my HN list for you.
The unpleasant side-effect has been a slight tendency to shoot the messenger by downvoting relevant-but-unpleasant news. But in general it has helped with story quality
I wonder if this could be tested. Even something as simple as http://news.ycombinator.com/classic applied to comments would be interesting. Or let PG pick, say, a hundred users and let each of them pick an additional two or three. Could the software show us the site as it would appear if those users' votes counted for more? It seems to me it wouldn't take long to get a feel for whether it had helped or hurt.
A karma penalty is a very soft slap on the wrist, at best.
It won't stop trolls, or assholes, or anyone with an agenda.
Subtracting a fixed amount of karma also gets less effective the more karma one has accumulated. So people with a lot of karma will be able to get away with more than people with less karma.
This has an upside, in that it allows more valued members of the community to express themselves more freely. The downside is that they can act like assholes without much repercussion. If the community winds up rewarding them for acting like assholes (by, say, upvoting their assholish comment) then that's even worse.
Of course, any community that not only tolerates but encourages assholes is not a community I want to be part of, and I've left a number of communities over that sort of behavior.
But there are other solutions short of "love it or leave it". I describe one such alternative in another comment in this thread:
That might work when there are a small number of participants and everyone has met everyone else face to face or when there's at least someone to vouch for the identity of every participant, but it doesn't scale very well to a community the size of HN.
Short "i agree" or "i disagree" type of comments are usually discouraged on HN, as they don't really contribute to the discussion. Usually.
I find it really odd that you cant downvote until 500 karma, and it appears you can never? downvote stories?
And then there are comments in this thread that say "its a really hard problem to figure out" -- no it isn't, you just need to have faith that moderation power will be used appropriately by the site's audience and give them the appropriate ability to do so.
Just like on quora, they seem to have blinders on to systems that work because they want to believe that only their design team could possibly come up with something novel and in that novelty find the best solution.
The later parts of the book (chapter 8 and beyond) seem applicable to the problems HN is facing.
PM me if you want, I'll send you my copy of the book.
2/ External values such as "democratic" likely oppose the actual objectives of HN.
3/ Within HN culture, there is an element of gate-keeping.
Also, weighted votes based on the karma of the user casting said vote.
Really, you're stuck with the same problem: just as there could be mass upvotes of "poor" comments and mass downvotes of "good" comments, there could be mass flagging of "good" comments as "spam", "dumb", or "mean".
On the topic of moderation I would suggest the ability to somewhat "follow" good commenters, and even perhaps block bad submitters. This way, reputation is not only karma, but quality of followers.
Yes, but the greater weight they get need not apply indiscriminately to all users of HN.
The simple act of voting on a comment implicitly indicates which other users a given user trusts and thinks should have greater weight. Namely, they are the other users who voted the same way on that comment.
A system could be developed which takes advantage of that information to give each user a personalized view of HN comments and articles.
I describe a scheme to do just that elsewhere in this thread:
Another way to think of it: a university needs teachers in the classroom. You can't just do research and have an open admissions policy. Someone has got to be providing training and feedback to the newcomers. Which is work. And you can't just have anyone do it. You need someone who's already had some training. A couple of thoughts:
1) You could feed those vested and proven folks with say, 1000 karma, 20% of their stories with top-level comments in non-descending order:
-- in randomized order instead of rank order, or
-- in inverse order, so they presumably have less cognitive burden to those undervoted great comments. Presumably it is less of a burden to skip over crap than decide if the 59 pt comment is really not as good as the 12 pt comment further down.
2) You could also add a more pre-emptive burden to rep: eg, you can't earn more than 10 points a day unless you vote on 10 new stories first. Feed a daily cookie to them with a popup with the policy, and encourage them to do it.
If you want an experimental focus group to pilot on, feel free to include me.
Isn't this is a logical inconsistency? There seems to be no problem dividing the community into haves and have-nots when it comes to post quality.
http://buildingreputation.com/writings/reputation_wednesday/
The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality.
Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments.
Only instead of having "direct democracy" ("rule of the mob"), you propose a "representative democracy" ("rule of the elites").
While there's something to be said for the "representative democracy" approach (namely, that at least the elites are familiar with the community's norms and mores, unlike some random newbie) they are just as susceptible to making poor decisions as the mob is.
In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good decisions.
1. On top of comments section have one which is for recent comment. I think lot of people feel that once the post is around for 30 mins (for a fairly popular post), even if they have something good to say, it will just not reach audience.
2. Remove karma points completely, just hide them some place where no one will see them. Use them silently in the background to optimize things, but dont bring them at the center. Generally new comers to site want to rise to top (of whatever) because that way they will be taken seriously. This incentive drives people to just write anything
3. No karma for submissions. People submit any article and get 10-15 upvotes but lot of articles do not add any thing to HN.
4. I think there is already some threshold on upvotes, perhaps increase it? Only so many upvotes/downvotes/submissions in a day or even in an hour.
Why not just make 1 the ceiling karma for all comments across the board? Or, in other words, why not get rid of karma all together?
I guess I'm still confused by how your proposal will solve anything.
It seems pretty clear that those people who really are commenting in good faith and aren't doing so to accumulate karma won't be swayed by whatever karma they may get (positive or negative).
So what does explicitly limiting the karma those good-faith commenters get achieve?
Part of the problem is the increase in the number of users. And there's not much you can do about that other than to actively drive users away from the site. (Difficult captcha? Erlang Fridays? Comic Sans?)
The other part of the problem is that the karma system rewards commenting. It isn't considered appropriate to downvote a comment unless it is overtly offensive or incorrect, so mediocre commenters don't receive signals when they are contributing almost nothing to the conversation. In fact, a mediocre commenter will comment more, because more comments mean more chances for random karma. And others see the mediocre comments and reciprocate. There is no way to reward someone for not commenting, even when it improves the site.
A number of the solutions already mentioned would help decrease the number of comments. One additional one: Make more of the site's behavior conditional on a high karma/post ratio rather than a high karma.
It would probably not be ideal to publicly publish names along with reasons, since this might encourage flame wars about why people voted in certain ways. However, perhaps there could be more private means of dealing with people who consistently misuse/abuse the system.
I think that instead of creating an atmosphere of better comments, this will instead create a site that has higher rated comments in the morning, and is stale later in the evening.
One problem with this is the perception that being banned (however temporarily) is a severe punishment reserved for major infractions, and that people might react strongly against that perception. To some extent that's the point: you want to drive away the people unwilling to change. On the other hand, you want to give those who are so willing the reason and opportunity to do so, and I think the occasional "time out" provides that.
It may still be an indelicate instrument for addressing the problem, but I think it's justifiable when the status quo is that known-good people are leaving voluntarily.
Note this discussion is exactly akin to deletionism on wikipedia – if we can categorise information effectively, why reject any of it?
It would encourage admins to be wise and for others to respect their wisdom.
That way comments from users with good reputation having comments with more points by default. I know this makes the rich richer, but that's the way PageRank works too. If your karma/reputation doesn't make you to be heard more, what's the point of karma anyway?
This isn't really a reputation system, or if it is, the reputation is comment-based and not user-based. I don't see the karma of a user when they comment. I would need to click on the link of their name, what I never do.
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. < 100).
Of course I'm just speculating about the potential value of this, but it might indirectly help a little.
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.
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.
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.
This is the biggest one IMO.
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.
The point of downvoting a 1-point comment is usually to let someone know their comment was inappropriate. A downvote against a 60-point comment is supposed to mean "This is not that good. It's just hivemind / good placement."
Taking one point away from a 60-point comment doesn't change its position, however. Maybe downvotes should increase its gravity or maybe they should have a greater push-back, even if it's not 1.1*count(downvotes) but rather (count(downvotes))^1.1.
The ones in which I really put some effort into explaining something, looking up some information, or explaining my point, usually get only one or two upvotes, if any at all.
I've probably voted thousands of times on various comments and articles on HN. Am I really going to care if someone sees that I voted this way or that way on some comment or other? I don't think so. I doubt many other people will either.
It doesn't much matter what the barrier is. A commenting system that crashes and destroys conversations occasionally, driving away people who are not sufficiently invested. A focused remit that drives away most people who see the site. A small group that does not advertise. But I've never seen any community sustain itself in a form that I want to be part of without some barrier to limit who gets involved in that community.
I'm not entirely clear on what the reasons are. Is it that we can only track a certain number of people? Is it that communities can only sustain themselves if turnover stays low? I don't know. But I've observed the rule in multiple places.
Given that, I've been surprised at how well HN held up. It started with a good seed. People who find pg interesting have a reasonably focused remit. The site lacks a lot of silly bells and whistles. People mostly find out about it through word of mouth. But still in the end without some barrier to entry, any sense of community is doomed. At least if my experience/opinions/etc is accurate.
Regarding the "laughs" I don't really understand what the big deal is. I like a funny/sarcastic (read: not stupid) comment that shows at least some insight or understanding of the matter or just pokes fun at a particular view. This is necessary and healthy for a discussion.
1) When is 'morning', exactly?
2) Allow N votes per hour instead of N per day
3) If (2) would devalue votes too much, allow N votes per 5 hour period.
Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed? If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place? Without voting, what will be left of HN?
> Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments.
Again: isn't that what we have right now?
I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it. I perceive that part of the problem is that the exceptional people who made HN what it is in the early days now have little say compared to the newbie masses who are dragging it down. The people in the middle (eg. myself) are a big number who increasingly become disenfranchised and are less active, thus voting less, thus exacerbating the problem.
> In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good decisions.
Here, the "follow" list would be private and only specifically there for you to nominate who you think make good decisions. This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice.
I don't see how you can separate popularity as you do. Why would I have a popular person in my list if I didn't trust their decisions? He could still be popular, just not in my list! Perhaps I should have called it a "proxy vote list" instead of a "follow list".
A user who is in the list of many other users need not even be told who or how many there are (the upvote total may need to be delayed or something like that to achieve this). People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity.
Submissions should hardly give any karma. That should take care of most of the problems regarding submissions.
About the approval: It should probably be the other way around. Flagged submissions are added to a queue for review (maybe letting the community to vote once more and therefor reviving the submission) and duplicates with comments are merged.
Random mumble: I have the feeling that many discussions depend too much on the poster. Sometimes complete discussions shift because of a comment of an established poster or live and die with said poster. And it's from time to time not because of some valuable insight but rather the fact that it's him/her. I am probably the only one who feels like that and I don't have a solution (if it needs one). Hiding the username and having to do an extra click (profile e.g.) to see who's behind the post would probably minimize the problem. But it would make it harder to filter out posts (which would need another indicator karma/per comment ratio (e.g.) to make it at least a bit useful).
Then each user would be free to use software running on their own machines to implement the comment recommendation scheme as described above.
In fact, HN wouldn't even need to de-anonymize the votes for this to work. All the HN servers would need to do is make available a list of unique user id's of the upvoters and downvoters. How those user id's map on to usernames wouldn't need to be revealed. But the user id's should remain consistent from comment to comment and article to article, so that the affinity number described in the original proposal could be consistently updated.
So, in this new proposal, each HN user would be assigned a unique id, and when they vote their id would be made available via the HN API along with the comment(s) they voted on when a given story's comments are downloaded for viewing.
Software running on a given user's local machine would then use the user id's and information on how those user id's voted to create a measure of affinity as described in the original proposal, and then sort, rate, or recommend comments accordingly.
I used to participate in the comments because the conversations were stimulating and the community was small. The community's too large for everyone to talk now, but HN has been the best tool for the intellectually curious to date and that doesn't have to change. The bar for commenting just needs to be higher.
When I read the top comments nowadays I'm expecting them to be written by:
- the author of the submitted article - the subject(s) of the article - employees or close relations to the subject(s) of the article - experts in the subject matter
At the bottom I expect to find comments such as product feedback or links to the print version of the article and minor but useful stuff like that. Smart people with interesting things to say shouldn't leave comments here--the community's too big for that now.
I'm not sure how you programmatically enforce that. It might be as simple as changing the commenting policies and have the users adjust their self policing.
Instead you have people ranting "content should be free", "paying is an outdated model", "the nyt are stupid" without any kind of coherent argument.
HN should make it clear that voting should reflect the value a comment adds to the conversation and not whether you agree/disagree.
Combined with Slashdot's default filtering (only comments highly rated comments are visible by default) and the huge flood of comments that popular stories get, very few people ever read the posts of AC's.
I've never had a Slashdot account myself, and have always posted anonymously. I haven't posted a lot, but I feel the posts I did make were all carefully considered, polite, and contributed to the discussion. But, because of Slashdot's discrimination against anonymous comments, they were rarely upvoted (and therefore rarely read by most users, who have thier comment filters set to only read higher rated comments).
Which is kind of sad, when you consider some of the utter garbage that gets upvoted there all the time, and considering that every comment (no matter how awful) made by a registered user starts off with a higher score by default.
Now that's not to say that Slashdot doesn't have good reason to rate anonymous comments lower than the comments of registered users. There are plenty of anonymous trolls of Slashdot, and that's one way of dealing with them.
That's also not to say that on HN, giving lower default ratings to pseudonymous comments than to comments left by authenticated users would necessarily be a bad thing.
But it should be noted that there are many high quality pseudonymous comments on HN right now (as only a relatively small minority of people use their real names here), and I'm not so sure how the HN community would react if the people who've revealed their names started to dominate the discussions, or if the comments by pseudonymous users were penalized by default.
I suppose that as long as pseudonymous posts weren't censored (as AC posts effectively are through the filtering mechanism on Slashdot), then it wouldn't be so bad. But I have a feeling that such filtering (and effective censorship) will inevitably come to HN sooner or later. And then pseudonymous users would become even more second-class citizens. And to that I'd really have to be opposed.
There are better ways of dealing with the decline in comment quality than penalizing pseudonymity.
Be warned, he's going to strongly advise you to set up a backchannel for public metadiscussion. Jeff Atwood resisted it vehemently at first when another metafilter moderator was a guest on his podcast, but they did eventually set up their meta subsite in the same vein.
Indeed. That's why HN is struggling with this problem, because HN chose to build its system around voting. So now it has to deal with one of the inevitable downsides of voting. Namely, that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality.
"If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place?"
Read through this thread. There are many suggestions.
"Without voting, what will be left of HN?"
Comments, articles, and community.
But I should note that I am not suggesting we get rid of voting.
"isn't that [a populartiy contest for comments] what we have right now?"
Yes. That's why I said your proposal was "just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments".
"I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it."
I'm not so sure it is an improvement as much as it is a different way of getting the same result, as it doesn't change the fundamental dynamic of the lack of quality in highly rated comments.
"This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice."
I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in comment quality?
To me it seems the only thing your suggestion would lead to is that popular users would become more popular, and the voices of less popular users would be drowned out even more than they are now.
"People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity."
But plenty of them are. That's part of the problem that having a karma score at all or rating/sorting comments based on votes at all. People will write to be more popular (which karma is a measure of).
Using ML to provide feedback is a bad idea. Most ML techniques latch on to surface features of the text rather than the deeper structure, so it'd just make it really easy for people to reword their mean comments ("this is just stupid" becomes "What an incoherent piece of gobblydegook" or something like this, which might make things funnier but I doubt it would help).
'Please refrain from making mean-spirited comments,
we like to maintain a positive atmosphere at HN;
and if you are planning to crack a joke, you might want
to think twice as jokes here are usually downvoted unless
they're *particularly* amusing.
Without trying to insult them, I know that it is a very close-knit and strong community, but the intellectual barrier is very low. The comment quality is very low. The notion that there is anything there that can help us is likely being spurned because, right or wrong, that's not what we're striving for.
While I was a little shocked to hear PG clarify that HN is a place for hackers and not startup founders (I kind of expected the opposite,) I think we can all agree that this isn't meant to be a site for the lowest common denominator.
I personally believe that quality control starts with the submissions. The higher quality submissions, the higher quality comments they'll attract. But that's just me, apparently.
Because users who don't upvote because there's nothing good to upvote are still active users.
If they're not active, why should HN assume otherwise?
If there really is nothing good to upvote, then I don't see what the adoption of the system you propose will do, as the extra proxy votes won't be used (there's nothing good to upvote, remember?).
The other major problem with your proposal is that it will be very open to gaming the system. Users could just create sockpuppet accounts to give their primary account the votes of the sockpuppet accounts.
Of course, even with the present system users can create sockpuppet accounts. But at least with the present system, voting from the sockpuppet accounts has to be done manually rather than automatically being aggregated in to one account by HN itself.
It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.
Personally, I want information to inform my actions. I want to make better predictions. Please give me info I can use. Help me sort it. Make me act on it.
I want statements I can agree with, or not. If I'm not sure which, please provide me access to distillable arguments for and against any such statement.
First, I want to very clearly understand what any statement intends to say. Please provide ample means for clarification of such a statement. What is said? What does it mean?
Next, I want to sort and compare reasons to agree or disagree with any such statement. I want to see who agrees or disagrees with such a statement. This is much more valuable to me than the herd voice.
Make it systemic: let broad statements rest on supporting statements, where each statement provides for debate to define whether it is True or Not, Unlikely or Likely.
Something like this might suck less than the bloviating blog/comment/infoglut of yesteryear, especially as the next billion users go mobile.
Some examples:
- "good": tptacek likes something and gives +1 point - he has no more power than anyone else to upvote
- "bad": RiderofGiraffes downvotes for -1 point
- "crap": RiderofGiraffes thinks a comment at -2 is mean, and downvotes twice. The comment is now at -3, since extra_downvotes do nothing on comments with zero or fewer points.
- "popular crap": tptacek double-downvotes a 17-point comment to 8 points. Two 2000-point (top-1000?) double-downvoters could also get it to 8.
- "ridiculously popular crap": tptacek and RiderofGiraffes hate a 302-point comment. tptacek double-downvotes it to 176; RiderofGiraffes double-downvotes to 150 (half of #upvotes - #downvotes = 300); lots of others also lend their extra_downvotes. The comment stands at 150 and upvotes have half effect.
I think this proposal strikes a nice balance: users with high (500+) karma can better help keep the crap out; extremely-high-karma users get a bit more power (only a bit - realistically, tptacek will typically remove something like five points from a popular-but-crap comment since others also have extra_downvotes).
More importantly, "normal" users still run the site (that 150-point comment is still at the top of the page, and no amount of extra_downvotes is going to dislodge it). If you're going to cry "democracy", remember that the only current way of dealing with popular crap is [dead] - losing half your comment karma is not that harsh. And, again, people with lots of karma are apparently interesting.
Note that points and extra_downvotes must be tracked separately; otherwise, people would want to wait until a crap comment has gained some points to make their extra_downvotes more effective.
Finally, two tweaks: it may be a good idea to let only comment karma count for extra_downvotes purposes, and it may be a good idea to allow extra_downvotes on submissions.
It's a pity that no-one is going to see this comment...
[Note: HN handles used for illustration only, I'll happily remove them if you'd like.]
Ironically that is one of the reasons why I lost interest. My interests moved on. A small fraction of the conversations taught me anything interesting. And so I drifted away. However the focused remit is essential for maintaining that community as it is, even if I am no longer that big a part of it.
Incidentally I am http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=tilly there, and http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=754085 describes some of the early history of how it came to be as it is.
Also, username hiding is a good idea in some cases, but I think it's worse overall. It encourages snarkiness, some posters are actually worth looking out for (grellas on legal threads, pg on HN, etc), and it makes back and forth discussions difficult to follow unless you give each user a unique ID per thread. Impersonation can also be a problem. Overall, I think it adds up to more problems than it solves.
# more polite language
# removal of irrelevant bits
# removal of memes
and hopefully this would encourage newbies to write better comments.
1) who votes on good comments 2) who votes on whose comments 3) who votes a lot / a little.
But mostly (1).
I take your point about ML being superficial. But if it's being used at all, shouldn't the users be informed about what the robo-brain thinks of them?
Your excellent example of a rewording might fool a lot of humans too (see pg's article another commenter linked to ... Ctrl+F "DH4").
. Econophysics, fuzzy logic, systems theory -- are those really serious fields? Could they become serious? The answers are subjective.
. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning -- too specific? is this just a journal that someone started to enhance her reputation in a self-defined field? how long has it been around and how long will it be around?
. Douglas Hofstadter -- scholar or dilletante?
. the blog of Terence Tao -- it is serious but is not published in a journal
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Jormakka_J/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who claimed to solve more than one Millennium Problem and is widely considered a crank. Articles were published in journals.
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Perelman_G/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who did solve a Millennium Problem. Articles were not published in journals.
Listen to Frank Wilczek talk about his feelings about not having his genius recognised: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Science/Physics/The-Univ... (Q&A at the end).
Academics play the karma game with much higher stakes.
Old guard would prefer to vote on a "Contributes/Detracts" axis, while new users vote on an "Agree/Disagree" or "Like/Dislike" axis.
Arguments about this erupt in threads, with newer users generally saying, "It's a democracy, this site is what the majority want it to be, and if most of us want it like this, your loss." But such an approach devolves into pop pablum.
I believe most other ideas here would be unnecessary if the meaning of the up/down arrows could be resolved either socially or algorithmically.
The "correct" solution would be to offer a quadrant, with contributes/detracts on one axis, and agree/disagree on the other. But that would require a rewrite.
Instead of a rewrite, I'd experiment with temporarily changing the arrows to say something explicitly supporting well reasoned comments:
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ contributes | detracts ] link | parent | flag
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ content | spam ] link | parent | flag
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago | interesting* | spam | link | parent | flag
I think this type of vocabulary is more in line with the desire to see well reasoned or contributory discussion flourish.
* Mouse over the word "interesting" could tooltip: "This comment made me think."
// This account is ~400 days old, but a prior anonymous account is ~800 days old, giving some perspective on the trend over time.
But you make a good point.
PS. I'm 3000+ karma, 3+ year HN user posting from public terminal in a hotel, hence the anon account. My apologies.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605
I think the primary accelerator in the inevitable slide towards 4chan is anonymity. I've seen this in my own experience: I'm anonymous on reddit etc. but use my own real name (easily googled) when posting on hackerne.ws. And the difference is potent: on reddit I am much more of a jerk than I am on HN. I think this is fundamental nature: anonymity gives you license to release your inner jackass.
I think you should require all posters to use their real identities except with special permission.
I know the standard arguments against this: how to verify identities, valid reasons for being anonymous, etc., etc. But I don't think they're enough reason to avoid a simple measure which would keep the site much more relevant, polite, and personal.
I dont follow.
I am saying that having a better system for your community to converse allows the community to thrive.
You may think the intellectual barrier to entry is low, or the intellectual quality of what you read on reddit is low - and I would counter that maybe your looking at the wrong subreddits for you.
There are a ton of subs that I cant stand, dont read, dont follow etc...
I simply ignore them - but I am talking about the mechanics of the forum. The ability to have ongoing conversations, up/down vote comments and submissions and the ability to categorize content via the submission process.
You're talking about the community being beneath some HN standard, where I am talking about the characteristics of reddit's infrastructure that allow the community to interact.
For some reason, people think that we need automated tools to weed out those that would be beneath their interests, but I don't think that is possible.
Also, how would you accommodate people who are just learning, trying to learn or are experts in other subjects yet are trying to expand their base? You cant say that the intellectual barrier is too low such that people who don't know what we are talking about cant participate...
Actually, yes, I am. I firmly believe, for better or worse, that the more popular a site becomes, the more interests it has to cater to. Somebody else posted in the thread that the three options for a community to stay true to its roots is to either exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.
Allowing everybody an equal share participation on the moderation capabilities panders to the latter. If everybody can moderate out, and the site continues to grow, then I think it's only a matter of time before the harder-to-understand articles are filtered out in favor of more easily digestible pieces that appeal to a broader majority.
I think the main difference between here and the notion of subredditing is that effectively, HN IS a subreddit, targeted at Hackers. I'm obviously not the say-all authority, but I suspect that splintering it further is not only unnecessary, but runs contrary to the concept of a focused community.
In fact, that there are subreddits that work so well (again in my opinion) speaks primarily to the fact that subreddits aren't very easy to find or discover.
As for the people who are just learning? I honestly don't know how to handle that. Though HN has worked really well with a diverse group of experts. There are lawyers, doctors and professionals of all sorts that are able to contribute to the areas they are knowledgeable in -- the trick is in somehow enforcing the restraint for them to not comment on things they know little about, or at least to not comment unintelligibly. The more aware of the community ideal everybody is, the more easy that becomes; but the more diluted the population grows to be, the harder that becomes to enforce.
Like I said, I don't know all the answers, and I certainly don't mean to impugn anywhere else in favor of HN - Reddit has plenty of perks, I'm sure, but it is the rare community that is able to subsist through popularity. The closest that I can think of to have lasted is kuro5hin, and they certainly had their own communal warts as well.
a) Staying on top of HN and current with articles and comments is becoming a fulltime job. Contributors who are productive in their non HN life will overtime realise that they are spending a disproportionate amount of time on HN. Something needs to be done to the mechanics of HN to change this. The only thing I can think of for this is highly unusual but here it is - Do not allow people to comment on stories by default, only vote for them as ontopic and offtopic. Later after a certain amount of time - stories become available for commenting or disappear entirely. This effectively decouples a story into two phases - is this story worthy of discussion on HN and second how good is the commentary on it. Doing this split will allow you to attack the story and comment quality in a more granular manner. Also sometimes its tempting to open an offtopic story just because it has 80 comments, hoping that some HN stalwart has added non trivial analysis to an otherwise trivial story. By not allowing discussion on offtopic stories such wayward curiosity on part of readers like yours truly could be avoided. b) Remove the indirection currently in place to flag stories and comments. Downvoting is more convenient currently, perhaps flagging should be a bit more convenient than it is currently. c) Turn HN into a fully customised experience. People prone to gossipping will overtime find themselves in a version of HN where gossip is abundant, ditto for technical users. An implementation is left as an exercise for the determined reader. d) All changes dont have to be live on news.ycombinator.com. You could try out multiple versions with different incentives, maybe different sub-communities will find different local optima. e) Force people submitting stories to write a comment longer than a certain threshold about the story.
I'm surprised to see so much focus on the comments. I think the front page is the primary problem. I wonder how much of the comment problem would fix itself if the front page had more signal and less noise. Maybe that's naive.
Personalization is most certainly the wrong answer for HN, but when I thought last week of my ideal solution to the problem this is what I came up with:
1. Personalized weighted point calculations. Each vote is multiplied by a number which ranges from 0 to 2 in .1 increments. Everyone starts at 1. Everyone who up-votes the same story as me gets .1 added to their weight. Everyone who up-votes a story I down-vote gets .1 removed from their weight.
2. New users can't submit stories during an initial probationary period. They also start out at .1 and get .1 added to their weight each week they're active on the site. After 10 weeks of activity they can submit stories.
3. Weights are applied to comment rankings but not derived from them. Comment rankings also need to be much harsher. We want fewer comments and higher quality comments. Maybe ((weight*2) -.5) for calculating comment points. But the floor is always 0.
I don't know if ideas along these lines could be successfully de-personalized.
These ideas I think are mistaken:
1. Any notion of explicit control. Such as: hard coded karma values, comment size, non-bayesian content filters, etc. (New user probation being the 1 exception)
2. Anything based on unweighted karma values.
These ideas I'm suspicious of:
1. Economic solutions. They strike me as having the same problem as micro-payments. I don't want to have to think about how I'm spending my alloted money each time I up-vote or down-vote. Also the purpose of money is trading, not creating artificial scarcity. And even assuming the goal of artificial scarcity is worthwhile (I don't) then it implies some kind of hard-coded explicit control to determine purse size, which will always be a mistake.
However, we are talking about how the scale of HN is getting to the point where people are complaining about S/N ratios and as you say:
>exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.
I think this is shortsighted, elitist or both. First, you/whomever posted this has clearly left out a better option; ADAPT to newcomers/scaling.
While I agree that HN may have been like a subreddit, with a target audience, HN is growing, entrpreneurship is growing, the startup ecosystem in the valley is growing, our knowledge base is growing.
Eschewing newcomers and growth is to operate in fear of progress.
Taking the spill-over and iterating what HN is to accommodate is not to "lose its cred" so to speak...
Further, I am not advocating a straight adoption of reddit, but I do feel that HN can learn a lot from how they enable the community.
I had written a bunch of suggestions in my first reply, but deleted them, but I was suggesting some options along the lines of:
Validate SMEs in given areas and give them high-level moderation/influence.
Post a clear HN-etiquette that delineates posting format/commenting format that the stie wants.
Earn further features/user abilities through karma - such as allow SMEs/high karma users to only create HN-subs.
There are a lot of things we can do, but to cry in the corner over newcomers is never a winning solution.
I'm not suggesting that we do, obviously. However, newcomers have the disadvantage of not knowing the history, the ethics, the goals/ideals. They only know what it was like 'when they joined'. When I joined, I was corrected a few times for missteps I made. The growth rate makes that less and less feasible. It isn't that I hold a grudge to new people, they are just disadvantaged when it comes to the communal etiquette standards.
1) Useful plugins, technologies, tools, or resources for development. 2) New Platforms (hardware, app store, device) or policy (privacy) changes. 3) Inspiring projects, stories, or news. 4) Cool science, physics, math, or other explanations and stories.
TBH - most popular HN stories cause knee-jerk reactions but have little content.
Maybe a specific 'work' filter would prioritize links into these categories?
My theory: Internet marketers descend on online communities that are popular. Possible solution: No follow on frontpage stories with less than X upvotes or no follow all frontpage stories.
There are some aspects of reputation systems which are useful for identifying misbehaving participants but I don't see any evidence of such use cases on HN. Yet the karma system encourages karma whoring which IMHO significantly reduces the SnR of contributions (both articles posted, and velocity and content of comments).
Maybe as a starting point the karma scores can be hidden from public view?
So I generally think that good stories shouldn't decay as fast as they do. And maybe also when there is some activity on them.
Maybe also we should have some category like "best stories of yesterday", putting some fresh attention to the good ones.
Lots of other good suggestions in this thread but I don't see this one.
I hope you can turn it around, I've gotten a lot of value from this site.
First, you say that you don't recognize that behavior is influenced by things like up-votes, down-votes, and deep threading. In the next breath you argue that a better system has a positive impact on the community. I don't see how you can have one without having the other. Making a community “thrive” is changing it. If you disagree with this please explain to me why communities like thriving, but don't like not thriving. If they are the same than they shouldn't care either way. If things have changed than you agree that the changes had an affect. Also a better system being better is something that I find to be true by definition.
Next you argue for downvotes, by saying that reddit has proved itself in virtue of subreddits. I don't think this is the case. I think that subreddits are harder to get to, creating a selection-bias in which only the people who are interested in that subreddit end up contributing to it. In other words I think you can explain the success of reddit's subreddits with subtle elitist bias. This creates a huge amount of irony, since your post is actually arguing against elitism.
You also claim that some people think we need automated tools to weed out things that our beneath are interests. This is another point that is sort of funny. We not only need those tools, we have them [1]. They are built into our minds.
In the end you ask rhetorically: can you ask someone who doesn't know what your talking about to not contribute to your discussion? This backfires too. Plato said: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” Proverbs continually tells the fool he should shut up (I'm almost done, really). The idea that you can ask people who don't know what they are talking about to be quiet isn't new or immoral.
I'm probably misinterpreting you, but that irony made my brain happy and I wanted to share it.
As I see it, HN is about the conversation. I don't care who brings up a topic, if it's interesting. And then, I'd prefer to see discussion focused on that one submission thread, instead of spread across 3 or 5 or more follow-on submissions, particularly those placing #, ?, etc. at the end of the URL.
If posting does not bring karma, maybe this would help reduce the number of threads and increase their concentration of ensuing conversation.
I'm not sure, though. Something subconscious tells me I'm not seeing the other side(s) of such a change.
Also, if possible, I think the duplicate checker would benefit from being enhanced to detect at least the more obvious/prevalent workarounds, e.g. those same #, ?, etc. Of course, this, of itself, likely leads to an arms race. But maybe it would have at least some temporary value.
for all new users and all existing users with karma<100
* on create account page give link to Guidelines to read and before signing up give us a quiz with 20 questions to assess our understanding of the most important ones. This would also give us a clear message that attitude and quality is very important on HN.
for all users
* rename "comments" to "thoughts" and add "chat" link to convore/wompt for a relaxed discussion. From "chats" users can deduct quality material to "thougts" for history value.
for users with karma<100
* include explanations on down-votes so we can understand our mistakes an learn from them. Give us a chance to become better rather then killing us and wait for us to reappear as yet another troll.
* make submit button on "thoughts" to countdown 10 seconds (with bail-out option) to give us time to rethink if the post is really useful
One way to counteract this is to have the new user match, say, pg's profile.
I know this is an offensive idea, but you simply have to decide whether to cater for the elites or the lowest common denominator. As time progresses the people just joining now will look back on this time as a golden age of HN -- it will get worse -- and in the future there will be a new wave of lower intelligence HN'ers. That is how it always is.
The solution I would prefer is (1) allowing users to curate their own experience with far greater granularity than allowed on a site such as Reddit. That is, use twitter like ideas of followers and lists. Allow us to choose who we see comments and stories from. I care about the votes from these people much more than somebody who just joined a couple of weeks ago and hasn't programmed or owned a startup company. (2) giving users with popularity in the community, moderation power similar to the kind found on StackOverflow. The power to close topics. Respond to bad usages of the vote button. Respond to flags. Perhaps even the power to moderate comments.
I've found the title of the article is fairly representative of how much I enjoy reading it. If this is true for others, why try to force us to upvote articles? Just count the clicks and use that as a strong weight in rankings. Is it currently analysed at all?
I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.
It's not quite badges, and it is a bit twitteresque but i really feel like it ads value to the site for me.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpgnh...
what if you had reputation presented per comment, but no public identity?
This is similar to an idea I was toying with a while back but never got around to nailing down. Upvoting or downvoting an item should result in a change on the personal account, but rather than it changing the account's "score" up or down, the system records the vote based on the "type" of item. If a series of items are categorized as "Gossip" and I vote them down, the system learns that I don't like "Gossip" items. An item could be in multiple categories ("Gossip" and "IT") and my past voting would determine whether or not I would see the item on the page (super-roughly "the item was categorized 50/50 Gossip/IT, dpk's Gossip score is -11 and IT score is 10, result is -1, don't show"). In effect, users would themselves be group-able by their votes, so if someone in your "group" posted an item, it would get an automatic bonus. If someone in your "anti-group" (someone nearly diametrically opposed to you) posted something it would get a negative bonus.
Categorization would need to be put to the community, and would be done while the item is on what is currently termed the "new" page. Once the item is categorized the various display scores (as loosely described above) will be computed and the result could be shown to the users.
One side-effect of this is that it allows users to "shun" spammers in to their own "group". They could spam all they want but nobody would see it unless they were really excited about seeing spam.
The idea has (at least) one major serious problem: It encourages group-isolation. This could be partially resolved by always showing a "best of group" block of links somewhere on the home page, which could encourage users to branch out a bit.
As I said, this idea is not fully fleshed out, hence the overuse of quotes and its nebulous, hand-wavy nature. It's a less punitive, more categorical system. It may not scale at all.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443089
In one of the comments on reddit ascheinberg wrote:
Like every single site like this, the problem is that the public is ready to ingest content faster than content becomes available, or rather, faster than worthy news is made, so in the lack of real gripping news, things of general interest fill the gap
So maybe we should try to slow things down by limiting number of votes/submissions per person per day?
If someone could submit only one story per day maybe he would do that more carefully?
The same applies to votes - with limited number of votes available someone would consider more carefully what to spend his votes on?
And as additional benefit making things slower on HN could have positive effect on our productivity ;).
To prevent moderation becoming a bane on non-spamming users, the threshold could be set to .05 or .10. (or .95/.90, depending on which way you train the filter.)
It worked for email when spam was a massive problem; perhaps it can work for comments while they're still only s small problem.