Can you provide the number of user accounts?
Have the number of posts also increased 12x fold? The turnover on the new page seems more like 3-5x from what it used to be.
http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ga.jpg
(This is the post, for reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388510 )
Anyone know the number of daily posted links? Comments? Now versus six months and/or a year ago?
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
I actually agree with you on this, and I wasn't going to say anything, but I've been a little discouraged by some of the stuff I've seen up-voted lately. I think Hacker News is a special place and hope to protect the community that we've built here.
(Sorry, that was too hard to pass up.)
A function of TC being seen as a leading VC/Startup news source and user submissions to extra points?
Perhaps I spend too much time here. Something about the company of intelligent individuals...
adjective
1 apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity : meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade.
2 archaic of, relating to, or characteristic of a prostitute.
The moment a social news site begins to degrade in my opinion is when comments are posted that add little or nothing to advancing or starting conversation (for example "Modded up for _______", "Really Nice _____" or my favorite "When I read the title of this post I thought it said ___. I have had too much ________ today")
There was a period where it felt as though the same articles would sit on the front page all day. The increase in the gravity for old posts and the increase in total number of posts has caused me (and I would assume others) to become more active in the site. I think the focus in moderation should be on the comments to set an example for what is expected.
Way off-topic I know.
Maybe an informal etiquette reminder displayed with a "confirmation" for potentially bad comments. The downvote never hurts either.
I suggest that it wouldn't be very much :-).
That means eliminating politics stories, because those:
* Appeal to pretty much anyone with an opinion, including lots of non-hacker types.
* Really suck people in. "Someone is wrong on the internet!"
Look at how many comments there were on the Obama/Broadband story. Were any of them really that interesting? I would expect the hacker mind (at least those who are not devout followers of the 'keep the government out of it' school) to have already arrived at the fact that it's some sort of monopoly/oligopoly situation and to cast about for research on what sorts of policy approaches might cause what effects, and have what sort of consequences, both positive and negative. One minute with Google scholar turns up this, for instance: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstrac... Most likely, someone who actually knows something about economics might be able to point to others of interest.
But that takes a lot more effort than the simple sorts of debate that tend to surround those stories.
Is it because the experience here is so good, or...
Is something in your work "missing" so much that your passion pulls you here instead.
hn is great, but if it "attracts" you more than your project, then it's time to take a good hard look at your project.
This is like moving from a small town to a big city. Someone can be rude to another person in a big city because more than likely they will never meet a again. In a small town everyone knows everyone else and word spreads rapidly. You don't want to act like an ass in a small town because everyone will hear about it.
In large online communities, karma is supposed to act as an incentive to be nice and contribute thoughtfully, but it is not as effective as true reputation among people that you know personally. What the world as a whole thinks of you is less powerful than what your friends think of you.
A good experiment would be to enforce the small town effect on an online community. Partition a news site into groups of 100-1000 members. Comments and submissions would only be visible inside each members subgroup until upvoted past a certain threshold. With luck members would get to know one another inside a group and desire each others respect enough to contribute to the discussion meaningfully. Debates would last for days or weeks instead of an afternoon as is the case on current news sites. Trolls damage would be confined to one group at time as well.
A few months ago I had an idea for automatically forcing people to submit story's to sub groups as the sight grows. So it starts as a base line then it's a Funny, then it's Funny, picture then it's Funny, picture, cat etc. And at each level people can automatically weigh how much they like each sub group. Then set the homepage as the average weight people give each sub group. Then redit started adding sub redits and I realized it was an easy idea to copy.
But to be honest, I haven't seen a whole lot of 'fluff' in the short period I've been here.
It is not 'digg-type stuff'. It's a founder, talking about a successful startup.
To me this is just as bad. Occasionally their is a good story, but nothing that can't be found at any number of other news sites or blogs.
I will most likely never release a webapp (I'm an embedded kinda guy), but I like seeing what others are doing and reading about their insights and experiences. It's one of the few places I can find a group of smart people doing something I find interesting.
I'm not saying TC is a good news source, simply noting that it's consistently lists high on posters & voters minds. TC is closer to 'The register' than I'd like.
While there have been flurries of "poor" content accruing a decent set of points in the past, I'm now starting to see a lot of downvoting occurring. Previously, downvotes were used on spam, offensiveness, or flat out "wrong" comments - whereas now it appears to be an indicator of opinion. This shift demonstrates how significant the "new wave" of HN users is.
I've got 3 weeks of nothing planned until school re-starts, and by then, who knows.
The wealth of information is great.. the front page has.. well.. loses it's interest after a couple of hrs of the day..
I've routinely voted up people I disagree with because I thought this was a place where opinions across the spectrum were to be encouraged. It would be sad to see this is now not the case and that instead you should say whatever's most likely to get you points. Are the people on the leaders board meant to be the most "average" in opinion as judged by HN readers? That sounds downright boring.
Of course, you might just be saying that's how people use downvoting, not how they should use it - which I'd agree with. Even so, a sanction against this practice would be super as it removes one's motivation to actually express one's true opinion (unless burning karma is one's hobby).
If you think you're going to lose a bunch of karma for just expressing your opinion, you'll follow the group opinion and it leads to groupthink.
