zlacker

I'm not sure why, but my feeling is that I am personally less happy with the content a) being submitted and b) making it to the front page than I was even 6 months ago.

Maybe since I'm not a newbie on HN anymore I'm remembering through rose-tinted glasses and yelling at the kids to get off my lawn.

The things I care about are programming tips, new software, javascript/python/ruby/etc specific articles, new startup companies. There seems to be a lot less of this kind of content and more general tech news, which I can read at any number of other sites.

I don't care about business stories(other than those related to startups) and rumors Techcrunch has started about something.

On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good. I would be great if there was a way to get easier access to the comments than the ity-bity link we have now.

>>geuis+(OP)
Perhaps some other kind of weighing system might work.

Votes from high karma users could boost stories more than low karma users. Is there any way to downvote a story?

>>geuis+(OP)
Looking at stories at one moment, on one day, is probably not capturing the whole story. It would be interesting to see something like the RMS difference in story ranking between the two menthods over a long period of time. If the two methods are truly equivalent, that number should tend to zero.

>>geuis+(OP)
I think this is mostly due to perception. I have experienced a similar change in perspective, but I still come here just as often and spend about the same amount of time reading the articles. But I now use this site as a baseline for quality comparisons. Rather then being wowed by all the cool articles here, I have come to expect this level of quality.Other sites have become less interesting to me as a result.

>>geuis+(OP)
I've been around long enough to have noticed several of these cycles. I could go for weeks seeing nothing interesting, then go nuts for a couple of days reading and posting. I don't know if it's me or hn, but I simply describe it as the natural ebb and flow of an organic entity.

Come with an open mind and have fun if there's interesting stuff that day. Get back to work if there's not. Either way, you win.

>>geuis+(OP)
Like all news, you get lulls. Sometimes, there really isn't much going on, but we will it with things all the same.

>>joseak+71
Bad idea. Remember the kerfuffle around the orange names? This would be worse, because high karma would have a numeric and measurable effect on the site.

>>iamwil+p2
I think this outlook sums up why news is so dangerous, no matter who the individuals are that make up the community or how they report it. . .There is some Alan Kay quote floating around out there of him paraphrasing something Douglas Engelbart noted about the difference between what is the news with computers? and what is new with computers?

I don't come to HN to read the news nor should HN be reporting the news to me, I come here because it's a community that is grounded in doing new things and showing me what these new things can do.

>>edw519+h2
A couple of weeks ago there was a patch of articles that reassured me about the site.

The most significant difference I see between 'classic' and 'normal' is the article entitled "First Steps Towards Post scarcity" is 28 on classic, but 13 on normal. Could be there had to be some difference and its random, but I generally find articles on this topic pretty light on quality thinking.

>>geuis+(OP)
> On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good.

Maybe its me, but I've found a lot more comments within the past fortnight or so grating on me than previously. Remarkably, every time I checked the submitter, they'd been on Hacker News for about a year and a half at least. And by grating I basically mean rude and unhelpful.

>>anc202+49
I've noticed a lot of the top voted comments lately are riddled with poor thinking and logical fallacies. I'm not sure if the smartest commenters are leaving, but the crowd definitely seems to be rewarding nonsense.

>>iron_b+a4
It seems slightly different than the orange incident. There, it was a highly visible symbol: either the poster's name was orange, or it was not, and it turned into a status symbol.

A number however is far more opaque, because it masks two different factors: the number of people voting, and the assigned weight of those people. For a given number, it is impossible (or at least difficult) to tell the relative importance of each factor.

Edit: This got me thinking: couldn't 'karma'-based voting help prevent the erosion that affects many other sites? If those dedicated members have high rank, there is a switching cost to joining another site, because they lose that elevated weight. That keeps them "in the game", whereas many other similar sites have lost the original members as average quality declined, which began a feedback loop of poorer quality.

Then, if elevated weight gives those users greater influence, the original character of the site is preserved because (1) the original users don't leave and (2) those users exert great influence on the site.

The only weakness is preventing low quality posters gaining karma weight through the voting of other low quality posters, thereby undermining the quality of high-karma users.

>>iamwil+p2
I think what needs to be avoided is not the lulls, but the lulz.

>>anc202+49
A few times I've found the account is over a year old, but comments only started recently. If the front page of their comments was filled (i.e. 10 comments), I probably wouldn't have noticed this. BTW they didn't seem especially bad, just the typical newbie comments before someone replied "Please elaborate".

>>geuis+(OP)
A few times I've compared the same programming article here and on proggit - and the later always had deeper comments. Maybe it's not surprising, since that's the focus of proggit, but only one of several here.

I've also twice noticed the same usernames on reddit and HN - and their comments on reddit are more helpful and intelligent than here... Though not a conclusive sample size, it does make me think that reddit's concentration of communities (with subreddits), and the ability to easily skip bad comments (with collapsing [-]) seems to be working.

But I find the stories submitted here are better than on reddit.

>>geuis+(OP)
I find that there's usually 1-2 stories per day that are significant for what I am seeking on that day. So, for me, it's not surprising if that doesn't always happen, since there are so many factors involved.

>>sho+yc
and the lols

>>10ren+Nd
It might be worth doing one more version considering the ratings only from people who have contributed significantly to the culture (their karma along with age should reflect reasonably well i guess)