Quality of HN Comments Over Time
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'09 '10 '11
When HN first started it was kind of like r/truereddit but with an emphasis on startups. HN today has almost nothing in common with this. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it's correct to say that the quality level is just an oscillation.
I don't think this answer holds true anymore, i.e. the newbies who are a year old would claim comment quality is going low. I think it now has become the norm. Why not just aim for a standard near the top quality submissions?
I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way.
Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.
I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation.
The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this:
I've grown.
The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises.
When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments.
edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.
Most of us that have been around since the beginning (this is my second account) are too busy to participate as regularly as we once did. I'd rather spend time on my business than get hooked on discussions here as much as I did in the past. I will jump in here every so often and I still think HN is relatively great. Doesn't everybody remember the big debate over even linking to Techcrunch articles? We have always been whining about what's wrong to realize that this place has consistently been pretty great.
And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.
You (pg) will not need this since you have the data.. ;-).. but for anyone else interested in doing analysis over time, HackerSlide stores JSON representations of the HN front page every hour (starting Oct 15 2010).
I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy.
I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.
Maybe you should compare random /active pages from years back. I don't know, I only found out about /active this last month, but I'm guessing the problem will be more visible there.
It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way.
As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical".
I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the true Hacker Mentality.
There was a submission a couple of weeks ago of a site that randomly arranged previous HN submissions of a certain threshold from the past with each refresh. Was really useful and sadly neither Searchyc.com or Google is helping with finding the post.
Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?
* Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3!
* Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users.
* Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.
* Site X begins to exhaust natural topics of conversation. Denizens of more than 3 months standing become sick of 100th
"What does Site X think about AlphaGamma?" post and begin to slap down newbies.
* Someone reminisces out loud about the Golden Days of Site X.
* Discussions on Site X become more and more about Site X. Extremely intelligent individuals begin to earnestly argue that their proposed feature will save Site X from itself.
* Someone proposes or launches Site Y. A how new community begins to form there ...
I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.
> Site X begins to exhaust natural topics of conversation. Denizens of more than 3 months standing become sick of 100th "What does Site X think about AlphaGamma?" post and begin to slap down newbies.
This implies it's hostility to "old hat discussions" that have already been around the block that people are worried about.
I don't think that's primarily it. The civility levels have slipped a lot... this place used to be as civil and friendly as meeting a bunch of people at a dinner party where everyone admires the host.
Still super-civil compared to the rest of the internet, but the levels have come down a lot. Raw outrage, profanity, and outright insults used to get downvoted to oblivion even if people agreed with the general argument the commentor was making. Rudeness really wasn't tolerated, so new members learned quickly that you had to think for a minute longer before replying.
It's still a great site, but it's not elitism and reminiscing that the old guard is scared of. It's comment quality slipping to rest-of-internet level.
>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.
And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with.
"Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
While I basically agree with you--I too have seen this cycle many times before--what I don't understand is why people feel the need to slap down newbies in an attempt to recapture some since-passed golden age.
If I get bored of a site or simply get nothing more out of it, I just move on.
If I see topics that are boring or simply have no interest to me, I just ignore them.
If I see rude, insulting comments or personal attacks, I just flag them and move on.
I really don't understand why people need to express so much hate.
How about, instead of a single community, the site runs as a set of "cohort" communities that each only allow direct sign-ups for their first year in existence, but then run a bit like leagues thereafter? If people like you on HN/2011, you might be invited into HN/2010, then HN/2009, etc. It could also be automatic/karma-based: if you earn enough karma on HN/2011, you start again on HN/2010 with 1 karma point (though you can also stay on HN/2011, marked as an alumnus/boddhisattva.
This comes across as snide. Slashdot circa 2011 is largely unreadable. So is Digg, so is main Reddit. The cycle may be real, but so is the phenomenon driving it.
I agree. One thing tho that never seems to come up: we people from older waves ignore the fact that we spent the last $N years growing, getting better, getting deeper into stuff, while the site has not grown with us. So even if the site hasn't changed, our perception of the topics and such has -- intro to X used to be deep, since we were little, but now that we are big, we just see a puddle :)
Interestingly, this isn't a problem related to any particular category of site. Hell, look at 4chan: bitching about newfags and how /b/ isn't good anymore, how /b/ was never good, different factions with different ideas on how to fix the problem (or what the problem is, or if there even is one), spinoff sites where the early adopters migrate to...
This isn't an HN problem, it's an Internet problem. pg could probably do some things to ward off dilution, but it won't last forever. Interestingly enough, Something Awful seemed to be pretty damned successful in this regard by doing the unthinkable and charging people to post there. I'd hate to suggest it as a solution, but it has been effective in the past.
Just because this has been the typical website lifecycle in the past, doesn't mean that it has to be the typical website lifecycle in the future. We increasingly have better and better tools to manage how people interact with sites and communities.
Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely that we will see more and better tools for community management available in the future.
The most important thing is for "us" to define exactly what current and past features of the community we want to preserve and also decide what kind and amount of "chaos" we want to permit to allow the site to evolve and improve. It makes the most sense for PG, YC founders and very high-karma users to be responsible for defining these community characteristics, ideals and values.
If you are right, a website could automate the cycle as follows:
1) Every user belongs to at most two (or k) classes.
2) Each class can have a finite number of users n.
3) When a class fills up, a new one is opened.
4) There are always two (or k) open classes at a time, and new users join both of those two (or k) classes.
5) The classes are staggered so they don't close at the same time; e.g. if k=2, n=10000, the first 5000 people to join belong to class 1 and class 2, the next 5000 belong to class 2 and class 3, the next 5000 to class 3 and class 4, and so on.
6) Users can only post to classes they are in, and can only comment on posts in classes they are in (or maybe newer ones too).
7) By default, users only see posts to classes they are in (or maybe their classes + older ones). They can opt in to see more if they want.
The idea might work better if it is combined with some more onerous mechanism to join classes late - a fee, a requirement for an endorsement from a member or someone. Charging a fee for access to the more '1337' earlier classes might be a good way to monetise the site; the fees could either be flat, or could escalate (exponentially?) with the age of the class and / or the number of people who pay to join it late (possibly with a discount applied as active members leave).
Classes might get too small due to attrition - coalescing older classes when they get too small might be a solution to this - it might also make sense to increase class sizes (exponentially?) as the site gets more popular.
For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses.
In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place, the cruft in another. Let's face it, the people who are complaining about lack fo deep tech are also likely to read and enjoy one of Spolsky's blog posts. There's no need to ban the latter to protect the former, just keep them in separate sections.
Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand.
I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.
As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation.
As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible for what's on the front page and what's in the comments. Having a handful of humans who are responsible for curating the front page (and possibly also pinning really good stories from new onto the front page) would solve most of these problems. Is this less democratic? Sure it is. Would the unfairness be worth it? In my opinion, yes.
This problem just isn't solvable with code; it takes benevolent dictators.
I'm probably one of those darned newbies who isn't a real hacker and is screwing the place up. (Sorry.) So I wasn't around in 2008 (or whenever the Glory Days were). I don't feel like this article or other discussions about the issue have really given me a good idea of what HN supposedly once was that it isn't anymore. I wish I could get such info. I think that kind of information would hold out some hope of figuring out a real solution -- a means to raise the bar or deepen the discussion or whatever it is that people are wanting.
I know there are other large forums on the internet but this is the largest one I have personally participated in. I think such large forums are breaking new ground, socially, in ways that do not compare to sites like Facebook. Where else can I actually speak with my 80K closest friends? If I am in a room of 500 at work (and not on the stage, because I am not one of the big wigs), only a handful of people around me can hear anything I say. We all can listen to the presentation, but we cannot converse. Here, any and all of us can converse. It is unlike anything you can do "IRL". I suspect that is part of the issue: No one really has a model for how you manage that kind of social interaction. And the models we do have break in that setting.
Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost.
Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product.
My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, first engineer hire and first design hire) of YC startups would probably make the best moderators and admins.
In fact, I would say that it's probably time that PG spin off YC as a full-time startup, assigning control of the design and codebase to one talented UI designer, one talented developer and one talented product manager.
For the site to keep growing in a way that maintains quality, it needs more functionality that it has. The two features that lack the most are filtering and combinatorial game mechanics.
Filtering is necessary so it is easy for the the hardcore tech articles to be easily found by high-karma members, so they can vote those articles up. If it's not findable, it's not voteable. Filtering is also necessary for people to extract the most value out of hacker news. Most users don't want 100 front-page articles everyday. They probably want 10-20 of the highest value articles. Less is more.
Combinatorial game mechanics like those on StackOverflow would help as well. Upvoting/downvoting is limited in that it will always fall victim to the masses. Giving special voting/tagging/burying rights to distinguished members (very high-karma users and YC founders and employees) would go a long way to helping eliminate the crap.
I think I speak for most members here, when I say that I don't want Hacker News to be a democracy. I want it to be a technocracy. I want the smart and accomplished people to control what is good and should be visible to all. I've got only 260 karma points, and personally I don't think that should be enough karma points to allow me to upvote a submission. 500+ karma points should be the threshold to be able to vote an article to the frontpage.
both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost.
I strongly disagree. Off the top of my head: XFree86/Xorg, Mozilla/Firefox, Debian/Ubuntu, Rails/Merb... these were all cases where the existing community had calcified in some key area and a fork was necessary to create a space where important work could get done.
And in most of those cases, not only was the fork stronger than the trunk in (some) specific areas, the fork actually led to the trunk getting stronger. Not only were patches merged, but entire projects, community values, development practices, etc were.
XFree86 is an exception, but organizational paralysis was what necessitated the fork, so it's not surprising they were also unable to respond to the fork.
But I just don't buy your notion that forking is somehow unhealthy and destructive. It's one of the most valuable ways we have to keep open source code, ideas, organizations and practices fresh, healthy, and vibrant.
Another reason HN may be boring: we've beaten a lot of the common topics to death. It only takes a handful of articles about "how to pitch a VC" to soak up most of the relevant advice on the subject. While posts often present a unique combination of previously mentioned ideas, it's becoming increasingly rare to actually find something new if you are a regular here.
As a low-karma, long-time lurker, I'm not sure I've ever really seen the kind of submissions he is looking for. Can someone provide examples of submitted content that would meet his criteria of deeply technical discussion worthy news?
How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal.
Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else.
As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.
Gated communities are effective means of preserving the identity of communities, they all employ some bar of entry whether racial, religious, ageist, or economical.There are many social maladies that are also unique to the gated community, the insularity often breeds all sorts of creepiness. Preservation all to often morphs to Stagnation.
Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.
I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.
The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.
When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.
When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.
It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.
Come now, I can't be the only one that finds the Hacker News quality "good to great"?
If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's good that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled.
There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied.
I think there is a vocal minority of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...)
Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a huge amount of those people visit Hacker News every day - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.
It's definitely not what Alex is semi-proposing but I've been running RubyFlow - http://rubyflow.com/ - for a few years now and it totally stole the MetaFilter model, just for Ruby-only stuff. No "votes" and points scoring - just interesting posts from people in the Ruby community coupled with me editing posts for format and deleting anything that's blatantly spam or offtopic. Seems to work though I have been tempted to go in the voting/Reddit/HN direction with it.. maybe I shouldn't!
Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1.
Why
Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day.
Further Analysis
Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links).
HN already gets the independent code submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by webzines\newspapers with builtin linkbait titles. This reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.
If the crowd has cycled so much, I wonder if maybe this isn't the best solution for the desired outcome.
Granted, I haven't been visiting tech-specific boards for more than a few years, but I'd generally agree that the more technical articles are what I'm interested in.
I think I'd be interested in a board that was geared toward programmers/hackers, but didn't use a typical karma/point system. I'd like to see one that perhaps utilized karma, but under a collaborative filtering system. So, in a simple for-instance, if a small subgroup of people tend to upvote articles that I do, those articles would be given more weight, and similarly those who downvote articles I upvote would be, from my perspective, given less downvote weight, while at the same time there might be a different subgroup that was weighted to value their downvote more. Perhaps give people the ability to tweak the tolerances of their collaboration. Give them the ability to say "if this guy has X karma and ignores someone's articles and votes, then I want to ignore them too"
Of course, this might be
1. a completely naive idea,
2. an idea that's already been tried and failed
3. an idea that's already being used
4. something to time-consuming for people with real work to do or
5. an idea that's unworkable and that I'm only having because I just started reading books on, and experimenting with, machine-learning ;)
Though even if it existed, I probably wouldn't use it. I already waste half my day reading the few articles that interest me on hacker-news, heh
it sucks that when you design any system or any set of rules, and humans are going to interact with it, you have to think "how are these shady bastards going to subvert my beautiful creation?"
I think that if you stay at any online community long enough, you begin to perceive a drop in quality - even if that drop does not exist.
IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information.
On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.
Where is the data that shows HN has degraded? We aren't seeing kitten pictures. A scan of the front page shows the mix of articles being programming, startups, tech.
I'm not sure what Alex wants? More discussion around PG's hackers and painters?
I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit.
Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.
It's simple really. Digg was good, then it got popular, Reddit was good, then it got popular. I've increasingly visited HN more than Reddit to get my old Reddit fix, as I assume others have, and so popularity has increased and now the quality is degrading as people want their karma fix or 2 cents.
There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll.
The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments.
Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnor0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdap|15 years ago|reply
Do those peaks feed periods of frenzied success (inspiring people to do better stuff faster)?
Or do they lag periods of success (pearls of wisdom come out when people are past the sweat-soaked white knuckle phase)?
Or is there some other correlation?
[+] [-] Aegean|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmars232|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.
[+] [-] sophacles|15 years ago|reply
The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this:
I've grown.
The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises.
When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments.
edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.
[+] [-] bootload|15 years ago|reply
2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/
2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/
2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/
2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/
2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663
[+] [-] 9oliYQjP|15 years ago|reply
And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json gets you what you want. For example: http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json
[+] [-] jraines|15 years ago|reply
I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|15 years ago|reply
As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical".
I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the true Hacker Mentality.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1
[+] [-] dewitt|15 years ago|reply
http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombi...
The first one saved was on Feb 22, 2007, just after the site launched:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news....
Notice that the second link is to pg's announcement post.
Second cached page, Feb 26, 2007:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news....
And so forth:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news....
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news....
Bounce on the ▸ icon to page from day to day.
This one has a gem on it from paul:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news....
The archive is not complete, but it does give a reasonable glimpse into the recent past of HN.
[Edit: I think I'll go crazy before getting the line breaks to look correct.]
[+] [-] cachemoney|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shii|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?
[+] [-] jsrfded|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|15 years ago|reply
* Hot new community forms at Site X.
* Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3!
* Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users.
* Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.
* Site X begins to exhaust natural topics of conversation. Denizens of more than 3 months standing become sick of 100th "What does Site X think about AlphaGamma?" post and begin to slap down newbies.
* Someone reminisces out loud about the Golden Days of Site X.
* Discussions on Site X become more and more about Site X. Extremely intelligent individuals begin to earnestly argue that their proposed feature will save Site X from itself.
* Someone proposes or launches Site Y. A how new community begins to form there ...
I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
This implies it's hostility to "old hat discussions" that have already been around the block that people are worried about.
I don't think that's primarily it. The civility levels have slipped a lot... this place used to be as civil and friendly as meeting a bunch of people at a dinner party where everyone admires the host.
Still super-civil compared to the rest of the internet, but the levels have come down a lot. Raw outrage, profanity, and outright insults used to get downvoted to oblivion even if people agreed with the general argument the commentor was making. Rudeness really wasn't tolerated, so new members learned quickly that you had to think for a minute longer before replying.
It's still a great site, but it's not elitism and reminiscing that the old guard is scared of. It's comment quality slipping to rest-of-internet level.
[+] [-] JonnieCache|15 years ago|reply
And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with.
"Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
[+] [-] cletus|15 years ago|reply
If I get bored of a site or simply get nothing more out of it, I just move on.
If I see topics that are boring or simply have no interest to me, I just ignore them.
If I see rude, insulting comments or personal attacks, I just flag them and move on.
I really don't understand why people need to express so much hate.
[+] [-] derefr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sophacles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|15 years ago|reply
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
[+] [-] redthrowaway|15 years ago|reply
This isn't an HN problem, it's an Internet problem. pg could probably do some things to ward off dilution, but it won't last forever. Interestingly enough, Something Awful seemed to be pretty damned successful in this regard by doing the unthinkable and charging people to post there. I'd hate to suggest it as a solution, but it has been effective in the past.
[+] [-] malandrew|15 years ago|reply
Upvoting/downvoting, filtering, disemvoweling, moderation, tagging, reputation systems, etc. are just a smattering of the tools we have available and with time it's likely that we will see more and better tools for community management available in the future.
The most important thing is for "us" to define exactly what current and past features of the community we want to preserve and also decide what kind and amount of "chaos" we want to permit to allow the site to evolve and improve. It makes the most sense for PG, YC founders and very high-karma users to be responsible for defining these community characteristics, ideals and values.
[+] [-] A1kmm|15 years ago|reply
1) Every user belongs to at most two (or k) classes.
2) Each class can have a finite number of users n.
3) When a class fills up, a new one is opened.
4) There are always two (or k) open classes at a time, and new users join both of those two (or k) classes.
5) The classes are staggered so they don't close at the same time; e.g. if k=2, n=10000, the first 5000 people to join belong to class 1 and class 2, the next 5000 belong to class 2 and class 3, the next 5000 to class 3 and class 4, and so on.
6) Users can only post to classes they are in, and can only comment on posts in classes they are in (or maybe newer ones too).
7) By default, users only see posts to classes they are in (or maybe their classes + older ones). They can opt in to see more if they want.
The idea might work better if it is combined with some more onerous mechanism to join classes late - a fee, a requirement for an endorsement from a member or someone. Charging a fee for access to the more '1337' earlier classes might be a good way to monetise the site; the fees could either be flat, or could escalate (exponentially?) with the age of the class and / or the number of people who pay to join it late (possibly with a discount applied as active members leave).
Classes might get too small due to attrition - coalescing older classes when they get too small might be a solution to this - it might also make sense to increase class sizes (exponentially?) as the site gets more popular.
[+] [-] psyklic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaffiene|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
[+] [-] redthrowaway|15 years ago|reply
Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand.
I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.
[+] [-] sachinag|15 years ago|reply
As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible for what's on the front page and what's in the comments. Having a handful of humans who are responsible for curating the front page (and possibly also pinning really good stories from new onto the front page) would solve most of these problems. Is this less democratic? Sure it is. Would the unfairness be worth it? In my opinion, yes.
This problem just isn't solvable with code; it takes benevolent dictators.
[+] [-] Mz|15 years ago|reply
I know there are other large forums on the internet but this is the largest one I have personally participated in. I think such large forums are breaking new ground, socially, in ways that do not compare to sites like Facebook. Where else can I actually speak with my 80K closest friends? If I am in a room of 500 at work (and not on the stage, because I am not one of the big wigs), only a handful of people around me can hear anything I say. We all can listen to the presentation, but we cannot converse. Here, any and all of us can converse. It is unlike anything you can do "IRL". I suspect that is part of the issue: No one really has a model for how you manage that kind of social interaction. And the models we do have break in that setting.
Just thinking out loud.
[+] [-] malandrew|15 years ago|reply
Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product.
My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, first engineer hire and first design hire) of YC startups would probably make the best moderators and admins.
In fact, I would say that it's probably time that PG spin off YC as a full-time startup, assigning control of the design and codebase to one talented UI designer, one talented developer and one talented product manager.
For the site to keep growing in a way that maintains quality, it needs more functionality that it has. The two features that lack the most are filtering and combinatorial game mechanics.
Filtering is necessary so it is easy for the the hardcore tech articles to be easily found by high-karma members, so they can vote those articles up. If it's not findable, it's not voteable. Filtering is also necessary for people to extract the most value out of hacker news. Most users don't want 100 front-page articles everyday. They probably want 10-20 of the highest value articles. Less is more.
Combinatorial game mechanics like those on StackOverflow would help as well. Upvoting/downvoting is limited in that it will always fall victim to the masses. Giving special voting/tagging/burying rights to distinguished members (very high-karma users and YC founders and employees) would go a long way to helping eliminate the crap.
I think I speak for most members here, when I say that I don't want Hacker News to be a democracy. I want it to be a technocracy. I want the smart and accomplished people to control what is good and should be visible to all. I've got only 260 karma points, and personally I don't think that should be enough karma points to allow me to upvote a submission. 500+ karma points should be the threshold to be able to vote an article to the frontpage.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|15 years ago|reply
I strongly disagree. Off the top of my head: XFree86/Xorg, Mozilla/Firefox, Debian/Ubuntu, Rails/Merb... these were all cases where the existing community had calcified in some key area and a fork was necessary to create a space where important work could get done.
And in most of those cases, not only was the fork stronger than the trunk in (some) specific areas, the fork actually led to the trunk getting stronger. Not only were patches merged, but entire projects, community values, development practices, etc were.
XFree86 is an exception, but organizational paralysis was what necessitated the fork, so it's not surprising they were also unable to respond to the fork.
But I just don't buy your notion that forking is somehow unhealthy and destructive. It's one of the most valuable ways we have to keep open source code, ideas, organizations and practices fresh, healthy, and vibrant.
[+] [-] johnrob|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmm57|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschobel|15 years ago|reply
Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else.
As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.
[+] [-] doron|15 years ago|reply
Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.
I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.
The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.
When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.
When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.
It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.
More people, more heat, Entropy.
[+] [-] pclark|15 years ago|reply
If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's good that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled.
There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied.
I think there is a vocal minority of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...)
Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a huge amount of those people visit Hacker News every day - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidhollander|15 years ago|reply
Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1.
Why
Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day.
Further Analysis
Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links).
HN already gets the independent code submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by webzines\newspapers with builtin linkbait titles. This reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.
[+] [-] doorhammer|15 years ago|reply
Granted, I haven't been visiting tech-specific boards for more than a few years, but I'd generally agree that the more technical articles are what I'm interested in.
I think I'd be interested in a board that was geared toward programmers/hackers, but didn't use a typical karma/point system. I'd like to see one that perhaps utilized karma, but under a collaborative filtering system. So, in a simple for-instance, if a small subgroup of people tend to upvote articles that I do, those articles would be given more weight, and similarly those who downvote articles I upvote would be, from my perspective, given less downvote weight, while at the same time there might be a different subgroup that was weighted to value their downvote more. Perhaps give people the ability to tweak the tolerances of their collaboration. Give them the ability to say "if this guy has X karma and ignores someone's articles and votes, then I want to ignore them too"
Of course, this might be 1. a completely naive idea, 2. an idea that's already been tried and failed 3. an idea that's already being used 4. something to time-consuming for people with real work to do or 5. an idea that's unworkable and that I'm only having because I just started reading books on, and experimenting with, machine-learning ;)
Though even if it existed, I probably wouldn't use it. I already waste half my day reading the few articles that interest me on hacker-news, heh
it sucks that when you design any system or any set of rules, and humans are going to interact with it, you have to think "how are these shady bastards going to subvert my beautiful creation?"
[+] [-] peterbraden|15 years ago|reply
IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information.
On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.
[+] [-] teyc|15 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what Alex wants? More discussion around PG's hackers and painters?
[+] [-] jefe78|15 years ago|reply
Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.
[+] [-] kedi_xed|15 years ago|reply
There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll.
The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments.
Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...