Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?

[tokenadult]

Here's an open-ended question for all of you. I saw the recent thread on the main page about "honeypot" submissions, including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that? What can we all do about that? What voluntary cooperation can we engage in as users of Hacker News to make HN a more useful, friendly, and informative online community? I invite open discussion of this issue here, with any and all suggestions welcome, including suggestions directed specifically to my own online behavior.

One suggestion I have made before is actively to upvote comments that either 1) ask for follow-ups with more details or facts to clarify or back-up a parent comment's statements, or 2) provide asked-for details or facts (especially with links to reliable online sources or citations to dead-tree reliable sources). I also like to silently upvote comments in which users are polite and say "please" or "thank you," as a measure to promote civility. What else is good to upvote? How else besides upvoting good comments and asking follow-up questions can each user here promote better comments?

Thank you for any ideas you share here. And many thanks, of course, to the dozens of users here whose posts and comments make HN a valuable community to me and to other users.

[patio11]

Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics (even politics within a thirty mile radius of a computer!), because they predictably descend into value-free flame wars. That destroys the sense of community even on good threads: after seeing "you're a fucking idiot" on some article about how the TSA is cracking down on Wall Street music piracy, people often think "Did you read the fucking post?" is acceptable discussing minutie about a particular startup's use of Redis.

[tokenadult]

Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics

Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment, which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

that political posts and commments have no place on HN.

That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to listen to community consensus here.

I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

and

"Undergraduation"

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

and

"Is It Worth Being Wise?"

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing business who wants to hire competent workers.

What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?

[jsdalton]

In that vein, I think the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) are too wishy-washy:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

The guidelines grant too much leeway here and make it difficult to educate new members about what's appropriate. Off topic should just read: "NO politics, sports, crime or general news stories." Full stop, no excuses.

Likewise, the on topic section provides too much cover for people to submit just about anything (hard to get more broad than "anything that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity."). I'd rather see tight, specific rules and let the community decide when it's appropriate to bend them.

[grandalf]

I'm more optimistic. I think most HN readers could pass an ideological turing test. Nonetheless, in the context of political discussions it's often socially acceptable to be obtuse.

I've had a few discussions with people on HN that have bordered on political (mostly around Wikileaks and Terrorism) and I think these discussions have left me more rational, as any good discussion should.

[EwanG]

I "personally" would prefer that such discussions still be made available, but that people have an easier way to block those if they don't want to discuss that (or at least don't want to discuss that at HN).

[e03179]

http://news.ycombinator.com/r/politics

[apparatchik]

Absolutly no politics, current mainstream news, or anything that comes near them. No OWS crap that keeps getting submitted. There's a lot of pieces from the Atlantic, Vanity, and other places that are being submitted and upvoted that are essentially political in nature but seem to be viewed in a good light simply because of their publisher. Cut out all that and the biggest problems will go away.

Promote civil discourse and find a solution to all the pedantry. There's lots of threads now where people are arguing for a long time essentially over semantics. It's really bone-headed and doesn't reflect well on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555595

[kaybe]

OWS as in Occupy Wall Street?

[adbge]

I'd like to see more people on the "New" page. I'm not sure how much attention it gets compared to the front page, but it seems like very few people are taking the time to wade through all of the submissions and upvoting the gems. Essentially, controversial topics are much more likely to garner the necessary upvotes to make it to the front page, and thus receive a lot of attention, while technical ones often fade into oblivion.

It's my understanding that HN's algorithm rewards articles that have lot of comments and discussion. I've observed that I typically enjoy articles that feature a high upvote to comment ratio, while I'm unlikely to enjoy articles with more comments than upvotes. I would be interested in seeing what the front page would look like if articles were penalized for having more comments than upvotes. Maybe this is just a personal quirk, I don't know.

I'd also like to see the community flag more comments than just those that are spam. Personally, I flag any very mean comments/ad hominems. I've been on the receiving end of such often enough that I know that those kind of comments can easily ruin somebody's day. I think, as a community, we should actively discourage comments that are mean. All criticism ought to be constructive, otherwise what value does it add to the discussion?

At day's end, though, the most effective way to influence the community is going to be leading by example. Long-time members of the community need to show newer members what is appropriate. pg needs to show the community "this is good" and "this is bad" and he has to participate. The entire tone of a community is decided by its most senior and most active members. The majority of a community will follow the lead set by those few.

[DanBC]

I visit new and upvote good articles. I also visit (http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories) and flag a lot of submissions.

I agree about "Be the change you want to see".

[kb101]

Hacker News seems to be evolving and becoming many things to many users. Why not leverage that instead of trying to restrict it? Regardless of whether things are "on topic" or not, the site has two things going for it that other communities often strive in vain to build: traffic and a definable culture.

My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice, network technology, programming tips, hacker culture, VC firm news, economics, politics, military tech.... whatever the topics are that people are actually posting and upvoting.

Classifying a topic could be done by a voting algorithm, weighted by karma... the poster thinks the topic is economics, then it gets marked as economics. If enough commenters feel that it falls under politics instead, then their clicks on that topic classification (submitted as part of the comment form) will reclassify it as such. Those users who want to see only certain topics can filter as desired.

The spirit of respectful and collegial debate that pervades the site is a huge draw and could just as easily be applied to the "off-topic" as the "on-topic"... and there is a synergy in having both available. It keeps things fresh and interesting and there is intellectual stimulation available here that you can't get anywhere else, regardless of topic.

I guess I am saying that the pool can be bigger and still be clean, and it can have a shallow and a deep end, fast and slow lanes, and serve a wide range of swimmers... but still be known for its overall high quality.

[chad_oliver]

I think that would work well (especially if the grouping could be largely automated). I personally would like to see a category for articles that are purely intellectually stimulating (e.g. stuff equivalent in thoughtfulness to pg's essays).

On the other hand, I think it would be useful to have strict limits on how far the culture stretches. We should try to preserve the geeky, business-y, thoughtful culture, rather than going the route of reddit where everyone's allowed to do what they want.

[mixmax]

This is a great idea.

[cschmitt]

I like the topics ideas, as someone who is very interested in the ASK HN threads. I think this is a great start and a way to get new people more involved.

[EwanG]

IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the requisite boulder of salt...

1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.

2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common "always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested, being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.

My .02 worth for you :-)

[DanBC]

> 2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in.

That's nice, but the problem is that those people then don't know just how bad the stuff they're ignoring has got.

Maybe they'll start to notice some churn in users; they'll notice that a favourite commenter is no longer around, or that there are many newer members who are creating odd posts. And then BAMN - HN is suddenly worthless.

[mattvot]

I agree with point 1. A Dedicated Full-time Community Manager could shape the community, chip away at the crap and support to cool aspects. Someone who knows HN inside and out, who listens to what the community wants, is willing to put their ego to the side when they are wrong and is stern enough to enforce rules.

[cromulent]

For me, if there was a little text before the "add comment" button that said something like:

Does this comment contribute something to the general discussion rather than just trying to prove that someone else is wrong? If so, [add comment]

then it might stop me from making some of my more bone-headed and offensively off-topic comments.

Imagining HN as a large round table discussion full of very smart strangers that I was lucky enough to join in with seems to help. Only say something that adds to the discussion, moves it along, or points out a seemingly missed but valid and contrary point of view, and don't be so rude as to mention that guy's stutter, the foreign guy's poor pronunciation, or be a boring pedant. If it gets boring, go to the next round table.

I'm a little concerned by the "citation please" two-word comment below someones long contribution for some reason. Not everything needs to be peer-reviewed here, there's plenty of room for well-formed opinions based on one experts own experience. I guess the problem is when they are crowded out by the poorly-formed opinions or dogma. A balance, like most things, I guess.

[smoyer]

I think that the down-voting has gotten out of hand and have seen several instances where participants seemed to have issues with each other or were reacting to a dissenting opinion. Shouldn't we welcome dissenting opinions? Doesn't that actually make the discussion more engaging and valuable?

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way. Perhaps a trick could be borrowed from the StackExchange sites and a down-voter would pay for the privilege with karma points?

[tokenadult]

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way.

Quite a few users agree with this general opinion, with differing values assigned to "didn't further the conversation in any way." One problem is that many users who are not furthering the conversation don't seem to notice that about themselves, and then demand an individual explanation for each and every downvote, which seems too much to ask for in response to comments that are, in pg's words, "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

While many users share the opinion that downvotes should mean something mostly about contribution to the community rather than disagreement with the point of view expressed, the opinion that downvoting is okay when used for expressing disagreement with the content of a comment has also been expressed by many users over the years, including by pg, the site founder.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If someone who disagrees with me on factual or policy matters has made a thoughtful comment that introduces me or other HN participants to new information, I am happy to upvote it. But if a comment indeed doesn't contribute to the discussion, because it merely expresses one user's opinion with no verifiable information, it's within the current site guidelines simply to downvote the comment, so that the person who posted it is made aware that he or she should try harder to make a substantive, evidenced comment next time.

[neutronicus]

Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof.

There's no value in identifying and shaming people who are overenthusiastic about products. Just correct any hyperbole - and don't crow about the fact that it's hyperbole! - and move on.

That's the most topical one, but "idiot", accusations of poor reading comprehension, and mocking interrogatives are all things I'd encourage downvoting as well.

[Udo]

> Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym thereof.

Seconded. I also believe, more generally, that the growing tendency to express negativity towards people (instead of ideas) is just as much of a problem as frequent offtopic threads. Luckily, this is somewhat easy to fix, because it may be easier to remind participants to keep a respectful tone than to define what actually constitutes a hacker-relevant topic.

[staunch]

$5 registration fee that goes to the EFF. Might slow growth to a more manageable level -- give people more time as lurkers, so they learn the culture.

[jrockway]

Why $5 and not $50?

MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.

[DenisM]

Actually all these problems have been solved in FIDO net about 20 years ago. There's usually a set of rules, updated list of off-topic subjects, a moderator, a set of co-moderators, public punishment, and ex-communication of repeat offenders. It worked fairly well for as long as moderators stayed on the ball.

I continue to be surprised that we have to re-learn all these things the hard way on the web.

[impendia]

One idea -- don't display the user's own karma score in the top right. It reminds me a little bit of an arcade game, and I confess it makes me want to earn more points.

I still think you should be able to see your own karma of course (click on your username), but that it should require two seconds of effort.

[stuntgoat]

It seems that comment contribution dissipates after a thread leaves the front page. There are valuable comments hidden from weeks and years ago only in that they are out of sight to us. The only way to check if someone has replied to a thread you are interested in, is to check that thread for updates ( or actively search for a topic ).

I propose thread subscription. If I want to watch a thread for new comments it would be convenient to get a digit on my nav bar regarding how many threads I am watching that have new comments.

I believe this would keep threads more active. Perhaps it would encourage quality posts, rather than quantity ( people might submit often in attempts to get on the front page ( even if for an hour ) ).

For instance, this is a great topic and I would like to subscribe to this thread-

[zerostar07]

I think the frontpage is great. That's probably because it's heavily moderated. I don't think there's a way to save the comments. Tragedy of the commons is inevitable when forums grow beyond a certain threshold. I 've even turned "showdead" to on as i 've found some great but controversial (read: thought-provoking) comments get completely buried under the usual HN popstars.

Might i suggest a crazy idea though: For every submission, ask 2 random members (who have a minimum but not high karma) to review it before it gets posted. If they disagree, ask a third. It's something i am testing out on my site, but i don't have sufficient user base.

[DanBC]

I recently submitted an article about lemonade stands. Most of the discussion was political. I was disappointed - I thought people could talk about ways to promote entrepreneurship or to teach basic concepts like added value. So, I apologise.

I try hard not to respond to any political posts. Now I can downvote I might consider downvoting those.

I avoid anything that mentions Apple, or MS, or often Linux, especially if they're in the same thread. These threads could be great, but often they're content free bickering. I upvote good information. I will consider downvoting flaming.

I haven't submitted many articles. I notice some people submit very many articles - 10 per day. I don't know if there's some way to nudge people into only subbing good articles. Maybe once they've got over twenty submissions they need an average score of X (for the subs) before they can sub any more??

I'd also welcome more power given to people with high karma scores (and maybe high average scores (although I realise there are some problems with average karma)) to have super downvotes, or downvotes for submissions, or some such.

[mattblalock]

I read and enjoyed your post. Like you, I too was disappointed the conversation was political... I was hoping for more startup oriented conversation.

[sendos]

I think one of the main problems with HN is the way comments are displayed on the page.

Essentially, the way things are set up, every thread becomes ossified after while. It becomes this stagnant, rigid, structure that doesn't change much when new comments are added.

This is the opposite of what you want, if you want a vibrant, active discussion on an interesting topic that lasts for longer than a few hours.

[polyfractal]

Adding the option to view comments linearly by date would help a lot. Or highlight new comments since your last visit. Couple that with subscriptions that someone else mentioned and you'd have a much easier time keeping discussions going past the front page.

Effectively, HN needs some of the features that forums and bulletin boards have had for ages. There is a reason forums work so well for discussions.

[alexandros]

Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do. By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community, strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective 'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit. The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the point of hn.

[tokenadult]

Thanks for everyone's thoughts on how each participant here can help all participants enjoy a more useful, thoughtful, and informative online community on Hacker News. I find it interesting that despite the thrust of the original questions, many suggestions in replies are suggestions that can only be implemented by forum management. Forum management may or may not make future changes in the forum software or forum rules, but I was especially curious about what everyday users of the forum (like me) can today and every day to make the online community better, one user at a time, all for one and one for all.

[whyproblem]

Ditch the politics / mainstream news and HN will be a very solid resource.

[Detrus]

Communities fall apart, especially large ones. Maintaining the same level of quality would be unprecedented, even if you had the exact same people they would change over time.

Also the minimalist computer science inspired upvote/downvote sorting system is a bit of a mismatch to human communication. Someone has to try a more complicated paradigm. I think tags on posts and comments would work better. Have a menu/autocomplete thing for common tags like [agree, troll, disagree, interesting, this, politics, hostile] and weigh submissions and comments through them. Should also be able to combine multiple tags and have a rating option for each tag. Label severity of disagreement, politics or suspected trolling.

This way when you need to tune the knobs you have more data to work with than just upvote/downvote, total karma and average karma. I don't expect pg to do these kinds of experiments though, he has minimalist tastes and limited time.

Also many times when communities fall apart, we have limited data to work with to see where things started to go wrong. Was it too many n00bs that chased experts away? Was it hostility? Did too many new people start voting on new submissions? I've seen some attempts at analysis of HN but don't remember them making clear conclusions.

[axefrog]

Does PG listen to the StackExchange podcast? There's some great information on there sprinkled throughout the various conversations they have. Jeff Attwood is very passionate about online community management and he and Joel Spolsky get into some interesting debates about some of the community-related problems that they have to deal with on StackOverflow and the other StackExchange sites.