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New users: Welcome. Please read the site guidelines.

532 points| pg | 17 years ago | reply

There's been a big spike in new users the last couple days. Unfortunately it's been visible not only in the traffic stats but in the character of the comment threads.

New users: we'd appreciate it if you'd please read the site guidelines before commenting. Most importantly, the principle that you shouldn't say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to someone's face.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News is an experiment. We're trying to see whether by asking people to be civil we can avoid the kind of nastiness that anonymity breeds by default. The experiment has worked so far. And while the new users may not realize it, this is why they're here. People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.

The principle that you shouldn't say things you wouldn't say to someone's face means you can't express yourself the way you might be used to doing on Reddit or Slashdot. This, for example, would not stand out on either of those sites,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459250

but it's not cool here.

137 comments

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[+] axod|17 years ago|reply
I've also noticed comments modded down to <1 for no good reason. I like the idea that here, generally downmods to <1 are reserved for abusive or off topic comments, rather than just something you disagree with.

To the new users: If you disagree with a comment, please reply to it, stating why. Don't just blindly downmod it.

Just my 2c

[+] mcargian|17 years ago|reply
On the flip side, I don't understand why someone should get 40 karma points for a two word witty comment, no matter how funny it was. Why isn't karma per comment limited to -1 to 10? Seems like it would limit karma bashing and karma mega-boosting.
[+] russell|17 years ago|reply
I have noticed a piling on of downmods in the past couple of weeks. TooMuchNick seems to have lost 30+ points for a couple of comments. They didn't add much to the conversation but they weren't so offensive that he deserved that. He got the point. Probably -1 would have accomplished it. HN is the most civil site that I have seen. All it takes is a gentle tap to remind a commenter the s/he didn't contribute to the discussion.
[+] nandemo|17 years ago|reply
As far as I know, new users can't downmod.
[+] kaens|17 years ago|reply
I'd personally like to say "Please keep HN civil, free from trolling, and intellectual." This site has been a great resource - and that's at least partially because the tone of the vast majority of the community here is pretty serious.

I have an account on reddit as well, and my tone over there is different than my tone here. On reddit I make a decent amount of off-the-cuff remarks, occasionally troll a bit, participate in pun threads, and also have a decent amount of intelligent debate and discussion. Here I keep my mouth (fingers?) shut (stoppped?) unless I have something to say, because that's the vibe here.

Here, I'm more likely to vote people up who have a differing opinion on an issue, or even if they have an opinion that offends me, if they are able of stating and defending their position logically. On reddit, I'd probably just skim over their post.

Etc.

The tone of this site has gotten a little lighter since the first time I was here, and it seems to have gotten a lot more of a focus on the business side of things, which is fine - but if people aren't careful, the site will devolve into yet another pick-your-favorite-site-here.

So yeah. Please keep HN grown-up. It's nice to see mostly responsible discussion happening on a site like this, and I hope it continues to happen.

[+] TooMuchNick|17 years ago|reply
And by "grown-up," we mean "like grown-ups who aren't from TechCrunch."
[+] ojbyrne|17 years ago|reply
That principle doesn't work online. In general you can say stuff to people in person that's insulting and abusive, and then just give a wry smile and everybody laughs. You can't do that online. The guideline has it exactly wrong.

The problem is that what you say online about someone is frozen forever, and takes on more significance than either the sender or the receiver actually meant. In person, I call you an asshole, you're impressed that I said it to your face, we both laugh and move on. On the web I call you an asshole, you call me an asshole, it escalates, shows up in google searches for both our names, people who aren't quite up to speed on things (recruiters) take it more seriously than it should be... bad stuff happens.

[+] pg|17 years ago|reply
Some percentage of the nasty things people say on web forums are said half-jokingly and offend because half-jokingness is hard to convey in text, but I think the majority are genuinely nasty.
[+] jmtulloss|17 years ago|reply
I really appreciate the distinction you drew here. I'm definitely an asshole a lot, but I'm fairly certain that at my core I'm a reasonable and accommodating person. That's something that can come across in person, but on the internet I have to take particular care to make sure I'm not stepping out of line.

Not that I always do, but I should :).

[+] TrevorJ|17 years ago|reply
It works in as much as we have the chance to reply and amend our comments if they are taken differently than intended. The same problems exist for phone calls and email as well but it doesn't stop people from figuring out ways to communicate wry or witty comments, it just changes the conventions that are used.
[+] zain|17 years ago|reply
I'd also prefer to see less "linkbait" on the front page; i.e. stories with titles that are, at best, only tangentially related and are instead overdramatized just to get clicks.
[+] TooMuchNick|17 years ago|reply
It would be healthy for submitters to look at headlines before they copy them directly, realizing that what makes sense for a blogger (aware of Digg) seeking some well-deserved attention for a post might not make sense in an extremely specialized forum like Hacker News.

What I mean is, a blogger is completely justified in naming a post "Why James Bond would never drink a Coke" (like I did for an environmentalist blog) if that blogger believed their purpose would be best served by alerting Digg users to the perfidies of the Coca-Cola company. But if a Hacker News reader appreciated the post's message -- that Coca-Cola is exploiting water rights laws in third-world countries to produce its products cheaply at the expense of the residents and their clean water supplies -- they would do well to use a different headline that what the desperate blogger, often paid by the pageview, had written with a view to Digg.

That said, bloggers will more and more overhype their posts in the way that media have since their beginning, and those of us on small thinky web sites will have to get used to downvoting and moving on.

[+] sh1mmer|17 years ago|reply
Curiously PG posting this gets 50 karma and counting, someone else posted a similar thing earlier in the week and got flagged dead.

I don't want to see this topic regularly but maybe the guidelines could be made more prominent for new users?

[+] pg|17 years ago|reply
Good idea. I should add some kind of welcome page.
[+] rw|17 years ago|reply
What has caused the spike in new users?
[+] pg|17 years ago|reply
I don't know (the web server doesn't keep track of referring urls), but it started on thursday.
[+] baddox|17 years ago|reply
Leo Laporte also mentioned this site on TWiT I believe. I was already a member, but perhaps this drove some people this way.
[+] critic|17 years ago|reply
Layoffs?
[+] Flemlord|17 years ago|reply
As a reddit convert myself, I'm terrified to post here. I hear that Paul Graham himself sometimes singles out dumb commenters and publicly ridicules them. ;-) Best to keep a low profile.
[+] mixmax|17 years ago|reply
I just read through your comments, and I think you should comment more often.

Besides, I'm sure Paul Graham wouldn't single out someone that has been trained in classical piano and seems to like Bach...

[+] unalone|17 years ago|reply
Ha! That happened to me early on once. It's okay, it doesn't ruin your HN citizen status as long as you don't keep saying silly things. (I was involved in a massive flamewar and utterly deserved repudiation.)
[+] TooMuchNick|17 years ago|reply
Unless you have a not-so-secret smirking attitude toward Paul Graham, having publicly ridiculed him in an earlier stage of your career and now being lucky enough to have no need for his money.
[+] ktharavaad|17 years ago|reply
I honestly hope that HN news does not degenerate into another reddit or digg-like news sites where comments and content are full of dramatized and useless material.

So far, I've found the users of this site intellectual, technical and insightful in their comments and as a result, its been a joy to participate in this community and I hope the crowd which this site attract remain the same - smart and technical people.

[+] icefox|17 years ago|reply
Just like when reddit started out. So what does HN do differently that will stop it?
[+] jumper|17 years ago|reply
I find that the site has definitely spread apart in it's values. And the real problem is as "undesireables" flood in, the people who are truer to the original culture get disgusted and back away.

As a personal (though perhaps not universal) example, see here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458256 , a +23 comment decrying the multi-page split of the article. See here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398185 , my own comment railing against them wasting my time\effort like that.... modded down to -6.

I don't want to be a whiny nuisance about it, but when that happened it really alienated me from the community and quite frankly I don't think I've contributed much anything of value since. I felt betrayed when I chose to stand against that kind of crap and I was stabbed in the back. Add in the fact that the "rules" are not being applied equally as the culture splits, and it just feels random and unfair.

To conclude my soapbox, I could be doing approx. 50 trillion things on the internet right now, so stop trying to waste my time\effort with 11 three sentence pages, snarky\"witty" comments; and God save the YCNews

[+] jhickner|17 years ago|reply
I think it just comes down to wording. The post that ends with "FAIL" got downvoted.

That seems pretty harsh to me, but I think people are just hypervigilant against any hint of encroaching diggishness.

[+] niels_olson|17 years ago|reply
Edward Tufte has a good thread of collected moderation advice and policies from over the years here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Here is the short essay he provides to anyone who cares to comment, at the top of the comment form:

-----------------------

This board is only about evidence presentations and analytical design. For all business matters (book orders, courses, shipping, prices, delivery dates), please go to the Graphics Press contact information on our home page

On the Ask ET forum, we seek to publish questions and contributions that advance the analytical content of the thread, provide a good example, or raise an interesting question. Contributions should be relevant to the chosen thread. Please no marketing pitches, gratuitous links, or incivilities. There are about 6,000 contributions in the 500 threads now published on this board; they provide good examples of what has been accepted for publication.

Some new contributions go to a non-public queue, which is frequently reviewed by a member of the editorial board in order to decide whether the material should be posted. About 30% of submitted contributions are posted; after publication, about half survive the occasional reviews of published items. The editors are unable to reconsider their decisions or to answer any queries about editorial decisions (some of which may well be mistaken). Publication policies are described in detail at Moderating internet forums [Ed. the link I mention above]

If your contribution is published, your email address will be masked on the board, and your identifying IP number will not be published.

-----------------------

[+] keizo|17 years ago|reply
Feature request/experiment: Put a small second column on the right side with the 'new page' on the main page.

I suggested this to reddit a long time ago when they first started to really get lame, but it never caught on.

[+] electromagnetic|17 years ago|reply
While this is up on the front page, I'd like to say that I love HN and the people on it.

There's lots of things I like about HN, like that links can't be down voted and that downvoting comments is an exclusive right to people with good karma.

However, the main thing I like about HN is that I see lots of civil discussion and people giving useful comments and suggestions. When I have seen disagreements (I believe I've been in a few myself) I notice that people tend to do what they do in real life and simply 'walk away'. When I read something that really irks me I usually just close HN and will come back later or whenever when I've forgotten about it.

[+] vaksel|17 years ago|reply
maybe make this post a sticky, so that everyone will see it right away. Can be temporary one...i.e. first 90 days you see this thread at the top of the list, then it goes away?
[+] michaelneale|17 years ago|reply
A suggestion:

Any chance that news stories could be throttled or more heavily edited/moderated just after a spike in new users? Just a thought, it could help to filter out those who are interested versus those just looking for another forum to do their usual thing on.

[+] pg|17 years ago|reply
The problem is more in the comments. The character of the submissions hasn't changed much.

The best way to deal with nasty comments by new users may be just to ask them to stop. Several times lately I've noticed established users doing that, e.g.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457319

[+] lionhearted|17 years ago|reply
Is it possible to change your username somehow? I'd switch over to using first name/last initial or first initial/last name if it is. I like being held personally accountable for what I write here, and the real life conversation standard.
[+] allenbrunson|17 years ago|reply
i'd say putting your real name and contact information in your profile suffices.
[+] jachee|17 years ago|reply
I showed up here because a real-life acquaintance wrote a nice post about HN on his blog, here: http://www.robsayers.com/programming/HackerNews.html I had visited in the past when it was purely Startup news, but I hadn't created an account.

As I'm more of a tinkerer and explorer than entrepreneur, the bent is more toward my liking, since the revision. I really like the attitude--or rather lack thereof--and look forward to becoming a part of the community.

[+] dhughes|17 years ago|reply
> People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.

It's true, I don't know how I stumbled across this site but one thing I noticed is the 'high quality' comments compared to other social news websites.

I'd say to the regulars be patient with us, the new folks in town, since we may be a bit jaded by some of the other places we visit and, yes, the anonymous nature of the Internet does bring out the worst in people, including me.

One thing I've learned when commenting is "less is more" (although you'd never know by this three paragraph 'comment').

[+] bitdiddle|17 years ago|reply
Well I post here once in a blue moon when I see something of interest, and I also comment. My long term goal is to break 100 points on my next submission.

It's a sad thing that it's been years now and we still have to have guidelines that essentially say what everyone was told by their mother when they were a child. I think this will improve some day when either 1. we ban dogs from the net or 2. we start shooting the bad ones :)

As an aside, PG, congrats! I saw recently that you were promoted up a level. It's a wonderful thing, non?

[+] alain94040|17 years ago|reply
Just a thought, but if you got modded down badly, being banned from HN for a few days, with a big banner that tells you why "sorry: your last comment was modded -5, we'll let you back in tomorrow", that might take care of the teaching once and for all.
[+] eande|17 years ago|reply
For some time I read hacker news nearly daily (one of the rare places) and mostly because of the comments. Some members here have good points, ideas and are right at the mark. Even with this valuable board discussion if many of these non sense comments increase it will turn away good members. With the anonymity of the internet there will be always some characters that need moderation and so far ycombinator did a good job. Keep it up.