Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

[toto]

Hi all,

I have been a RSS subscriber for a long. I love HN but I have to admit that I get a little frustrated by the increasing percentage of noise. Especially by off-topic links.

I spend now too much time sorting useless stuff (for my needs) for reading a few really good links.

Do you also think there is too much noise?

If many agree, maybe it will be a signal that it is now time to add some categories/filters. :)

Thanks.

[timtrueman]

I have one suggestion that would possibly help: separate out "saved" versus "up-voted". For me, I rarely want to save something but I would love to go to the new page and up-vote more interesting stories to get rid of the noise. But maybe that's just me--I'm also the type who never submits anything unless I want to see the discussion on it. I'm guessing there's a lot of karma-whores and hence all the TechCrunch articles (I kid, I kid). Anyone have an idea for putting the incentives in the right place for submitting with that in mind? Fractional karma for submission up-votes?

[321abc]

I didn't even know we had karma here. I just submit articles I find interesting in hopes that they'll be interesting to the community.

Also, I'm not quite clear on what you're having problems with. Why can't you "go the the new page and up-vote more interesting stories"?

[pj]

I'm not sure all of us here are hackers and we don't always come here for programming articles. I read hacker news as an alternative to google news or watching tv. For me, it's mostly entertainment that alleviates my boredom with a weighting toward improving my skillset and keeping up to date in my industry.

If there were only code articles or technology articles, it'd get boring and I'd probably come back less often. I probably spend way too much time here really, but I probably click on 75% or more of the articles on the front page. I click on them because they are interesting, not necessarily because they are about programming or technology -- they expand my mind.

I think mind expansion is good for hackers.

[tokenadult]

One thing that can help the whole community is to look at the list of stories submitted by noobs

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic. Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.

[pvg]

It's a stopgap at best and more likely a no-op. The fundamental problem is that the 'community' is unbounded and prone to instability by growth. This is not the case with just HN but almost any online forum, be it USENET, slashdot, reddit, etc. The initial and early populations tend to have a lot in common, are significantly self-selecting, etc, etc. This produces 'interesting' content, which in turn fuels growth which fuels further growth and the eventual dilution of the 'community' and the quality of the content. Such forums experience only growth pressure but nothing in the opposite direction, at least not until they become so boring or insipid that people go somewhere else. Naive voting schemes like in slashdot, reddit or HN don't really help.

[vaksel]

cool I can save a ton of money on a used shipping container. Do these guys not realize that HN is no-follow?

[webology]

There is a lot of noise but I prefer the classic view - http://news.ycombinator.com/classic over the existing homepage. It'd be nice to have a few features like never show me techcrunch articles again but all in all I still prefer Hacker News over everything else.

[smhinsey]

I did a quick search and didn't see anything too relevant. What is the difference between the classic and standard views?

[codedivine]

For filtering, use greasemonkey with HN Toolkit script.

[profquail]

I'm trying to learn Lisp/Scheme/Arc right now so that I can play around with news.arc. I've a good amount of work with numerical algorithms (statistics, matrices, graphs, machine learning...you name it), and I think there is a great deal of improvement to be had in the scoring algorithms that are used by social news sites (not just HN, but Digg, reddit, and so on).

Maybe YC could sponsor a little "Netflix Challenge" for Hacker News, where the 1st-place prize is an automatic bid to the upcoming YC round.

[rms]

There is more noise by quantity because there are more links than ever, but the average quality hasn't gone down. It only seems like it sometimes, because the site has good and bad days.

Also, if you just want programming links, read http://hackerhackernews.com/. The topic here is much broader than only technical things.

[tcoffeep]

It hasn't been updated since July 7th. Unless nothing else that's been up lately has been about programming...

[iamwil]

When there are slow news days, the front page tends to fill with dribble. Sometimes that gets people to submit better stuff, so it balances itself out.

[8-bit_Blaster]

I completely agree that there seems to be far too much noise on HN.

That's actually the reason why I haven't bothered checking this website for months, but got curious and decided to come back today to see if things have changed.

The thing that I find most noisy are the "ASK HN" posts. I wish there was a way to filter these out, so I only get news.

C'est la vie

[travisjeffery]

I was going to comment last night on the post on how to sleep better in the Summer, but I didn't in hopes that sort of thing would stop itself. But all-in-all that sort of stuff doesn't belong on Hacker News, after all the site is Hacker News.

[321abc]

What solution do you propose? I don't think merely saying "let's keep things topical" is going to work. People are going to keep submitting articles they find interesting, and upvoting articles they find interesting, regardless of the topic.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was the one who submitted the "How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night" article. Yes, it's not topical. However, I'm not ashamed! I thought it was interesting, and clearly so did the 44 other people who upvoted it.

I'm quite pleased with the community that's developed here, who are discriminating enough to pick out many articles I find interesting.

However, HN could definitely be improved, so that people who are only interested in certain topics (such as only computer/hacking related articles) or not interested in other topics (such as off-topic, or political, or venture capitalist articles) could more easily filter through what's becoming a firehydrant of links.

I think the best way to do this is by implementing tags.

[csomar]

I think we can reduce bad submissions by prohibting new users and users with a karma less than 500 for example.

We can calculate a score based on user oldness and his score, so he can submit or not and the time between his submissions.

[TallGuyShort]

By the way, polls are officially supported - it will add options to the header of your post that people can select of - independent of any comments or replies to thread, or links to your own karma. Details are here: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html (See March 1st, "Polls") - I do not know if the 200-karma threshold is still in effect

[toto]

"Sorry, you need 20 karma to create a poll." :) I have... 1.. :) I created a new "linked" account.

[ttam]

imo, yes, the quality/type-of/whatever of submissions has become very different from what it was 2 years ago. but then again, that's a subjective analysis.

but imho tags/categories are awful. there has to be a better solution to this.

i don't think filtering domains will do much good either.

editors like slashdot aren't exactly great (and require an editor staff).

voting schemes reflect the taste of the community (more specifically the percentage of people that vote - not taking into account bots/cheaters). there's always slashdot's semi-random karma system, but it's not really that great either.

so really, what's the solution? no effing clue..

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on the other hand, i'd really like to know the stats on the number of people who click on an article and the number of people who voted on the same article.. also, average points stories get and so on..

edit: oh yeah, nevermind that, forgot that only after some X karma you can downvote/flag

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oh well, information overload.. it's a joy

[lionhearted]

One thing I'm seeing more of lately are internet-isms in comments like "Fail" and "2. ??? 3. Profit!" It seems to dilute the quality of the comments for two reasons - first, they themselves aren't that insightful. But more scary is that like five other people typically jump in and reply with more internetisms afterwards. The comments here have historically been the best I've seen, but seem to be slipping just a touch lately.

I don't know how that would be tackled exactly. I suppose just introducing new people politely to the culture here, and for current members to refrain from upvoting comments that are ok but have the pseudo-clever semi-snarky internet vibe to them.

[whatusername]

Technically "2. ??? 3. Profit!" was a South Park-ism (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park) ) And I realise that this comment was perhaps what you were complaining about - but it was worth pointing it out none-the-less.

(And for the record: "1. Collect Underpants, 2. ????, 3. Profit" seems to be a more mature business model than some that are featured here on hn.)

[uuilly]

http://twitter.com/newsycombinator only posts pages that appear on the front page. An RSS feed might get a little noisy.

[jamesbritt]

hnsort.com, and the greasemonkey script for sorting, really help. I sort by comments or points to find where the interest is.

But I agree that the RSS feed can get cluttered. Maybe a yahoo pipes thing could create a delayed feed that only passed items with certain characteristics.

[gaerfield]

Yes, I agree. HN has many interesting stuff, but I have problems to follow all news, because it's just too much.

[hooande]

No.

[californiaguy]

Hacker forums are a lot like indie rock bands.

[cperciva]

Are you saying that indie rock bands get louder and louder the more popular they get?

(Serious question -- I don't listen to rock bands, indie or otherwise, so I don't know how the time- and popularity-dependence of their volume.)

[321abc]

I think there's definitely a lot of noise. Having categories (or tags) would be a good aid to sorting through it all.

[Rickasaurus]

Oh please don't let this turn into reddit.