I was just thinking the same thing. Keeping the design minimalist and 'blingless' keeps HN from suffering a MySpace-like decline. People here are attracted to the content, not the eye candy (there is none).
I recall a game developer saying that badges for achievement (Xbox Live! etc) are a sign that games are becoming less imaginative and less fun, and sticking badges in there is a way of getting the users to keep playing. Badge for reaching 100% completion in GTA 4? Screw that. My time is too precious.
Over the past few years, I've tentatively decided to not play any game that has achievements. I used to scour regular games thoroughly, but have found that games with achievements tend to become endless grinding slogs for no satisfying reward.
Yeah, like searching for all the 'flying rats' (pigeons) in GTA and shooting them. Utterly pointless.
For the life of me I don't know how people do endless, repetitive bullshit on World of Warcraft either - I keep away from those that do. Seems like an utter waste of time, and I immediately think of the South Park episode 'World of Warcrack'.
People over a certain karma level (I've forgotten how much, but I was one of them) had their username colored differently (gold IIRC) in the comment threads. That meant that comments by high karma people stood out. This made it look like their comments were more important.
The community here rebelled (including me) because there was a feeling that high karma and something interesting to say were not necessarily correlated.
I've never managed to understand why everyone's buying into this "badge" concept so heavily. They're a fairly reasonable game mechanic (though I think they're overused even there), and game mechanics can be effective motivators, but they really only motivate people to "win". Do we really want people trying to "win" HN?
Hacker news does not need badges because hacker news is about content. (Discussion and articles) Badges will do nothing to add to this and would risk ruining the experience.
Thanks for the additional info. What about StackOverflow then? That's also about content. (Questions and answers) Badges there seem to encourage contribution. What's special about HN, in your opinion?
> What about StackOverflow then? That's also about content. (Questions and answers) Badges there seem to encourage contribution.
StackOverflow is for programmers, and its scope pretty much limits participation to programmers and people directly tangential to programming. Thus, you don't get the internet hoi polloi problem.
> What's special about HN, in your opinion?
The editors and culture have largely managed to turn back the horde of lolcats, not funny puns, flamewars, and vacuous content. This is nigh impossible on a broad scope site. Hacker News is an incredibly rare feat, and has a fragile equilibrium that needs constant attention to preserve.
If hard-editing killing and re-titling submissions stopped, how long until this site denigrated to chaos? I'd say the over/under is two weeks.
Well, it already has a leaderboard and some other sorts of rankings, http://news.ycombinator.com/lists which I find very useful. Not sure why the link to it is buried at the bottom of the page.
The reason they're buried is because they exist to satisfy peoples' curiosity, not to serve as a leaderboard. PG doesn't want HN to turn into a karma race (and I agree).
There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated with people trolling. It's also useful for identifying comments which lots of people find useful - or ones which are useless. It's basically a community-powered spamfilter and measure of relevance. That said, I would be entirely in favor of hiding or obscuring karma, outside of comment sorting (and even that could be obscured while still being useful).
Of course, hiding/obscuring karma could remove some of the motivation to upvote comments. It would be interesting to see how usage patterns changed if it was hidden/obscured ...
An option to hide karma would be useful as well, for people who aren't interested (like you). I wonder if there's an extension for some browser which does that; if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write one [stripping out everything in the form of "# points" and the (#) next to the username in the bar at the top of a page ... adding display:none to all the score_# classes and applying a bit of filtering to pagetop would do that.]
I'm also in favor of getting rid of downvotes, mostly because I see them abused too much (people being downvoted for expressing unpopular opinions, especially anti-apple), but that's neither here nor there.
One thing I like a lot about it is that you don't get the "first post" effect, where the first few people to say something get page top and all the attention. That's how it is on Slashdot.
I agree that the lists page is useful, but I don't use it for finding out about posters. It's a good filter for content, as it can help me find the most upvoted posts, the ones with the most discussion, and insightful comments on stories I may not have seen.
I don't think hackers see value in fake awards. I for one don't see the point, except for the desire to compete to see who's got more badges on their sash. Until these badges can buy me a sandwich, pay my rent, etc, I'll leave them for the kiddies to collect.
Hear, hear. The real award for me from reading HN, would be if it ultimately made me smarter and more informed, and therefore successful in starting (and hopefully selling) a startup. Not to mention having a cool place to hang out digitally with like-minded people ;-)
Makes good sense. What if instead there're badges for hackers based on their coding ability? What would you think of that? (Not that it's easy to compute of course.)
Hack News is a place I frequent to come across interesting subject matter. It is not a place to accrue accolades based on posted material. There are plenty of other communities to visit if you want to make a name for yourself.
Rather than putting extra layers of complexity on to the site, I feel that if a plugin/add-on to the browser was offered that would provide this functionality gained enough momentum then the discussion of implementing it on to the site would be worth further discussion.
I think the biggest draw for a lot of us is the pure simplicity in the site as it is.
It really depends on what kind of badges/achievements are created.
We definitely wouldn't want anything like "submitted 10 posts to HN", but something like "submitted the most popular comment in an article" might be cool.
I don't really like badges the way the article's system is designed (this coming form a guy whose startup is about helping sites gives users points and badges). A big part of the kickback that I see from people on here has to do with turning Hacker News into something that gets "played". I prefer a system where you can recognize and reward users for their individual participation. For it to avoid gaminess (in the bad sense of the term) it needs to be about milestones that are meaningful and further the goals of the site.
In other words, a badge for 10 submissions, 50 submissions, 100 submissions, etc., etc., would not be a good system as it could encourage people to spam. A reward for 10 submissions, each with at least 15 up votes, while not perfect, is a little better.
All of this belies the point that HN is not really a great candidate for a badge system. There just isn't enough to do. A user can submit, comment, vote, and flag. That just isn't enough actions to build a compelling system around. I do think that contextual reputation could be a good thing - if reading comments on an article about scalability, knowing that a user has posted quality comments or articles about the topic in the past helps me to weigh the value of the current comment. HN isn't really set up for this though. So, as much as I'd love pg to call me up and ask about integrating IActionable into HN, I don't think it would really be a great idea at this time.
What you describe is the h-index ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index ). It is one of the fairest ways of measuring merit, but for most social sites it has the problem of being too fair.
If you're maintaining a site like stackoverflow or reddit, you want lots of comments, and it is better to reward lots of marginally interesting comments than a few really insightful ones (since a lot of marginally interesting comments will make people come all the time to check for more and find new things to entertain themselves, keeping them at the site looking at ads, etc).
Maybe HN could display the h index of a user instead of his/her karma.
While that might work on a small scale, I think at larger scales it starts to just turn into excessive noise. It also becomes hard to distinguish between "marginally interesting" and "karma whoring". I think long term its much better to encourage the behaviors you want. Besides, you can always lower the threshold for "interesting". The point is to encourage the creation of good content and ignore (as far as rewards go) the creation of bad content. The h-index stuff is interesting, though, and I'll definitely be looking in to it some more.
How about just giving badges to those folks who want them?
That would provide a useful social signal.
Oh, so you want badges to distinguish you from other folks? Fine - each interested person gets to define one or more badges and pass them out as she sees fit. Your badges will be recognized as marks of quality and good breeding while "those badges" will be seen as, well, best to not say.
I'm reminded of Jerry Rice. When he scored a touchdown, he calmly threw the ball to the ref.
When you've really made it, you act like you belong and don't need some token.
This is essentially the function of the various lists for leaders, best comments/submissions and so on - though, like badges, they should be taken with a big pinch of salt.
FourSquare is a game, a contest, and doesn't really have any content associated with the badges. Games and contests have prizes. HN is all about content and badges would be a distraction. The voting on HN is to surface content not populate a trophy case.
How many hackers out there use Foursquare? Can you comment on what you think of the badges there? It's possible that you go to HN for news, where you care about content, and the latter for fun, where you do like badges.
Its fun to see your page about badges to HN users. A badge I would like to see would be "Philosopher". It should be given to the person who gives the most insightful comments about how things are supposed to work. There are in essence two kind of posters on HN. First are those who give technical comments. They can debate you about many concepts of CS/Management (or whatever is it they are talking about technically). The second class is, the once who give comments about how things are actually supposed to work in real life. I can scale my app whenever I want. There are plethora of comments about how to scale on HN. But there are few who advice you on when to scale and why to scale and how much to scale. I think these people deserve a badge.
