My favorite part, which clearly shows that PG understands what the dynamic of a news site and it's users, is when it states:
"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting."
Frankly, I think this happens way too much. Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary. While they have definitely created interesting things, the product is probably more important than the person.
I think one of the main problems with celebrity/current events stories is that one article will rarely contain a good, complete overview. Weeks/Months/Years later, there will be great, in depth, interesting articles that cover all the fascinating aspects of a story, but the day to day news and blogs on a subject are more prone to shallow analysis of one aspect of a situation.
For example, the whole Wikileaks/Assange situation has many aspects that would be interesting to hackers: IT security failures, a paradigm shift in how effectively governments are able to keep things secret, calls for Internet censorship, small groups of people/hackers/script-kiddies DDoSing major credit cards in an example of asymmetric warfare, transparency vs secrecy, and (to some extent, but less so) the contents of the cables themselves. However, because these are being revealed over a course of weeks, HN instead gets flooded with dozens of articles about small facets of this event, rather than a larger and more in depth analysis.
Does this make sense to anyone else, or am I completely off target here?
Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question.
See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 ), knowing the background he's coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter.
And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch, or, more likely, other Random J Blogger.
The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot (following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all, this way I see only the things they care to comment about.
The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these "celebrities".
It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.
The problem is that you really don't know who Random J Commenter is. That person could be a more successful and more knowledgeable person who just happens to NOT want to be a celebrity. There are plenty of smart people who simply don't want to play the popularity game. That doesn't make their input any less valuable.
Additionally, in my opinion, you are going to find more success in following tangential ideas from someone successful. You aren't going to duplicate what pg or Joel or any of those guys have done. The real value comes from intelligent people discussing tangents to some idea or theory. And if popularity is disproportionally rewarded to the thought behind the discussion, then the result will be less contribution to the site.
I also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much time.
It used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not the same thing.
Sounds like you meant that in some kind of snarky way, but absolutely yes. A thousand times yes.
I could care less about brand, whether from commenters or famous people in titles. Just give me good content. I don't come here to join some kind of fan club, either for authors or commenters.
And of course the reverse is true. We have folks purposely downvoting based on authors or commenters. Which is just as whacked.
No snarkiness was intended. I was agreeing and expanding your comment. Nothing irks me more than seeing a very insightful discussion between "high profile member" and "regular user" and seeing a drastic difference in the point total of the comments when they are equally interesting. People should upvote content and not commenter.
I don't think there's a single high-karma user on this site that disagrees with this point, or a single high-karma user on the site that wouldn't like it better if comment scores were invisible except to their owner.
The site also needs to do away with the leaderboard once and for all, and, in a perfect world, make it hard to find out how much karma another user has.
Seeing my own karma has absolutely made my writing suit HN better (I'm a lot meaner elsewhere). It's a valuable signal. I wouldn't wine if I got docked, or if karma went log-scored or something like that, because it's absolutely true that high-karma users also get an automatic point boost, but I'd rather not lose the signal.
I'm a relatively new user of this site, and I neither know, nor care who these 'high-karma users' are. I don't recognize the names and thankfully HN doesn't highlight their karma count next to their profile link here. I didn't even know there was a leader board and don't want to see it.
I don't scan the comments as much as others probably, but when I do, I prioritize by a few things: Those that include links, and when I have the time, those that are lengthy, since often those can be from people who had a lot to say and you can tell by the tone of the first paragraph if it's worth your time.
I love the egalitarian nature of the system that doesn't single out new users who might just as well have valid points to make.
I'm not sure which aspect of my comment you were referring to, but I don't think there's data to back up the suggestion that the majority of the visitors here fetishize karma count and care greatly about it.
They care about learning something new, being intellectually stimulated and sometimes just being entertained, but given the limited way that karma is exposed, I'd be surprised if the average user goes to any great length to find out the karma count of a comment poster.
You can probably take my word for it on this one; if it's remotely possible we can end this branch of the discussion on that note, or on agreeing to disagree, I'd be happy for it.
Would you (or others) be interested in a small browser extension to strip other people's points from display? Safari / Chrome, as FF is pretty different, and I've done a bit with Chrome.
I may have to make it, now that I think about it. It'd probably change my voting habits a bit. Especially if I also removed the usernames until after I voted... flatten the playing field, so to speak, while still identifying like-minded people.
Amazing how people project their own mood onto internet comments. Sorry about that.
Thanks for the explanation.
Yep, I'd much rather read a dozen guys that nobody knows that help me out in life and help me make terrific changes than become pen-pals and an expert on the top 17 people in the tech industry or on HN. This herd mentality stuff drives me nuts at times.
You know, I also feel that people should own their comments, but something as simple as hiding the name until the mouse hovers over the pseudonym would prevent a lot of abuse. It's not like we all have to become anonymous. I think the board just needs to take steps to prevent automatic up or down voting. There are lots of solutions to choose from.
The problem with celebrity in this field is that very frequently celebrities are known more for their personality than they are for the things they say. You have the Asshole, the Motivator, the Snarky Sassplant... etc. They become famous not because they're intelligent or say smart things — let's face it, almost every person in this community is bright and most of them are well-spoken, yet plenty of them still struggle for recognition — but because they adapt a certain tone that's instantly and comfortably recognizable, so that when we see their name we can sink ourselves into whatever's expected of their writing without having to put in too much effort.
The celebrity writers always have a certain personality. Whether it's John Gruber or Paul Graham or Dave Winer, they've established exactly what sorts of things they're gonna talk about and how they're gonna talk about it. When we see their names, we know what to expect. Whether it's a good post or a shit post (and everybody has some of each), we still feel like we got our click's worth and are satisfied with that.
If I had a choice to see a new DaringFireball essay or another essay, completely unknown, completely at random, I'll probably go with the DF one. It sells me a certain level of quality, a topic that I usually am interested in, a writing style that I very much enjoy. The unknown essay might be more valuable or relevant, but I'm not as instantly willing to give it a chance.
...unless, of course, the author makes an effort to grab me, by titling his essay provocatively or writing in an entertaining style. But then once he finds success with that method, he's not going to want to drop the shtick and risk becoming unknown again. He'll continue with it. At a certain point he'll become a celebrity poster. Then we're back to dealing with the same old shit as we did before.
Part of the problem is that HN displays us both POINT VALUE and USER NAME before it even gives us the essay. There is no way to read a comment without seeing the author and the point value before hand. So we're unavoidably biased before we see a word.
I agree that there's a problem, but I don't think that celebrity is it. If you took away the comments' scores and removed the names, I could probably still tell if they were made by high-karma members.
I think the problem is that the way they think and post is more in line with the majority of users on here. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. I think the problem is that we (like any other group of people) tend to focus more on "I agree with that comment" and less on "That comment is insightful and brings a fresh perspective on the issue whether I agree with it or not". I wish I could say that I'm innocent of this, but I'm just as guilty of supporting my own point of view as anyone else is.
"Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary."
While true, the much bigger problem is not that these posts get too many upvotes, but rather that they're the only posts that reliably get any upvotes at all. It's hard to justify even bothering to submit stories since for even the best posts it's a complete crapshoot as to whether or not they get any votes.
In theory, yes, upvotes indicate valuable content and downvotes indicate irrelevancy. This worked brilliantly for Digg and Reddit, after all, right?
In practice, the people that designed the upvote-downvote system and presented it to us as Web 2.0's way of making the Internet perfectidealolympus forgot that they were dealing with human beings. They assumed they were dealing with computers or something for which there's a such thing as "optimal". As a human being, sometimes I feel like a selfless contributor of optimizing upvotes and downvotes, other times I feel like upvoting because hey I like this guy, other times I feel like downvoting because fuck the world and fuck you buddy, and still other times my Dadaist urges kick in and I vote entirely randomly to sow discord and paranoia among the otherwise content bourgeoise. Or at least that's how I imagine some people vote.
The thing about dealing with vague information like "links" and "comments" is that there is no agreed consensus on what's optimal. Back when I first joined Hacker News two or three years ago, there was a faction of users (myself included for a time) who disagreed with snark replies and witty one-liners. That's almost all gone now; we accept that the community feels the need sometimes to be clever rather than overwhelmingly in-depth. There have been people who complain about HN's start-up news/technical news/YCombinator-related news/breaking news/programming news/obituaries/spammy motivational blog posts that tell you you should be happier than you are/Paul Graham's thoughts on his local deli's chicken salad. None of them are "right" per se; they all simply have a different vision of what they want. If YCombinator wanted to evolve Hacker News, they could attempt to install solutions to this perception problem, and come up with clever alternatives that would help each of us see only the things we want to see. But I'm guessing they're happy with HN as it is, warts and all; I'm also betting that most of us are accepting of HN as it is, or at least we suspect any attempts to fix problems will only make them worse.
So in the end ironically the votes up and down don't matter. Downvoted content is sometimes great. Upvoted content is sometimes really terrible. The lucky thing is that Hacker News is meaningless enough that we won't be shedding tears over its imperfections. Or at least we shouldn't be.
What, it all does not matter? This is all just meaningless words on a computer said by somebody somewhere?
I think that is resignation. Every community needs a culture, forms to pressure others into doing the 'right' things, ways to be able to incorporate others. Once you loosen up and make it free for all this might as well be talking to the lowest denominator.
I don't think it's a bad thing that HN's upvotes/downvotes aren't as good as they could be. Honestly I don't think anybody cares about who has the most points in a given thread. What matters is what people say, and how they interact with one another. While Hacker News has some problems with that sometimes, on the whole it does a damn good job of being a community. Even the irritating things about it are kind of adorable in a way.
When I said it's meaningless, I mean relatively rather than in some nihilistic sense. Obviously, things on this site matter. But if we have a front page on which I'm only interested in 5 or so posts at a time because I think the rest are silly, that's not too bad if other people are looking at those other posts. I'm not going to get too pissed off at the sensationalism and the dumb stuff. That's just the way this site is. Trying too hard to change that might ruin all the things that I like.
HN is not particularly Serious Business, you know? It's a fun site with some great commenters, but it's not like MetaFilter where the culture is so unique and good that I'd get upset if it started deteriorating. Or like the old threads I read on Slashdot or Usenet where I realize there was such a good thing once but now it's gone into decline. HN has always had these community guidelines that nobody follows, and its successes have been despite that. If that makes sense.
I think the problem is that you run out of things that are deeply interesting while the "urge to post" continues to grow among users. It seems to me to be an inherent limitation of social news sites that want to keep their front page refreshing with new stuff. As journalists would probably phrase it, it's difficult to fit deep thought into the news cycle.
Some of the "urge to post" comes from the nerdy "somebody's wrong on the Internet" impulse, but a lot of it comes from gamification. HN is just gamified enough to breed competitiveness.
If it were my site, I'd add a document classifier that makes articles about certain topics face a headwind, or better yet, creates a kind of repulsion between recent articles... If there are already two articles on the front page about Assange on a given day, that's enough.
If documents are clean, you can compute the repulsion from the bag-of-word dot products between documents, but web pages often have a lot of noise in the outer template, so getting good results with web pages means you need some kind of template drop-out.
That's great- I'm a relatively new user and I didn't know that page existed. I think you should have to read it (like a terms of service) and check I agree before you can create an account.
People who don't like the posts showing up on the front page should flag more posts. Even if it's too highly-rated to kill a story, flaggings reduct the amount of time a story spends on the front page.
Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.
Where there are no bright lines, your side of the road becomes mine. Rudeness banned (mostly). Condescension, upvoted. Dumb, downvoted. Groupthink, upvoted.
My favorite condescension indicator: Post that include the sentence "Sigh."
As I'm posting this, the top submission on the /news page is "Why Microsoft Sucks: Hotmail dev team questions need for open standards".
I am guilty of upvoting it. Five seconds of thinking before upvoting would have prevented me from doing so - the linked comment just doesn't support the headline and Microsoft being hostile/oblivious to open standards isn't such big news anyway.
My point is that maybe we should be able to cancel upvotes. This would give upvoters the chance to read the comments (shallow stories usually have some comments pointing out that they are not that interesting) get convinced that they made a mistake and fix it.
Well, I understand that this might not be as simple as decreasing the counter. I suspect that there might be some impact on the ranking algorithm and probably a dozen things I haven't thought about. Still it might be worth it.
In the last six months, I've seen a lot of linkbait on the edge of webspam get voted highly on HN.
Although HN's quality is better than it's competition, HN subscribers still have the psychology that makes Reddit what it is. (Now, you need a ~lack~ of psychology to explain Digg, but that's another story)
Reddit is actually pretty good for 'hacker news' if you unsubscribe from the front page and everything not related to hacking, then add all the programming-related subreddits you're interested in.
Probably the greatest reason for Hacker News' success is the fact that PG and many YC associated founders have the access to kill posts. This keeps the trash out and the content in. Also, we need to keep in mind that these people are users of hacker news and not just moderating it.
While the welcome page does a great job of explaining the kind of atmosphere it has created and how people should behave, it doesn't explain how it encourages it. In short, blunt words, how do we keep the jerks out?
Someone who wants to be a troll isn't going to be discouraged by a few words in the welcome page. That type of user isn't likely to even read the page in the first place.
On the other hand, that's not the point of a welcome page either. It's to welcome those people that do want to be a friendly new user. However, then I read HN's hypothesis about popular community sites declining in quality, the first thing that went through my mind was 'Oh no, how does HN solve that?'
HN has obviously been successful at it so far. Maybe it's the utilitarian nature of the site. Perhaps HN's biggest benefit here is its name. The subject matter might not be limited to 'hacking', but the thought lingers in people's head when they hear it, and probably keeps a good number of people at bay who would otherwise post the latest Justin Bieber gossip.
While it's relatively easy to comment on the stuff that gets to the homepage that shouldn't be there, the actual stories/discussion that don't make it there are a loss to our community.
F.ex. I found the 7 comments and a brief appearance on a thoughtful article like the "Tracking all releases by Etsy" [1] disappointing. That would have been a great discussion, we all together didn't have.
Thanks for this, I'm new and was brought here through a link on Reddit so this info is handy. It appears Reddit is slowly falling into the Digg world of phantom upvotes/downvotes and stolen, resubmitted content. I'm assuming this was posted because this website has gotten several refugees from those sites looking for intelligent conversation in the comments and posts.
I would find it very helpful to have a little blurb on the "Submit" page detailing how to submit to the different subpages (e.g., "ask", "jobs", "offers"). From what I can tell, submissions are automagically placed into the different subpages; one can help this sorting by adding "ASK HN" "SHOW HN" etc. to the title.
Not allowing new registrations would end the "hacker" part of hacker news. Hacking is about being open, sharing information, and ALLOWING OTHERS TO SHARE BACK. To disallow new registrations would be to disallow others to share back, as well as kill the "open-ous" of this site.
In short, what you suggest would kill the site, not save it.
"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting."
Frankly, I think this happens way too much. Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary. While they have definitely created interesting things, the product is probably more important than the person.