And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment, but would never have become a formal blog post. Invite-only communities intentionally give up on that kind of discourse for... what? Easier moderation?
I will jump on and add that the filter options that the OP talks about are a weakness, not a strength.
I like HN because I get exposure to ideas and topics that are out of my normal orbit. A lot of the web is very narrow these days and I know HN has it's limitations but it still feels very diverse.
I’m this case you can have your pie and eat it too. All that is missing is a popularity page.
It’s true that random professional posts are the best part of HN but I mostly care about the posts that appear in /best for things outside my interests.
I think that when our reputations are on the line, that we act much better but also discard the grit and sharp edges that are the catalyst for interest and growth. I believe that we begin to converge on a single, aggregate pseudo-personality that is the most accepted register for communicating within.
Karma points enable this convergence because they are the only metric that we can do data analysis on comment quality, and so build into the various user interfaces.
So we can all think of many combinations of karma and account - 4chan, reddit, hackernews, youtube (which was trying to require given names); The concept of a website displaying account progeny is both an affront to privacy (in both directions) and a remarkable way to improve comment quality, which I make no effort to define.
The invitation only model seems to scale only so far, as all "cool parties" start off cool because only the cool people are invited (cool in this sense means compatible: consider both artificial and natural boundaries such as a physical party of people congregating for social purposes, a private web forum, or even the internet itself, which was initially available to only those that could enter and navigate it). We have euphemisms such as "Eternal September" to connote the perpetual ruining by outsiders infiltrating what was previously more private.
I vastly prefer to allow the unsanitized comments to enter a feed, and root through them so that people are not behaving as though being watched. It's exhausting but because both extremes are allowed to exist, the comments with the highest signal to noise ratio are often the most honest. Anecdotally I have found (exceedingly rarely) the most honest, insightful, or inclusive comments are on a site like 4chan, with the least restrictions and the least incentive to build a reputation (it's impossible). On hackernews, and I know I am projecting, I believe that we artificially act better than we are, on average, because we have something here to lose. A clever post turns into a job reference, or a reference to work becomes discovered by a future boss, etc.
Ultimately I am glad that all of these combinations exist. Losing a cultivated registry of who's who would have an immediate loss of largely high quality comments, but losing the wild west of anonymous bilge leaves us with no place to be our most honest, regardless of how much or how little it contributes.
>I believe that we artificially act better than we are,
Most of the time when I see unproductive conversations go back-and-forth here, it's often clear (or I'm quick to give the benefit of doubt) that at least one of them is a newbie trying to meaningfully contribute to a conversation where they don't know how much they don't know. But there's a sizable number of posts where I'm convinced the poster is a passive aggressive asshole that knows exactly the game they're playing. As long as they can hold a conversation with the surface level appearance of someone acting reasonable and polite, they get to be wildly disingenuous and/or cut people down nastier than the kind of comments that would be immediately moderated away.
you've accidentally hit on a strategy that might work well.
Have a site with one public user account that is linked to a reputation and a shadow one created simultanously for snark / sharp riposte's / unpopular opinions.
I've had my projects (see my hn profile) or my blog posts hit lobsters a bunch of times and finding myself unable to respond to the comments as I don't have an account there.
Agree 100%. I know people who are domain experts but also very introverted. They don't blog, promote themselves or claim to know things that they don't. But, thankfully, they can and do post here on HN and that benefits us all.
My thoughts exactly. Diversity is really important if you're open to your assumptions being challenged and learning from those with different perspectives.
Invite only tech communities can actually be harmful if these open access communities don't also exist. Closed communities end up reinforce existing inequalities and in-group biases. If it were as large and influential as HN, inequality like this would be a real issue.
That just indicates people are so worried about loosing their reputation on their main account that they resort to throwaway account for projecting their views thats just sad.
Not true. Sometimes it's whistleblowers and people who rather not have their identity doxxed in case they end up fired at <insert FAANG>. Sometimes people want to share extra info about their startup but w/out divulging who it is... where as their REAL profile has all their personal data so you can easily figure that stuff out.
There's plenty of reasons for throwaways besides just being 'nefarious'.
> There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment
This is now a myth. HN used to be like this but look for yourself, it's no longer like this. It's no longer worth my time to dig for worthwhile nuggets in the HN comments nor is it worth my time to post a high quality comment because I know the only responses will be nitpicks and a few worthless internet points.
PS: There's a vague rule about not criticizing HN that gets invoked fairly often. Be prepared for this thread to be gassed.
EDIT: Dropped off the internet due to a DOS? Snort is fun. Hi dang and friends!
I come across one of these kind of comments every other day. Some of my favourites are from green accounts that registered just to share their knowledge. So many of HN viewers aren't even registered, but when the urge arrives to share, the low barrier for entry means they can. We all get something from it.
I disagree. An example that immediately comes to mind is the 737 MAX grounding. People very experienced in flight systems and the way the Boeing software is designed appeared (from where!) with some absolutely fascinating insight that I haven’t read elsewhere.
It doesn’t happen often, but HN doesn’t often discuss things outside of its wheelhouse either. Usually we’re litigating matters of opinion, usually about whether JavaScript is bad or not.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the ranking of the current submission, that's because users flagged it, which is the usual reason why stories drop in rank.
As for comments by people with domain knowledge, I was just looking at this a couple weeks ago. Here are a few I randomly ran across:
There are tons of these, many of which don't get much notice. We've periodically published a highlights list, but I'd like to come up with a way for users to nominate such posts as highlights when they run across them... something like a positive 'flag'.
Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them".
I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters.
Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower.
The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic.
I’d politely suggest reading the post, especially the “Polite & Knowledgable Community” section. Afterwards, you could have a look through https://lobste.rs/hats
> This has snowballed and now the community is full of experts in their fields
The front page is mostly dead. The most discussed thread has like 17 comments. And a lot of those comments are uninteresting - e.g. "Hey, really nice post!".
I think it's more important to have a lot of users, with the occasional user that has a deep expertise in one area rather than a small group of people that are slightly better on average.
Honestly, there are probably plenty of small subreddits that have a higher level of expertise. Places like /r/askhistorian have proven that it's possible to have really good in-depth and insightful discussions if a modicum of moderation is implemented. It's especially easy for topics related to a profession and even more generalized, topics that aren't too inflammatory like politics or religion.
I think the invite only aspect of it can be a problem. The invitee needs to get the invite from someone that they either know in real life or someone who can vouch for them online.
The former isn't a great solution because it requires users to be linked to their real identity by at least one person. Real identities have some advantages, but requiring it bars a lot of good discussions that people don't want linked to their real name. Allowing pseudonyms gives people freedom to publicly say something they would traditionally only say privately or sometimes not at all. If it is paired with strong moderation, like HN is, it can prevent the greater internet fuckwad theory from going into effect which is a common problem with anonymous communities.
If you have people inviting people that they don't know the real identity of, the invite system isn't really adding anything beyond making it slightly more complicated to join. I could understand a theory that a higher barrier to entry means that only people with a high desire will join resulting in a better community. It is possible that results in better discussion, but I'm not sold because there are plenty of bad users like spammers and bots that are also highly motivated.
I have to disagree with the false dichotomy you are presenting wrt to the invite system. Specifically, being forced to reveal your real identity to at least one other user vs. "inviting people that they don't know the real identity of" which you say means that "the invite system isn't really adding anything beyond making it slightly more complicated to join."
There are many people online whose real identities I don't know whom I consider thoughtful individuals more than capable of engaging in meaningful and respectful discourse. I'd be happy to vouch for them in an invite-only board.
It is much easier to compartmentalize and hide things online when your true identity is unknown. I have enough karma here on HN, that I am sure I could get someone on Lobste.rs to vouch for me without personally knowing me. But maybe my karma is only high here because I have a cabal of other accounts upvoting me and the mods haven't caught on yet. Or maybe this is my one authentic account and on Reddit I run a swarm of bots that hits /r/politics to support my chosen presidential candidate.
Appearing to be a good user on one site doesn't guarantee that a person will be a good user everywhere. Personally knowing someone and having that real life connection to provide consequences is a much stronger deterrent to bad behavior.
Tangential: I have recently had my articles featured on the front page of Lobsters and HN within hours of each other. Not the same article, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but:
- It's very hard for a HN post to get noticed. New posts linger in /newest (frequented by relatively few people) for about half an hour before falling down to the second page, and you need to be lucky enough to receive enough upvotes in that timeframe to hit the front page. Lobsters' "success rate" appears to be higher.
- In terms of traffic, I got about 11K hits from unique IPs from HN and about 1.7K from Lobsters.
- I like that Lobsters clearly indicates when a submission is authored by its submitter.
Overall, as people have mentioned, both communities are great. I've been here for 10+ years – thank you for everything, HN!
I disagree [that it is "better"]. I am a wayward hacker in a non-tech field. Don't know anyone from whom to obtain an invitation (to be clear, not soliciting for one -- don't have time for another site/newsfeed), probably even within 1-2 degrees of separation. I suppose they are perfectly happy remaining small and low-traffic, so it works for them.
Why do we need to do this kind of comparison? They are both quite nice. I think HN is better for what I look for (but r/programminglanguages and a few others are even better) as there are just a lot of people here who actually have experience with the topics discussed. PL experts, formal method experts, cancer experts, etc everyone is ready to write quite a nice explanation for nothing. The volume on Lobste.rs for some topics is just not large enough to get an insightful convo going.
Also I notice a lot of Lobste.rs is a mix between my fav subreddits & HN. So it's a circlejerk. But then again r/programmingcirclejerk is one of my favorite subreddits anyway.
> The volume on Lobste.rs for some topics is just not large enough to get an insightful convo going.
I get that sense too. I looked at the titles of the links on Lobste.rs and this is a purely subjective opinion, I feel the content appeals to a specific demographic. I struggled to find a link there that would interest me (not that my opinion matters terribly).
10-15 years ago, we experienced something similar with Slashdot and Kuro5hin. Kuro supposedly had much higher quality content, but I couldn't help but feel the site only appealed to certain kinds of people. I appreciate high quality content yet could not bring myself to care about Kuro. (I'm sure many here have the opposite experience, so I'd be interested in your counterpoints).
I very much believe in curation, but without volume, curation seems like pre-mature optimization, it seems to me.
Good point. I only ever heard positive things about kuro5hin, but I never warmed up to it, no matter how hard I tried.
It's the same as some print newspapers. You know they are better than some others, but all of their content is just too... dry? for you. And no, I don't mean too high-level or non-boulevard. They just seem to have an air of something that doesn't suit you.
I once subscribed to a Canadian magazine called "The Walrus" -- it was the Canadian parallel to Harper's.
The articles were well-written, but the subject matters were... how to put this... oh so boring. They were all these long-form articles about first-world upper middle class white-bread issues that few people actually cared about except for the insular literary classes.
I killed my subscription and subscribed to the Atlantic instead.
The invite-only nature will only benefit the site while it's small. It will either stay small or suffer the same users as other sites. The down-vote with reason feature is nice.
I'll be interested to see how they leverage the user tree. I'm no expert in social media bots, but it seems like the user invitation tree could be important to identifying not just networks of bots that are generating low-value content and trying to amplify certain viewpoints, but the people inviting those bots into the network in the first place.
I think the point here is that if someone starts spouting rubbish, the person who invited them loses "face" - it reflects badly on them. So invitations aren't hard to come by, provided you have a reasonable reputation for saying things that are sensible.
This is a throwback to an early age when you would never talk to someone in social circles without first being introduced. If someone turned out to be a "bad sort" then the mutual acquaintance who had introduced you had proven themselves not to be reliable, and so you don't trust any future introduction from them. The scene in "Pride and Prejudice" where Mr Collins goes up to talk to Mr Darcy without having been introduced is a classic example of breaking these social norms, and the loss of reputation that ensues.
There is a lot of current research on "reputation" and "trust", and the "invitation tree" is one very simple way to provide some of the benefits.
That's the flip side, and part of the reason research on the question is active, ongoing, and occasionally contentious. It's a choice to make, and a mechanism to employ. One alternative is the HN model wherein everyone can contribute and you have no idea of their experience, expertise, or trustworthiness.
It's a choice, and it has consequences.
One thing I'd like to see added to HN is the ability for me to assign trustworthiness scores to other users, and then filter based on that. There are people here who I've come to know will provide value, even if their views are unpalatable, and their karma is low. There are others who have reasonably high karma, and yet who I know add little of value (for me!) to conversations.
Again, that would risk a filter-bubble, but it would reduce the number of comments I need to wade through before getting to those of value -- all from my personal view, of course, and your judgements would be different.
He's really good at that. I can't recall if he disclosed his methods. Most don't to avoid giving the people doing it a chance to adapt. Let them stay at low-effort attempts. :)
Users and mods have used it to detect sockpuppets and voting rings. We've had almost zero trouble with bots because of the invite system.
It's not obvious from browsing the site (though of course it's visible in the source: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/791b21f60a2e952cab...) but users can lose the ability to invite if they reach a net score of -5 (rare, they have be a bad actor right out of the gate) or from a mod removing it (also rare, they typically have to invite several problem users or run a voting ring).
I haven't tried lobste.rs. but I enjoy HN without tags (In fact I don't think I'd use tags if HN brings this feature). I enjoy reading articles from different domains (other than tech). And this variety is what keeps me engaged to this platform.
I replied to the author on Mastodon earlier. Copypasta:
>huh, I totally disagree. The moderation on Lobsters is really self-interested and fickle, and there's little done to protect any opinions which differ from the mainstream. I've seen a lot of trolls and hateful threads go unmoderated just because they agree with the party line. The platform also has a censorship problem, in which they merge new posts into old posts even if they're tangentally related - for example, if an article spreading misinformation front pages on Lobsters, the rebuttal posted the next day will be quickly merged into the original thread which, by then, is on the second page and already passed through most Lobsters reader's purview.
>The HN mods go out of their way to try and make a community which is diverse and representative of a broad set of viewpoints. Sometimes this goes too far and allows really dissonant opinions to be surfaced, but on the whole I think this approach is better.
I also agree that HN has its share of problems, though. Someone else pointed out that HN has a problem wherein a small minority of users can flag posts out of existence.
The hateful comments are all passive aggression in my experience. I don't mean anything anti-semitic content or anything along those lines of hate - I just mean bad faith arguments, ad hominem attacks, etc.
As for non-mainstream, basically anything that the moderators don't agree with. Could be about technology or politics. Anything which dissents from the prevailing opinion of a comment thread is also at risk for being moderated. They don't moderate the discussion, they moderate the topic.
So a few passive-aggressive comments are "hateful"? I find this a really strange way to put things, to put it mildly, especially considering that overall, Lobsters does better than most of the internet which is often filled with much more direct content.
I rarely see content moderated (the mod log is 100% public). Lobsters is much more narrowly focused than HN, so off-topic stories tend to get removed. That's ... a feature, not an attempt to "censor dissent". Honestly, if you want to make these kind of strong accusations you should back them up.
The same applies to the "censorship by merging" claim from the parent comment. Reasonable people can disagree on how to best merge stories etc, and that's all fine, but claiming "mod censorship" is quite a strong accusation regarding the motives of the mods.
Man, I miss what.cd, not just for the content but for the obsessive users they had and the collections they made. Want all albums with a shoe as the cover? They have a collection for that. Want good music to start a journey into classical music in the 1800s? They have a collection for that. I mostly used it to discover great music, and the void that what.cd left has yet to be filled for me.
You can join one of the successor trackers. Though, I expect them to be taken down in turn when they become more well-known.
The centralized private tracker model has a fatal flaw in that it's too easy to take down and all the work/hours people put in in curating and creating metadata ultimately wasted.
There are alternative models where the metadata is distributed but so far nothing has really caught on.
Laughable to compare the obsessive curation of music on what.cd with any of those platforms, not to mention the fidelity and the vast range, far exceeding what’s available on the other platforms.
It's not so much because of the pirating that this service was successful, it's because of the dedicated userbase it held.
If something like what.cd integrated with something like Spotify- a legitimate way of accessing lots of music- say "here's a button to stream" somewhere on the site, it would probably be successful.
Mind you, one of the other reasons that these sorts of things with torrent or whatever backends get so popular is because there isn't a particular gatekeeper that can decide what can and can't be on the platform [1.] Destroying and damaging the effort of people who help your platform on their spare time tends to garner ill will.
I would pay for what.cd. In fact, I did pay. I think I donated about €200 at some point.
The entire experience of what.cd was just amazing, and services like Spotify are lacking a lot. The situation is better than a few years ago, but still very far from perfect.
Yes. But they are nowhere close to the ways you could discover with it.
Spotify's playlists doesn't even compare.
>Oh kay. More like you just liked stealing from creative professionals.
Ofc.
In fact, there are studies that show that piracy helps the industry. And I bet the biggest winners are the creators themselves, as they are the ones that profit the most from exposure. Musicians get more more from concerts than albuns sales.
There's a site that is basically oink 3. Don't forget that what itself was a successor of oink. Not sure if it's against the rules to name it. It seems much harder to get an invite to it than it was for the previous 2 though.
I tried to get an invite for one of them using the "IRC interview", and I was berated for not having "studied enough" because I didn't know the detail of some pedantic rule (I think it was about some detail on which format trumps which) and I explained something else in slightly different words.
The entire thing was super-pedantic and super-silly, and a massive turn-off for that community (I didn't try again). As far as I'm concerned there is no good alternative to what.cd.
I'm interested to try out participating... but I cannot get an invite, despite talking with folks in their irc, posting my homepage, some projects, github profile, etc.
Meanwhile, other folks are coming into the channel and getting invites. That's annoying...
Maybe this is for the better, though. I totally understand why they'd want to restrict membership and keep things focused and civil. But there is also something that feels off about excluding people who are probably qualified to be there.
Sort of like interviewing at tech companies, there may not be a good solution. I imagine they're willing to put up with false negatives as long as false positives are minimized.
And that does make sense. But being on the other end of it is weird.
While I do agree that having to give a solid reason before downvoting would be a much welcome feature to HN, being invite-only makes it a non-starter, and it only fosters elitism.
Sure, it'll always have a small, curated community, but you can be assured the politeness will stay skin-deep before long and there simply won't be enough differing points of view to allow insightful discussion of any kind. It's the same issue I keep seeing time and time again in other closed communities (e.g. invite-only Mastodon instances) where it ends up rotting them from the inside out: they're too big to remain cohesive as just a group of friends, but too small to receive any fresh air. I'd believe "cliques" would be the less polite way to call them.
Its true that this system blocks spammers and marketers. At the same time it also prevents a large amount of genuine users who want to take part in the dicussions because its hard to get an invite. So overall the system does more harm than good.
> Invitations are used as a mechanism for spam-control, to slow registrations to a pace we can acculturate and to encourage users to be nice, not to make the Lobsters userbase an elite club.
I'm personally not happy with the randomness of the chat invite system. I have some ideas on how to streamline it but I haven't had time to present them, and I lack the Ruby chops to actually contribute to the site's code.
It's not that hard to get an invite. Ask in an HN thread and there's a good chance somebody will hook you up, assuming they either know you, OR can tell from your HN comment/submission history that you're not some weirdo who is going to spam lobste.rs with crap.
> Ask in an HN thread and there's a good chance somebody will hook you up
That works for users who have seen this thread. How does a person who has not seen this thread knows that they have to ask in some random HN thread to get an invite? What about users who don't have an HN account?
One popular tech site in Russian was invite-only for a very long time: https://habr.com I remember you could get in by someone inviting you or if you wrote a good guest post (there was a separate area for this kind of guest posts and no one could see who the author is). I got impression that invite-only system worked quite well as the site was known for high-quality content and discussions.
It's more like Medium, than Lobsters, HN or even Reddit. And while they initially succeeded at attracting users with invite-only scarcity, they utterly failed with negative reinforcement.
Hey, I'm interested. I can't see your email and probably you can't see mine, so if you think I'm not an asshole, could you send it to adrian D0T arroyocalle AT gmail D0T com
Look all social platforms (from blogs to news aggregators and networks) continuously change. Not in the manner of the ship of Theseus but in the concept that the people who use the platform determine what the site is all about.
What eventually happens is that the people that have been there the longest reminisce when the site was different and they actually preferred that kind of content. But, the site has gone into a new direction.
Invite only? Google in beginning was the same, hence why I never made a gmail account and stayed on yahoo, which allowed me to easy move from it to protonmail 15 years later. Also Facebook was the same, only students were allowed in beginning, which meant I never made a Facebook account either.
The down-vote feature (for those who didn't read the article: you have to provide feedback to down-vote) is something I've spent years saying HN badly needs.
These days I just don't bother posting most of the time because while I shouldn't be bothered by abuse of negative rep; you can't help be pissed off when you've spent a short while including detail only for someone who doesn't understand the subject or has a personal bias in the subject to react with a knee-jerk down vote. It's not as bad when people reply because at least you gain context into their point of view (even if you don't agree with them) but it always felt, dare I say, "rude" to effectively fine a comment karma without explaining why you've done so.
Also HN's model actively encourages burner accounts where people will say something they know to be contentious with an anonymous account so they don't burn their own karma. The problem with that is that can then sometimes lead to trolling too. After all, why sensor your opinion if you're now a burner account?
There used to be so much good content posted in the comments but the quality seems to have diminished over the years and I honestly think that's in part due to more people reaching the karma threshold for down-voting. The more times a genuinely thoughtful or informative post gets a knee-jerk negative vote, the less people will feel inclined to give up their time writing thoughtful or informative comments.
Downvoting isn't the problem - it's spam flagging. There's no better tool for suppressing ideas and viewpoints you disagree with than flagging it. Only on HN can a story occupy #1 on the front page due to overwhelming upvotes, and 30 seconds later be sunk to the depths of page 2 or 3 by a handful of flaggers who disagree with the content that's presented.
Whenever someone flags a thread, the thread either gets globally flagged or not. If it automatically gets globally flagged, a mod may un-flag it. Or, it may not be automatically flagged, and a mod will flag it.
We can then find the probability that a user's flag will result in a "permanent, global flag" by looking at the user's history. We ought to use the lower bound of the Wilson score interval for this. This is the user's trust score, which needs to remain hidden from them.
We then set some threshold under which a user's flag will be shadow-ignored. This way, we only act on feedback that has a high probability of fitting the same pattern of mod behavior. Just make sure you have quality mods who consistently and correctly flag threads.
Strongly agreed. If I recall HN also has some built in functionality that downranks posts when the comments on it come in at high volume, indicating some level of flame war.
I get the motivations behind both, and in some situations it works great. But a lot of the time it helps to enforce a monoculture on the site: any disagreement, particularly strong disagreement, is seen as a negative signal and is vanished from the site. Next time you see a post about, say, women software engineers, you’ll be able to watch it happen in real time.
I have complained about this to moderators before. There are certain topics that are almost off limits on HN not due to the rules, but due to the heavy flagging they always receive. Articles by, about, and for women are one common example. These articles being flagged results in this community being pulled further into a dangerous realm of misogyny that already exist in some pockets of the tech world.
EDIT: Another example of semi-banned topics is criticism of HN. This post was number 1 on the front page a few minutes ago. It is already down to 11 with several older posts with fewer points higher up on the front page.
EDIT 2: And now this post is seemingly flagged killed. From number 1 to disappeared in roughly 10 minutes.
I'm not a mod and I don't have any inside track, but I've been around a while. I suspect that this item has fallen not because of flags, but because it's got 80 comments and only 75 votes. There is a mechanism as a proxy to detect flame wars, and is not necessarily because of flagging.
If you think this has been sunk inappropriately then email the mods. They are quite open to getting honest, constructive comments and suggestions. If you think this item and this discussion is of value to the community, let them know and they might agree and remove the flame-war penalty.
I have scrolled through several pages and this post is no longer in the top 200 on HN. I have never seen the flame-war penalty hit anything close to that hard that quickly. I am pretty sure this is from user flagging.
It may be. I've also now read through most of this thread and I can say categorically that for me, this thread is now mostly full of dross, and I'd be tempted to flag it as being of negative value to HN.
I haven't, but I can see why others would. Like it or hate it, the purpose of the voting system is to provide a direction for the content. You may disagree, but it's like elections - you get what "the community" deems valuable or relevant.
There's a lot of stuff I post that sinks without trace, and other things that get downvoted into obvlivion even though I personally think they are of positive value.
I am not suggesting we remove the ability to downvote or flag. I still want the community to decide most of these things. I simply want more accountability for these actions so they aren't used for petty reasons. You would be free to flag this post for causing a comment section full of garbage. You would just have to say that rather than flagging and moving on.
That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering. IMO it's much better for signal/noise ratio not to go there.
I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.
I respect your position but I don't agree with your conclusions:
> That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality
It's only low quality if the reasons for down voting are low quality and since the purpose of forced replies is to weed out low quality moderation, I think the ends justify the means.
> and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering.
People already bicker about the moderation. Constantly. What I'd hope to see it fewer people impulsively moderating posts. Which might have the ironic effect of reducing some of the complaints.
Obviously those who have a tendency to bicker will likely continue to do so but that will be little change to what they're already doing now.
> I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.
That may also turn out to be true for HN but equally it may not. Every forum and community is different so what works in one place might not work in another -- and visa versa. As it is, the quality of comments have and peer moderation has already been on a downwards trajectory for a few years now so it's probably worth trying some new ideas to see if it does shake the less confident yet still experienced engineers back into contributing thoughtful posts.
I think the idea is that when you flag or downvote you have to provide a comment on the action, and that comment is then displayed when someone asks for a list of downvotes and/or flags. Those comments are not part of the regular comment system, and one can't reply to them.
It's what happens on Lobsters, but whether or not it makes a difference is hard to say. The traffic is small enough that I doubt the effect is properly measurable.
Right, but however you expose that information, aren't you just providing nucleation sites for meta-debates? This is a site that practically begs users to generate opinions about everything; you can't even pick the background color for your blog post without potentially sparking a 10-comment subthread about it. Off-topic meta arguments are arguably the biggest problem comment threads on HN have.
... and on Lobsters you would neither need to speculate what happened nor kneel in front of the mods to fix it, because moderation actions are publicly logged¹. :-)
HN has hosted countless threads about gender issues and articles by, about, and for women. Here is one from two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128385. Some get flagged; sometimes we turn off the flags, especially when the article contains substantive information and isn't primarily a sensational piece.
This is by no means an under-represented topic on this site in relative terms. You may feel that it's under-represented in absolute terms, but that's true of every important topic, because front page space is the scarcest resource HN has.
Isn't the fact that you regularly have to turn off the flags on these articles a sign that these articles get unnecessarily flagged? And even when you do unflag articles, sometimes it is just too late to rescue. For example, this article was flagged. You unflagged it, but by now it is page 8 instead of number 1 on the front page like it was when I saw it.
EDIT: This comment received two downvotes within 3 minutes of me posting. It is a comment buried half way down the comment section on a post that is 8 pages deep on HN. That type of immediate reaction seems strange and as a user it would be helpful to know whether something I said is unfit for this community or if there is some other reason for that reaction. Requiring users explain themselves for this behavior provides some immediate value for me on this comment.
It's a sign that moderation mechanisms and user mechanisms sometimes produce different outcomes, which is true of every aspect of HN, and is why moderation is necessary in the first place. I wouldn't draw specific conclusions about gender issues from that. Gender is a well-represented topic on HN, and has been for years. Some people feel it should be more so, some less so; that is also the case for every prominent topic, and doubly so for divisive ones.
We didn't unflag this article. We turned off the software penalty called the flamewar detector.
There's nothing odd about your comment being downvoted. Other users are still reading this thread just like we are. As for why they downvoted, perhaps they felt you were prosecuting the point in a repetitive way, or that the discussion has gotten too meta. Those things attract downvotes because they quickly get uninteresting.
Did my other comment here legitimately get flagged? I am supremely confused by that. I guess you could read that first sentence as rude, but that hardly seems flagging worthy. I also have no idea if that is even the reason it was flagged because flagging requires no justification on HN.
Dang, do you see how that flagged comment reinforces my point?
I'm afraid I don't. Sure there's abuse of the flagging system; there's abuse of everything. But HN's system as a whole (consisting of community, moderators, and software) has countervailing mechanisms for that and other abuses. The example you raised, of threads about women and gender issues, shows this very much, since those not only do not "always get flagged" as you claimed, but just the opposite: it is one of the more prominent topics on HN, as I've explained.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what your point is, other than to complain about downvotes and flags, which is a discussion that gets increasingly repetitive and tedious, which is no doubt why the posts attracted further downvotes and flags.
For sure it sucks to see one's comments downvoted or flagged. The best response to this is to reflect on what in your comment might have led to that. Usually it's not so hard to see this if you're willing to look objectively. If you do see something, that's good learning for next time. If you don't, chalk it up to the quirks of other users and move on—it's priced in for everybody, and focusing on it further (e.g. by demanding reasons) is a poor use of energy and an especially poor direction for further discussion.
You really aren't going to admit that there is any abuse of the flagging system? Either way, at one point this article said [Flagged] in front of it and now it doesn't. Can articles reach that flagged state from purely the flame war detector?
I disagree about the gender thing and I'm not the only person to mention that specifically in this comment thread, but I recognize arguing that point isn't going to get us anywhere.
My point in that edit was that it is strange to see immediate and strong reaction on a comment that is buried so deeply. There are different expectations for a comment here compared to something on the front page in which many users are likely to see it as soon as it is posted. I have mentioned this to you before, but I think constructive feedback is important if you want people to actually become better community members here. Both you and I are left wondering why my comment received a negative response and I therefore have no direction on how to improve my comments.
I think that a better solution, at HN scale, would be to limit the number of downvotes in a 24 hour period.
Not clear what the ideal number is; maybe 5 at 500 karma, and 5 more per 500, possibly up to some limit (25?).
Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one.
I suspect that the recent trend to low-quality downvotes is because 500 is a relatively low threshold with as much traffic as HN gets these days, and we have a bunch of newbs who were champing at the bit to inflict some punishment and go nuts with it when they get the ability.
Limiting downvotes at first would train users to be more thoughtful in what they censure; eventually the limit becomes no practical barrier, but hopefully by then the habit is established.
The Slashdot karma system sort of had something like this. It’s been a few years, but comments weren’t given point totals but tags like “insightful”, “funny” for positive or “troll” for negative. This way a comment had feedback on why it was ranked higher or lower. A moderator only had so many points to give for a limited period of time as well as other guardrails. In order to get mod status you had to do things like history of reading comments in articles and posting articles and comments which in turn had high marks. This made a positive feedback loop where more positive participation gave more chances for mod status.
On top of that there’s a meta-moderation system where in turn mods in comments are evaluated if they were modded fairly or not. If marked fair the original mod got more karma, and less if deemed unfair.
I don’t know if such a system can exist in modern day, but out of all comment systems I always found the Slashdot style both simple and fair for the complexities of large comment volumes.
> Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one.
I’d think if your reply was something low quality you’d end up with more downvotes than the parent you just down voted. Or am I misunderstanding something?
My experience on HN is that getting 500 karma was not easy; it’s quite hard to get submissions past “new” and comment karma takes some time to accumulate. I think it took me about 7 years! Perhaps others have an easier time.
I'm not on lobste.rs, so I could be getting this wrong. But I believe the system is that you have to choose a reason for downvoting, which is shown to the person you downvote, but that you're not required to reply to the post, and the user doesn't know who in particular did the downvoting.
I'm not on lobste.rs either and if that's their system then that's not entirely what I had in mind. I'd want voting to be first class comments. That way bad moderation surfaces quickly and can be moderated on itself -- thus pushing the abuser below the threshold for access to negative voting.
One thing I think HN does really nicely is that you cannot down vote someone who's replied to your comment. Only 3rd parties can. That too can be abused if there's an argument between 3 people but it's still a better system than not having one at all.
Has the downside though that now a genuinely bad comment takes much more space in the comment section, because of all the comments necessary to justify its downvotes, and all the comments arguing with those comments (I'd expect that to descend into flamewars very quickly).
That is certainly one possible outcome. However HN already supports tools to minimize the pain there via comment folding and/or hiding down voted comments (the option for that is in your profile).
Optimistically speaking another outcome is also possible, fewer people feel the need to down vote comments so topics where people are using moderation to suppress an unpopular opinion (rather than moderate an objectively bad comment) might see fewer flamewars.
Of course incorrect posts should still receive moderation but this also ensures that errors are accompanied with corrections -- which doesn't always happen at the moment.
HN's moderation system certainly isn't the worst I've seen. Far far from it!! But I do think now is a golden opportunity to review it's moderation system to see if any tweaks could enhance the experience. Doing nothing is sometimes just as bad as doing the wrong thing. :)
This is a very good idea, and I think the quota should be even lower. I also think the old Slashdot mechanic of allowing a set of tags on user mod votes is useful to provide additional feedback.
Another reason for requiring feedback for downvoting is so others know why it was downvoted. There have been many times where I’ve seen a dead comment on a topic I’m not familiar. I know the general user disagrees with that statement but I have no idea what’s “wrong” with it. Conceivably it’s because it’s obviously wrong to anyone in that domain so nobody bothers commenting or it’s a contentious issue in that domain and people who agree or could provide further insight don’t think it’s worth the negativity to bother commenting.
Either way I have no clue. I read a comment recently about setting up a graphics pipeline that seemed reasonable enough but was downvoted to hell. I would have liked to know why.
>Another reason for requiring feedback for downvoting is so others know why it was downvoted
That will just lead to bickering. And really if that's the rule then you should also be forced to make a meaningful comment when upvoting.
I find that there are times to downvote that don't or shouldn't require a comment. It will just spiral into a comment war tit for tat comments spiraling down into a hundred levels.
> I find that there are times to downvote that don't or shouldn't require a comment. It will just spiral into a comment war tit for tat comments spiraling down into a hundred levels.
I'd be interesting to hear some examples. The only instances that sprung to my mind were instances where posts probably should be flagged instead anyway. However I'm open to the possibility I've overlooked some scenarios (as well as the possibility that flagging might get abused as a way of voting without commenting)
I really liked this idea too until I realized that it's really easy to come up with an excuse like "this doesn't make any sense". Which often times, is the real reason. I don't think mods have time to investigate each little spat and confrontation if someone chooses to "abuse" the system.
I think HN's current system of keeping a limited window open so that comments that in general are disagreed with will be downvoted makes sense. Honestly, I think it's even kind of brilliant, and I am not sure what system would be better.
I would agree that having to give a downvote reason is more relevant at bigger communities. But I'm usually surprised at how "lighter" moderation/voting works better in HN/Reddit
I remember the "Web 1.0" days of forums and slashdot where votes/moderation was more fine grained. But it seems cheap comments were more valued in these kind of environments than in the more modern ones (even if they're popular on Reddit, and I'm glad here it's toned down)
Yes sometimes the community here will disagree with you and there's a bit of "echo chamber" effect, though I find my comments will usually have an ok number of votes after a while (sometimes my opinions won't match the community, sometimes I'll have a badly worded comment that's misinterpreted and goes to have a low score, well, you can't get it right always)
i fail to understand why some comments get down-voted. sometimes i am thinking the same thing the commenter got down-voted for. i sometimes ask myself if there is no language barrier at play at times?
but i am usually not logged in, or on the phone, to comment. i seldom log in and yet has been around forever. i have accounts before that i forgot the password for. i think there are many of us that just hang around...
now, other times, i fail to understand why some posts get to the front page. and they never fail to get there. the first few replies on those are "see previous thread", "discussed before", and so on. and there is so kind of popularity thing going on that makes some people auto-magically get to the front page.
I like the reasoning behind lobste.rs that was described. When it first came out, i simply thought it was a clone of hacker news. Having read this post, I'm intrigued. I've recently been spending more of my time on tildes.net (and highly enjoying it!) rather than hacker news...So maybe I'll start focusing on tildes.net and lobste.rs, instead of HN...hmmm.
Lobste.rs has a better site and functionality, but HN has a better community and much more activity/discussion. Though I want to note that having a better community doesn't mean the people on HN are nicer or more educated. There's just more users on this site, and thus more content overall, which means a larger amount of good content.
I personally don't see the appeal with Lobste.rs. Every time I see it mentioned on here, I'll go back to take a look but I never see enough interesting discussion or content to make me consistently return, or desire an invite.
As a Reddit / Hacker News-alternative (or supplement), I've been far more impressed by Tildes.
Firstly, I like HN. I've been regularly visiting this site for over a year, and I like the content and commentary.
And while I like the idea that anyone can join, it would be really nice to limit the down vote for the same reasons outlined in other comments here.
Someone I work with put it bluntly when they said "Just post a polite but witty reply to something on Hacker News and watch your points tumble like corporate stock after a security breach."
I think "better" is too reductive a framing for comparing things as broad and deep as online communities. There's no single dimension to judge quality on, and it's largely a matter of personal taste. I appreciate the praise but this post feels like a missed opportunity for a really valuable conversation about how design features have shaped these two sites (to say nothing of the dozens of others they draw inspiration from). In short: https://lobste.rs/s/bxuqzy/why_lobste_rs_is_better_than_hack...
One thing I noticed is that the search feature on there is far worse than HN's. Doing a side by side comparison, I have to go to the 2nd or 3rd page on Lobste.rs to get the results that I would have expected to be first.
Yep, and it's slow, too. I just deployed some code to improve it last week and we've got some more in the pipeline. In the meantime, a Google search with `site:lobste.rs` is probably more effective.
> Are people using HN, etc. as an info repository?
One of the nice things about HN is that people with way more experience than you in any given field make posts and comments about their work at times. While generally not useful for specific step-by-step instructions, there are good tips here and there that are at least worth considering, or alt viewpoints that may be interesting to consider in the future.
Feedback from Lobsters, esp those that run the site and major contirbutors, was mostly in agreement. Most responses preferred one or more of peaceful coexistence, getting good from both, and/or cross-posting good stories/comments to both communities. A seemingly-tiny group does hate HN or SV, though. We're less about which is best so much as helping make the one(s) we use the best.
On Lobsters, culture articles usually get more upvotes than downvotes. This article on Lobsters got a large number of downvotes at a higher-than-usual ratio indicating they thought it doesn't represent Lobsters' vies and/or might offend the HN community. That's despite kevq being a guy we like who writes and submits lots of content that gets plenty of upvotes. Just throwing out there for anyone on HN wandering if this was a group consensus or just kevq's thing.
Speaking for myself to address a few comments in this thread:
1. Looks dead. It usually is on weekends. Check back Monday and Wednesday. Always slower-moving, lower comments, and just more laid back, though. Although niche, we're unusually strong in accessibility, formalmethods, plt, and testing. Look at the tags:
2. Politics, echo chambers, moderation, etc. The site itself is diverse. The main preferences in voting are people that just want deep tech vs people that want human side and/or political (most far-left-leaning). There's plenty in between who submit links, drop in randomly, etc. These two are just most vocal about preferences. If not haters or trolling, then moderators let visibility be determined by votes w/ worst collapsed, not deleted. Deletes and bans are rare with constructive criticism from community being most common.
3. Experts. Lobsters comments has higher expert-to-non-expert ratio on a lot of topics due to its model. HN's model and long history gives it a higher volume of experts and expert comments. The two are also usually different even on same article or topic. Reading both sites is best for maximizing expertise.
Dan, I appreciate the list you posted illustrating No 3 since I've needed that on most of the occasions I've described HN's diverse array of experts to people not on the site. Definitely passing it along.
