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Dear HN, I'm worried about us
91 points by andreyf on Feb 4, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 113 comments
I ran a little experiment... in a popular story, I said basically the same thing three ways:

Angry sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465422 (current score: -5)

Definition of my scope of knowledge, followed by the same opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465428 (current score: -4)

One-sentence witty sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465436 (current score: 9)

Now, I really value our relationship, and it's meant to me more than any other coder/news-community relationship I could have imagined, but this isn't the Hacker News I feel in love with.

We all know "karma doesn't matter", but it definitely shapes the discussion that takes place. So let's reiterate some social guidelines which always helped this relationship flourish. I'll start:

- don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which are egregiously offtopic or seriously detract from the conversation




McKinsey suggests and practices a rule about growth: don't grow more than 25% per year if you want to preserve your culture. I think once HN started having self-reflective posts it passed into "Shirky Completeness", a stage in communities where the old hats become preoccupied with preserving the culture and cannot keep up with training new users to fit their mould. Sub groups fork off to the point that the several concurrent streams stop interacting. My friend and I realized we were reading completely different aspects of HN.

Karma is (or should be) a proxy for quality. But there are no mechanisms except social ones.

I also suspect that there are certain commercial "reputation" companies that have HN in their sights now. Not spammers per se, but father along the continuum to PR. There have been quite a lot of activity geared toward "whipping the froth" and post-storms around specific topics.

It may be time to fork HN. I actually also suspect PG has already forked HN for private YCombinator use. I haven't seen a post from RTM or TLB for over a year.


I'm by any standard an absolute rookie here and I realize that gives me 0 standing on how things 'used to be', but as compared to how things are elsewhere HN is a very large improvement.

That might be reflective of how small the site still is but at the same time it seems that the quality of the discussion is well above most tech oriented subcultures out there.

More users will mean more submissions, eventually the 'new' queue will go by so fast it will be harder to pick out the good stuff, hopefully enough eyeballs on the new submissions will keep the spam and the astroturfing down to a minimum.

And keep in mind that even a user with huge 'karma' can have a bad day, it's an average, not an instantaneous measurement of quality.

There is clear evidence of what you classify as 'whipping the froth' (beautiful metaphor):

For instance there have been many attempts to get the google friend tracking feature listed, at some point I saw three submissions on the 'new' page at the same time and a whole bunch of them that had already passed by, clearly that is not helping at all but it does not seem like anybody cares enough to do something about it. The more that gets a foothold the harder it will be to get rid of it.

Outright spam could be easily handled by making it impossible to submit links until you've crossed some karma threshold, linkfilter.net has used that method fairly sucessfully for years.


Good point that karma as applied to users is an average. I've done some flaming here I'm not proud of. I meant that points applied to posts and comments are supposed to be a measure of quality. If we start going solely on reputation of the poster we've merely set up a pantheon and kicked away the ladder.

You're right that the velocity of the /newest page is the biggest problem. There may be a UI way of encouraging more upvotes. But I think it's still down to culture if we want to maintain the overall quality.


People started worrying about preserving HN culture about 6 months in. It's one of the constants of the site. Which is not to say there's nothing to worry about. Just that people worrying is not necessarily a sign there is.

There's no separate fork of HN. Rtm never posted, and you can easily test your statement about Tlb:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tlb


I wonder if calculating a user's karma as a weighted average of the scores of their last N comments, rather than a sum, would help. Inasmuch as karma scores affect anything, it might gently encourage fewer, more insightful comments.


I've been working on something very much like this for the last couple days. Stay tuned.


Hey Paul, just putting down a quick observation as why this could potentially penalise some users based on geography (That is if you have it so features are enabled/disabled based on your average karma instead of total)

One of the things I've noticed is that us on the other side of the world have trouble generating the same kind of karma that other's can generate which is really a function of being too late to discussions.

For example, east coast USA is often around 14 hours behind my timezone, so I typically get to conversations about 6-8 hours after they've started and when people are usually heading to bed.

Generally I find my comments down the bottom of threads with 1 or 2 karma.

However, if I post in the middle of the night (usually as I'm heading to bed) or really early in the morning (essentially as I get up) I am in the peak hours of HN, my comments on average do very well for Karma, simply because more people are available to read them and as such vote them up or down accordingly.

Just a thought - you might want to have thresholds based on a person's "prime time" instead of a predefined average.


Yeah, I know about this problem. I hope to cook up some kind of solution eventually.


ok cool - just highlighting it ;)


how about something like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467739


The weighted average of recent posts approach to karma sounds like a good idea. I imagine that might change my own posting behavior in a way that I hope is liked by all.


Have you thought about publishing a subset of HN's data so others can experiment with it?


There are a couple archives of all collected posts, though in quick searching I can't seem to find the right keywords. (Haven't had my tea yet though...)


Also, some comments stimulate interesting sub-threads. In cases where something is voted way, way down but has positive responses, it's probably trolling; positive with a lot of positive responses could mean "thought-provoking".

Of course, the real trick is to encourage interesting discussion and not just an echo chamber...


That's a very clever idea. Although with any calculation like that - there is still the bobcat issue: http://xkcd.com/325/ I really like the concept though - A running average of karma forces those who post lots to post quality and rewards those who are new but post well.


Past attempts to fork it with newmogul.com (nickb) and nonhackernews.com (mattmaroon) didn't work:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com+newmogul.co...


Ah yes, but those were attempt to fork the non-HN crowd away from HN.

No one should be surprised that doesn't work. it's the old timers that are dissatisfied with the new crowd not the other way around.

Forking away the hackers works, reddit did it to slashdot, proggit to reddit, HN to proggit and reddit.


I didn't say forking inherently doesn't work. Both nickb and mattmaroon are old timers who wanted to create valuable communities themselves, not just to create distractions and attract a lesser crowd or something.


I like New Mogul well enough, and am learning which submissions to prefer to send there and which to post to HN. I learned about nonhackernews.com from your post, so thanks for the information, and now I'll see if that site will fit some of my desire for online discussion with smart people who discuss topics that don't fit well here on HN.


I suspect that part of the problem is in the execution--our collective social will simply isn't sufficient to maintain an awesome community as time (and users) go to infinity.

Along that line, I've been experimenting with some more direct controls for community control: scaling voting power with user intelligence as measured by an objective standard. I posted about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464700


http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tlb


You are right -- tlb is active again though rtm is not. I meant that I hadn't noticed them in the mix in quite a while.


I don't think forking the current concept would work. The Digg/Reddit model seems to have had its best time. Some new concept should be created. Twitter seems like the right direction to me because you can follow only the people that you think are interesting.


FriendFeed seems to be actively building on that model, with their commenting features. What worries me is that this inhibits meeting new people far away from you in the social graph: I'd like to hear PG's or Paul Buchheit's opinions, even though I don't know them in real life.


People vote their emotion. Can't change it.

You can pretend that people vote based on value of the article, whether it should appear lower or higher on the page, etc. But you're just fooling yourself.

So the karma system rewards people who make the most people feel the best. You can call that cleverness, schmoozing, politics, or bullshit. Because of this, it promotes people thinking of like mind, not necessarily interesting things. It's "let's say happy, slightly interesting things to each other about information that doesn't challenge our worldview"

Known bug.


This site has taught me not to downvote with emotion.

I pretty much think "how many votes should this have? how great is the comment?" and I upvote or downvote it based on how incorrect their current rating is.

Lately I find myself upvoting a lot of comments I don't agree with simply because people have downvoted them into oblivion just for having a different opinion.


I'll do that too. I'm much more lenient towards people with good opinions here than I am anywhere else.

Even so, sometimes I'm tired and in a bad mood and I'll read somebody making a long, utterly wrong point and I'll downvote it instead of responding. Nobody's entirely innocent.


One of the primary reasons I come here is to learn new things.

A lot of this learning comes from people I initially disagree with, but that have good arguments or insights. And I upvote them, even if I don't agree.


One of the critical factors in an aggregation site (or in a consulting relationship for that matter) is the ability for participants to step outside the norms. To disagree.

HN has a better record of this than say, reddit. That's why I stay here. There's some opportunity for people with radically different opinions to meet and share. To the extent that the board supports that, I'm a big fan.

But to the OPs point, you can say the same thing different ways and get different results. It's not about information. It's about emotional impact.

So you end up doing this little dance whenever you'd like to correct somebody. There are lots of tactics, but it all boils down to presenting information to somebody they're not going to like in a format that's easily digestible.

To some degree, that's just being civil -- treating people like you would if you were talking to them at a bar. But that's time intensive and most times I know I don't think it's worth the effort. Folks will argue with you ad infinitum anyway, and that's best-case. So you stick to short, catchy, terse comments that mix in a little information goodness. People upvote the comment thinking it's the information, but it's really the emotional impact of the message. It's the presentation, stupid. The content is not nearly as important.


I wonder how these scores were affected by their placement on the thread.

I've observed that many good HN comments that are added relatively late often fail to get any additional positive votes -- my guess is that people can't be bothered to scroll down, and/or assume that anything with a low score is not worth reading especially when there are other comments in the same thread with high ratings.


I think you're right here. Also depends on the timing.

If you're the first commenter, and you're 'kinda' right, you'll get far more upvotes than if you're late to the party and very right.

I think the reason the 3rd comment got upvoted was that it wasn't a direct comment, but a response to someone else.

Having said that, I think we're reading way too much into this.


Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, so I downmodded them all, if that makes you feel better.


Each of your comments detracted from the conversation

Clever, but not true. The sarcastic ones did, I agree. But the second one started a thread of sum karma ~100. That's the opposite of detracting ;)


Your comment suggests an interesting way of rewarding people who further the conversation. Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds.

1 - This makes the witty comeback a lesser strategy for obtaining karma.

2 - People who are aware of this will stop responding to trolls. Even if they publish a well-reasoned response to a troll, they will be giving them karma points. Since this is not a common feature of internet forums, this might be worth spelling out above an active comment form.

3 - The best strategy for karma is to advance the discussion somehow. Even if your point ends up exposing the point of view of people on the other side.


Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds.

That sounds like a surefire way to encourage provocation (a.k.a trolling). If you make a deliberately provocative and clueless statement and n people take the time to exhaustively tell you why you're wrong (for which they get karma), I don't think you deserve any of the karma given to the comments you provoked.


Only give people the upmod points of responders if the original comment has positive karma. Or let's say your original comment has karma +4; you get karma of responders up to +4 per response, but not more than that.


The more complicated the system, the easier it is to game.

Presumably at some point that ceases to be true for a sufficiently complicated and good system, but my guess is that we're up into AI-complete territory there.


Thanks for the extra five karma, sucker!


Problem with this system is that it further skews the rewards to early commenters, especially those that play devil's advocate. People who post early already have an advantage since there is less competition for upvotes, and newer comments appear below slightly upvoted comments by default, ensuring better visibility for early upvoted comments. Adding you suggested karma rule would make this even worse.


The behavior we reward will be the behavior we have to live with. Simple as that.


I downmodded only that one because it gave an incorrect and unnecessarily aggressive version of what Kent Beck wrote. Joel is 'a bright, experienced guy' in Beck's words, became 'Joel is an idiot' in yours.

I upmodded some of the answers you were given because they were informative and calmed the conversation down. That is the opposite of detracting.


so I downmodded them all

Frankly I do not see the point of downvoting or bragging about it, and your explanation does not make it right either.

Each of your comments detracted from the conversation,

You single handedly decided what detracts from the conversation, and I am sure you are not HN spokesman.

It's like "an eye for an eye", but in this case you are hurting someone because you disagree with their opinion or the way they expressed it (and yes, I understand sometimes some users can be disrespectful).

But even when someone is clearly not following the HN guidelines, they should simply be reminded of it, then ignored forever.

The "free hand" in HN will auto-regulate them. That is the same free hand that does not upvote spam links.

Downvoting comments "should not be" just as downvoting stories "is not". Silence is by far the best way to respond to ignorance.


This thread was specifically made for conversation about how those 3 comments were voted, I dont think that counts as "bragging"

While they didnt add "in my opinion" I think its more than obviously implied that it was his opinion that he was stating, and was not attempting to speak on behalf of anyone else.

and the original poster stated that comments detract from the conversation should be downmodded, I agree that all 3 were somewhat insulting and added no value to the conversation, while I may be a relatively new user, they all seemed out of spirit (in my opinion)


Except the entire point of allowing users to downvote comments is to promote civility. If someone is not being civil, then they should be downvoted. This is a clearer and less distracting means of telling someone what's not appreciated.

At least, this is my understanding of how pg intends the system to be used.


Yes, my understanding of the site culture is precisely that downvoting is to show that a comment doesn't contribute to the discussion, rather than to show factual disagreement with the comment. This thread here is a discussion about a submission that suggests not everyone is interpreting downvoting in the same way, and that is a legitimate issue to explore here, as long as we are all in metadiscussion mode.


I invited explicit discussion the matter a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361390


Are you using an anecdote to refute statistics?


You have chosen a very elaborate way to ignore the Hacker News guideline that suggests "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.".

Your first comment had no context; it could have been applied to any story.

Your second comment suggested that you were wading into a debate about Agile Methods and XP without knowing who Kent Beck is.

Your third comment actually appeared to pertain to the discussion.


The magnitudes of the scores seem different than they might have a year ago, but the directions don't.


A year ago, comments that weren't blatantly offensive/crummy/rude/jerkish usually didn't fall below 0 points. The restraint of the community is what encouraged me to get so involved.

I'm all for downvoting a bad troll or uninvited meme/rickroll-speak much lower, but it kind of hurts to see real comments being modded into unreadably gray negatives for disagreement purposes.


I'm not sure what the exact rule is right now, but would it help to simply increase the threshold at which people are allowed to downvote comments?


would it help to simply increase the threshold

Priviledge thresholds have been periodically increased by the management. However, the process (so far) has been manual. Threshold-increase might instead simply be automated with code that also calculates karma-inflation.


Good idea. I just doubled the karma threshold for downvoting (to 100).


Yeah, I'm probably going to limit negative scores. It's nasty to see people piling on. And seeing nasty things tends to make people nastier.


I've seen behavior on some "other" social news-type sites that suggests that there is a huge psychological gap between 1 and -1 karma on a comment. It seems that the first few downmods on anything greatly increase the likelihood that the comment will get downmodded again because the groupthink factor comes into play. Thankfully, on HN I think we tend to have more independent thinkers so it is somewhat less of an issue.


Along the same lines of the downmod quota suggested in the sibling post, you could make downvotes cost a user some of their karma.


Maybe give people a downmod quota


I've seen that work in some cases. In other cases it encourages trolls to post enough times that they can't be downvoted more.

HN has the flagging system in place, though, so this might be worth a try. The Achewood community gives you more downvotes ('lames') the more upvotes you've received, though that might encourage groupthink.


Based on my sporadic use of reddit, short comments are the noisiest form of rot/cancer a in reddit-like engine/interface, such as puns and lame jokes that self-perpetuate into long threads.

Perhaps the comment form should have a self-check note along the lines of: "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." Good heuristics for self-detection are: short and no substance. Perhaps mods need to nuke bad comments for a while to establish a noticeable standard.


That's a very interesting observation. I noticed that too. Short comments are occasionally very useful. Occasionally they're the pin that pops the balloon. "What happens when x = 0?" But usually they're short on length because they're short on ideas.

I wonder if there is some way to discourage short comments? I could for example bias the comment sorting algorithm to put longer comments higher among siblings.


I think that bk has an excellent point with putting a small "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." note under the comment box.

The psychology of such a note might help a lot, besides not all recent posters would necessarily know that thoughtless witty comments aren't highly valued here.


I already put an invitation to read this

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

under every comment box for the first day of a new user's account.

Maybe I should add an additional confirmation step for short comments.


You probably should.

I hardly ever read EULA's (which this in some ways is), and I'm probably not alone in this behaviour.


Unfortunately this idea isn't going to increase the quality of commenting, it is just going to encourage stupid people to pad out their nonsense, Steve Yegge style. It's also going to punish people whose witty remarks are actually witty.


I think that one of the things that holds people to very high standards here is their respect for the community and the many members that have something interesting or insightful to say.

I have (almost) never experienced a comment that was an obvious digg-user unwittingly passing by, but many comments from new users that want to join the conversation but haven't been here long enough to get a feel for the unwritten rules, and thus post comments that may not go well with the rest of the community.

These users will definitely be helped by a small reminder that they should contribute in a meaningful way. The challenge, as you hint at, is of course what this reminder should be.

Maybe something short and witty like "Remember: if it isn't worht reading it isn't worth posting"


"Remember: if it isn't worht reading it isn't worth posting"

Most people think everything they have to say is worth posting. I'd rather something specifically aimed at short comments, as mentioned above. Something harsh aimed at something under, say, 100 characters, and a brief little reminder towards something under 100 words?


I wouldn't prevent people from posting short comments, just ask "are you sure?" I don't think anyone would go to the trouble of making their comments longer just to avoid an "are you sure?" screen.


I think there is a place for a bit of whit every now and again, what we want to avoid is having threads devolve into long lists of one-sentence banter. If you study the structure of these sorts of threads on reddit, I think one of the best tweaks we could make to avoid that sort of rot would be to auto-collapse any reply thread that has x% of replies that are under a certain character count unless the parent comment has a relatively high karma value. As you pointed out, sometimes the pithy statement is needed to break the ice, but rarely would and valuable discussion involve 6-7 one-sentence replies in a row, which is what you get when a conversation on reddit devolves to a joke-fest.

Auto-collapsing threads for comments that are below a certain karma threshold seems like a nice tool as well - it still allows access if you want to parse the thread, and trolls still have a place to do trollish things, but it moves the behavior into an opt-in situation where you have to actually click on the thread in order to see it.


I think I only made one comment on my first day. Perhaps this should be something that appears for an account's first X comments, where X is a sane limit. Perhaps a karma-limited reminder would be more effective for those who tend toward lurker. Then again, perhaps for the lurker class, that's ultimately unnecessary


I think there's a place for small comments and witty remarks.

My appreciation of them is like a bell curve, with the optimum ratio of wit[1]/serious comment probably about 1:20. Higher than that, and it starts to get a bit like reddit. Lower and it's taking itself a bit too seriously.

[1] This completely excludes bad puns, memes etc. They have no place here.

Edit: replaced the asterisk after wit with a [1]. Anyone know how to escape an * that's not preceded by whitespace?


Wouldn't the change of algorithm be a variation on the LOC metric that's universally despised? People would simply write longer comments with possibly as little worth.


I don't understand what's so bad about witty one liners, per se. I wish there was a better mechanism for filtering the types of cascades you mention as opposed to arbitrarily declaring one liners off limits. (Ie, have different _views_ into the same thread.) Seems there should be a way to have quality discussion _and_ the occasional bit of humor. Slashdot manages to do ok despite "+5 funny"...


Before /. got overrun with trolls and idiots, it used to be a nice combination of one-liners and honest-to-god interesting, information-dense material. I liked it that way.

In fact, if you could mix the jokes with the information density in just the right way, I think that would be a hugely popular site. People like laughing, and they like having jokes to share with the other hackers during the day.


Presumably because there are more users now, so if the direction hasn't changed the values of the community shouldn't have changed either.


You are doing "karma inflation" for various abilities given to users, but what about for post and comment ranking?


I'm not sure I understand your experiment. You expressed the same thing three ways, so people clearly aren't voting differently according to whether they agree or disagree. They're voting on how you expressed yourself.

Personally, I don't disagree with the votes much. The witty sarcasm has been up-modded too much, which is a problem on all sites, but it was the most concise and least agressive post.


I have been on HN for almost 700 days now and read it almost daily, I rarely post, comment, or login but I think the content & community here is best in class.

While there seems to be some discussion about the quality of the community lately, I think the quality of the submissions is still extremely high, and that the comments are still for the most part insightful and valuable.


I upvote things that I think are more important for other people to read -- that is, if I think it should be displayed higher on the page.

I downvote things that I don't think other people should bother reading -- that is, if they're uninsightful, irrelevant, or somehow distasteful.

The vast majority of things I just leave alone.

I think the word karma itself is partly to blame. It makes you think you're rating whether the comment is good or bad, but the effect of the up/down arrows is merely to sort comments based on relative quality/value for people who view the thread after you. For a while, I've toyed with the idea of suggesting a new interface that asks users to sort comments, rather than upvote or downvote, but I haven't thoroughly thought about it.


I was thinking about two sets of up/down buttons.

"comment adds to/detracts from the thread" and "agree/disagree with the comment"

The idea being to have fewer controversial yet contributing comments downvoted to unreadability.


"don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation"

Maybe it's time to make the functionality different, make the mechanisms easier to not get wrong with respect to the guidelines.

Perhaps you hit the downvote button and you are given two choices "off topic / detracts" or "I disagree" and the latter is a no-op with respect to karma.


downvote <- disagree

flag <- detract

how about using it that way? May be PG can have some logic to screen all flagged conversation on flag score than a semantic scan or abusive content.


Why should anyone be penalized in any way for disagreeing? Is well thought out disagreement any less valuable than the opinion of someone who agrees with you?

Why would we as a community even want people to know which opinion is more popular (provided both opinions are intelligent and well thought out)?


As you implicitly point out, jyothi's suggestion is not how things are normally done here.

Upvoting is generally for agreement or promoting something well written. Downvoting is usually for things that are outright false or trollish. Disagreement is expressed by... well... disagreeing (yes, that means via reply) OR voting up another comment that already expresses your disagreement (no point having many people say the same thing).

I hadn't considered it until you pointed it out, but in the case of trolls, flagging is functionally the same as downvoting, so I really only downvote things that are blatantly false.


All this experiment demonstrates is the extreme importance of style and presentation. If you say something negative in a joyful, entertaining way as opposed to a bitchy way people value your contribution more (enough more that the negative comment is all of a sudden considered a positive contribution to the discussion rather than a low-quality dig at someone).


I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable.

This community has been over variations of this topic quite a few times. The conclusion I drew from reading those discussions was that telling people how you think they should behave, and expecting it to actually happen, is not going to work (regardless of the quality of your argument and/or the population).

I've wondered for a while about the effectiveness of two different 'scoring' ideas. One is to make downvoting beyond some threshold (-1, perhaps) cost one or more point of karma for each downvote -- so if you really feel the need to drive something into the dirt, you have to give up some of your own karma as pennance for your obvious lack of self control and inability to follow the site guidelines. The other is to give up on global karma, and split the voting mechanism into categories such as 'agree/disagree', 'signal/noise', etc., so there are mechanisms to express a handful of the different reasons people have for voting.

Just thinking out loud...


I tried to think of a one-sentence witty sarcasm that would fit perfectly here, but couldn't. So, instead, I will point out that sometimes one line is all you need. I would much prefer a short reply that contains something new to a longer, very thoughtful, reply that adds nothing to the conversation. If it's even a little bit funny, all the better. In other words, "Omit needless words."


1. Joel makes disparaging remarks about Beck and his ideas without understanding those ideas well. If you're familiar with XP, you can see that Joel's argument is with more of a strawman than the substance of Beck's ideas. If not, Joel admits he doesn't really know what he's talking about right there in the podcast.

2. Beck responds, saying that Joel is uninformed and wrong. He doesn't give a lot of specific detail. He's written and said quite a lot already, and Joel's superficial caricature doesn't merit a detailed response.

3. You accuse Beck of ad-hominem.

It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with Beck's ideas, and it's not even precisely about agreeing or disagreeing with your accusation. It's that the whole affair is based on a misapprehension, and you're steering the conversation down a sidetrack.

Between your three distractions, the short and simple one-sentence witticism is less damaging than the emotionally charged and loquacious rants. Maybe that explains the votes. $0.02.


i tend to agree, and i follow the mantra of only dishing out karma for things that are either particularly helpful/insightful/interesting, and only downvoting things that are actually detracting from the topic at hand.

everything else is neutral, which would, to me, include something that i don't agree with but doesn't actually detract from anything.


I'm fairly new here, I think I've been around for 3 months or so now. I try not to down vote anything.

A little bit of self control needs to be had to do so. I may disagree about user x's stance on programming language y - but he's adding to the conversation so I have to back away.

However if we're having a discussion and someone decides to randomly throw in a lolcat reference that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, I don't have a problem down voting them, dousing them with gasoline and just watching them burn.


That's both a little harsh and by your own standards asks for a downvote...


I've been here for some time now. HN has changed, but so far the change is not very bad. In fact i think that we were able to steer the change in the community in a good way. HN is a living system, we see imperfections, good, that means we're still alive. Living organisms change all the time, we only have to do it right, so far we've done it well. Discussions like this one are a good sign, were not slacking off and leaving the site to just go downhill.


I feel that this is a function of the size of the community plus the type of people in that community. As it gets larger, it gets filled with more of the type you don't want.

Compare the Joel on Software discussion forum with the Business of Software discussion forum. Same site. Same format. Completely different quality of discussion.

We've done experiments to help raise the quality of discussion by limiting the number of posts, having active moderators, deleting rude and obnoxious posts...

But I expect asking your community to shape up doesn't work too well.

The comment about PG forking the discussion probably seems like the only solution. Start over every couple of months or years.


Agreed. Perhaps it would help stem the groupthink if points on individual comments were hidden? That way, one would need to judge the comment based on its own merit, rather than going with the crowd.


Insight #0: We're not all in the same room; instead of broadcasting a post, use our previous voting preferences to route posts to us.

#1: We read what other people like us read; spread the workload of evaluating new posts amongst the people clusters. As posts gain traction in one group, show to other nearby groups.

Anything wrong with this other than compute time and assuming that the solution costs less than our current social costs (say this was done secretly, is it pareto optimal if the troll doesn't know others don't read their posts?)?


If you want to tell people how to use a self-moderating site, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Either hire moderators, go to Slashdot's system of rewarding certain behaviors with moderator points, or live with the digg/reddit consequences.

Also, controlling how people downvote things is going to be really tough. Many people think comments that they disagree with do detract from conversation. I think one obvious rule should be you can't downvote comments on stories you comment on yourself.


PG what about reducing new sign ups?


Your post is on the front page. This means we are still actively introspecting as a community. That's a very healthy sign in my opinion, so I wouldn't worry so much.


It could also be signs of vanity. Reddit went downhill after a month of a ton of people writing Ask Reddit posts.

I'm not saying we have that problem, but usually, the presence of a topic like this is just taking away from an external news story.


I already penalize Ask HN posts (or more precisely, url-less ones) significantly in the ranking algorithm. That seems to keep them from taking over the front page.


So 'pgrank' is much more advanced than we think.


It really all boils down to each of us continuing to make an effort to maintain a level of discourse here that we all desire. Karma tweaks and algorithms are tools but they absolve very little of the actual hard work it takes from every member of a community.


Well don't you think its good the "angry sarcasm" was -5? I think it is very out of place here. the -4 and +9 difference is worrying though (although the points have changed since then... damn timezones !).


i like when users can customize the results. eg, categories rather than a single popular ranking. there are some technical/performance issues to consider, but in an ideal world, my ranking could be customizable on:

* submitter karma or username

* number of comments, links in comments (and links should be shown in a toolbox so i don't have to scroll for them)

* max/mean comment karma

* submission domain

* submission key words or category

* popularity-newness continuum position

(edit: i keep forgetting how to make bullet lists, and help only tells me how to make new paragraphs. eit)


groupthink is an inherent problem with sites like this...nothing you can do about it.


Nice experiment; are you a scientist?

( one sentence witty sarcasm )


Invite only?


It's been discussed before, and rejected.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373789


> don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation

True, we shouldn't downvote something just because we disagree with it, but it's more difficult to define what's detracting from the conversation.

Some may disagree with a comment, but since they "can't" just downvote because of that, they deem it "detracting" and maybe even say so. I think we should only downvote comments that are clearly inappropriate, not those that are somewhat off-topic. Everyone has their way of trying to contribute to conversations, and the conversations don't have to fall strictly under whatever topic is in the headline.


design flaw.


I think the problem boils down to the presence of non-hackers in here. It's mostly the non-hackers that abuse the downmodding (anyone who throws a hissy fit like a little girl and starts the abusive downmodding by accusing someone of trolling over that someone expressing a negative opinion of an MSFT product, IS.NOT.A.HACKER . . . that is only an example, but I think it is clear that 99% of hackers are not the delicate, emotional creatures that are into the abusive downmodding)

The solution would be to simply reject submissions that are obviously not hacker discussion material from being posted (yes, hackers are wont to talk about anything in the universe, but please, straight up MBA/Suit garbage HERE? . . . c'mon - a hacker interested in that can go somewhere else to discuss those topics if he/she wants)

The nearly effeminate debate submissions about css vs tables, for example

The MBA/Suit news

Those go, and most of the undesirables around here go. The obvious problem with this is that censoring is both distasteful and can be counterproductive . . . I don't envy the position PG is in.

I say readers protesting abusive downmodding in the threads themselves would be one positive step.


THIS PROVES MY POINT

Hackers would have engaged me in discussion of what I wrote.

Effeminate MBA candidate WANNABE HACKERS would downmod me.

Thank you, you have proven my point.


There's discussion? I just read the links.


I agree. I thought the vagina hacking story last week was out of place. Maybe we should discust this story too http://is.gd/ilUX Breast Hacking. All of these shoule net the person like myself a lower karma some how preferable with some kind of number system

Like this tweet

lelafin Yay! 105% on my first math test of the semester! ...and where is today's snow??? Wed, Feb 04 09:46:23 from web

Snow!




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