Am I the only one who despises the gamification and absurd elitism present in this product? I've neven been fond of exclusivity, and am of the opinion that good content ecosystems are resilient and will surface superior content regardless of the number of people present. The "tragedy of the commons" argument is a total straw man, and if anything is erroneous. HN thrives because of the volume of people and diversity of content.
Good content is good content, irrespective of who discovered it or how much notoriety they have. It's not the prerogative of the site to make arbitrary decisions about who ought to be able engage in the discussion or who ought to be able to submit content. Such draconian, "karma"-based restriction will likely preclude the submission of a lot of great stuff and will make it more difficult for newcomers to engage with the site.
HN is pretty damn good at surfacing interesting content. Restricting submissions and users in an arbitrary manner is not the way to improve news aggregation.
You are implying that there is not absurd elitism present on HN (which, in my opinion, there very much is) as well as an exclusive environment. For example, while my comment is both an opinion and said in a non-confrontational way, the fact that it's going to be unpopular among the HN elitist crowd will likely mean some sort of negative repercussions (downvote or hellban).
For crying out loud, the thread about 'the evolution of HN' on the top of the front page is disallowing comments from "new" users! Holy smokes if that isn't a slap in the face of egalitarian content contribution. And let me be very frank here when I say that if your goal is to attract "hackers" -- and keep them around -- to contribute to items of interest to other "hackers" then it's in your interests to tone down any kind of totalitarian control over the conversation, or you will probably soon run out of "hackers".
Your comment that HN thrives because of the volume of people and diversity of content is exactly what paul graham is arguing against in his quotes on the recent TechCrunch article. He is saying that there's a direct correlation between scale and undesirable interaction and content. If that isn't exclusive and elitist, I don't know what is.
Again, I hope a fair amount of people get to read this comment before it (and this account) disappears, because it's a glaring problem with this system.
The major problem is the owners are making it invite only, but the owners are not interesting and accomplished enough to be the top of the pyramid of a successful site (they can't easily invite up.) They see HN's dilution as the problem; but diluting from the high water line set by PG st al leaves HN higher than TheList with no dilution.
I have an honest question. Do you really feel this way about "pg et al"? I'm asking because these kinds of comments about "pg et al" is really not helping anyone at HN or elsewhere defend against accusations of elitism and exclusionary sentiment.
Yes, I think that he is a good programmer who thinks and writes well about both the technical and business aspects of software development. And the et al are like him to varying degrees.
It is necessary for a great discussion site to be founded by an elite person or by elite people, because the core of the site needs to be made of people who both have quality thoughts and express them well. For whatever reason that isn't a commonly found trait, so those who possess it are elite.
That said, it is not necessary for founders of discussion sites to pursue exclusion, and as we have seen on Hacker News, a variety of quality new members are attracted here by the 'elites' and also become good participants. Many, in my opinion, surpass some of the 'et al' in member quality.
I do think some mediocre members come along with, but I see them developed into better members over time, and this gives the community practice assimilating and improving mediocrity. By contrast, TheList will have very little practice spreading its culture so it will be a brittle, barely fruitful community.
So, a community with elite core members can be open and fair to new members while making them into better members and even has the possibility to improve the community over time. A community with less than elite members that practices elitism and exclusion does not do as well even relative to its initial position.
I can get on board with a lot of the philosophy in your statements about refining or distilling "member quality". However, it needs to be said that there is a ruler-on-the-knuckles system of punishing opinions that dissent against those of this so-called "elite core" comprising HN, regardless of the correctness or quality of the dissent. And I think it happens with enough frequency and consistency that it has made the "elite core" into an "elitist exclusion zone" that ends up smoothing off the rough granularity of the kind of qualities that make someone an "elite" person. The kind of qualities that HN should be encouraging and helping to refine, if improving themselves and the community is indeed their goal.
Also, I think it's critical to be aware of correlation versus causation in situations like this. What is causing the "refinement of elite persons" that supposedly turns mediocre contributors into better ones on HN? We can say that people who read HN more than once a week will likely have exposure to something that helps them learn and grow, but that is not due to the nature of the other "elite" people on HN. It's due to the nature of the information presented on HN. I become a better programmer because I am exposed to quality information on HN, not because some "elite" member of HN is doing anything to make me a better programmer. This is a very important distinction, because more often than not, it seems that the "elite core" of HN is under the impression that they are improving mediocre contributors (and claiming victory) when in fact it is the content doing the improving.
There is a very interesting link here on HN called "the elves are leaving middle earth -- the soda is no longer free" (or similar) which describes the kind of "scale problem" HN is having. The management of HN itself is undergoing a very similar transition, from one of encouraging the hacker mindset to... something else.
Most importantly, I have often found that the "elite core" is sanding away the sort of rebellious je ne sais qois that makes a person "elite" -- or a "hacker". Please reference my favorite essay of pg's about "the word hacker". There is visible decay and erosion of the principles expressed in that essay in the daily happenings of HN. I have for years thrown that essay around as a cure-all explanation of why I think the way I do, and it seems an opus of irony that the "elite core" of HN would do well to read it and take stock. You should wonder why a "hacker" like myself is burning through throwaway accounts and getting hellbanned for what amounts to the expression of dissenting opinion. As pg said so eloquently so many years ago -- indeed, a different pg altogether -- a hacker "can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm".
My senses are telling me to avoid HN and its "elite core", to the point that I need to weigh the benefits of staying versus the benefits of never coming back. And that is not a good sign for HN.
Good thoughts. I agree that the content is primary; however, I count some comments here among the best content and those are written by community members to other community members.
I also agree that PG is not always making the best choices and deputizations in his struggle to maintain the quality of the community. I understand that both decisions to pursue openness and exclusion in a large community will drive away some quality members, but the exclusionary tactics (banning the wrong kind of people) upset people philosophically opposed to it in addition to causing the atrophy found in exclusionary policies as I said earlier.
I hope that you'll stick around and contribute some great content, but if you don't, please influence TheList or whichever community you prefer to embody that anti-totalitarian hacker mindset and thus to really compete with HN. We will all benefit from that.
I did not say that at all and you know it. I'm quite happy you've launched your site. When I look at the frontpage I see good articles by friends of mine on it. It's a good place. And even if it wasn't, you'd still be able make it and put it online.
But, not everybody can make a website that succeeds at doing one of the things Hacker News does better than Hacker News, and I stand by my saying that an open community founded by elite people will be more successful and less elitist than an exclusive community founded by perfectly good, but not elite, people. And this is relevant because one of your core aims is avoiding community dilution/decay with your karma system and exclusion (the invite system.) I would not bring it up if it was incidental.
I, sincerely, would really like you to prove me wrong, though!
Are you doing some kind of scaling? It looks much better when I scale to 110% (Chrome and IE), but at the default 100% I get the artifacts. Tried a few different zoom settings, some are ok, some are not.
On the HN site I can zoom to any size and the font renders correctly .
I wish I had a Windows computer to test with. I'd play around with font size in the inspector until I got it rendering correctly. If you can give me a font size that renders correctly I'll change it.
super easy way to get windows vms installed on virtual box. Installs as many versions of IE as you want/need, preconfigured on clean vms. The vms are provided by microsoft: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
I'm not a web guy but you might need to check out the root cause, from looking at the inspector I presume you're using google webfonts? this might be related:
Still getting it. (also in IE)
I noticed that if I zoom in at x400 it looks great, it starts looking better at x175 but only has none of that artifact stuff at x400.
You may want to reconsider the "top 15" thing, and even the pages of content thing, if you're trying to fill the longform niche. I don't know what direction you'd necessarily want to go in, but I do know that the form factor you're using right now is the same one that gave rise to the problem you're trying to solve.
I would use the same form factor, but give each story a unique decay rate based on word count. You could also take the ratio of pageviews to upvotes into account. That problem with HN is that by the time enough people have time to read a longer story it's already gone forever, so all we really get on the front page is the text equivalent of lolcat pictures. By keeping longer stories around for longer on the new page (and then on the front page) you are putting everything on more equal footing.
Like I said, I don't necessarily know. I'll tell you what, I'm going to go think about it for an hour and come back.
For now, stating the problem correctly will have to suffice: What form factor rewards Depth over Sensationalism? The latter should be understood both in the journalistic sense and in the "wow, that's a cool animated gif" sense. NB: if there's a universal law of content aggregators, it's that the less time it takes to absorb content, the higher its upvote ceiling and the more that category dominates. E.g., on Reddit, imgur > gifs > youtube > political headlines > short articles > your niche. Call me crazy, but you may seriously want to consider doing away with votes, headlines, even the "next" button. I really don't know. Brb in an hour or so.
I think you summed up the problem very well. The next step is how do you get a COMMUNITY of people who value that and will vote accordingly?
Really, the problem isn't filtering / upvoting articles; that is a really well solved problem. The problem is creating a community that values what you value, and ostracizing those who don't (or at least ensuring they don't have a vote).
See my response to the other guy. I don't think you can "explicitly" solve the community problem, due to the issue of poseurs. E.g., if you explicitly create a site called FilmEnthusiasts.com, you'll get some film enthusiasts (i.e., exactly what you're after), but you'll also get a bunch of knuckleheads who think the Dark Knight was the 6th best movie ever made. http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
You have to solve the problem implicitly, which means setting up barriers/hurdles/shibboleths to entry, which is anti-thetical to the web, which is why it's so goddamn hard to do on the web.
Constraints:
1. The web as it exists today is largely slanted toward clickthrough. Yes, this means that the Reddit Comment Model dominates, but it also means that the content users link to is sensationalist and, frankly, poor quality, because the publisher doesn't much care how long the user stays, only how many clicks they generate.
2. Content vs. comments. In my web forum experience, which is more extensive than I'd like to admit, form factors tend to favor one or the other, either in terms of quantity or quality. There is no such thing as a high-quantity, high-quality forum; if there were, you wouldn't be trying to make one.
3. Growth vs. loss of cohesion, aka the Eternal September problem. I've seen this solved only twice in countless tries, but each under very unique circumstances. (One of them is r/SRS, which I think is a bunch of silly people, but they've both grown a lot and kept being exactly what they want to be, which is something virtually no online forum can say they've accomplished.)
Potential exploits:
1. Your name, The List. You're not a bunch of submissions that happens to appear in ranked order, you're The List. How many items are on The List each day? If the answer is infinite, not much thought went into making the list, which means you aren't a site that rewards depth. One alternative model: Take link/topic "requests" and let users vote on which will appear the next day. This avoids the ever-present problem of reposts, which is what drives away longtime users fastest. Whatever, say, 7 topics win, those 7 items are linked and up for discussion the next day. Losers are cast into the abyss and nothing from that domain can be resubmitted for another week. (Or you could just hand-pick from among the requests. Whatever.)
2. Lack of time-sensitivity. You're trying to be the opposite of the 24-hour news cycle. If somebody has a thought-provoking piece from 2001 about 9/11 (like Hunter S. Thompson's take on the event), then awesome! People would love to see that. But it'll never match up against Fox, CNN, et al., who put food on the table by shortening your memory. So don't let them compete. No news. Fuck news.
Why I think the above can defeat Eternal September:
First, to characterize the problem: it is not people. People are never the problem. People are largely whatever situation you put them in. Eternal September was Usenet's fault, not the fault of incoming college freshmen, as former Usenet folk like to claim.
Take it out of the internet context. What's something else people get sick of? And then are super surprised to find out later that other people are into? I.e., the same way people get into Reddit, enjoy it, decide it's declining, leave altogether, then vomit when they hear it's getting 5B pageviews a month?
Music. Top 40. Whatever you're listening to when you're in your teens/20s, you're going to be listening to the rest of your life. But it's not like the Backstreet Boys were so much better than Justin Bieber. (Let me tell you, the people hating on Justin Bieber now freaking loved NSYNC, and I've got the photos to prove it.) It's just that after listening to X amount of music, your tastes are established, and everything new after that sounds the same because it all sounds sufficiently different from what you're used to.
How do you defeat that? Change the form factor. No more radio. 5 songs a day. They better be fucking good.
One thing that I'm keen on someone trying out is this:
Instead of having upvotes (or likes or +1s or whatever), separate the concept out into different notions. You have a different goal in mind than I do, but my list was "Agree, Eloquent, Beautiful, Laughed". You might instead have "Agree, Promote, Eloquent, Useful".
The principle is to have a small list to capture the different ways someone reacts positively. It's a short list to prevent the paradox of choice, but it's descriptive enough that you can still meaningfully express your upvote in more than one dimension.
Not only does it pad out the page, which prevents users from digesting many headlines at once, but it gives the submitter a "sticky" comment at the top of their submission page for them to elaborate on their post. If you're aiming for high quality content and discussion, it might be worthwhile to consider it.
Also, thanks for making your alternative open source and documenting your sorting algorithm!
Wow thanks for pointing this out (about the algorithm). That's perfect for people like me who hobby around in algorithms! Big thanks for considering your users!
Love this idea....I actually don't like that HN makes me choose to either click through directly or read comments. Wish it (or TheList) would just do blurbs!
You can use tldr.io plugin to get some blurbs before deciding if the link is worth clicking. It works great on HN. However there isn't many of them yet.
If the site is aimed at high quality content I'd suggest that the submit page should not be the first thing that the user sees after creating the account. I understand that right now you need users&submissions but in the future it might be beneficial if users will be required to learn a bit about the community (read X posts, take part in Y discussions etc.) before submitting stuff.
It looks pretty nice! I would suggest that you get rid of the list numbering. It adds little value to the front page (knowing the exact rank of a post isn't very useful) and makes the points a little more confusing.
The layout makes all of the difference. The numbers aren't right next to each other on hackernews, so there's enough visual difference between the two.
The numbers weren't right next to them on the list before (they're now gone). The difference is that the point total is under the news item on HN, where the list put it next to it.
There was more space between the numbers on the list than on HN. HN is only separated by the up arrow.
If anyone wants an invite, I'd be happy to give one out if you actually deserve it. You can submit an application on the page, but if you want to send details I'm at ian{dot}carroll{at}snapstudiodesign{dot}com
I like this approach to karma as well, but I wish the number were hidden altogether and instead had an "excellent", "good", "neutral" or "bad" model for community standing. This can prevent heard mentality for up/down voting.
Good content is good content, irrespective of who discovered it or how much notoriety they have. It's not the prerogative of the site to make arbitrary decisions about who ought to be able engage in the discussion or who ought to be able to submit content. Such draconian, "karma"-based restriction will likely preclude the submission of a lot of great stuff and will make it more difficult for newcomers to engage with the site.
HN is pretty damn good at surfacing interesting content. Restricting submissions and users in an arbitrary manner is not the way to improve news aggregation.