When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty good score. Now each point means much less for some reason. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't trust each individual person as much. For example, as I write this, the top comment is about someone using a script to submit this article. It's two sentences, and it has received eleven votes. To me, each of those individual votes mean less than they used to.

The net effect of one vote, for the whole culture of hacker news, has gone down significantly. This reduces the total perception of worth for each user, and, more importantly, for each voting action. Back in the beginning, I felt like I had some amount of power, in that if I voted something up it would literally rise in the list. In fact, I felt like I had some sort of responsibility. Now that active, obvious change in story rank rarely happens, so I feel like my vote is somewhat worthless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

The big question would be how to propagate submissions and comments between communities. Especially if each community develops its own unique character. I've thought about organizing each community onto branches of a B-tree and letting upvoted submissions move up the tree, though my intuition says that this might not scale, as one community might overpower the rest.

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

This solves another problem that really bothers me: an upvote to a really insightful comment (like the parent) has the same weight as an upvote to a comment that's merely useful, or, worse, that merely shares my feelings on some topic. Insight (in my opinion) should always count for more than anything else, and I think limiting upvotes will make it so -- because I think most people actually do care about it most.

- EDIT - Another (even more dire, IMO) problem that might have a similar solution: comment threads are way too long. Only four or five months ago I could make a comment and I'd be absolutely certain that at least a few reasonable people would read it, and so it never felt like luck when my comments moved up; my good comments inevitably got upvotes, and my mediocre comments stayed where they were. Now comments get lost in the wash. I'm tacking this edit onto this comment partially because it's tangentially relevant, but mostly because I don't have faith that anybody will ever see it otherwise.

That's a huge problem, and I suspect that it is in fact the fundamental cause of the degeneration of other social news sites. When people know that their contributions will be noted, they act like they're participating in a conversation. When the success of a comment depends on a metaphorical die roll, I think people adopt the mentality of, "I'll throw shit at the wall and see what sticks."

In the same vein, addressing the problem of too many comments, the extent of right to comment could somehow be earned. Say an unproven user can only comment in particular circumstances, maybe on threads that aren't already heavily commented on?

With a smaller population of users, each interaction becomes an investment in an individual relationship that may pay off later (financially or otherwise). And if someone upvotes your comment, you know they are endorsing you, personally.

With a larger population, this dilutes to something like a branding exercise.

So there's some balance between having lots of diverse perspectives and skill sets (large population) vs. having individualized relationships (small population).

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/02/comments-rating-s...

That is, a good model of changing fashion are some forerunners that starts doing something -- and then gets copied by lots of people. The ones that want to be fashionable then have to change or look like all others.

Technical news sites seems to be places with interesting discussion that gets overrun with wannabees that lowers the average quality. If this is correct, HN is doomed to be Diggified (the opposite of dignified). Like all non-invitation discussion sites.

The reason HN is so addictive is because it is filled with things we think might be useful someday. We're like pack rats at a flea market.

The question is, what utility do we get out of what we find here?

Idea: maybe there could be a second class of upvote, which could only be given, say, a week, or a month after a story or comment was submitted. The meaning of this upvote would be, "This proved to be useful to me professionally." And so, in addition to HN/best and HN/bestcomments, there could be HN/useful and HN/usefulcomments.

My co-founder is nearly 3000 miles away. Hacker News single-handedly keeps my head in the startup game. Bootstrapping would be impossible without this site to act as a virtual startup town square. The stories and comments I read here motivate me better than anything ever has. I used to start projects and forget about them on a nearly daily basis. Hacker News has focused my efforts and sharpened my mind. Sure, you can fritter away hours here, but hey, you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

This sentiment is very common here, but I strongly question it. I also wonder why people don't label their time here a little more honestly: as procrastination. We all justify it as "oh, but I might learn something useful for my future". And some of us might have indeed tangibly improved their lives (though I'm sceptical). But surely whatever benefits you gain can be reaped by visiting say once every 3-4 days, vs 12 times in one day? More generally, out of the people who do claim to have benefited their lives, are they able to point to a specific instance or two where HN tangibly improved their lot?

I'll be honest: I resent visiting here often. I'm a worse person for it. Every minute I (or you, for that matter) spend here, someone else is spending that minute doing great work (for some definition of 'great'). In fact I am suspicious of anyone who has a ginormous amount of comments posted frequently; I do not see it as something to be proud of, but quite the opposite.

I'm sure there are people who buck the trend (pg seems to frequently post here, yet still manages to do great work. I am convinced that he has cloned himself without telling anyone).

If you look at the feedback I initially got here for OurDoings, and then look at what OurDoings is like today, there's no question I've learned a lot.

I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality.

Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their problems living up to this, it is their stated objective.

It was Ed Koch (and his police commissioner) who initiated the broken windows based policing. Giuliani took it to the next level and as you correctly phrased it, is the one with whom it became most associated.

And when an article has 10 upvotes in the first few minutes, it's almost guaranteed to make the top spot on the front page, and therefore gain even more votes from real users due to the publicity and feel that others have found the article interesting.

I was top 15 and wanted to get invited to Startup School again, so I didn't make the script. But since then, users have come out of nowhere to reach the top ten, accumulating karma at a dizzying pace.

One of the top users has said he submits the best stories from his rss reader every day. I believe a more likely explanation is that all stories from sites that are commonly referenced on the front page are auto-submitted by a script that checks for new articles every few minutes.

This was also my explanation on why so many techcrunch stories have been upvoted on news.yc--they make an easy candidate for auto-submitting: not because of story content, unfortunately, but because auto-submitting stories from sites that already appear often and that other auto-submitters might submit gives one a free set of 4-10 votes each time.

Hmm, looks like 15 of my 21 submissions have been from my blog.

... the evidence suggests nearly all of them are doing it to drive traffic...

First, I stumbled upon Hacker News by searching for information related to angel and vc investing. I found Y Combinator naturally. As I was reading the application (just to see what the process entailed), I read one line about how good applicants come from HN. My impression at the time was that applications were screened for high karma points--even though I had no idea how a karma point was earned.

So to be perfectly honest, for the first few weeks I was obsessed with Hacker News. I spent A LOT of time on this site, before I came to the conclusion that Mr. Graham noted. It took a while for me to realize the TRUE value of this site: a civilized discussion forum where I could meet other people just like me and learn from their experiences.

But I also noticed competition in the comments section that has left me a bit turned off. Sometimes I feel like people are trying to prove something, by unnecessarily down-voting a good comment or arguing just for the sake of arguing.

What a sad thought. "Gaming" hacker news to get invited to Startup School.

Here's an idea:

Why not just be yourself. Contribute what you can. Take what you need. Make a few friends along the way. And learn a thing or two that may change your life. I can't think of a better place to do it.

One corollary to that is by not having done it, all I can do is write a post on news.yc. But that does not mean that it should be confused with the act of actually doing it.

But here is something close: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136837

  Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble;

So the mechanics of this system are basically that when you compete with someone that is much better than you and win your score should be adjusted upwards. Conversely, if you lose to someone worse than you, your score will be adjusted downward. Adjustments are done in batches, say after a player has finished a tournament (I use five voting events between readjustment).

My application to a user karma system would be analogous in that a "match" or "competition" would happen every time someone directly rates someone else (stories may be exempt). A high-karma user upvoting a low-karma user would increase the low-karma user's karma and decrease the high-karma user's karma. If there are two users with equal karma and one up or downvotes the other. the number of points exchanged will be minimal (the gain/loss scales with the difference in karma).

The idea is that your ideas are competing with the opinions of the high-ranked users. The assumption is that new users will have bad ideas and that high-karma users will downvote them. A downvote from a high-karma user is expected and doesn't cost the new user very much (they are expected to "lose" to them often).

I've sketched out some of the functions here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/76193

Maybe I shouldn't have used the word bad. But new users may not know the established traditions of a group, maybe they haven't even bothered to read the FAQ. The articles that got me thinking along these lines were: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.ht... . The gist is that an important group function is to defend itself against (new) users.

This essay finally compelled me to register an acount, upvote some links and to make my first comment.

I think it's good actually. Now when I'm about to publish something, it's second nature to go through and look at each sentence and ask "Is this false? Is this the sentence that someone is going to tear apart and make me look stupid?"

I know many of us have probably wondered what you've been thinking about your experiment. I know I have. As usual, you've managed to write the essay before people are even asking the question.

Wow, it's like university. :-)

Ok, now that I've made that moronic joke, being HN I know I'll need to add some more substance to counter balance the negative effect. This, in essence is one of the reasons I love coming here - For users that care it's self policing, in other words, what Paul says regarding the broken windows theory is absolution correct.

FWIW, there are a lot of users that don't care. I know some of my highest-rated comments here have been one-liner jokes. This means that the community doesn't really consciously think about "policing", they just click things that they agree with or that made them giggle.

I am new to hackernews, so I can't claim any idea of how to apply these ideas to that site. However, I find the notion of a "town center" a very intriguing one for the web, especially apropos of footnote 7 of the article. Most social sites act like huge suburbs, and many of their users are invariably suburbanites trying to escape the suburbs. In this way, the problem of a lack of place gets abstracted, and suburbanite communities emerge around topics that the real people can't discuss in their physical environments for lack of a place to do so. Their place to discuss things they would explore in the real world itself becomes amorphous and isolationist. But this is too broad; enter Dunbar's number.

I don't think Dunbar was the first to suggest that communities need a finite size, but his observation that that size is proportional to the volume of a brain region is interesting in that it provides an example of a willingness to assign a metric for community size to which human beings would be subject. This raises the question I'm trying to ask and the point of this long-winded comment.

How can we create fulfilling communities on-line that will enhance the essentially human aspects of such communities? Jessealdridge suggested breaking large communities up into smaller numbers (perhaps something like www.fluther.com allows). But if any metric like Dunbar's number is to be believed, this number should be a reflection of a deeper determinant of identity in a community, which itself requires an obvious representation in the allowable forms of interaction on the site. In the high-quality sites in the physical world, human communities are delineated by spatial relationships according to the organizing principles of architecture. But such places are rare in the physical world, and are mostly confined to very old cultures or small liberal arts colleges.

Perhaps one of the reasons that such frameworks of fulfilling human interaction are so rare is that they are very difficult to understand and very expensive to make. The web can do better at creating frameworks for human interaction because it uses information explicitly, potentially clarifying the underlying principles generating the framework, and because it is much less expensive for people to come together and create something on the web than it is for them to come together and make something architectural, in the physical world.

Unfortunately, this seems to mean (as you pointed out in your article) that sites much less often impart a sense of a change in place, or of a place at all. I wonder how the problems you've outlined (trolls, stupid comments, mean people) map onto the architectural representations of these problems, and how the solutions you've come up with could map onto architectural solutions to the analogues of those problems. In short, the article makes me wonder, however tangentially, how the web could benefit from being more than a surrogate, and perhaps more of a support structure, for physical human communities.

best line of the essay.

This is probably sophomoric, but... I was wondering why there is no semantic engines that can identify the major themes in the comments and present them like a table of contents or color code them like checking a cached page on google? I'm imagining something like Yelp's engine that picks out the best dishes.

To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true _of_.

HN is also my primary tech portal. While I still visit slashdot, I've found HN to be faster on stories that appear there, and I've also found more relevant items here.

For instance, there was recently a thread here regarding list copying in Python. Though I've used Python for years, I'd never known the information that was in the linked article. It's now a part of my personal Python knowledge base.

When you download ARC you get a HN example inside.

http://www.arclanguage.org/

PG, have you considered invite only schemes?

What about explicit 'people rank', where friends can rate eachother in a reputation system? That might really help with the quality of comments.

It would also help conversation is you could follow people you like. Twitter and Tumblr both do a really good job of 'pick your peers'. I often track these two links: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ivankirigin

It would be nice if there was a thread stream of selected people. It would make me engage in conversation more often. Too many comments don't have an easy response, making them closer to declarations than discussions.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

Subjectively, the frontpage and discussions have grown quite bland here; without necessarily corresponding to a reduction in the quality of each article, it feels as if the range of content linked has become homogenized.

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Donohue_Measur...

However it’s not only the “tag line” which need to be rewritten but also the content.

Which mean one version of the article for HN users, another for Reddit and yet another for Digg.

Which can translate into three levels:

- advanced (readers able to understand abstractions),

- intermediate (readers who want to understand “how to control”)

- and beginners (readers who just want to find a solution to their problem through a simple step by step process).

This force onself to write with a specific audience in mind. And I think it’s the key point of Paul Graham article: understanding your users.

Last but not least: having the comments section on where you found the link but not on the page where is displayed the article.

I found HN comments with Stackoverflow are so far the only sites where proper discussions can really happen with very inspiring thoughts.

However those Karma thingies, I absolutely don’t care. Also the triangle button (upvote), I use it only as a bookmark button.

Also what’s really rewarding is when you check the “New” page and see few hours after it hits the home page. You feel you’re not only following.

Here's a relevant thread from Overcoming Bias. It is more about modeling the problem than looking for fixes, but you might find it interesting:

"forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people".

I liked the two ideas Paul mentioned: length of comment is related to stupidity, and not using the same words again. Just make those fall toward the bottom of the page and we'll all be happy.

While any algorithm can be gamed, length is still pretty good. If I have to go through the extra effort of adding two paragraphs each time I write something, well... it takes time to type. So I have an incentive to think and improve my comment.

Once you get in,addiction is non-reversible,the digging goes deeper and deeper ..into the web's bosom.It never stops. The NET is nursery rhyme's..."Come into my parlor" "Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly; ... and went into his den, For well he knew the silly fly would soon come back again: ..."