I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't look like it. There's surprisingly little difference between this and the regular frontpage.
I'm not sure why, but my feeling is that I am personally less happy with the content a) being submitted and b) making it to the front page than I was even 6 months ago.
Maybe since I'm not a newbie on HN anymore I'm remembering through rose-tinted glasses and yelling at the kids to get off my lawn.
The things I care about are programming tips, new software, javascript/python/ruby/etc specific articles, new startup companies. There seems to be a lot less of this kind of content and more general tech news, which I can read at any number of other sites.
I don't care about business stories(other than those related to startups) and rumors Techcrunch has started about something.
On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good. I would be great if there was a way to get easier access to the comments than the ity-bity link we have now.
I've been around long enough to have noticed several of these cycles. I could go for weeks seeing nothing interesting, then go nuts for a couple of days reading and posting. I don't know if it's me or hn, but I simply describe it as the natural ebb and flow of an organic entity.
Come with an open mind and have fun if there's interesting stuff that day. Get back to work if there's not. Either way, you win.
A couple of weeks ago there was a patch of articles that reassured me about the site.
The most significant difference I see between 'classic' and 'normal' is the article entitled "First Steps Towards Post scarcity" is 28 on classic, but 13 on normal. Could be there had to be some difference and its random, but I generally find articles on this topic pretty light on quality thinking.
I think this is mostly due to perception. I have experienced a similar change in perspective, but I still come here just as often and spend about the same amount of time reading the articles. But I now use this site as a baseline for quality comparisons. Rather then being wowed by all the cool articles here, I have come to expect this level of quality.Other sites have become less interesting to me as a result.
> On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good.
Maybe its me, but I've found a lot more comments within the past fortnight or so grating on me than previously. Remarkably, every time I checked the submitter, they'd been on Hacker News for about a year and a half at least.
And by grating I basically mean rude and unhelpful.
I've noticed a lot of the top voted comments lately are riddled with poor thinking and logical fallacies. I'm not sure if the smartest commenters are leaving, but the crowd definitely seems to be rewarding nonsense.
A few times I've found the account is over a year old, but comments only started recently. If the front page of their comments was filled (i.e. 10 comments), I probably wouldn't have noticed this. BTW they didn't seem especially bad, just the typical newbie comments before someone replied "Please elaborate".
It might be worth doing one more version considering the ratings only from people who have contributed significantly to the culture (their karma along with age should reflect reasonably well i guess)
A few times I've compared the same programming article here and on proggit - and the later always had deeper comments. Maybe it's not surprising, since that's the focus of proggit, but only one of several here.
I've also twice noticed the same usernames on reddit and HN - and their comments on reddit are more helpful and intelligent than here... Though not a conclusive sample size, it does make me think that reddit's concentration of communities (with subreddits), and the ability to easily skip bad comments (with collapsing [-]) seems to be working.
But I find the stories submitted here are better than on reddit.
Bad idea. Remember the kerfuffle around the orange names? This would be worse, because high karma would have a numeric and measurable effect on the site.
It seems slightly different than the orange incident. There, it was a highly visible symbol: either the poster's name was orange, or it was not, and it turned into a status symbol.
A number however is far more opaque, because it masks two different factors: the number of people voting, and the assigned weight of those people. For a given number, it is impossible (or at least difficult) to tell the relative importance of each factor.
Edit: This got me thinking: couldn't 'karma'-based voting help prevent the erosion that affects many other sites? If those dedicated members have high rank, there is a switching cost to joining another site, because they lose that elevated weight. That keeps them "in the game", whereas many other similar sites have lost the original members as average quality declined, which began a feedback loop of poorer quality.
Then, if elevated weight gives those users greater influence, the original character of the site is preserved because (1) the original users don't leave and (2) those users exert great influence on the site.
The only weakness is preventing low quality posters gaining karma weight through the voting of other low quality posters, thereby undermining the quality of high-karma users.
Looking at stories at one moment, on one day, is probably not capturing the whole story. It would be interesting to see something like the RMS difference in story ranking between the two menthods over a long period of time. If the two methods are truly equivalent, that number should tend to zero.
I find that there's usually 1-2 stories per day that are significant for what I am seeking on that day. So, for me, it's not surprising if that doesn't always happen, since there are so many factors involved.
I think this outlook sums up why news is so dangerous, no matter who the individuals are that make up the community or how they report it. . .There is some Alan Kay quote floating around out there of him paraphrasing something Douglas Engelbart noted about the difference between what is the news with computers? and what is new with computers?
I don't come to HN to read the news nor should HN be reporting the news to me, I come here because it's a community that is grounded in doing new things and showing me what these new things can do.
I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't look like it.
I'm not sure if this measure means much... with no downvotes, if quality goes down, "classic users" will simply vote less often. That would be a decently interesting statistic: (page views)/(story votes) over the lifetime of older accounts. Not sure if that data is still available, though.
Actually one of the surprising things is the huge percentage of votes cast by old-timers. For frontpage articles it is never less than 40% and sometimes as much as 80%.
Doesn't this make sense? The people who are most likely to vote are those who feel like they're part of the HN community, and those people are much more likely to be old-timers. I guess this is somewhat surprising if there are many many more newcomers. What's the ratio of new voters to old voters?
Definitely not intuitive given all the old timers are feeling the quality is gone down and yet they continue to contribute for the front page articles to stay on.
Does this mean the problem at core could be with submissions and the moment it floats up to page 1 - which it would with just > 4 points in 3-4 hrs it gets reassuring votes even from old-timers.
PG, You should dig out the data on how lazy old-timers are getting in digging out material for HN front page :)
I've been here long enough... since February or so I've drastically decreased my voting participation. I perceive that my votes won't counteract the effects of the (well-intentioned) flood of newcomers.
I'd be more curious to see the difference on a highly-emotional news day -- election, war, disease -- that kind of thing. Would the old guard stick to tech-related material? Or are they as vulnerable to highly-charged stories as the noobs?
In all honesty, there really isn't much going on in the way of external-to-hacking events in the world right now.
While both of those stories are important news, the former isn't new, and the latter doesn't (unfortunately?) have much of an appeal to most people in the West (which is where most people in HN are located).
As a quick & dirty test, can I see "HN Frontpage ranked using only votes from accounts over 2 years old"?
Can you turn this into a feature, with a user-specified time period? -- would be an awesome filter to view HN by and to see, if, over a period of time there is any difference in quality?
Calculating that stuff on the fly is simple and fast with a single hard-coded algorithm vs using a custom view per user. You would also need to store a lot more information to be able to recalculate this stuff. Granted HN does not seem to cache it's pages, but it's one of the first options when looking to increase speed.
PS: Even just limiting sorting to the top 1000 overall stories and top 1000 new stories could be a major speed bump.
I think I remember PG mentioning that with the new server everything fits in memory ...
I see your point about speed, but I think that there are a bunch of shortcuts you can take (like your top 1k idea) that mitigate the issue, and if it is a feature you can switch off if you'd prefer to just go fast with the hard-coded, then ...
I don't know why some people here rag on new users so hard: everytime I've encountered a particularly low quality submission or comment it was from a 100+ day account.
This makes the assumption that 'senior' members' voting habits haven't degraded over time. Say a bad post hits the front page - would this subtly influence future votes (regardless of how old someone's account is), resulting in more bad posts making the front page?
On a semi-related note, it would be neat to keep a history of the front page at regularly sampled intervals (say every year, starting at year 1) and see how the two measurements diverge over time.
It reminds me of the distance formula in a vacuum that evaluates [or rates] a submission as a ratio according to it's position out of 210 [basically any story with a non-zero karma value (p - 1) that evaluates <= 210 has made the front-page] I guess the gist of what I'm getting at is, how are you generating these lists? Are they all extended from this algorithm and filtered according to a condition? Have you ever generated a list that doesn't extend this algorithm?
[EDIT]
Ok, so while I'm here, in this meta-HN of a thread, I'm going to ask a question that might seem like absolute bat-shit:
What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN?
I think it's the recent comments - their shallow attacks reduce the perceived quality of the submissions.
Recent comments tend not to collaborate with the article - they aren't filling in gaps, adding further instances, extending the concept; discussing where the article is clear or unclear; correct or incorrect. And they are neither respectful nor kindly. They don't build on, or with, the article to create something better.
Instead, comments compete with the article - they find spelling errors, logic errors, or denounce the article in a shallow, general, global and vague way, often labeling it with connotational language. They aren't trying to build value, but destroy it.
The only criticism I enjoy reading is what you'd get from a kind and wise mentor. If someone hates an article, I'd prefer it if they just ignored it.
But I can't make them do that - so, recently I've taken to ignoring the comments here, and going direct to the article to make up my own mind.
I think I have recently been wrongly profiled by someone who shares this view. I mentioned that certain patterns of behavior in internet consumers resemble those encountered in dating sites and used car dealerships. I know there have been economic studies of this. (Couldn't find it with Google, though.) However, I was attacked as if I was merely trying to associate Apple Computer with dating sites and used car salesmen.
In my two decades online, I've found that those who attack others to try and "clean up" a news group actually end up trashing it with noise and junk. (In fact, I have been guilty of this as well.) Much better for everyone to act respectfully.
I read it as you adding something to the discussion.
But I have noticed that certain subjects tend to rile people up - I think it's to do with categorizing people, almost like an -ism (as in racism or sexism). PC/mac is one of these; but there's also vi/emacs, Windows/Linux, programming languages, and even Holden/Ford (apparently). The so-called religious wars, that tend to bring out emotions. Probably because people identify with the product, and so any perceived slight is taken as a personal attack, therefore there's a wish to defend against it or to counter-attack, grabbing whatever means are available.
I've noticed that I've strayed into the area myself: without realizing it, I've used Mac/PC to make a point (about integrated hardware/software vs. modular components - the former is needed in the earlier years. It's an idea from Clayton Christianson, of the innovator's dilemma fame.) I wasn't attacked, but I got some odd responses... eventually I realized that it's just a touchy subject. Like sex, religion and politics.
I think you might have caused offense with the earlier part of your comment, where you seem to be implying that Mac purchasers lack "the wherewithal to tell the difference." I can see that causing offense, even though you are a Mac user yourself, and you intended it in a neutral way. And that's coming from me, who's not a Mac user.
I agree that the denotation of the statement is neutral - the same statement is true of evaluating professional work in general: dentists, surgeons, barristers, plumbers, car repairers, etc... and of course coding (for the non-coder.) How do you know if you are being ripped off? You don't.
What I was getting at was that consumers in general lack the wherewithal to make computer purchases. In a situation like that, you can make a lot of customers satisfied by treating them well and paying attention to details in your products. Apple, CarMax, Saturn, Trader Joe's -- all of these companies know that if you look out for your customers, they will pay for that.
But your point is well taken. Most people react first with their stomachs, genitals, and fists before their brains. I'm starting to hate them. I suspect they are subject to the same foibles as the ones who treat Asians like cartoons and doormats.
I only mention these two links because I've started trying to apply them to myself, and they seem to be helping. When people react badly, I first think "it's not me", "this is a one-off" and "it's only in this specific circumstance". That helps me to be "liberal in how I listen" by defusing my anger/judgmentalism. Then I try to be "strict in how I speak" by being factual (this is hard, but I can do it) and warmly/kindly (I'm not so good at this part - but that's how I'd like them and me to be.)
BTW: I think you make your point about consumers very clear in the above - it wasn't as clear before. hmmmm... maybe explicitly mentioning "in general" (as you do here) is a shortcut to avoiding people taking things personally, if one senses they might. I recall in Ben Franklin's autobiography, he reinvented his whole style of expression to be less confrontation, to "it may be so", "it appears to be" and such like, as he was getting in too many duels (a.k.a. flame wars?)
If we're going to keep this around, the threshold ought to be set at a particular time instead of 1 year back from whenever the request is made. So I changed it to use a fixed threshold set just before the infamous TechCrunch mention in March 2008.
In fact, the two views are almost identical -- I wonder if it is simply because there aren't that many votes from accounts less than a year old. Could you share what fraction of front-page votes came from new voters? Thanks.
Maybe the new accounts hate almost everything that shows up. Remember, we can't downvote, so lack of vote is the way to express disapproval. (60-odd days old here, would be on a downmodding rampage if allowed)
EDIT: By the way, the lack of downvoting means that posting any article that isn't so off-topic as to get flagged and removed is free karma. I've been working hard to get to the 100 karma so I can downvote and I'm still only at 78, and I'm thinking maybe it's because I don't submit articles.
You can't downvote on stories, only flag them, even after you get the downvote button for comments.
And FWIW, I've managed to get 550+ karma without submitting any stories and only posting (what I hope turns are) interesting comments. So don't think you have to submit stories to get karma.
The decrease in quality could be due to less good stories on the new page and not newer people upvoting. That is, newer people may be just as good at upvoting, but the real issue is that so few people upvote from the new page. If true, this change would further the problem because even less real votes from the new page would be occurring.
To test this possibility, randomly reserve some of the places on the front page for new stories (perhaps in the bottom half). Then more people would be looking at and potentially upvoting the good stories from the new page.
When U [said](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html), need to "weigh the votes" I thought you said considering votes from people with more than a certain points as more, rather than what now seems to be "older peoples votes only"
What about articles submitted by over 1 year olds? A quick look of the front page shows we'd lose articles by:
vorador, blasdel, kqr2, lrm242, ontilt, vijayr, markup, charlesmount and figured. On the whole those are pretty good articles, but a classic submits would be interesting to compare with.
Seems to me there are more Reddit-type comments submitted lately. It is something I have been very conscious of, much stronger than a hunch or gut feeling. I'm curious as to why you tried to measure this - do you still suspect a drop in the mean quality of the HN clientele despite what the /classic page might suggest?
