

Ask PG: Is something staving off the decline of HN? - markerdmann

The quality of the site seems to have risen significantly over the past week. Is this the result of inspired tinkering, or just a random upswing? I was hoping to read through the recent commits to news.arc, but I wasn't able to find a public repository of the Arc code.
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pg
The quality of the stories, or the comments?

The only changes recently are a better voting ring detector, and the hiding of
comment scores. The former has definitely kept stuff off the frontpage that
otherwise would have made it.

It's harder to say if the hiding of comment scores has made comments better.
It has definitely made the site more pleasant for me to use, but I may be in a
unique position because people love to pick fights with me.

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markerdmann
Both, but the increased quality of the stories is what led me to ask. Will the
changes to the voting ring detector show up in the Arc source, or is that kept
secret in order to preserve the effectiveness of the detector?

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codeup
I know many disagree with hiding comment scores, but in my view, the quality
of discussions has notably improved since scores are hidden.

I would be interested in knowing how pg estimates the effect of this tweak.

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rawsyntax
Here's a public repo, if nothing else it's a mirror
<https://github.com/nex3/arc/>

