
Thoughts on using news.YC (please contribute, please read) - jwecker

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jwecker
Moderate submission volume + high volume of intelligent comments = very nice
site to come and visit for a while.

High submission volume + no comments or hundreds of one-liners = might as well
set up a news aggregator.

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python_kiss
There is a similar "karma" system on my social network, and one of my users
suggested that we limit the amount of karma a user can receive within a give
day. On YC, it makes sense to limit the submission volume according to the
person's karma level. Someone with high karma is unlikely to be spamming the
site.

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notabel
This, combined with a burying system to get rid of junk stories, could clean
up the 'new' section substantially. It would also be useful to factor snr into
the computation; the nature of the karma system, which makes it more
advantageous (at a marginal level) to submit a story than a comment,
encourages a shot-gun approach to submission; SNR would combat that.

EDIT: Ha, points to jwecker for posting about SNR while I was writing about
it.

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dfranke
I've never used Digg, but from what I read of them, their burying system is
working out rather poorly. Burying a story on Digg requires an O(1) number of
votes, so anything controversial gets buried even if 90% of users agree that
it's an excellent article. A simple up/down model like Reddit's seems like a
better idea, but see the top-level comment that I'll have posted in about two
minutes.

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dfranke
I think there are a couple reasonable assumptions about high-karma users that
we can work to our advantage:

1\. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" queue than average, because
they spend enough time on the site to exhaust "top" and want to read more.

2\. They're more likely than average to be open-minded about controversial
stories as well as less tolerant of inane ones. If they spend more time on the
site, then it's more to their advantage to promote interesting stuff rather
than promote an agenda. It's dumb to piss in your own pond.

Here's what I propose: high-karma users get more voting power over *young*
stories, to enable them to police the "new" queue and out-muscle spammers and
voting rings. After stories are a few hours old, high-karma users no longer
get a boost if they haven't voted on them yet. If high-karma users have
already voted on a story when it reaches the aging threshold, the boost goes
away for upvotes but not for downvotes. That way:

1\. Bad stories never see the light of day, because high-karma users bury them
and they stay buried.

2\. Controversial stories will make the front page, but they don't stay there
long if the rest of the community doesn't like them.

3\. Good stories make it to the front page slightly faster.

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pg
We have some software for dealing with spammers and voting rings. It's not
that visible, but it's there.

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dfranke
Dang, already? Sounds like Arc is working out well.

Still, though, any statstical approach (which is what I assume you're using)
is going to have some lag because you have to wait for a statistically-
significant sample. You can catch any given offender after he's caused an O(1)
amount of trouble, but if the offenders don't correlate with each other, you
can get overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of them. Spammers certainly
do correlate with each other, but it's not obvious that voting rings do.

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notabel
I'm prone to think that pg's algorithm is, to some extent, content based. I
have no real evidence to support this, just the evangelism in "A Plan for
Spam."

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dfranke
Right. That's what I meant by "spammers correlate with each other". I'd be
very surprised if content-based filtering were useful for catching voting
rings. You can use graph-theoretic metrics to catch them, but unlike spammers,
identifying one doesn't obviously help you identify others.

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danw
Perhaps they use highly advanced computers called 'humans'? :D

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jwecker
The word karma in the context of this site has two meanings to me- one is that
if you give a little of yourself and write a thoughtful comment or needed
submission then you'll be rewarded. The other meaning to me is this- give a
lot of it out and it'll come back to you. So if you care about karma, be
liberal with it. (and I'm not talking about moderating this comment up).

If there is a constant flow of karma, it's much easier to see a
differentiation in comments. There's nothing more irritating to me than seeing
a comments board full of great thoughts and lots of responses where everything
is either 1 or 2 points.

[upd] - and, of course, the old slashdot rule- focus on modding up- have a
very good reason to mod down. Sure wish the digg community had followed that
rule (back when I still used it).

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danielha
"[...] constant flow of karma [...]"

I like how you put it because I've always thought of "karma"-type points in
social networks as money -- social currency. We want to stimulate the
"economy" by having an active exchange of karma through the community,
encouraging more and more discussions and contributions.

python_kiss's comment about limiting karma is also an interesting thought.
Inflation is something to ponder about in this analogy.

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dfranke
There is no absolute Right supply of either fiat money or karma. If every
dollar bill in everyone's wallet magically turned into two, the price of
everything would double and nobody would be materially affected. Similarly,
doubling everyone's karma and causing the up arrow to give two points rather
than one would have no material effect.

Inflation matters when you factor in time. Inflation encourages risk. It makes
your current savings become less valuable in the future, encouraging you to
try to increase your wealth to compensate. Too much inflation encourages too
much risk, and you get a bubble.

Money is valuable because it can be exchanged for scarce resources. Karma is
valuable because it gets you attention, which is a scarce resource. There are
two kinds of attention: visibility of articles and visibility on the leader
board. Karma is the cause of the latter, but only a byproduct of the former.
There are a fixed number of articles on the front page and a fixed number of
spots on the leader board, but both become more valuable as the community
grows, because more eyeballs means more attention.

At this point, the money analogy breaks down. Money is both a unit of
accounting and a medium of exchange. Karma is only a unit of accounting. It
tells us how wealthy we are, but we can't exchange it for other wealth.
Attention doesn't behave like a commodity either. If we give and receive the
same amount of attention, that's not the same as simply doing nothing.

So, news.yc really doesn't behave anything like a conventional economy. If any
analogy can be drawn at all, I'd say that we're in a state of deflation. As
long as the community continues to grow, producing articles now is less
profitable than producing articles later.

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notabel
One thing I find interesting about news.yc is the relatively small set of
active contributors to the comments, and their rather high availability: case
in point, this thread, which is feeling to me rather more like an ongoing
conversation than a /. style shout-fest.

Anything that can be done to encourage this feeling of intellectual discourse
is a win, in my opinion.

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pg
We're actively trying to avoid the nastiness that seems to take over so many
online discussions. That's why there are fewer down-arrows here, for example.
I suspect that down arrows are more often clicked on stupidly than up arrows,
that if you don't have down arrows you give people fewer ways to inject
stupidity into the system.

I'll probably never get around to supporting bold text in comments either, for
the same reason.

To some extent news.yc is protected by being about a topic only a small number
of comparatively smart people care about. With any luck we'll never have the
full-blown trolls you find on general news sites. I have some ideas for
solutions if trolls do start to appear.

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python_kiss
^ ah, sounds like communism :p

I've joined well over 50 social networks and what I've noitced is that freedom
to choose appeals more to people than the right choices already made for them.
More features, more niches, more startups, more choice. Users might complain
about features, but fundamentally they like choice.

The more time a user spends making choices on a network, the more loyal he or
she becomes. You don't spend 12 hours of your life customizing your profile if
you don't plan on sticking to it.

Lastly, too much of anything is bad. The state should have control over
medical supplies, education and energy. But beyond that, it should trust the
consumer with running the country.

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jwecker
I automatically click on a submitter's name if I don't recognize it. If that
submitter has only 1 karma point and is obviously new to the site, that
submission gets extra special scrutiny- meaning if it is even remotely
promotional I assume it's spam.

If you want to jump into the community here, esp. if you've already been
lurking for a while- don't do it by doing a submission (unless it's a killer
submission)- add some nice comments please!

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mattculbreth
Well I think we're at the former right now. Probably need a few more comments
per post, but that will happen I think.

What we want to avoid at all costs is what happened at Reddit yesterday with
the impeachment business. That's no good. I know they're working on it (spoke
to them last night) but it was annoying there for a while.

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jwecker
Good point. On an unrelated note, however, your comment reminded me of another
note I want to make: If your post is in response to a comment- please make
sure and thread it. Because the site shows comments in the same nested level
in different positions (either random or rotating or something, I haven't
figured it out yet) each time the comments are loaded it gets real confusing
if the comments aren't threaded correctly. There's plenty of horizontal space
in the site's design so we shouldn't be reluctant to use it. The alternative,
of course, is to quote what we're replying to.

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danielha
I'm not a fan of threaded nature of comments. It's done to faciliate exactly
that -- commenting, and does not provide for a proper discussion environment.
It's difficult to follow a discussion from start to finish when popular
comments are placed at the top.

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danielha
What we need is more incentive for active discussion among topics instead of a
flurry of ho-hum links. The community built around the "news" is the most
compelling part of YC News.

Incidently, the project I'm working on relates to this in many ways.

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python_kiss
Has anyone noticed that submissions tend to receive more points around 4 to 10
am GMT, Eastern Time? Posts that I make after 9 pm usually remain at "1 point"
throughout the day. This probably has something to do with the Silicon
Valley's working hours.

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jwecker
I can tell you that at least for me that's when I try to read a chunk of new
submissions regardless of existing score. Once something has a couple of
points it is much more likely to continue to grow if it is worthwhile, but it
takes slogging through a lot of crap sometimes, it seems, to find that
underrated 1-point submission- even though there are plenty of them in there.

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notabel
I'll be honest, I've not been nearly so good about doing my time on the 'new'
page. In your experience, are there any strong patterns in good submissions?
What I'm getting at is basically: are there any views on the new submissions
list that would make finding the under-rated ones substantively simpler?

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jwecker
That's a tough q. for me- I generally have to just open 3 or 4 of them and
make a decision of whether or not to up-mod it then do it again sometime
later. Two kind of related thoughts, though, for those who don't spend a lot
of time working on the "new" page:

If you concentrate on the top of the new page and like a submission and mod
it, it will get exposure near the top of the top page and get some real good
input usually, so that's the best place to start- just look at the 3 or 4
submissions at the top of the page and spend a few minutes.

Nevertheless, there are some amazing submissions that because they don't get a
point in their first hour of existence (because everyone is eating lunch or
busy submitting their own etc.) end up moving clear down the list without
anything. If you want some good karma (the real kind) spend time with the 4 or
5 at the bottom of the list giving belated deserved credit for some posters.

