
Withdrawing from Hacker News - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/WithdrawingFromHackerNews.html?HN
======
solipsist
I will be probably downvoted for saying this (as I see other people who tried
to convey a similar message on this thread were), but I think that posts like
these are of little interest to many of us. I don't mean to offend anyone,
especially not RiderOfGiraffes who I greatly admire, but I think it's worth
pointing out what other HN users have been trying to say.

Posts like these are bad for HN for a few reasons:

    
    
      - they appear often and usually repeat the same message
      - they support the minority of elitists who already dominate HN
      - their content is only news-worthy to users who've been on HN
        for a while and not the new ones 
    

Basically, any content that is submitted to HN and refers to a user or a
user's experience of HN is simply a popularity contest. Whether it becomes
popular on HN depends on the popularity of the user. The active and prominent
users then feel the need to upvote and comment as they can relate to the
poster. However, any budding new user that is trying to 'break in' to the
community is confronted with what appears to be a form of exclusivity.

 _What results is a thread in which the OP, upvoters, and commenters that are
supporting news that only apply to them._

HN shouldn't have threads like these - threads should apply to as many people
as they can. I'm not saying that life has to be fair, but I think the end of
these posts would help make HN feel like a more inclusive place.

~~~
jacquesm
The alternative is to have high profile members like nickb disappearing and
then to have 10 threads (or even more, instead of just one) that wonder
whatever happened to 'x'.

Also, after contributing 100's of hours (or even 1000's...) I think a goodbye
note is good form rather than bad form, these threads apply to all the friends
and contacts that someone has made through HN and in the case of
RiderOfGiraffes my guess would be that would be a very large number of people
indeed.

I agree with your general sentiment, but if patio11 or tptacek were to slink
off like a thief in the night then they'd be overwhelmed with email from
concerned people.

Also, when I was growing up I was taught to say hello on entering a venue and
goodbye on leaving, maybe that's old fashioned but it's perfectly ok with me.

As for the criticism, check the last couple of entries in this thread and say
he doesn't have a point.

Anyway, since I'm not here, I'll leave it at that ;)

~~~
solipsist
You make a good point that it benefits a lot of people to know where the high
profile members went, but maybe there's a better way to do it.

If there is some unique perspective on HN that can apply to everybody then,
sure, go ahead and post it to HN as a blog post. However, any generic
I'm-leaving-HN messages could maybe go into a category of "Leaving HN: ..."
posts (instead of a link). These could still hit the front page, but there
would be a clear distinction between this community news and other news.

~~~
jacquesm
Maybe a 'farewell' note in the profile? Or a way to modify your profile that
puts a '(gone)' marker behind your name in old threads?

Grellas started this (and he's back), I thought it was pretty classy and
considerate of him, which is why I did it myself.

Anyway, your comment seems to have incited a large number of people to flag
the post so it's no longer on the homepage. It's a pity that a long
contributor of HN would get sent off like that while 'TopGear responding to
Tesla' has been on the homepage for many hours now.

------
alain94040
It's called experience: before you discovered HN, you knew less. HN lifted you
to a certain level. But now that you have reached that level, you are no
longer impressed, you feel like it's all repetitions.

Be assured that there are hundreds of people who were like you two years ago,
who are discovering HN today, and are benefiting immensely.

What HN can't provide you is a community that will grow more and more
specialized as yourself grows.

It's funny because in my latest startup (<http://letslunch.com>), we have a
very strong notion of reputation, so we match entrepreneurs with increasingly
experienced entrepreneurs, as your reputation rises. I believe it works for
in-person interaction, but I doubt it can be built for an online forum.

~~~
alex_c
I was going to say something very similar. I've been irritated by repetitive
content / themes, but a lot of that is simply because I've read it many times
before - it's not necessarily a sign that the community is getting stale, it
just means I've been reading it way too much.

Interesting point about the community growing more specialized - I thought
that HN losing its focus on startups (circa the Startup News -> Hacker News
rename) was overall a negative thing, since that's what attracted me in the
first place, but in retrospect it's probably not. I think I would've got bored
much faster reading effectively the same posts about startups over and over
again. The wider scope has probably helped to keep the site fresh for me, at
the cost of somewhat lower signal/noise.

------
blhack
I totally agree with this, but it's kindof sad to see people just give up on
this community.

I've seen some things tried in the past (like hiding karma in comment
threads), and I think it would be great if we could try a few more things in
the future.

I'd love to see HN try making users "earn" karma. You "spend" your karma when
you upvote or downvote somebody. Upvotes cost one point, downvotes cost two.
This is good because it incentivizes people _not_ to downvote people (it's
"expensive"), and also prevents brand new users who don't yet understand the
conventions from downvoting things just because they disagree with them.

I think that one of the big problems lately has been comments being
inappropriately downvoted. I asked a question a couple of days ago about how
google justifies things like google charts (which I use heavily), and was
downvoted to -4 for it. 3 years ago (when I joined) this wouldn't have been
the case.

Meanwhile I'm starting reddit-style to see joke threads pop up in the
comments.

I really think that a lot of this is new users, and I really think that
slashdot's style of earning the right to moderate is a solid concept. We
should try it.

~~~
pronoiac
Newbies can't downvote. There's a karma hurdle to clear before you can
downvote, over 200 - I've heard it scales so only the top _n_ users can do so.

~~~
Osiris
I have 420 karma, and I don't have the option to downvote, and I've been on HN
for a while.

~~~
jschuur
I looked this up recently, and it looks like it was bumped from 200 to 500 in
the last year or so.

------
z92
> As the site has become popular so the population of exceptional individuals
> has become diluted.

As someone who has made the journey from slashdot to reddit to hacker news
starting from 90s, I have strong believe that right now, somewhere, a new
community site for programmers is rising. I only need to find it.

~~~
abraham
Check out Forrst. It might be what you are looking for. <http://forrst.com/>

~~~
btipling
Wrong type of community for me personally. It's mostly designers and not
enough interesting stuff from an engineering perspective. One too many HTML5
CSS3 show off links. I'm more interested in systems programming topics.

~~~
abraham
I would say Forrst tends to be tilted towards web development but of the 30
most recent code snippet posts only two were design related.

------
Kilimanjaro
The more a community grows, the more susceptible it is to PR attacks to
manipulate its content. With just 100 fake ids, any attacker can bring to the
front page any news they want, even astroturfing becomes easy, downvote
everything you don't like and upvote your agenda.

ie. one thing is to call Ubuntu's latest release a disaster, another one to
call it just different from previous releases or just point out the
differences and let every reader decide.

Linkbaiting should be banned, sensationalism should be banned, highly biased
news should be banned, hype should be banned.

Once groupon (just to name one of many) appeared more than ten times a day in
the front page, now their PR machine has slowed down to a halt. Yes, they pay
PR agencies to launch torpedoes at every news outlet, we all know that. But
without proper monitoring it can become tiresome to the reader.

Moderation is key, news should be moderated according to every forum's
interest, in our case tech news and entrepreneurship.

I hope someday PG understands that to avoid the fate of slashdot, digg, TC,
etc he must enforce stricter rules for quality content, even if he has to pay
a couple of editors to maintain the front page and the comments clean. And no,
HN is not untouchable, it may fade into oblivion too.

Unless he is in bed with some PR agencies (like TC) in that case, everything I
said is moot.

~~~
igrekel
Moderation to represent the interests of the users is moderation done by the
users. If you and everyone upvote appropriate content (including on the new
page) it will eventually reflect what people find interesting. It is about the
users do, not just about what PG does. HN has always been about finding the
right mechanisms so that the right balance in content is reached. What has
changed is the number and the kind of people on the site, it has changed what
type of submission is upvoted, it has also made the number of submissions
increase, making it more difficult for the interesting ones to come through.

------
pclark
RiderOfGiraffes was certainly one of the top contributors to the site - and
I'll miss him and his brilliant submissions.

Duplicate content simply comes with the territory of socially powered sites.
If I look at the top 10 stories right now, I feel like it perfectly
encapsulates Hackers: <http://cl.ly/5iFy>

This reminds me of a software project I made ages ago, and one of our initial
goals was "seeing duplicate content on the web is lame, and we can solve that"
what we realised after a number of months of building a reasonably elaborate
Google Reader API powered service, was that the solution for users is to
simply ensure there is _other content_ to look at, case in point: having 50 or
so stories on each Hacker News page. Since then, I have tried very hard to
never over think _why_ someone would use a service.

My only worry with Hacker News is how much people jump on bandwagons such as
the Color funding debate, and I just found myself shaking my head at peoples
snide comments over peoples creations and accomplishments. On the flip side,
every time I check Hacker News I am blown away by the community, such as this
thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184>

------
RiderOfGiraffes
If anyone wants to follow my writings I intend to post them here:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?HN>

There's nothing there yet, and I won't be posting every day.

~~~
imurray
Please consider providing a rss or atom feed.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Completely experimental - I'm trying to do this "by hand" as a learning
experience. I'd be interested if you would tell me if this works:

* <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml>

Cheers!

~~~
imurray
Yes it works for me: I could click it in firefox and subscribe in Google
Reader as usual.

You could put the following in the head of your page:

    
    
        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Colin's Blog" href="rss.xml">
    

That enables an orange RSS button in some browsers (not Firefox 4, but still
creates a feeds listing in the page info).

Edit: clicking on it in chrome gives an unformated mess. You can provide some
formatting by adding a css file. As an example, I made this:
<http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml> more-or-less by hand,
and it links to a css file.

------
pg
Colin, is the problem more a decrease in the quality of the stories on the
frontpage, or a decrease in the quality of the comment threads?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I started to try to work that out, and after a while found myself unable to
care. In the end, that was what made the decision for me to stop interacting
with the site so much. The following are observations from my personal point
of view, obviously, and it's worth keeping in mind that I'm not necessarily
your target demographic anyway.

I've tried not to let this turn into a rant. I may not have succeeded ...

Anyway.

The front page does feel a little worse, but there's still stuff that does
belong there. There's still a lot that's good, and perhaps my perception that
it's worse is simply because I've grown. I talked with Ward Cunningham once
about this - any good community helps you to grow, but after a time you
outgrow it. Perhaps they should be like a book - you read them, and then after
that you dip into them for a bit, then less often, and eventually you don't
pick them up again.

So maybe the front page isn't that much different. Later this week I'll try to
get the time to compare some of my snapshots from two years ago. If I have
thoughts, where do you want me to send/put them?

But the comments, they definitely feel worse. There are still brilliant and
insightful comments, and there are many, many good and valuable comments. But
there are also many valueless comments that nevertheless get upvotes, and
there's definitely a more snarky feel. I've felt myself being dragged into
that at times and had to pull myself back. That didn't used to happen.

I also hang about on the "New" page because I think the longer-standing
members should do that, and I'm really, _really_ tired of the apparently
endless repeat submissions of the same stories, endless re-submission of older
(although admittedly valuable) items, and the rise in content-free gossip. But
if the experienced members don't read it, how will "the right items" get
upvoted, and inappropriate items get flagged?

You can't do much about how people vote, but people seem to be upvoting things
that they find amusing or entertaining, and confusing that with "gratifies
intellectual curiosity." People down-vote things they don't agree with, even
when they are genuinely valuable.

Er ...

That's it. I hope that helps.

~~~
pg
I'm definitely concerned about this problem. Comment threads have gotten
meaner and stupider. And as you say, what makes it worse is that the mean
and/or stupid comments often get massively upvoted.

Do you have any suggestions for things that might fix the problem? I have all
kinds of ideas I'm half considering, but I'm curious to hear what you think.
We're on mostly uncharted territory here.

Maybe I'll ask HN generally...

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
As with all these things, I think the problem is complex, and has many
intertwingled aspects and factors. I have many thoughts on what the problems
are, but fewer on how to fix them. In part, I don't understand the mentality,
so find it hard to understand why things are thus. I observe, however, that
what you need to do is to find a way to "incentivize" the behavior you want.

Upvoting a comment that's mean-spirited, unhelpful, or otherwise of negative
value should carry a visible cost. But who makes that decision? You can't rely
on the community to do so, because that puts you in the same position. Perhaps
you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they have the right
to declare comments to be of negative value. Then any upvotes such a comment
accrued, count as negative karma for the upvoter. There might be other,
simpler and more visible ways to achieve the same net result.

I know good hackers are interested in many things besides hacking, but
"intellectual curiosity" is being interpreted very broadly. Any definition
will lead to people playing the lawyer game on the words, so that's a hard one
to try to narrow down.

Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or
something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making
someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent.
The idea would be that higher ranks get to decide if the decisions by lower
ranks are right or wrong, and hence those of lower rank can advance if they
behave in a manner you choose to reward.

Or something.

These are quick "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They won't work,
but perhaps suitably clever people on HN can find mutations of them that will.
A few ideas were being tossed around here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873>

... although that was more specifically to try to solve the "submission race"
problem that jacquesm had identified. But some of those ideas, mated with some
of the above, might produce more fit children.

~~~
jseliger
This: "Perhaps you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they
have the right to declare comments to be of negative value," might be true,
but I'm not sure it scales. I don't know if I would count as "trusted elder,"
but I'm very sparing with my downvotes and reserve them for the stupid, mean,
and wildly off-topic comments (which are often "meta" threads about whether a
topic belongs, etc.).

"Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or
something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making
someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent."

I think any attempt to automate this will be susceptible to gaming,
groupthink, and so forth, and it makes karma too much like a game.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
That's why I said these are "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They
aren't expected to work, and finding fault with them is no real challenge.

Mutating them into something that does work is more important, interesting and
useful. There's more discussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

Enjoy!

------
physcab
It does seem like fatigue is setting in for some of the leaders. I think
that's normal. When you give so much energy and time to something you expect
the same in return. You expect that people are going to care as much as you
and you become disappointed when they don't.

So change your expectations. When I joined over 2 years ago I remember
contributing every feasible moment. It was exhausting and I remember feeling
so demoralized from the downvoting or from the fact I didn't receive as many
upvotes as I thought I should from what I thought was an insightful comment.

Finally I decided that for me HN was best used as passively as possible. I
read HN often but I try to only contribute when a topic is in my domain. That
solves the confidence problem and the burnout problem. I dont foresee myself
leaving anytime soon. I havent noticed degrading quality in articles submitted
or comments like others have. Maybe it's because I don't watch the site as
closely, but for me the site still works as intended.

------
dman
You will be missed. You were an integral part of my hn experience and I will
miss your ability to supply relevant links and commentary to the topic being
discussed.

------
kidmenot
I'm new here (this is my first comment by the way, so hello everybody), but
I'm sorry to see a long-time contributor go.

The fact that I'm new doesn't mean I don't see that the signal-to-noise ratio
is not really good. I came across some very good and inspirational articles,
but also a lot of things that in no way have something to do with the reason
people follow HN.

And I share z92's belief in a cool community we have yet to discover.

On the other hand, this is probably the fate of every community: it's great
while few people are a part of it, but its quality degrades rapidly when it
gains serious traction.

Best of luck, even though we don't know each other.

------
jacquesm
Take good care Colin, enjoy your longer days and please stay in touch.

Thanks for your tireless efforts at making HN a better place, they'll be
sorely missed.

Where else would one find a juggling, programming mathematician :)

------
SandB0x
Sorry to see you go. I'll miss your valuable insights, tireless cross
referencing work and your occasional maths tutoring threads.

------
rudiger
Is this the evaporative cooling effect[1] in action?

[1] - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>

~~~
shii
Yep, and RiderOfGiraffes is not the first to go :(

After nickb, mattmaroon, jacquesm, and many other "greats" that you'll find in
the searchyc.com logs left, I always questioned why I stick around here
anymore. Certainly not to see junk linkbait posted all the time.

~~~
Alex3917
Realistically unless you have someone who is willing to spend 1,000+ hours per
year making qualitative judgments about the quality of every active
contributor, and who is then willing to go around being kind of an asshole,
the community is eventually going to fall apart. And right now that's not
going to happen, because there's no profit motive.

You could do something where you collect everyone's email address, and then
give anyone willing to spend the time to be HN's curator the ability to send
out 3 emails a year to the entire list that they could sell advertising
against and promote their own projects. But short of that, I don't see anyone
stepping up to put in the time and emotional labor required. The only other
solution is to implement a paywall, but I don't see that happening any time
soon.

~~~
skmurphy
I think you may have mis-assessed "no profit motive"

HN support YCombinator in several ways. In particular consider how much less
visibility YC would have without HN.

YC has been very clear that they evalute HN contributions of new applicants.

I am not being critical of YC or HN, I just wanted to point out that YC is run
as a money making venture and HN is managed to support it.

~~~
Alex3917
"HN support Y Combinator in several ways."

The maintenance that HN receives is proportional to its value to YC. This is a
problem, because as the userbase increases, the maintenance required and the
marginal value created scale at different rates. It's not a show stopper by
any means, but eventually there may have to be some sort of realignment.

------
Mz
One of the things that a post like this offers is closure. People are notified
that "Elvis has left the building" and something has changed. I've had a
couple of cases where I made it clear I planned to leave an online community
and the listowner and others begged me to stay/come back. In both cases, I was
ultimately thrown off. I now think that if it's no longer a good personal fit
for a major contributor, it's a mistake to try to keep them. If the community
values what they contributed, this might be an opportunity to consider what
the remaining members wish to do to create something of value which can draw
the interest of high quality members. But begging someone to stay who is no
longer satisfied is coming from a position of "you have something of value to
give us but we don't really have much of value to give you". It's not a
healthy, sustainable thing.

Of course, the door is always open. It's not like ROG or Jacqesm or whomever
else has left was thrown off. But it's probably not a good idea to make too
big of a deal out of it should they choose to post again/occasionally.

Peace and good luck in your life's journey, wherever it may take you.

------
rbanffy
It just crossed my head. What if we use a flag count (times a comment or
submission was flagged and flagging was agreed on by a moderator) to "counter
vote". If someone who get flagged often upvotes something, that upvote acts as
a flag and could, maybe, be turned into a downvote...

I'll edit it and make it clearer in the next hour, but I wanted to leave it
here while I have lunch (and think over it) so others can demolish (it's
always nice to be corrected by people smarter than me) my idea.

------
Tycho
Does this mean we don't get to see results of your proposed saved stories
experiment?

Anyway you're one of the names that have stuck out in my time here so far.
Maybe the site will change for the better then you can come back.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
No, it doesn't mean that. If anything comes of any of the experiments it will
be posted to my blog or web site, and I'll probably tweet it as well. If
people read those and think they're relevant, they'll get posted here.

Certainly anyone who helps will get personal replies.

~~~
Tycho
So are you looking for people to send in their 4 pages of saved stories, or
are you not ready yet?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Not ready yet - I will return to that thread and contact anyone with contact
details in their profile. At least one of them will probably post for me.

Thanks.

PS: Also attempting to set up an RSS feed on my "blog".

------
Sandman
First jacquesm leaves, now RiderOfGiraffes... that's a loss of two very active
contributors in a relatively short period. Hopefully none of the other great
contributors to HN have any similar thoughts about leaving. Anyway, I think
that we may soon have to see some new names on HN that can provide such good
articles and thoughtful comments.

------
riskish
RiderOfGiraffes: I feel the same dilution since joining over three years ago,
especially lately.

------
benjaminlotan
Thanks for posting, as a newer HN user (8 months), i now have a deeper respect
for the system and will try harder to keep quality here and only submit
quality content.

generally, i follow HN on twitter, that provides me a nice flow of the good
stuff. and i always know i can go comment and participate when something
strikes me.

------
Panoramix
Thank you for sharing so much interesting stuff. It has come to the point
where, if I see your name next to a submission I think to myself "oh , here's
a good one".

I wish you all the best.

------
ig1
Maybe what the startup community needs is a closed forum, something like
Forrst where you need an invite, and if you violate the community rules both
you and your inviter gets punished.

There are advantages in having an open community in that it encourages people
thinking about startup and not well connected to the community to get
involved, but I'm starting to think the benefits of a closed community may
outweigh the disadvantages.

------
kunley
I guess quite a solution to the submissions quality problem would be allowing
down-voting of submissions at some karma level cap.

This way, a group of users with best karma would be allowed to just stop
crappy submissions. Otherwise, they have to be here all the time to promote
non-crappy submissions only to not let them sink in a flood of crappy ones,
which is dumb.

------
artmageddon
I haven't been a part of the community for very long but have come across a
number of threads that had your cross-postings or insight on the subject at
hand. I enjoyed seeing your contributions and am sad to see you go. I'll
definitely be keeping an eye on your blog.

(Also: loved your username)

~~~
shii
Yeah, the username is not for without reason either:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692>

------
petar
This pain point has been addressed before. One proposed solution is given
here:

    
    
      http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1
    

Implementation pends user excitement and suggestion for how to start-up.

------
Natsu
I was afraid of something like this when I saw you reply to something I asked
with the phrase "if I'm still here."

Please don't vanish completely.

------
mattyroze
It's Ok to walk away.

------
rboyd
as we say in poker (when someone's giving up the game), "see you next week"

------
antidaily
<http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg>

~~~
power78
This is not reddit

------
reader5000
To be fair, I'm an HN user who has been here 594 days and have never heard of
you, and am sort of confused why largely anonymous users of a site like HN
feel the need to post their own dramatic farewell posts. If you aren't feeling
appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend.

~~~
ig1
_If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life
friend._

That's exactly the kind of snide comment that's making HN a less pleasant
place and pushing good contributors away.

~~~
reader5000
Sorry you interpreted it that way but it was legitimate advice. Real life
relationships trump pseudo anonymous internet relationships.

