
How about this idea to save Hacker News from fluff? - kirubakaran
Any Hacker News submission that is also on Reddit front page need to be flagged for review or hidden until approved by admin. Exceptions would be (programming,math,science etc).reddit<p>While this won't solve all the fluff related issues, it will still do a lot of good I think.<p>What do you think?
======
zoltz
To make the workings of Hacker News dependent on Reddit or any other site
looks conceptually wrong --- can't it stand on its own?

The same holds for _explicitly_ favouring topics like programming, math,
science or whatever. From ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (emphasis is mine):

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: _anything_ that
gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

------
edw519
I think we should leave things exactly as they are. Some of the best "how to
do your app" discussions result directly from these "fluffy" posts. Whenever
one of these shows up, the ensuing thread is usually very long with many
hackers presenting many different opinions. It turns into a "community-based
analysis and design session" with exactly the kind of people you'd like to
have.

"This is what the up arrow should mean."

"This is what karma should be."

"This is how to get it to behave like..."

And we're all talking about OUR app, the one we all know and love. These are
my favorite threads and one of the best ways to learn and get to know each
other a little better.

What we already have is better than anything any one of us could have
designed.

Keep the fluff coming (just not too much).

(EDIT: This was the 2nd comment posted. One hour later, there are 22 comments
about OUR app. This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. Great thread!)

~~~
pg
I would not count on that. I have a hypothesis that the character of a site's
comment threads is a time-delayed function of the top stories. If we want to
keep the 14 year olds away, we have to ensure that the front page of News.YC
looks boring to them when they come across it.

~~~
mrtron
I wish I had access to such a great source of information when I was 14. I was
just starting to become a competent programmer, and would have greatly
benefited from the recurring messages in this site (like release early and
often, I rarely released anything to anyone but a small circle of friends). I
finally began to learn these principles through a lot of trial and error on my
own in my mid 20's.

While I realize that the majority of users will be 20-40 year old web app
creators buy don't alienate anyone. Going forward can we look to keep non-
hackers away? I think everyone enjoys this community, let's not strangle the
spirit of it trying to keep it from changing.

~~~
pg
Sorry, I know there are thoughtful 14 year olds. I don't want to exclude them.
I'm using "14 year olds" as shorthand for people whose mental age is 14.
Basically, anyone, whatever their age, whose comments you can imagine being
said by Beavis & Butthead.

~~~
andreyf
I'm not sure users can be neatly split into "mental 14 year olds" versus
"mental adults". I act like a mental 14 year old sometimes (usually on
reddit), and sometimes I don't (usually here). I think most users are like
that, and if we give an appearance of incentive for people to act maturely,
then they will. I think this is at heart a psychological problem, not a
sorting problem.

Of course, some people will act like "mental 14yo's" no matter what, and
others never visit reddit anymore - but it seems intuitive that most people
are somewhere in between.

------
tolmasky
I don't understand the need to control things to such a degree. If certain
posts become popular its because people want to read them. If its true that a
majority of people here only want certain kinds of posts, then these "fluff"
posts should move down the list pretty quickly naturally. If you really want
this to be such a super exclusive club where only the "right" articles make
it, then maybe we should just ditch the whole community thing entirely, make
sign ups only through invitation -- AND if you pass a science/CS/math test!
Then only people exactly the same as you would ever contribute.

~~~
Spyckie
"If certain posts become popular its because people want to read them." Why is
reddit's content consistently horrible to the yc community? YC is not serving
all people's needs in content - its serving a particular sector of users that
expect knowledge/motivation from their content-browsing rather than
humor/time-wasting.

Ycnews is figuring how much they should control because the fact is that if
you don't have controls, the content and user base becomes like reddit. Also,
the extreme degree of control that you suggest is so ridiculous that you're
doing nothing but insulting a lot of hard work that people have done to find a
good balance between being super-exclusive and open to everyone.

------
pg
That is a pretty intriguing idea. Except you'd want to use points as the test,
or it would break if you were a day off.

~~~
chengmi
I have another idea--why not just give people on the leaderboard the ability
to "downmod", except it wouldn't affect the points of the submission, just
increase the gravity so it drops off the front page quicker.

~~~
curi
maybe people over, say, 500 karma? seems like enough. reaching the leaderboard
is a lot harder than a fixed number.

~~~
alaskamiller
expand the leaderboard to 100 people

~~~
pg
ok: <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

~~~
alaskamiller
ty

------
mixmax
I can think of several reasons it won't work. Off the top of my head:

1) There are just so many shitty links and LOLcats out there that the chances
a shitty submission to YC is also on the frontpage of reddit is very small

2) The problem with reddit is that the signal/noise ratio is so high, not that
there are no good submissions that make it to the frontpage. For instance this
[http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/02/22/zero-sign-on-with-
client...](http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/02/22/zero-sign-on-with-client-
certificates/) is currently on the frontpage of both reddit and YC.

There are much better ways of doing it than this proposal. For instance use a
bayesian filter to measure the submitted site up against previous submissions
with high ratings.

~~~
yters
I think the bayesian idea would work for the general case, but it would cause
problems for the corner cases, which tend to be the most interesting.

------
brk
Another alternative is that when a URL is submitted, that URL is checked
against other popular sites (Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Sphinn, etc). Then the
submission is granted (or debited) points based on where else/how frequently
it appears on other sites. Submissions from some sites might get points auto-
credited on creation (based on how commonly submissions from that site have
accumulated points in the past).

Submissions that link only to another Reddit post, and not the actual story
would be debited even more severely (those of us that want to read reddit
already go there).

At some phase, a "FoundRead" might become a "Digg", ie: it's fairly well
understood that the majority of the News.YC user base knows of the site and
goes there directly to consume content. But in the short term it would be
credited points for most submissions.

This should have the effect of demoting submissions that are all over the net,
and especially those that are just links to digg/reddit. It should also have
the effect of causing people to dig harder and deeper for truly good content
to post.

------
ardit33
how about being able to downmod submisions, or at least flag them as fluf? if
enough users flag a post, (weighted by their karma) then that submission
should be removed from the main page.

~~~
cawel
That is interesting. The problem we're facing is fluff, so it seems fair to
devise a strategy targeting fluff specifically. I have a hunch that fluff
climbs up to the top because of a small group of happy-fluff-voting people
(young accounts for some, as PG noted earlier in another thread). If this
assumption is right, we could rely on the whole HN community for flagging
fluff out effectively, as those happy-fluff-voting people are a minority.

I'd discard ideas like allowing downvotes on articles. I do think the decision
(by design) not to have downvotes reduces immature voting and also makes it
clearer to detect suspect behavior, just like the fluff problem we're facing
at the moment (e.g. 20 downvotes added to 40 upvotes brings a total of 20
votes, and thus reduces the alarm signal).

~~~
Spyckie
Maybe we should focus on the underlying users that vote up fluff, and kindly
inform them of the goals of ycnews community in content rather than focus on
dealing with the fluff itself?

------
Kelevra
Your "solution" to the problem of a community-driven website is to stop making
it a community-driven website and call in the administrators? Isn't that
pretty much giving up?

~~~
danteembermage
I think an important distinction to make is that there is no such thing as
100% community driven. Certainly reddit is a lot closer to 100% than Hacker
News which is a lot closer than CNN, but no matter what there are admin
involved. For example reddit decided that posting ascii pictures of Fry was
funny... once. Then they changed the rules so you couldn't.

At Hacker News the admin have been pretty up front about what they will do;
edit titles, penalize stupid people as defined by the admin, etc. I think the
threat of intervention does a lot even if it's turned off at the moment. I'm
sure it's in the cards to keep the site as good as possible and that objective
is correlated with being community driven as much as possible, but there's a
trade-off there and I'd bet sometimes it goes the other way.

~~~
derefr
Ahem: <http://img.4chan.com/b/>

(Even mentioning this, though, I theorize that, in the future, there will be a
sort of Godwin's law that prevents sociologists from bringing up 4chan.)

------
mynameishere
An old suggestion I made: Just put a downmod arrow on once a submission hits
the top 20.

------
billbob
The solution is way more simple. Since the stories are driven by the users, i
would only allow a certain user profile to join. i.e hackers only.

The problem with digg and reddit is they allow anyone to join. In almost all
UGC sites the users define the site. However if you define your users you
define your site.

~~~
kirubakaran
I understand where you are coming from.

However, to me and to many others I know, "Hacker" is an ideal that we strive
towards... an asymptote... (Stallman is there...Linus is there...I am not
going to be there at least for quite some time. But I am trying hard.)

~~~
dfranke
> Hacker" is an ideal that we strive towards... an asymptote...

I disagree with that. There can't be an asymptote because there's no upper
bound. You strive toward infinity and "hacker" is just a mile marker along the
way.

~~~
kirubakaran
True. From my point of reference, it at least _seems_ like an asymptote.

The more I learn, the more questions I am coming up with - which seem to
increase my mass as I accelerate. May be one day I might have a weird look on
my face and be enlightened. ( Airport lady voice gently says "You have
arrived" :-p )

~~~
dfranke
No, that day won't come. You'll have lots of little epiphanies along the way
every time you grok some new big beautiful idea, but there isn't going to be
any sudden moment of True Enlightenment.

I suspect you've already passed the "hacker" milestone without realizing it.
The metaphors you're using are a good sign. How do you rate on this rubric?

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html#hacker_alrea...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html#hacker_already)

~~~
kirubakaran
Thank you! :-)

I am not sure of the answer for: "Has a well-established member of the hacker
community ever called you a hacker?". But working on cool stuff will earn this
soon or later I guess. So, thanks a lot for the encouragement.

~~~
dfranke
Well, bear this in mind: you can consider condition 3 the least important.
While conditions 1 and 2 are essential components of being a hacker, condition
3 is just a symptom. (1 && 2 && 3) is sufficient; (1 && 2) is necessary but
not sufficient; (3) is neither necessary nor sufficient.

It's not like (3) is some sort of formal induction ceremony. It'll just be an
offhand comment that the speaker probably won't remember making a week later.
Most often it'll take the form of "you should talk to Fred; he's an XYZ hacker
too" during a technical discussion about XYZ. It also tends to occur more
often in person than over the internet. If you're worried because it hasn't
happened yet, but most of your socialization is on the internet rather than
meatspace, then don't sweat it.

------
manny
Another suggestion if it hasn't already been suggested before, is that the
URLs provided should be checked with previous news.ycombinator.com submissions
and if there is a match, the website should bug you about it.

i.e.: person A: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- OK

person B: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- <msword>"Are you /sure/ you want to
submit this article? personA did this <date> ago."</msword>

person C: submit: www.xyz.com/article 2 -- Bug them even for this, just so
people can get the idea that its in good form to stay fresh and not have 2 or
3 URLs in the main news feed that will be all from the same website. This
isn't reddit or digg. This shouldn't be "oh I found this website slightly
interesting and so i'll put up 3 or 4 submissions to specific articles."

------
gills
What about a more economically-inspired system?

Add a karma cost to actions affecting the headlines (submitting and voting on
content). Make users think a little more about how they vote, and when
submitting make them put some amount of karma on the line which, if the
submission is useful, will easily be earned back.

The karma for all of this must come from somewhere, as it does now. For people
such as myself with a pretty low level of participation, maybe this would also
be an incentive to speak up more often and submit some interesting material.

I don't know, it's not a complete thought, maybe some folks can improve it.

------
ca
pg has noted that the fluff stories that this site's target audience might
vote up (the "dangerous" stories that would attract those mentally-14-years-
old people who are ruining / have ruined reddit) seem to tend to be quick to
read. Is there a way HN could keep track of how long a particular story was
kept open?

It'd be a pretty contrary approach. Clicking on a link would probably have to
open the story in an iframe within HN. Lots of people hate that, I know. Maybe
it could be made optional? Would people sacrifice that for improved link
quality?

The iframe would be set below whatever amount of HN chrome at the top pg wants
plus an "I'm done" button. HN could keep track of time between clicking on the
story and clicking "I'm done".

A big question I had was "what about fraudulent reports." It's interesting
that this is somewhat self limiting because increasing ranking this way would,
by definition, take more time. Also, using the existing anti-spam heuristics
(E.g., mostly new accounts upvoting a story), HN could further filter out time
reports from unreliable sources.

It occurs to me also that this could be done completely transparently if HN
didn't have to deal with the so called "same origin" security policy. A plug
in could probably be written for HN to get around it, but bypassing the single
most important security policy of the web might just be an intrinsically bad
idea.

------
hhm
math.reddit and science.reddit should be considered exceptions as well I
think.

~~~
kirubakaran
Sure! I meant to include that too. Fixed now. Thanks.

------
h34t
Help us rally together against our common enemy. Send us all to Reddit "by
mistake" 10% of the time that we try to access Hacker News.

By the time we make it back here, we'll be so distraught by our unexpected
exposure to the histrionic twaddle of our enemy that we'll be in the mood to
impulsively downvote anything that even remotely _resembles_ fluff on our
"home turf."

------
cawel
Defining ourselves in terms of Reddit (like refusing articles because they
were posted on Reddit) is (funny and) problematic because:

\- HN is independant from Reddit, and has its own identity, let's deal with
our challenges.

\- it would probably not fix the fluff problem (as it is not a simple
solution, and there exists articles on Reddit which do not fall in the fluff
category)

------
jakewolf
Ha, was thinking about that last night. Anything already on reddit should
automatically be deleted.

------
whacked_new
It worked for Slashdot.

Once you rely on centralized human intelligence, expect a decrease in speed.
Of course there are other ways to do it. I prefer a market system. If I had
critical mass at my disposal, no second thoughts about using such a system.

------
r7000
What about turning on the existing voter power algorithm? (The one that has
never been turned on as it was not making much of a difference in tests).

Would we see much of a difference?

------
VinzO
What would be the problem by having a downmod arrow for submission based on a
karma threshold like for comments? It would allow users to filter by themself.

------
eusman
No, thank you. I don't go to reddit anw.

