
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN? - pg
I was just asking RiderofGiraffes if he had any suggestions for fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403449) and it occurred to me that I might as well ask everyone.<p>Anyone have any suggestions?  We're on mostly uncharted territory here.<p>The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted.
======
strlen
Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just
display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a
certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to
e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to
agree with general tendencies of the site.

For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g.,
"You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" in
a thread discussing software projects) that is both information free and mean
(perhaps Blub wasn't the author's preferred choice, but chosen for him or
required in order to build an application for the iBlubber). People on this
site generally dislike Blub, so the comment will get upvotes without adding
any value to the discussion (an example of adding value would be saying you
were able to do this in 100 lines of Flub using its cool new hygienic macros
with a link to a paper on hygienic macros in Flub).

That's not to say all comment score data should be gone. Comment scores can
still be kept and comments could be displayed on stories in the other in which
they're displayed now (a mix of comment score and how recently it was posted).
Generally, what I've found is that comments showing up _first_ tend to be of
higher quality i.e., overall algorithm works more often than not.

[NB: I work at LinkedIn and we do this for connection counts-- we want users
to network with each other, but we don't want to make it a "who has the most
connections" game, that's why when you have over 500 connections (which is
perfectly legitimate and allowed), only "500+" is displayed as the count on
your profile]

~~~
Tycho
Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide
remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How?

 _Minimum comment length of ~50 words._

This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't
put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one
liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow
jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer,
better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.

~~~
tptacek
You just banned 10 out of 12 of the 'pg comments on this thread. :)

~~~
jeromec
I was thinking the same thing which is why I didn't mention the length idea.
However... what if users over say 1 year and with a high comment average were
exempted?

To add to that, lionhearted posted a comment about inevitable site decline
because of open membership and _equally weighted_ voting. What if only
accounts over 1 year could vote (or diminish their vote weight)?

Wouldn't instituting a min. length requirement and taking away new user voting
improve the problem significantly?

~~~
Tycho
But there is something unsavoury about that sort of elitist/privilige system I
think. Perhaps, however, the word-count restriction could apply only to the
'top-nodes' of the comment threads, ie. if you're replying to the submission
itself. That way, things are started off on the right foot, and snidey one-
liners never get upvoted to the top of the whole thread.

~~~
jeromec
I know what you mean, but is it really elitist if it's only a time
requirement? It's like admission to a club, anyone can get in but everyone
past the current site size pays their dues (in this case by sticking around).
If the goal of the site is to not die from popularity, this may be
understandably necessary.

On your other point, I'm thinking that short unwanted quips can rear their
ugly head anywhere along threads.

~~~
hugh3
The thing about elite prestigious clubs is that a large portion of the
discussion and activity inside the club turns out to be about membership --
who wants it, to whom we should give it, who is unworthy of it, how worthiness
should be decided, and how _awesome_ we folks inside the club are compared to
all those folks who aren't inside the club.

(Or at least, that's what I assume it's like -- I don't know, I've never been
invited into any elite prestigious clubs...)

Even if you say "Oh, it's just a time requirement", what are you gonna do if
_Big Name Smart Person_ shows up wanting to comment? Surely you're going to
let them in. So now you have an _elite_ line and an _unwashed_ line and you're
arguing about who should be in the elite line.

~~~
jeromec
The restriction isn't for commenting, only voting. "Big Name" would have to
stick around 6 mo. to a year to vote. Shouldn't be a problem if site quality
(the key draw) remains high.

------
mixmax
I used to be a big contributor to this site, but for the last months I've
found that my interest in the site has waned.

I've thought a lot about why, since I used to _really_ enjoy HN - now it's
just one of a few newssites I visit every day. It's hard to quantify but here
are my reasons and my take at the decline:

1) The obvious one: Signal to noise ratio in the comments is way down. The
problem is twofold - there are both more bad comments, and the ones that are
good aren't necessarily voted to the top. This makes it harder for me to find
the nuggets that would be shown at the top of every comments page a year or
two ago. As others have pointed out it sound easy but is in fact a very hard
problem to solve.

2) The interaction in the comments is less interesting. I used to have great
arguments in the comments. Sometimes I would convince someone of my point of
view sometimes it was the other way around, sometimes there just wasn't
agreement to be found. But it was always interesting and civil, and I very
often learned something new. Engaging in, and watching others have interesting
discussions was for me one of the main things I loved about HN. It's like when
you go to a dinner party and get to sit next to this incredily interesting guy
that is exceptionally insightful and has some really interesting things to
say. The conversation leaves a mark on you.

3) I often find that the comments I make that I personally find insightful or
interesting don't get a lot of upvotes, while the ones that state something
obvious or funny get more upvotes. This isn't encouraging me to interact with
people here on an intellectually interesting level. If others do this as well,
which I suspect they will, then it's extremely degrading to the discourse in
the comments. I often find that I don't bother to write up a response to
something because I know won't get a lot of attention. Sometimes my points are
totally missed.

4) Maybe I've outgrown the site. Many concepts that were new to me when I
joined HN are now familiar, and many discussions have already been had.
RiderofGiraffes describes it well in the linked comment.

I owe a lot to HN, and I really want it to succeed, so I stick around and hope
that things will change. But for now it's from a less engaged position.

~~~
hugh3
I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN
break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I
haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in
the quality of _stories_ as well as comments.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other
stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some branch of
human knowledge. But I just checked the first 90 stories and there's nothing
matching that description. Instead there seem to be an awful lot of "gossip"
and "personality" type stories. Tesla vs Top Gear! Tech CEO shoots elephant!
Trollish "What I hate about facebook" stories! The interminable "Is it a
bubble?" discussion!

On the other hand, it might just be my opinion... obviously _somebody_ is
interested in the current front-page stories or else they wouldn't have been
voted up. Do other folks think that the interestingness of the stories has
declined?

~~~
waterlesscloud
Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding
and submitting quality stories?

My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't
maintain itself."

So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time.

Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I _know_ very few people do
this, because I find good stuff overlooked there _all the time_.

And submit stories you want to see here. Someone has to do it or they'll never
show up here.

~~~
photophotoplasm
> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do
> this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

This is the biggest one IMO.

~~~
mcshaner1
One of the problems with new stories (for me at least) is when they are
submitted. I often see something interesting in the rss feed that was
submitted several hours before I got to it. Upvoting on a story that old is
useless, if it hasn't reached critical mass by some time threshold, no one
will see it.

It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I
find interesting.

~~~
loxs
It's the same with comments. I usually join discussions several hours late.
Mostly because I live in Europe. Usually I get 1 or 2 up/down votes and almost
no answers.

So I generally think that good stories shouldn't decay as fast as they do. And
maybe also when there is some activity on them.

Maybe also we should have some category like "best stories of yesterday",
putting some fresh attention to the good ones.

------
coffeemug
Look at <http://gamedev.net> \- they've grown their community from a few
active users to more than a hundred thousand and the quality only increased.
They had to go through a period of significantly decreased quality as the
community grew, and faced all the same problems as HN. I believe a combination
of the following changes would fix things: (from most to least important):

\- Upvotes need to be weighed by karma, and karma of exemplary members of the
community needs to be seeded by you (and other exemplary members). This way
cliques of mean/non-insightful users can upvote each other to their heart's
content without making any appreciable difference in their karma value.

\- The above would fix the quality of articles on the front page, not just the
quality of comments. Our most successful blog post to date was "will the real
programmers please stand up" ([http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-
real-programm...](http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-
programmers-please-stand-up/)) which is at best a provocative rant. The actual
technically insightful content isn't nearly as successful. TechCrunch mastered
the art of linkbait headlines. Weighed upvotes will solve this problem.

\- Anonymity breeds animosity. If I don't know someone it's much easier for me
to say mean, dumb things (see: YouTube). The solution is somewhat
controversial, but I strongly believe the downsides of threaded discussions
strongly outweigh the upsides (ability to carry on multiple discussions at a
time). Removing the ability to have threads will force people to pay attention
to who they're talking to and have a coherent discussions instead of snarky
oneliners.

\- Moderators need to be able to lock down threads that are getting out of
control.

\- When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off
with it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to
continue the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other
and participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.

~~~
nyellin
> When the article is off the front page, the discussion quickly dies off with
> it. There needs to be a "hot discussions" tab that allows people to continue
> the conversations. This encourages people to get to know each other and
> participate in a coherent discussion that spans beyond 24 hours.

The decay constant should also be decreased, so that interesting submissions
stay longer on the homepage. I usually don't comment on old submissions,
because it feels like no one reads or votes on them.

I am willing to sacrifice the number of good articles on the homepage each day
for the quality of comments on each article.

(edit: added last paragraph)

~~~
markkanof
This seems like it could help. I tend to read a submission, and maybe a few of
the early comments, and then it just stews in my brain for a bit. Maybe an
hour or two later I will suddenly have a fully formed idea to share, but by
then the story has already left the front page, so I just don't bother
commenting. It's not that I only want to comment if I think I am going to get
points, but I only want to comment if I think someone is going to read it. I
don't really see a point in just shouting out into the void.

Also, having the stories leave the front page so quickly encourages people who
are just interested in getting points to throw out whatever garbage they can
in hopes of grabbing a few upvotes by being one of only a few comments on a
given submission.

------
idoh
Let us not be too hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really
understood. At best they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you
wouldn't be able to tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not.

If this were my product then I'd try to gather a corpus of bad comments,
selected outside of the vote system (because the problem is that voting might
be broken). While I was at it, I'd also find out the good comments, because
promoting good comments might be just as good and easier than getting rid of
the bad comments. After that, I'd try to figure out what counts as a good vote
or a bad vote, because the problem probably doesn't really lay with the
comments themselves, but rather how people vote against them. Bad comments
aren't really a problem if the vote system does a good job of spotting them.

Then I'd take a careful look at comments and votes:

\- Is the distribution of good comments / bad comments even throughout the set
of commentators, or are there users who are dependably good or dependably bad?
If it is a lumpy distribution then you can use that. I'm guessing that
everyone makes dumb comments, and there is something with the system that
inflates the scores of bad comments compared to good comments as more people
can vote. But I'm also guessing that only so many people are capable of
leaving good comments too. Get the data and find out for sure.

\- Do the vote scores that these comments get a reflection of the quality? If
the votes are, then maybe the system isn't as broken as you think. If they
aren't, then you've got a lead on the problem - you can look at the bad
comments that get lots of upvotes and try to suss out what is going on.

\- Do high-karma voters do a better job of finding good / bad comments that
average? If they are better, then maybe you give them more weight. If they
aren't then you'd have to shelve that idea.

\- Are there people good at commenting but bad at voting, and vice-versa?

\- Are there people who are good at upvoting, but not at downvoting, or vice-
versa?

It's all sort of tedious, but basically I'd advise leaning on the data and
make decisions based off of that. I'm pretty sure that if you dig in a bit
something is going to really stick out in a big way. Once you've found that,
then you can build a feature / change around that.

~~~
Goladus
One problem I know is a problem because I see it all the time is people
getting downvotes and not knowing why. If even a fraction of the people who
have this problem complain, that's a lot of people who don't understand the
unwritten rules.

~~~
dgallagher
Perhaps things need to be spelled out explicitly. If someone says something
that gets a downvote, they need to be offered constructive criticism. "Here's
why you were downvoted, and what you can do in the future to prevent it from
happening again."

This is very time-consuming to do, however. Writing a detailed response is
costly and repetitive. Pressing "downvote" is easy. You punish the commenter,
but don't tell him/her why; it's up to them to figure it out on their own,
which is sometimes difficult/impossible from their perspective.

An idea:

If you downvote, you have to pick a reason why you downvoted from various
options (e.g. drop-down list, checkboxes). If you pick something, your
downvote is cast. If you don't do anything, the downvote isn't cast.

In the options, you can list ~10-20 reasons to downvote (too mean, off topic,
etc...). Select one or more items from the list, and submit it. What was
selected appears in a "voting stats" page/section for said comment. Then the
user can then get the gist of why they were downvoted, perhaps with a generic
message saying how they could improve in the future.

The downside is that it might required a re-direct if you downvote (might be
annoying on iPad/mobile devices), and it'll also take longer to downvote. I
don't think the latter will be an issue since downvoting is rare, and I'd
imagine people would be willing to fill out a quick web-form if they really
think something deserves negative karma.

~~~
follower
This is a proposal going that direction:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404513>

------
tptacek
A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have
in the site guidelines now.

~~~
pg
The problem with that is that it's hard to say exactly what counts as
politics. E.g. is an article about economic inequality like this one

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027>

politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social
phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.

~~~
kwis
It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?

Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple
portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and
discuss it?

~~~
mgkimsal
Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with _hacker_ news.

~~~
kwis
I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about
to start startups.

That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to
refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.

~~~
pg
HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a
disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup
business.

~~~
ssclafani
And therein lies the problem. As HN and Y Combinator itself have grown, as
well as the general startup climate, HN has become increasingly startup
focused to the point where many would describe it as "for startup founders"
rather than "for hackers". And there are a lot of new users who like it that
way (or assume it's supposed to be that way). But then you have the old guard
like tptacek who would like nothing more than to see HN filled with only hard
tech/science posts. That's a gap that isn't going to be filled with any
algorithmic tweak or new comment layout.

~~~
tptacek
I would strongly prefer an HN that only had startup posts. I think this part
of the thread is going off the rails, though. The problem is, "how do you
improve comment quality on HN". We can probably avoid debating the premise of
the question, and just focus on the (plentiful) ideas themselves.

------
pkaler
There is no scarcity with upvotes. If I have an infinite amount of money to
spend, I will spend it without prudence.

Cap the number of upvotes that a user gets each day and give explicit feedback
on how many upvotes that they have left.

~~~
staunch
Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a higher
daily limit to spend. Works quite well.

~~~
bootload
_"... Perlmonks does this, and based on your total karma you are given a
higher daily limit to spend. Works quite well. ..."_

I always think of the Perlmonk progression as a good idea. It will require a
radical departure in use/interaction and might be seen as too controlled. PM
had the advantage of doing this from the start (as far as I know) PM #244776

~~~
btilly
Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived there.
Which was in the first few months.

~~~
bootload
_"... Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived
there. ..."_

It certainly works. I always go there ready to really think twice before I
post & you learn. HN appears to be more OpEd a lot of the times.

~~~
btilly
Perlmonks certainly works. However I don't think that the level system is the
reason. My opinion is that the real reason is that a good community was
established early, and then a focused remit maintained it.

Ironically that is one of the reasons why I lost interest. My interests moved
on. A small fraction of the conversations taught me anything interesting. And
so I drifted away. However the focused remit is essential for maintaining that
community as it is, even if I am no longer that big a part of it.

Incidentally I am <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=tilly> there, and
<http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=754085> describes some of the early history
of how it came to be as it is.

------
tptacek
A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average
feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments
are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other
times it just begs for an unproductive fight.

~~~
pg
Interesting idea. That would be pretty easy to implement: it could be an
ordinary comment, but that would only be visible to the sender and the
receiver.

~~~
tptacek
Note that this won't "fix" the comment problem, but every time it is used,
more likely than not, it's going to improve the comment threads, because the
alternative is publicly calling someone out.

Please label it "the gruseom button".

~~~
jacques_chester
You've called me out in public before. Shame is an effective teacher.

~~~
alextp
Except with sufficiently snarky/provocative comments trying to shame the
commenter might look from the outside like something very similar to petty
disagreement.

I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly
opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the
readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These
are a problem, as they encourage snark and posing over effectively arguing
things out, but they are very hard to treat as disagreeing with them is likely
to cause knee-jerk reactions in many upvoters.

~~~
crasshopper
Strongly agree with where you're going here. Every time I see a "senior" or
"better" HN handle call someone dumb, I think: well, who says you're so smart?
Who makes you the dictator of "good" comments?

I never see "nice" tellings-off. A "nice" telling-off might be: "reader123,
this comment is mean. please be nicer"

~~~
jacques_chester
That is exactly the sort of telling-off I got. It was polite and to the point.
After I edited and apologised tptacek deleted his remonstration.

------
tptacek
Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories
that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to
the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm
being minimalist here).

A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th
take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.

~~~
bretthopper
To me, this is the biggest problem with HN rather than comment quality. Tons
of related, and even duplicate, stories happen all the time which fragments
discussion. Not to mention the duplicate posts which happen a few months
later. Thankfully someone usually remembers and posts a link to the previous
discussion but that shouldn't be required.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I think it's an interesting idea to be able to "group" related posts that
occur within a certain time range of each other. If five posts on the new iPad
7 come in within the same three days, someone can drag them all together into
the "iPad 7" thread.

But this?

 _the duplicate posts which happen a few months later_

Once we're up to a timescale of _months_ , or even weeks, we're no longer
being sensible. Instead we're exhibiting FAQ Syndrome: The irrational fear
that someone, somewhere, is saying something that isn't entirely original.

I think the cult of originality is actually a big _problem_ at HN, and other
"news" sites as well. The important things in life are not particularly
original, and they do not change particularly quickly. A site that is
determined not to re-discuss previous topics is doomed to discuss nothing but
ephemeral trivia. The great thing about celebrity gossip is that it is always
new! We can manufacture celebrities at whatever rate is needed to keep the
front page fresh. But we can't manufacture Knuths as needed; we've only got
the one set of Maxwell's equations; new books on the scale of K&R or SICP
don't come along every day. But if we discourage the constant reexamination of
these classics they will get placed on the dusty shelves and we'll see nothing
but discussions of the latest gossip and bling. You know, like we have today.

I always wished HN would feel more like academia, which cycles like the
seasons. Every year, you discuss all the classics again for a new audience of
newbs. After a little while, you've heard all the classics and are ready to
graduate, or become a professor. This is what makes me miss the days when this
was "Startup News" and was more explicitly tied to the YC cycle, the time when
you could tell that a new YC class was starting by watching for the influx of
new people.

~~~
tptacek
I think only time scale we need to think about is the front page.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Agreed.

------
gleb
I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments.

Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large
number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion
from starting at all.

I'd say:

* create some real cost to making comments

* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time

* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly

~~~
pg
Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do
something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some
threshold.

~~~
gleb
If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would
lead to better discussion.

Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be
encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.

It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community
considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment
being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need
to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe
implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't
correlate with good.

I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts
that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some
that don't. See how this affects the results.

~~~
jacques_chester
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would
> lead to better discussion.

I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable
rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.

~~~
notahacker
It also actively disincentivises posting constructive comments on threads few
people are likely to read, as commenting has a negative expected value. A
constructive suggestion in a page dropping towards the bottom of the Ask/Show
HN _might_ get an upvote from the author if they vote, has a negligible chance
of garnering upvotes from anyone else, and yet is more potentially _useful_ to
at least one member of the community than any number of eloquently-stated
opinions on the 'openness' of a particular platform, whether we're in a bubble
yet or the idiocy of the USPTO.

------
jjcm
I'd suggest that there are more tiers to functionality than are currently in
place. At the moment, after 500 points you're given the ability to downvote
comments. Perhaps there should be additional barriers in place, such as this:

0 - Ability to comment on threads

50 - Ability to upvote comments

500 - Ability to downvote comments

1000 - Ability to submit articles/stories

2000 - Ability to downvote articles/stories

etc. While this may reduce the number of incoming stories, perhaps there could
be a way for power users to sponsor stories submitted by those who aren't able
to submit them to the feed themselves. The more I think about it, the more I
like this approach - create a queue of "pending stories" that anyone can
submit to, but only those who have sufficient experience on the site can
approve them (or remove them from the queue).

For those who say that I'd be pandering to myself here, note that I'm at 620
points right now - with this proposition I'd be reducing my current abilities.
However I think that it's a small price to pay to improve the quality of
submissions.

~~~
garindra
The problem with this approach is that then the users will instead choose to
save up their points to submit their OWN stories, instead of spending them
upvoting (and downvoting) threads and comments which help improve the content
curation on HN (and is one of our main goals here).

This approach may work if there is additional points given by the system to
the upvoter (or downvoter) if there is significant number of other users doing
the same thing as that upvoter (or downvoter) too, which means his/her action
is indeed valid and objective.

Users would then be more willing to vote, with the hope that other users will
do the same thing as him/her too, and reap more points than what he/she spent
for upvoting/downvoting. This enforces more thinking and evaluation of
comments or stories before even upvoting or downvoting them.

~~~
TuaAmin13
I got the impression this was more of the Y! Answers option. You're in essence
"leveling up" and with each level up you're getting more features unlocked.
You unlock the ability to submit stories, or the ability to upvote/downvote
comments. I didn't take that as point cost to perform action X.

------
psawaya
Make it easier for new stories to get noticed before they fall off the new
page. It's a crapshoot if your submission gets noticed, and (it seems at
least) the stories on the front page come from the same domains and
submitters, probably because people tend to vote based on name recognition.

I realize that doesn't directly relate to comments, but I think some of the
declining quality of conversation owes to the fact that it's getting a bit
stale. How many blog articles about productivity can we discuss without some
decline?

I don't think we should ban political articles at all. In fact, I think less
blog posts about "are we in a bubble?" and more articles on economics,
science, philosophy, etc would make HN much more interesting. The median
comment here is still of much higher quality than at sites like reddit. And
although certain subjects can be sensitive, I doubt that banning these topics
will actually reduce meanness, it will just make the change in decorum harder
to notice.

Finally, a more extreme idea: why not add a second kind of vote? Perhaps we
could vote comments agree/disagree in addition to up or down. These could be
right and left arrows, to drive home the point that disagreeing with something
ought to be orthogonal to whether it adds to the conversation. We could weigh
these votes less, so that rankings more reflect how insightful we think
something is, instead of how popular.

~~~
pg
Would it work to make the new page longer?

~~~
there
yes, but maybe show things a bit differently as well. when items in /newest
make their way to the frontpage, remove them from /newest. links with 0
upvotes and 0 comments should fall off the page faster, or rather, any link
with at least one other upvote/comment should stick around longer to try to
gain traction.

~~~
gridspy
Perhaps a submission should only fall off the page when X unique visitors have
clicked on that link.

That way good content with poor headlines still has a shot.

------
user24
Limit us to N upvotes per day.

In other words - make votes precious.

That way people will think more about how to 'spend' their precious votes.

A similar thing works in poker. If you empty out your change jar and give
everyone a fixed amount to start, and at the end of the game it all goes back
in the jar, people play in a certain way. If you play for actual money, even
just change, the gameplay does often change for the better, because their
chips now have value.

At the moment we all have an infinite amount of votes to spend, so we can
casually upvote anything we find briefly interesting - because our votes have
no value to us.

By limiting the number available per day, we are forced to spend our votes
more wisely.

Alternatively, making upvote decrement our karma will also add perceived value
to the action of voting. However I think HN users care less about their karma
scores so I think this approach wouldn't work as well as limiting users to N
votes per 24 hours.

N can be fixed at, say 10, or increase with karma so 'better' users get more
votes and thus more influence.

~~~
jjcm
Slashdot does this with moderation, and I have a few problems with it. Namely,
I don't know which of the comments I'm currently reading are the top 5
comments that I'll read that day. Perhaps it's a slow news day in the morning,
and I spend all of my moderation points on comments that are "good enough".
Later in the evening something big breaks, and insightful comments abound
everywhere - suddenly I have no points to spend on those comments.

I think that instead of creating an atmosphere of better comments, this will
instead create a site that has higher rated comments in the morning, and is
stale later in the evening.

~~~
user24
Various possible solutions:

1) When is 'morning', exactly?

2) Allow N votes per hour instead of N per day

3) If (2) would devalue votes too much, allow N votes per 5 hour period.

------
solipsist
The problem lies within the deeply nested threads that continuously go back
and forth between a few select people. Most of the mean/dumb comments on the
first level thread are downvoted or flagged and moved to the bottom. This
makes it easy to read the high quality comments - just look at the top.

The problem occurs when you start reading into a nested thread of comments.
Users will sometimes argue 4 or 5 times back and forth, often becoming mean
and uncivil. What results is a somewhat personal discussion among a few people
that doesn't fit in with the rest of the thread. While the quality may
actually increase the deeper you go into a thread, the relevancy to the
original thread decreases (which matters most).

I think that this behavior is what is hurting HN's overall quality. Uncivil
and deeply nested threads like these are hard to keep track of and deeply get
out of control.

The solution:

    
    
      - hide deeply nested threads (greater than 3 or 4 comments deep) and
        let the users choose to show them
    
      - promote commenting in higher threads (this will come as a result 
        of hiding deeply nested threads) 
    
      - hide or lessen the visibility of threads consisting of comments
        from only 2 or 3 people

~~~
crasshopper
Occasionally intelligent discourse only _begins_ several comments in. We
wouldn't want to exclude that.

If "karma whores" drive the system, then the incentives created by this change
would drive them away from commenting on sub-threads. I guess "kw" probably
already post something snarky right under the top comment (and probably time
it).

The third of your points is your best idea (imho). Comments among just a few
people are less likely to be generally interesting.

------
geuis
Make voting on comments cost karma. Alternately, make new story submission
require at least 100 minimum karma level. I suspect the effect here would be
to reduce the number of frivolous and spammy submissions. When more high
quality submissions are the topics of conversation, the quality of comments
will go up.

~~~
randall
Slippery slope... I think Digg is the ultimate example of where the "elder
statesmen" become the only people that matter.

Anyone who's smart should be able to contribute w/o passing some sort of
exclusionary bar.

~~~
Alex3917
"Anyone who's smart should be able to contribute w/o passing some sort of
exclusionary bar."

The difference is that to get even one or two stories a week on the front page
of Digg, you basically had to devote your entire life to the site. Whereas
getting 100 karma doesn't take more than a couple weeks of casual use.

------
ChuckMcM
Extracting a requirement from the question, you have

Define bad comment : A comment which has either or both of the properties
'mean' and 'dumb' and is 'massively upvoted.'

Define Hacker News Health : The ratio of non-bad to bad comments.

In previous systems this function has been addressed by moderation whereby a
speaker for the culture has the authority to remove comments deemed to be
'bad' and thus by gardening the experience make it more 'good' for the
participants. Not a system that scales well.

I see a number of comments "Is this just another Reddit?" which suggests that
from a culture perspective there are immigrants from other groups who bring a
different definition of 'interesting' which has enough support from the group
to prevent them from being pruned early.

That suggests an experiment.

Add east west buttons to comments, and perhaps topics as well. Notionally the
value of 'east' is 'more like Hacker News' and the value of west is 'more
unlike Hacker News'. Let readers vote on what they see as being more or less
what they expect to see. Track their 'east/west' karma (perhaps we could call
it there 'wings' with a nod to left-wing and right-wing).

One could imagine then creating a 'fog' effect much like trending topics are
moved to the top of the page we could move top left topics to the top of the
page and top right topics to _a new page_. In the ideal world people would
self select which page they were more interested in, and HackerNews could in
fact develop a community much like Reddit algorithmically with their own start
page and their own high karma posters.

Could provide an interesting space to explore if nothing else. Probably a
publishable paper in the results if someone were so inclined to go there.

------
euroclydon
When tptacek flags a front page article (and tells us he did), I can't think
of a single time I have disagreed with him. Yet, the story usually remains,
for hours or indefinitely. So, find more people like tptacek, and give their
flags more weight.

In other words: Moderators who enforce the spirit of HN and have the ability
to just kill stuff. I'm really surprised this isn't happening already. If I go
post some derogatory remark on a heavily moderated blog or forum, it's get's
junked almost immediately.

~~~
pg
Actually that's something I've already changed. A few hours ago I made flags
have a lot more weight.

The old weights were ok for the more engaged users we had a year ago, but now
the ratio of votes to flags on a fluff story tends to be a lot higher.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
So that's why my submission plummeted so quickly. One person made a reasoned
argument for it not belonging, lots of people piled on and flagged it, hey
presto, gone.

Giving flags more weight is not necessarily the answer. Punishing people for
making bad comments is, I think, more important. Equally important is
punishing people for upvoting bad comments.

But now it's late here, and starting tomorrow I'm really not going to be here
for a while. Good luck PG, I hope you can find a way to reduce the mean-
spiritedness fluff, and make HN more pleasant again.

~~~
crasshopper
You could make flags scale concavely.

~~~
crasshopper
Come to think of it, maybe upvotes should scale concavely as well.

------
ig1
I was writing an open letter to HN on my blog for this topic, but this now
seems a more appropriate place to reply (apology about the style which seems
out of place in a comment):

Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share
links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and
discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was
discussed.

Sadly that time has long gone. As I write this, on the front page of HN there
are maybe 4-5 stories out of the top 30 that relate to startup topics.

Articles relevant to startups are being pushed out by generalist tech and
programming articles that are better served by the many many subreddits on
these topic. While it's open to debate whether these are on-topic on Hacker
News or not, HN is far less about startups than it used to be.

Many contributors to HN don't even see it as being about startups anymore,
even contributors who've been involved in HN for over a year are talking about
it as a tech or programming site. The startup stories that reach the frontpage
tend to be on technical topics, the non-startup tech audience of HN now means
stories focused on the non-technical aspects of startups such as marketing and
raising money make it to the front page far more rarely than they once did.

I remember complaining at one point about the number of stories about A/B
testing on the front page. I wish I could complain about that now.

Take a look at Gabriel's Ask YC archive - it was created to address the
startup questions that frequently turned up on HN, for many of these topics I
can't recall when I last saw them discussed on HN.

There are a hundred social networking sites that serve the tech community from
proggit to dzone, what differentiated HN was the focus on the startup
community. That focus is dying out, and we're becoming just another tech
social news site.

I don't think we can make HN be more about startups again, the audience has
changed too much for that, and it wouldn't be fair to the non-startup tech
community that's come to rely upon HN.

So instead I'd like propose that HN stays as it is, but pg creates a new HN
called Startup News, which has startups at it's heart as HN once did.

~~~
Jabbles
Presumably the name changed to reflect the fact that there are many things
unrelated to startups that the founding "hackers" wished to discuss. HN
_isn't_ entirely about startups now, in the same way Amazon is not purely
about books any more.

You seem to dislike the non-startup material, yet those older members who were
around at that time must have liked the discussions sprouting from the "more
generalist tech" posts, else the name wouldn't have been changed.

Thus, I reason that it is not the _range_ of topics submitted that is the
problem, but the _quality_ of the _posts_ and subsequent _comments_. I believe
the older members valued intelligent discussion on any topic (centered around
tech-startups).

I think a solution should concentrate on improving the _discussion_ of topics,
promoting those that spark the "best" (for some definition of "best")
conversations. Therefore I suggest:

More liberal use of the downvote button by those that have the ability (over
500). Number and score of comments should play a (larger?) factor in ranking
stories. More aggressive moderation of "off topic" or vacuous submissions and
comments.

~~~
ig1
When the name was changed to "Hacker", the term Hacker wasn't used in the tech
sense but rather in the same sense that it's used in the YC application form.
As in a clever unorthodox solution to a problem.

But over time people took it to mean hacker in the technology sense of the
term, and thus we now get reviews of Ubuntu on the front page, which you would
never have seen a few years ago.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
A final thought: If you don't discriminate between the actions of the vast
majority, and the actions of those identified as being aligned with your
desired intentions for the site, nothing will work. I can probably "prove"
that.

I think any solution will require the identification of individuals whose
actions are "more trustworthy," and giving them greater weight, or more
powers.

Anything else can and will be swamped by the majority, whose intentions you
have no control over, and no reason to trust.

~~~
andywood
Yes. Simple karma = democracy = power in numbers. That worked when the
majority were exemplary. That's no longer the case, therefore democracy now
works against the site. The solution is to equalize by giving asymmetric power
to the exemplary.

------
jacquesm
I think it is in part the comments but also very much the articles.

One very simple suggestion: an 'off topic' tab where stuff that does not fit
the HN bill can be moved to. An 'offtopic' link similar to the 'flag' link for
users with more than 5K karma, that answers the questions 'what do you get for
karma' nicely as well too.

~~~
euroclydon
Not having sub-HNs is refreshing. Introducing them would be to simultaneously
give up the fight and alter the nature of HN forever.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but since the content is there _anyway_ you might as well give it its own
spot and stop it from cluttering the homepage. Those that want their junk food
can have it and the rest of the readers get theirs too.

I'm not advocating 20 different subjects, just one, 'offtopic'. The place
where threads go that get too many upvotes to flag (because apparently they do
interest people) and that do not contribute to the topics of 'startup' or
'hacking'.

It's either something like that or _much_ more active moderation of the
content.

------
JesseAldridge
Looking at this comment page it's clear that there is an absolute deluge of
excellent ideas waiting to be implemented. The bottleneck here is pg. pg
doesn't scale. As far as I can tell, he's the one who does the vast majority
of work on Hacker News, and as the site grows -- and as YCombinator grows --
pg's (already huge) workload is only going to increase. This is, of course,
similar to the "Linus doesn't scale" problem faced by the Linux kernel, to
which the solution was git. [1] I expect a similar distributed solution is
needed for Hacker News.

Re-writing the software in a language more people understand (e.g. Python)
could be a good first step here. But I don't know if pg is willing to give up
on his silver bullet (arc).

Turning Hacker News into a business might help. Create a situation where
exceptional people can make lots money by figuring out how to make HN great
and let market forces do the rest. Although figuring out how to make money off
of content could be a pretty tough problem.

More generally, I think pg should be thinking less, "How can I improve Hacker
News?" and more, "How can I create an environment where other people can
improve Hacker News?"

I mean... investing in startups is a full-time job, running a high traffic
website is a full-time job, building a programming language is a full-time
job, raising a child is a full-time job... trying to do all four at once
probably isn't going to work.

[1]
[http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0957.h...](http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9809.3/0957.html)

------
tptacek
Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate
argumentative comments.

~~~
pg
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that
without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most
interesting comments in a thread.

Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread
are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for
individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users,
and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?

Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's
clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express
approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is
an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't
do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what
voting was _for_ , then this could break voting, which would in turn break the
sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.

~~~
scythe
>Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a
thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not
for individual leaves?

How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how
well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.

Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually
aren't the comments people are looking for.

~~~
pg
That is a great idea.

~~~
crasshopper
No offence to pg, but why did this comment get upvoted 9 times?

This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as
well as the number of points a comment gets.

~~~
jcl
Upvotes are sometimes used to indicate agreement.

~~~
gnosis
Yes, but in this case the upvoters could have simply upvoted the parent
comment pg was replying to.

Short "i agree" or "i disagree" type of comments are usually discouraged on
HN, as they don't really contribute to the discussion. Usually.

------
b_emery
3 words: Bayesian Comment Filter. Just does the opposite of what the spam
filter does. Use the corpus of great comments from the past to find great
comments of the present.

I'm only half joking. Fundamentally, the thread is about a filtering system.

~~~
pg
That could work, actually. Instead of focusing on discouraging bad comments,
maybe the answer is to promote good ones. Plus I have some code I could use
for that.

~~~
colinsidoti
But it raises the question, do you have a way to single out the corpus of good
comments from the past? If past up-votes were reliable I don't think this
thread would exist.

~~~
pg
I could train it on stuff from "the good old days."

~~~
crasshopper
What if I get a bunch of good comments from the good old days, train a
Bayesian filter on them, and then make a comment bot with bias in my favour?

Perhaps you could give _everyone_ a comment bot, like a green/red bar that
says whether the comment looks like low quality or high quality as you're
typing it. A lot of people might edit the comment to make it better, or simply
delete the comment (you could design UI to encourage this ... eg RBM's can
highlight which words look like they're causing the problem, or offer a Kill
Comment "X" when the comment is far into the red).

You could also train the bayesian filter on (graphwise) voting patterns,
rather than on comments as bags of words.

------
andywood
First, thank you for acknowledging this as a real problem. The quality of HN
is a function of the community. This doesn't just mean who's here - it means
who's here, _and_ how they act when they're here. While tweaking the "game
variables" on the site may help, I believe it's more important and to the
point to reinforce community standards somehow.

When I first discovered HN, I quickly learned by various cues that this is not
a place to drop sarcastic, one-line zingers, but rather a place to act as you
would in a real-life business setting. The cues included both the example of
the dominant commenters, and their chiding of non-conforming commenters. Over
time, with the growth of the site, there are proportionally fewer commenters
setting a strong example, and more commenters lowering the bar and getting
away with it.

We are conditioned to feel that democracy = good, but in online communities I
do not believe it is the case. Rather, when there were more "good" commenters,
democracy was on your side. The "good" commenters had the power of numbers.
Now, increasingly, the unconditioned, lower-quality commenters are beginning
to gain the power of numbers. In order to counter this, you must provide the
"good" commenters with a some other type of power.

You could hand select a number of members, based on your personal knowledge of
their historical comment quality, and how much you think they reflect the HN
that we want. Give them the ability to super-downvote. This status does not
need to be public. It's not a status-symbol. As a bonus, this could give the
exemplary members some small incentive for sticking around, by making them
feel like they can do something meaningful to fight for HN, beyond just
complaining.

Also, Eliezer has dealt with this problem quite a bit, rather successfully,
IMO. Maybe ask him.

------
goodside
"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b)
dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

Find a few examples of comments that are unambiguously (a), (b), and (c) and
have either you personally or someone you trust flag them as such. Next, take
the set of all people who upvoted the abc-flagged comments. Their votes now
have a 50% chance of not counting towards vote totals from now on, but in a
way that the user isn't shown that their votes aren't being counted -- perhaps
with an artificial "offset" vote that appears a few minutes later.

There's fun parameters one could throw in there too, like exponential decay on
the likelihood of a vote being magically offset that spikes back up every time
the user votes stupidly.

~~~
pg
Unfortunately I know that won't work because I've already tried that
experiment. For about a year I've been annotating such comments, but when I
analyzed who upvoted them, the upvotes were very broadly distributed.

~~~
goodside
Would it be possible to make public a data set of heavily up-voted comments
that suck and challenge the community to come up with algorithms that can
predict whether a given popular comment sucks or not? I'd think you could get
a fair amount of mileage just by measuring frequencies of certain technical
noun phrases.

I paused for a second at the privacy implications of this, but honestly all
comments are submitted here with the assumption that they will forever be
visible and subject to moderation or critique.

~~~
joshfraser
Even the best of us have been tempted to toss out a snarky comment or mean
response from time to time. There are comments I've made that I wouldn't have
posted if I had been challenged to improve it before posting. Since there
seems to be a correlation between one sentence comments and snark, perhaps a
"Are you sure you want to post that?" prompt would help for short comments.
Maybe show the same prompt for comments that contain certain words?

------
chaosmachine
This is probably 300 comments too late, but I mocked up a solution:

<http://i.imgur.com/nY4X4.png>

It's something I've suggested before, getting rid of downvotes and replacing
them with flags.

~~~
gnosis
An interesting idea. But, unfortunately, it's very open to abuse. There is no
guarantee the flagged comment has been flagged correctly.

Really, you're stuck with the same problem: just as there could be mass
upvotes of "poor" comments and mass downvotes of "good" comments, there could
be mass flagging of "good" comments as "spam", "dumb", or "mean".

~~~
chaosmachine
It shouldn't be too hard to limit abuse. Set appropriate thresholds, give less
weight to new accounts with low karma, ignore flags from users who frequently
flag inappropriately (this last one could be automated by comparing upvotes
from a list of "known good voters" against the flags. For example, if you flag
stuff that pg upvotes, you're probably flagging inappropriately).

------
silentbicycle
I think that having more content on the front page that isn't shallow industry
gossip would have a positive effect on discussions overall - they tend to drag
down the other threads, and bring in a lot of people who don't understand /
follow the commenting culture here.

The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first
to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is _continually_ posted.
Many interesting posts fall off the bottom of the new page within an hour - a
post has to quickly appeal to lots of people, or it's gone. This leads to
lowest-common-denominator submissions.

Instead of moronic "first post!" comments, we've got a plague of "first
submission!"s.

The sum of the scores on the new page divided by the oldest's age may be a
good metric. Currently, the total is 217, and the oldest two say "1 hour ago"
and "2 hours ago", roughly 90 minutes. That's only 2.4 points per minute, and
this thread (118 points, 1 hour ago) is a major outlier; without it, it's 1.1
per minute.

Whether you make submitting articles _cost_ karma (3-5 points?) and/or add a
penalty for posting an article that was subsequently flagged and deleted,
fewer dull submissions would improve discussions. (It would also help with
spam.)

~~~
JesseAldridge
One potential solution to this problem is to distribute the load of evaluating
the new page among the community. Look at StumbleUpon for an example of how
one might go about this. All new links go into a pool. The user clicks the
stumble button and a link is selected from the pool using a weighted random
algorithm -- urls with lots of upvotes are more likely to be selected, new
urls are more likely to get selected, etc. The user votes on the article, then
requests another.

Maybe users should have to vote on X links on the new page for every Y links
they view on the front page.

~~~
silentbicycle
While that makes some sense, I'd rather see the firehose turned down a bit -
otherwise the site is implicitly skewing itself toward the tastes of people
who have time to sit and rate links all day.

------
ChrisNorstrom
I don't know but maybe get rid of Karma that caries over from article to
article. This is what drove me insane about Reddit. The mean, smart ass,
slightly funny but useless comments made it to the top while other more useful
comments where completely ignored or buried. The problem with democracy is
"Bandwagon" + "herd mentality".

I myself tried this on TechCrunch and got up into the top 5 most "liked"
commenters. All I did was post snarky, rude ass, criticizing, comments that
appealed to the sarcastic douche bag within us all. It was easy. My faith in
humanity vanished over that time period because it was so easy to do.

------
sunir
Idea 1. Charge for memberships like Metafilter.

I believe in the Quaker rule, "Only speak when you can improve the silence."
Other people think speech is like squatting on land. You have to speak to gain
footing. By charging people for the privilege of speaking, you make them
consciously decide whether what they have to say is worth the $5 to join. They
will probably say no.

~~~
decadentcactus
When you say for memberships, shouldn't you mean charge for comments? It
wouldn't affect the site much if I could still sign in, save threads, set
procrast etc. Which would still be useful to many users.

~~~
sunir
You could make the charge wall control:

    
    
      * posting a comment
      * voting on a comment
      * submitting a link / question
      * voting on a submission
    

Each of those are debatable. For instance, submission voting might be open to
all but comment voting is not.

An interesting variant: You can 'keep' a link without paying, but if you are
paying, your 'keep' is the counted as a 'vote'.

------
jedsmith
Complete the fledgling environment of selectivity in one fell swoop and
explicitly say, in the guidelines, that low-karma users are no longer allowed
to participate. Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all
users below 5,000 karma. These meta posts, the how to vote posts, the
discussion here and in other threads, the lamenting about comment quality in
general: all of this aggravation is dancing around the central issue, which is
low-karma users turning Hacker News into something that the high-karma users
do not want. Period.

Just look at this thread. One person has _eight separate top-level comments_
on this item, and is winning popular support. A large number of them have
almost the exact same number of upvotes. You might as well rename HN to Shaped
in the Old Guard's Image and wall it off. Just get it overwith so people will
stop:

\- Writing tired farewell pieces, and calling it a good thing because they're
respected and high-karma

\- Then turning around and churning out blog content that is front-paged daily
on the community just departed from

\- Complaining about HN's slow decline towards Redditdom

\- Downvoting comments because they disagree with them

I know this sounds like snark, but it's totally honest. You have a big choice
to make here: either you foster and encourage new users to participate, or you
wall it off and keep HN in the bubble of functionality and community that the
old guard reminisces about.

As a relatively new contributor, I've never felt more unwelcome on a site than
I have here at times. It's not even about me. It's certainly not about
disrespect to those high-karma users who believe in this community the most.
It's about the community. If you want your community a certain way, then lock
it to the people who made it that way. I also intentionally set the
theoretical karma limit above my karma, because I'd love an excuse to not come
back.

Aside: All of this meta crap recently is setting up for HN to be disrupted by
a new community. I also find it telling that in the time it took me to submit
my comment and upvote the parent post -- say, ten seconds -- I was already at
zero.

~~~
SandB0x
> _Remove the ability to vote, comment, and perhaps read from all users below
> 5,000 karma._

This is hardly a good example to all the aspiring startup folks on how to
treat your users.

Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because they
know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick around
if the site were walled off?

Edit: Removed the accusation of trolling, apologies for that.

~~~
jedsmith
If I were trolling, would I expound upon my suggestion as I did? If you
stopped reading at that quotation, you're right: I'd be unsure if I were
trolling as well.

This is about what the community wants and needs. pg and the other long-term
users want the community to stay a certain way, hence this item itself;
closing off that community to only those that participated in the development
thereof will allow the community to remain where it is desired.

> Perhaps the old guard/high karma users keep posting here in part because
> they know they have a large audience. What makes you think they would stick
> around if the site were walled off?

The same thing that made them stick around when the site did not have a large
audience.

------
petervandijck
HN is beyond the point where you can improve comments with small adjustments
to the comments or karma system. History (on other sites) shows this. The
problem is sheer size.

There is only one real solution, which is to reduce size.

You can do that by closing new signups, which is a little bit like tying rope
around a girls feet to prevent them from growing. Not great, and probably
leading to rot.

Or you can do that by fragmenting up the conversations. Reddit has the rather
primitive subreddit system. It works somewhat. A better system is Twitter's
follow or Facebook's friend systems.

In either case, if you do this, the result would be something quite different
from the old HN. The uproar would be great, and lots of people would leave.

The alternative is the slow death of online communities with scale. I just
don't think that tweaks in the comment-karma system are going to solve this
problem.

Good luck!

------
tokenadult
_The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b)
dumb that (c) get massively upvoted._

a) If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member,
delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment
gained. That is something that can only be done by someone with curator powers
here, but the rest of us can be encouraged to flag such comments more, and
reminded not to upvote them.

b) If the comment is dumb, make a better comment in the same thread and
downvote the dumb comment, especially if the dumb comment already has
significant karma accrued. Anyone who has downvoting power (and user who has
made many upvoted comments) can do all of that, and anyone who can post a
comment can do some of that. Again, the curators can remind users from time to
time to maintain those standards.

c) All users can browse the bestcomments list

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

to search for massively upvoted comments that are still within the downvoting
time limit, and downvote those that are mean or dumb. Curators can delete
those comments as needed.

Example and reminders go a long way. (By the way, because I, and I suppose
most users, don't read this site exhaustively, I'm not fully aware which
recent comments may be the most problematic. But definitely feel free at any
time to provide me or other users with advice on how to raise the quality of
comments here.)

After edit: another comment from another user in this thread prompts me to ask
whether all new users who sign up see the site guidelines automatically or
not. That might also help a little, if it isn't already done. Posting links to
the site guidelines in threads with problems might also help.

~~~
akkartik
_"If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member,
delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment
gained."_

Even better, deduct everybody's vote on it from their karma. So downvoters get
+1, and upvoters get -1.

------
noblethrasher
The nuclear option: Periodically take the site down for a while and then
rebuild the community (kind of like the Matrix). The quality people will
likely stick around.

~~~
noblethrasher
Perhaps only users with a certain level of karma have it roll over to the next
version of HN. Everyone else gets reset (or even loses their account).

~~~
greendestiny
I think I'd be more tempted with the opposite. Either way a week's break for
HN a year would certainly have an interesting effect on the community.

------
Mz
A couple of things I have commented on previously/elsewhere on HN:

A) My understanding is that "formal culture" is the historical human antidote
to trying to interact with large numbers of folks they don't know all that
well. Older, more densely populated parts of the globe tend to be more formal
than American culture. Yet American culture is the primary influencer of many
online communities, including this one. The assumptions made by a less formal
culture and the practices which grow out of them start to cause problems when
you don't actually know people that well and it simply isn't possible to know
everyone here all that well with 100k uniques a day.

B) "Greet people warmly at the door": The general assumption that the ill-
mannered newcomers are The Problem tends to promote the problem. Greeting
people warmly who are new to the site and speaking with them gives them
opportunity and motive to learn the culture and try to fit in. Talking trash
about how they are mucking up the place and studiously ignoring them until you
are ready to chew them out gives them every reason to behave badly or to
assume no one really notices or cares what they do and little opportunity to
learn to fit into a polite culture. They don't ever even get to experience the
polite culture. All they experience is rejection, insults and such themselves.
"Eternal September" isn't because there are new people. It is because the new
people don't get inculcated. Hating them on sight and giving them a hard time
for simply being new (which is the undercurrent of a lot of posts here) is a
major fail if you want to preserve a valued culture. Culture is not preserved
by just hanging on to the old folks. It is preserved by teaching it to the new
people and helping it grow in a healthy manner.

I'm sure there's more but that's what readily comes to mind and, right this
very minute, I'm not up to giving it more thought or time and effort.

------
Locke
I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable.

The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of
solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe
there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions
devolve into:

    
    
        1. I have an idea!
        2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
        3. Oh, in that case we could just...
        4. But, then...
    

The "quality" of HN and it's community is a function of _many_ variables. It's
hard, maybe impossible, to tweak the site and expect predictable results (and,
there are always unintended consequences).

It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.

Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had
become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So,
let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll
be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to
wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-
side css hack to make HN look even _better_? Do we end up with more or fewer
designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen
to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a
prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is
overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?

I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while
longer.

~~~
Mz
_The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of
solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe
there isn't a solution._

I don't agree at all. Just because many people disagree does not mean there is
no answer. I think the problem is that this is a hacker site, hackers like to
put together technical solutions for moderating a forum, and forum moderation
is primarily a people-problem. Thus the best answers here seem to get largely
overlooked while people debate endlessly how to tweak the voting system (or
some variation thereof). I don't know what the solution to that issue is but
that doesn't mean it cannot be done.

Peace.

------
btilly
This was a long thread, and I have no idea whether my response will be
noticed. But I've been around a lot of online communities, for a lot of years,
and there is one thing that I have noticed. The key to sustaining quality
seems to be barriers to entry.

It doesn't much matter what the barrier is. A commenting system that crashes
and destroys conversations occasionally, driving away people who are not
sufficiently invested. A focused remit that drives away most people who see
the site. A small group that does not advertise. But I've never seen any
community sustain itself in a form that I want to be part of without some
barrier to limit who gets involved in that community.

I'm not entirely clear on what the reasons are. Is it that we can only track a
certain number of people? Is it that communities can only sustain themselves
if turnover stays low? I don't know. But I've observed the rule in multiple
places.

Given that, I've been surprised at how well HN held up. It started with a good
seed. People who find pg interesting have a reasonably focused remit. The site
lacks a lot of silly bells and whistles. People mostly find out about it
through word of mouth. But still in the end without some barrier to entry, any
sense of community is doomed. At least if my experience/opinions/etc is
accurate.

------
nhangen
Relatively new user here...

I found the site when someone submitted something and asked me to upvote it. I
didn't know what that was, so came here and made a stupid comment and got
downvoted. I didn't know what that meant or why it happened, and no one went
out of their way to explain it.

Months later, I have almost 1k karma and still didn't know who RiderofGiraffes
was, and don't find myself caring.

The real issue here is culture, and the cultivation of it. There is a culture,
but it's tough to find, and it's far from discoverable. Most of the links new
users need to know about, such as the top 20 list, are hidden deep in the
site. There aren't any avatars, and because of the strange nicknames, I never
know who I am talking to unless I click through and they happen to have listed
a URL or Twitter handle.

Point being - if you want people to act a certain way, I think you need to do
a better job of describing it. I say that to the entire community.

I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of that,
it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort of
behavior we see.

Just my .02, but this is what I'm picking up here.

I still love HN.

~~~
bootload
_"... The real issue here is culture, and the cultivation of it. There is a
culture, but it's tough to find, and it's far from discoverable. ..."_

The best place to start is read pg's essays ~
<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html> I got the feel for HN before HN existed
through reading.

 _"... I don't get the feeling of a nurturing environment here, and because of
that, it's sort of a "fend for yourself" environment, which leads to the sort
of behavior we see. .."_

One quick hack I use is every time I comment, find a good comment or story I
background check the user, find their twitter id, follow them and add them to
my contact list. I'll twit my HN list for you.

~~~
bootload
the list is here ~ <http://twitter.com/bootload/hackernews/members>

------
kulkarnic
I think I am too late to the discussion already, but I think all of pg's a),
b) and c) are caused by people who think that this is OK-behavior.

I think a new user should, by default, get "read-only" access. Once the
account ages, so the user sees what is acceptable behavior, should you get
write-access.

Another idea is to actually make good the name of the site ( _Hacker_ news).
EITHER a) Show us you actually are a hacker-- do you build things, or just
troll? Is your relation to technology deeper than "I read techcrunch?" This
could be a simple matter of adding a text-field or a mandatory
homepage/startup URL field, and asking (say) 3 longtime HNers to decide if the
"applicant" is interesting enough to the HN community.

OR b) get invited by a long-time HN-er to join (There should be a strong
disincentive to invite indiscriminately: for instance, everytime a person you
invite gets downvoted, you lose 0.2 karma points).

I know, this scheme sounds elitist. And it is. Yet, I can't think of a single
interesting HN-er this would filter out.

------
Tycho
I know you're talking about comments, but I did a quick snapshot of the front
page and color coded each submission by it's category

    
    
        blue = hardcore hacker stuff
    
        turquoise = industry-related light reading
    
        biege = acceptable entrepreneur/political commentry
    
        red = fluff, stuff we could do without
    
        black = meta (eg. this thread)
    

[http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=scw684&s=7](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=scw684&s=7)

That's a pretty healthy mixture if you ask me. Only about 10-15% or the
articles are unworthy of HN, and even that's debatable. The majority is
technical stuff, with a few valuable pieces on business/economics in general
sprinkled in.

So although some people seem to think the quality of comments is declining, I
still believe HN provides phenomenal quality in its capacity as 'news for
hackers.'

I'm not sure if changing the rules will do much good; it might have the
opposite effect. I think there's pro-active measures we can take which might
prove best, like: finding interesting people and inviting them to HN. Quora
would be a good recruitment ground.

One last point, I think the role of the founder/leader is very important to
online communities. I've been in other forums which went to absolute shit once
the 'pg-equivalent-person' ditched them in favour of Twitter. More essays from
Paul Graham, perhaps ones talking about online behaviour/ethos, would be a big
benefit :-)

~~~
yesimahuman
I too am not really worried about the site. I haven't been around as long as
some, but I've noticed more than anything that topics about startups that used
to be exciting are now getting stale. We've learned new things from HN that
leaves us looking for more and we aren't finding it yet. I trust in the
community and those writing about technical topics to keep pushing the limit
and teaching us new things. I don't want to see the mechanics of HN change too
drastically.

------
rlpb
1\. Set up a Twitter-like directed graph of users, so users can provide HN
with people they'd like to "follow". This graph need not be public.

2\. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or
downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple
people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself,
then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy voting is the sole purpose of the
follow graph, eg. "I want to vote the same way tptacek, cperciva and pg do".

Perhaps publish a leaderboard of top followed people and their voting history
to try and avoid a Digg situation.

Perhaps limit the number of people one person can follow. This would help with
performance as well.

Perhaps the number of proxy votes would need to affect the score of a comment
or submission logarithmically instead of linearly.

Edit: there may need to be a minimum level of karma needed to proxy vote to
avoid sockpuppets. Perhaps limit it to active accounts, too.

~~~
gnosis
I don't think this really solves the problem either.

The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality.

Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for
comments.

Only instead of having "direct democracy" ("rule of the mob"), you propose a
"representative democracy" ("rule of the elites").

While there's something to be said for the "representative democracy" approach
(namely, that at least the elites are familiar with the community's norms and
mores, unlike some random newbie) they are just as susceptible to making poor
decisions as the mob is.

In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good
decisions.

~~~
rlpb
> The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality.

Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed? If you want to avoid
this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place?
Without voting, what will be left of HN?

> Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for
> comments.

Again: isn't that what we have right now?

I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it. I perceive that part of the
problem is that the exceptional people who made HN what it is in the early
days now have little say compared to the newbie masses who are dragging it
down. The people in the middle (eg. myself) are a big number who increasingly
become disenfranchised and are less active, thus voting less, thus
exacerbating the problem.

> In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good
> decisions.

Here, the "follow" list would be private and only specifically there for you
to nominate who you think make good decisions. This gives those who reduce
their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice.

I don't see how you can separate popularity as you do. Why would I have a
popular person in my list if I didn't trust their decisions? He could still be
popular, just not in my list! Perhaps I should have called it a "proxy vote
list" instead of a "follow list".

A user who is in the list of many other users need not even be told who or how
many there are (the upvote total may need to be delayed or something like that
to achieve this). People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity.

~~~
gnosis
_"Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed?"_

Indeed. That's why HN is struggling with this problem, because HN chose to
build its system around voting. So now it has to deal with one of the
inevitable downsides of voting. Namely, that popularity is not necessarily
indicative of quality.

 _"If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of
voting in the first place?"_

Read through this thread. There are many suggestions.

 _"Without voting, what will be left of HN?"_

Comments, articles, and community.

But I should note that I am not suggesting we get rid of voting.

 _"isn't that [a populartiy contest for comments] what we have right now?"_

Yes. That's why I said your proposal was _"just another way of staging a
popularity contest for comments"_.

 _"I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it."_

I'm not so sure it is an improvement as much as it is a different way of
getting the same result, as it doesn't change the fundamental dynamic of the
lack of quality in highly rated comments.

 _"This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice
rather than a lesser voice."_

I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a
voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in
comment quality?

To me it seems the only thing your suggestion would lead to is that popular
users would become more popular, and the voices of less popular users would be
drowned out even more than they are now.

 _"People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity."_

But plenty of them are. That's part of the problem that having a karma score
at all or rating/sorting comments based on votes at all. People will write to
be more popular (which karma is a measure of).

~~~
rlpb
> I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a
> voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in
> comment quality?

Because users who don't upvote because there's nothing good to upvote are
still active users.

~~~
gnosis
If they are active, then by definition they are involved in the site (though
not necessarily by voting, they could also submit stories and make comments).

If they're not active, why should HN assume otherwise?

If there really is nothing good to upvote, then I don't see what the adoption
of the system you propose will do, as the extra proxy votes won't be used
(there's nothing good to upvote, remember?).

The other major problem with your proposal is that it will be very open to
gaming the system. Users could just create sockpuppet accounts to give their
primary account the votes of the sockpuppet accounts.

Of course, even with the present system users can create sockpuppet accounts.
But at least with the present system, voting from the sockpuppet accounts has
to be done manually rather than automatically being aggregated in to one
account by HN itself.

------
jcl
I think the main problem is that there are too many comments: The number of
comments has increased, but the number of comments that a person can
reasonably read, reply to, or vote on has stayed the same. Thus, comments
receive less moderation, and less of it from long-time HN users.

Part of the problem is the increase in the number of users. And there's not
much you can do about that other than to actively drive users away from the
site. (Difficult captcha? Erlang Fridays? Comic Sans?)

The other part of the problem is that the karma system rewards commenting. It
isn't considered appropriate to downvote a comment unless it is overtly
offensive or incorrect, so mediocre commenters don't receive signals when they
are contributing almost nothing to the conversation. In fact, a mediocre
commenter will comment _more_ , because more comments mean more chances for
random karma. And others see the mediocre comments and reciprocate. There is
no way to reward someone for _not_ commenting, even when it improves the site.

A number of the solutions already mentioned would help decrease the number of
comments. One additional one: Make more of the site's behavior conditional on
a high karma/post ratio rather than a high karma.

~~~
tspiteri
I agree that there are too many comments. Perhaps a fix would be to discourage
users from commenting by asking them politely not to. For example, the "add
comment" box could be removed from the story page, and you might need to click
on a link to add a comment, just as you usually have to do for a comment
reply. Then a note could show up every time reminding the users that they
should not comment if they do not believe their comment will add something
valuable to the discussion. I would think that most users come here because
they enjoy the quality of the discussion, and if reminded that their actions
are reducing that quality, they might hold back on commenting. Many times I
read a comment after writing it, see that although it does add a little, it
does not add enough to the discussion, and just close the tab without posting
the comment.

------
raganwald
One thing I wonder about is whether accumulating personal karma is a red
herring: trolls don't seem to care about their karma, and good folks may not
care either.

Perhaps the most important thing about upvotes and downvotes is how they
affect visibility. Everyone wants their voice to be heard, and some people
want the opportunity to influence whether other people's voices are heard or
not, e.g. by flagging stories or killing comments through downvoting.

If the big deal here is visibility, then I would concentrate on the algorithms
that decide when a comment thread is rendered gray or invisible and the
algorithms that decide the ranking of comment threads. I would look for
patterns of votes or commenting that might help distinguish "popular but
fluffy" from "popular and thought-provoking."

~~~
raganwald
Also, and this is really obvious, I would try to quantify the value of each
position on the front page. Given an "average" story at #1, how many votes
does it get? How long does it stay at #1? The answer is probably a curve of
some sort, or a surface, but the general idea is that if you know what the
typical #1 story gets, you can look at a story and determine whether it is
outperforming stories in #1 position or under-performing them. You can do the
same for all the positions on the page. You can determine the historical
likelihood that someone looking at the front page will upvote a story in
position #5

This data is interesting because now if you randomly perturb the front page,
say by putting a new story in position #5 and lying about how many points it
has. Show this perturbed page to a small sample of users and see if the story
beats the historical averages or not.

If that kind of thing worked, it could help correct for the phenomena where a
popular story stays popular just because it's popular. You can now rank
stories by how well they take advantage of their "real estate" on the front
page. Those that underperform the average sink, those that outperform the
average rise.

One hitch. This might not work if you tell people you're doing it.

------
diego
I'm surprised this book hasn't been mentioned here yet:

[http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-
Farm...](http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-
Farmer/dp/059615979X)

If you read that book and then look at HN, it's clear how its design
encourages behaviors that are not aligned with the goals of the community
managers.

~~~
crasshopper
diego, would you mind summarising for us what's wrong with the design?

~~~
diego
I'm playing by ear, but the one thing that stands out after reading the book
is the display of karma (user / comment / post scores). One thing the book
emphasizes is that if you display karma prominently, users will feel motivated
to perform actions that will improve their numbers. This means perhaps going
for a witty one-liner instead of a comment contrary to the community beliefs
that could be downvoted into oblivion. More here:

<http://buildingreputation.com/writings/reputation_wednesday/>

------
michael_nielsen
Many people have made interesting feature suggestions. However, the core
problem isn't features. It's developing a general understanding of how to
scale up online communities while preserving quality. pg has written before
about the benefits of essay-writing as a way of deepening one's understanding
of a problem:

"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write
anything... Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak
a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to
write them. That's why I write them... Just as inviting people over forces you
to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read
forces you to think well."

So why not write an essay on how to build large online communities?

------
tptacek
Have comments start at -1.

(Or, better yet, -thread_depth).

~~~
chc
That's kind of a "my amp goes up to 11" kind of thing, isn't it? You're just
changing the label for "no votes either way."

~~~
SandB0x
No, it assigns a cost of 2 points to commenting.

~~~
rbanffy
It could discourage dialogue. Some very good, troll-free, threads are also
very deep.

~~~
jjcm
Perhaps after a certain number of comments in a thread, it would no longer
cost karma to make additional comments? For the first one to three comments,
it requires a 2 karma down payment, following which you're free to have open
dialogue.

------
bdclimber14
I think the root cause is inherent to growth. As the number of naive new users
increases exponentially (assuming this is happening), the more experienced
portion of the community has a harder time swinging vote totals for quality
pieces. It's not that new users are stupid or malicious; new users are simply
uneducated about the type of comments and content that are most fitting with
HN. With more new users, the community gives affirmation of mediocre content
through votes.

I've been fairly active on HN for about 6 months. A year ago, I remember
submitting articles and making comments that, while at the time I thought were
fitting, I am now embarrassed of. (This also may be the case 6 months from now
for my current submissions).

Sure, I perused the introduction, FAQs, and other comments and articles.
However, I didn't get a real sense of quality until recently. Just like with
software development, the best way to learn is by doing.

Here are a few ideas:

\- Enforce some sort of social contract that users must agree to before
submitting articles. Describe appropriate usage to give users a sense of pride
in the community.

\- A combination of account age and page views could be used to ensure new
users are _experienced_ enough to participate. There are the obvious negative
side effects of this.

\- Allow high-karma users to send private messages (previously mentioned) to
users that submit inappropriate content informing them of the reasons why it
may not be best. Down-voting and public comments are too cold. A warm private
message from a 5 year HN veteran explaining how I can be a better member would
be welcoming.

The bottom line is that the quality decrease isn't from malicious users (rude
and negative comments aren't necessarily malicious in those users' eyes) but
from naive users.

------
tptacek
Add "Assume Good Faith" to the guidelines; this is one of the few Wikipedia
rules that I think really helps.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith>

------
tptacek
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for
instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.

~~~
pg
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get
flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if
flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it.

Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments,
and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for
incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your total
number of comments) you'd actually get kicked off the site temporarily.

~~~
dochtman
One of the Dutch news sites I frequent also has qualitatively different forms
of upvoting. E.g., you can upvote for humor, upvote for insight, upvote for
new information. By applying different metrics to different kinds of comments,
it might be easier to create the kind of balance you want.

~~~
Luyt
What site is that? I'm curious.

------
naner
Commenting is almost no-friction and there is an immediate psychological
reward in getting your voice heard. This makes it extremely easy to knee-jerk.
Perhaps you can A) make commenting cost more or B) delay the reward long
enough to force a re-evaluation before the comment goes public.

For A you might try making commenting cost karma in certain situations.

For B I've got no ideas. I'm thinking about how I sometimes will write an
emotionally charged email and then wait a day before sending it because I know
I'm unable to think clearly. Emotions will have cooled by then and the email
looks like it was written by a crazy person. There's not any way to force
delays on commenting that I can think of since the articles and discussions
here move so fast.

------
johnyzee
Thank God you've noticed. I seem to recall that you brushed off this
observation for quite some time.

One thing I've noticed repeatedly in the online communities that have scaled
succesfully (in a cultural sense) is that the founders/owners/admins tend to
take a very active role, both proactively by being role models and also by
stepping in and settings things straight whenever they feel the community is
straying too far from their vision. Reddit is a good example of this. Joel's
forums at joelonsoftware, which fostered a very tightly knit entrepreneur
community, were also heavily influenced by the omnipresence of the site owner.

Unfortunately this is not an elegant technical hack, just simple hard work on
the part of administrators.

------
Jarred
I'm fairly new here, but I've been in a lot of different internet communities
for several years now. This seems to happen to every major growing internet
community and maybe this is a way to both filter out the bad content and
encourage the good content.

What if user's had the option of investing karma into a submission/comment? If
a user wants to comment or send a submission then they have to spend some of
their karma points in order for other people to see it. This would bring the
submission/comment more default points but would be negative points toward the
submitter. That means it will appear higher on the page dependent on the
amount of points they invest in the post. When/if a submitter's post is
upvoted enough to pass the amount he invested, the submitter would gain karma.

I think this would work better because right now people can basically post
what they want without worrying about their karma going down very much. This
would do two things, firstly it would reduce the karma inflation, and secondly
it would encourage higher-quality submissions and discussions.

I originally said this here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403085>, but
I think this would be a better place to say it.

------
mbesto
I think I have a simple fix:

When you hover the up arrow button a tooltip should say "This comment ADDS to
the discussion" and on a down "This comment DOESNT ADD to the discussion". Too
often I think people just click the arrows based on (1) the username (2) "oh
ya I agree, I hate that too!".

Up/down voting should be an extension of the community's ability to assess
whether someone's opinion is adding to the community thought process. We often
forget that (I do myself).

------
tptacek
Allow commenters themselves to publicly flag their own comments to prevent
them from accruing karma. Call it the "sincerity" flag. Actually, this is my
#1 top feature request for HN, period.

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, can you elaborate?

~~~
tptacek
The parent to your comment, my original comment, is currently scored at 1. I
would like to push a button to make 1 the ceiling score for that comment. I
would actually like a button to make 1 the ceiling score for all my comments,
too.

~~~
akkartik
But how would this help improve comments? Wouldn't the worst-behaved also be
the least likely to hit such a button?

~~~
tptacek
One reason comment threads get tendentious is when people think other people
are commenting to game the thread and collect karma. The karma-ceiling flag
tries to say "this is a good faith comment".

~~~
akkartik
Ok, I see. I haven't noticed that phenomenon of gaming the thread. Is it so
common that this would be the best way to fix comments?

~~~
scott_s
I would use this feature for any instance where I try to explain to a new user
what kind of tone our community strives for. It would be a way to assure them
that I'm explaining this to them for the good of the community, not to garner
more karma.

------
socksy
I see two issues in comment threads:

1) Despite guidelines, people vote up comments they agree with. If they have
enough karma, they vote down ones they disagree with. There's little you can
do to change such a situation

This is inadequate — sometimes you can see interesting and informative posts
up the top; sometimes interesting posts have a relatively low comment score,
simply because they are controversial. The more specific and detailed a post
is, the more chances they have to offend (or just not overall agreement), and
the more chances they have to get a downvote/not be voted on. If a comment is
very general, (eg "How awful.") it will be a lot less controversial, and thus
more get more votes.

On the other hand, it can be useful to see comment scores as a barometer to
popularity — which framework/language/cool solution for a specific problem is
upvoted the most can be genuinely useful information.

This is a problem that many sites that implement "voting" have. I'm not
entirely sure of what a solution can be. One might be that there be two
metrics — one for interestingness/helpfulness/what the guidelines are for
anyway. The other for whether you agree with a post(/find it funny). There are
potential problems with this idea, for instance, it complicates voting (the
simplicity of a vote increasing a comment's score is one that everyone can
understand). However, I think that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

2) Comment threads that try to be increasingly funny, with signal to noise
ratio decreasing with every increase in depth. I often find myself scrolling
down past a lot of uninteresting and unimportant comments to get to the next
comment that isn't part of the first thread. This is a little harder to
tackle, as sometimes good comments can be revealing deep in a thread full of
mediocre ones, making it difficult to just fold comments part a certain level.
Perhaps only fold when most of the comments are under a certain threshold
(like 5 points)?

------
peterlai
You could help people discover good comments by allowing them to collapse
comment threads. A simple [-] button by each comment should do the trick.

~~~
matthodan
I like this idea-- you might even start with comments collapsed so users can
quickly identify threads of interest. Here is a simple mock-up of what I'm
envisioning:

<http://imgur.com/SGbyG>

------
SoftwarePatent
Allow us to mark certain accounts as "friends" or "favorites". Then on every
comment and article, display points originating from "favorites". Like "77
points by pg / 15 points from friends." This preserves the democratic aspect
of the site, while giving users valuable information they can use to skip
boring content.

------
pbiggar
Here's one you suggested to me: have people pay to comment.

If this were any other website, I'd suggest simply requiring a Facebook or
twitter account to log in. Worked for Gawker et al, but it won't fly with this
demographic.

So just charge people $1 to activate their account. It'll reduce the shite,
and 99% of the commenters won't care. What happens to the edge-cases of people
who don't have a credit card is an open question, but I suggest validating
them some other way (solve a problem in Lisp perhaps).

~~~
gnosis
I don't think this solves the problem.

It just restricts the site to those people who can/will pay.

There are plenty of people who'll gladly pay for the privilege of trolling or
posting garbage. And the more they pay the more entitled they feel to post
whatever the hell they want.

~~~
pbiggar
And then they are kicked off, and must pay again.

------
dkokelley
Limit comments? I think that commenting must COST the poster something, which
means that for a comment to be worth while, it must justify the cost.

Karma might be worth it, but a: I don't think posters value it THAT much, and
b: this doesn't prevent stupid comments that are likely to gain popular
support. In fact it might encourage it.

Instead I would say that a user gets a limited supply of comments to post.
Then, the user must decide if their 'lol this made my day' comment is worth
giving up a portion of a limited resource.

Determining the appropriate way to limit comment supply without a major
negative impact on positive replies is the tricky part. Karma, membership
length, submissions and comments could calculate into the figure. Is the
figure reset every day, week, month? I don't know. Hopefully this works as
brainstorming food.

------
hanifvirani
How about weighted votes based on karma? After a certain karma threshold, your
vote value is doubled. The system could also have multiple levels. For e.g. at
2k karma, when you upvote/downvote a post, it gains/loses 2 points. At 5k
karma, 3 points and so on. Or maybe the user can choose his vote value,
limited by his maximum vote value. Perhaps we can also use the average karma
somewhere in this equation.

Another suggestion is the ability to downvote submissions after a certain
karma threshold. We can use the weighted vote system here as well.

Yet another suggestion is 12 hours/24 hours/1 week bans.

Another problem that I admit facing is the unwillingness to post something
with the fear of it not getting upvoted and thus affecting my average karma,
even though it might have added value to the discussion.

------
webwright
Moderators?

You could have people who have over X karma (or people you hand pick) have
disproportionate abilities to downvote or nuke comments/stories that are mean
or dumb.

It would be easy to train a small circle of people how to moderate well. It
seems nigh impossible to train the entire userbase of HN to do it.

~~~
jcl
HN already has hand-picked moderators (mostly YC alums, IIRC) with the power
to kill bad stories and users. This seems to have worked well for stories, but
I guess it hasn't scaled to comments.

------
ComputerGuru
A hard limit on the maximum upvotes a comment can get. Say, 25.

~~~
JeffL
Also a limit on how much Karma you can get from one article submission. A lot
of times it feels like luck when someone submits something and gets hundreds
of Karma for it because they posted it first.

------
znt
A turkish message board (www.eksisozluk.com) with about 200k users faces the
same problem, and uses moderated user acceptance as a quality filter.

First of all if you want to create an account you have to wait for the mods to
announce application submission dates.

If you can manage to create an account during that period, you are made a
'rookie' and what you submit to the message board is invisible to everyone,
except mods. You are only allowed to post a total of 10 messages.

When you are done posting your first entries, you wait for mods to read and
evaluate the value you bring to the platform and if you keep within the format
& legal limits of the board. If so, you are made a normal user.

A similar process would especially prevent the bots spamming this place.

------
brk
Lots of good suggestions, forgive me if my suggestions are a dupe that I
missed.

1)For certain high-profile domains, assign no karma to submissions. This would
probably a hand-curated list of domains, but would probably include:
Techcrunch, pg essays, avc.com, etc.

2)Allow users above X karma (500?) to vote to give any other user a "time
out". At some threshold (25?) of votes, that user is muted for 1 week.

3)For any users that submits more than 5 articles from the same
domain/subdomain, either suspend karma accumulation or suspend their ability
to submit until they reach some mix of other submissions with an average score
above 10

4)Create an article tagging system, and/or a way for users to ignore
submissions on certain topics and/or from particular domains.

------
Groxx
Don't make submissions give the submitter karma. Currently, the fast way to
gain karma is to be the first to submit a big story, and duplicates abound
because everyone tries something different.

If there's no incentive, there's no race.

I, personally, also like the up-votes costing karma. It'd make the act much
much more costly to perform, so high voted comments will be more likely to be
selected on content than laughs.

~~~
kxs
I think so too. I don't know whether submissions shouldn't give any karma, but
in my opionion it should be limited. For instance they could start out with 0
points and the submitter gets a point for every 50 upvotes the story gets or
something like that. Another possibility would be to seperate submission and
comment karma and may be have them limited in some way as well. There is
currently a big mismatch, you'd need ~5 highly "appreciated" comments to get
the same amount of karma one medium apple story "earns" you. This makes karma
as - some sort of metric - less useful.

Regarding the "laughs" I don't really understand what the big deal is. I like
a funny/sarcastic (read: not stupid) comment that shows at least some insight
or understanding of the matter or just pokes fun at a particular view. This is
necessary and healthy for a discussion.

------
rexreed
It sounds like Hacker News needs a reason for being. Who is the audience? What
is the value proposition? Shouldn't the needs of the audience and the
"problem" HN is solving be the answer to this question?

For me, I came to HN for:

* A free, online location where people can exchange ideas and commentary relevant to tech startups, that welcomes newcomers and experienced alike.

Perhaps it's different for others:

* A place to collect points to boost one's ego and sense of self-worth in front of peers.

* A paid site for members of a small community to exchange topics in a way closed to outsiders

* A place for those who have earned a role as experts or taste-makers to evaluate and/or judge the ideas of others.

Looks like there's no consensus, hence the reason for HN's decline.

~~~
crasshopper
rexreed, I really like where you're going with this. Without clearly stated
goals (what to achieve and what to avoid) as well as data on what has already
happened, and a theory of why various groups of commenters behave as they do,
a solution is unlikely.

------
pumpmylemma
Consider starting (or merely sanctifying) a HN IRC channel or webchat. I think
a lot of people comment and visit HN now just for something to do; they are
bored and want to do some intellectual sparing.

If there was a irc.ycombinator.com with real-time chat topics, it might help
separate "the wheat from the chaff," so to speak.

E.G. #japan-nuclear-chat

If not a chat, I'd say focus on something that doesn't fight the size of the
community. Personally, I'd prefer if HN was shrunk to like '08 levels, but
that's not going to happen. I think adding a service that allows for water
cooler talk but keeps it isolated from deep technical discussions would work
better than karmic tinkering at this point.

~~~
gnosis
Check out #startups on freenode.

------
sunir
Idea 3. Enlarge space. There are too many people in the common agora, so split
up the community into smaller, more focused spaces, akin to Reddit. For
instance, there are natural categories here around news, programming,
business, science, and politics.

<http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/EnlargeSpace>

------
julius
Limit the number of upvotes to 1 per thread. So the user has to choose the
best comment.

This adds a cost to upvoting just like the "N upvotes per day" ideas (which I
like a lot).

------
ig1
We could penalize commenters not using their real name.

Techcrunch comment quality has improved by an order of magnitude and trolls
have been largely wiped out since they started requiring people use Facebook
or Yahoo accounts to comment.

~~~
pg
I'm considering that, possibly without disclosing on the site who the user is;
just having to authenticate oneself at all would probably help.

~~~
gnosis
I value my privacy. If I was required to use my real name here, I'd wish HN
good luck and move somewhere else.

~~~
ig1
That's why I used the term "penalize", rather than "require". We could for
example give comments from named users a higher default score.

~~~
gnosis
This reminds me of how Slashdot allows unregistered users to post under the
monicker "Anonymous Coward" (AC), and by default gives all such posts a score
of 0, while the posts of registered users start off with a score of 1.

Combined with Slashdot's default filtering (only comments highly rated
comments are visible by default) and the huge flood of comments that popular
stories get, very few people ever read the posts of AC's.

I've never had a Slashdot account myself, and have always posted anonymously.
I haven't posted a lot, but I feel the posts I did make were all carefully
considered, polite, and contributed to the discussion. But, because of
Slashdot's discrimination against anonymous comments, they were rarely upvoted
(and therefore rarely read by most users, who have thier comment filters set
to only read higher rated comments).

Which is kind of sad, when you consider some of the utter garbage that gets
upvoted there all the time, and considering that every comment (no matter how
awful) made by a registered user starts off with a higher score by default.

Now that's not to say that Slashdot doesn't have good reason to rate anonymous
comments lower than the comments of registered users. There are plenty of
anonymous trolls of Slashdot, and that's one way of dealing with them.

That's also not to say that on HN, giving lower default ratings to
pseudonymous comments than to comments left by authenticated users would
necessarily be a bad thing.

But it should be noted that there are many high quality pseudonymous comments
on HN right now (as only a relatively small minority of people use their real
names here), and I'm not so sure how the HN community would react if the
people who've revealed their names started to dominate the discussions, or if
the comments by pseudonymous users were penalized by default.

I suppose that as long as pseudonymous posts weren't censored (as AC posts
effectively are through the filtering mechanism on Slashdot), then it wouldn't
be so bad. But I have a feeling that such filtering (and effective censorship)
will inevitably come to HN sooner or later. And then pseudonymous users would
become even more second-class citizens. And to that I'd really have to be
opposed.

There are better ways of dealing with the decline in comment quality than
penalizing pseudonymity.

------
bvi
Flag comments (essentially public shaming). Look at how Quora does it. If a
user's reply is not in line with the question, other users flag it as "not
helpful" (and explain why below).

So the more the people who flag stupid comments (instead of just downvoting),
the more these comments should descend to the bottom, regardless of number of
votes.

------
revorad
The problem with these posts on the declining quality of HN is that people
can't agree upon what the ideal comment quality should be, just like they
can't agree on what stories should be on HN.

I propose we have complete transparency.

PG, please start by giving 10 examples of the kind of comments you are most
worried about, so that you define the problem in very clear terms. There might
be disagreements and we need to surface those before suggesting solutions to a
vague problem.

Extending the idea of transparency generally, make all votes public, such that
everyone can see who voted what.

------
crasshopper
Weight upvotes differently as they come from different people -- or, play
around with displaying different "top" content to different users.

Some starting places might be:

* upvotes from someone who reads regularly but votes irregularly count more

* upvotes from IP's that have not clicked through count less

* using a collaborative filter on upvotes to guess which stories are more likely to appeal to different readers

* randomly putting a few threads or stories out of order for each user

* users who, early on, vote-up comments that are voted up later are rewarded (f''<0 or just a ceiling on the reward like 10 upvotes) with their upvotes being worth more

* modal version of the above, using a pagerank style algorithm to calculate the helpfulness of users

* upvotes from people with more karma are worth more (again f''<0)

* mess around with sub-thread weighting. I don't know how you do it right now but it seems like a good comment on a lower sub-thread is less likely to be seen than a mediocre comment right below the +43 top comment.

* mess around with page-placement weighting. The very top is most likely to be seen and voted on. 3/4 of the way down is very likely to not be seen -- so a vote either way means more there.

* limit the number of upvotes each user gets. Could be per time, per story, per karma....

I didn't use HN a year or two ago, but it seems to me that across such social
news sites the following types of content are unjustifiably upvoted:

\- confidence

\- lists of books

\- slams (mother###ker)

\- references to high-IQ stuff

\- certain lengths are preferred [must be 2-3 para's long to get hugely
upvoted, 2-3 sentences has a higher prob. of just a few points]

If you do some more research perhaps you could just decide on what are "bad"
kinds of comments, such as negativity, and use text mining / sentiment
analysis to detect them and hold back their points.

Using any of the - ideas would force HN designers to commit to what actually
_constitutes_ bad content, rather than social engineering (* ideas).

------
ankeshk
Let moderators mark a comment as "not useful". And everyone who voted for that
comment earns negative karma. This will make people think twice before voting
for a comment. Dumb and mean comments won't be voted on.

This allows you and the mods to set the tone for comments.

Of course, the weak point is - moderators bias may show up. And a worthy
comment may be marked as not useful occasionally. So depending on the number
of moderators you have, you could make it so that the minimum criteria is x
number of moderators have to mark a comment as not useful.

------
lhnz
The problem is that as a group of geeks get diluted by newbies the
intelligence level of the group goes down. As the intelligence level decreases
the ability for this group to filter for the conversations previously highly
voted decreases. More intelligent people filter for more intelligent stories
and comments. (Is reddit a worse community? No. Does it have a different
audience? Yes. That is what is happening here.)

I know this is an offensive idea, but you simply have to decide whether to
cater for the elites or the lowest common denominator. As time progresses the
people just joining now will look back on this time as a golden age of HN --
it will get worse -- and in the future there will be a new wave of lower
intelligence HN'ers. That is how it always is.

The solution I would prefer is (1) allowing users to curate their own
experience with far greater granularity than allowed on a site such as Reddit.
That is, use twitter like ideas of followers and lists. Allow us to choose who
we see comments and stories from. I care about the votes from these people
much more than somebody who just joined a couple of weeks ago and hasn't
programmed or owned a startup company. (2) giving users with popularity in the
community, moderation power similar to the kind found on StackOverflow. The
power to close topics. Respond to bad usages of the vote button. Respond to
flags. Perhaps even the power to moderate comments.

------
mikek
How about notifying people when their comments have been flagged and pointing
them to the site guidelines?

------
eof
It's a significant change, but I think the way to solve the problem generally
is to have move than one dimension to vote on.

As social sites rise in popularity, common denominator posts such as humor or
common circle jerking are going to rise to the top.

The answer, I think, is to allow people to vote on multiple metrics: 'cool',
'funny', 'good idea', 'hacker porn'.

With those separate signals it would be easier to tweak the algorithm to get
the front page looking 'like you want it to,' or the users could choose how
they want their posts to be ranked.

------
Sargis
Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter
with the invited person.

~~~
tptacek
Thus ensuring that we don't get spontaneous comments from e.g. the UX guy at
Zappos on that story about Zappos. A non-starter, I think.

~~~
ig1
That could be worked around, contributing could be invite only, but also allow
a non-invited contributor to post but their post would be collapsed (or at a
negative score) by default until an invited contributor voted it up.

------
bonaldi
This is a fairly classic problem of forum scale. If people don't have an
investment in their profile and what it stands for, they won't care about that
persona, and you quickly fall victim to the Law of Anonymity.

Number of suggestions to solve it:

1) Put a real value on user accounts. Charge $5 for them, or otherwise make
them hard to get -- perhaps invite-only from users with a certain rating -- so
that they are felt to be valuable.

2) Active editing. Assigning a numeric value to everything a user does only
goes so far: eventually there has to be a consequence for their posts (greater
than it going grey). It's OK to ban users who are all noise, after a fair
warning.

More controversially:

I think threads re-ordering themselves make it incredibly difficult to follow
a conversation. Because comments move around, when you return to a thread you
either have to re-read or re-skim multiple comments that you've already read.
The alternative is to treat threads as one-shot jobs. Visit once, don't come
back. That's death to conversation, and conversation is the heart of a
community.

It's this reason, I suspect, people don't often post meaty comments in threads
once they already have a good few comments in them -- they know they'll never
get the traction of upvotes to stay near the top, so why bother? The fix:

3) Flat threads. Don't rearrange, don't indent. Show scores if you will, but
don't order based on them. The longest-lived web communities, the ones with
the best conversations, from the Well to Metafilter, all have this in common.

------
anurag
It would be a big change, but enforcing real identities could help. Very few
top commenters on HN are anonymous, and people are much more likely to be rude
or intellectually lazy when no one knows its them. Given HN's readership there
is a big incentive for most users to appear smart and nice through their HN
activity - if potential co-founders, investors and clients could dig up my
mean/dumb comment (or my upvote of one), I would be less impulsive in
commenting and upvoting.

~~~
logic
I'm afraid I can't get behind this idea.

First, we've had excellent "Ask HN" submissions in the past which tried to
discuss private startup-specific problems that a partner or founder was
having. These discussions were timely and relevant, and we were only able to
have them because the poster felt they could present their issue anonymously.

Second, I don't believe you've thought through the overhead of your
suggestion. Does pg hand-approve new accounts, requiring a faxed copy of a
driver's license or other state-issued identification? Or do we wait until
someone flags an account as "possiblity not a true identify", and, again,
burden pg with chasing that person down until they prove they are who they
claim, and with dealing with the complaints it will generate?

~~~
anurag
Regarding your first point - you could enable a special Anon mode and have the
user jump through hoops to comment anonymously. I believe impulsive upvotes
and comments are the primary reason for declining quality and making real
identities the default choice would avoid that.

Regarding your second point - tying into existing identity providers like
Facebook would have little overhead beyond the initial implementation. If you
wanted to go a step further, you could create an automated phone verification
system, like the one Google uses for new accounts. Again, the intent would be
to make it _harder_ to comment or upvote anonymously, not impossible.

------
rexreed
Get rid of the whole point system. I go to HN for the community, not to
collect points. It seems to provide incentives for the wrong behavior, even
tho I understand that it was originally intended to do the exact opposite.

A community stands or falls on the quality of the interactions. Therefore to a
certain extent, you have to let it thrive or die on its own.

Solely my opinion, but I see points as getting in the way, motivating bad
behavior, and not relevant to why I come to HN.

~~~
gnosis
Karma can also provide a subtle (or not so subtle) incentive to good behavior.

For instance, I've seen many instances of newbies making an "lol" or "wtf?"
comment only to be quickly downvoted in to oblivion.

Hopefully it doesn't take much of that for them to get the point.

Also, the downvoting provides a quick and easy way for the community to
express displeasure at someone violating the community's norms, without
needing to write a long post explaining just why a comment consisting solely
of "lol" or "wtf?" isn't appropriate.

On the othe hand, it's clear that karma is not a panacea, that it can be
gamed, that it can encourage an echo chamber effect, and that it scales poorly
when a site becomes as large as HN.

------
Skywing
Perhaps some logic, during new thread creation, that looks for similar, older
threads? Prompt the user to comment in an existing thread if it's very
similar. Much like StackOverflow, if I recall. This may reduce duplicates.

It appears to me that most of the URL submissions are just tech blog websites
using HN as a tool to drive traffic. There are even users out there that just
wait for a new blog post by jacquesm so that they can post it for free karma.
I think in situations like this, karma and voting become less useful because
people will up vote just so that something might land on the front page, for
traffic.

This leads me to another trend I see a ton in #startups. Somebody will create
a new submission and link it on IRC and ask for free up votes so that it gets
more visibility. Once again, this is where up votes aren't being used
properly. But, I also think it highlights a potential difficulty for valuable
new submissions - it's difficult to get that initial visibility and up votes.
Perhaps to remedy this, make the "/newest" section be the default section, and
move the highest voted to something that you have to navigate to. This will at
least highlight new entries for people just hitting the main URL.

------
tantadruj
I see this is a question of group culture. We learn by looking around and
imitating. We all acknowledge this behavior when advising startups to ship
products and learn on the way. This group is no different; the main difference
is, that it grows too fast to learn from old members and reading a guideline
can be compared to reading a book about startups versus doing it. Here are my
suggestions I hope they will be helpful:

for all new users and all existing users with karma<100

* on create account page give link to Guidelines to read and before signing up give us a quiz with 20 questions to assess our understanding of the most important ones. This would also give us a clear message that attitude and quality is very important on HN.

for all users

* rename "comments" to "thoughts" and add "chat" link to convore/wompt for a relaxed discussion. From "chats" users can deduct quality material to "thougts" for history value.

for users with karma<100

* include explanations on down-votes so we can understand our mistakes an learn from them. Give us a chance to become better rather then killing us and wait for us to reappear as yet another troll.

* make submit button on "thoughts" to countdown 10 seconds (with bail-out option) to give us time to rethink if the post is really useful

------
bootload
_"... fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN ... Anyone have
any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here. ..."_

In any group of people where the cost of joining is minimal and the freedom
reins are loose, you will see behavioural changes mutate in ways resembling
Golding's _"Lord of the Flies"_. The big problem with HN is the founder
assumption that we (users) will be a) civil b) willing, positive contributors
and c) thoughtful. Maintaining this requires some means of natural selection.
At first it was probably a combination of being curious, an early adopter and
nerd-like. Some (quick & possibly stupid) ideas:

\- intellectual paywall: add a penalty of a kind that selects
readers/contributors

\- classifier: run a classifier that categorises users by type and apply rules
(behaviour modifier)

\- change focus of HN to News with sub hacker focus (radical focus change)

\- add a real minimal paywall sending $ to something like EFF or other hacker
friendly charity (penalise by currency - bad)

\- stop HN altogether (deny)

\- wipe the slate clean & build a new HN like community but with
<http://perlmonk.org> like progression of privs by tasks (enforced discipline)
at start of user creation.

------
jp
Display percentages instead of points relative to sub-tree total. This way
points are hidden but relevance stays intact. Then use colors instead of
numbers to indicate "good" sub-trees so that people have to convert
hexadecimal values to extract the relative karma. Then add a hidden karma-
boost mode where a up-voting "short term good commenter" indicates the
presence of another "short term good commenter". Add another view called
"contested" where down voted links can get a second chance. This might reduce
group-think and content-shaping. Let "short term good commenter" double vote
on contested links. Add a content merge option to reduce or group duplicates.

I think people are mean because they get down voted a lot by people who "play"
HN like WOW and everyone non-omg-erlang is a target. And lots of people here
think KARMA == FREE TRAFFIC SPELL. Because spending most of your life on HN
showcases how busy you are making money. Although.. nobody will ever read this
comment because the thread is already two hours old and the in-crowd has
already started writing meta posts that will take over the front page two
hours from now.

Or maybe this is all about.. hello TechCrunch readers !

------
crasshopper
Bias in favour of upvotes from the bottom of the page.

Everybody scrolls from the top down. Those who vote for lower-down stories are
less likely to be amplifying the hive mind.

------
duck
Let's make karma actually worth something. To do this, change these items:

1) You can submit _one_ link a day. Additional submits cost karma.

2) Costs karma to reply to any comment. Top level comments seem to already
filter okay. If you get downvotes on the comment you made the karma cost is a
multiple of that.

I also think some things would help in general:

1) Title/Domain Regex - Allow me to specify a regex to exclude things from the
frontpage. For example /Apple|iPad|techcrunch/.

2) You have to have 10 or 20 karma to do anything besides top thread comments.
It would be easy to get that with a little effort, but it would pretty much
eliminate all the spam and low hanging crap.

3) Have a option to (turned on by default) to collapse comments using the
common +/- interface and display the _total_ score for that thread. I think
then you would be able to focus and find the good threads quickly. Coming into
this discussion 5 hrs after the fact like I am doing is where this is really
needed.

4) This is a big one, but I will throw it out there. Create an API. With that
I think a LOT of smart people (instead of a few) could play with all of this
and maybe find somethings that no one here is currently thinking of.

------
noahl
I don't know the solution, but let me offer a suggestion as to what the cause
of the problem is.

I think the issue is that the things that seem insightful to relatively
unskilled programmers seem obvious to very skilled ones. A lot of the blog
posts I see on sites like this rehash issues that I thought were settled a
long time ago, but what's happening is that people understand things _for
themselves_ over and over again. And it's actually helpful when they write it
up, because their writeups then lead other people to understand these things.
Thus there is a steady stream of posts about the same set of ideas _that are
always helpful to people, but are still clogging HN_.

The trouble is that there's no way for people who have already understood
something to stop seeing the same old posts. I see three options: \- get rid
of the less-skilled people \- keep the less-skilled people, but stop them from
learning from these posts \- somehow let people opt out of seeing posts on
things they understand, but keep them around for other people to see

It seems obvious that the third solution is correct, but I don't yet know how
to do it.

~~~
crasshopper
Another possible response to this problem would be to have "sticky" ideas that
somehow define what HN is about. Ie, if you're new here, read some of this
stuff before you start commenting.

------
randall
I understand this is primarily about comment quality, but I had an idea for
keeping story quality high: Score votes via bookmarklet as higher than a
standard vote. That'd be one way to ensure that someone actually _read_ a
story, rather than just upvoted a catchy headline.

Naturally this would have to be kept secret, since it'd invariably lead to a
potential voting ring issue.

------
dchs
How about a basic API (make comments/votes/users available as JSON objects) so
people can build different filters and see what works?

------
GHFigs
Hand out short-term (up to 24-hour) mandatory noprocrast vacations (i.e. bans)
freely, visibly, and arbitrarily. If somebody makes a stupid comment, they get
asked to leave for a while, and everybody sees it. Simple and unambiguous. It
also puts the onus on the user to modify their behavior in a way that lengthy
meta-commentary threads about just how bad their comment was tend to not.

One problem with this is the perception that being banned (however
temporarily) is a severe punishment reserved for major infractions, and that
people might react strongly against that perception. To some extent that's the
point: you want to drive away the people unwilling to change. On the other
hand, you want to give those who are so willing the reason and opportunity to
do so, and I think the occasional "time out" provides that.

It may still be an indelicate instrument for addressing the problem, but I
think it's justifiable when the status quo is that known-good people are
leaving voluntarily.

------
th0ma5
A suggestion could well be to not have threads like this one (not trying to be
disrespectful!) An interesting thought is the idea that punk music was dead
the first time someone said punk's not dead.

~~~
pg
I could see that being the case with a trend/fashion, but it's not so much of
a problem with other things.

~~~
chuckharmston
Borrow a verse from the book of MetaFilter: people need an area for meta
discussions, and it's better for the signal:noise ratio if it's in a separate
but equal space.

In fact, there's lots to be learned from MetaFilter. Two long but useful
videos containing Mathowie's wisdom:

\- <http://vimeo.com/11916466>

\- <http://vimeo.com/21043675>

------
moblivu
I may not be a long time HN user, even less of an experienced one, but I think
that the race for Karma may be responsible. The core mechanic of HN is to
function through Karma, but unfortunately it is also the source of this
problematic. If users are obsessed about obtaining it, why not make that every
action on HN costs some.

Another problem is what the comments are about. It's more a matter of
Objectivity vs Subjectivity. At first the point of a comment is to give a
point of view about the article and then discuss about it. I have found that
now it is more a matter of who has the best point of view and that if it is
contrary to the majority; it will fail. Thus resulting in multiple pointless
comments, giant upvoting for the one who "blasts" the one with a different
point of view and so on.

Filtering may be a solution, but if the problem can;t really be solved with an
algorithm due to the human nature, it is a matter of a longer brainstorm...

------
pasbesoin
I'm not sure about it, but some of the comments about no karma have kept me
thinking about "no karma for submissions". For _any_ submissions.

As I see it, HN is about the conversation. I don't care who brings up a topic,
if it's interesting. And then, I'd prefer to see discussion focused on that
one submission thread, instead of spread across 3 or 5 or more follow-on
submissions, particularly those placing #, ?, etc. at the end of the URL.

If posting does not bring karma, maybe this would help reduce the number of
threads and increase their concentration of ensuing conversation.

I'm not sure, though. Something subconscious tells me I'm not seeing the other
side(s) of such a change.

Also, if possible, I think the duplicate checker would benefit from being
enhanced to detect at least the more obvious/prevalent workarounds, e.g. those
same #, ?, etc. Of course, this, of itself, likely leads to an arms race. But
maybe it would have at least some temporary value.

------
bbulkow
I think the answer is fairly clear. If you remember Digg before it got
popular, and Reddit before it got popular, you understand how these sites lose
focus when they increase readership. The devistation of Digg, and now the
serious problems at Reddit, are forcing more general-readers to HN.

Solutions:

1) Reddit staved off this effect for a while by both re-tuning the karma
ranking computation, and wiping everyone's karma back to 0. The effect of
hyper-people with too much power is problematic. I don't think that will work
here, but it's possible a re-tune will help.

The general idea of a redo on the karma system was stated above: the right
answer is to take a look at "good comments" and "bad comments" and look at new
threads.

2) HN as invite only. Anyone can read, few can vote/comment. I'm not sure I'd
make the cut if you were to have certain blessed voters/commenters. I like the
suggested improvement of having this calculation be hidden, and never to show
karma.

3) Moderators. The community I live in with the longest lifetime is
"chowhound". They don't have a voting system (or good web technology), they
have ruthless monitors. Monitors are never supposed to remove for quality of
post, but they do simply nuke from orbit "that's what she said" post chains.

4) Look, there's one real fact here. As someone who, myself, sells a database
product aimed at people like those who read HN, I have a huge incentive to get
an article into HN. It could make or break my company - no fooling. Once you
incent bright people to break your system, it will be broken. Socket puppet
rings will rule. Eternal vigilance - that is, a moderator-like junta charged
with looking at quality every few months and ruthlessly implementing whatever
solution is correct at that time, is the only way to continue HN's spirit.

5) I will guarantee you that if something isn't done, there will simply be a
slow, sure slide to mob rule and ignorance.

------
citricsquid
I don't think you really can. This site is a _community_ and the users matter
above all the features. If the user quality takes a nose dive all you can do
is hold off the inevitable with new comment rankings. Every site has a point
where it gets so big it declines in quality, reddit hit that and now those who
want the old reddit back are coming here.

The only way to truly guarantee it would remain high quality would require
credentials to use the site, or require invite/referrals, but then that has a
whole host of its own problems.

I'm relatively new so I don't know what HN "used" to be like, but in the short
time I've been here I've noticed it decline. It seems to me that more and more
people who aren't knowledgable or have insights to offer are joining and
people like jacquesm and riderofgiraffes are leaving. It was inevitable and
has happened in every community I've ever used.

------
ajju
A community can grow only so large before it has to provide some
personalization so it is not trying to be everything to everyone.

Reddit has subreddits and you can choose the ones from which stories appear on
the front page. HN can start with allowing users to 'frontpage' other users
aka whitelisting by showing stories from only these users on the front page.
The next logical step is allowing blacklisting. Version 2.0 of this would
allow whitelisting and blacklisting of content-sources (sites), in addition to
users, so that I could blacklist certain blogs if I wanted to.

This will result in some fragmentation of the community, but in my opinion, it
will keep HN interesting for everyone. This may also reduce the need to answer
subjective editorial questions such as - we don't allow politics, but is open-
source-politics politics? Is coverage of world-changing-elections allowed?

------
scott_s
An explicit voting protocol may help. Personally, I would like to see "No
downvotes for disagreement" made official.

------
planckscnst
Allow every user to have downvote suggestions. Allowing people to suggest that
a comment should be downvoted allows those with sufficient privilege to hone
in on the bad comments and it lets other users be more involved. Possibly,
track a user's 'discernment' level - increase it when a suggestion is acted
upon. Use this to weight how much that user's suggestion effects a comment's
"downvote-suggestion rank" as it is shown to the trusted users. Promote users
to trusted status when their discernment reaches a certain point. This
discernment level would both measure a user's interest in maintaining the site
as well as predict how good they would be at it.

Maybe even do this in general (for up and down votes): all users cast only
suggestion votes. Trusted users cast the real votes.

------
danielford
I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the
difficulty of gaining admission. One of my favorite forums put me on a waiting
list for three months before they let me post.

So I'd prefer the addition of some sort of barrier to entry. Either an invite
system like the private file-stealing sites use, a sign-up fee like Metafilter
uses, or a vetting process for potential members.

Ideally, I'd love to see Paul Graham take a couple hundred of the best users
and start a new forum. After they had some time to establish the community,
people like me could apply for membership, which would involve submitting a
written case, and waiting a week for the existing members to vote on it.

*This was originally a reply to lionhearted, who deleted his perfectly reasonable post.

~~~
jacques_chester
> I've generally found a strong correlation between forum quality and the
> difficulty of gaining admission.

There's a well-research phenomenon that people believe that a group is more
valuable if it was harder for them to become a member. It pops up everywhere
from YC to skull & bones to young men being ritually injured in the deserts of
central Australia.

~~~
danielford
This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my
assessment. Compare the average Metafilter comment to the average YouTube
comment. You'd have a difficult time making the case that there wasn't a
discernible difference in quality between the two.

~~~
jacques_chester
> This is true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm incorrect in my
> assessment.

Right, but as the subject of a membership ritual I have to discount your
assertion.

Sometimes membership rituals _do_ increase value. But they increase
_perceived_ value regardless of what follows.

~~~
danielford
Aren't you engaging in the genetic fallacy here though? Pointing out a
possible origin of my belief does not mean that you have disproved the belief.

~~~
jacques_chester
As developed through this discussion, my point would be that we need an
outsider's perspective on the quality of a community. Perhaps a "passer by".

------
YuriNiyazov
Add more moderators, put them on rotation duty, and, instead of having them
kill comments (except in the most egregious cases), have them patiently
educate the people who put up the mean/dumb comments, as well as the upvoters.
Write software that makes this process efficient.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Apparently tptacek suggested something highly similar here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403750>

------
pvandehaar
The question is in two parts: (1) Why do people add bad comments and stories?,
and (2) How do we keep those from getting upvoted?

1) When newbies first see the karma system they begin (like in any game) to
work hard to raise their numbers. They watch closely to learn what kinds of
comments will get them points. Ways to address this: -Make new users read the
guidelines and address this issue more directly there. -Make Karma look less
like a competition.

2) Like other comments have said, figuring out who upvotes bad comments
requires data-mining. A serious question here is whether democracy is a viable
option any longer. What is the site meant to be: a mob, or a tight community
which a mob may watch? Do we educate the problem-voters, or do we dis-empower
them?

------
noblethrasher
Create positive and negative moderators but make the roles mutually exclusive.

The positive mods can promote stories and comments beyond normal up-voting and
the negative mods do something similar with down-voting/flagging.

People can become 'supermods' based on karma, election, or something more
arbitrary.

------
dustingetz
* more comments than upvotes seems to correlate with low-content articles, because everyone feels qualified to comment

* articles with disproportionately few comments per upvote are sometimes the most interesting

if you can get low-content articles off the front page faster, and more
interesting non-pop articles visible longer, it would probably attract the
hacker community more and the pop community less.

misc ideas:

* remove all system incentive to submit links

* change UI to increase visibility into user history, so that reputation becomes even more important, and low-quality activity sticks with you for a while

* fix the new page! incent people to upvote new links, or a creative UI hack like a single new submission at the top (e.g. "sponsored" on reddit)

------
invertedlambda
If I were to rephrase the question on this thread, it seems to me that it
could also be stated as "how do you keep HN comments from turning into
Slashdot comments"? I don't say that in jest - I used to read Slashdot, but
after a while I got really sick of 1) the vitriol and 2) the inanity of the
comments that were on the first page. Granted, some folks had really
interesting things to say, but truly funny/insightful comments seem to be a
rare commodity.

But look at it in a positive light - the comments on HN could never be
classified in the same - or even near the same - bucket that comments on sites
like YouTube and Yahoo! News.

------
nathanhammond
Decompose commenting score into a two-part system representing up-votes and
down-votes:

Up-vote score = sum(karma of up-voter)

Down-vote score = sum(karma of down-voter)

Score is displayed in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute score would
be the same method as we're currently using. The relative score is presented
as a part of the whole.

Something like [+++++++|--] could represent the ratio of the positive score to
the negative score (which are the weighted scores based upon karma).

And, as a possibly added benefit, taking this approach enables the ability to
reduce the karma level before allowing of down-voting, making people feel like
they're able to participate more-fully earlier.

------
dangoldin
Thanks for bringing the problem up. I never contributed too much but dropped
in whenever I felt I had something insightful to say. Recently it has been
getting less frequent but I think it's just that many of the front page
stories aren't as interested as they have been and there is a good amount of
duplicates. Since the community is large the comments tend to drop down faster
as well so it's more difficult to get a discussion going.

A possible idea is to put up a dump of the HN data somewhere for users to
download. Maybe the community can analyze it and find interesting
patterns/behaviors and possibly solutions?

------
mindcrime
A few thoughts

A. "flag" for comments? Whether that just brings them to the
editor/moderator's attention, or kills them based on some algorithm, would be
an open question.

B. More moderators/editors - drawn from the pool of people who have shown
themselves to share the "HN spirit" (or whatever you want to call it), who are
empowered to kill stories and/or comments.

And maybe some limits on what new accounts can do? Maybe go so far as
requiring new users to lurk for some period of time, before being allowed to
post? Or some limit on post / comment frequency, until you've demonstrated
some sense of alignment with what's appropriate here?

~~~
chc
You can already flag comments. Click the "link" or "reply" links by a comment
to see it.

~~~
mindcrime
Cool. All this time here, and I'd somehow failed to notice that before.
Thanks!

------
jacques_chester
> Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here.

I'm surprised to hear someone as experienced as you say that. I've only been
online since 1997.

All successful internet communities seem follow a common life cycle:

* Early adopters seem to be good

* They attract more users

* Someone pines for the old days

* Earnest discussions start about how to "save" the community

Here things bifurcate:

* Descent into infinitely recursive navel gazing with site population following a visible half-life; OR

* Equilibrium is reached after a certain number of the early adopters leave.

I imagine this can be modelled as stocks-and-flows. It would be interesting to
see if there are any predictable tipping points or at least observable,
predictive metrics.

------
bmelton
You might also check out this thread, which pertains to submission karma and
its distribution: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873>

------
eggoa
Institute a one-time $5 fee to participate.

~~~
jacquesm
Users from non-first world countries would suffer disproportionate from not
being able to participate.

~~~
pbiggar
Well, we want something expensive to discourage people. How about we make it
$100, or you can solve a problem in Lisp. Alternatives for both the cash-poor
and time-poor.

------
thorax
Experiment suggestion: Upvotes are weighted as today, but downvotes are
heavier weighted when you're downvoted by a user with high karma. I'd probably
say that weight can't send a comment negative.

------
jmtame
I'm making an assumption here, but maybe the original folks who made up HN are
voting less. so you might have newer people doing more voting, and they may
not understand the quality of comments before upvoting.

similar to how google looks at more than just keywords in a document before it
ranks it highly, maybe you can weight each vote. a vote cast by an early HN
user isn't so binary, maybe in reality it counts as 2 or 3 votes while we call
it "+1" there is a weight to their vote based on how long they've been on hn
and their karma?

------
soamv
It seems that both reddit and metafilter seem have stronger meta discussions
than HN. Reddit seems to have meta posts on the frontpage every once in a
while, while metafilter has a fulltime forum (metatalk) dedicated to meta
discussions.

Though there are meta discussions once in a while on HN too, they tend to be
more general in nature, not specific to a certain comment or post.

I think an active meta discussion community would help with continuous small
corrections, and eventually improve people's opinions on what kind of comments
are good or bad.

------
rbarooah
I think the larger problem is that comments that aren't emotive, but are
reasonably insightful get ignored. HN quickly trains newcomers not to bother
with them, and to go for pithy zingers.

~~~
wladimir
Indeed, this is pretty easy to notice. When I look at my posts, and see which
ones are upvoted, it's mostly the ones that are short and emotive.

The ones in which I really put some effort into explaining something, looking
up some information, or explaining my point, usually get only one or two
upvotes, if any at all.

------
crasshopper
Make downvotes worth more against massively-upvoted comments.

The point of downvoting a 1-point comment is usually to let someone know their
comment was inappropriate. A downvote against a 60-point comment is supposed
to mean "This is not _that_ good. It's just hivemind / good placement."

Taking one point away from a 60-point comment doesn't change its position,
however. Maybe downvotes should increase its gravity or maybe they should have
a greater push-back, even if it's not 1.1*count(downvotes) but rather
(count(downvotes))^1.1.

------
dreish
Pick as many active users whose judgment you trust as you can find, train a
Bayesian classifier on their votes, up and down, and use that to score the
voting patterns of users. Set ignore for the ones with the worst scores. Even
if it turns out not to help much, at least you'll have had some fun doing it.

Also, there's currently nothing reminding users of the ideals you want them to
uphold just before they submit a comment -- i.e., right next to the submit
button. It never hurts to ask.

------
CrazedGeek
The simpler ideas I have are to aggressively kill any snarky or pun-filled
comments and raise the downvote karma limit (again...).

A slightly more interesting idea would be to temporarily ban any member that
does very anti-guideline things from posting for a little while, coupled with
an explanation as to why they were banned. Even an hour-long ban may be
effective. The GameFAQs boards do this, and while they have their own
problems, not following the guidelines isn't one of them.

------
rlpb
Find some way of qualifying upvotes by who made them, at what point in the
lifetime of a comment and each upvoters upvoting frequency. Use these factors
to adjust the score, rather than just a score+=1.

A user who upvotes ten comments a day should have far less impact per upvote
than one with very high karma and a high average score who only upvotes
infrequently (and is not involved in the thread).

I realise that you're asking about comments; I think that this applies equally
to story submissions.

------
jerhinesmith
This is more or less me thinking out loud, but why allow upvoting for new
users and not downvoting? Does it not make sense to have a barrier to entry
for each? Maybe the ability to upvote only happens after you've been here for
3 months and downvoting after 6 months? (I personally like tying those
abilities to seniority vs. points as I tend not to comment often, but can
easily identify a snarky comment that adds no value -- with no ability to
downvote it).

------
ericflo
Reddit solved this problem by splintering into different communities, and let
them self-select.

------
tspiteri
For (c): create a limit to the amount of votes a user can use, for example,
make it impossible to vote on more than 5 items in 24 hours. Story votes,
comment upvotes and comment downvotes would all count towards this limit. This
would be useless if there is a large number of users who vote up negative
comments, and would only work if the problem is caused by a smaller number of
users who upvote a lot of frivolous comments and stories.

------
ctl
What would happen if people could see both the upvotes and the downvotes on a
given comment, rather than just its total karma score? I've used sites (not
social news) that worked like that, and I've found that e.g. seeing +6/-0 on
one of my posts is more satisfying than seeing +15/-4. If you implemented
downvote visibility I think the overall effect would be to discourage comments
that get lots of downvotes. (The current policy, in contrast, encourages any
comment that'll get a net positive karma score.)

I'm pretty sure that on the whole that would be a very good thing. Downvote
visibility would certainly discourage dissent, which sucks. But I think the
kinds of posts it would most strongly discourage are, in order, mean comments,
stupid comments, and contentless (e.g. snide) comments -- which are exactly
the things that have been dangerously proliferating recently.

And I don't even think it would much reduce the expression of minority
opinion; there's a certain pride that comes with dissenting that makes it
tolerable or even enjoyable when other people disagree with _you_. Whereas
when you make a cheap joke, being able to see all the people who found it
stupid or crass is a major buzzkill.

------
benologist
Comment collapsing ... with 260 comments on this submission it's such a very
long page that the voting activity is going to be concentrated in the first
thread/s.

------
GBKS
I think it's a problem inherent in the larger audience - it's a different
dynamic with less intimacy. To restore the intimacy that begets the high
quality, I recommend introducing ways to customize my experience, whether it's
sub-HNs, categories, following, or something else. That way people can create
clusters and privacy for themselves and control their experience.

I don't think this can just be solved by tweaking karma logic.

------
dman
I am a bit late to comment but here are a few thoughts

a) Staying on top of HN and current with articles and comments is becoming a
fulltime job. Contributors who are productive in their non HN life will
overtime realise that they are spending a disproportionate amount of time on
HN. Something needs to be done to the mechanics of HN to change this. The only
thing I can think of for this is highly unusual but here it is - Do not allow
people to comment on stories by default, only vote for them as ontopic and
offtopic. Later after a certain amount of time - stories become available for
commenting or disappear entirely. This effectively decouples a story into two
phases - is this story worthy of discussion on HN and second how good is the
commentary on it. Doing this split will allow you to attack the story and
comment quality in a more granular manner. Also sometimes its tempting to open
an offtopic story just because it has 80 comments, hoping that some HN
stalwart has added non trivial analysis to an otherwise trivial story. By not
allowing discussion on offtopic stories such wayward curiosity on part of
readers like yours truly could be avoided. b) Remove the indirection currently
in place to flag stories and comments. Downvoting is more convenient
currently, perhaps flagging should be a bit more convenient than it is
currently. c) Turn HN into a fully customised experience. People prone to
gossipping will overtime find themselves in a version of HN where gossip is
abundant, ditto for technical users. An implementation is left as an exercise
for the determined reader. d) All changes dont have to be live on
news.ycombinator.com. You could try out multiple versions with different
incentives, maybe different sub-communities will find different local optima.
e) Force people submitting stories to write a comment longer than a certain
threshold about the story.

------
niels_olson
You need gardeners. Which is work. But you don't ask just anyone to tend your
garden. You ask a gardener.

Another way to think of it: a university needs teachers in the classroom. You
can't just do research and have an open admissions policy. Someone has got to
be providing training and feedback to the newcomers. Which is work. And you
can't just have anyone do it. You need someone who's already had some
training. A couple of thoughts:

1) You could feed those vested and proven folks with say, 1000 karma, 20% of
their stories with top-level comments in non-descending order:

\-- in randomized order instead of rank order, or

\-- in inverse order, so they presumably have less cognitive burden to those
undervoted great comments. Presumably it is less of a burden to skip over crap
than decide if the 59 pt comment is really not as good as the 12 pt comment
further down.

2) You could also add a more pre-emptive burden to rep: eg, you can't earn
more than 10 points a day unless you vote on 10 new stories first. Feed a
daily cookie to them with a popup with the policy, and encourage them to do
it.

If you want an experimental focus group to pilot on, feel free to include me.

------
xccx
Simple upvoting/downvoting can't handle the herd voice. Too much text. No time
to read it all. Make something actionable to better filter and engage us.
Please!

Personally, I want information to inform my actions. I want to make better
predictions. Please give me info I can use. Help me sort it. Make me act on
it.

I want statements I can agree with, or not. If I'm not sure which, please
provide me access to distillable arguments for and against any such statement.

First, I want to very clearly understand what any statement intends to say.
Please provide ample means for clarification of such a statement. What is
said? What does it mean?

Next, I want to sort and compare reasons to agree or disagree with any such
statement. I want to see _who_ agrees or disagrees with such a statement. This
is much more valuable to me than the herd voice.

Make it systemic: let broad statements rest on supporting statements, where
each statement provides for debate to define whether it is True or Not,
Unlikely or Likely.

Something like this might suck less than the bloviating blog/comment/infoglut
of yesteryear, especially as the next billion users go mobile.

------
staunch
Plenty of good suggestions here. I just want to add one thing: I've been here
since the very early days and still think the site is great.

Yeah, it's become a much bigger community and there are more of every kind of
post (good/bad/ugly). Overall it's still a great site and it has been
successfully maintained.

So please do tighten things up some, but avoid any drastic change for now. The
system is working pretty damn well.

------
FirstHopSystems
In point I don't think it's a decline, just more of a noise issue. Many of the
articles are interesting but I am noticing more submissions that have only a
abstract connection to qualify for "Hacker" news.

I don't have any well though out answers to the question. I do think the more
questions out there that could help solve this problem.

I'm thinking the commenting is more of a symptom than the underlying
issue(s).......

------
PStamatiou
Perhaps make it so that posting a comment actually costs karma (maybe based on
your comment karma average for some subset of users with low averages) making
people only comment when they are sure they are adding value. This makes it
hard for new users to get started though.

Edit: appears I'm not the only one that suggested something like this.
searched the page for "cost karma" and found a few comments.

------
tlrobinson
What about giving more weight to users that (a) have been here longer, or (b)
have more karma?

I feel like this would add some "drag" to the rate of change.

------
jrspruitt
This site has been my go to place for reading material for a year to more. The
other day I finally got an account, to test the waters of participating in the
comment section, which often times are more interesting than the articles
linked to. I hope my participation maintains the expected levels, but there in
lies the problem. Anything based on a community, is bound to that community,
like democracy, freedom to choose doesn't necessarily mean, the people are
going to choose well. One universal truth through out human history, what
rises, shall fall, when it involves a community of people. I figure, if my
participation isn't rewarded, its not the place for me, so I'll move on, or
just refrain from creating more noise. Its hard to convince people to self
regulate like that, which is the only way to deal with it not becoming an over
generalized, overly watered down link repository, that lost its niche in a
flood of popularity, which would be a shame.

------
baguasquirrel
I don't offer any solutions, but I can offer a cause of the problem.

HN has become important. I know people IRL who will get their friends to help
mod their submission. I likewise see stories that just scream, this person has
friends who probably modded them. These won't stay on the front page for long
at all, but they do increase the signal to noise significantly.

------
knowtheory
The real problem is that it's difficult to encode social constraints into a
system. StackOverflow tries it, and i think that they have erred on the side
of restricting contribution in order to preserve their system.

It is far more effective to have members of the community, particularly people
who are representative of the ethos that HN has had to point out bad behavior,
and recommend more responsible courses of action.

In so far as we are a community, we should encourage behavior as a community.
Ultimately the point of writing comments and posting links is for others to
see them, karma is worthless otherwise.

To that end, i think there's interesting things that could be done with
average karma. If we're trying to encourage hill-climbing behavior towards
better karma, why not highlight comments w/ higher average karma than you
have? If we are trying to encourage leadership, then perhaps we should point
out who is leading, and the behavior which we should be emulated.

------
BrainScraps
Okay, I've given this a little bit of thought and think that like many
problems, game mechanics can be applied to control human behavior here.

HN Karma can be retooled to give people a certain number up/downvotes as well
as a rate of regeneration. Perhaps new users will get 3 upvotes a day and no
downvotes. Upvotes need to be rebranded so that users understand that they are
not the mechanisms of popularity contests or flame wars.

This is my vision, feel free to take from it what you will: "HN tokens are for
you to use to make this is most intelligently crowd-curated site known to the
English language.If you find a post or comment that helps you to solve a
problem, see another point of view, or expand your thinking, drop a token in
to promote it. However, if you are found among those using your tokens to add
fire to flame wars or to reward comments that have no creative or intellectual
value, your token regeneration rate will be reduced. Choose wisely."

------
sampatterson
Rather than making the site invite only, how about some means of
differentiating read and write access, i.e. the amount of times you can upvote
or submit is tied to your karma.

That way the information is still accessible to everyone, and if someone new
has something to interesting to contribute, that info will still surface if
it's picked up by vetted users.

------
donohoe
There has been much talk of better days, better comment threads and such.

I've been here less than 2 years but I ask if anyone can spare the time and
dig up some classic examples of stories and threads, and great back and fourth
comment based conversations...

I realize this is difficult given the non-archival nature of HN but can anyone
show a "then" versus "now" difference?

------
gruseom
This feels like a demographic problem of a larger population dragging down the
average. If that's the case, then some sort of curation (vote-weighting or
otherwise privileging certain users' input over others) is probably necessary,
because the overall level of dumbness, meanness, or mediocrity just isn't
going to change that much in response to anything HN does. (I'd much prefer to
be wrong about this. Any elitist solution seems regrettable.)

I wonder if this could be tested. Even something as simple as
<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic> applied to comments would be
interesting. Or let PG pick, say, a hundred users and let each of them pick an
additional two or three. Could the software show us the site as it would
appear if those users' votes counted for more? It seems to me it wouldn't take
long to get a feel for whether it had helped or hurt.

------
gnosis
Implement something like a recommendation system for comments.

Any time any two users vote on the same comment, the HN system should create a
number representing the "affinity" between the two users.

This affinity should increase if the users voted the same way on that
particular comment, and decrease if they voted differently.

Then, instead of displaying the number of upvotes or downvotes next to a each
comment, what should be displayed should be the number of upvotes and dowvotes
weighted by the affinity of each user who made that vote.

Comments should rise or fall using the formula HN uses now, except it should
use affinity-weighted upvotes and downvotes.

In effect, in this system the other users are making "recommendations" on the
comments they vote on. And their recommendations are weighted by how similarly
their previous votes were to the votes you made.

This scheme results in every user seeing comments customized in a way that
automatically infers their preferences.

So, if you prefer deep, insightful comments about technology, you'll
presumably upvote those comments, and the affinity between you and the other
users who upvoted those comments increases, and when they upvote future
comments, the comments they upvote will be more likely to show up on your
radar as they'll probably be closer to the top of the page and have a higher
numerical score.

Conversely, those people who prefer brief, funny comments would similarly have
the comments they see be displayed in a way that caters to their preferences.

Instead of trying to please everyone in a one-size-fits-all top-down approach,
this is a more distributed approach which "recommends" to each individual user
those comments which are likely to be preferred by that particular user.

Of course, this scheme is more computationally intensive than having the
current system of simple, unweighted upvotes and downvotes, or even of
manually curated/moderated comments. It also requires active upvoting and
downvoting of comments by users for it to work well.

But the advantage of this is that the more users upvote and downvote, the more
accurate the system gets in "recommending" comments to them. So implementing
this system would provide an incentive for active participation.

It's also an automated, algorithmic system which should scale much better than
proposals that require manual human intervention, such as implementing
moderation/curation of comments.

A similar scheme could also be applied to articles, such that the HN backend
would weigh articles based on the affinity between the user viewing the
article list and the users who've voted on those articles.

~~~
gnosis
After giving this a bit more thought, I realized that this scheme could be
made even more decentralized by simply de-anonymizing votes and providing an
API to HN that would allow fetching of the voter lists for each comment (and
article).

Then each user would be free to use software running on their own machines to
implement the comment recommendation scheme as described above.

In fact, HN wouldn't even need to de-anonymize the votes for this to work. All
the HN servers would need to do is make available a list of unique user id's
of the upvoters and downvoters. How those user id's map on to usernames
wouldn't need to be revealed. But the user id's should remain consistent from
comment to comment and article to article, so that the affinity number
described in the original proposal could be consistently updated.

So, in this new proposal, each HN user would be assigned a unique id, and when
they vote their id would be made available via the HN API along with the
comment(s) they voted on when a given story's comments are downloaded for
viewing.

Software running on a given user's local machine would then use the user id's
and information on how those user id's voted to create a measure of affinity
as described in the original proposal, and then sort, rate, or recommend
comments accordingly.

------
joelburget
First of all, change is inevitable. The worst response is too much worrying
about it and talking about how you would like things to be how they used to
be. Users come and go so it will never be exactly the way it used to be. A
good response is to embrace the change and make it work.

In this case the problem seems to be an influx of new users that don't
completely understand what the site's about. It seems to me the best response
is to more actively encourage good commenting from new users. My suggestion is
inspired by stackoverflow. Over there, below a certain karma threshold, users
must submit their edits to be reviewed by others. It might be beneficial to do
the same thing for, say, a user's first 10 comments. They would submit a
comment, a more experienced user reviews it and gives feedback if necessary.
That way new users are forced to learn a little bit about what the community
values in a comment.

------
asdf333
I think it is about whether the identity of the HN community remains in tact.
HN can survive as long as the identity (even if it morphs) remains something
specific and associable. Reddit, for example still has a distinct
identity/culture even though it is a very different one today than in 2007.
Digg, for example, had less of an identity and culture. It was more of a
"mainstream place". Reddit kept its quirks and its colorful users which made
the place unique.

As long as there is an identity that people find distinctive at HN, I don't
think it will die.

All of the suggestions here kind of fit into that paradigm for me....how do
you control/preserve identity?

\- You could give old timers more control (downvoting)

\- You could give newcomers less control until they prove themselves (no
account creation just to upvote your friend's post)

\- Enlist help in keeping tracking/managing the pulse of the community (like
reddit, which has multiple admins on the lookout for issues)

------
macrael
A well implemented following system could solve a number of problems. The most
important feature of this would be to automatically create (or suggest)
"follow" connections based on your upvotes. If I upvote someone a few times,
suggest I follow them. Then, display comments from people I follow with some
sort of marker.

This would give comments context. The site would in effect be saying "hey,
you've read four or five comments by this person and thought they were sharp."
or, "don't waste your time with this comment, you haven't liked their others."
I don't know how many times I've read smart comments without actually
connecting that they were all being written by the same person. It is only
extremely good and prolific people who I actually recognize by hnname. This
would help me find more.

This is really a reputation/karma system, but scoped per user instead of site
wide. You can go further and trickle votes down the follow chain, so that the
people who I follow follow also are part of my personal reputation network.
This would help cut down the amount of interaction I have to do to make the
following system useful. This is essentially page rank.

With this in place, HN can become a more personalized aggregator wherein the
links and comments that are liked by the people you like are more often
presented to you. It is quite possible this could create the equivalent of
subreddits organically as the site's membership creates following chains
interested in different things.

Now, this is a very technical solution to the problem, which means it probably
isn't merited. I think that metafilter is probably one of the right guides to
watch and that for them careful moderation has been key.

Also, there are a number of real problems with this solution, the first being
that it significantly increases the risk of the echo-chamber as people start
to be split in to like minded groups. I've thought about some ways to deal
with these issues, but I don't feel like this post is the place for them.

------
Sandman
I think that part of the solution may be to introduce a feature that would
give users that reach certain karma thresholds the ability to give more and
more points to a comment when upvoting.

For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's
upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The
user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign
three points and so on. Users should be able to decide how many points they
want to give to each comment.

The same should apply to downvotes. Prominent HN users should be able to make
their downvotes "hurt more" if they want to.

Also, these thresholds could be used for "downvoting penalties". For example,
a newbie would lose 4 points when downvoting, but a user over the first
threshold would only lose three and so on. Users with karma above one of the
thresholds would no longer lose karma when downvoting.

~~~
riledhel
I've seen this feature in other communities and, given enough time, comments
get +10 or 0 in a 0..10 scale. So in the end it's basically the same.

~~~
Sandman
Perhaps you're right about this, but the main point was to give prominent
users more power when upvoting and downvoting. The idea was to make upvotes
and downvotes of those on <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders> count more
than the votes of newbies. The reason why I suggested that users should be
able to decide how much points they want to assign when voting is because,
there may be situations when you find a comment interesting, and want to
upvote it, but not so insightful that you would give it your maximum amount of
points.

------
j_baker
Every article from techcrunch and about techcrunch should get an automatic
ranking penalty. Seriously. Techcrunch occasionally posts an article that's
useful and warrants not banning them completely, but I don't think the
community would lose anything by not having the average techcrunch article
that gets posted here.

------
SeanLuke
My previous comments on this issue:

<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605>

I think the primary accelerator in the inevitable slide towards 4chan is
anonymity. I've seen this in my own experience: I'm anonymous on reddit etc.
but use my own real name (easily googled) when posting on hackerne.ws. And the
difference is potent: on reddit I am much more of a jerk than I am on HN. I
think this is fundamental nature: anonymity gives you license to release your
inner jackass.

I think you should require all posters to use their real identities except
with special permission.

I know the standard arguments against this: how to verify identities, valid
reasons for being anonymous, etc., etc. But I don't think they're enough
reason to avoid a simple measure which would keep the site much more relevant,
polite, and personal.

------
gte910h
I disagree that the quality is declining. I think you're just suffering a
misapprehension of the quality of old.

~~~
ig1
Comments are certainly declining in quality. For example this thread from a
submission I made a year ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215549>

The quality of discussion was much higher than on most posts today. And that
was only a year ago.

~~~
gte910h
Depends entirely on the post. Esoteric technical issues (as in the business
model of advertising) have a higher level of debate than more relatable
articles.

~~~
ig1
Compare it to some of the recent articles on Paywalls, there's almost no
discussion of business models left.

Instead you have people ranting "content should be free", "paying is an
outdated model", "the nyt are stupid" without any kind of coherent argument.

------
jackfoxy
The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You
need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN,
as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form
of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of
message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways
to bubble up story submissions that otherwise get lost.

No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the
pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow
further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest.
Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can
be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various
projects.

~~~
Mz
Except that HN already has a commercial purpose: It serves the needs of Y
Combinator in some ways. You cannot fill out an application without including
your HN handle, everyone on the app has to have one (or get one if they didn't
have one already), and Paul reads a lot of the comments here and often is
familiar with the person to some degree via their online participation here
and that influences decisions concerning who gets into Y Combinator. So
whatever gets done here probably needs to be done with an eye towards not
undermining that agenda. Making it a commercial enterprise could so radically
change the game as to make it useless or even counterproductive for its
existing business-related agenda. How much would HN have to be worth to make
it acceptable to lose that? I think only PG and the rest of Y Combinator can
answer such a question, and possibly only to themselves rather than publicly.

~~~
jackfoxy
There are all sorts of ways HN could be monitized (which is what I meant by
commercialized) without at all impacting its usefulness for evaluating Y
Combinator applicants. I just think it will take real investment to upgrade
HN, and if it's not monetized it's hard to justify that investment.

------
ajro
I've just been browsing through news page and I stumbled upon this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443089>

In one of the comments on reddit ascheinberg wrote:

 _Like every single site like this, the problem is that the public is ready to
ingest content faster than content becomes available, or rather, faster than
worthy news is made, so in the lack of real gripping news, things of general
interest fill the gap_

So maybe we should try to slow things down by limiting number of
votes/submissions per person per day?

If someone could submit only one story per day maybe he would do that more
carefully?

The same applies to votes - with limited number of votes available someone
would consider more carefully what to spend his votes on?

And as additional benefit making things slower on HN could have positive
effect on our productivity ;).

------
ssp
Make a graph containing edges from each user to the comments they voted for,
and from each comment its author. Then run something like PageRank on it and
show the resulting ranks of both comments and users.

It would help with comment quality because it would make people compete for
approval from high-quality users.

------
sushrutbidwai
Few suggestions -

1\. On top of comments section have one which is for recent comment. I think
lot of people feel that once the post is around for 30 mins (for a fairly
popular post), even if they have something good to say, it will just not reach
audience.

2\. Remove karma points completely, just hide them some place where no one
will see them. Use them silently in the background to optimize things, but
dont bring them at the center. Generally new comers to site want to rise to
top (of whatever) because that way they will be taken seriously. This
incentive drives people to just write anything

3\. No karma for submissions. People submit any article and get 10-15 upvotes
but lot of articles do not add any thing to HN.

4\. I think there is already some threshold on upvotes, perhaps increase it?
Only so many upvotes/downvotes/submissions in a day or even in an hour.

~~~
goosmurf
I'll second the removal of karma points, at least publicly.

There are some aspects of reputation systems which are useful for identifying
misbehaving participants but I don't see any evidence of such use cases on HN.
Yet the karma system encourages karma whoring which IMHO significantly reduces
the SnR of contributions (both articles posted, and velocity and content of
comments).

Maybe as a starting point the karma scores can be hidden from public view?

------
hollerith
Comment quality here is still vastly higher than it is on most other sites
frequented by programmers, designers or entrepreneurs, and higher than any
other site (e.g. Wikipedia) of its size or larger. It's just really hard to
maintain the quality of a site as big as the HN of 2011 when there are no
significant barriers to participation by anyone with internet access and a
basic command of the English language.

I humbly suggest that for the conversation to lead to HN's doing even better
than HN has so far will require the participants in the conversation to verify
that they are referring to the same thing when they write "comments that are
(a) mean and/or (b) dumb", e.g., by the participant's providing actual
examples (with the author's name removed) of comments they consider mean or
dumb.

------
MrMan
Question - is a YC class currently in session, or did a selection round just
end? I am an outsider and do not know the routine, but what if you are seeing
a seasonal effect caused by increased activity by YC hopefuls and participants
before and after these periodic selection events?

------
zbanks
To help improve the quality of comments, what if the OP's vote was weighted
more than everyone else's? Their upvotes could be worth 3-5 instead of just 1
point.

An OP is motivated to keep their comment thread awesome: having better
comments leads to more upvotes on the story. And, on a personal level, the OP
would be less likely to upvote snark against their own story.

The obvious downside would be that the OP could effectively censor opposing
ideas. However, I don't think this would happen that often: counterpoint
comments generally do pretty well on their own, and would probably still rise
to the top even without the OP's help. (Of course, the _best_ OP's would
recognize the benefit of discourse and promote these comments anyways... but
not everyone is perfect)

------
jmatt
Make voting transparent. Provide access to who has voted a comment up or down.

The community will act differently if they know others can see their behavior.
Then again this may have negative effects.

I think that in general I'd be more thoughtful when voting comments up or down
if I knew others could see.

~~~
gnosis
How many people are going to scrutinize the voter list, or keep track of which
people voted which way over time? And how many of the voters are really going
to care?

I've probably voted thousands of times on various comments and articles on HN.
Am I really going to care if someone sees that I voted this way or that way on
some comment or other? I don't think so. I doubt many other people will
either.

------
apollo
1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new
ranking schemes.

2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative
importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where
nodes are users and edges are votes.

------
rooshdi
Hide the username and vote count for comments with positive votes. Show the
username and vote count for comments with negative votes. Users will be able
to see the profile and username of a positive user by clicking on a "see
profile" link in place of the username.

------
edanm
Charge people a (modest) sum to participate in HN. Say $10 a year. I don't
know many regulars who wouldn't easily pay that money, but I doubt too many
trolls would.

Not sure what is behind the paywall, e.g. commenting only, or commenting and
upvoting. You can try a few combinations.

------
malbs
The timing of this post is amazing.

I'm by no means a prolific commenter on HN. If I have something of value to
add I'll try to ask; otherwise I usually abstain (but I'm only human, made a
few dumb comments)

I just saw another article, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404157>

and the two comments on it were either bashing IQ, or talking about penis
size.

I feel like maybe the reddit/4chan community has started reading HN?

I felt like posting a comment on that thread asking, nay begging, for someone
to post something interesting as a followup to the kids question in the video,
instead we have.. I just don't know.

And after saying that, I have no useful suggestion. Any feedback system that
is implemented can still/will be gamed.

------
gokhan
Just based on observations, not numbers: Any member can upvote and HN is more
popular. There will be more upvotes to be distributed among comments. Early
comments seem to be receiving more upvotes than late comments, regardless of
the community. So, unqualified comments will be receiving more and more
upvotes.

Did raising downvote limit to 500 made any difference in unfair downvoting? If
so, giving upvoting to more qualified people will also solve this for some
time, means we can focus on measuring the qualification.

Maybe we should be able to mark individual comments as unfairly upvoted.
Higher unfairly upvoted scores might decrease the value of future upvotes of
voters on that comment.

------
davidmathers
Uh oh. Over the past 6 weeks I've had the feeling of being liberated from my
years-long Hacker News addiction. Now you want to fix it and suck me back in.

I'm surprised to see so much focus on the comments. I think the front page is
the primary problem. I wonder how much of the comment problem would fix itself
if the front page had more signal and less noise. Maybe that's naive.

Personalization is most certainly the wrong answer for HN, but when I thought
last week of my ideal solution to the problem this is what I came up with:

1\. Personalized weighted point calculations. Each vote is multiplied by a
number which ranges from 0 to 2 in .1 increments. Everyone starts at 1.
Everyone who up-votes the same story as me gets .1 added to their weight.
Everyone who up-votes a story I down-vote gets .1 removed from their weight.

2\. New users can't submit stories during an initial probationary period. They
also start out at .1 and get .1 added to their weight each week they're active
on the site. After 10 weeks of activity they can submit stories.

3\. Weights are applied to comment rankings but not derived from them. Comment
rankings also need to be much harsher. We want fewer comments and higher
quality comments. Maybe ((weight*2) -.5) for calculating comment points. But
the floor is always 0.

I don't know if ideas along these lines could be successfully de-personalized.

These ideas I think are mistaken:

1\. Any notion of explicit control. Such as: hard coded karma values, comment
size, non-bayesian content filters, etc. (New user probation being the 1
exception)

2\. Anything based on unweighted karma values.

These ideas I'm suspicious of:

1\. Economic solutions. They strike me as having the same problem as micro-
payments. I don't want to have to think about how I'm spending my alloted
money each time I up-vote or down-vote. Also the purpose of money is trading,
not creating artificial scarcity. And even assuming the goal of artificial
scarcity is worthwhile (I don't) then it implies some kind of hard-coded
explicit control to determine purse size, which will always be a mistake.

~~~
teyc
David, I was coming to the same conclusions as well. One downside is that to
the new user, the articles appearing would be what is considered interesting
by the "average" user.

One way to counteract this is to have the new user match, say, pg's profile.

------
planckscnst
Every N times someone upvotes a comment, prompt the person with a reminder
that good reasons for upvoting a comment are x,y,z, not a,b,c. One especially
important thing for the latter category is "You agree with the content of the
comment."

------
JeffJenkins
How about using the ratio of points to comments as a signal for articles, and
maybe the ratio of up+down votes (i.e. number of votes, not net points ) to
sub-comments for comments.

This gives you some of the effect of what I think would be the best solution
-- limiting the site's scope significantly -- in that it would give you things
which people found interesting but weren't so general that everyone felt they
could comment on them.

I think this would work well in conjunction with some of the other ideas in
the thread which reduce the number of upvotes people are likely to give
(specifically, a cap on the number of upvotes and a visual cap on the display
of upvotes).

------
bbq
You're trying to control the character of this site. It started in a good
position, but has been slowly drifting. You can wait for it to change its
course and find its way back to the sweet spot. Or do nothing and hope it
finds a new position. These are both long shots and not very likely. The other
way is to apply force to move it back where it was.

The content of this site is the average of community activities. If you want
to increase the quality of content, you have increase the average quality of
activities.

Moderation does this: removing low quality submissions increases the average
quality. You could be more aggressive in moderation. Remove more comments.
Take away commenting privileges temporarily for repeat offenders. Ban bad
users.

Another option is giving trusted users 'megavotes,' worth more than 1 point.
They can downvote that admittedly-funny-but-not-constructive comment to a more
appropriate point value and upvote that other comment that's downvoted for no
good reason. These users work to increase visibility and rewards of high
quality content and decrease the visibility and rewards of low quality
content. Hopefully this would work in a feedback loop to increase the natural
average quality of content.

Both of these suggestions can help force the decline of mean, dumb, and
inappropriately upvoted comments.

However, I think many will be wary of these suggestions because it can lead to
bad things. I'm concerned too. Trusted users can abuse their power and destroy
the feelings of community that have developed. Mistakes _will_ be made and
people will be upset.

But it needs to be done. Mistakes are mistakes. People find ways to get upset
here everyday. Valuable members leaving already hurts the community.

Technical solutions won't cut it. Hacker News could be about coin collecting
and the software could be exactly the same. The software does little to shape
the community on a larger scale.

Ultimately, the average of the community is pushing in the wrong direction, so
you need to push back by fixing the average to your favor. There may be better
ways of doing this then what I've described, but it's time to pushing hard.

------
akkartik
Make votes public.

~~~
ashleyw
I like this idea.

Also perhaps if a comment was controversial (i.e. lots of up _and_ down
votes), a list of the first users who upvoted it could be added next to the
comment, e.g. "userA, userB, userC and 27 others upvoted this". That way, a
stupid comment would be like the plague, nobody would want to be one of the
first to upvote it (and therefore put their name next to it), and so it would
quickly sink.

~~~
wolfrom
I've always imagined that this is why Quora mentions the voters for a
question. Another aspect to that display of votes is that it shows up in the
list of a users activities. Clicking on a profile could display the articles
and comments that the user upvoted/downvoted. This would cause users who
consider their reputation to be important to think twice before upvoting
something less appropriate.

------
Yana_Convelife
How about rather than down-voting, you allow people (possibly with some
minimal karma) to delete comments if they violate the terms? If a comment is
deleted, there would be a trace showing that there used to be a comment that
got deleted by John. John's profile could then show all the comments he
deleted, just like it now shows John's submissions and comments and anyone
(perhaps with the same minimal karma) would be able to revive a frivolously
deleted comment. Hopefully, that would mean that people would not delete
comments unless they can stand for it.

But I'm pretty new to HN, so my comment may not take into account its
evolution.

------
brm
I've said it before and I'll say it again, limit the number of comments and
submissions per user per day... See discussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242505>

------
pama
How about only upvoting comments of at least DH4 [1]?

Comments that state their ranking in your disagreement hierarchy are allowed
to be upvoted above a threshold (say 5 karma points) if these comments are at
least DH4. The remaining comments are questions, clarifications, suggestions,
or plain old mean and/or dumb comments; they would remain below the karma
threshold.

You could add an optional DH tag to each new comment and only enforce the
threshold rule in an alternative "view" of the HN site (until you are happy
with the results).

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

------
Tycho
Simple and easy suggestion: above the textbox on the reply page, add some
guidance on tone and behaviour. Like,

    
    
        'Please refrain from making mean-spirited comments,
        we like to maintain a positive atmosphere at HN;
        and if you are planning to crack a joke, you might want 
        to think twice as jokes here are usually downvoted unless
        they're *particularly* amusing.
    

Or whatever you think's more appropriate. The problem to me seems that general
bitchy behaviour is the norm on internet IT forums, so people come here
thinking it's ok. Maybe they just need a little guidance.

------
Dnguyen
May I suggest going back to earlier time of HN? Because of the success, there
are too many cooks in the kitchen. You have to always increase the number of
moderators as the input from users increases. We are all here to read/discuss
pretty much the same news. Why not have a chosen few provide the links and
start discussions. Maybe the moderators themselves? This will cut down on
duplicate links/stories and it will cut down the noise tremendously. Those who
are truly interested in HN, will stick around and discuss. Those who are not,
will simply go find their news somewhere else.

------
dpcan
430+ comments on a Sunday. One might say that for HN'ers, the quality of posts
comes in at a close second to having this community of peers to converse with,
argue with, share with and even make lame jokes with.

------
mrb
pg: allow more people to downvote. For example I have 409 points of karma, yet
I do not have the right to downvote.

Or perhaps assign more weight to upvotes/downvotes from members with a high
karma, than those with a lower karma.

------
rosenjon
I think it would be interesting to have to say why you up or down voted
something, along with the vote. Make the reasons public, so people can see how
the system is being used, and then publish guidelines based on the aggregate
results that give people an indication of the best way to use the system.

It would probably not be ideal to publicly publish names along with reasons,
since this might encourage flame wars about why people voted in certain ways.
However, perhaps there could be more private means of dealing with people who
consistently misuse/abuse the system.

------
gasull
What about making the points of a comment be multiplied for a factor depending
on you karma?

That way comments from users with good reputation having comments with more
points by default. I know this makes the rich richer, but that's the way
PageRank works too. If your karma/reputation doesn't make you to be heard
more, what's the point of karma anyway?

This isn't really a reputation system, or if it is, the reputation is comment-
based and not user-based. I don't see the karma of a user when they comment. I
would need to click on the link of their name, what I never do.

------
scythe
Something slashdotty -- i.e. qualitative moderation, not just quantitative
moderation -- would help. If you had seperate upvote buttons for "amusing" and
"informative", this could factor into sorting.

------
Panoramix
This is a separate issue, but one thing that is not perfectly clear to me is
what an upvote/downvote is supposed to mean. Does it mean that I agree with
the comment, or that it adds to the discussion?

~~~
curtis
I think it would be an interesting experiment to add clearly labeled
agree/disagree buttons in addition to upvote/downvote.

------
gersh
I'd look at how different users respond to different articles? Do they click
on the article? Do they comment? Do they come back to the site after they see
the article? Do they vote for the article.

Next, you can correlate how various people voted with whether a specific
person will like the article and/or comment. Finally, you should be able to
tell who will like or not want something to get voted up. At this point, you
can customize for everyone or weight the influence of people based on well
correlated their taste is with the top karma people.

------
kgo
There's one problem that's similar to reddit. Although there are guidelines
(or reddiquite) you need to go out of your way to find them. Sure, clicking a
link isn't that tough, but it's not automatic either.

I wonder what would happen the guidelines or some sort of one-page community
code of conduct were displayed when you actually created an account. Would
that give users a better set of expectations? Or would they just click throug
it like a EULA?

Maybe force existing users to click through it one time as a friendly reminder
when the feature is introduced.

~~~
mryall
A guidelines link in the header would be a good idea.

------
Goladus
It would be nice to be able to click a button to inform the poster,
_discreetly_ , that the comment exhibits negative qualities like:

    
    
        hostility
        unclear connection to parent
        factual errors
        

etc.

Discretion is necessary to encourage people to address and fix the problems
with their comments and style rather than provoking them to guard their
reputation.

Sending individual emails is effective at this, but takes too much time and
energy. Being able to click a button that gives a commenter specific feedback
could be very effective.

------
davi
Delete humorous one-liners vigorously, especially ones that get lots of
upvotes.

Lots of other good suggestions in this thread but I don't see this one.

I hope you can turn it around, I've gotten a lot of value from this site.

------
dglassan
Have you considered adding a down vote button like Reddit has? I know you can
flag comments above a certain karma level but I think that either giving
everyone the option to down vote or having a lower karma threshold to down
vote would allow the community to regulate itself.

Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of
responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussions up, but
I think enough people on here care about the quality of the community to help
out.

~~~
count
There is a downvote button - it too has a karma threshold. See:
<http://i.imgur.com/EBYAe.png>

------
dpkendal
Bayesian filtering for comments based on downvotes, with failing comments
requiring moderation by a human. My guess is that most mean/dumb/ad-hominem
comments use the same words/phrases as other mean/dumb/ad-hominem comments.

To prevent moderation becoming a bane on non-spamming users, the threshold
could be set to .05 or .10. (or .95/.90, depending on which way you train the
filter.)

It worked for email when spam was a massive problem; perhaps it can work for
comments while they're still only s small problem.

------
dispenser
As a user of HN for pragmatic (read: non-timewasting) reasons, here's what I
want to see on HN in this order:

1) Useful plugins, technologies, tools, or resources for development. 2) New
Platforms (hardware, app store, device) or policy (privacy) changes. 3)
Inspiring projects, stories, or news. 4) Cool science, physics, math, or other
explanations and stories.

TBH - most popular HN stories cause knee-jerk reactions but have little
content.

Maybe a specific 'work' filter would prioritize links into these categories?

------
allending
Get rid of karma.

------
projectileboy
I think the best you can do in news.arc is to experiment with various forms of
throttling (i.e., the first link/comment vote = 1, the second slightly less
than one, and so on). Beyond that, it might require you to play the role of
benevolent dictator and kill user accounts that consistently engage in nasty
behavior. The most extreme option would be to shutdown HN and spawn a small
number of child HN-style sites, each with a narrower focus.

------
presidentender
Base moderation on a points system, a la Slashdot. Grant a user one (or three
or 6.5 or n) mod point every time another user replies to one of his comments.

The effect this has is twofold. It grants some incentive to posters who start
comment threads, rather than making just single comments which are likely to
strike more users' upvote chords. It also reduces the tendency to blindly
upvote or downvote based on agreement or for dumb humor.

------
crasshopper
How about giving users two upvote buttons. The second one appears X seconds
after the first one has been hit. Because really great comments, I've noticed,
often provoke first: yeah, good. And then, later: wow, that was really really
good. I wish I could upvote it again. (the second upvote can have a different
meaning)

Google Hotpot does something like this, limiting the number of Really Great
votes you can make with unlimited +1's.

------
JoachimSchipper
Give high-karma users more power to downvote: if you downvote a comment, click
the now-red downvote button again to add e.g. <your karma>/500
extra_downvotes. At any time, a comment with extra_downvotes has
min(#extra_downvotes, max(0, #points) / 2) fewer points than it would
otherwise have.

Some examples:

\- "good": tptacek likes something and gives +1 point - he has no more power
than anyone else to upvote

\- "bad": RiderofGiraffes downvotes for -1 point

\- "crap": RiderofGiraffes thinks a comment at -2 is mean, and downvotes
twice. The comment is now at -3, since extra_downvotes do nothing on comments
with zero or fewer points.

\- "popular crap": tptacek double-downvotes a 17-point comment to 8 points.
Two 2000-point (top-1000?) double-downvoters could also get it to 8.

\- "ridiculously popular crap": tptacek and RiderofGiraffes hate a 302-point
comment. tptacek double-downvotes it to 176; RiderofGiraffes double-downvotes
to 150 (half of #upvotes - #downvotes = 300); lots of others also lend their
extra_downvotes. The comment stands at 150 and upvotes have half effect.

I think this proposal strikes a nice balance: users with high (500+) karma can
better help keep the crap out; extremely-high-karma users get a bit more power
(only a bit - realistically, tptacek will typically remove something like five
points from a popular-but-crap comment since others also have
extra_downvotes).

More importantly, "normal" users still run the site (that 150-point comment is
_still_ at the top of the page, and no amount of extra_downvotes is going to
dislodge it). If you're going to cry "democracy", remember that the only
current way of dealing with popular crap is [dead] - losing half your comment
karma is not that harsh. And, again, people with lots of karma are apparently
interesting.

Note that points and extra_downvotes _must_ be tracked separately; otherwise,
people would want to wait until a crap comment has gained some points to make
their extra_downvotes more effective.

Finally, two tweaks: it may be a good idea to let only comment karma count for
extra_downvotes purposes, and it may be a good idea to allow extra_downvotes
on submissions.

It's a pity that no-one is going to see this comment...

[Note: HN handles used for illustration only, I'll happily remove them if
you'd like.]

------
crasshopper
pg, you could present cleaned data in a Netflix Prize-style challenge. Let the
hackers see the patterns in the data (whether bad upvotes are coming from new
users, from old users without a lot of karma, etc) and make the prize be XX
minutes of your attention (or money).

It seems like a lot of the comments on this thread are asking for more
information -- or at the very least working from very different personal
experiences.

------
siculars
Vote scarcity. The way all these karma systems work now is that you, the user,
have unlimited votes. But ask yourself, when did you ever value anything you
had unlimited quantity of? There needs to be some limit to the number of up or
down votes a user can cast in any given time frequency or other metric. The
key point is to make votes 'cost' something.

Also, weighted votes based on the karma of the user casting said vote.

------
rafaelc
One idea is that you would only allow users with X month old accounts to
comment. X is simply the time since you started noticing the decreasing
quality of comment threads, with perhaps a small buffer added onto that time.

This would still allow everyone else to utilize HN as their source of news or
as their RSS feed into the tech/startup world, while testing for the source of
the decreasing quality of comment threads.

------
nickolai
How about having an additional metric in terms of responses to a post? If it
doesnt deserve a response, it probably doesnt add much to the discussion.

------
zecg
It's a solved problem already, a new /classic/ every two years. Looking
forward to /classic/classic/, since /classic/ has really gone downhill lately.

------
abbasmehdi
There are a lot of responses to this question and I haven't read all of them,
so I apologize if somebody has said this already, but the answer is dead
simple: HN has gotten more popular! That's it. If I must state the obvious,
this translates to a lower average IQ because the larger the degree of
separation from the original creators of the forum, the lower intellectual
density gets.

------
jamesrcole
In the guidelines, ask people to write titles that try to summarize the
content of the linked page. Think of titles as micro-abstracts.

You could even change the 'title' field in the submission form to
'description' (with its content limited to fairly small number of characters,
of course. e.g. < 100).

Of course I'm just speculating about the potential value of this, but it might
indirectly help a little.

------
hi_from_cuba
(a) follows from (c), and (c) is trivial to fix by anonymizing the comments
before they are voted on. Way, way, _waaay_ too much fanboyism is going on HN
and selected few users get all their comments voted up regardless of the
merit. Fix this and the rest will follow.

PS. I'm 3000+ karma, 3+ year HN user posting from public terminal in a hotel,
hence the anon account. My apologies.

~~~
jdavid
on that note, i wonder if completely anonymous would be interesting. what
would it be like if there was no notion of identity at all?

what if you had reputation presented per comment, but no public identity?

------
rokhayakebe
Currency.

Threat upvotes/downvotes as currency and limit the amount of coins someone has
in one day. If you have only five upvotes per day, you are going to start to
think about how to spend them.

Closed doors, but glass walls.

Reading should be open to everyone, participating should not. No more new sign
up unless they have an introduction or they submit a request and we can have a
way of letting certain users approve.

------
physcab
There needs to be a better system of moderation. Perhaps highlighting
moderators and/or allowing people to apply to become one.

------
sc00ter
Personalise the front-page? Add a weighting that pushes up contributions
posted by users whos previous contributions I have upvoted, on the basis that
there's a chance we share similar interests if I consistently upvote their
contributions. It could also push up articles that users I've previously
upvoted have commented on.

------
sage_joch
Add a mechanism that encourages people to think before upvoting, like a karmic
bank account. Maybe someone could upvote twice for every once they were
upvoted. It could reduce the common reflex of upvoting a short/witty comment;
with only so many upvotes to give, you'd want to "invest" in comments that
really earned it.

------
3dFlatLander
All of the suggestions listed involve changing some mechanic of the site. Some
of them are quite good though (I think voting based on karma is neat).

My theory: Internet marketers descend on online communities that are popular.
Possible solution: No follow on frontpage stories with less than X upvotes or
no follow all frontpage stories.

------
Naomi
Here's an idea I've seen on other sites: before a comment is approved, the
poster has to go through a page that contains general posting guidelines.
Often it seems people write something quickly, without stopping to think
whether it might be offensive. This would give them an extra chance to censor
their contribution.

------
invertedlambda
How about a rotating group of admin users? Every 30 days a new batch of X
users with greater than N karma get to bury/downvote/ban poor quality
submissions/comments. This group would be forcibly rotated so that you don't
get the "entrenched elite" problem.

It would encourage admins to be wise and for others to respect their wisdom.

------
weaksauce
Have you thought about scaling the effect of an upvote based on the number of
words that a comment has? Of course there are implementation details that you
would have to worry about but I could see that encouraging longer more
thoughtful commentary and penalizing snarky 5 word answers that garner easy
upvotes.

------
flipside
If I had a way to improve the quality of HN but that would require a complete
overhaul of the voting system, extensive testing, and slightly more work by
5%-20% of users, do you think people would go for it?

My feeling is that things aren't bad enough for radical change here yet, but
if the right 5% are, it might be possible.

------
ohyes
I would recommend getting rid of up-voting and positive karma. People make
pithy comments in order to get positive karma. Same reason for meme threads.

The real reason for a karma mechanic on HN is to filter out incredibly stupid
comments. So keep down-voting. Things that are down-voted should go to the
bottom of the stack.

------
bergie
On Maemo News we solved this by enabling downvoting of submissions (well,
aggregated feed items), and by making downvotes worth 5 upvotes.

The unpleasant side-effect has been a slight tendency to _shoot the messenger_
by downvoting relevant-but-unpleasant news. But in general it has helped with
story quality

------
ig1
Comments that are legitimate and well thought out often get downvoted if they
disagree with the popular opinion, but "me too" posts that agree with popular
opinion get voted up.

HN should make it clear that voting should reflect the value a comment adds to
the conversation and not whether you agree/disagree.

------
mcgin
You may be doing this already as it seems pretty obvious to me, but you could
give more weight to comments based on their length. In general the most
insightful comments are longer than poorer dumb comments. Also be more firm on
the shouldn't appear on mainstream news sites rule

------
ronnier
Stop accepting new members for awhile.

------
Trindaz
Count clicks on articles.

I've found the title of the article is fairly representative of how much I
enjoy reading it. If this is true for others, why try to force us to upvote
articles? Just count the clicks and use that as a strong weight in rankings.
Is it currently analysed at all?

------
paolomaffei
SubHNs

------
rexreed
Maybe the fact that there's no separation of topics is part of the problem?
Right now it's just one big comment bucket. Maybe some categories of posts so
that off-topic stuff can be ignored would be really helpful. Right now, it's
just one big stream of consciousness.

------
sunir
Idea 2. Restrict memberships like Gmail invitations.

Give finite invitations to your YCombinator classes and alumni. Have them pass
out invites to people they know. Give out more invites when you think you need
them. At least this reroots the site back in the "Startup News" seed.

~~~
SoftwarePatent
I upvoted this but disagree. My first submission to Hacker News was an Ask
HN[1]. Since that day I have been working hard to follow the advice I was
given there. I can't express how valuable the advice was to me. Under your
suggestion, that would be impossible.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069477>

~~~
sunir
I just wanted to float this option out there for discussion to see if people
thought a tighter clique would be better. I would also be cut out of the
community if it were invitation-only.

I note that the /old experiment (a Hacker News whose voting data set was
limited entirely to accounts > 1 year old) demonstrated no obvious improvement
in quality.

It seems to be entirely a question of the public choice of what is acceptable
content to submit.

------
DrJokepu
How about calculating comment and submission scores as log(sum(karma of
upvoters) - sum(karma of downvoters)), while the way individual karma is
calculated would stay the same (that is, total number of upvotes minus total
number of downvotes)?

------
anthonyb
The main issue seems to be that comment quality is decreasing, so you could
always try my honeypot idea: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352247> :)

~~~
owntwofeet
I also think some varient of the honeypot might be worth experimenting with.
Perhaps instead of blacklisting, pg should do something more forgiving like
throttling their request handling to give them plenty of time to think about
what they've just said.

Perhaps karma should be subject to gravity. Login is required to view HN.
Submitting comments and links is expensive while lurking is cheap. Perhaps 5
karma points buys you a comment or submission; 1 karma/min to lurk.

 _Just as we [ought to] only make things customers would pay for, we should
only submit things users would pay to read._ While Hacker Monthly does do this
in some fashion, I don't think we should have to pay with monetary currency--
but in cpu time.

------
13Psibies
1/ The point of the karma system, as far as a user is concerned, is to
increase one's karma number.

2/ External values such as "democratic" likely oppose the actual objectives of
HN.

3/ Within HN culture, there is an element of gate-keeping.

------
maxer
having been here for a few years, i feel that any time i comment or post
anything interesting it will be downvoted. unless your a rockstar having an
opinion doesn't count.. expecting downvotes...

------
steve19
Explicitly ban bots.

This will get rid of some of the (b) comments from bot sock puppets.

------
da5e
Perhaps the karma for submitting articles should be separate from the karma
for comments. I know when I was out to build karma I focused on submissions
because there wasn't a downside.

------
roadnottaken
Limit comments and/or submissions and/or votes to a few per day.

------
aaw
I really like the /classic front page view. Could we try a similar comment
view as well, with votes only counted from users who've been here for at least
a year?

------
crasshopper
pg, how much have you played around with simple weights of upvotes _vs_
downvotes? Eg, making a downvote worth -1.1 and an upvote worth +1.0.

------
Locke1689
Add a story downvote at a very high karma threshold.

------
crasshopper
How about a "suggest an edit" button? Maybe senior members can suggest

# more polite language

# removal of irrelevant bits

# removal of memes

and hopefully this would encourage newbies to write better comments.

------
colinsidoti
I almost launched a site that was meant to compete with HN. Here was the
strategy to take you over:

Note: Thanks to Incubomber.com members and Aaron Burrow for coming up with
these ideas.

The specific problems that were being addressed:

1\. Karma is given for link aggregation instead of content creation. Consider
the user that is lucky enough to be the first to realize that you have posted
a new essay on PaulGraham.com. That user will instantly post the link on
Hacker News, and is guaranteed to gain a ton of karma. But aren't you more
deserving of that Karma?

2\. Community bias crushes the little guy. It seems that a bot is constantly
running on Hacker News that matches titles against the regular expression "`YC
?[WS]?\d{2}`i" and automatically adds karma until it reaches the home page.
But what makes news about a Y Combinator startup any more interesting than
another startup? Some power users have a similar effect on the community. This
predisposition makes it excessively difficult for unknown users to establish
themselves.

3\. Up votes are given where up votes are not deserved. It’s hard to blame the
users, though. If someone makes a hilarious submission, it certainly deserves
some recognition. Similarly, if someone reiterates a widely known fact, it
still feels right to express agreement. Unfortunately the only way to
communicate these feelings is by placing an up vote, which is not the proper
way to place votes and detracts from the quality of the community.

The solution was Anonymerit.com (Never launched, but one of us may get to it
eventually.)

Anonymerit.com Eliminating Bias While Evaluating Credibility

What is Anonymerit? Anonymerit is a new type of community where submissions
earn merit anonymously. At the end of each month, the top submissions will be
compiled and published with their author revealed (optionally). (Kudos to
Hacker Monthly, we may have swiped this from you)

How does Anonymerit work? Anonymerit is focused on content creation rather
than content aggregation. All submissions and comments are the original work
of their author, but Anonymerit will withhold their identity. Submissions are
kept anonymous so the community can evaluate the content's credibility without
introducing bias towards "noobs" or "power users," a symptom that plagues many
communities as they become more established.

To evaluate a submission, users can participate in two polls with simple plus
('+') and minus ('-') options. The first poll evaluates the popularity of a
submission. In general, this is used to determine if the community agrees with
a post. The second poll evaluates the merit of a submission. For this poll, a
'+' is used to indicate that the submission was thought provoking,
informative, and insightful. A '-' is used for submissions that focus on
widely known ideas, or are simply reposted content.

This separation is imperative because it allows users to quickly express their
feelings at a granular level. The total scores can reveal that a submission is
generally disliked but still worth reading, or that nearly everyone agrees but
the content is already well-established and does not need to be reiterated.

\--------

A monthly publication combined with anonymous postings is awesome. The
publication is required because it motivates people to post their original
content on HN rather than their own sites. Entrepreneurs, knowing that
investors will inevitably be reading the publications, would kill to write
quality content that makes it into the publication. This same fact also serves
as motivation to properly vote and comment on submissions. YC already has a
huge name, but imagine how much bigger it can be with a renowned publication.

The anonymous aspect is good because it lets people post anything without the
fear of being stomped on by PG. In the end, you're only really looking for the
best, and you can still find that through the publication. It's a win win.

~~~
akkartik
I like this idea.

------
gasull
Paul, what about using StupidFilter to filter out trolls?

<http://stupidfilter.org/main/>

------
newguy889
Have a hard tech theme day once a month, like Erlang day. Let's do Scala Day
tomorrow!

------
harshpotatoes
Why are mean comments posted? Answer: because they are massively upvoted.
People like Karma, and Karma is a useful tool to teach newbies how to act, by
giving them shining examples of excellent posters/posts voted on by the
community.

Why are mean comments upvoted? Answer: I don't know.

People learn how to act on HN by watching what gets upvoted, listening to the
tone of discussions, and reading the submitted articles. Presumably, the
unwanted comments are being made by new members of the community. Somehow,
these new members were not properly taught by the community. In which step
were they not properly taught?

I would like to submit three possible problems, along with three possible
solutions.

1) The problem is in the voting system. Mean comments are being upvoted, and
the senior members of the community are largely powerless to stop these
comments. Sure, they can downvote, but they are just one vote, and there are
still many more junior members who will upvote the mean comment. If you
believe that: Senior members know what's best for the community, these members
are senior because they have high karma, these members have high karma because
the community has voted that these people know best. Weighing a vote by the
karma of the user who made that vote would solve the problem of mean comments
being upvoted.

2) The problem are the stories that make it to the front page. Mean comments
and the votes they receive are a symptom. The users who upvote are getting
their social cues from the stories they read on the front page. Broad
requirements on stories that are HN worthy allow for a wide variety of stories
to get posted to HN. This is good for somebody who sifts through the 'new'
section, but it also means that the only stories that get massively upvoted
are stories that have general intersections between all of our interests.
Evidence seems to show that the most common shared interest is gossip, which
is conveniently unwanted by the community. The solution in this case, is to
make stricter requirements about what stories are allowed.

3) The problem is that bad apples will always exist no matter what you do. At
the moment, the easiest place for bad apples to exist is on the front page of
HN. Unfortunately, this is also the place a lot of normal users like to exist.
Perhaps a sandbox could be made for the bad apples to hate each other, and
allow the normal users to exist in separate but equal lives. Unfortunately,
this seems to go against the HN spirit, and I can't think of any useful ideas
on how to implement such a sandbox without it sounding like a subreddit.

Finally I would like to add: I like that HN takes the time for these self
analysis every now and then. But, I think it's important to remember that we
don't know what's best for us. The mere fact that we will upvote the type of
content we don't want shows this.

This leads me to reiterate a comment best stated by idoh: "Let us not be too
hasty in proposing solutions when the problem isn't really understood. At best
they are shots in the dark. Even after you ship them you wouldn't be able to
tell whether the fixes actually did anything or not."

------
derrida
Have a captcha-like box at the bottom of "submit" with methods that need to be
written for some giant program created by the community. The interface that
gets implemented could be selected by the community.

------
ericingram
I agree that the tone of comments is quite "mean"

------
karlzt
what is the best example of a comment that is mean and/or dumb that got
massively upvoted?

as a last resort you can always stall HN for 1 month.

------
bootload
_"... Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here
..."_

This is a radical idea probably without merit but small incremental steps to
improve the quality of submissions & comments are short term fixes to deeper
problems. What are the root cause(s) of poor quality responses?

Identity

Good behaviour in any group is important if you encourage identity. I tried
hard in any sites I've joined to stick by the spirit of the group because my
identity is tied to anything I say. What would joining HN be like with no
identity and zero reputation. A place where there is high competition for
submissions and few examples of what is really expected of you? The only sign
post I see is _karma_ some FAQ's on behaviour - but who reads those? My
behaviour is effected by those around me who in all reality want to improve
their standing through karma. Progress is measured by a score that is
derivative of what I do, who cares about the outcome. Make identity
meaningful. SO does this well. Users are recognised and rewarded. The hard bit
is HN isn't binary.

Utility

I join sites like HN because of the quality gap on the web. The only other way
I can do this is directly interact with fellow entrepreneurs. HN fulfils this
purpose. HN also is about things that interest hackers. That was the intent,
discuss new ideas, intelligently. HN is a lot like the LME discussing the
effects of X on Y, substituting copper for ideas, effects of conflict on price
for execution of product. What happens when the purpose is subverted or
unfulfilled?

Audience

Who reads and contributes in HN matters. I don't recognise the readers I
started with. As the audience drifts the early adopters leave as the utility
of HN drops. A lot of good hackers started here but will probably leave or
have left. This is a real problem. Hackers leaving is a signal that things are
broken or that the usefulness has been reached. Hackers are really sensitive
to certain types of audiences, especially non-technical. Like frogs, Hackers
leaving HN might be a sign the audience is polluted with the wrong type of
users.

Broken

HN is fundamentally broken. We already know this. It's not a new problem. But
something has to fundamentally change to address user identity and utility.
Encourage good behaviour by looking at [Identity]: the need to fit in,
contribute, improve and [Utility]: the reason users contribute and not get
bored or get up to mischief, leave.

Induction

Entry needs to be set higher than it currently is. Where else of value is
entry a handle, email and time enough of a measure of worth? I would put a
concrete intellectual challenge in the form of some writing, say 500 words in
their profile. For extra credit a link to a site the post exists. The purpose
is twofold. Create a baseline set of information that can be classified
through code and used to judge the quality of the HN user. Users could game
this if they wanted but a quick check against a post on a users website could
avert this. This benchmarks each user.

Evaluated

All subsequent posts are measured against their score. Submission scores are
scored against their benchmark.

Purpose

Make a real purpose for staying on at HN. Encourage interested HN users to
also submit to apply to YCombinator, even if they think they don't fulfill the
criteria to make them improve. Tie identity to purpose by making contributing
to HN a part of submitting to YCombinator. Give some real purpose. Make being
on HN way beyond just submitting links, making stupid comments and watching
your score.

------
teyc
I believe the decrease of 'quality' is due to the failure of HN to create a
society of like-minded people. This failure is on two levels. Firstly, the
open voting system and comments drive has a tendency to revert to the mean.
Secondly, HN needs to create hackers the way a school creates students. I
realize there is an anti authoritarian streak among hackers but a geek club is
pretty exclusive in its taste. New members have to be "schooled" into the ways
of a hacker. In real life, it is impossible to have a town hall meeting where
everybody talks at once, but HN is already bigger than a town hall.

I believe Quora does rather well in this respect because it encourages longer,
considered posts. The (fast) rate of decay on the front page partially
contributes to the problem because it models a news site, rather than a
technical discussion site, where most techniques and approaches remain
timeless.

Here are some possible approaches:

1\. Encourage longer answers and comments at the top level. This can be either
implemented as a simple word limit, or automatically placing longer comments
at the top of the comments list.

2\. Recycle old posts which have good comments. This should fix the
disincentive for people to provide long-lived answers.

3\. Make HN a "not" news site. This means that the incubation period is longer
before posts make it to the front page. Unless something has a long term
value, it will less likely be voted up because the reader would have already
seen and discussed it on TC, Reddit, Digg etc..

4\. (option to #3). Have posters classify whether the post is a news or a
technical discussion one. News links will have a different rate of decay, and
will occupy limited number of spots on the front page. Furthermore, these
posts will not be recycled.

5\. Require a link to be submitted with some comments. This is to encourage
submitters reason like hackers do. Provide some guidance - e.g. does this news
contain some data? What are the insights/inferences one might draw from this?
Does this article discuss a problem domain? Does the post illustrate an
assumption that is subject to hacking? What is your personal take on this? It
also acts as a disincentive for people to submit links without giving the
topic due consideration. I recall that eHarmony was very succesful in its
early days because internet dating sites usually have more men than women. By
subject the men to a barrage of interview questions, eHarmony was able to
maintain a balance between the male and female participants. I thought this
was a great hack.

6\. Implement some sort of disincentive for upvoting of inane comments. For an
example, do an automatic Quora-style follow, where you will start to see this
person's comments at the top of the comments page. Make it difficult to
"unfollow" (say three clicks). It will encourage people to be more careful
about polluting their personalizations.

------
adrianwaj
Simple, tie board participation more closely with YC application scores. What
were you thinking?

------
eli_s
Stop trying to rely on the hive to vote good stories to the top. Either the
democratic approach doesn't work or HN is getting gamed - either way the site
is now effectively broken.

A decision has to be made from the top about what HN is all about. If it's
startups and business then that's the only type of story allowed. Everything
else gets dumped. I don't need another Reddit.

Mods would need strict guidelines about what qualifies and everything even
slightly outside of these guidelines gets turfed.

oh and get rid of karma. It's bs. Encourages hivemind like nothing else.

~~~
crasshopper
eli_s, I would submit that the hive is able to distinguish good from bad
around the origin but once points get very high, votes are self-amplifying.

In other words, what gets 500 votes isn't much better than what gets 300
votes. But what gets 100 votes is much better than what gets 5 votes.

------
mkramlich
I think it is very likely that there are voting rings and sock puppets here on
HN. If so, it would cause a distortion in the scores awarded to all the
content, sometimes up or down, depending. Therefore anything that helps fight
that would improve the site by more honestly gauging the quality of submitted
posts and comments, which then improves the S/N ratio.

How to do this exactly? Not sure. But I'm confident that fighting it more will
improve any site.

------
Devilboy
Admit defeat and just use the slashdot system. For all its trolls and failings
slashdot still has the best crowdsource comment moderation system on the
interwebs.

The Slashdot System

\- Comments start at +1 and can range from -1 to +5 only

\- Mod points are limited and distributed randomly as needed

\- Only members with good karma are eligible for mod points

\- Mod points must be used within 24 hours

~~~
crasshopper
I would distribute uniformly rather than randomly.

------
jawartak
Make commenting cost 2 karma.

------
zyfo
Comment scores should either follow the opinion of the elite (role models,
learn-from-the-best) or your "peers" (like snide remarks? go ahead).

Currently it's the tyranny of majority. Suggestion for b (possibly intensive
processing): Change comment display order depending on your previous voting.

------
bigwally
The problem is the constant refreshing of stories on the front page. I need to
visit a few times a day to have some idea as to what is going on.

If the refresh rate was slower, or the ability for a story to get to the front
page would take longer then I would visit less.

At a guess most of the dub/mean comments get made by people who visit many,
many times a day and comment out of boredom.

Some method to slow down the entire system would slow down all the posters and
would result in longer posts rather than a bunch of witty one liners. Why
would anyone go to the trouble of writing an in depth response to anything
when it will be gone in three hours.

Increase the quality of the articles and you will increase the quality of the
comments.

At least HN doesn't have youtube quality comments yet. :)

------
pitdesi
Agree that there is a problem with comments, but there is also a problem with
terrible or duplicate articles getting to the front page. I'd like the ability
to downvote articles and we should all patrol duplicates - only allow linking
to primary sources, etc.

------
sabat
It's not all bad, but I've noted a disturbing trend of dogpile upvoting and
downvoting.

What about taking away downvoting? It would change the dynamic, at least. I
suppose it doesn't solve the problem of stupid posts and comments being
upvoted.

------
zyfo
Karma threshold for upvotes. Higher for topics than comments.

