
News News: Faster, Fewer Flamewars - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#29apr09
======
DanielBMarkham
I'm skeptical of the exponential delay -- seems like another way of saying "if
you're in a drawn-out conversation with somebody, take it somewhere else
because you're boring us"

Which then limits your options for participating in a controversial subject to
a) doing nothing, and b) making some grand overarching statement and not
caring what comes after it.

Neither of these seem to add to the site.

I understand the desire to prevent emotions from overwhelming posters, but
geez, sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I've found that if both sides are honest and stick to an intelligent
conversation, a lot of times you can learn a lot by the time you're about 7
levels in. Most of the time you learn that the two sides, while posturing,
aren't really that far apart.

I like deep threads every now and then. Shows me how people are thinking.
Shows how they react on their feet. Shows the depth of their position (or lack
thereof). Teaches respect for each other and community values.

Flamewars? Not so much. But HN hasn't exactly been a nest of flame-waring, at
least as far as I can see. There are heated discussions, they blow over, then
life moves on.

But hey, not my call. I hope this works out the way you want, Paul! I'm always
willing to see how an experiment works out. After all, I was one of the
original orange members. (or was it red?) : )

~~~
stcredzero
What if readers could vote on the exponent? Maybe add a "flamewar" button that
raises the exponent, which starts out at something innocuous like 1.1.

~~~
bmelton
I suspect that it would be easier (though I don't know how practical) to
simply zero the exponent for arguments that are getting upvotes. At least then
it doesn't penalize the discussions generally accepted as quality.

~~~
boredguy8
Or, slightly more moderate: suppose the delay is depth^1.75 seconds: each
upvote could be a slight reduction in the 'depth' factor: (depth-score/3)^1.75
or something like that. Could also be useful because becoming more "flamey"
means you're actually increasing the depth via down votes.

------
dfranke
The one day timer for /noobs should start ticking when they make their first
submission, not when they create their account. Otherwise spammers can just
wait a day before submitting anything.

~~~
pg
I haven't seen any cases yet of spammers letting accounts mature before using
them. There would be no practical benefit. All the limits depend on karma, not
account age.

------
dschobel
_Rtm just made a couple changes to Arc's internals that have made the site
visibly faster._

I was just reading the wikipedia page on Arc yesterday and it talks about an
unofficial fork of Arc which came about because of a perception of slow
development in the official branch.

How are those two branches playing these days? Is there any cross-pollination
of code?

~~~
stefano
Currently the last release of Arc is one year old. The fork (Anarki) has had
more visible development, although it has slowed down after october 2008. You
can see the full history here: <http://github.com/nex3/arc/commits/master/> .
There has been no cross pollination of code: the anarki fork fixes a few bugs
that are still present in the official release of arc and it has a few
interesting extra features, such as the possibility of defining your own
functions to be called when a non-function object gets called. Another
interesting implementaton of arc, which does include a few features from
anarki, is rainbow: <http://github.com/conanite/rainbow> .

------
jasongullickson
I'm a newcomer to HN but I was amazed to find out how long it's been around.
It has the feel that many of my favorite sites had in their infancy which they
inevitably loose as time goes on.

It's great to hear that the system is constantly being improved to maintain
this environment, bravo.

~~~
trickjarrett
Change is a constant on HN. Site changes, algorithms, etc. But through it all
the community has remained largely tightknit and focused, which are definitely
feats of their own.

~~~
Hexstream
There is one constant: widespread paranoia, justified or otherwise, about the
quality of the site and alleged degradation. This since approximately day 1.

~~~
trickjarrett
Because the community here is largely composed of early adopters and tech
people. People who have been part of other sites who we grew attached to and
watched as they degraded around us.

Is it paranoia? I don't think so. I think it's a fervent and constant
vigilance against such.

But even then, it's definition has changed. The acceptable topics has
broadened. We held open forums through the political season to discuss whether
we wanted political news, etc.

So even then our definition of quality submissions has changed.

~~~
jasongullickson
If nothing else it proves that this Quality is sustainable, even if the cost
is eternal vigilance (which isn't so bad, and I imagine not outside the nature
of the sort who frequent this site).

~~~
swolchok
Maybe it's just me, but I thought I had been watching the site go downhill in
the past month or so. I have rarely found a submission I really wanted to
upmod in that time.

~~~
Hexstream
It's not just you, everyone thinks the site is going downhill in round-robin
fashion.

------
mechanical_fish
_there is now an exponential delay before reply links appear on deeply nested
comments_

I think this is a fascinating idea.

~~~
eru
I'd prefer to be able to enter my comment as soon as I can think of it, but do
not have it show for other people until the time is up.

~~~
Hexstream
I'm thinking this would significantly affect the effectiveness of this new
feature. Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth
but otherwise have about the same quantity of flame comments?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Exactly.

Let's say I'm really mad at your comment you just wrote. Really mad.

So the little "reply" button isn't showing up.

Do I a) stop being angry because a little button is disabled or b) find some
other way to vent online?

I'm voting for b. And if you're going to vent anyway, I'd rather you nest it.
That's what nested comments are for, anyway -- stuff that gets more and more
detailed about a particular conversation.

~~~
TrevorJ
That's why I think auto-collapsing threads with less then a certain threshold
of karma after a period of time might be the way to go.

~~~
lucumo
Forget _auto_ -collapsing, I'd like to be able to collapse period.

It happens quite often that I've already read a really long thread and just
want to skip over it to the new stuff, or that the topic discussed in the
thread is just not that interesting to me, but the topic of the post is.

------
jasonlbaptiste
I'm officially nicknaming <http://news.ycombinator.com/noobs> _The Land Of The
[dead]_

------
benreesman
Is it possibly to give a nice brief summary of the kind of change that brought
about this speed up? Because... damn the site is fast now!

~~~
gruseom
I was going to ask that too: what are the "couple changes"?

~~~
pg
Some common functions that took n arguments used to generate garbage when
given 2.

------
vaksel
Do we even have flame wars? I'm a fairly active reader and I don't really
remember ever seeing one on here.

~~~
tokenadult
They are ignored by most of the most active users here, which keeps them small
and contained, because they never gain much karma, in most cases.

------
ilamont
Thanks for making HN faster. I visit the site repeatedly throughout the day
and the slowdowns can be frustrating.

------
ggchappell
Shouldn't there be a link to the the noobs list on the lists page? There isn't
(yet).

------
bisceglie
i like the idea of exponential delays for deeply nested comments. i wonder if
there is a more direct way to force people to take their time in writing
replies. maybe a timer on how long a reply textfield is active (i know, full
of flaws, but a start, at least).

if it doesn't inhibit thoughtless replies/comments, at least it will destroy
the excuses of "oh, i should have thought about my response a bit more", and
"that's not what i meant, i should have clarified that point."

~~~
amalcon
It also might simply cause people to work around the feature, by adding new
top-level comments (that are actually replies to nested comments). I will be
interested to see how well it works.

~~~
philwelch
Opening "link" in another tab is a better workaround.

~~~
benreesman
Hopefully the delay is enforced at the server. Have you checked to see if
opening 'link' in another tab defeats the restriction?

~~~
pg
As you guys have discovered, the restriction is in the code that generates the
reply links, not the code that receives the replies. I'm hoping this will
suffice.

~~~
Hexstream
May I inquire about your thought process with respect to security implications
when you wrote this code?

A. "I know this is sloppy and will be found out sooner or later, but I hope
people will respect the restriction anyway."

B. "I know this is sloppy, but I hope nobody will find out."

C. "This isn't really sloppy, as I know full well the security implications
and don't care about them at all."

D. Didn't really think about the implications.

~~~
pg
C is the closest, but this is not even a question of security.

------
axod
I just assumed it was a bug... You can just click on [link] and then comment
still right?

------
noss
Another clever idea is to add delays to troublemakers' site-browsing
experience. Not my idea, I picked it up somewhere.

Not that it was added according to the post, but I am just saying that it is
clever. :)

------
pmarin
When arc3 ?

