
A Proposal To Improve Hacker News - sthatipamala
http://sridattalabs.com/2012/08/17/a-modest-proposal/
======
thaumaturgy
This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default
response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a
people problem using technical solutions.

Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual
design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I
think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuff. (I
don't have any good science for this, but I've been spending too much time
online since the dial-up BBS days, and community development is one of my
interests.)

Eventually every community needs one or more managers, or gardeners
(<http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>) -- people who
have been around a long time, who embody the "spirit" of the site, and who
have, not absolute, but special influence on the community. (RiderOfGiraffes
immediately comes to mind; I really wish he was still around.)

This is absolutely analogous to Google attempting to avoid customer service
completely by piling on more and more automated systems. While those systems
help, they can't yet replace an actual customer service department -- and I
think the frequent complaints from people who've been impacted by Google's
lack of customer service bears this out.

I like some of the suggestions in this post, but I don't think that they can
resolve the main issue with HN at the moment: it has grown to a size which
needs one or more community managers.

There are some architectural issues too. I think the current trend in online
forums, where new things are always better than good things, is ultimately a
step backwards in terms of encouraging thoughtful discussion
(<http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/>). If a really interesting
item comes up on HN that requires, say, a solid hour to compose a thoughtful
response -- something very technical that would benefit from some number
crunching -- there is very little motivation to commit the time to write that
response. By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the
next new thing. However, the first person to respond to an item with a quick,
witty, or snarky response gets rewarded with lots of attention.

And that is a problem that can not be resolved by any of the suggestions so
far.

~~~
Danieru
> By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new
> thing.

I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two
blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5
minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the
end).

Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page.
They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either
had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long.

Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page,
readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time
reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the
posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted
submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place
among their non-frontpaged peers.

The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a
strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In
same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive
enough. Meanwhile people do _like_ longer posts but reading a full essay is
barrier to upvoting.

~~~
ckcheng
Perhaps votes should be weighted by the length of the submitted post. So,
e.g., votes on short submissions are worth less than votes on full essays.
Length of the post can be gamed, but I guess when that happens some form of
information theoretic measure can be used as part of the weighting.

I don't suppose this is already being done, is it?

~~~
slurgfest
It is going to be hard to make an algorithm which can't be beaten (e.g.) by
just applying more adjectives and synonyms. Which can easily be automated.

~~~
dllthomas
Actually, I strongly doubt it can be easily automated in a way that doesn't
reduce readability, which I expect to lead to a sharp drop off in number of
up-votes. If the number of up-votes drops off faster than the advantage gained
from the longer post, the system can't be gamed.

------
dmlorenzetti
_Reward users for browsing "New"_

This is an interesting suggestion.

I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the
community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front
page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've
failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of
course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat
abstract reward nonetheless).

Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from
commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs.
Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the
fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own.
"You get what you measure."

~~~
rauljara
I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average
karma.

The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be.
Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you
are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to
influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you
didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it.

I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot
of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads
to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively.

I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads
where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are
worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and
it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio.
But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near
the bottom of the page, is awful.

~~~
polyfractal
Wow, I had no idea average karma sorted people higher/lower.

But you actively try to protect your karma? After my karma hit 1000 I
basically stopped caring anymore. What incentive do you have to protect your
karma (serious question, I'm not sure I understand why it matters)?

~~~
dhimes
I didn't know this, either. This idea will only work if karma measures what we
want it to measure. If karma isn't associated with quality but with site-
gaming, or snarky commenting, or other bad stuff, this system creates a
positive feedback loop for sending the site in the _wrong_ direction. Yikes!

------
benologist
I think this lays the real issue out but buries it:

> The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using
> HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up
> vote cabal, or write sensationalist content.

HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering,
submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with
that territory.

I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is
ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.

~~~
zalew
> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other
> bullshit that comes with that territory.

that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh
comments' everybody complains about.

and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and
tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to
obtain on my own. now I wonder how many more git and fabric tutorials do we
need, or why should I care what every blogger on the planet thinks of twitter.

~~~
polshaw
And that _every_ blog post must be followed by 'Why blog post A is wrong' and
then 'why blog post A and B are _both_ wrong'.

~~~
ericdykstra
I'm surprised there isn't 3 "Can't design? Learn programming." posts on the
first page right now.

------
jmduke
Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals
satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to
defeat famine with cannibalism")

~~~
sthatipamala
You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly
propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid
controversy (as that is not my aim).

~~~
pessimizer
Don't worry, it wasn't controversial or offensive, just a trope that signals
satire - which is not what you intended.

------
dwwoelfel
_While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are
many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight
the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies
with green._

PG tried that (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181>), except with
orange instead of purple.

~~~
kapitalx
Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem
has always been around. I wonder if this problem is cyclic and peaks at
different times during the year or during certain events, such as summer or
demo days.

~~~
philwelch
> Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this
> problem has always been around.

It hasn't.

------
Steko
One thing I'd like to see: Merged discussions.

Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another
link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's
just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a
NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked.
Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-
thread.

This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5
twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help
enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.

~~~
GnarlinBrando
This would graduate HN away from the list of links model that is so prevalent.
Certainly an interesting idea, but a big change as well.

------
_delirium
I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not
sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I
think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of
content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including
myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely
related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest
can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and
_actually reading_ it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their
time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed
to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim.

One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it
seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the
firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the
community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged
content as well.

~~~
ryanmolden
Could you incentivize people that upvote new items that ultimately cross some
threshhold (front page/votes) such that their upvotes translate into some kind
of karma or reward points of some sort? The earlier you are as an upvoter the
bigger the reward? Of course that may just incentivize people upvoting
everything in sight :) Perhaps historical upvoting patterns on the New Page
could be incorporated to penalize that kind of behavior. Just throwing it out
there. I do agree, I occasionally browse the new page but there is just so
much cruft there that looking for the gems is time consuming so I generally
just (lazily) wait for them to hit the front page.

Edit: Once again bitten by reading HN comments before the article as he
proposes something along these lines in the post, doh! :)

------
polshaw

        >Distinguish veteran users
    

I would much rather go the other way. It should be a meritocracy, not
celebrity worship.

For example give unique IDs for each user on each post. They could still link
to profiles, and could optionally be kept for submissions.

------
OmIsMyShield
No. I disagree that we need some sort of way to protect / alternatively value
the old folks with valuable contributions. This is a bad idea.

At first glance it seems good, since the old & upvoted are known entities - on
average, they are valuable to the community. Thus, give them something that
others can aspire to, even if it's just a purple link.

I would caution that this _will_ introduce strange, unforeseeable side-
effects, not least would be that you would necessarily have to classify new
users as dodgy, until such time that they have added enough data to be re-
classified.

Doing that to new users might even be beneficial in the short term. But in the
long run I fear that adding any frictions and subtle "you-aren't-as-valued-
yet" around new users might introduce subtle behaviours and keep certain types
of people away - something not easily quantifiable until it becomes too late.

I have a pet, untestable, and probably worthless theory that the tone of HN
has slowly drifted toward the bitterness we see now because (a) you can't
downvote links, so you have to express disagreement through the comments,
thereby adding negativity to the comment thread that might have otherwise just
been 'n downvote, and (b) the fact that comment scores are invisible doesn't
give new adopters an idea of how strongly people agree or disagree with tone
or topic in people's posts. So they don't learn by osmosis.

Both these ideas gave short-term benefit but I believe (totally
unscientifically) that they slowly, invisibly, led to the tone of the site as
a whole.

Be careful when changing the system, as the human part of it is difficult to
manage via proxies like scoring and similar. And if we introduce a way that
subtly penalises new people (or values old contributors, alternative view of
the same idea) we might just change the way we attract new people - and a
community needs all sorts of new people to stay alive.

------
buro9
The hide button will not work for long.

It is an attempt to treat the symptom and not the cause.

I run large communities, and I've implemented "hide" and "ignore" functions
for pretty much everything in my time.

People rub each other up the wrong way, so they want to ignore anything the
other person says.

People get rubbed up by all threads on a certain topic, so they want to ignore
the topic.

When a topic hits the news in a big splash and half the front page is the same
thing, they get annoyed and want to ignore the whole of that topic for a short
while.

Failing to hide/ignore all of that stuff results in them lashing out to the
detriment of all.

But, if you indulge it by providing the hide/ignore all you've done is hide
the symptom. Now people think it's cured and it is not.

The problem here isn't the content, it's the reaction to the content.

The problem here is with the reader and contributor, not pg and the code base.

The problem is that there needs to be a shift in attitude and etiquette from a
lot of users.

It's a people problem, and people need to be shown what isn't an acceptable
way to behave.

------
Terretta
I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you
pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would
result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully
evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would
result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National
Enquirer style headlines.

There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling
between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is
closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for
agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued
comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight
quality if multiple axes were available.

~~~
GnarlinBrando
I agree that multi-directional voting is worth exploring and that promoting
karma points leads to more sensationalism. Possibly even some form of
democratic tagging?

------
georgemcbay
"It would be incredibly shocking to see a vitriolic HN comment coming from
community leaders like tptacek"

wat

~~~
SoftwareMaven
While I agree that tptacek can be blunt to the point of cruelty, his arguments
are well reasoned. I've also never seen him belittle the efforts of anybody
(though I have seen him torch week reasoning). Even if I've disagreed and
silently wished he would walk away from a thread, his contributions to HN are
worse the bluntness.

~~~
georgemcbay
I agree 100% (which is why I went with a silly "wat" instead of challenging
the statement directly).

Every forum has a small group of people who tend to lack social graces (or
what passes for them online) but aren't just random assholes and are correct
most of the time. As long as these people don't stray too personal too often,
their contributions remain a net positive, IMO.

tptacek certainly fits into that, he just seemed like a funny choice to lead
off with in that statement.

------
finnw
I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but most sites (including
HN) with partially-automated moderation systems make the same assumption:

    
    
      *You only need one "karma" variable, for both posting and moderation*.
    

That is, users who post popular content (i.e. comments that get a lot of
upvotes) and those who moderate well (i.e. votes strongly-correlated with
those of the admins) are rewarded in exactly the same way, that is by
increasing the value that unified "karma" variable.

IMHO this is not the best approach. For every prolific poster (who probably
has decent karma already) you probably have 10 "lurkers" who have read most
stories posted in the last month, know what they do (and don't) want to read,
and are just as well-qualified to vote on stories and comments as those who
regularly post comments (and earn karma from them.)

So what would happen if you made "posting karma" and "moderation karma"
independent of each other?

(sort of a trick question, since it has been done.)

------
leed25d
The title of your piece suggests a satirical tone and I was ready for a
delicious morsel. Alas, I could not detect the slightest hint of sarcasm or of
a darker, ulterior aim. It could still be there, mind you, but on subtler
wavelength than my resonant cavity can detect. It might as well have been
titled "HN Considered Harmful", I suppose.

------
throwaway54-762
I was a little disappointed that this wasn't sarcastic
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal>).

------
forgottenpaswrd
"there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time."

I'm of the opinion that arguments must be judged by itself, and not by the
"Aristotle said" conformity method that so many problems brought to society in
the past and in the present.

I'm probably one of the older people here and had like 7 different accounts or
so(I keep forgetting passwords and accounts when my machines change-update).

I had a big karma on some of those accounts, but honestly I don't care the
least. I have more important things in my life to do-care, and so most of the
interesting people in HN. A great PhD with great things to say is going to
have work to do better than collecting "karma" on Internet all day long.

------
connortomas
I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is
totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels
relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the
comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides.

It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this
lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig
deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an
article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a
conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of
snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world
experience. To me, this matters.

I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community -
for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an
indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what
they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be
brought front-and-centre somehow).

Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little
naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.

~~~
danielweber
I think there is a lot of identity associated with users. I'm relatively
young, and often I will see one user identifying another user by their first
name, which I don't know at all. People know each other here.

This might be bad. If so, I'd say all comments should be anonymous for 2 days.
Give out a pseudo-random pronounceable handle to each user for posting on each
thread. People making dick comments will still have to deal with their
commenting history as posts are "unmasked" in 48 hours. (This well could cause
more problems that it solves.)

~~~
connortomas
That's interesting, and it's probably something I'll come to recognise as I
spend more time here. However, from where I'm standing, it does seem as though
the issue is that those ties are breaking as the community grows. I'm not
totally sure adding a further layer of anonymity would strengthen discourse
(though it could be an interesting experiment).

------
evolve2k
The 'more' link regularly fails to render on my IPhone 4 leading to a further
long term aversion to going there. Not sure if anyone else has had the same
experience? Just saying if it's affecting many devices this Is just
compressing the issue further.

~~~
vacri
I have a different problem in that the 'more' link uses some crazy key instead
of 'page=2'. If you press it a relatively short time after being loaded,
you'll get 'unknown or expired link', meaning you need to backtrack, reload
the page, scroll again, click... it's trained me out of bothering to do it
anymore.

------
ljd
I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do
have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem:

before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment)

after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) *
(Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank))

another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) *
(Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))

EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually
want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just
pull out that "+ 1")

This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment.
If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma
but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You
have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not
someone else's material is userful to the community.

This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life.

Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is
effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.

~~~
CJefferson
The problem with average karma is stat it strongly discourages people from
posting replies to less popular or older messages. I've made a conscious
choice to ignore my average karma. I dont think it is conducive to good
conversation, as it tends to be heavily biased towards the first few posts.

I wonder if we should go the other way -- I always liked slashdot's system of
a 5 point cap on any post. Is a 500 point post really enter than a 100 point
post, or is it more likely it is seen more often?

~~~
ljd
Good point, I adjusted it to reward "New" threads.

------
gue5t
"What doesn't matter" ... "Complaints of 'too much startups, not enough tech'
or vice-versa"

Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news
bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if
it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making
software and hardware do interesting things.

~~~
unimpressive
The site was originally called startup news. I think that in retrospect the
rename to HN was a bad idea, because it changes peoples expectations of what
the site is for.

Regardless, what you are describing would be much appreciated.

------
michael_fine
I find that paradoxically, the biggest problem with Hacker News right now is
the hot algorithm we use. It's great for bringing good stories to the
attention of the community and having a burst of short lived discussion over
those stories, and then dying out. What it's not great for is long term
discussions.

For example, with Quora, when someone answers a question, or posts a comment,
you never care how long ago it was posted, because there are notifications,
and the front page is based on what you follow, not how popular the questions
are.

This is a hard problem to fix, but a couple suggestions I have are to improve
the threads feature, such that it resembles a real notification bar. Secondly,
I think a new page should help, a mixture between the front page, and the
saved stories, which shows active discussions, and an emphasis on one's that
you have upvoted.

I think those might help reduce the ephemerality of the discussions here.

------
gcv
How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on
HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps
submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the
quality of the submissions.

Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would
be a bargain.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I would not blink twice at this. Few better ways to weed out the trolls. It
would be interesting to devise a way to utilize money and karma in a way that
basically says, "If you are provably improving the community significantly,
this costs you nothing; but if you are average or, worse, a drag, you will
pay."

------
jeffool
Between the to bar and the content, for a week or so, place a centered link
reading "A personal message about the future of HN from Paul Graham." Make it
a thread maybe. Talk about the expectations of visitors. The need to build up,
rather than drag down. To hold back the snarky comments, no matter how funny
we find them. (And not to vote them up, no matter how funny we find them.)

Talk about the virtues of reddit's better maintained communities if you're not
looking for serious conversation.

Make the post exactly what you want from the community.

Treat them like the serious business and tech minded sluts you want them to be
woke under your roof. And point that out too. You're choosing to engage, like
you often do. You don't want to, and shouldn't have to, seek technological
answers to people problems.

Maybe you'll convince a few people to think before posting/voting.

~~~
jeffool
... "Treat them like the serious business and tech minded ADULTS".

Last time I ever make a post on my phone with a time limited edit function.
Especially when sleepy, with Swype.

------
twelvechairs
Surely one badly-needed feature is needed is more different views. As the
community gets bigger, the single 'front page' doesn't cut it anymore.

Reddit's subreddits have become enormously successful in this vein (probably
to the detriment of its main page, which nobody in their right mind would read
anymore). I'm not saying this system is perfect for HN, but other systems in
the same direction might be very nice eg. tags for things like 'please provide
feedback on my new page/product' (I'd love to see them on one page), or
different types of comment view on a per-user-basis (how do _I_ want to see
comments, not one system for all HN). For my mind, an encouragement of
diversity along these lines would help the site thrive whilst allowing users
to keep (and define) their own community standards.

------
Tooluka
> Distinguish users. Reward users.

Wrong. Instead user karma system should be deleted completely. (Yes, I know
that I am a "newbie" here. Think what you want.). I have seen too many portals
died or degraded by the weight of "karma". The only working example is
probably Stack Overflow and I think they won't last long because of it.

Only reason why SO can survive is continuous strict moderation. I like "C++ vs
Java", "Most influential book" and similar topics very much but they really
don't belong to SO by their rules.

The same should be applied to HN - ban those millions Twitter and FB topics.
Ban topics with complaints (however reasonable). Ban SOPA/ACTA etc. topics.

In short - filter everything that is not educational for IT specialists. Yes,
it would be more boring that way (or not) but it would ensure HN quality and
survival.

------
comatose_kid
There is a tendency to upvote comments you agree with, and downvote comments
you disagree with.

This has two ill effects: 1) Witty and popular viewpoints rise to the top,
creating an atmosphere of superficial groupthink 2) People with unpopular (but
insightful!) viewpoints may be discouraged from posting them.

Given this, would the level of comments improve with the following change?

Replace the up/down vote buttons with a single button next to each comment
that reads: 'insightful', and use that to vote up comments. Forget about
downvoting stuff - the low content viewpoints and rudeness will both sink to
the bottom. Or if you wish, add a 'flag' box for comments made in poor taste.

Using such specific labels would make people think twice before voting, both
about the purpose of their vote and if the comment needs a vote at all.

~~~
woah
Do you think that the label would change people's behavior in the long term,
or would they end up just thinking of it as an upvote?

~~~
comatose_kid
Not sure, but trying it out would be a good way to find out...

------
dumbluck
I think HN should be a democracy:

1\. Don't let people create multiple accounts so easily. Switch to OpenID and
have the ability to associate old accounts with the new ID or have the old
account deactivated within 90 days. I don't even know how many accounts I've
created, but it is a lot. This is basically anonymity. This does not work.

2\. Don't filter comments and not hide topics that anyone disagrees with
unless they are extremely offensive, and those could be marked as offensive
and then PG and those with enough karma will check those and if they are
offensive, they will hide them, but anyone could still see them, vote on them,
and comment on them, if you clicked a flag to see them. You have to login to
upvote, downvote, mark as offensive, post, or comment.

3\. Show who upvoted or downvoted to everyone. This will make people think
twice before downvoting.

4\. Allow private communication between users so that if someone downvotes you
without saying why, you can ask them why.

5\. The new page is grouped by: last 24 hours, last 3 days, last week, last
month, last 3 months, last year, and then by year. Everytime something is
upvoted it goes to the top of the new list for the group it is in.

I'm sorry that some people have complained that HN works fine technically as
it is. It certainly does, for those it serves. However, people complain that
there are negative views here. I think the changes I proposed will help with
that. But a bigger problem is that people's posts and comments get whacked. If
you handle things in the way I described, and stop silencing me and others, I
think the community will be much happier.

------
vannevar
It's unlikely that a purely algorithmic ranking solution will be adequate. HN
should better leverage the judgment of the site's veteran members across the
board, rather than only for article ranking. Awhile back I posted a self-
organizing way to filter comments that works in this way:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753>.

------
FrojoS
>HN could benefit from implementing infinite scroll, so the next page is
appended asynchronously to the current one. [...] The problem is only a small
minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button on bottom of the
page.

Yes. More so, if I spend considerable time, reading the second or even third
page I can't get to the third or fourth page because the "More" link becomes
broken after a while.

------
noblethrasher
I suggested this on a previous 'improve HN thread' (instigated by pg himself):

Shutdown HN for a week or so and when reopening only let a certain quota in
per day/week/month. Give priority to old and/or high karma members. I think
that it will have the effect of churning the low quality membership.

Perhaps allow these elected to elect others to enter "promised land".

~~~
hardwear
do you have a link to the thread?

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

------
smashing
The Usenet readers had kill file's. That is the only solution which will have
an overall improvement with no downside.

------
jhuckestein
I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set
the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone
will not be enough though.

Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting
upvotes by the same metric?

~~~
rdl
I agree with showing certain users in certain colors. I don't think karma is
the right metric for it.

I'd like to see green for new users, maybe some specific color for throwaway
accounts of someone with a real account, let people with special other colors
reveal that color if they wish, and maybe good and bad colors for people who
meet other requirements -- there are some people who probably deserve a "red
flag" for 30+ days, but not hellbanning, and others who deserve the honorary
purple.

The only karma related way I'd award purple is for submission points, or for
being early upvoters on submissions in /new which are later upvoted by a lot
of other people. Sheer accumulated comment karma is probably not a great
metric, since someone who is on HN a lot, chooses to write "populist"
comments, etc. is likely to accumulate a lot of karma without adding much
value.

------
reledi
I think a lot of new users are unaware of the HN guidelines [1]. Linking to it
from the nav bar could help showing what is and isn't an acceptable way to
behave.

[1]: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

------
DodgyEggplant
Shirky 2003, about habitat, 1990. Nothing new here, really. Same issues, same
lines of thoughts for solutions.

A Group is it's Own Worth Enemy: <http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

------
tome
Personally I think I'd raise the bar to moderator rights to those with several
thousand karma, and encorage strongly to flag stories they think are
inappropriate. That should get the site closer to what it was a few years ago.

------
chmike
I have to disagree with most suggestions.

What criteria would make someone purple ? Popularity ? Number of karma points
? What would be the incentive to respect them more then others ? And why would
they deserve more respect than others ?

I'm a long time HN reader and I don't have much karma. Its because I try to
post and comment wisely. Why wouldn't I deserve respect ?

My impression is that radical comments are more prone to votes since they pull
on the emotional strings.

It would be a bad idea to favor people voting in the new section because I bet
people would vote blindly just for the benefit of voting.

------
lewisflude
Why not show the "new" tab as the front page and put "top" as a menu option? I
know it's one more click for a lot of us, but it could be a nice change! Or,
at least make that the default.

------
DanBC
There are a handful of domains that host pretty shoddy content - poor
research, poor writing, link-baity titles, bias, etc. Banning those might be
too extreme. But it'd be nice if there was an A list and a B list and then a A
and B list.

the A list would be carefully curated set of URLs proven to be of interest to
the community (but a domain can easily be removed if they start getting too
many bad stories); the B list would be everything else' the A and B list would
be both.

------
hobbyist
While reading this article through HN, (<http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-
the-dark-web/>) I thought it will be a good idea if HN can be moved inside an
onion network like tor. People need to go through tor in order to access the
site. It should not be visible via normal http/ip addresses. This can reduce
the number of users coming on HN, and hopefully HN maintains the authenticity.

------
salvadornav
I think "reward for browsing New" could be a good idea yet very difficult to
implement it well. What I'd like to see is a front page with various lists of
submissions according to different criteria, some ideas: 1st| most votes this
month - this week, 2nd| "Hot today" (this'd be similar to the current front
page I believe), 3rd | "Promising" (Posts from New section that begin their
momentum), 4rd | Most commented month / week. Basically a bit of filtering.

------
austinlyons
Sridatta, thanks for taking time to articulate your ideas on how to improve
Hacker News. I enjoyed your post and really like the idea of distinguishing
veteran users.

------
revorad
A proposal to improve Hacker News: shut it down for a month.

------
sktrdie
But is there a "Hacker News Manifesto"? No there isn't. HN is what it is
because of the community. Sure, there should be moderators to control the
profanity level.

But overall, if content is interesting and it's up-voted, it means it's
meaningful to someone and therefore should maintain its place on HN.

The content should be driven by the community - if it's too startup related or
too technology related is really a subjective matter.

------
sendos
What do people think of the idea of removing down votes and allowing only up
votes? Has this been shown on other discussion boards to work?

~~~
MartinCron
My immediate reaction is to say that the downvotes serve a useful purpose.
They can indicate social disapproval without adding noise or fanning
flamewars.

The downside, of course, is that you see so many "WTF? Downvotes? Why"
Comments.

------
dinkumthinkum
Honestly, I think this is kind of much adieu about nothing. On the original
thread, one commenter looked at the OP's original submission and found a lot
of praise etc. Similarly, wheher I see ShowHN posts with projects that seem
trivial or even frivolous to me, there are usually many well wishers offering
a lot of praise.

------
geon
> only a small minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button

The size migh be an issue, but the greatee problem is that by the time I reach
the bottom of the page, the link has usually expired. If you want your users
to see the next page, that really is inexcusable.

------
silenteh
I would also remove the duplicated content/submissions which create or could
create fragmentation of good comments, besides a personal frustration for
having just wasted time opening again the same link only because the title
seemed different.

------
Kilimanjaro
Change the front page to show 30 hottest articles plus 10 new, 10 ask, 10
show, 10 jobs and 10 startups.

Run a contest to redesign the frontpage with all these sections.

As I said earlier, adding a section with upcoming startups by batch would
greatly benefit us all.

------
obilgic
What about putting front page and "new" page together into a single homepage?

------
suyash
Add to the list: Keep HACKER NEWS FOR AND BY HACKERS..stop posting other
useless content. I want this place to learn and read about new coding
practices, api's, only technically relavent stuff.

~~~
peterwwillis
There's lots of non-technical stuff that's relevant to hackers. Broaden your
horizons.

------
truth_dude
What I cant wait for...."Why the new Hacker News sucks"

------
cremnob
What about paying $5 to have a HN account? SomethingAwful and Metafilter both
do this and it helps keep the quality high (along with good moderation).

------
franzus
> community leaders

That's where I stopped reading. I don't need or want a leader who can lead my
thoughts.

Also: Meta discussions are never productive. They only waste time.

------
alpine
Some things have a natural life then die.

------
hujjio
Stop the censoring for a start...

~~~
ericd
This is a good piece on why aggressive moderation is necessary to keep online
communities from devolving into cesspools, even though it may attract cries of
censorship:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>

~~~
jmtame
I never thought about it until now, but the best IRC networks I hung out on in
the 90s were ones with really good net admins who enforced the rules. Even
when I was younger, I didn't belong on certain IRC networks, and I was quickly
banned from them. That same rule applies to all the other communities (mostly
gaming) that I was involved with.

One problem with banning users is that they're not difficult to prevent from
returning. At least on IRC, you had to pay for a BNC to change your IP address
because whatever your dynamic IP resolved to, the hostname was fairly easy to
reliably ban.

------
hackermani
All comments can be made from Tweetbot only. Done.

