

Pleading with HN: Submit and upvote "better" content - robg

There really are only two ways to make this community "better" if you deem it lacking:<p>1. Submit<p>2. Upvote.<p>Sorry, but that's it.
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noodle
question: doesn't submitting posts like this, which will likely garner a bunch
of points, contradict the theme that it is pushing forth? seeing a bunch of
top threads that just talk about the state of HN makes HN much less HN-like.

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rantfoil
Agree, there's already another "content gripe" thread at the top. At least
this one is saying something positive, though. =)

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raganwald
You are mistaken, sorry. Complaining does change people's behaviour. You
wouldn't be complaining about other people's behaviour if you didn't think so!
That being said, you are entitled to suggest that submitting content and
upvoting content is the _best_ way to make the community "better."

But it is not the only way, at least not until HN explicitly forbids meta-
posting.

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paulgb
> But it is not the only way, at least not until HN explicitly forbids meta-
> posting.

I hope we don't, there have been some effective meta-discussions in the past.
For example, one lead to the banning of valleywag stoies (I know pg posted a
poll on it, but iirc. it was other users who were complaining initially).

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biohacker42
There's a lot of people that would agree with out. And a lot of people that
point this out whenever someone complains.

But could you (or anyone) explain how submit and upvote keeps this community
from growing and become ever more generic?

In my mind popular = generic, and I'm not sure how Submit & Upvote helps?

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robg
I'd say the guidelines and then the community that breathed life into them.
That's the hypothesis any ways. They seem to be the only thing restricting the
content.

I think some additional algorithms could work, and we're building an
application based on them. But so far, here, I'm not sure they're necessary.

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mooneater
How about a separate "On-topic" metric with voting.

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known
What are the incentives?

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rms
we need meta.news.ycombinator.com

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DanielBMarkham
Seems rather odd to be complaining to the customers that their complaining is
wrong.

Sound like a guy running a hot dog stand. Each day, a thousand folks come by
and buy hot dogs. Maybe ten thousand just read the signs. About a hundred of
the regulars say "Why don't you paint the sign blue?"

You can say, "no" or you can say "yes". What makes no sense at all is to keep
arguing with the complainers.

Is there a way to paint the sign blue without losing the traffic? If so, do
it. However -- and this is what bugs me -- perhaps you like the traffic more
than the contributors. Perhaps the contributors are just suckers creating
unique, interesting, and varied content on your site everyday. And if that's
the case, well it doesn't really matter at all what 'HN' really is, because
the whole point is to let it evolve into a mindless link farm not to service
the commenters/readers. In other words, the true customers are the passerbys,
not the people eating the hotdogs.

I don't believe this premise, but it is self-consistent. I would like to see a
drop-down voting system where there would be 5-7 categories each user could
choose from. If I thought the article was interesting, I could choose
"interesting". If you thought it was on-topic, you could choose "on-topic".
etc. Add a flag and tag feature, get rid of downvotes entirely, and at least
then the site is customizable to work no matter the reader's preference.

