

Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot? - dant

I'm fairly new here (I'm a refugee from Reddit) and occasionally I read comments where someone complains that a post isn't appropriate or that the standard of conversation has gone down recently. And whenever I read those comments I'm troubled by a nagging sense that nobody has a plan. That things will gradually get unbearable and that when they do the people who built up this site will just move on and found a new community and the whole process will start over.<p>Is there a plan? What's stopping 100,000 Digg users hearing about HN on TV and showing up with posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats?<p>Clearly there's the code behind the site, the karma system and minimum thresholds for downvoting and so on. I've also seen people linking to the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) occasionally, to try shame people into behaving themselves.<p>I've got to be honest though, I can't see anything that's fundamentally different about HN that means it will avoid the fate of those other sites. You let me register, what's to stop others? Do you have to "Accept" the guidelines when signing up? I can't remember, even if you do though, let's be honest, nobody's going to read that.<p>I don't know, do you think HN is structure well enough to prevent it happening? Is there a special plan? Or do people just expect to have to move on when things go down hill?
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pg
I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from
the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more
popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow.
Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much
easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice
growth.

~~~
gwc
Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?

HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users;
presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of
those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with
an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do
wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are
primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological
aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.

~~~
Xichekolas
> _ever-increasing variance in quality of those users_

I'm not sure it's necessarily the quality of the users. Call me an optimist,
but I think most people in general are decent and most people that bother to
come here are pretty smart.

I think the problem with size is the same reason everyone else is a crappy
driver but you. In a normal day of driving, you are surrounded by mostly good
drivers, but a couple of them are bound to make really stupid mistakes (just
by random chance). Since this is your only experience with them, you label
them a "bad driver" and it overshadows all the good driving around you. If you
only drive on lightly traveled roads, you are less likely to see a stupid
mistake, but get on a major interstate highway in a major city and there are
enough people that something is bound to happen.

Likewise with large social news sites. Every user is a 'good user' 99% of the
time, but has that random moment when they do something trollish or get
carried away with an argument and say something mean. (I know it has happened
to me before.) When a site gets large, the probability of this happening on
any given thread rises accordingly, and since everyone focuses on these
instances, it seems like every thread is full of trolls and angry people.

I think anonymity also plays into it. Large communities are by default
anonymous, and small ones are not. People in small towns don't cut each other
off or tailgate each other, because you are likely to know the person in the
other car, or at the very least be headed to the same place. (I know, I'm from
a small town.) In a major city, you are never going to see that other car
again, so no one cares if they act like an asshole.

------
brk
Here's my thought on the matter... The "Killer feature" here is the lack of
killer features. There are no buddy lists, stupid picture icons, special
groups, or karma-whoring incentives. It's just a simple place to exchange news
that is generally relevant to a hacker community.

The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention
will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of Digg and
Reddit refugees.

BTW, welcome to hacker news...

~~~
tstegart
What? there's no karma-whoring incentives? Damn! I totally thought I was going
to get to change the color of the toolbar...

~~~
boredguy8
And polls! Why else would I post but to reach the HN Nirvana of being able to
post polls?

~~~
jmatt
for when that day comes...

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

------
gaika
PG <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547> :

"1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and
politics) are banned here.

2\. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if
he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

3\. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.

4\. Votes on comments affect karma.

5\. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already
been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking."

~~~
jon_dahl
I'm hopeful - but there was a time when #3 was true of Reddit, too. Now if
your Reddit comment includes the word "fap", you're about guaranteed to be
upmodded.

------
adambard
As a fellow Digg->Reddit->here refugee, I think we're the problem. Judging by
the fact that you didn't defect from Reddit sooner, it can be reasoned that
you enjoy a dash of offbeat humor, politics, and funny pictures with your
programming (and in this case entrepreneurial) articles and news. In other
words, you're like me, and the rest of the early majority.

We go from social news site to social news site, dragging down article quality
with our penchant for less-than-total fact saturation and off-topic posts.

The only responsible thing is to get your hacker news here, and your funny
pictures elsewhere. Refrain from contributing posts or articles and let the
people that make this site great continue to make it great.

Wait, crap. Except for this post and that post.

------
jon_dahl
The most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community
positive, is this: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines:

 _Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video,
picture..._

The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official
standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is
"Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate.

Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less
programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle
nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking
site at the moment.

------
Readmore
The only hope is our elitist comment trolls. Also the fact that HN has far
fewer users makes it much easier to deal with the problem.
[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.yc...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.ycombinator.com/?metric=uv)

~~~
PieSquared
I'm mildly pleased that HN shrank, not grew, this month. Not by a lot, but
still. Hopefully that won't reverse. If the community doesn't grow, it can't
turn into another digg.

~~~
pmjordan
Note that the statistic isn't for HN only, but also includes the rest of
ycombinator.com. I suspect HN didn't shrink; instead YC got press hits in
April + May after registrations and kicking off the summer cycle. Also, for
that level of traffic, I'd be wary of compete.com stats. More so than usual in
any case.

------
gunderson
I can't believe nobody has mentioned collaborative filtering.

Simple collective voting and new/hot/controversial are very unsophisticated
measures of how much any particular user will like something.

For an example of how powerful collaborative filtering is, check out
movielens.org

The key is to take each user's votes and use them to figure out based on other
peoples' votes what stories and comments to display. Then the community
doesn't really "grow". Sure you may get some niche communities that grow, such
as people who all tend to upvote cat pictures, but the "thinking person"
doesn't have to worry, b/c as long as there is a weak (or negative)
correlation between cat pictures and your upvotes, the system will never
recommend any to you.

Imagine rather than one massive community, an infinite number of beautifully
overlapping ones. I think the ideal system would consider votes for stories
and comments, and show each person mostly content that had a high probability
of being enjoyed.

The "new" tab might show things with less of a strict filter to prevent false
negatives.

The research group that built Movielens has some papers on the web and the
math isn't that tough. With a properly design collaborative filtering system
there simply will not be the digg/reddit degradation where the site gets so
big and noisy and low quality. Sure there may be stories that are hugely
popular, but as long as the algorithm gets enough quality input (votes) on a
variety of things, no user would get too many duds.

Ironically Reddit's redesign only increases noise by tending people away from
the subreddit niche communities that had existed -- I would more likely click
on a weak title if in a quality subreddit than if it's the #4 item on the
screen.

At the rate it's going, news.yc will surely become the next reddit, and
eventually the next Digg. As others have pointed out, we'll all have probably
moved on by then to the next site (or hopefully one that implements CF!).

It seems odd to me that nobody has implemented a site like this with CF... As
with most of my posts, if anyone wants to collaborate to do an experimental
site like this just let me know. There are some cool ruby libraries out there
and of course gsl.

------
nazgulnarsil
Don't make your posts too entertaining. Don't make your posts too short. A
community of people who post large chunks of dense text about esoteric
subjects will keep the horde out.

------
foulmouthboy
I read all the answers, and I'm now convinced that there's nothing keeping
this site from eventually going down that same path.

Death. Taxes. Gentrification.

~~~
attack
Yes, the majority of people here just support banning, harsher punishments,
and locking out all outsiders. Those are very poor solutions!

#1 and #2 cause strong negative backlash. As you would learn from marketing
theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x
more damage to your brand than your best users improve it. #3 Locks out a lot
of useful expertise. For sure, HN could use a lot more knowledge about
programming. So far, this site has attracted lots of people who want to learn
but much less so people who already know a lot and have wide experience. We
still very much need to be inviting to the latter.

Another point that very knowledgeable people are very opinionated, stubborn,
and generally assholes. Linus Torvalds is the stereotypical example. This is
not to excusing the behavior, but the correlation exists and we will all have
to try not to get so offended and ban people like immature children.

If you try to hold onto the past forever instead of trying to improve then you
will fail.

I hope this was useful.

~~~
astine
"As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally
screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best
users improve it."

I'd say that a jackass active on the site is more damaging than one banned. If
you ban someone, you have only upset one user. If you allow a
spammer/troll/flamer/etc to continue unchallenged, you have upset all of them.

The thing with online communities is, this is Web 2.0, your users are your
product. The better the users, the better the product. If you have a good
community, smart, helpful people will be attracted and will thus improve the
community. If you have a bad one, they will be warded off. Scum breeds scum.

Think broken window theory.

~~~
attack
If that could be achieved then, yes you would be quite correct. However, it is
very hard to completely cut people off on the Internet. Furthermore, they can
start disparaging you through other mediums (eg blogs) and influence people
they still know to be using your site.

~~~
astine
So? Thats free publicity. If they something bad about you, all they're doing
is informing people of your existence. People will judge for themselves
whether you are worth using, usually by checking it out themselves. At least,
the kind of people you want on HN will.

The problem isn't with them badmouthing you on your site, it with them
polluting your product. If the product sucks, people won't use it, no matter
how much you suck up to them.

------
acousticiris
I think there are a few things going on here that differentiate it from
Digg/Reddit (I'll leave out Slashdot for the moment, because I think they have
different concerns).

On Digg and Reddit, there is no "focus". Digg started out as a tech news site
and degraded slowly until they opened up the doors to include all news, which
brought what you have refered to as posts on Obama's latest news and pictures
of their cats.

On reddit, the day I stopped reading was the day I saw a post on the front
page encouraging folks to not post political stories on the politics sub-site
because they don't get enough attention that way. That would imply that both
sites have a problem with "activists".

To me, that sufficiently explains why the front page of HN "works". What I
can't figure out is why the comments on this site tend to be so civil. The HN
community seems to lack the hostility that plagues virtually every other site
of its kind. Is it fewer angry people? Older, or more mature audience? Maybe
it's migrants from the three sites you mention who were fed up with the poor
behavior exhibited there?

------
jlouis
The main difference is very simple, yet effective: HN has a specific goal. It
is not a place which will just flow with whatever is posted. Some things are
allowed, and some things are not.

Hopefully, the choice of content will keep people interested in that kind of
content, and remove those that don't. They already got reddit/digg/foobar for
their stories.

Comments would take more time to moderate, if we think of users up/downvoting
as a differential equation that slowly is moving towards the "intelligence of
the masses". So in time, the level of comments will degrade. The way of
keeping that from happening is, of course, to mercilessly kill bad comments
and keep them out with overpowering ;)

------
davidw
PG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high
quality.

~~~
gwc
This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online
communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem.

I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?

~~~
parenthesis
There is the difference between HN and reddit/digg etc. that pg and co. do HN
for love, whereas, whatever other motives they may have, the other sites are
trying to make money.

~~~
hpr122i
Classic counterexample: kuro5hin.

------
boredguy8
It probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. ->
k5 -> reddit -> HN.

At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except
to shut the site down.

~~~
tstegart
Except a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!

~~~
crazyirish
lisp? you mean arc good sir. I'm not sure how effective a bayesian filter
would be at classifying news stories as interesting/non-interesting though.
Has anyone tried this?

~~~
jcl
Yes, it looks like pg built something to recognize good/bad stories:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213951>

------
captain-m
If growth isn't a concern why not force people to wait a certain amount of
time after signing up before they're allowed to post?

That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting
and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.

------
azharcs
I think just not compromising is good enough to keep the quality of the site.
I don't see HN doing any deals with NY Times or getting a ad deal with Google.
They have kept it simple, just pure news and it is surrounded by smart bunch
of people who want to keep it that way.

------
noodle
the quick and dirty answer is the userbase. it doesn't, at least right now,
turn into digg/reddit/slashdot because the people who want to see a
digg/reddit/slashdot are already at digg/reddit/slashdot.

the community here likes how things are and has a vested interest in keeping
HN like it is. so thats what they do, try and push out the bad where they can
and promote the good.

------
xenoterracide
I don't think anything... the algorithm that decides what's on the front page
is currently just so so, and no one wants to improve it.

------
reazalun
Limit the number of news submission per user in 24 hours. I suggest max 5
news/24 hours. That way, we can guard HN from spammers.

~~~
mixmax
That would be a bad idea since submissions follow a powerlaw , meaning that
the majority come from a relatively low number of users that submit a lot.
Check <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb> for an example.

~~~
stcredzero
Are you saying that those posts wouldn't be made by someone else? I doubt it.

