
What I've Learned from Hacker News - mqt
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
======
dcurtis
I think a lot of the growth problems might have to do with the devaluation of
karma. The solution to this might actually raise the quality of comments and
front page stories.

When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was
a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each
point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty
good score. Now each point means much less for some reason. I'm not sure why.
Maybe it's because I don't trust each individual person as much. For example,
as I write this, the top comment is about someone using a script to submit
this article. It's two sentences, and it has received eleven votes. To me,
each of those individual votes mean less than they used to.

The net effect of one vote, for the whole culture of hacker news, has gone
down significantly. This reduces the total perception of worth for each user,
and, more importantly, for each voting action. Back in the beginning, I felt
like I had some amount of _power_ , in that if I voted something up it would
literally rise in the list. In fact, I felt like I had some sort of
_responsibility_. Now that active, obvious change in story rank rarely
happens, so I feel like my vote is somewhat worthless.

I tend to mostly agree that the quality level of submissions and comments has
stayed the same during the growth of this site, but the devaluation of karma
has led to other cultural changes. There's something comforting about sharing
ideas within a small group of people because you feel like you have real
influence, and I think I'm starting to lose that feeling here. There are so
many new faces that my perception of quality has gone down, even if the actual
net level of quality for each item has stayed the same. Seeing many posts with
100+ karma on the front page recently has kind of solidified that feeling for
me. Who are these hundreds of people?

~~~
trominos
I agree, and I think that the solution is simple: limit people's ability to
give out upvotes. Maybe restrict people's weekly upvotes to c * ln(karma) + d
or something. (Make d small!) Or have upvotes actually cost you like a tenth
of a karma point. (Dunno if karma should be turned into currency, though,
since then I could imagine people trying to game the system.)

This solves another problem that really bothers me: an upvote to a really
insightful comment (like the parent) has the same weight as an upvote to a
comment that's merely useful, or, worse, that merely shares my feelings on
some topic. Insight (in my opinion) should always count for more than anything
else, and I think limiting upvotes will make it so -- because I think most
people actually do care about it most.

\- EDIT - Another (even more dire, IMO) problem that might have a similar
solution: comment threads are way too long. Only four or five months ago I
could make a comment and I'd be absolutely certain that at least a few
reasonable people would read it, and so it never felt like luck when my
comments moved up; my good comments inevitably got upvotes, and my mediocre
comments stayed where they were. Now comments get lost in the wash. I'm
tacking this edit onto this comment partially because it's tangentially
relevant, but mostly because I don't have faith that anybody will ever see it
otherwise.

That's a _huge_ problem, and I suspect that it is in fact the fundamental
cause of the degeneration of other social news sites. When people know that
their contributions will be noted, they act like they're participating in a
conversation. When the success of a comment depends on a metaphorical die
roll, I think people adopt the mentality of, "I'll throw shit at the wall and
see what sticks."

My solution would be to limit weekly "root" comments (comments that respond
directly to a submission, not to other comments) with a formula similar to the
one above (c ln(karma) + d), though with the caveat that comments that get
more than a few upvotes get "refunded." But frankly I'd endure any kind of
unreasonable limitation if it would get rid of the feeling that this community
is gradually but inexorably turning into a mob.

~~~
JeffL
I think that's a good idea. When people can give out unlimited upvotes, it's
like the government printing money non-stop. Karma loses its value.

I don't know if the ability to upvote should be related to a persons Karma
score. That might make one group too powerful and reduce the egalitarian
nature of the site. What if everyone was just limited to 10 upvotes per day?
Do you really need more than that? The more you read HN, the more carefully
you will have choose what to upvote.

------
davi
_What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site
that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not
a description of HN._

The reason HN is so addictive is because it is filled with things we think
might be useful someday. We're like pack rats at a flea market.

The question is, what utility do we get out of what we find here?

Idea: maybe there could be a second class of upvote, which could only be
given, say, a week, or a month after a story or comment was submitted. The
meaning of _this_ upvote would be, "This proved to be useful to me
professionally." And so, in addition to HN/best and HN/bestcomments, there
could be HN/useful and HN/usefulcomments.

Anway, thanks again for the site, Paul, and please keep experimenting.
Watching you experiment is at least as interesting as any particular post.

~~~
michaelvw
I am less concerned by the implication of reduced productivity. Though reading
Hacker News may negatively impact present productivity, it may improve future
productivity by exposing readers to new concepts, approaches, etc.

It reminds me of an article about Pixar (though a cursory search doesn't seem
to find it...) which described their workspaces as having only a few central
bathrooms in order to facilitate people running into each other, discussing
ideas, and being exposed to different people's work. I think Hacker News
provides a similar service without having to get up and walk at all.

~~~
unalone
Hacker News, unlike bathrooms, is instantly available and you can get to it in
a few clicks. This is easily the site I spend my most time, and I'm not
entirely certain that's a good thing.

------
JoelSutherland
_I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for
users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and
just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped
being honest._

I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality.

Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding
what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their
problems living up to this, it is their stated objective.

Hacker News has a different objective. It's goal is to be interesting to
Hackers. I really could care less about democracy and I think others would
agree. Submissions and voting are just a means to the "hacker interesting"
end.

~~~
potatolicious
Absolutely agreed - and this goes for the voting system as well. I don't
necessarily care about up-modding a submission or comment; I do so to try and
help out and keep discussions clean and at least somewhat intelligent. If
there was some intelligent way to filter submissions or comments without user
input, then I wouldn't mourn the loss of "democracy" in the system at all.

Oh, and from the post - snarky comments and memes are definitely becoming a
problem on HN. They add nothing to a discussion, are not insightful in any
way, and do not express anything except the author's ability to regurgitate
old jokes. They need to stop.

------
fallentimes
_A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to
resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the
top stories were de facto chosen by human editors._

These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)

~~~
pg
Ours was that initially we couldn't give it away. The first couple merchants
would only agree to use the service if we gave it to them for free and did all
the work of building their stores ourselves.

There was also the fact that many of our most successful merchants were
selling something dubious. But I wouldn't call it a secret because we didn't
know it ourselves. We had no idea why the stores selling Japanese comics or
"dietary supplements" did so well.

~~~
yters
Web 2.0 runs on dubiousness.

------
bk
Completely minor factual amendment:

It was Ed Koch (and his police commissioner) who initiated the broken windows
based policing. Giuliani took it to the next level and as you correctly
phrased it, is the one with whom it became most associated.

Source:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=vHKBXA8nXvQC&pg=PA63...](http://books.google.com/books?id=vHKBXA8nXvQC&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=broken+windows+new+york+koch)

------
aston
Glad to hear that the orange names won't be back. I think people do more than
enough judging based on the poster name as it stands without any highlighting.

~~~
paulgb
Me too, but I'm glad it happened. It was a neat experiment.

~~~
mixmax
Indeed - the true test is not whether you try something new, but whether you
have the balls to admit it was a mistake and pull it back.

------
gabrielroth
I would be interested to know how much time PG and others spend moderating the
site -- not improving the code but killing stories and comments, banning
users, etc. HN always feels to me like a self-policing community, but this and
other remarks from PG point to non-trivial amounts of intervention by higher
authorities, which makes me wonder how much work it takes to keep things on
track.

~~~
pg
I would guess about 1-3 hours a day between all the editors combined. But it's
not too painful, because the editor UI is designed to make it easy to kill
crap as you come across it while reading the site.

------
tsally
Does the submitter have a script that automatically posts new essays from
paulgraham.com? You've submitted the last three in a row almost instantly. Not
that I'm criticising; just curious :-).

~~~
vlad
Years ago, I figured that I could get lots of karma by creating an auto-submit
script to submit stories from techcrunch and paulgraham.com. Best of all, if
another auto-submit script submitted the same story a bit later, they would
actually be voting up your story, so the more auto-submitters existed, the
better. Sure, more competition from other scripts and users sounds like it's
bad. However, I calculated that the scripter still wins because when they're
the first to submit, there are even more votes than before (due to other
scripters submitting a story a few seconds later and therefore voting up the
original). It's better to get beaten by other scripts most of the time and
make it to the front page with a bunch of upvotes in just a few minutes, than
to always be the first and only submitter/upvote, most users never seeing the
story.

And when an article has 10 upvotes in the first few minutes, it's almost
guaranteed to make the top spot on the front page, and therefore gain even
more votes from real users due to the publicity and feel that others have
found the article interesting.

I was top 15 and wanted to get invited to Startup School again, so I didn't
make the script. But since then, users have come out of nowhere to reach the
top ten, accumulating karma at a dizzying pace.

One of the top users has said he submits the best stories from his rss reader
every day. I believe a more likely explanation is that all stories from sites
that are commonly referenced on the front page are auto-submitted by a script
that checks for new articles every few minutes.

This was also my explanation on why so many techcrunch stories have been
upvoted on news.yc--they make an easy candidate for auto-submitting: not
because of story content, unfortunately, but because auto-submitting stories
from sites that already appear often and that other auto-submitters might
submit gives one a free set of 4-10 votes each time.

I guess my point is that Hacker News is being gamed the way reddit and digg
are.

~~~
edw519
_I guess my point is that Hacker News is being gamed the way reddit and digg
are._

What a sad thought. "Gaming" hacker news to get invited to Startup School.

Here's an idea:

Why not just be yourself. Contribute what you can. Take what you need. Make a
few friends along the way. And learn a thing or two that may change your life.
I can't think of a better place to do it.

Karma is a very minor byproduct. What you and this community become is the
real payoff. But like a planted seed, you may just have to wait a while before
you see that result.

~~~
run4yourlives
I think I read that sentence as being the opposite as you did, i.e. He
_didn't_ game HN because he wanted to get invited again, even though he almost
did.

~~~
vlad
Correct. While I was working actively on my software, my brain focused on the
best ways to do X or Y in the fastest time using a software application. In
other words, writing something to make me more productive or more time
efficient, even if it wasn't something that would be sellable. If it saved me
time, then I could therefore use that time to code something I could sell. So
I let my brain wander around the karma concept and that's what I came up with
(a long time ago). But no, I decided not to do it.

One corollary to that is by not having done it, all I can do is write a post
on news.yc. But that does not mean that it should be confused with the act of
actually doing it.

Another corollary is that maybe doing it wouldn't have been a bad idea. If
karma is the measure of value, and users enjoy the stories, maybe developing
an algorithm that automatically submits stories to news.yc (and judges how
users vote on it to then submit better stories, the way a human might) would
actually be something Paul loves, and the first release of such an app, of
course, could basically submit everything indiscriminately to start with.

------
twopoint718
I've been toying with the idea of adapting the Elo rating system from chess to
a social site's user score. The basic idea from chess is that you assume
someone has an intrinsic _skill_ in some arbitrary units (I think you start
out around 1,000 and a 2400+ is senior master) and that we can only _infer_
that skill from how they perform in tournaments. Furthermore, your skill in
any particular game is assumed to be normally distributed about that intrinsic
skill value. It is also assumed that your skill will only change slowly over
time (we don't have to pin down a moving target).

So the mechanics of this system are basically that when you compete with
someone that is much better than you and win your score should be adjusted
upwards. Conversely, if you lose to someone worse than you, your score will be
adjusted downward. Adjustments are done in batches, say after a player has
finished a tournament (I use five voting events between readjustment).

My application to a user karma system would be analogous in that a "match" or
"competition" would happen every time someone directly rates someone else
(stories may be exempt). A high-karma user upvoting a low-karma user would
increase the low-karma user's karma and decrease the high-karma user's karma.
If there are two users with equal karma and one up or downvotes the other. the
number of points exchanged will be minimal (the gain/loss scales with the
difference in karma).

The idea is that your ideas are competing with the opinions of the high-ranked
users. The assumption is that new users will have bad ideas and that high-
karma users will downvote them. A downvote from a high-karma user is expected
and doesn't cost the new user very much (they are expected to "lose" to them
often).

I've sketched out some of the functions here:
<http://paste.lisp.org/display/76193>

EDIT: grammar fix, typed this before coffee

~~~
calambrac
That doesn't seem like a very nice assumption, that new users will have bad
ideas, and if old users lose karma every time they vote up a new user, how can
you ever know if the new user genuinely has nothing to offer, or if old users
are just wary of decreasing their score, and therefore, influence? (i.e., I
have lots of karma, and I know if I upvote this comment that I like, it will
increase their score quite a bit - I have influence now - but it will also
lower my karma, and I'll have less influence over the next comment I see which
I may like more...)

This is what happens in chess: highly-ranked players just simply won't play
new or lower-ranked players at all. It's not a bad thing there, but then
again, it is a competition. A social site isn't, though.

~~~
twopoint718
Oh I agree completely that it isn't a nice assumption; it is just a
simplifying one (like the proverbial spherical cow) that's mostly wrong. But I
don't think it is _entirely_ wrong, and the ways that it is right may be
useful, as an experiment.

Maybe I shouldn't have used the word _bad_. But new users may not know the
established traditions of a group, maybe they haven't even bothered to read
the FAQ. The articles that got me thinking along these lines were:
<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html> and
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.ht...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html)
. The gist is that an important group function is to _defend_ itself against
(new) users.

But I think that what it'll do is to make votes matter because _they cost
something_. Mostly, I'm interested to see what the implications would be.

~~~
calambrac
Okay, but why should votes cost more for a user with more karma? I would think
the opposite should be true, that if karma is an indicator of a user's value
to the site, someone with more karma should pay less to vote up a newer user.

~~~
twopoint718
The way that I'm thinking about it is this: that it is relatively unusual,
from the standpoint of the community, for a high-karma user to upvote a low-
karma user.

Karma is a measure of the norms of the community, parceled out to users.

------
run4yourlives
_What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site
that caused them to waste lots of time._

Wow, it's like university. :-)

Ok, now that I've made that moronic joke, being HN I know I'll need to add
some more substance to counter balance the negative effect. This, in essence
is one of the reasons I love coming here - For users that care it's self
policing, in other words, what Paul says regarding the broken windows theory
is absolution correct.

The whole broken windows theory (and it critiques) are fascinating reads. I'd
urge anyone who only knows of the summary version to dig deeper into the
ideas. Certainly up most hacker's alleys.

~~~
jrockway
_For users that care it's self policing_

FWIW, there are a lot of users that don't care. I know some of my highest-
rated comments here have been one-liner jokes. This means that the community
doesn't really consciously think about "policing", they just click things that
they agree with or that made them giggle.

(As an aside, have you ever read a really well-written post that you
completely disagreed with, and didn't upmod it? I have. It's hard to promote
people that are wrong. Human nature trumps "self policing", it seems.)

------
falava
I've enjoyed HN as an anonymous reader and learned a variety of lessons too.

This essay finally compelled me to register an acount, upvote some links and
to make my first comment.

Purpose defeated? May be I'm starting to ruin the news site I like more.

------
DanielBMarkham
Thanks Paul.

I know many of us have probably wondered what you've been thinking about your
experiment. I know I have. As usual, you've managed to write the essay before
people are even asking the question.

The addictive/interesting balance is a fascinating subject. I'll be looking
forward to hearing from you about that in the future.

------
pkaler
How about requiring submitters to tag stories that are submitted?

If you have a set of blessed tags, then the submitter must carefully think
which tags apply to their submission. This also forces the submitter to
consider if the story fits with the content guidelines of the site.

~~~
mixmax
Tags would also be great if you want to find information on a particular
subject later.

Maybe that would be a job for the guys that run searchyc (www.searchyc.com)

------
mangoleaf
HN has reached critical mass. No need to worry about a quick death anymore.
Add friction to keep the randoms out and to help make those that stay feel
like they are part of an exclusive club. Friction = cost. Some micro payment,
say .99/yr, that adds enough friction to slow the adoption by non-core types.
Those that value this exclusive "club," like myself, would gladly render unto
Caesar.

------
ivankirigin
Too much navel gazing is really bad for a site. This isn't to say the essay
lacks insight, just that Hacker News is diminished by frequent debates.

PG, have you considered invite only schemes?

What about explicit 'people rank', where friends can rate eachother in a
reputation system? That might really help with the quality of comments.

It would also help conversation is you could follow people you like. Twitter
and Tumblr both do a really good job of 'pick your peers'. I often track these
two links: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ivankirigin>

It would be nice if there was a thread stream of selected people. It would
make me engage in conversation more often. Too many comments don't have an
easy response, making them closer to declarations than discussions.

Also, have you considered adding an explicit cost to votes? You could weight
those above a certain karma threshold higher if each vote were $0.10.

------
homme
What effect has it had on you as far as going from just posting an essay to
posting an essay and having it deconstructed? Has instant criticism made you
more reticent in what you say, or even annoyed?

~~~
pg
Everything I've posted online has been examined pretty thoroughly since about
2001, first on Slashdot, then Reddit, and now here. So I take it for granted
now.

I think it's good actually. Now when I'm about to publish something, it's
second nature to go through and look at each sentence and ask "Is this false?
Is this the sentence that someone is going to tear apart and make me look
stupid?"

That's why when someone is dissing me in vague terms in a comment thread, I'll
occasionally ask them to quote a specific sentence or passage from the essay
they believe is false. Because I've already checked.

------
ivankirigin

      Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble;

Best. Pun. Evar.

------
mathogre
Hacker News is one of the places I go to "spin plates." In some ways it's a
productivity enhancement inasmuchas I keep my mind active when otherwise
needing a quick break.

HN is also my primary tech portal. While I still visit slashdot, I've found HN
to be faster on stories that appear there, and I've also found more relevant
items here.

For instance, there was recently a thread here regarding list copying in
Python. Though I've used Python for years, I'd never known the information
that was in the linked article. It's now a part of my personal Python
knowledge base.

I like HN. I read it regularly, whether at work, at home on the computers, or
on the go through my iPhone. It's that good. Thank you!

------
axod
"HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile"

I wish you could still see the URL though. If an article has been deaded,
there may be some comments about it, but you can't see the url, or click on
it...

~~~
pg
You can still see it by using edit?id=whatever

~~~
axod
Ah thanks for that :)

------
Goladus
One way to avoid meanness is to apply a principle known colloquially as
"Miller's Law." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller>

_To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true
and try to imagine what it could be true _of_._

That is, when you see someone wrong on the internet, instead of trying to
force them to agree with you, identify what they know that makes them believe
their assertion.

------
poub
I found absolutely spot on in your article to submit an article with different
headers on whatever “community” you target (e.g. Reddit or HN or even Digg)

However it’s not only the “tag line” which need to be rewritten but also the
content.

Which mean one version of the article for HN users, another for Reddit and yet
another for Digg.

Which can translate into three levels:

\- advanced (readers able to understand abstractions),

\- intermediate (readers who want to understand “how to control”)

\- and beginners (readers who just want to find a solution to their problem
through a simple step by step process).

This force onself to write with a specific audience in mind. And I think it’s
the key point of Paul Graham article: understanding your users.

Last but not least: having the comments section on where you found the link
but not on the page where is displayed the article.

I found HN comments with Stackoverflow are so far the only sites where proper
discussions can really happen with very inspiring thoughts.

However those Karma thingies, I absolutely don’t care. Also the triangle
button (upvote), I use it only as a bookmark button.

Also what’s really rewarding is when you check the “New” page and see few
hours after it hits the home page. You feel you’re not only following.

Have a good day and thanks for your work. Thibault

------
brett1211
"stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones."

best line of the essay.

This is probably sophomoric, but... I was wondering why there is no semantic
engines that can identify the major themes in the comments and present them
like a table of contents or color code them like checking a cached page on
google? I'm imagining something like Yelp's engine that picks out the best
dishes.

thanks.

------
alain94040
Hear, hear: if you have a solution for detecting stupid comments, let Paul
know.

I liked the two ideas Paul mentioned: length of comment is related to
stupidity, and not using the same words again. Just make those fall toward the
bottom of the page and we'll all be happy.

While any algorithm can be gamed, length is still pretty good. If I have to go
through the extra effort of adding two paragraphs each time I write something,
well... it takes time to type. So I have an incentive to think and improve my
comment.

Really, I like this. It's really the same problem as Google search: out of all
the junk out there, how can you tell interesting content? Because we all want
to read only amazing stuff and engage in discussions with brilliant people. In
practice, it doesn't work that way yet, but what if technology made it
possible?

~~~
tptacek
If it's a similar problem to Google, then you wonder whether the reputation of
the commenters and the comment's responders could factor in.

I'd like a system that gave credit to people who start high-ranked threads (in
the aggregate).

~~~
wallflower
I would be interested in seeing the total aggregate comment points for a
thread. I think some of the most interesting threads take off with unexpected
tangents. For example, the recent one on marriage/dating.

~~~
tptacek
A lot of really dumb, risible comments inspire thoughtful, valuable takedowns.

------
dfeldman
In general I enjoy Paul Graham's essays. However, they all have the footnote
problem when reading them. The footnote problem is that I can click on the
footnote's number to read the footnote, buf I can't click to go back.

I am only commenting here because I can't find a more direct access to Mr.
Graham.

------
chandler
>> The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that would have
been there when HN started.

Subjectively, the frontpage and discussions have grown quite bland here;
without necessarily corresponding to a reduction in the quality of each
article, it feels as if the range of content linked has become homogenized.

Objectively, however, it's quite clear that the range of content hasn't
strayed much at all (witness archive.org). This failure to change lends a
certain banality of tone to the site that is almost unbelievable.

------
atheenastar
Wow...Great! I truly enjoyed reading this most enlightening article. Many
points you touched on, I say Amen to that.

Once you get in,addiction is non-reversible,the digging goes deeper and deeper
..into the web's bosom.It never stops. The NET is nursery rhyme's..."Come into
my parlor" "Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly; ... and
went into his den, For well he knew the silly fly would soon come back again:
..."

Summed up in you words,"You may be wasting your time, but your not idle." Haha
Cheers!

------
quantumhobbit
Part of the reason Hacker News has maintained its character is the people it
attracts. The people it attracts, hackers, are drawn in by the subject matter
of hacking, which hardly appeals to the lowest common denominator of the
internet. I'd like to see the same approach taken with sport or politics. Can
an internet community be created that discusses politics or even religion in
an intelligent and respectful way? It might be possible, likely way harder
than hacker news to pull off.

------
rayvega
_HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile_

I have never had the urge to flip that switch. The sheer quantity of the
quality links are enough to keep me engaged.

------
mattchew
I'm pleased to hear that you're interested in the problem of
attractive/addictive distractions. Important, interesting problem. I'm looking
forward to reading your thoughts.

Here's a relevant thread from Overcoming Bias. It is more about modeling the
problem than looking for fixes, but you might find it interesting:

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-
tradeoff...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-
tradeoffs.html)

------
YuriNiyazov
Might be a minor point, but - pg, could you elaborate on the distinction
between "bad people" and "people behaving badly"? I read most of the
"Dilution" section as saying that bad behavior is situational (someone who
flames on reddit posts intelligent comments here), except for the following
blurb in the middle:

"forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people".

Is the implication that these "bad people" can't possibly behave any other way
except badly?

------
Roberto57
Paul, I really hope you don't decide to shut down or limit access to HN. While
I'm not at the programming skill level that HN is targeting, I'm learning a
great deal from the articles I find here and I think I'm becoming a much
better programmer as a result. HN is my first read every day and I appreciate
being able to access it. Thank you very much.

------
tigerthink
My solution to the news-site addictiveness problem was to install LeechBlock:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476>

and put up barriers to visiting reddit or hacker news after 11:00 in the
morning.

------
releasedatez
Thanks for this experiment project Paul. I think Hacker News naturally
attracts the right people which creates a very good vibe. Most if not all of
the comments I read here are constructive and helpful at times. This is unlike
any other sites out there.

------
yamil
I don't post any comment on HN anymore and I don't read comments often. It's
time consuming. I visit HN every day and I pick 2 to 3 interesting links on
average. That's it. If I need more time to waiste I go to reddit it's more
fun.

------
inanutshell
pg's essays give a lot of insight into practical things in life. The
corresponding comments are also good, but sometimes not good.I am a regular
reader of these essays. So who posts the comments can be restricted, but
sustaining HN will be good for the people like me, who learn a lot from it.But
it is quite natural that one wants to just post some comments, just for the
sake of being a part of the discussion.Once you keep reading good things for
quite some time, your fingers itch to type in some comments. Yes, I agree that
this is not good and one should observe some control.But please keep up HN, it
is very good.

------
zandorg
One thing I really like about HN is that you have chance to, once in a bad
light (low karma), redeem yourself with future posts that are more carefully
written.

------
alrex021
Out of curiosity, what language is HN programmed in?

~~~
poub
It’s programmed using ARC

When you download ARC you get a HN example inside.

<http://www.arclanguage.org/>

<http://www.arclanguage.org/forum>

------
alrex021
"but also because I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling"

I'd be glad to have that problem in my new venture.

------
clubenetwork
Thanks for sharing Paul. Very insightful comments about the challenges of
running an online community!

------
aeschylus
This is not nested because it is only partly a reply to Jessealdridge.

I am new to hackernews, so I can't claim any idea of how to apply these ideas
to that site. However, I find the notion of a "town center" a very intriguing
one for the web, especially apropos of footnote 7 of the article. Most social
sites act like huge suburbs, and many of their users are invariably
suburbanites trying to escape the suburbs. In this way, the problem of a lack
of place gets abstracted, and suburbanite communities emerge around topics
that the real people can't discuss in their physical environments for lack of
a place to do so. Their place to discuss things they would explore in the real
world itself becomes amorphous and isolationist. But this is too broad; enter
Dunbar's number.

I don't think Dunbar was the first to suggest that communities need a finite
size, but his observation that that size is proportional to the volume of a
brain region is interesting in that it provides an example of a willingness to
assign a metric for community size to which human beings would be subject.
This raises the question I'm trying to ask and the point of this long-winded
comment.

How can we create fulfilling communities on-line that will enhance the
essentially human aspects of such communities? Jessealdridge suggested
breaking large communities up into smaller numbers (perhaps something like
www.fluther.com allows). But if any metric like Dunbar's number is to be
believed, this number should be a reflection of a deeper determinant of
identity in a community, which itself requires an obvious representation in
the allowable forms of interaction on the site. In the high-quality sites in
the physical world, human communities are delineated by spatial relationships
according to the organizing principles of architecture. But such places are
rare in the physical world, and are mostly confined to very old cultures or
small liberal arts colleges.

Perhaps one of the reasons that such frameworks of fulfilling human
interaction are so rare is that they are very difficult to understand and very
expensive to make. The web can do better at creating frameworks for human
interaction because it uses information explicitly, potentially clarifying the
underlying principles generating the framework, and because it is much less
expensive for people to come together and create something on the web than it
is for them to come together and make something architectural, in the physical
world.

Unfortunately, this seems to mean (as you pointed out in your article) that
sites much less often impart a sense of a change in place, or of a place at
all. I wonder how the problems you've outlined (trolls, stupid comments, mean
people) map onto the architectural representations of these problems, and how
the solutions you've come up with could map onto architectural solutions to
the analogues of those problems. In short, the article makes me wonder,
however tangentially, how the web could benefit from being more than a
surrogate, and perhaps more of a support structure, for physical human
communities.

Could hackernews benefit from having some relationship to physical places?

------
zenocon
happy with HN now. please don't change the formula. i say that knowing it will
change...but pleading with you to try to leave it the way it is.

------
albertcardona
_I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the
broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous._

I would like to remind you here of the analysis made in the book
"Freakonomics" regarding the "miraculous" reduction in crime at that time.
Namely, lots of individuals that would have been in the social situation
leading to crime were not born. The suspected cause being an abortion case won
some years before in court.

~~~
barry-cotter
I love Freakonomics, it's a large part of the reason I'm studying economics
but that chapter is a catastrophic pile of wrong. Two articles picking it to
pieces

<http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf>
<http://islandia.law.yale.edu/donohue/Joyce%20%282004%29.pdf>)

~~~
albertcardona
Interesting, had no idea their point had been put to such a scrutiny. Thanks
for the very interesting links.

~~~
bodhi
I was interested as well, I discovered this:

[http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Donohue_Measur...](http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Donohue_Measurement_Error.pdf)

Down the rabbit-hole we go!

------
c00p3r
I have a little idea too. May be it will be useful for users of this site to
view little icons (pictures) of country flags, based on geoip (like in most
torrent clients), OS based on browser version - the major ones - osx, win,
linux, bsd, iphone, symbian. And may be browser icon - safary, ff, chrome,
etc.

If those ideas does not confront with privacy policy, they would be simple but
useful tricks.

