
Dear HN, I'm worried about us - andreyf
I ran a little experiment... in a popular story, I said basically the same thing three ways:<p>Angry sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465422 (current score: -5)<p>Definition of my scope of knowledge, followed by the same opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465428 (current score: -4)<p>One-sentence witty sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465436 (current score: 9)<p>Now, I really value our relationship, and it's meant to me more than any other coder/news-community relationship I could have imagined, but this isn't the Hacker News I feel in love with.<p>We all know "karma doesn't matter", but it definitely shapes the discussion that takes place. So let's reiterate some social guidelines which always helped this relationship flourish. I'll start:<p>- don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which are egregiously offtopic or seriously detract from the conversation
======
aristus
McKinsey suggests and practices a rule about growth: don't grow more than 25%
per year if you want to preserve your culture. I think once HN started having
self-reflective posts it passed into "Shirky Completeness", a stage in
communities where the old hats become preoccupied with preserving the culture
and cannot keep up with training new users to fit their mould. Sub groups fork
off to the point that the several concurrent streams stop interacting. My
friend and I realized we were reading completely different aspects of HN.

Karma is (or should be) a proxy for quality. But there are no mechanisms
except social ones.

I also suspect that there are certain commercial "reputation" companies that
have HN in their sights now. Not spammers per se, but father along the
continuum to PR. There have been quite a lot of activity geared toward
"whipping the froth" and post-storms around specific topics.

It may be time to fork HN. I actually also suspect PG has already forked HN
for private YCombinator use. I haven't seen a post from RTM or TLB for over a
year.

~~~
silentbicycle
I wonder if calculating a user's karma as a weighted average of the scores of
their last N comments, rather than a sum, would help. Inasmuch as karma scores
affect anything, it might gently encourage fewer, more insightful comments.

~~~
pg
I've been working on something very much like this for the last couple days.
Stay tuned.

~~~
froo
Hey Paul, just putting down a quick observation as why this could potentially
penalise some users based on geography (That is if you have it so features are
enabled/disabled based on your average karma instead of total)

One of the things I've noticed is that us on the other side of the world have
trouble generating the same kind of karma that other's can generate which is
really a function of being too late to discussions.

For example, east coast USA is often around 14 hours behind my timezone, so I
typically get to conversations about 6-8 hours after they've started and when
people are usually heading to bed.

Generally I find my comments down the bottom of threads with 1 or 2 karma.

However, if I post in the middle of the night (usually as I'm heading to bed)
or really early in the morning (essentially as I get up) I am in the peak
hours of HN, my comments on average do very well for Karma, simply because
more people are available to read them and as such vote them up or down
accordingly.

Just a thought - you might want to have thresholds based on a person's "prime
time" instead of a predefined average.

~~~
pg
Yeah, I know about this problem. I hope to cook up some kind of solution
eventually.

~~~
froo
ok cool - just highlighting it ;)

------
DanielBMarkham
People vote their emotion. Can't change it.

You can _pretend_ that people vote based on value of the article, whether it
should appear lower or higher on the page, etc. But you're just fooling
yourself.

So the karma system rewards people who make the most people feel the best. You
can call that cleverness, schmoozing, politics, or bullshit. Because of this,
it promotes people thinking of like mind, not necessarily interesting things.
It's "let's say happy, slightly interesting things to each other about
information that doesn't challenge our worldview"

Known bug.

~~~
thorax
This site has taught me not to downvote with emotion.

I pretty much think "how many votes should this have? how great is the
comment?" and I upvote or downvote it based on how incorrect their current
rating is.

Lately I find myself upvoting a lot of comments I don't agree with simply
because people have downvoted them into oblivion just for having a different
opinion.

~~~
unalone
I'll do that too. I'm much more lenient towards people with good opinions here
than I am anywhere else.

Even so, sometimes I'm tired and in a bad mood and I'll read somebody making a
long, utterly wrong point and I'll downvote it instead of responding. Nobody's
entirely innocent.

------
ilamont
I wonder how these scores were affected by their placement on the thread.

I've observed that many good HN comments that are added relatively late often
fail to get any additional positive votes -- my guess is that people can't be
bothered to scroll down, and/or assume that anything with a low score is not
worth reading especially when there are other comments in the same thread with
high ratings.

~~~
axod
I think you're right here. Also depends on the timing.

If you're the first commenter, and you're 'kinda' right, you'll get far more
upvotes than if you're late to the party and very right.

I think the reason the 3rd comment got upvoted was that it wasn't a direct
comment, but a response to someone else.

Having said that, I think we're reading _way_ too much into this.

------
menloparkbum
Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, so I downmodded them
all, if that makes you feel better.

~~~
andreyf
_Each of your comments detracted from the conversation_

Clever, but not true. The sarcastic ones did, I agree. But the second one
started a thread of sum karma ~100. That's the opposite of detracting ;)

~~~
neilk
Your comment suggests an interesting way of rewarding people who further the
conversation. Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that
responds.

1 - This makes the witty comeback a lesser strategy for obtaining karma.

2 - People who are aware of this will stop responding to trolls. Even if they
publish a well-reasoned response to a troll, they will be giving them karma
points. Since this is not a common feature of internet forums, this might be
worth spelling out above an active comment form.

3 - The best strategy for karma is to advance the discussion somehow. Even if
your point ends up exposing the point of view of people on the other side.

~~~
neilc
_Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds._

That sounds like a surefire way to encourage provocation (a.k.a trolling). If
you make a deliberately provocative and clueless statement and _n_ people take
the time to exhaustively tell you why you're wrong (for which they get karma),
I don't think you deserve any of the karma given to the comments you provoked.

~~~
Eliezer
Only give people the upmod points of responders if the original comment has
positive karma. Or let's say your original comment has karma +4; you get karma
of responders up to +4 per response, but not more than that.

~~~
jerf
The more complicated the system, the easier it is to game.

Presumably at some point that ceases to be true for a sufficiently complicated
and _good_ system, but my guess is that we're up into AI-complete territory
there.

~~~
Eliezer
Thanks for the extra five karma, sucker!

------
tptacek
You have chosen a very elaborate way to ignore the Hacker News guideline that
suggests "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good,
and it makes boring reading.".

Your first comment had no context; it could have been applied to any story.

Your second comment suggested that you were wading into a debate about Agile
Methods and XP without knowing who Kent Beck is.

Your third comment actually appeared to pertain to the discussion.

------
pg
The magnitudes of the scores seem different than they might have a year ago,
but the directions don't.

~~~
thorax
A year ago, comments that weren't blatantly offensive/crummy/rude/jerkish
usually didn't fall below 0 points. The restraint of the community is what
encouraged me to get so involved.

I'm all for downvoting a bad troll or uninvited meme/rickroll-speak much
lower, but it kind of hurts to see real comments being modded into unreadably
gray negatives for disagreement purposes.

~~~
pg
Yeah, I'm probably going to limit negative scores. It's nasty to see people
piling on. And seeing nasty things tends to make people nastier.

~~~
netcan
Maybe give people a downmod quota

~~~
unalone
I've seen that work in some cases. In other cases it encourages trolls to post
enough times that they can't be downvoted more.

HN has the flagging system in place, though, so this might be worth a try. The
Achewood community gives you more downvotes ('lames') the more upvotes you've
received, though that might encourage groupthink.

------
cchooper
I'm not sure I understand your experiment. You expressed the same thing three
ways, so people clearly aren't voting differently according to whether they
agree or disagree. They're voting on how you expressed yourself.

Personally, I don't disagree with the votes much. The witty sarcasm has been
up-modded too much, which is a problem on all sites, but it was the most
concise and least agressive post.

------
dmarques1
I have been on HN for almost 700 days now and read it almost daily, I rarely
post, comment, or login but I think the content & community here is best in
class.

While there seems to be some discussion about the quality of the community
lately, I think the quality of the submissions is still extremely high, and
that the comments are still for the most part insightful and valuable.

------
mark-t
I upvote things that I think are more important for other people to read --
that is, if I think it should be displayed higher on the page.

I downvote things that I don't think other people should bother reading --
that is, if they're uninsightful, irrelevant, or somehow distasteful.

The vast majority of things I just leave alone.

I think the word karma itself is partly to blame. It makes you think you're
rating whether the comment is good or bad, but the effect of the up/down
arrows is merely to sort comments based on relative quality/value for people
who view the thread after you. For a while, I've toyed with the idea of
suggesting a new interface that asks users to sort comments, rather than
upvote or downvote, but I haven't thoroughly thought about it.

~~~
jodrellblank
I was thinking about two sets of up/down buttons.

"comment adds to/detracts from the thread" and "agree/disagree with the
comment"

The idea being to have fewer controversial yet contributing comments downvoted
to unreadability.

------
timf
" _don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the
conversation_ "

Maybe it's time to make the functionality different, make the mechanisms
easier to not get wrong with respect to the guidelines.

Perhaps you hit the downvote button and you are given two choices "off topic /
detracts" or "I disagree" and the latter is a no-op with respect to karma.

~~~
jyothi
downvote <\- disagree

flag <\- detract

how about using it that way? May be PG can have some logic to screen all
flagged conversation on flag score than a semantic scan or abusive content.

~~~
TomOfTTB
Why should anyone be penalized in any way for disagreeing? Is well thought out
disagreement any less valuable than the opinion of someone who agrees with
you?

Why would we as a community even want people to know which opinion is more
popular (provided both opinions are intelligent and well thought out)?

~~~
Xichekolas
As you implicitly point out, jyothi's suggestion is not how things are
normally done here.

Upvoting is generally for agreement or promoting something well written.
Downvoting is usually for things that are outright false or trollish.
Disagreement is expressed by... well... disagreeing (yes, that means via
reply) OR voting up another comment that already expresses your disagreement
(no point having many people say the same thing).

I hadn't considered it until you pointed it out, but in the case of trolls,
flagging is functionally the same as downvoting, so I really only downvote
things that are blatantly false.

------
mdakin
All this experiment demonstrates is the extreme importance of style and
presentation. If you say something negative in a joyful, entertaining way as
opposed to a bitchy way people value your contribution more (enough more that
the negative comment is all of a sudden considered a positive contribution to
the discussion rather than a low-quality dig at someone).

------
gills
I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and
while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable.

This community has been over variations of this topic quite a few times. The
conclusion I drew from reading those discussions was that telling people how
you think they should behave, and expecting it to actually happen, is not
going to work (regardless of the quality of your argument and/or the
population).

I've wondered for a while about the effectiveness of two different 'scoring'
ideas. One is to make downvoting beyond some threshold (-1, perhaps) cost one
or more point of karma for each downvote -- so if you really feel the need to
drive something into the dirt, you have to give up some of your own karma as
pennance for your obvious lack of self control and inability to follow the
site guidelines. The other is to give up on global karma, and split the voting
mechanism into categories such as 'agree/disagree', 'signal/noise', etc., so
there are mechanisms to express a handful of the different reasons people have
for voting.

Just thinking out loud...

------
SwellJoe
I tried to think of a one-sentence witty sarcasm that would fit perfectly
here, but couldn't. So, instead, I will point out that sometimes one line is
all you need. I would much prefer a short reply that contains something new to
a longer, very thoughtful, reply that adds nothing to the conversation. If
it's even a little bit funny, all the better. In other words, "Omit needless
words."

------
arebop
1\. Joel makes disparaging remarks about Beck and his ideas without
understanding those ideas well. If you're familiar with XP, you can see that
Joel's argument is with more of a strawman than the substance of Beck's ideas.
If not, Joel admits he doesn't really know what he's talking about right there
in the podcast.

2\. Beck responds, saying that Joel is uninformed and wrong. He doesn't give a
lot of specific detail. He's written and said quite a lot already, and Joel's
superficial caricature doesn't merit a detailed response.

3\. You accuse Beck of ad-hominem.

It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with Beck's ideas, and it's not
even precisely about agreeing or disagreeing with your accusation. It's that
the whole affair is based on a misapprehension, and you're steering the
conversation down a sidetrack.

Between your three distractions, the short and simple one-sentence witticism
is less damaging than the emotionally charged and loquacious rants. Maybe that
explains the votes. $0.02.

------
noodle
i tend to agree, and i follow the mantra of only dishing out karma for things
that are either particularly helpful/insightful/interesting, and only
downvoting things that are actually detracting from the topic at hand.

everything else is neutral, which would, to me, include something that i don't
agree with but doesn't actually detract from anything.

------
mikeyur
I'm fairly new here, I think I've been around for 3 months or so now. I try
not to down vote anything.

A little bit of self control needs to be had to do so. I may disagree about
user x's stance on programming language y - but he's adding to the
conversation so I have to back away.

However if we're having a discussion and someone decides to randomly throw in
a lolcat reference that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking
about, I don't have a problem down voting them, dousing them with gasoline and
just watching them burn.

~~~
jacquesm
That's both a little harsh and by your own standards asks for a downvote...

------
pavelludiq
I've been here for some time now. HN has changed, but so far the change is not
very bad. In fact i think that we were able to steer the change in the
community in a good way. HN is a living system, we see imperfections, good,
that means we're still alive. Living organisms change all the time, we only
have to do it right, so far we've done it well. Discussions like this one are
a good sign, were not slacking off and leaving the site to just go downhill.

------
mhp
I feel that this is a function of the size of the community plus the type of
people in that community. As it gets larger, it gets filled with more of the
type you don't want.

Compare the Joel on Software discussion forum with the Business of Software
discussion forum. Same site. Same format. Completely different quality of
discussion.

We've done experiments to help raise the quality of discussion by limiting the
number of posts, having active moderators, deleting rude and obnoxious
posts...

But I expect asking your community to shape up doesn't work too well.

The comment about PG forking the discussion probably seems like the only
solution. Start over every couple of months or years.

------
dmpayton
Agreed. Perhaps it would help stem the groupthink if points on individual
comments were hidden? That way, one would need to judge the comment based on
its own merit, rather than going with the crowd.

------
patrocles
Insight #0: We're not all in the same room; instead of broadcasting a post,
use our previous voting preferences to route posts to us.

#1: We read what other people like us read; spread the workload of evaluating
new posts amongst the people clusters. As posts gain traction in one group,
show to other nearby groups.

Anything wrong with this other than compute time and assuming that the
solution costs less than our current social costs (say this was done secretly,
is it pareto optimal if the troll doesn't know others don't read their
posts?)?

------
rm999
If you want to tell people how to use a self-moderating site, you are likely
setting yourself up for failure. Either hire moderators, go to Slashdot's
system of rewarding certain behaviors with moderator points, or live with the
digg/reddit consequences.

Also, controlling how people downvote things is going to be really tough. Many
people think comments that they disagree with do detract from conversation. I
think one obvious rule should be you can't downvote comments on stories you
comment on yourself.

------
jsmcgd
PG what about reducing new sign ups?

------
anuraggoel
Your post is on the front page. This means we are still actively introspecting
as a community. That's a very healthy sign in my opinion, so I wouldn't worry
so much.

~~~
unalone
It could also be signs of vanity. Reddit went downhill after a month of a ton
of people writing Ask Reddit posts.

I'm not saying we have that problem, but usually, the presence of a topic like
this is just taking away from an external news story.

~~~
pg
I already penalize Ask HN posts (or more precisely, url-less ones)
significantly in the ranking algorithm. That seems to keep them from taking
over the front page.

~~~
anuraggoel
So 'pgrank' is much more advanced than we think.

------
TrevorJ
It really all boils down to each of us continuing to make an effort to
maintain a level of discourse here that we all desire. Karma tweaks and
algorithms are tools but they absolve very little of the actual hard work it
takes from every member of a community.

------
michaelneale
Well don't you think its good the "angry sarcasm" was -5? I think it is very
out of place here. the -4 and +9 difference is worrying though (although the
points have changed since then... damn timezones !).

------
diN0bot
i like when users can customize the results. eg, categories rather than a
single popular ranking. there are some technical/performance issues to
consider, but in an ideal world, my ranking could be customizable on:

* submitter karma or username

* number of comments, links in comments (and links should be shown in a toolbox so i don't have to scroll for them)

* max/mean comment karma

* submission domain

* submission key words or category

* popularity-newness continuum position

(edit: i keep forgetting how to make bullet lists, and help only tells me how
to make new paragraphs. eit)

------
vaksel
groupthink is an inherent problem with sites like this...nothing you can do
about it.

------
stuntgoat
Nice experiment; are you a scientist?

( one sentence witty sarcasm )

------
lpgauth
Invite only?

~~~
unalone
It's been discussed before, and rejected.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373789>

------
shiranaihito
> don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the
> conversation

True, we shouldn't downvote something just because we disagree with it, but
it's more difficult to define what's detracting from the conversation.

Some may disagree with a comment, but since they "can't" just downvote because
of that, they deem it "detracting" and maybe even say so. I think we should
only downvote comments that are clearly inappropriate, not those that are
somewhat off-topic. Everyone has their way of trying to contribute to
conversations, and the conversations don't have to fall strictly under
whatever topic is in the headline.

------
giles_bowkett
design flaw.

------
mroman
I think the problem boils down to the presence of non-hackers in here. It's
mostly the non-hackers that abuse the downmodding (anyone who throws a hissy
fit like a little girl and starts the abusive downmodding by accusing someone
of trolling over that someone expressing a negative opinion of an MSFT
product, IS.NOT.A.HACKER . . . that is only an example, but I think it is
clear that 99% of hackers are not the delicate, emotional creatures that are
into the abusive downmodding)

The solution would be to simply reject submissions that are obviously not
hacker discussion material from being posted (yes, hackers are wont to talk
about anything in the universe, but please, straight up MBA/Suit garbage HERE?
. . . c'mon - a hacker interested in that can go somewhere else to discuss
those topics if he/she wants)

The nearly effeminate debate submissions about css vs tables, for example

The MBA/Suit news

Those go, and most of the undesirables around here go. The obvious problem
with this is that censoring is both distasteful and can be counterproductive .
. . I don't envy the position PG is in.

I say readers protesting abusive downmodding in the threads themselves would
be one positive step.

~~~
mroman
THIS PROVES MY POINT

Hackers would have engaged me in discussion of what I wrote.

Effeminate MBA candidate WANNABE HACKERS would downmod me.

Thank you, you have proven my point.

------
dotan
There's discussion? I just read the links.

------
tsbardella
I agree. I thought the vagina hacking story last week was out of place. Maybe
we should discust this story too <http://is.gd/ilUX> Breast Hacking. All of
these shoule net the person like myself a lower karma some how preferable with
some kind of number system

Like this tweet

lelafin Yay! 105% on my first math test of the semester! ...and where is
today's snow??? Wed, Feb 04 09:46:23 from web

Snow!

