

When sites like Digg and Reddit revert to the mean -- is HN next? - quoderat
http://www.michaelalanmiller.com/?p=1996

======
tokenadult
"Perhaps give an actual, real IQ test to use a site. There are several 10- or
20-question tests that have a .85 or higher correlation to full-length tests,
and that is probably good enough for internet work."

Suggesting a short-form IQ test as a way to cure the problem of site
degradation suggests the author hasn't read many sites populated by people who
have scored high on IQ tests. They can be appalling too. Rationality and IQ
are orthogonal

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=97803001...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/aij-cnt.pdf>

and there are plenty of people with high IQ scores who don't know how to
behave themselves in online discussion. For some really pathetic examples of
IQ tests identifying high-scoring ne'er-do-wells, see

<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/>

and especially

<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html>

for what really happens when high-IQ people get together. (Sometimes those
unusual IQ tests are not validated, but then again validation is just another
problem with IQ tests. )

To light a candle rather than curse the darkness, I would suggest that the way
to keep an online forum on-task, civil, and useful is simply (difficultly) to
moderate it well. As I recall, Reddit's "no censorship" policy has been
manifested with very minimal moderation. Deal with the user's overt behavior
on the site, and don't worry about the user's IQ score. Smart is as smart
does.

~~~
unalone
Wow, fascinating links.

I've never understood people older than, say, 15 who still insist on things
like IQ tests. I've never noticed a correlation between IQ and observable
intelligence: in many cases, quite the opposite. Many bright people don't
apply their intelligence and learn to use it, and then their insistence on
their mind belies their ignorance, much to the irritation of everybody else.
There's more to intelligence than testing.

~~~
lionhearted
Raw natural ability can be pretty crippling to development in most fields. But
people with raw natural ability who also develop discipline, humility, a
willingness to fail/endure/persevere come out to some of the most amazing
people of all time.

~~~
unalone
Yep! Last week on my blog I wrote something that went like this: "Technique
without personality is craft. Personality without technique is shit. Together
you get art." And it's the same for intelligence: you can be disciplined
without being that bright and still bring your focus towards doing something.
You can be bright and unfocused and fascinate people without ever getting big
things done. It's when you bring the two together that you get incredible
things.

------
fiaz
A more interesting question would be: why shouldn't HN revert to the mean?

EDIT #1: The speed at which I'm being down-voted warrants some further
explanation...

The article headline raises a question about the potential decline of HN as a
"quality community". The fact of the matter is that with all things being
equal, HN is just as susceptible to decline just as much as Digg or reddit -
HN follows the same "social news" principle after all.

So then why shouldn't it follow the same principle?

In attempting to answer this question I'm hoping that members will forward
ideas to counter this principle _in general_ , given that all things are equal
in this space.

EDIT #2 [on a separate note]: I should add that the future of HN (or Digg or
reddit) ultimately depends on the demand of the community. If we get an influx
of users that want to discuss:

Ruby vs. Python

Emacs vs. Vim

Bootstrapping vs. Funding

Or whatever else comes to mind, then so be it. Btw, we've been good as a
community in avoiding religious discussions, so I'm pretty happy to be
insulated from the whole Mac OSX vs. Vista debate!

The bottom line is that we can draw parallels to other communities that have
risen/fallen based on the whim of the dominant memes that come and go, but
eventually the fate of this place relies upon what memes we choose to
propagate.

~~~
endtime
One important difference is that you need 100 karma to start downvoting
people. It makes HN more resistant to invasion, though not entirely so.
Perhaps people could be required to have been members for a month before
upvoting stories or something as well.

Unfortunately, this requirement is less effective if people cheapen karma by
not being judicious with their upvotes, as I try to be here much more so than
on reddit. Upvotes effectively shape HN; upvoting witty one liners and puns,
etc, is the path to becoming reddit.

~~~
jacquesm
one easy way around that would be to set the various karma thresholds as a
function of the number of registered (active) users.

------
tdavis
There's a very simple fix for this that has been proven to work: charge for
admission and moderate incredibly heavily. Charging some small sum, say $10,
weeds out lots of younger people (no credit card). Moderating heavily deters
people from joining and causing a fuss because they will quickly lose their
investment.

Content (and members) need to be pruned constantly. Comments with too low a
karma rating should disappear; they're just noise. Submissions that are
turning this place into "Economic News" should be removed before they get to
the front page and get random up-votes to create even more noise (if I have to
flag something on the front page, that's wrong).

I have moderated many forums and though I've never modded a for-pay community,
I know strict moderation works. Some people will complain, but the people who
come for good content and good camaraderie will thank you for taking out the
trash on a daily basis.

~~~
bprater
I'm all for this, too -- but pg doesn't like the Metafilter community, which
uses this model.

------
run4yourlives
Of course it's next. It's just a matter of time. This is obviously the natural
life cycle of internet forums, and has been since the beginning.

Story quality is directly linked to user growth. When you have a small niche
site with "niche-expert" users, you get a high interest and visible actions;
as the site grows, individual actions matter less, the niche is expanded into
those that may only have a casual interest in the topic, and the forum
inevitability changes to meet the needs of the average user - which _is not
the same type of user that previously existed_. As the more windows are
broken, the more "decay" is introduced into the forum. But the site is doing
exactly what it's supposed to do - mirror the average demographic. It's that
demographic that changes.

You simply cannot grow a website like this and maintain a niche focus. So if
you choose to welcome more and more people, this is the end result. The sites
that have been successful at maintaining focus control either the story
submission (/.) or the entry of users (MeFi).

Sites like HN and reddit need to limit growth the same way a small startup
shouldn't focus on growth per se if they want to retain that particular
environment.

How to do this successfully is another problem altogether.

~~~
pg
_Of course it's next. It's just a matter of time._

One can always claim this about something that hasn't happened yet. But it's
already been two years and 15x growth and the sky has not fallen. So you could
just as easily argue that what has saved us so far (killing fluff stories,
insisting on civility in comment threads) will continue to work.

~~~
icey
Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who
runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. Reddit and Digg
ultimately became for-profit companies and in doing so, embraced the
democratic method of policing their sites.

HN on the other hand is somewhere between an oligarchy and meritocracy; and
can only work that way because pg doesn't appear to want to monetize it.

My point is that reddit and Digg are far more similar than reddit and HN or
Digg and HN.

~~~
run4yourlives
_Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who
runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation._

While true, I don't think this matters in the long run. Reddit's founders are
pretty active, and clearly the decline started prior to the sale.

What I do think though is that the items you bring up work to accelerating the
effect, certainly.

(Oh, and someone give the parent a free up-mod since I hit the down arrow when
I was copy/pasting his comment. Thx)

~~~
pg
The level of conversation on Reddit didn't decline because the founders were
apathetic. They still care a lot about the site. But they are committed not to
censoring anything, either comments or stories, and that tends to make the
site something of a free-for-all. A massively successful free-for-all,
incidentally:

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/?metric=uv)

For most users the change in the character of Reddit couldn't accurately be
called "decline," or their traffic wouldn't still be growing so fast. It just
seems like a decline to the small minority that includes us.

------
drfloob
I know a handful of people that have reasonably high IQ's (above 130 or so).
Many of them also have infantile senses of humor, short attention spans, and
live with their parents well into their late 20's.

It's been said a few times already, but raw processing power doesn't
necessarily say anything about a person's maturity, rationality, or interests.

What could work, however, is a Maturity Captcha! When a user submits a story,
(s)he's presented with a series of snarky headlines and/or lolcats and asked
"Do you think this headline is funny?" or "Isn't the kitty clever?". Or maybe
word problems: "Jack wants to buy a Wii, but he only has enough to pay his
rent. Should Jack buy the Wii anyway?". An answer of "yes" to any of those
would have some negative repercussion (instant user ban, posting ban, lower
karma, public humiliation, etc).

Getting past the captcha would be ridiculously easy for 14-year-old geniuses,
but at least there will be a constant reminder of exactly what's unwelcome.

On the other hand, aggressive censorship could take care of the chaff pretty
effectively. After all, the problem is, generally: "how does a small ruling-
class of individuals shape the growth of an entire community". There no sense
in deceiving ourselves about what that means: elitism, exclusivism and in some
senses, totalitarianism.

But hey, if it's YOUR community, do whatever you want!

~~~
queque
I like the question about the Wii. Here is another maturity filter question
which might sound familiar to many folks: "Does it make more sense to you to:
(a.) buy a semi-dorky used car and pay off your student loans, or (b.) buy a
brand-new car and take on 5 years of car payments and allow your student loans
to chase you well into your thirties?"

------
jwesley
I think HN has a few advantages that give it a fighting chance:

1\. It's not a business, or at least a direct one, so the site owners are not
focused on growing the audience infinitely. 2\. It is not dependent on
advertising revenue, so there is no pressure to go "mainstream" to attract
bigger advertisers. 3\. The members are passionately self policing. Seems like
every other day there is a thread about HN going off the deep end.

------
makaimc
It's very interesting to me that so many other people had the same experience
with Digg and Reddit that I did. At first, I read it obsessively but now I can
barely stand to scroll through the headlines. HN has gone through a different
cycle so far. At first I only read the front page because it had enough of
content for me, but now I skip many of the front page stories and go directly
to the "lost" gems on the new page.

~~~
timf
I hang out in the new section a lot too. I can't tell if many people also do
or not, I assumed before that it was a popular place to sift through. But now
I am not so sure, e.g. HN founder pg does not seem to mind if the new queue
becomes a firehose:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475779>

I am going to miss a good S/N ratio there, though.

------
chime
I understand Digg has this problem and I stopped being a regular user there
over two years ago. However, with reddit, it's pretty much a la carte. You
subscribe to the subreddits you find interesting and your home page will only
show those. I do not subscribe to the most popular subreddits like politics,
pics, business etc. and instead subscribe to smaller, niche subreddits like
wikipedia, long-text, and space. My wife subscribes to funny, cute, and health
subreddits and reddit has material customized for both of us.

Yes, it is more work to make sure I get to keep seeing interesting things and
it does take some time to find more interesting subreddits to follow but it is
much better than seeing typical mainstream news on it all day.

------
ChaitanyaSai
I was wondering out the meta-phenomena of community members complaining about
decreasing quality. While it may be valid, doesn't it make more sense to make
a more concrete argument about why the quality is going down.

More along those lines here:
[http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2009/02/dilution-of-
qu...](http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2009/02/dilution-of-quality-in-
social-aggregators.html)

------
christofd
hmmm... community management

1\. Nightclubs are an intesting example of the steady rise and decline of new
ideas. They attract copycats and their followers and the club dies, because
the initial 'intellectually curious' crowd gets run over. Meanwhile, clubs
that are overly elite and gated just don't have the style and communication
culture. I've seen this, as a music fan, in Munich, Germany, over a period of
10 years. Often places that look like a dump are able to maintain their fans
(that's one of the strategies).

2\. Gated communities become stale quickly. Silicon Valley culture developed,
because it was beneficial to work together with others as the pie was growing
for everybody. (That's also why the industrial revolution created a middle
class). The academic community is a stark contrast to this, because there is
no tenure position out there for everybody. IMHO (5 years work at university)
the communication culture is probably in the order of 50% toxic intimidation
games (noise).

------
yalurker
One key difference is that HN can be seen as "startup news" not "tech news".
This is a much tighter niche, which reduces the appeal to certain
demographics. It also means that if HN starts down a "slippery slope" that it
starts from a point further away from base, giving more time to adapt/confront
it.

~~~
anthonyrubin
Would discussions of top ten movie lists, politics and excessive meta-
discussion qualify as starting down a "slippery slope"?

------
jorgem
What if you could just have some settings: 1) I don't want to see any
submissions from people who became "members" after me. 2) And, I don't want to
see ANY comments from people who signed up AFTER me.

So the site stays about the same for ME. Even though it may look different to
someone else.

------
donniefitz2
I don't think HN is going down the same path as Digg. It's still keeping it's
focus for the most part.

------
lionhearted
Having a semi-gated community can work. One of the best places for
statistics/business/intelligent discussion in baseball is sonsofsamhorn.net -
you need to get invited to get a membership, but there's a "Sandbox" that non-
members can post to. Anyone can read SOSH, but the quality stays high due to
mostly only qualified members posting/discussing.

