

Snobbism-less way to save hacker-news from becoming another digg/reddit - tzury

The only two aggregators I consume in my google reader are this site and http://friendfeed.com/.<p>I recently noticed that hacker news is gaining popularity which makes posts less interesting.<p>I was wondering what if the karma will removed, would it cause karma-motivated posters looking for other places to be top ranked<p>I just wish we will remain a small community with common interests but I am not sure it is even possible nowadays.
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pg
The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by
20% like a step function, and since then I've noticed slightly dumber stories
getting slightly more votes. I don't think getting rid of karma would solve
the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission.

I may finally try turning on some kind of vote weighting. But there is a more
organic solution:

 _Long-time users: please vote more._

If people voted up good stuff more often, that would fix the problem. And I
know there is a lot of room to do that, because we now get around 12k unique
visitors a day, and yet top stories rarely have more than 100 votes.

~~~
brett
The best voters are going to be the ones who take the time to read and
evaluate what they're voting on. They're naturally going to get outpaced by
people who vote reflexively based on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for
short attention span content. So even if you somehow manage to convert
habitual readers into active participants over the long term you're fighting
an uphill battle in terms of numbers.

I, for one, would love for you to turn on vote weighting because I'm really
curious how well it will work.

~~~
bayareaguy
_They're naturally going to get outpaced by people who vote reflexively based
on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for short attention span content._

Perhaps a little javascript could be used to disable the article vote arrow
until the page was actually read by the user, or maybe the arrows should only
be on the comment page.

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eurokc98
The issue to me is between these two things: Alienate potential users versus
allowing the mainstream crowd to alter the community. Digg and Reddit are
prime examples of what eventually happens once sites become mainstream. To
determine the best action we need to know what the long term goals of the site
are, without knowing that its tough to generate any 'fix'.

How about going the invitation only route? Or creating a series of basic
coding/php type questions in order to sign up (think captcha)? I think either
of those if implemented would cut down on the drive by comments that bring
down discussion.

~~~
m0nty
Personally, I'd go the mefi route and charge $5. That seems to work there, and
(since this site is primarily about YC's aims and its potential founders) I'm
sure serious entrepreneurs wouldn't think even _once_ about paying.

Look at it this way: people will pay for the privilege of an intelligent
conversation, but trolls feel so entitled that 99% of them will never pay.

~~~
staunch
It felt funny how different my reaction was to the idea of paying at
Metafilter vs news.yc. I scoffed there, but I'd pay $5 here in a heartbeat. If
that's all we have to do it seems a small price to pay.

Maybe if it added up to enough there'd even be a YC company funded by it :-)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Oh, _man_ \-- your post made my math-addicted brain start estimating the
financial cost of the time I spend here on news.YC. Now I need a drink, and
it's only noon.

Believe me, $5 would be _nothing_.

------
mechanical_fish
I'm not convinced that this "less interesting" problem is real.

For one thing, talking about the "quality" of news.yc posts is like talking
about the weather. It's partially random, and it fluctuates. Sometimes it's
grey and drizzly! Sometimes it's sunny! Sometimes you have Hurricane Katrina!

There certainly are lots of people complaining about the quality of posts, but
that in itself isn't evidence of anything. People constantly talk about the
weather, too. It's a safe topic, it's a shared experience that connects you
with your audience ("Did you get wet yesterday? Yeah, I got wet, too!"), and
it changes a lot, which guarantees that there will always be something to say.

Any community larger than five will never agree on the definition of an "on
topic" submission. One person's sensationalist linkbait is another's clever
marketing hook. One person's banal retread is another's timeless classic.

Finally, I don't think we need another system. We have a system: PG edits the
site using whatever tools that come to hand. (Yes, the karma system is there,
too, but it's kind of lightweight -- karma does not convey ultimate power,
it's subtle in its influence, and it mostly serves as a way to send small-
scale social signals.) Ultimately, I don't trust systems to build readable
sites: I trust editors. I'm confident that, if the site starts to suck, PG
will start arbitrarily pruning and transplanting and reworking the rules until
it doesn't suck anymore. I certainly trust him more than I'll ever trust any
mindless, gameable, automatic system, or any silver-bullet gimmick.

~~~
Flemlord
Believe me, it's real. I've been on reddit for a long time and I've seen it go
from a great site with quality links to kitten pictures and "Vote Up If You
H@te Hillary" posts. It's not as bad as most people say, but it's certainly a
different site than it was a year ago. I'm not sure how to prevent it here,
other than manually editing the system and deleting certain users.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Perhaps I should clarify that I'm not convinced that it's real _on news.yc_.
Not yet, anyway.

Yeah, reddit and Digg are disaster areas. I don't know why, and your guess is
as good as mine. My impression is that, in Digg's case, they tended to play up
the gaming aspect early on -- e.g. they put up huge banners trumpeting the
number of diggs for each article -- and built their audience out of people who
think that competing to push articles up the leaderboard is a fun sport. Now
they've reaped the whirlwind. Reddit, I'm not so sure I could even guess. I
didn't stick around to analyze the phenomenon; I just left.

I do agree, however, that the only proven solution involves manually editing
the system to some degree.

------
yummyfajitas
One thing that might be useful is for users to be able to block other users.
If I don't want to read any more posts/submissions by WakeUpSheeple or
AlienFromPrisonPlanet, I can just block them.

One could combine this with flagging accounts for possible deletion if they
are blocked by too many people (as WakeUpSheeple probably would be). Deletion
would occur only after editorial review.

This wouldn't work for that other site, since trolls have critical mass. But
it might work for us.

------
iamdave
Good question, as I've noticed a few posts completely irrelevant to everything
that goes on normally here at Hacker News. It's a thin line to tread about
removing karma and I'd love to hear some users thoughts about the issue.

------
systems
Sorting, searching, filtering, tagging and personal preference should solve
this problem

Moral is, this site should add features that solve the problem instead of
asking the users to ... just behave!

~~~
r7000
> Sorting, searching, filtering, tagging and personal preference should solve
> this problem

and ruin the sense of community (baby + bath water)

------
iamwil
I've also noticed a lack of interesting articles on the front page ever since
pg's "troll" essay. The current general hubbub over zoo vs savanna comparisons
takes up too many slots.

I think there are a couple ways to go. One thing to try is to show points, but
no upvoting on the front page, and allow voting on the 'new' section, but no
point totals. That way, articles that that get upvoted are interesting
articles from people browsing new articles. Without the influence of points
tallys, people will be voting more or less independently.

As it stands now, social news isn't a 'wisdom of the crowds' sort of thing,
but more like a positive feedback system that relies on a catchy title and a
chance on the front page. This probably makes it more of a hit-or-miss for
good articles.

Secondly, as any community gets bigger, the common ground between them gets
smaller. There was some quote about television being stupid and inane, not
because people that watch it are stupid and inane, but that the common
interests we have are stupid, but our refined tastes are varied.

I find myself upvoting very little on the front page now, and the I have to
spend time scouring the 'new' section to find the interesting stuff. To be
honest, I see no reason why we shouldn't fragment the top news. This isn't
like a newspaper where we only have one page to print on. However, I don't
mean, breaking it up into "subHNs" like reddit did.

I mean, I should be able to alter the weighing of the front page. The simplest
scheme would be to allow a user to follow certain people's submits. I
regularly like nickb (other than his xkcd submits) and chaostheory's submits,
but not as much edw519. A mere difference in taste. However, my own news
snobbery shouldn't affect what goes on the front page. Everyone then has their
own 'view' of the top news. That way, if Hacker News sucks ass for you, it's
because you voted for "haha news" and followed submitters' articles that you
don't actually find interesting.

One of the arguments against this is that the articles would homogenize,
because people would follow the same types of things. Though potentially
computationally expensive, one might be able to characterize a user based on
the articles submitted/voted in some parameter space, and then you can show a
distance measure between this user vs you and all the people you follow.

------
slim
i think going social and "asymmetrical" is the way to go.

think twitter. their subscription system does not obligate you to follow
people following you. this is the key to good content filtering.

of course we can keep a "public timeline" (for new users which don't know
where to begin)

------
chomchom
I agree that the posts are getting more mundane as some try to get 'the top
score' possible. I'm all for this place being incredibly pompous if keeps up
the quality of the content. I question the purpose of a number based karma
system. Couldn't we just have a thumbs up and thumbs down approach on
individual posters and not their posts. This way if you personally recognise
that someone has a higher quality of posts, then you will go to the effort of
recommending that person. Then you may choose to look at those who are
connected to them. This way people don't have the same motivations. I'm all
for a subscription based scheme as well if it keeps the quality up. Maybe even
charge for it.

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twak
use a pagerank-like karma assignment (high karma people give more karma). it's
better than having a slashdotesque editor. (and the only thing our grahamist
overlords would have to do is to kill someone's karma if they go off topic)

~~~
twak
all these ideas are a little experimental. how can we try them out without
nuking this community?

------
dpapathanasiou
_I just wish we will remain a small community with common interests_

It's interesting to see the comments in this thread while others are talking
about optimal company size (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144969>) and
why large companies can be dysfunctional
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144904>).

------
ambition
How about imposing a small karma penalty to post a new story?

Then, set a minimum karma requirement for posters. The karma requirement could
be positive or negative.

It would eliminate spammers and reduce bad stories in one fell swoop.

I noticed a couple users tend to post a large number of stories which generate
no discussion and earn no points, but there's no loss to the user and no
prevention mechanism.

------
gaika
It is possible if you add proper trust metric, karma as it is right now is
just a little bit too primitive for that.

~~~
rms
What do you mean by a proper trust metric? I see systems of karma on sites
like these eventually evolving into reputational economies so I'm curious
about any way of making karma more complex.

~~~
gaika
Trust and reputation are always in context, current karma system ignores it.
But once you add context visualizing and interpreting karma becomes hard. Take
a look of how we're trying to deal with this problem (link in my profile, sick
of being accused of spamming, sorry).

~~~
rms
I have an account there but I'm unclear on what you're doing differently with
reputation..

~~~
tim2
Utilizing reputations through clustering of voting histories in order to
produce their recommendations is a pretty good description of what's going on
there now. Next they're planning on giving you even more control by allowing
you to control who you trust directly. This combined system should be the
special sauce that really solves this problem, I think.

------
jamespitts
How about this approach: the earlier a member signed up, the more their votes
count in the rankings.

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andreyf
> I just wish we will remain a small community

This might be the problem? Simply the size?

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webframp
so remove the karma and there's no more motivation to gain some sort of social
ranking cred? interesting idea.

~~~
echo419
I don't know that could go both ways: Those who post in order to spread
information for information's sake may continue to do so, while those who spam
may simply go away because there is no "reward/recognition" anymore. However
those who spam may also feel that they now have nothing to lose and may post
more worthless stories even more often.

------
edw519
I would seriously consider changing the appearance of the colored header bar.
There are 9 items on this bar, but they are not all the same kind of item.

The first 4 (Hacker News, new, threads, and comments) are different views of
the same data, so they should be tabs.

Leaders, jobs, and <login id> should be links (blue underlined) because they
take you to another page, not another view.

Submit and logout should be buttons.

I would change "Hacker News" to "Popular" and I would put the "New" tab first,
because the Popular view is the default. I still get confused by the "threads"
and "comments" tabs (now what are these, again?)

Why do I make these suggestions?

Because we are all so used to the site, it's almost impossible for us to
visualize how noobies see it. We really need to think about how to better
direct people to the new page more often and more easily, without making it
the default page. I think the biggest problem is that too many good stories
never gain enough traction to graduate to the popular page. If a good story
falls to 31st on the new page without an upvote, we'll probably never see it
again. This happens often because new posts come in faster than people get to
vote for them.

I often read a story that I think is fascinating and wonder how people here
will react to it, so I submit it, only to find it disappearing without any
upvotes or comments. On the other hand, sometimes my submission takes off to
the top of the front page. I realize that I probably think a little
differently that a lot of people, but not THAT MUCH differently. Sometimes, I
think, it's just timing. Thus, the "It fell off the new page too fast"
hypothesis.

Just a thought. Of course, if the data suggests otherwise, then never mind.

------
xlnt
remembering the name of everyone interesting works less and less well as the
site gets bigger.

~~~
bootload
_"... remembering the name of everyone interesting works less and less well as
the site gets bigger. ..."_

I've noticed this as well. I keep a running tally of the frontpage with
hacker, points, karma where I can sort the front page to read the top pages by
person/karma. A quick scan of the front page shows me almost all are new
names, most have karma of <700\. Another check is the /news page compared to
the leader board.

