
Dear sw007 - raganwald
http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-sw007
======
3pt14159
The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by
people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side
of 100).

The reason that this is a problem is that the average person has more friends
closer to the median IQ than they do further away. So when people share new
sites with one another they are generally sharing it more often with lower IQ
people than they are with higher IQ people. These people come, love the
content, stay, and repeat the cycle.

Countermeasures are just fighting this effect. It happened to Reddit, Fark,
etc. One countermeasure is smart-flight evidenced by people fleeing to other
subreddits like "TrueReddit" or making nearly identical subreddits
"CanadianPolitics" vs "Canada". Or "LibertarianDebates" vs "Libertarian". It's
like "white flight" only the division isn't racial, it's cognitive.

In my opinion HN suffers far less than it reasonably should, given its
popularity and influence. Probably due to good attention, moderation, and
direct involvement by pg. It's likely that when I joined HN I knew far less
about the world and tech; upvoting the 500 mile email posting or a basic
article on split testing. But I've grown and the community probably became a
bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

The only community I haven't really seen it happen to so far is Less Wrong,
but over there they are absolutely _fanatical_ about keeping out poor
discussion. I don't know if that is worth the effort.

To me, the best thing to do is to just leave once it gets bad enough and a
better alternative pops up. Something else will come along. Maybe a secretive
invite only HN, or something that customizes which articles you see based on
what you upvote. The problem with the former is that secret societies are
generally self-important and word always gets out (remember fight club
anyone?). The problem with the latter is that it absolutely ruins a feeling of
community. So those probably won't happen, it will probably just be a new
community, much like this one, but with a clean slate.

~~~
tokenadult
_The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written
by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this
side of 100)._

What is your evidence for this factual assertion? (I have done a huge amount
of research on IQ testing, and I have never seen a trace of a finding like
this in any of the research literature.)

 _But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and
less intelligent._

How would we assess the "intelligence" of an online community?

Why not rather just help everyone acculturate?

~~~
3pt14159
I guess a lifetime of my friends handing me books that were written by smarter
people than either of us as well as the widely popularity of a site like
wikipedia.

Maybe IQ is the wrong word when it comes to subject matter excellence. Maybe
it's a combination of knowledge and IQ. But I certainly do not enjoy reading
the Toronto Sun.

As for assessing the intelligence of an online community, it shouldn't be too
hard. It's been proven that for native English speakers vocabulary directly
correlates to IQ, even when controlling for linguistic IQ. So you could put
together a managed LDA generative model that trains on various documents
either classified as academic research all the way down to 5th grade writing
and see what the topic drift is over time. Should correlate relatively well.

------
alexshye
"And this is not a passive experiment"

This seems to be the most important thing here. In any community, you have the
chance to play an active role. If you stay and do good, you help it in your
own way. If you jump ship, you leave the community with one less person that
cares.

------
jfaucett
this was a great post. its hard to deal with negativity when you're so close
to the things you share on HN. But I agree just getting one positive and
constructive comment is worth filtering through a lot of negativity. Its where
another guy shows you something you've never thought about and it makes the
code beautiful, or a critiques that helps make your app a better experience
for people who have gotten a genuine interest in it.

------
_lj
Am I missing something here? This post makes it look like the conversation is
surrounding the increase in negative comments vs the decrease of positive
reinforcement. I don't think that's the crux of the issue at all. I come here
for an interesting conversation. Lately, I haven't been getting it. Replacing
overwhelmingly negative but unconstructive comments with overwhelmingly
positive but unconstructive comments isn't the way forward. That's just
trading one kind of troll for another. And to clear up any misconception - I
don't think anybody's explicitly saying "say nicer things, no matter what!"
But I think a focus on the positivity vs the constructiveness of a comment
will take people down that road anyway.

------
rdudekul
The author asks to ignore all the negative advice and pick out the positive
crumbs. Not everyone can take negative comments effectively. I for one agree
with sw007 that it is demotivating to receive a bunch of negative feedback.
Also genuine entrepreneurs posts seem to struggle to come up on page 1 of HN,
when mostly controversial or sensational topics seem to take the prime space.

Kudos to pg for observing and listening to us. It would be awesome to have
guidelines and incentive structures to keep HN as entrepreneur friendly as
possible.

~~~
raganwald
I don't actually advocate 100% ignoring it. I know from personal experience
that negative feedback is very hard to handle. I don't believe in just
"positive thinking" or "ignoring negative experiences," I believe in using
specific mental habits to manage my own thoughts and emotional responses.

What has worked best for me is a methodology called "Learned Optimism:"

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism>

I wrote about my experience with it here:

[https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-...](https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-01/optimism.md#readme)

It's not the only methodology, there are other very good ones in the popular
(but excellent) books "Feeling Good" and "Mind Over Mood."

------
dumbluck
Good post, Reg! I think you made Steve's day, and it is good advice for
everyone on HN as well. I would be in favor of allowing people on HN to
downvote overly negative comments. That would help I think. Not allowing
everyone to downvote is a problem. HN karma != helpfulness.

------
tkahn6
So the general sense is that HN used to be great and a more open place. I
agree. Here's an idea to prevent and reverse the decline of HN:

Set a large karma threshold for upvoting rights.

If you give a bunch of new users the right to upvote they'll just upvote each
other based on their ideas on what makes a good community. There's no way to
maintain or enforce the culture of the community when the new members can just
bootstrap their own culture base with little to no input from the existing
community.

If pg was inclined he could set this threshold, normalize/zero-out the karma
scores for all accounts created after date X, and effectively go back in time
to that date in terms of who has the power to set the tone and culture of HN.

