
A reminder for us all: The Hacker News newcomer welcome page. - RiderOfGiraffes
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
======
retroafroman
My favorite part, which clearly shows that PG understands what the dynamic of
a news site and it's users, is when it states:

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly
interesting."

Frankly, I think this happens way too much. Any post about Zuckerberg,
Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary.
While they have definitely created interesting things, the product is probably
more important than the person.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You could almost make a rule that any article that had a famous person's name
in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction.

Don't get me wrong, some of these articles are very good, but way too many
people vote up celebrity instead of content.

~~~
logicalmind
You could almost make a rule that any comment that had a high profile user's
name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction.

Don't get me wrong, some of these comments are very good, but way too many
people vote up celebrity instead of content.

~~~
sdrinf
Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question.

See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223> ), knowing the background he's
coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my
mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter.

And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about
B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale
controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because
Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch,
or, more likely, other Random J Blogger.

The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot
(following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the
stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all,
this way I see only the things they care to comment about.

The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that
neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his
articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these
"celebrities".

It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.

~~~
brlewis
I also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good
comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much
time.

~~~
rcfox
<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
It used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now
it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not
the same thing.

------
dholowiski
That's great- I'm a relatively new user and I didn't know that page existed. I
think you should have to read it (like a terms of service) and check I agree
before you can create an account.

~~~
mechanical_fish
HN probably should link to that page a little bit more prominently.

Yours is one good suggestion, though I'm not sure you really need to make it
clickthrough. Just call out the link fairly loudly on the signup page.

~~~
DupDetector
I have just signed up, and it is fairly prominent. It's also linked to under
the comment box on every page. It says:

    
    
      If you haven't already, would you mind
      reading about HN's approach to comments?
    

I'm guessing it will eventually go away.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Ah. Yeah, trust me, it goes away at some point.

------
Semiapies
People who don't like the posts showing up on the front page _should flag more
posts_. Even if it's too highly-rated to kill a story, flaggings reduct the
amount of time a story spends on the front page.

------
T_S_
_Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and
don't be rude or dumb in comment threads._

Where there are no bright lines, your side of the road becomes mine. Rudeness
banned (mostly). Condescension, upvoted. Dumb, downvoted. Groupthink, upvoted.

My favorite condescension indicator: Post that include the sentence "Sigh."

------
praptak
As I'm posting this, the top submission on the /news page is "Why Microsoft
Sucks: Hotmail dev team questions need for open standards".

I am guilty of upvoting it. Five seconds of thinking before upvoting would
have prevented me from doing so - the linked comment just doesn't support the
headline and Microsoft being hostile/oblivious to open standards isn't such
big news anyway.

My point is that maybe we should be able to cancel upvotes. This would give
upvoters the chance to read the comments (shallow stories usually have some
comments pointing out that they are not that interesting) get convinced that
they made a mistake and fix it.

Well, I understand that this might not be as simple as decreasing the counter.
I suspect that there might be some impact on the ranking algorithm and
probably a dozen things I haven't thought about. Still it might be worth it.

~~~
PaulHoule
In the last six months, I've seen a lot of linkbait on the edge of webspam get
voted highly on HN.

Although HN's quality is better than it's competition, HN subscribers still
have the psychology that makes Reddit what it is. (Now, you need a ~lack~ of
psychology to explain Digg, but that's another story)

~~~
SkyMarshal
Reddit is actually pretty good for 'hacker news' if you unsubscribe from the
front page and everything not related to hacking, then add all the
programming-related subreddits you're interested in.

------
ajaimk
Probably the greatest reason for Hacker News' success is the fact that PG and
many YC associated founders have the access to kill posts. This keeps the
trash out and the content in. Also, we need to keep in mind that these people
are users of hacker news and not just moderating it.

------
jschuur
While the welcome page does a great job of explaining the kind of atmosphere
it has created and how people should behave, it doesn't explain how it
encourages it. In short, blunt words, how do we keep the jerks out?

Someone who wants to be a troll isn't going to be discouraged by a few words
in the welcome page. That type of user isn't likely to even read the page in
the first place.

On the other hand, that's not the point of a welcome page either. It's to
welcome those people that do want to be a friendly new user. However, then I
read HN's hypothesis about popular community sites declining in quality, the
first thing that went through my mind was 'Oh no, how does HN solve that?'

HN has obviously been successful at it so far. Maybe it's the utilitarian
nature of the site. Perhaps HN's biggest benefit here is its name. The subject
matter might not be limited to 'hacking', but the thought lingers in people's
head when they hear it, and probably keeps a good number of people at bay who
would otherwise post the latest Justin Bieber gossip.

------
ojilles
While it's relatively easy to comment on the stuff that gets to the homepage
that shouldn't be there, the actual stories/discussion that don't make it
there are a loss to our community.

F.ex. I found the 7 comments and a brief appearance on a thoughtful article
like the "Tracking all releases by Etsy" [1] disappointing. That would have
been a great discussion, we all together didn't have.

[1]: <http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/> (Couldn't
find the HN article anymore)

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Search:
[http://searchyc.com/submissions/track+every+release?sort=by_...](http://searchyc.com/submissions/track+every+release?sort=by_date)

Finds: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985008>

------
jdp23
Very useful. Wish I'd seen it when I first got here ... it'd be great to
include a link to it on the main page and mention it in the FAQ.

~~~
sizzla
Seconded. A great read that finally conviced me to join. Thanks.

------
PrestoManifesto
Thanks for this, I'm new and was brought here through a link on Reddit so this
info is handy. It appears Reddit is slowly falling into the Digg world of
phantom upvotes/downvotes and stolen, resubmitted content. I'm assuming this
was posted because this website has gotten several refugees from those sites
looking for intelligent conversation in the comments and posts.

------
jsarch
I would find it very helpful to have a little blurb on the "Submit" page
detailing how to submit to the different subpages (e.g., "ask", "jobs",
"offers"). From what I can tell, submissions are automagically placed into the
different subpages; one can help this sorting by adding "ASK HN" "SHOW HN"
etc. to the title.

------
bhavin
"Does your comment teach us anything?"

HN approach to comments in a nutshell!

~~~
kgermino
Does _your_ comment teach us anything?

------
rokhayakebe
Frankly I believe Hacker News should not allow new registrations any longer.

Edit: Or at least make it invite-only.

~~~
younata
If HN were to do that, I'd leave.

Not allowing new registrations would end the "hacker" part of hacker news.
Hacking is about being open, sharing information, and ALLOWING OTHERS TO SHARE
BACK. To disallow new registrations would be to disallow others to share back,
as well as kill the "open-ous" of this site.

In short, what you suggest would kill the site, not save it.

~~~
steveklabnik
If it was dead, it wouldn't "be so bad" anymore... for a certain definition of
'solves the problem,' it solves the problem.

Note the scare quotes around "be so bad." I still think HN is a valuable place
to spend my time.

