
A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post - steeleduncan
http://slidetocode.com/2012/09/07/cost-karma-to-post/
======
nkohari
My Hacker News account is 1859 days old (just over 5 years). Over those 5
years, I've gone through several stages of my entrepreneurial career.

HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a
startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a
startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company,
and finally joining a friend's startup as CTO. I've changed throughout, and
I've seen Hacker News change as well.

The problem I have witnessed with Hacker News is that over the years, it's
transformed from a place where civil and intelligent discourse can be had to a
place where each comment seems to be made for show. Rather than making solid
arguments, each person seems to want to be seen as more intelligent than the
rest of the commenters. This phenomena is the reason for what in my opinion is
a breathtaking level of pedantry about the most mundane topics.

For example, there was a post on the front page yesterday about scalability at
GitHub. It was an interesting and insightful article from a knowledgeable
author. The top comment was something along the lines of, "I can't believe
they wasted so much time making the UI look this good." HN used to be a place
where insightful articles were rewarded with intelligent conversation and
debate. What happened?

Another example. Someone launched a site earlier this week involving the sales
of hobbyist electronics. The site was definitely interesting, and they
experienced a large volume of traffic from HN and Reddit. The top comment?
Something along the lines of, "when a startup can't keep its site up, it makes
me question their abilities." HN used to be a site where you would be
congratulated for launching. What happened?

It's this kind of stuff that has to go. I don't think Hacker News was ever
perfect -- and maybe I'm just rooting for the site because of the potential
that it has -- but it's definitely gotten worse over the past few years.

As a community, we need to stop the posturing and the pedantry, and get back
to civil and intelligent discourse. We also need to act as the site's immune
system, and stop promoting content that is clearly written to be seen but adds
nothing to the conversation.

~~~
WaltDaniels
I feel that you are talking about an issue that is MUCH BIGGER than HN story
replies. Society, as a whole has become much ruder. I attribute it to the
passive-aggressive frenzy that is Social Media. All of a sudden you can call
someone ANYTHING YOU WANT without fear of direct (and many times indirect)
retribution. This phenomenon has saturated our daily interactions. Now,
instead of a courteous phone call requesting my presence, my boss chats me
"come here". What?!?! Am I a bad-dog? C'mon people ... remember your manners!

~~~
crisnoble
Your all caps typing could be considered rude, unless you are actually meaning
to shout those words.

~~~
WaltDaniels
Touché. Caps were just meant to share my frustration ... no yelling.

~~~
prawks
Italics tend to come across as much less imposing to readers, I use them
_heavily_ now.

~~~
lelandbatey
Italics and other text modifiers are essential for clear communication using
only text. However, as a new user myself I was frustrated by a lack of
documentation for comment markup. As far as I can tell, the only text modifier
for HN comments is _italics_ which are specified by surrounding a word with
asterisks.

I wish there where more text modifiers (like bold and underline), as well as
some kind of documentation for them.

------
shin_lao
The downward spiral feeling comes from after reading HN for a while, you start
to reread the same articles and same comments.

It does not mean HN gets worse and worse, it means you extract less and less
value.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I feel like this is closer to the root cause. People start out and everything
is new, and they have this huge sense of wonder about what is going on around
them in the valley, and then after a year or two you realize that bigger
picture moves more slowly, a lot of people re-invent the wheel, Etc.

But the conversations are actually nearly the same quality, they are just re-
hashes of conversations you already know the answers too. Sometimes you'll get
someone who is quite disgruntled from the it and that will be a pain until
they stop but for the most part it seems to be ok.

That said, if every submission only had one comment 'see link to previous
discussions of this form' that would be pretty boring too.

~~~
127001brewer
_... wonder about what is going on around them in the valley ..._

Why does it have to be mainly about Silicon Valley? I like to think that there
are a lot of interesting people and companies outside Silicon Valley.

In my opinion, there can be a lot noise here, but the quality postings and
comments are much, much better than anywhere else. And, yes, the bigger
picture moves more slowly than a lot of us would like. But isn't that the way
things work?

------
mooism2
Comments with so little value that they get downvoted already cost the
commenter karma.

Most posts that have not reached the front page yet do not reach the front
page at all. Comments on pages that do not reach the front page have much less
opportunity to receive upvotes. This proposal risks discouraging comments on
submissions that have not reached the front page; since some submissions only
reach the front page because of the comments, this would harm HN.

~~~
bryanlarsen
You also don't want to penalize comments on articles that have dropped off the
front page. They're useful to people who get to an article through Google.
These readers are much less likely to be logged in and thus, much less likely
to upvote.

------
lathamcity
I thought the main problems on HN were

-Linkbait articles rapidly accelerating to the front page while good stuff like questions or Show HN gets lost in "New".

-The slight trend in the community towards vitriol and nasty criticism, which there was a lot of chatter about two or three weeks ago.

In both cases, in my understanding, there's a lot of upvoting of the
controversial links/comments from new people with low karma, which is how
they're kind of taking control of the community.

I came up with some ideas in the shower about this. First, I thought it might
be a good idea to create some logarithmic mapping of karma value to vote
weight. The weight wouldn't give the user more karma for being up-voted by a
high-karma person, but it would factor into the site's systems. That way,
people with more karma have more of an impact on the community.

Second, I thought that the quality of a user's previous submissions should
factor into their reputation or something on this site somehow. Maybe HN could
look at the trend of votes earned on recent comments and the ratio of
downvotes:upvotes or downvotes:views (since controversial comments get upvoted
a lot, we want to look at how many times they were downvotes, not the total
score since that will probably be very positive regardless of how many
downvotes there were) and use that information to somehow affect the user.
i.e. if someone is getting a lot of upvotes for mocking someone's project in a
nasty but particularly clever way but also getting a considerable number of
downvotes, the system should say hey, this guy writes posts that a lot of
people don't think belong on our website, and then take action on that
somehow.

Note, I'm "new" (198 karma, joined about a year ago) so I may not know what
I'm talking about.

------
pg
You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort
of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many
of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of
initial karma and cost to post you have in mind.

I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a
study of that type and showed that it would work.

(I realize it's not a perfect test, because people would make different
comments if they knew comments cost karma. But that is a desirable direction
to have error in.)

~~~
wonginator1221
I think that there's also a chance that charging karma for a comment could
also alter the quality of discussion here on HN. Although it may reduce
comment "spam", commenters would have a stronger incentive to follow popular
opinion to ensure that the cost of posting a comment is recouped. This could
potentially reduce the number of dissenting (yet still intellectually
provoking) comments.

This hivemind mentality is a major problem in many online communities, but I
do think that the hiding a karma on is definitely a step in the right
direction.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
IMO one is trying to do with karma what Google are doing with SERP positions -
reward valuable content.

If you do what they've done and personalise results then gaming the system
becomes a lot harder; the only real way to win has to become producing quality
content.

Metrics such as rank, average, sd, account age, up & downvotes could be
combined by the reader in order to personalise story listing and comment
rank/display on the story page.

That way if I want to reward a persons comments with a karma boost for average
comment karma I can do so, but you could just do upvotes or just rank on
inverse of downvotes or whatever.

This way the site users generate competing algorithms, algorithms will be
adjusted and 'evolve' to generate the prefered ranking of comments. Those who
dont want to write one can pick a recommended or default algo.

If user written algos are too expensive to use (though I'm thinking it would
be client side in js) then a selection of algos could be offered by the site.

------
forrestthewoods
Any solution relying on karma is doomed to fail imo.

Karma is easy to min-max. I've gotten good at it. Only ~1200 karma but I'm
averaging over 10 per post. It's easy with a bit of practice.

None of my comments are particularly good. They typically express a mostly
safe opinion in a mild manner. I don't like to make non-root posts as they
rarely get upvotes and I hesitate to post in a large thread (like this one) as
it's easy to get buried.

I don't even know why I post this way to be honest. I was mostly just curious
to see how high I could get my average. The bar to get upvotes on HN seemed
really high at first and I wanted to be a good poster. Now I see the road to
karma is paved with safe, fluffy comments.

~~~
zerostar07
Wow that is very insightful. I 'm surprised that even here people are
willingly conformists to gain acceptance.

~~~
sliverstorm
Don't be. People conform everywhere, all the time. HN isn't _that_ special.

~~~
finalcut
I don't think the fact that people conform is surprising. What is, possibly,
surprising is that someone laid it out there - that they are being a
conformist.

Typically, in my experience, people aren't that honest with themselves.

------
jcr
On the bottom of every page is a clearly defined link for everyone to make
whatever "Feature Requests" they want:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

The owner of this site, pg, helpfully provides that thread for feature/meta
discussion, and kindly requests for feature/meta discussion be placed there.

If you had searched for and read all of the previous meta discussion on
potential HN features, then you'd know your suggestion has already been
proposed _many times_ and debated to death in near endless variations.

The only important question is why you decided to ignore the polite request of
the person who created and pays for this site with your attempt to grab
attention for your feature request proposal?

You probably had good intentions, and were overly excited by your idea, but
you just didn't stop to do the needed homework and think things through
completely. Don't feel too bad, everyone has "Fire Aim Ready" moments.

~~~
steeleduncan
I have never seen this, thank you for pointing it out - I will use it, but to
be honest this is precisely the kind of valueless bureaucratic comment that
irritated me enough to write the blogpost.

This is an internet forum, not a hashtable; uniqueness is not a design
requirement, conversation, discussion and thought are, so I intend to have
many more "Fire Aim Ready" moments.

If I think about something strongly enough I will write about it, often post
it and if people are interested enough in it, they will discuss it. I'm sure
most ideas problems and potential solutions have been mentioned somewhere in
mankind's 4000 years of written words, but context changes over time and many
conversions are worth having as many times as necessary before a problem is
solved.

~~~
DanBC
So you are part of the problem - repetitive content - that you seek to
eliminate? The suggestion you made was also made over 1600 days ago. The
problem you claim is new was happening before you joined!

Maybe the hints and tips for new users could repeat every couple of months?

Sorry for grumpiness if this post sounds grumpy.

~~~
gosu
Yes, your post does sound "grumpy". If you're aiming for civil discourse, then
there's no reason for you to phrase your attacks as condescending rhetorical
questions.

------
shanelja
I get frustrated when I post a massive comment on an article which never gets
read, I don't believe it would add to the environment of the website to have
it cost me 'karma' also, it would effectively take away my inclination to
comment on new topics.

I do care about Karma, it's how I know I'm doing a good job, that regardless
of my opinion, people agree with my reasoning and the argument I've put forth,
I put thought in to my posts, not just posting for the sake of it and it would
be a shame to see that go to waste by being penalized before I've even had the
chance to be heard.

This aside, I believe that HN doesn't need improving, I'm a long time reader
and it annoys me when people seem to see some kind of downwards trend in the
content, it's a news aggregation site, in essence, so perhaps this "downwards
trend" people seem to be observing is merely the winds changing direction in
terms of news.

HN has always been start ups, HN has always been popularity contests between
brands and programming languages, the fact that it seems to be consumed these
days by Apple-Samsung etc, is because that is what is in the news at the
moment, eventually that will change to some other dominant topic and people
will claim they are sick of seeing that too.

As I said before, this is a news aggregation site. The sum of all the content
in a particular genre is the overwhelming majority of content on here. That
only changes when some other trend starts to emerge, until then we have to
wait.

For the record, I for one am also sick of reading about Apple-Samsung, but I'm
more than content to sift through it to find the quality content which exists
on here (not that the content isn't quality coming from Apple-Samsung, just
that it is fairly monotonous now.)

------
Claudus
I have been reading HN for years, and I disagree with the premise that there
is a "downward slide". For people like me, it might be helpful to provide some
sort of evidence to support your claim.

The solution you are proposing also would silence users accounts permanently
without any chance for redemption, those users would become disaffected and
resentful, and with the trivial nature of account creation here, might cause
new problems.

HN is a community, and I think a system that promotes corrective behavior
(like the current one) works best when it exerts negative social pressure for
"bad" posts and helps new users integrate themselves into the community.

If you've ever seen the movie "Hackers", the character "Joey" is a total noob,
and the other characters are constantly giving him negative feedback when he
does something stupid, eventually he learns a few things and becomes more
useful.

------
lifeisstillgood
Over the past few days I have had (mostly) intelligent conversations with
people I have never met on JSON, DNA testing in 40,000 years old bones,
Scottish independance, and salary needs of contractors.

I simply cannot imagine doing that anywhere else.

And I doubt that any of my comments rate as insightful or beautiful. Yet
stopping me making them would have killed those conversations.

I can agree that the submissions _seem_ less interesting than 5 years ago, but
the conversations engage me as much as ever, which is fine - HN _has_ changed
- it has become more necessary to _participate_ \- it is _not_ wikipedia - its
not supposed to be a passive read.I have been a lurker here longer than my
username, and in the past year it has been noticeable that HN is more like a
conference - the interesting stuff happens _talking_ to people in the
corridors.

My 2 cents suggestion - hashtag comment threads. Then the best comments, most
insightful, most summarising, can be extracted on any given hashtag subject -
a living FAQ if you like.

But don't make huge changes - the real stuff is about talking with other
interesting people. Thats great - lets not risk it with big unproven changes.

------
kghose
I think we should concentrate on

1\. Submitting better articles

2\. Upvoting better articles

3\. Posting better comments

4\. Upvoting better comments

5\. Add to the signal

6\. Stop worrying about the noise

~~~
johnleppings
This approach didn't work for Slashdot, Digg and Reddit, which are all fallen
civilisations. If we don't try anything new to solve the problem, this
civilisation will fall as well.

~~~
javery
Reddit actually has extremely high quality subreddits - it is just the main
tags that have degraded.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Reddit's front page look like neon lights of a cheap brothel, how can we know
there is a great experience waiting for us in a dark room?

~~~
xyzzyb
Because it's as easy as going to a subreddit (r/linguistics is pretty
interesting). It's a free and open website: the barrier to entry is
practically non-existent.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Oh, this is the European approach to startups versus Americans:

Make it super difficult to create your company(or post a comment) so only good
companies will be created(or good quality comments posted). Right?

In the real wold if you make risk threshold too high, new people do not enter
because of fear. That is the reason most of the tech startups in the world are
Americans.

In Europe investors will require you to have a degree, if so they will ask you
for your experience, if so they will ask you for your business plan, if so
they will ask you for market research for your b.plan, if so they will ask you
for profits you already have, if so...why the hell I need you if I already
have all that?.

------
rlt3
The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new
users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments.

To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop
expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche.

The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something
Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like $2, would be
fine.

Of course, this will never happen. This isn't really something I want to
happen, but, to me, it seems to be the only way of limiting the user base in
an effective manner.

~~~
sgdesign
Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro"
tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.

~~~
rlt3
I feel that this creates elitism. Anyone can buy a 'Pro' tag. What makes a
person's comments, who is willing to spend money, better than one who is not?

------
pmelendez
This is interesting but I am concern that people with no enough karma to post
would abandon the account (because would be useless at that point) and
starting creating new ones. Or worse, as they could have dummy throwaway
accounts for potentially risk comments in which case this mechanism would not
achieve its goal of getting better quality post.

However, I think it still would be possible to do something similar, like
proportional weights for upvotes and downvotes depending on the karma. Also
weighting your posts with your karma could help making to grow faster those
posts coming from a reliable user.

We could go even further, making the karma as a rating instead of a linear
accumulator and update it using something like an Elo rating system where we
could compare the actual score (upvotes points) with an estimate prior score
based on the actual karma (pretty close to what happen on chess actually)

I don't know.. I am just writing down some crazy ideas that came to my mind
when I read the post. Any insights?

------
alttag
One of my frustrations about the perceived downhill spiral (as a relative
newb, having been here just over a year) is all of the proposals for improving
HN which keep making it to the front page, and inevitably spawn the same set
of suggestions in the comments.

------
iand
Am i missing something? If it costs karma to comment and you have no karma,
how are you supposed to earn enough to start commenting again?

~~~
epo
Well, you could acquire it with the passing of time. Say for those with a
karma below 25, they get 1 point a day until they reach 25.

~~~
ballooney
People (like me) often sign up initially because they have something to add on
something right now (a space-flight article (my field) in my case), and rarely
because they anticipate being moved enough to comment in 25 days.

This proposed mechanism would especially preclude contributions from the
people whose content is being featured, which you often see ('hey, author
here, thanks for the interest...' etc) who sign up just to answer questions
about their blog post or the bit of software they've authored that has got to
the front page.

To me this stuff has often has higher value than 80% of the comments from
career commenters, just by virtue of the SNR to the discussion at hand. It
would be a disservice to the community to preclude it, I think.

------
franze
I don't care about (HN) karma, and i believe (a.k.a. untested hypothesis) most
HNers don't care about it. In conclusion i don't think that adding /
subtracting something most people don't care about will solve ... anything.

~~~
ed209
I do care about karma.

I care because it's a measure of whether what I say is agreeable or
disagreeable. It's not about fitting in or following the herd, but if I say
something that loses me karma I want to understand why. Maybe I'll end up with
the same opinion anyway or maybe it teaches me to think more before I talk.
Mostly, karma helps me reflect on my opinions and question those opinions.

The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they
downvote_

If you agree with me, then an upvote with no commentary is fine. If you
downvote me, tell me why. Maybe I could learn something, maybe I get the
chance to explain myself better, maybe an open disagreement on a point
enriches the community.

~~~
alttag
... And much of the time, I think asking for a comment with a down vote is a
good idea.

Except, there are obvious trolls. Or someone else has already explained why
the comment was inappropriate.

It happens enough that the reason for the downvote seems—to me—facially clear
... so while I agree it's a good courtesy in most situations, I don't think
enforcing it would help. Maybe a UI change could encourage this behavior
(e.g., highlight "reply" on downvote), but this loses some of the clean look
of HN ...

~~~
prodigal_erik
Maybe if it's out of band somewhere. If comments are not worth reading (IMHO
the purpose of downvoting) I would usually prefer not to plow through
subthreads explaining why.

------
robomartin
For the most part HN is far from being in decline. I say this from the
perspective of going back to very active participation in various lists back
in the days when USENET and private BBS's were your only choices. I've seen a
lot, the good, the bad and the ugly.

I do feel that some tweaks here and there could be useful, and I suspect that
this is happening on a somewhat regular basis. My own pet peeve is that down-
votes ought to cost you something and that down-voting should require a
comment. Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not pollute
threads too much.

We are all guilty to some degree of adding pollution. This is a group of human
beings, not algorithms. It will happen. And this is normal.

As a libertarian and real working entrepreneur who has founded and run several
companies, succeeded and failed, I tend to react negatively to very liberal
views and views not necessarily rooted in real entrepreneurial experience.

On the political end, some of the younger minds on HN have been politically
polluted by the liberal bend of our universities and mainstream media. Until
they have a collision with reality they then to simply parrot what was driven
into their heads because that's all they know.

On the business end, there are a lot of people posting on HN that have never
actually started or run a real business, leased space and equipment, hired and
fired, had to deal with the various corrupt liberal labor boards, had to deal
with taxation and regulation, the agony of business problems and the
exhilaration of business success and a myriad of other real-world forces that
a business has to face on a daily basis. Yet, they'll come to HN and think
that because they read the internet they understand business.

All of this is OK to some degree or another. As I said, it's human nature and
this is a group of human beings.

I like HN and want it to remain a high-quality source of interesting
discussions relevant to the tech entrepreneur (and not just about which LISP
is better!). I'll do my part and try to refrain from reacting to some of the
aforementioned posts unless I can truly add valuable insights. Maybe others
should also take a moment to re-examine their behavior patterns and see what
could be improved. It's probably that simple.

~~~
thebigshane

      Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not 
      pollute threads too much.
    

I really like the idea of private comments for this case.

Wild tangents, pedantry, grammar/spelling corrections, personal questions,
(constructive) criticism could all be optionally made private and avoid
clutter in the threads

------
overgard
I have no opinion on this, but I do have a meta thought: I wonder if the
"quality" of posts is the wrong way to frame the discussion of trends about a
community. As an example, it's linguistically like describing an activity as
"fun": it means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. For
instance, the "fun" of having dinner with friends is a lot different than the
"fun" of a roller-coaster, but we use the same word for both even though we're
really talking about very distinct emotional states. Same thing with
"quality", maybe we shouldn't just talk about if posts are better or worse,
but rather what trend they're moving towards (if they're moving at all).

I havent been there in years, and I only ever lurked, but I felt like slashdot
came close to getting this right, in that you could rate the qualities of
something on various axis (ie funny/insightful/interesting), which made
scanning the comments really easy. If I didn't want snark I could skip over
that easy enough, whereas if I was in the mood for it I could just go all out
reading that.

If I were to notice a trend, I would say the site has moved from being a
little bit more positive but echo-chambery, to a bit more critical/negative
but with more diversity of opinions. I have no opinion on whether that's
better or worse, it just feels like a shift of tone to me.

If I were to make a criticism of hacker news though (and it's a minor one --
I'm still here after all), it's that this community is maybe a little too
self-serious, out of a terrible fear of becoming redditesque.

------
ForrestN
If everyone who made a big pronouncement about HN's sad demise instead
submitted a great article, went through and up-voted every story and comment
they thought was interesting, and left some thoughtful comments, we would
probably be in much better shape.

------
deveac
A thought on requiring Karma to post:

What is the point? Looking at it, the idea implies a requirement where a
scarce resource is depleted in order to contribute.

The hopeful goal is that quality of contribution goes up, since you are
spending a scarce resource.

In order for this to matter at all and drive behavior, the amount of that
scarce resource required to be spent must be significant enough to matter, -or
non-trivial (what that amount is I don't know, but that is immaterial).

Here is the problem:

While the goal is changing posting behavior for the better, this system might
have unintended consequences that have the opposite effect. Users may just
start posting lowest common denominator (Hacker News version of it anyway)
posts in order to just snag upvotes so that they always have plenty of karma
to post. Essentially, it could encourage "karma-whoring" posts, and comments
across the site could devolve in the aggregate if this behavior is adopted in
any significant amount.

We all know about certain other social sites and the kind of chaff karma-
farming brings in. HN mitigates this my keeping karma hidden among other
things. This idea though, seems like a different mechanism that could easily
encourage that behavior.

------
jmsduran
Personally, I like the idea of an "HN playground" of some sort: a series of
mirrored HN sites, where each attempts to implement and test a different/new
community mechanic.

Whether it be having to spend karma in order to post or some other scheme, I
think it certainly would be interesting and allow people to tweak and provide
feedback at a more massive scale.

------
kwamenum86
Have to disagree.

This has already been mentioned elsewhere but comments with little value are
already penalized when people downvote them.

If you notice more crap comments that aren't being downvoted that's because a)
the community standards are changing and b) there's no good way to penalize
all crap comments anyway - some will slip through the cracks. And as a result
of b) great comments will slip through the cracks, which means people will
lose points needlessly even when they're not trolling.

I'm not saying your proposal wouldn't have an impact on trolls. But there
would likely be an awful lot of collateral damage.

------
dgunn
I'm not sure how submissions like this are still showing up so commonly or how
they arrive at the top of the list. If ever there was a community of people
capable of solving the problem of "improving HN", this is the one. I supply a
problem statement and solution below.

Problem: HN has problems which seem not to get fixed despite recommendations
made to the maintainer(s?). Why? I suspect it's because maintaining HN is one
of the lowest priority jobs to the maintainer of HN. The guy is busy! Fixing
problems or implementing possible features quickly would have very low ROI to
such a person. This isn't to say that he(they?) doesn't care - just doesn't
have time because his other responsibilities are _actual_ responsibilities,
not a hobby. This is the equivalent of hiring an independently wealthy person
to work for your company. The person may really like working for you, but you
can't rely on them. They have little incentive to stick around if they get
even slightly bored.

Solution: Make a new one. Someone make something better. You know where your
primary audience lives (here) so you know where to find users. Monetize it in
some way so that I know you'll keep working on it. Make it your full time gig.
With the number of users you could get, you wouldn't have to ask for much. A
donation model would probably pay you a pretty good salary. Be nice to the
community and make reasonable attempts to fix the issues they bring up.
They'll probably even help you fix them if you need them to.

------
crusso
I propose that HN hold a contest a la Netflix whereby identity-sanitized user
activity is made available for various parties to run algorithms on in order
to improve the general quality of comments and articles.

Basically, the contest metrics would be:

* Given ALL identity-sanitized user activity -> Predict the average voting behavior of individual users.

I've watched online forums deteriorate for almost 3 decades now. It's a shame
to see HN following the same pattern of trolling, populist reputation seeking,
post-spamming, account spoofing, and just generally immature behavior.

------
EdiX
> This way comments with so little value to the community that they are
> ignored completely or just downvoted would reduce the commentator's Karma

If a comment gets downvoted the user already loses karma on it, does it really
matter if you award one extra karma penalty point? And given that downvotes
are free above the threshold I don't see how a comment that adds very little
value would not get downvoted by someone, I think that comments that get no
downvotes and no upvotes aren't inherently malevolent.

> My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms
> with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the
> sake of saying something and collecting Karma.

If collecting karma is the reason they are made not getting any upvotes would
already be a deterrent, no?

IMHO this suggestion makes no sense, all it does is deter people from posting
on long threads, because few people tend to read those and posts there often
end up with no upvotes or downvotes, and to comment articles with many
comments, because the pages after the first one are effectively inaccessible.

But I also think that Hacker News has been improving in the last year, so we
probably disagree. What I would fix is the "new" page, which is getting filled
with trash and too fast moving, decoupling submission karma from comment karma
would help. Requiring a minimum comment karma to submit entries would help a
lot too and it would single-handedly kill spambots too.

------
justjimmy
This was discussed a while back as well
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554>

And my thoughts "Here's an idea: Have karma and voting tied together. Your
Karma is basically how much votes you get to give. If someone makes a good
post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma. The person made the
post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote other posts. We can
limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way they can
vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality articles/posts. Now it
works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too, thus
making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action will
cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without
thinking. Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote
positive contribution and dissuade useless contributions. The tricky part is
balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons votes/karma from
the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes into the system.
Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10 votes each month.
But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must first contribute
enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100 upvotes to your
posts/contributions)."

------
steve8918
I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says
that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards.

I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think
that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum.

Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them
may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've
seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside
jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most
topics stay on target.

If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are:

1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the
ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately
if it starts to degrade in quality.

2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24
hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread,
and leaving with impunity.

3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that
more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that
> more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page._

I use the HN RSS feed, with Google reader; I never look at the HN front page
ever. This works pretty well for me; I can very quickly skim though all new
articles, and those I've seen are gone (but I can mark those I want to come
back to later as "not read").

------
andrewljohnson
I think part of a perceived drop in quality is that the older forum members
have been there, and done that.

I caught a glimmer that HN might be getting good again the other day. There
seems to be a surge in article about how to be an entrepreneur, while
balancing family, new children, and a real, adult life. Those topics are much
more interesting to me these days than articles exhorting me to get things
done.

------
e03179
Some HN members know other HM members in real life. You have business or
personal relationships with others that also read, post, and comment on this
forum. Some of you have never met any other HN member in real life, but do
consider some HN members as friends and acquaintances.

I, on the other hand, have met none of you and don't carry on a virtual
relationship with any other HN member. I consume your news and up-vote
articles that I want to see more of on this forum. And on rare occasion I will
post a comment.

All that said, besides PG, I absolutely don't care what the USERNAME is of the
original poster.

I do scan the front page to see if there is any article is an extraordinary
number of POINTS or COMMENTS. POINTS and COMMENTS are probably 75% of the
reason why I click on a link of the front page. And the more comments a link
has, the most likely, I will click on the COMMENTS thread before I even read
the article. 25% of the time I will click on a link because it contains a
keyword (to include the URL snippet) which is in regard to something I care
about.

------
epo
Metafilter is on of the very few internet forums which maintains high quality.
It costs you $5 to join and if you abuse your membership you will have your
membership cancelled without refund or appeal.

It is actively moderated by 'staff' who delete egregiously off-topic posts
(and their followups) and you can't post new topics for a week after joining.

Some of this doesn't apply to HN but penalties only work if they hurt. I mean
who cares about losing karma? It only appears when someone checks your profile
and it confers no advantage whatsoever (that I know of, perhaps I don't have
enough).

And really, isn't some of this just people getting old who should have moved
on? Like your grandpa going to the bar he frequented years ago but complaining
about all these young people and their loud music. Perhaps the complainers
should reflect that HN is no longer for them.

What are cost free impediments to trolls and spammers? Impose a time delay
between joining and being able to reply, and a longer delay before being able
to post new topics.

------
finalcut
I realize I'm pretty late to the game on commenting here. I don't comment
often. I've been on HN for 1558 days and have a karma score of 7. But here are
my thoughts.

I use reddit for entertainment purposes (for the most part) and I use HN for
educational and inspirational purposes. That was why I started using HN and it
is still why I do.

Sure, as the community has grown, there have been more comments that add no
value - but they are just more obvious now. It isn't that hard to ignore them
and to find the meaningful or useful comments.

On the surface the "cost karma to post" idea sounds great - it certainly
wouldn't have much effect on me - but I agree with the various others who
think it would discourage unpopular but still very useful and (at times very
correct) comments.

If the price to pay to get a well rounded discussion is the presence of vapid
commentary - then I'm willing to continue to pay it.

------
grandalf
There are always ebs and flow. The community is less niche now than it was a
few years ago, so naturally the ratio of stores on the front page to stories I
choose to read has gone down a bit.

But I still find that there are many exceptional comments and so even though I
now consume a smaller percentage of overall daily content than I did a few
years ago, I don't think the quality of the content I consume via HN has gone
down at all.

There are occasionally threads that appear to have no interesting comments in
them, and those are usually the sort of vapid, TechCrunch stories or
tabloidesque personal interest stories that many of us find annoying.

For what it's worth, I also find it annoying to read weak technical blog posts
written by people who are clearly just trying to generate blog traffic and
don't really have anything interesting or motivated by a real startup problem.

------
nicholassmith
The people who leave comments that spoil hacker news don't care for karma,
they'll just sock puppet to get their way. I don't think there's an especially
large issue here, bad comments get down voted to the pits anyway.

Plus getting a down vote is often useful to help keep in the community
guidelines.

------
charlieok
I like the custom filters <http://hnapp.com/> provides. I have one that sets a
point threshold stories must pass before they show up in my feedreader. If the
signal/noise gets a little too low, I raise the threshold. Works for me :)

------
bencevans
Wouldn't that mean there would be loads of crap posted to HN rather than just
crap comments?

------
mistercow
I think the karma penalty for commenting is not a bad idea, but I think taking
away the ability to comment is untenable. As others have pointed out, it's too
easy to game by making a new account.

A possible alternative would be to take away voting privileges if the karma
score drops too low, but even this should be done as a _local_ drop rather
than a global one. Otherwise, established members with lots of karma can slide
into mediocre commenting without penalty.

However, if you take away voting privileges for losing karma too quickly, then
new users _must not_ be able to vote. Otherwise, once again, it is simply too
easy to create a new account when you lose your privileges.

------
utopkara
Why is karma any significant to the quality of a post?

It already costs enough to create a post (in time and effort); if that doesn't
have any effect on the quality, it is not clear why an additional cost in
karma would make a difference.

HN is not a personalized news feed. If a story has been upvoted sufficiently
to float up the ranks, that means there is sufficient community interest in
the subject. Given the way HN works and the size of its audience, there is
simply no way you can magically fix the posts to fit a particular definition
regarding the topic, quality or the tone without strict monitoring; and if you
do add admins, etc. that wouldn't be HN anymore.

------
blhack
Is this where we compare slashdot ids, I mean measure account sizes I mean
account ages against each other?

If you don't like the quality of stories on HN, you can change it. Go out and
find/write good content, then peruse the submit button.

------
ionforce
All this will lead to is gaming the system by trying to post material which
will gain karma, i.e. currying the favor of the majority, vs posting things
that are legit interesting. It will bury gems and minority opinion.

------
chaffneue
Really all I feel we need to regulate is the blatent keyword/SEO spam and link
bait from various online publications. Other than that, I find most of the
content on HN hasn't changed all that much from a couple years back when I
started reading. There's already a flag button on the interface, but perhaps
some kind of spam score or feedback system would help the community point out
misleading articles and marketing efforts. I don't know if registered users in
the community are the ones from which to demand karma unless they're known to
post such links repeatedly.

------
sumone4life
Interesting idea. Instead of simply saying people can't post if their karma is
too low you could take the users total Karma relative to 0 and add a sorting
feature filter that sorts based that. Only problem is new people would get
buried pretty quickly and it may feel like they are trying to get someone's
attention from across the room while in the middle of a pack of screaming
monkeys. Adding a sort by "new" feature could help new users get their voice
heard and voted up or down accordingly. Just a thought.

------
EGreg
I personally think this thread is full of great discussion. There is certainly
a certain character of pedantry on Hacker News, but that's not necessarily a
bad thing in terms of feedback. Compared to a lot of other forums, Hacker News
gives a lot of good feedback, and the stories on it have been very helpful to
me.

Just my take. I personally don't care about karma on this thing. However, I
must admit that I cared a little more when it was displayed! Public
reputations seem to do wonders for keeping people well-behaved.

------
rdl
The main way I'd improve HN is more aggressive moderation of stories -- there
are just many which often lead to bad comment threads. Either bounce them off
the site entirely, or lock/hide/prevent comments on those stories (like on
some job posts).

Right now, the first page of stories are all "good", but often there are 50%+
bad ones.

The other thing would be some way to coalesce multiple stories on the same
topic into a single entry -- when Steve Jobs dies, it's nice to have a front
page post, but no real need to have 30 of them.

------
fjorder
This is actually a pretty bad idea because it would discourage people from
commenting on anything but the top posts on the first page. Commenting on
something interesting that's 3 pages deep would basically mean throwing away
karma unless that post manages to get up-voted, which is never a sure thing.
Of course, some good discussion is often what gets good material upvoted! This
change, while it might improve comment quality, would drastically impair the
upvoting process.

------
lignuist
I think all these approaches lead to elitarism and blackhat KEO tactics (Karma
Engine Optimization). Maybe a form of the pretty common the-forum-used-to-be-
better-syndrome? :)

------
da_n
I think this could possibly work if HN was a paid-to-post service, even if it
was just $1 p/m. The only problem I can see otherwise is this would open the
possibility of an underground currency for karma. It might result in user
accounts who exist purely for karma collection, getting upvotes from droves of
dummy/spam/bot accounts, then posting spam. It would be possible of course to
try and detect this, but not trivial I would think to avoid false positives.

------
zedzedzed
The public forum should follow democratic ways... I dont like the idea of
costing karmas, when in such public forums, one have full right to speak
freely for free...

------
enraged_camel
One (major?) change I'd like to see is requiring the user to post a reason
when they downvote something. This would not appear as a reply to the post
itself, but rather be available for viewers in a pop-up box when they mouse-
over the post.

I think this would really solve the problem with rampant downvoting of things
people disagree with (as opposed to downvoting low quality content, which is
what it's supposed to be for).

~~~
gruseom
I suspect most of the reasons given would be "fdshjfdsf".

~~~
enraged_camel
It would relatively straight-forward to filter out bogus input like that.

------
swalsh
This raises the risk of posting even higher. As it is now, if your average
comment karma falls below 0, your account is secretly perma-banned from
posting. If you're at -1 karma by default, the amount of people who become
"secretly perma-banned" will increase significantly. I'm sure that will
improve some comments, but I feel we also will most certainly loose out on
good posts in the future.

------
anamax
One change has been an influx of people who propose improvements. Another is
an influx of people who care about karma.

Who, exactly, isn't going to post something because doing so will cost them
karma points? (Hmm - maybe discouraging karma-whores is a good thing,)

Or, are you thinking that folks with too little karma wouldn't be allowed to
post? Since karma can be earned by clicking arrows, that's not much of a cost.

------
dschiptsov
It should cost a user Karma to down-vote and up-vote.

------
DanBC
Many of the comments on the "Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy,
patent iPhone 5 design" (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487905>) were
disappointing / annoying / frustrating.

I am being the change I wish to see by not commenting in threads like that.

Visiting NEW and up voting great stories, and flagging garbage, helps. Maybe.

------
Xcelerate
One trend I've noticed is that my best posts (which normally take 10-20
minutes to write) get much less of a response than witty one-liners.

------
mikecane
I wonder how many people here have from time to time pointed to one of their
own posts? You'd see that HN has a longer tail than just the one-day front
page most people think it has. And this is true for submissions that get many
votes as well as for those that get none. So thinking you know what people
want is nonsense. You just know what _you_ want.

------
pinaceae
To actually argue about the proposal at hand:

\- It amplifies the echo chamber. Only if people like and agree with me, I'll
get points. Only with points I will be able to post. Loop here.

\- It punishes lurkers who only once in a while see the 'need' to comment. Not
every comment gets up- or downvotes.

Want to 'improve' HN? Instead of this navel gazing post, why not post
something worthwhile?

------
silvestrov
It is difficult to restrain users from posting too often when creating new
accounts are free: how do you compete with free?

You can't make it worse than creating a new account because then the users
will just create a tons of new accounts.

So somehow you need to make account creation "more expensive" to be able to
have a working cost/rate-limiting on posting.

------
zerostar07
We should be able to invest on articles with our karma and get dividends when
others invest. How about we add article karma options for posting to certain
time windows? We could even start lending some karma, then wrap it all and
bundle them as sub prime loan backed securities. Let's call it operation
karmageddon

------
nhebb
I only have one wish for improving HN: randomly rotate the top comment. As it
stands, the discussion usually veers off into a meta discussion around the
first comment.

At the time of this posting, the thread is 14 hours old and has 239 comments,
so even if HN'ers agreed with me on this point, the odds are they will never
see it.

------
sageikosa
I often make comments specifically not intending them to be discussed. Some of
those might be interpreted by some as sniping a discussion board, but I don't
see this as a discussion board, but a comment board with replies.

And I take some pride in being able to condense my thoughts and get my point
across without detracting.

------
olliesaunders
I’d like little avatar pictures next to poster’s names. They are much easier
to recognize quickly and introduce an extra level of accountability and
identity to posting. I wonder if the reason this hasn’t been done is because
PG is too busy or it would significantly increase server load.

------
jre
An alternative solution would be to hide (by default) posts that have no
response and that have been made by users with karma below a certain
threshold.

It would also be possible to compute the average number of upvotes for each
comment thread and show the threads with the most upvotes first.

~~~
DanBC
An interesting idea.

I'm not sure how well it'd cope with vote rings.

------
lnanek2
Unfortunately, most people vote up what they agree with, not what is useful. I
don't want to come to a site to read a bunch of mild wish washy comments by
people only saying nice things many agree with, that's a waste of my time.

------
ta12121
There is no objective system that can deliver guarantees about subjective
quality.

------
tokenadult
From the submitted blog post:

"I have a suggestion for improvement: it should cost Karma to comment, and
when your Karma drops below a certain threshold you can no longer comment.

"My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms
with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the
sake of saying something and collecting Karma."

I agree with the rationale for the proposal here. The bad comments are the
comments that pg described in 2011

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively
upvoted."

No one should be upvoting a comment that the current author refers to as
"trash comments [that] are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into
them" because such comments fit the definition of comments that are both mean
and dumb. If you see something that is mean, absolutely downvote it. It's
clear that our site founder and most veteran members of the HN community (and
all of the most thoughtful members here, however recently they have joined)
don't want any meanness or kneejerk criticisms here, so download comments like
that ruthlessly. That's upholding the guidelines.

Dealing with comments that are dumb (in pg's words) or have little thought put
into them (the OP's words) is a bit harder, because if I don't have domain-
specific knowledge, I may not know what comments are dumb. Wikipedia has its
own problems with lots of dumb content, so often looking it up on Wikipedia
will only add stupidity to HN. But in threads about subjects I know about, I
try to scan for comments that point to reliable sources (that issue is
crucial) and otherwise show signs of thoughtful research before posting. Then
I upvote comments that I know for sure to be polite, true, and informative
(well, I try to do that routinely here anyhow) and I downvote comments that
are shown to be dumb by the context of the discussion and reliable knowledge
of the world.

We can all do the same, if we can upvote or downvote at all. Some users with
accumulated karma can also flag comments that violate the site guidelines.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

(To flag a comment, follow the "link" link text next to the comment, which
takes you to the specific URL for the comment, and there you will see a "flag"
link if flagging is enabled for your user account.)

Basically, every moderation problem on every forum (I have been a forum
moderation on one forum or another since 1993) involves someone being willing
to take out the trash. It stinks to have to take out the trash, but someone
has to do it. If you have upvoting power, upvote the good. If you have
downvote power, definitely downvote the mean ("kneejerk criticism") and
downvote the dumb ("thoughtless") to the degree you can identify it. If you
have flagging power, go to the extra effort of comment-specific flagging for
the especially bad comments. But most of all, upvote the good. I have a slogan
that I tell my children to help develop their social skills that "no one ever
receives enough appreciation." So be generous in upvoting good comments, to
drown out the bad.

And thanks for agreeing with pg's statement from last year

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

that both comments that are (a) mean and comments that are (b) dumb shouldn't
gain karma, but rather lose it.

P.S. I see from the other comments in this thread that there is confusion
about whether the original blog post, which has the title "A proposal for
improving HN - it should cost Karma to comment" is about submissions of new
articles or about comments to submissions by others. That appears to be
related to the submission title here, which is "A proposal for improving HN :
it should cost a user Karma to post" as I type this about an hour after the
blog post was submitted as a new submission here on HN. I am only talking
about comment rules in my reply here, not about submission of new article
rules.

~~~
Alex3917
Heh Wikipedia is the worst. I feel like half the time I post something
intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading
books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm
wrong.

The problem with Wikipedia is that you're not allowed to plagiarize. So if
there are three reasons to believe something is true, you'll get three of them
listed. But if there are 100 reasons to believe something is true, you'll
still only get three of them. Which essentially means the more reason there is
to believe something is true, the less likely it is that Wikipedia will
accurately reflect that. Digital Maoism indeed.

~~~
chris_wot
_Heh Wikipedia is the worst. I feel like half the time I post something
intelligent I basically get a bunch of people calling me a faggot for reading
books, more often than not with 'references' to Wikipedia to explain why I'm
wrong._

I feel the need to point out that this is not, in fact, a problem with
Wikipedia.

~~~
Alex3917
Maybe not entirely, but Wikipedia being wrong about lots of basic things is
certainly a problem.

~~~
dbaupp
[citation needed]

If I recall correctly, there have been studies comparing Wikipedia and
"proper" encyclopediae that suggest the error rates are about equal, and quite
low in both.

~~~
Alex3917
'Wrongness' is an abstract concept that can't really be measured, let alone
with something as simplistic as an error rate. An article can be 100%
factually accurate, yet still be entirely wrong.

------
yxhuvud
I think that this would be a better solution to people submitting new
articles. Set a cost for submitting new articles and spam bots will have a lot
harder time.

EDIT: Reformulation.

------
TomGullen
How about giving more weight to upvotes from people with more Karma. I'm not
sure if all upvotes are currently equal (I suspect they are).

------
agumonkey
I often wish HN turned into a child of c2.org wiki. I won't complain as I
don't have the brain or knowledge to help much in the matter.

------
sycren
I don't want Hacker News to turn into Quora.

~~~
landonhowell
I don't think adopting a piece of someone else's best practices would.

------
floatingatoll
I'd rather see it cost karma to upvote/downvote. Higher cost for articles,
lower cost for comments.

------
solnyshok
hmm, to fight noise, make every char and click count. If you want to upvote,
give up one karma point. Downvote? Minus one point from you too. And, finally,
daily word limit, so that people give couple of thoughtful and conside
comments.

------
joelthelion
How about restricting voting to users with more than, say 100 karma?

~~~
phreeza
Maybe something like this is already secretly the case, at least for comments?

------
sigzero
Why? When an article is bad it can be down voted appropriately.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Just like comments that demonstrate the writer is not lucid.

------
bluedanieru
Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has
everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped
_slightly_ compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this
is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and
other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or
whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the
same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back
and see if you still feel that way.

One thing that _has_ happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers,
is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a
board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more
out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or
even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement,
remained silent, or donned your flame suit.

~~~
mixmax
As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you.
When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was
amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet
before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking
about it I've realised what has changed: Me.

It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeable than
I was five years ago (partly because of HN) and obviously the barrier for what
I find insightful has been raised. This is a natural progression in life, and
it happens to everyone. Chances are that if you look at what you did 5 or 10
years ago you'll find it to be naive, shallow or obvious.

Maybe it's simply time to move on.

~~~
starpilot
> It's been 5 years, and I've changed.

I think this is true of every "kids these days are less worldly" article and
the oft heard "favorite music/newspaper/other media isn't as good as it used
to be." The world hasn't gotten dumber, you've just gotten better taste, and
better at spotting bullshit that has always been there.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Making the claim that everything is objectively worse, back in my day
everything was golden, get off my lawn, &c. seems to be easier than
introspection for a lot of people. We are not impartial observers, nor are we
immutable—we tend to forget that.

------
markmm
I am new to HN and I think the board's post are high quality compared to some
other boards. One issue I have is that it can be too serious and void of
humour. I assume the blogger of this article needs to lighten up a bit.

------
nirvana
It should also cost a karma to downvote someone else, maybe two. Upvotes would
remain free.

This way downvote might go from "I disagree with your well reasoned
contribution" to "this person isn't contributing to the discussion."

