
Ask HN: How is it that HN is a success? - bm98
Dang&#x27;s comment on HN&#x27;s self-regulation [1] got me thinking: It&#x27;s amazing to me that HN actually works.  That, the the most part, the best submissions and the best comments <i>do</i> tend to float to the top.  I wouldn&#x27;t expect individuals acting in their own self-interest to bother to spend the time to upvote and downvote and flag things, especially when the feedback from such actions is so minimal.  But they do, clearly!<p>Are there any papers that have studied this phenomenon?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12205581
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JaumeGreen
It works because of the people in here that write exceptional comments and act
as a regulator.

I've noticed a certain reddification of comments: memes, funny answers, and
uninformative drivel. These answers are usually downvoten, rightfully so in my
oppinion.

If a huge influx of new users comes too fast and they don't get used of the
culture here they could upvote those kinds of comments, and change the culture
to a different one, one where memes go to the top instead of interesting
comments.

I'm not against when it happens in the right places, I do browse reddit, but I
come here for the expertise of the participants in the discussions. Surely
some of them may express better what I've said, or even disagree with some or
all of it, but I'll grow wiser thanks to that.

~~~
hexane360
I love/hate to watch the same thing happen (on a small scale) to subs on
reddit. Some communities can grow and grow while maintaining a culture, but
most have some drift, or even a complete change in the userbase.

~~~
sotojuan
/r/minimalism is a good example of this. Not to sound pretentious, but I was
one of the first hundred or so subscribers to it. It's been bad for a few
years now but in general it was killed by a massive influx of users who all
had their own definition of minimalism, and they came before the sub had
enough time to have its own culture/definition.

------
Jtsummers
I suspect it helps that people can't downvote until they have 501 karma. That
means they must've participated for at least a decent amount of time in the
community before getting any real power (upvoting is useful, but downvoting is
regulation). By the time someone gets to that level, they know what's
encouraged and discouraged by both the moderators and the community.

Another thought: Unlike Reddit or most standard forums, we don't have subfora.
We have one forum, one set of front page news, one set of comments per article
(with good efforts to minimize duplication of posts, even topics). I think
this helps to force people to play nice with each other. I can't go into
hn/politics and troll, then go back to hn/programming and be civil. The whole
community sees (or can see) my posts. Uncivil behavior in one thread will
color the way people view me elsewhere. Forcing me to more seriously consider
my behavior (I've deleted many posts, the two-minute delay I have on mine has
saved me a few times from posting-in-anger).

~~~
totony
The minimum karma to downvote also accentuate the echo chamber

EDIT: I guess echo chambers actually _help_ popularity

------
snowwrestler
I don't think that the best submissions and comments float to the top. Some
real dogs get voted to the front page because (for example) the byline is Sam
Altman, or it's some trending political topic, or it confirms some widely-held
opinion.

And comments that violate the prevailing opinion here often get voted into
negative numbers, even if informative and well-written. Just try to argue that
piracy is having a negative effect on music, movies, etc. and see what
happens.

I would recommend that everyone browse /newest here on a regular basis. I
often find great stuff there that never makes it to the front page.

------
cs702
The specific set of rules and mechanics that currently regulate HN are not the
key to its success. The main reason HN works, in my view, is because Y
Combinator TRULY CARES about having the most relevant and interesting
submissions and comments float to the top.

HN's rules and mechanics (e.g., requiring a minimum karma to downvote) are a
CONSEQUENCE of these priorities. These rules and mechanics have evolved in
lots of ways from day one, and will likely continue to evolve, forever, as HN
moderators do their best to prevent them from being gamed.

Unlike many other discussion-oriented websites with user-generated content,
HN's main priority has NEVER been to reach a greater audience or to grow web
traffic at the expense of quality. The main priority has always been high-
quality content. As far as I can tell, HN moderators would eagerly accept a
narrower audience in exchange for better content any day.

~~~
gxs
Great response and agree wholeheartedly.

Amazing the results you can get when you optimize for something other than
revenue/number of users/page views/reach/etc.

~~~
cs702
Yes, exactly: HN is optimizing for something other than the usual, easily
measurable metrics of "success." Well put.

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Yhippa
It's the quality of the users that makes this work. If people care and
downvote things that aren't germane to the discussion at hand that helps a lot
with pruning. Otherwise low-quality content hangs around.

Also I see some very high quality and insightful comments on this site that I
don't see elsewhere. I think twice about posting things that don't add to the
discussion.

The only other place I saw high quality discussion like this was Slashdot with
their excellent moderation system. Unfortunately the people who hung around
there in the mid 2000's turned me off. Generally open source zealots hung out
there and you didn't see many dissenting opinions.

Dissenting opinions are my favorite thing that help me deal with my personal
biases and HN encourages it.

I think the minute average users like me stop caring about the site then the
quality will go down.

------
superuser2
HN is unabashedly homogeneous. It's a community by and for science-educated
upper-income white male software engineers who (claim to) value thinking like
scientists and being articulate, and share a strikingly uniform set of
opinions about the industry and politics.

The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out
of the community is so narrow that, assuming you like a decent proportion of
highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of
them.

There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).

~~~
AndreyErmakov
>> HN is unabashedly homogeneous.

I think you've summed the nature of HN pretty well. I wish I knew that before
I joined (recently), but unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way.

>> The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed
out of the community is so narrow...

That is exactly the conclusion which I arrived at after about three weeks of
active participation. At that point I lost any interest in continuing trying
to become a part of the community.

In my opinion, the HN community is not very healthy and has become incestuous
in its nature. People basically choose to exchange with the like-minded only,
share the same opinions, upvote the things that match their view of the world
and downvote deviant opinions.

This all is aggravated by the fact that the HN user base is mostly North
American and visitors from other world regions are somewhat of a minority in
here (my observation). That's why a lot of ideas and opinions that I see
around here are just "alien" to me, although I've never had a problem finding
a common language with Europeans, for instance.

In its current form, I can often look at any new question that comes in here,
and if I have seen its equivalent on HN before, I already know what will be
the most upvoted comment and what kinds of downvoted comments I will find at
the bottom of the page. The mechanics of HN is such that it works as a giant
"echo chamber" and users are "taught" which kind of opinions they're supposed
to like, support and help to spread and what will happen to them if they defy
the state (downvoting sanctions).

I'm sure many like this way of things, but the way I view it you can't have
healthy offsprings (which are ideas and opinions) if your community embraces
incestuous relationships as its core defining value. Without diversity, there
is no evolution.

On a related note, I used to be one of the early users of
StackOverflow/StackExchange sites. In its first couple of years they had a
liberal content policy and this invited a healthy, diverse and vibrant
community that produced many profound and wise ideas. When they went down the
deletionism route and started discouraging deviant opinions, the most
interesting people started to quit and in about a year or two the sites
degraded to such an extent that made it pointless to return in the search of
quality content.

HN is not there yet, as I still see some high quality answers now and then.
Usually they're neither upvoted not downvoted, they just stick somewhere in
the middle-bottom area and I have to dig for them. Sadly this requires much
time which I'd rather spend on more important things.

I also very much dislike that anti Russia/China/Turkey/Islam rhetoric that
comes every now and then. It's not that bad as on Reddit where you can just
say some not very intelligent bad thing about those countries and get yourself
a few hundred upvotes and a dozen gifted "reddit golds". That's just the new
bottom that Reddit recently hit. I sadly see HN moving in the same direction.

>> assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and
comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.

>> There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).

Apparently I'm with that group as I no longer have any wish to hang around HN.
At that point I'd be ashamed to admit I've tried to be a HN member, as it
would be an embarrassment to admit to having an active SO/SE account these
days. To me, that was a mistake in judgement. I'd like to delete my account
and make the divorce official, but apparently HN does not allow that and does
not buy into the "Right to be forgotten" idea. I have no doubt that most of
the HN users share that same official opinion being the "example citizens"
that they are.

------
minimaxir
See the 1% rule:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))

Very, very few people on HN vote relative to the population as a whole.

------
k__
> the best submissions and the best comments do tend to float to the top

I guess this is a "filter-bubble" problem. The HN crowd is (probably?) rather
homogenous, so the stuff that gets to the top is stuff the people here like
and think is good. This doesn't mean that anything getting to the top here is
good in a general sense.

There are enough people out there who despise HN for being a bunch of
privileged white guys, who only talk about stuff that privileged white guys
like.

I'm one of these privileged white guys and I like what's going on here, so I'm
probably not in the position to judge HN objectively, haha.

~~~
Freak_NL
I don't quite get why you jump from homogeneous to 'privileged white guys'.
That seems to force racial and gender issues into a discussion where there are
none.

The community here seems to consist mostly of software engineers and people in
related fields of work, and in that sense we might be a homogeneous bunch, but
that makes sense for the topics discussed here.

~~~
superuser2
>That seems to force racial and gender issues into a discussion where there
are none.

The sentiment expressed in your comment, the belief that racial and gender
issues are unimportant or nonexistent, is exactly one of the shared values
that defines the HN in-group.

~~~
Freak_NL
> the belief that racial and gender issues are unimportant or nonexistent

That is absolutely not what I wrote, nor what I belief. You are shoehorning me
into a position, and I resent that.

I do belief that racial and gender issues are not relevant when discussing the
pros and cons of cryptocurrency or the benefits of two-factor authentication.
That to me goes beyond a shared value, it ought to be common sense.

HN communicates via text — no avatars, no non-sense. All that matters is
whether or not you can formulate a post in English that adds to the topic.
Aside from English proficiency, that is about as inclusive as you can get.
There could be a dog behind the keyboard on the other side for all I care — as
long as he/she is civil and provides some interesting insight into the topic
at hand.

Having an interest in software and its related topics is not the exclusive
domain of the 'privileged white male', regardless of the demographic slant
towards men in the software industry (of any colour really, depends a lot on
the country posters hail from and the local demographic make up of the
population).

------
wvenable
Joel Spolsky wrote an article about this over a decade ago and no doubt
influenced the design of Stackoverflow:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html)

It articulates that the existence or lack of features can adjust how an online
community functions.

------
jackskell
The quality of the discourse here is why I lurk.

Thankfully, HN isn't well known and polluted. It is a refreshing place for
civil discourse on the Internet, and I have not found very many other places
like it.

If there's a donate button here, I'm missing it.

------
red_blobs
Whether people like it (or would like to believe it), it works because it
doesn't allow the tyranny of the masses. It doesn't give everyone a voice,
which means better comments and content for all.

------
mbrock
I think it's partly because there's still a rather strong ideal of what good
HN content should be like, backed by active participation by reasonable
moderators who enforce the guidelines when they're blatantly violated.

There's also a text by pg where he explains some of the design (or "anti-
design") choices that shape the community in a desired way.

------
lumberjack
Peer pressure. If you come upon a nice behaving community you feel like you
should behave accordingly.

------
DrNuke
It depends on your definition of success but yes, respect for YC's reputation
and a genuine interest in learning the SV way of doing business gently
regulate the behaviour of this world wide community.

------
pasbesoin
"opt in"

People choose to be here, and to make it what it is.

Administration restricts itself to what is necessary.

