
Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines - andreyf
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#
======
swombat
Yes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all
because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I
joined two and a half years ago.

~~~
edw519
Right on, swombat.

Last year, upon Iteration 27 of this same subject, I threw something like this
together in jest:

    
    
                     Quality of HN Comments Over Time
       |                   . .
       |                  .   . 
      q| . .             .     .
      u|    .           .       .               . . .
      a|     .         .          .           .       .
      l|      .       .              .      .           .
      i|       .     .                  . .               .    
      t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
      y|                                      (that's all)
       |________________________________________________________
        M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A
                        '09                     '10
                        

I must have been on to something because so many didn't realize it was a joke.
What fun that was. All I have to do is shift the x axis every n months: some
things never change.

Original thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604>

~~~
Osiris
This is completely off-topic, but how do you format your comment to force
mono-spaced font?

I haven't been able to find an instructions on what formatting can be used in
comments, like to quote a previous post, for example.

~~~
Hates_
<http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

------
revorad
One question I ask myself now before commenting is: Will this comment
significantly improve this conversation?

I try not to comment if the comment is merely:

1\. clever and amusing 2\. expressing anger/disagreement 3\. disproving a
wrong but unimportant claim made by another commenter.

Besides these, submitting, upvoting, downvoting, not voting and flagging are
enough to make HN more interesting for myself.

~~~
uxp
I find myself writing comments fairly often, but end up pausing before I hit
the reply button to re-read what I'm replying to and to think if my comment is
actually contributing to the discussion. A good percentage of the time, I just
end up closing the window.

I may have good intentions to begin with, but if what I say reads as being one
of the three points you wrote, there's no point in having other people argue
against my invalid or ignorant claim. It just leads to semantical flame wars.

~~~
billswift
Me too. But the worst thing about commenting here is how all the context that
you are replying to goes away and you can't re-read your comment within the
context of the discussion, because all you can see is the immediate comment
you are directly responding to. Interestingly, this is the only site I comment
on that has that behavior.

------
todayiamme
One of the biggest reasons I can think of for the eventual decline of HN are
the result of these words;

>>>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<<<

The problem over here is that people's version of what gratifies their
intellectual curiosity varies. What I find interesting is deeply subjective
and I need to acknowledge that to contribute anything, anywhere. The same
thing goes for HN in general.

HN is starting to attract people outside of its core audience and in doing so
it inevitably leads to the point where people come in whose mean of what's
interesting is different from the mean of what's interesting for the core
audience.

It isn't their fault, but this process feeds into itself. So, if I see a post
here on HN on death. I have this tendency to post up stuff related to death.
Regardless of the fact whether or not they adhere to the spirit of the
guidelines. People see that and they are more inclined to upvote it, since
there is already content like that on the front page. So, it accelerates.

You might have noticed that the front page of HN always follows a pattern
there are a series of similar posts which come up and stay there over the
course of time. This is a good thing and a bad thing as well. The trick is in
stopping it at the right time. That's where the community and the moderators
come in, but if the majority of the community don't know any better than that.
This means that the community can't self adjust. The moderators then have to
play a stricter role, which is inherently negative in the longer run.

At the same time, if you define those words too strictly then HN won't be HN,
anymore. This is the underlying paradox that needs to be solved to avoid that
decline.

------
bpyne
As long as someone has opened up a guideline discussion....

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it
makes boring reading."

Agreed in full.

However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with
no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due
to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2
of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.

~~~
swolchok
So assume it's that your comment fell into the "noise" category and work
harder on producing "signal" next time. We don't need to have a discussion
every time someone felt that some post did not contribute sufficiently to the
discussion.

~~~
bpyne
The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague
recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?

No, a discussion would create noise, which would not be valuable for the HN
community. A voluntary, anonymous, tip about what made the downvoted comment
noise would be more than sufficient. To avoid it becoming a discussion, no
reply would be allowed. (Just to throw a half-baked idea out.)

Downvotes could easily become learning exercises that boost the comment
quality over time.

~~~
swolchok

        The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?
    

Don't post just because you can. Don't echo comments others have made. Don't
post "obligatory" comments or content-free Reddit memes. Say something
meaningful that is not immediately obvious.

Don't treat post writing as an exercise in upvotability optimization.

------
mcantor
At its worst, Hacker News has continued to impress and inspire me as vastly
superior in quality and consistency compared to other online communities.

------
Vivtek
I'm pleased to see that I am officially allowed to complain that HNN is
getting to be just like Reddit.

~~~
jng
Hacker News is starting to feel like programming.reddit.com a year ago. Now,
Reddit is getting more and more like Digg a year before that. Digg certainly
looks like Youtube comments one year before. Now, Youtube, _that_ surely is
now just like Myspace some time before. And Myspace now is somewhere close to
what the AOL forums used to be. But AOL - don't look at the AOL forums! they
now look as bad as Usenet did when everyone joined there, before they were
Google groups, before they were called DejaVu, when all the newbies had just
spoiled all the good old newsgroups.

We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there, and we could build a
cozy place with no trolls and newbies, and share really interesting stuff and
discuss it intelligently.

But I'm sure the dumbfucks will follow us around, from here to the end of
time.

~~~
10ren
Youtube is improving.

They have votes now. I've seen a few insightful comments there (it depends on
what kind of video you're looking at, of course - _you_ being the crucial word
here.)

~~~
daychilde
A million monkeys banging on typewriters occasionally produce insightful
comments by sheer random chance.

They still produce more insightful comments than Youtube commenters.

------
ljf
thanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of
off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc.

one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking
to same story hours or days apart.

~~~
duke_sam
I'm pretty sure if you try to submit the same link multiple times HN will show
you the originally submitted story.

~~~
sp332
It doesn't always work though. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572>
and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579> were posted one day apart,
with identical URLs.

~~~
ptomato
Actually the link checker only checks vs. links that are currently loaded into
memory.

~~~
vijaydev
links loaded into memory - how does that work? Can you please explain?

~~~
ptomato
Anything that has been accessed within the past x amount of time and hasn't
fallen out of cache yet. For more info, check
<http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc> around lines 1485, 1550,
233.

------
blahblahblah
My main annoyance with HN posts lately is the use of profanity in post titles
and occasional posts that are, in general, NSFW. For those of you in startup
land this probably isn't an issue, but on behalf of those of us who are still
"workin' for the man" please take a moment before hitting the submit button to
imagine that you still have a boss and consider whether your imaginary boss
who just walked into your office and saw this post title on your screen would
be A) pleased that you are taking a moment to keep up with industry trends
while you're waiting for your code to compile or B) wondering why you would
waste your time reading such trash. If it's the latter, consider whether this
is because the topic of your post is really inappropriate for a professional
forum (if so, please don't bother posting it) or if it is an appropriate topic
but you're using profanity as a crutch because you're too damn lazy to write
an articulate, descriptive title (if so, stop being lazy and rewrite your
title).

------
techiferous
A reminder from the guidelines:

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

And some recent examples of comments here on HN:

"All you have is a pink blouse and a pathological case of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder" -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644724>

"I'm sorry, but even on HN I feel it is appropriate to reply to this jackass
with only two characters: FU" -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644606>

So sometimes HN can feel like a pretty rough place and a reminder is in good
order. To HN's credit, though, these comments tend to be few and tend to be
downvoted. You can also find comments like this floating around:

"Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit;
I'll buy you coffee." -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641763>

------
petercooper
Everyone seems to be focusing on the voting of comments, but I think the tips
on what to submit (and vote up) are the most violated, as seen by the now
almost daily post about men vs women.

~~~
jacquesm
Not to mention a morbid fascination with death.

------
10ren
I must have noticed this too, because I switched my hackernews bookmark to go
directly to the newest submissions a few days ago, since I didn't like what
was on top. Reading and upvoting from newest is the most effective way to
change what is on the frontpage. <http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>

Lamenting the bad is less effective than embracing the good. As in life.

------
grandalf
My take is that hackers are sometimes _gasp_ interested in discussing
political issues. Thus, the best approach is not to have people constantly
chastising topics/comments as off topic, but to keep the quality of each
comment high enough that an intellectually curious person would enjoy reading
it, even if it's about something not typically associated with hacking.

------
lsc
hey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm
considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s
feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is
work.

So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to
[link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story
comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there,
and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is
one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would
still need to click the link to comment.)

Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with
every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems
to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.

I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.

~~~
mquander
I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that
there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if
the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.

~~~
lsc
hm. What do you think of the other suggestion, a "submit this to hn/talk about
it on hn" link that asked a user to do the submission for me? does that make
it any more or less spammish, in your opinion?

~~~
ismarc
While it may be a bit spammy, with the frequency you updat your blog, I
personally wouldn't see it as such. However, you're tying yourself to HN for
discussion (typically a good discussion), but I see it as "setting precedent"
for others.

You remember the web rings? It reminds me of that. Perhaps a single platform
for managing discussions of articles/posts/blogs similar to news list sites,
but specifically for discussion of the posts, not specifically for news. I
mean, we could all find a majority of these articles on our own if we wanted
(eventually), but the community discussion about the topic/story is what
really adds to it.

In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I
wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a
standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

~~~
lsc
>In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but
I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a
standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

hm. well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't do it? I mean, really, what I want
is to outsource the 'community management' stuff. As far as I can tell, hacker
news has (for now) has the best community of any similar site I know of.

I could set up my own community site that other bloggers could use for
comments... but that would defeat the point for me, as I wanted to outsource
the community management bit.

~~~
ismarc
Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently,
but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually
seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and
just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for
others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.

~~~
lsc
hm. neat... and it wouldn't spam up the rest of reddit? hm. I don't spend much
time on reddit, so I don't really know of the culture, well, much, but that
might be the way to go, I mean, if that sort of thing is acceptable within the
cultural norms of reddit.

------
mkr-hn
I try to be a good new person who follows the rules. :)

The rating system is probably the only one I've seen work this well. When I
see myself getting downvoted, it tells me pretty clearly that I need to go and
reconsider what I posted.

The apparent degradation in quality is probably because the average quality of
discussion on the internet has declined as more people entered the melee.
It'll probably go back up as new combatants start to get better at expressing
their ideas. That, or it'll become so hopelessly unproductive that everyone
will collectively decide the internet was a bad idea.

------
dkennedy
I just can't believe the volume of new posts. I posted a link to my own python
blog 23 hours ago and since then there have been 470 other postings. Perhaps
an idea is that people should only post their own work or even it HN was
limited to programming related posts only. I come here for insights into
different languages and the programming profession. I'm not that interested in
the politics of another country or parenting tips for New Yorkers.

------
krschultz
It is August. A lot of people are on vacation - including writers of blogs and
articles. Get used to it. We have X numbers of stories on the front page, we
won't always have X amount of interesting stories. Some days we will have 0.
The world doesn't fit into nice even patterns.

------
lotharbot
The title should say "please (re)read _and follow_ the HN guidelines".

~~~
gabrielroth
The title should say: "Reminder: Kindly (re)read and follow the HN
guidelines." Describing one's own reminder as "kind" is presumptuous.

------
JshWright
The only trend I've seen lately that's bugged me is people creating
"throwaway" accounts with names intended to be a joke specific to the comment
they've posted.

------
bobbywilson0
This is a nice public service announcement. It does make me think that these
guidelines should be linked to more prominently somewhere, maybe on submit
page?

------
sz
Maybe there should be a link to this on the post and reply forms, at least for
newer accounts.

------
JacobAldridge
So, where's nickb?

Oh, and Erlang, Erlang, Erlang.

That is all.

------
sabat
I don't see HN going downhill in terms of submissions or in discourse. Things
are mostly the same as they were 2-3 years ago.

I do worry -- perhaps unnecessarily -- about the killing of submissions for no
obvious reason. Apparently using a URL shortener is verboten, although the HN
guidelines don't mention this. But using one will get your story autokilled.

Yesterday, I tried to submit what I thought was an interesting story about
Scoble's Building43 and older founders, but the submission page kept calling
me a spammer. I am by no means a spammer.

I really want to understand what causes stories to be killed, mainly so that I
can participate in good faith. But even asking about this seems to make one
_persona non grata_. I sense a chilling effect here. I hope I'm mis-reading
all this, and that I'll be proven absolutely wrong. :-)

~~~
mapleoin
What do you need the URL shortener for? I find it very annoying to have to
click in order to see who the author of the content is when I can just look at
the domain name at the end of the HN submission.

~~~
sabat
_What do you need the URL shortener for?_

Actually I don't use them here; never have. I just noticed a post having been
killed, and saw a followup from HN staff explaining that using a URL shortener
will cause a post to be autokilled.

I don't care about URL shorteners. I am concerned about what the rules are,
and particularly the rules that are not explictly stated in the HN Guidelines.

~~~
jacquesm
That's fairly logical though, a url shortener would allow re-submission of the
same link over and over again and drops the hint of where the link goes to
from the 'new' and 'news' pages as well as the ability to hover on the link
for the full url.

All of which are useful. Url shorteners are ok for twitter or IRC elsewhere
they're just unnecessary complications.

~~~
spoondan
He's not arguing for URL shorteners to be permitted. He's arguing that the
prohibition should be made upfront.

~~~
jacquesm
How much more up-front than seeing your link go 'dead' could it be?

After all it's not like anybody reads the guidelines linked above anyway
before submitting a link, especially not if they're old hands (and most likely
not even if they're not). Maybe a message could be added to the submission
process that said: "You've used a URL shortener, _bang_ , you're dead", but
that's pretty obviously the reason why. After all, all your other links will
get through just fine.

~~~
sabat
The URL shortener was just an example -- just one example. My point is not
about bit.ly or anything like it.

My point is: there are apparently a bunch of rules, and I don't have the sense
that I understand them. Worse, I have the sense that _asking about the rules_
is frowned upon. I find this a little chilling, and it seems to fly in the
face of the quasi-libertarian spirit I generally find on HN.

~~~
jasonkester
That's by design. The worst thing you can do is tell spammers why you flagged
their thing as spam.

Right now, there are spammers repeatedly submitting shortened URLs to their
WOW Gold sites and not checking to see if they're killed. That actually stops
a good fraction of it, because frankly, they're not very smart people.

If you told them exactly why their current tactic is not working, they'd
immediately move on to the next one and the next one until they find one that
works.

~~~
sabat
My point has nothing to do with spammers or URL shorteners -- that was just an
example. See above if you care to know my actual point.

But this is probably related. I think the anti-spam measures are probably
going too far. I'm not a spammer. No site I've ever attempted to submit has
been been a spam site, an ad site, or anything else self-serving. Yet my most
recent attempts to submit have been stomped on, accusing me of "wasting my
time" by attempting to spam HN.

Here's the most recent article I tried to post -- you judge whether I'm
submitting spam sites: [http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/8/29/startups-
old-peopl...](http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/8/29/startups-old-people-
and-robert-scoble.html)

------
magamiako
I think this is just a reminder to those that can't push their agendas on the
new Digg to not come here and try to push it. Take it somewhere else.

Good riddance.

------
bcrawl
I blame digg

------
kamechan
aside from this one, i never read the comments. i'm just here for the links
not the community editorialization of them. but my faith in "communities" has
dwindled over the years through my continued participation over the years in
this thing called "the interwebs". as the japanese would say, ganbatte
kudasai. keep up the good work/do your best.

in other words, please do not ruin this nice little community with your own
baggage.

------
robertg
Still better than reddit.com/r/programming

------
didip
Remember, it will be September soon. That's probably the point of this post.

------
j_baker
Done. What do I win?

------
moron4hire
>> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

What if I make snide comments in face-to-face conversation?

