

Too much noise in HN? (Open question) - toto

Hi all,<p>I have been a RSS subscriber for a long. I love HN but I have to admit that I get a little frustrated by the increasing percentage of noise. Especially by off-topic links.<p>I spend now too much time sorting useless stuff (for my needs) for reading a few really good links.<p>Do you also think there is too much noise?<p>If many agree, maybe it will be a signal that it is now time to add some categories/filters. :)<p>Thanks.
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timtrueman
I have one suggestion that would possibly help: separate out "saved" versus
"up-voted". For me, I rarely want to save something but I would love to go to
the new page and up-vote more interesting stories to get rid of the noise. But
maybe that's just me--I'm also the type who never submits anything unless I
want to see the discussion on it. I'm guessing there's a lot of karma-whores
and hence all the TechCrunch articles (I kid, I kid). Anyone have an idea for
putting the incentives in the right place for submitting with that in mind?
Fractional karma for submission up-votes?

~~~
321abc
I didn't even know we had karma here. I just submit articles I find
interesting in hopes that they'll be interesting to the community.

Also, I'm not quite clear on what you're having problems with. Why can't you
_"go the the new page and up-vote more interesting stories"_?

~~~
sorbus
Upvoting a submission also adds it to a list of saved submissions. Thus, if
one uses that list to remember interesting articles, discussions, or things
that one wishes to read, upvoting many articles which one does not necessarily
want saved would dilute that list.

~~~
chrischen
Yea I just found out about that feature. I was trying to figure out how to add
an article to my saved list and was dumbfounded to find the one I wanted to
save already in my list! I thought for briefly (for as long as my intelligence
would allow) Ycombinator had read my mind and it turned out it was cause I
voted it up. Yep, so intuitive!

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pj
I'm not sure all of us here are hackers and we don't always come here for
programming articles. I read hacker news as an alternative to google news or
watching tv. For me, it's mostly entertainment that alleviates my boredom with
a weighting toward improving my skillset and keeping up to date in my
industry.

If there were _only_ code articles or technology articles, it'd get boring and
I'd probably come back less often. I probably spend way too much time here
really, but I probably click on 75% or more of the articles on the front page.
I click on them because they are interesting, not necessarily because they are
about programming or technology -- they expand my mind.

I think mind expansion is good for hackers.

------
tokenadult
One thing that can help the whole community is to look at the list of stories
submitted by noobs

<http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories>

once in a while and flag those that are plainly spam or very badly off-topic.
Sufficiently many flags kill a submission.

~~~
vaksel
cool I can save a ton of money on a used shipping container. Do these guys not
realize that HN is no-follow?

~~~
fallentimes
They spam with such mass they probably don't even care.

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webology
There is a lot of noise but I prefer the classic view -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic> over the existing homepage. It'd be nice
to have a few features like _never show me techcrunch articles again_ but all
in all I still prefer Hacker News over everything else.

~~~
smhinsey
I did a quick search and didn't see anything too relevant. What is the
difference between the classic and standard views?

~~~
kirubakaran
Classic counts the votes of only the users who have been with HN for > 1 year.

~~~
iamwil
How did you know about this? I seemed to have missed the boat on this one.

~~~
kirubakaran
I searched searchyc.com for about 10 - 15 minutes to give a link to the post
where pg mentioned that he created "classic" view and that classic and regular
are not much different - which means growth hasn't harmed us much. Sorry I
couldn't find it. (Usually I'll obsess over it until I do find - but I have to
change this habit)

~~~
chengmi
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607285>

edit: How often does Google reply with the answer when you comment that you
can't find something using their site? Now that's service right there...

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profquail
I'm trying to learn Lisp/Scheme/Arc right now so that I can play around with
news.arc. I've a good amount of work with numerical algorithms (statistics,
matrices, graphs, machine learning...you name it), and I think there is a
great deal of improvement to be had in the scoring algorithms that are used by
social news sites (not just HN, but Digg, reddit, and so on).

Maybe YC could sponsor a little "Netflix Challenge" for Hacker News, where the
1st-place prize is an automatic bid to the upcoming YC round.

------
rms
There is more noise by quantity because there are more links than ever, but
the average quality hasn't gone down. It only seems like it sometimes, because
the site has good and bad days.

Also, if you just want programming links, read <http://hackerhackernews.com/>.
The topic here is much broader than only technical things.

~~~
tcoffeep
It hasn't been updated since July 7th. Unless nothing else that's been up
lately has been about programming...

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8-bit_Blaster
I completely agree that there seems to be far too much noise on HN.

That's actually the reason why I haven't bothered checking this website for
months, but got curious and decided to come back today to see if things have
changed.

The thing that I find most noisy are the "ASK HN" posts. I wish there was a
way to filter these out, so I only get news.

C'est la vie

------
travisjeffery
I was going to comment last night on the post on how to sleep better in the
Summer, but I didn't in hopes that sort of thing would stop itself. But all-
in-all that sort of stuff doesn't belong on Hacker News, after all the site is
Hacker News.

~~~
321abc
What solution do you propose? I don't think merely saying "let's keep things
topical" is going to work. People are going to keep submitting articles they
find interesting, and upvoting articles they find interesting, regardless of
the topic.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was the one who submitted the "How to
Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night" article. Yes, it's not topical. However, I'm
not ashamed! I thought it was interesting, and clearly so did the 44 other
people who upvoted it.

I'm quite pleased with the community that's developed here, who are
discriminating enough to pick out many articles I find interesting.

However, HN could definitely be improved, so that people who are only
interested in certain topics (such as only computer/hacking related articles)
or not interested in other topics (such as off-topic, or political, or venture
capitalist articles) could more easily filter through what's becoming a
firehydrant of links.

I think the best way to do this is by implementing tags.

~~~
travisjeffery
The way I see is that this is how things start: one article like this is
submitted and then each week another one is added, like a Fibonacci sequence
until you have how Proggit or Digg is today.

And you can say that Hacker News will stay pure or whatever but this is
exactly how things began with other sites and then slowly but surely things
became less and less relevant. I do think that it will take quite some time
before Hacker News gets that way but I'd rather be strict now and nip it in
the bud before regretting it later.

With the analogy of tags I would say that if you had the two most basic tags:
"hacker-related" (programming, science, tech and related fields) or "non-
hacker-related" (ie. sleep habits) Then I would only have hacker-related
tagged material here.

Now I realize that in the case of Digg they did purposely branch out to expand
their community. And I doubt pg would do the same. Thus the speed at which
Hacker News would descend in quality would be much slower, but in my mind it's
not a sense of speed it's a sense of direction. And right now Hacker News is
descending from the direction and the kind quality we had.

~~~
321abc
So you propose we "be strict now". Could you elaborate on just what you mean
by that?

If I could be so bold as to take a guess at what you mean, it seems you're
suggesting that the HN community submit only topical links.

I think that suggestion will generally simply be ignored by those people who
want to (for whatever reason) submit non-topical links because only a small
fraction of HN submitters will even read your suggestion, and most of those
that read it aren't going to care (or they wouldn't have submitted off-topic
links in the first place).

In order to reach all submitters, we could have some sort of global notice
reminding everyone to only submit topical links. Maybe a stern and clearly
worded warning on the submission page itself.

But say we do that and people continue to submit and upvote off-topic links.
In my opinion, this is precisely what's going to happen. So then what?

I think there is no solution to keeping HN pure short of having the site be
moderated by people dedicated to keeping it pure. But clearly that's not the
model HN wants to pursue.

As long as HN is self-moderating it will not stay pure, and the more popular
it gets, the further away from purity it will drift (witness what happened to
Slashdot and Kuro5hin).

So, given that HN is not and probably will not stay pure, how can we improve
the situation? I think the solution is clear: tags. Tags will let each reader
more easily focus on what they find interesting, no matter how "impure" the
site gets. It's an easy solution and one that should scale pretty well.

------
csomar
I think we can reduce bad submissions by prohibting new users and users with a
karma less than 500 for example.

We can calculate a score based on user oldness and his score, so he can submit
or not and the time between his submissions.

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TallGuyShort
By the way, polls are officially supported - it will add options to the header
of your post that people can select of - independent of any comments or
replies to thread, or links to your own karma. Details are here:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html> (See March 1st, "Polls") - I do not
know if the 200-karma threshold is still in effect

~~~
toto
"Sorry, you need 20 karma to create a poll." :) I have... 1.. :) I created a
new "linked" account.

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ttam
imo, yes, the quality/type-of/whatever of submissions has become very
different from what it was 2 years ago. but then again, that's a subjective
analysis.

but imho tags/categories are awful. there has to be a better solution to this.

i don't think filtering domains will do much good either.

editors like slashdot aren't exactly great (and require an editor staff).

voting schemes reflect the taste of the community (more specifically the
percentage of people that vote - not taking into account bots/cheaters).
there's always slashdot's semi-random karma system, but it's not really that
great either.

so really, what's the solution? no effing clue..

\-----------------------------------

on the other hand, i'd really like to know the stats on the number of people
who click on an article and the number of people who voted on the same
article.. also, average points stories get and so on..

edit: oh yeah, nevermind that, forgot that only after some X karma you can
downvote/flag

\-----------------------------------

oh well, information overload.. it's a joy

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lionhearted
One thing I'm seeing more of lately are internet-isms in comments like "Fail"
and "2. ??? 3. Profit!" It seems to dilute the quality of the comments for two
reasons - first, they themselves aren't that insightful. But more scary is
that like five other people typically jump in and reply with more internetisms
afterwards. The comments here have historically been the best I've seen, but
seem to be slipping just a touch lately.

I don't know how that would be tackled exactly. I suppose just introducing new
people politely to the culture here, and for current members to refrain from
upvoting comments that are ok but have the pseudo-clever semi-snarky internet
vibe to them.

~~~
whatusername
Technically "2. ??? 3. Profit!" was a South Park-ism (see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)> ) And I realise that this
comment was perhaps what you were complaining about - but it was worth
pointing it out none-the-less.

(And for the record: "1. Collect Underpants, 2. ????, 3. Profit" seems to be a
more mature business model than some that are featured here on hn.)

~~~
jrockway
_Technically "2. ??? 3. Profit!" was a South Park-ism_

I for one welcome our new television meme overlords.

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uuilly
<http://twitter.com/newsycombinator> only posts pages that appear on the front
page. An RSS feed might get a little noisy.

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jamesbritt
hnsort.com, and the greasemonkey script for sorting, really help. I sort by
comments or points to find where the interest is.

But I agree that the RSS feed can get cluttered. Maybe a yahoo pipes thing
could create a delayed feed that only passed items with certain
characteristics.

------
gaerfield
Yes, I agree. HN has many interesting stuff, but I have problems to follow all
news, because it's just too much.

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hooande
No.

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californiaguy
Hacker forums are a lot like indie rock bands.

~~~
cperciva
Are you saying that indie rock bands get louder and louder the more popular
they get?

(Serious question -- I don't listen to rock bands, indie or otherwise, so I
don't know how the time- and popularity-dependence of their volume.)

~~~
Radix
No, he's saying that the quality is variable. Sometimes they have one great
album and the rest are poor, or an album has a few great songs and the rest
sounds like filler.

~~~
Agathos
I thought he was saying they stop being cool when too many people discover
them.

~~~
erikwiffin
That sounds about right.

Unfortunately I tend to find both right as they stop being cool. (I joined on
erlang day)

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321abc
I think there's definitely a lot of noise. Having categories (or tags) would
be a good aid to sorting through it all.

~~~
Rickasaurus
Oh please don't let this turn into reddit.

~~~
321abc
It's not tags which would turn HN in to Reddit. It's the community. If HN's
community was identical to that of Reddit, HN would turn in to Reddit (minus
the tags). But HN's community is not the same as Reddit, which is why the
articles which are submitted and upvoted on HN generally differ from Reddit
(with some overlap, of course).

I don't see how not having tags helps anything or anyone. It just keeps the
article space flat instead of organized by topic.

Of course, the articles still have different topics. They're just not easily
distinguishable from one another by automated means.

~~~
Radix
HN is more like a subreddit than reddit itself. Adding tags would allow the
original Startup News users to sequester themselves into the article threads
they enjoyed, while new people would join the community unnoticed and
uninitiated. Eventually the front page would boil over with TechCrunch and
Apple gossip.

Tags are bad because keeping the article space flat keeps out people with only
marginally similar interests.

~~~
321abc
The question is, how much are the original Startup News users doing to keep
the site pure? Clearly not enough, or this particular thread would have never
been started.

The article space is flat right now, but that hasn't been enough to keep the
site pure either.

I think the battle for purity has already been lost. Now it's just a question
of whether the site is going to be rendered useless because the number of
submissions is going to be too great to slog through with a flat article
space, or if it's going to be made manageable with tags.

