Ask HN: On improving the quality of submissions (on the top/front page)

[karmakaze]

I noticed that I now sometimes write negative comments for poor/incorrect posts which in the past I would have merely ignored. At first I felt bad about doing so but was compelled nonetheless. On reflection I think it's a response to the number of low-effort/low-quality or factually devoid/incorrect stories that do sometimes make it to the front page.

I see value in a feedback mechanism for raising the bar of top voted submissions. Since posts aren't downvoted flagging is reserved for other use, what other acceptable means is there for providing this signal? At the same time, if there's not already discussion on such a post, even a negative one is engagement which could further popularize it.

Another thing I've started doing is being more liberal with my upvotes to get them above the floor of low-quality post scores.

Does this seem like what's happening and a fine way to approach it, or should something else or nothing be done?

[potamic]

I believe this is what flagging is for. The guidelines suggest to use it for spam and caution against feeding such discussions.

Now, when to pass along a bit of feedback is a judgement call only you can make, but I think in most cases people will also learn by trying and failing.

[carlosjobim]

There is only one remedy against low quality content: Post high quality content.

Your OP is the same OP that has been posted hundreds of thousands of times by this point, on different forums and usergroups. And the answer is the same as it has always been: Drown out low quality content by posting high quality content.

[bjourne]

HN has a nursery. Go there and kill of the nonviable and nuture those with prowess. Since the distribution of popularity on HN is exponentially distributed this has an over-sized effect on the top page (and is easily gameable to everyone's chagrin).

[PaulHoule]

I don’t think comments make a story more visible on HN, it’s not like

https://tildes.net/

My belief actually is that visibility of posts is suppressed if they get, say, 20 comments and already have 50 votes.

So if you want to be systematic about posting comments with some “tough love” go right ahead.

[karmakaze → PaulHoule]

Thanks. I didn't mean that it affects the score, but I know I'm more likely to click into a post/discussion if there's already a comment there.

I was trying to think of what would be a good stock format of response that would be constructive. A good one is to say that it's an interesting topic and this other link has good details on the topic. Maybe identifying shortcomings in the post such as writing, poor logic, or posed facts if sufficiently bad to warrant it.

[PaulHoule → karmakaze]

That’s a great idea.

I’ll mention that I do select posts to HN with the assistance of a smart RSS reader and the two of us are adding posts to the queue faster than we can submit them so the next frontier is bringing the quality up but it’s not so trivial to define ‘quality’. Specifically “lots of points” or “lots of comments” are not a great metric in themselves because I know (and YOShInOn knows) that I could easily do better on both of those by posting clickbait articles on shoplifting in San Francisco or the low fertility rate of Japan and I wouldn’t be proud of that.

I don’t have a clear picture of what exactly it looks like but if I were able to teach my RSS reader to parse comments that would be a good thing.