I am currently spending my life working on signal processing - constructing a story of what is happening in the world from sensor data. And you know what - noise is good. You would perhaps think that the thing to do is to turn on the filters, crank 'em up, and don't ever let a noisy bit of data through.
But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It's still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.
Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post 'quality' - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they'd comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on.
They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with 'quality'. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You'll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it's civil and on topic.
I've concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don't forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a 'consume' site for me, and occasionally, post. I don't want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I'll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can't see that changing much. I can't see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I'll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you?
Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It's a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It's messy, it's beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.
Thank you Roger for a well written post. It captured my sentiments in an analogy about complexity and chaos and value.
I've been a reader of HN for a long time. I am not am industry thought leader. I'm one of the nameless horde of programmers that have been integral and famous at companies you've never heard of. I've had an account for over 2200 days, but have less than 250 karma. You know why? I only comment when I have something to say that I think is pertinent. When I do comment, I spend 5-10 minutes getting my wording good enough that I won't waste anyone's time.
I will watch how this plays out, but I suspect this will be my final HN comment. This change confirms that PG does not want people like me participating in his forum. I hope I'm proved wrong; HN had been my main RSS feed for like 5 years. There's always lobste.rs
>I will watch how this plays out, but I suspect this will be my final HN comment.
Might be a better idea to test the system and see how it affects your posts in actuality instead of relying on anecdotes from others though. Just a thought.
If you post high quality content, almost nothing should change. Are you upset because you didn't fit in the somewhat arbitrary initial rule to be included in the set of moderators?
I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don't want to see a thread with five hundred comments that say
This.
Or whatever trendy catch phrase is floating around the mindspace that month. And this system differs from what you describe in that there will be no set group of moderators. The community itself will decide what it wants to see and encourage the type of contribution it deems valid.
Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in any variant.
But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading.
It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like participating in endorsement.
If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of 'this' comments.
I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN.
There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community.
The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist.
> But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal.
It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know?
There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote.
There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity.
This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the 10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times.
From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying signals on HN than up/down voting.
I guess my main question is what is pg seeing that he doesn't like? He stated that comment quality was 'higher' after he turned this on briefly. I honestly have no idea what this means as it lacks specificity. From there I went with what the main complaints of posters in this thread and the other thread were complaining about. Vacuous comments, puns, and the like. I must admit to a high tolerance and enjoyment of witty zingers, so long as they don't dominate the discussion, so that colors my view re noise/signal.
Is this really a problem that HN has, though? I mean, yeah, occasionally, you'll see stuff like that. But anecdotally, I'd say it's definitely the exception.
The type of comment you're talking about ("This.") feels like an invented boogeyman used to justify overly harsh censorship by the Party (the HN karma elite).
I'm not saying HN is perfect as it is now - it's not - but personally, I feel the a greater problem lies with the quality of submissions rather than the quality of comments. Frankly, I'd rather see Pending Submissions instead of Pending Comments.
No offense but your argument is quite similar to UK's internet censorship law. Hey you don't want CP (in your case "trendy catch phrase"), so we should have a level of censorship (moderated comments). And in no time the system becomes the oppressor of free speech and flow of information.
Also please note that the earlier system had upvotes/downvotes for comments. Through votes the community can decide the type of contribution it deems valid.
"This" posts here are different to those elsewhere. There is currently no way to indicate succinctly your support for a comment except to the commenter. With scores hidden how can I indicate my support for a position quickly in a way that is visible to all users "This.".
"Downvote to grey-out" is lame IMO. Harming readability as an indication that a post doesn't contribute is very poor - it's hard to tell how much it's been downvoted, it's hard to read (some of us want to read what are often simply dissenting comments rather than non-contributing comments).
For a community that's all about "disrupting" everything in the world, this place sure gets itself in a tizzy over every little change to its own world.
Look, it's just a little change. It's not the end of the world. The impact is likely to be minimal, with only the very worst comments remaining unendorsed.
Give it some time before you write up essays about why it's a bad idea.
>For a community that's all about "disrupting" everything in the world, this place sure gets itself in a tizzy over every little change to its own world.
It's that same ethos that makes it counterintuitive to heavily moderate such a community. It's a little ironic that it's a problem that the "the rebels are being disorderly".
Or perhaps the irony is that such a community actually does require moderation.
I think it's for a similar reason sites such as reddit and 4chan (though their topics are often rather lewd) have seen so much success. They're like big melting pots, and all the good stuff floats to the top. Sometimes even the most average of topics can be made interesting by a relative unknown providing some insight.
TL;DR you really reduce your chance of finding diamonds if you don't let some dirt through too.
The two forums you're talking about, the "One was obsessed with post 'quality'" and "Those are the ones with far less concern with 'quality'." Are you talking about elitistjerks and mmo-champion? Just wondering
No, they were for a woodworking hobby (well, hobby for me, profession for the pros). Don't want to be more specific because I really respect all the moderators in the forums.
But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It's still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.
Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post 'quality' - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they'd comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on.
They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with 'quality'. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You'll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it's civil and on topic.
I've concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don't forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a 'consume' site for me, and occasionally, post. I don't want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I'll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can't see that changing much. I can't see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I'll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you?
Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It's a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It's messy, it's beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.