warning meta-comment, queasy people that can't handle introspection should stop here
There is a constant meta-discussion on HN, with HN being on top of course, that social news aggregation sites tend to devolve along the following lattice, HN->reddit->digg->4chan. Various signals are referenced that this is happening, typically in the form of people behaving outside of the established site or community guidelines. HN's guidelines for example state that this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011258 runs counter to the guideline:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
So not only was the post counter to guidelines and very clearly not a topical HN post, it was a repost, just a short while after appearing on reddit's main page. In addition, the title:
> How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
(while it is the original article title) blows threw at least half of the guidelines for submissions.
which was immediately downvoted to something like -5 at one point and all of my subsequent comments, even topically related and without violating any HN guidelines were immediately hammered. Some additional people responded to my meta-comment, all non-trollish, one guy is now +8 and another is enjoying time at 0. This is schizophrenic.
The guidelines for voting on HN (at least at one time but I can't find any such guidelines anymore) clearly state(d) that upvotes should be for comments that create interesting discussions and should not be due to agreement with the poster. The converse should also be true, essentially, downvotes should be for trolls. But since I was meta-commenting, something that has been well documented and relatively cherished on this site as a way of maintaining quality and preventing the typical downtrend of other aggregator sites...my comments shouldn't have been downmodded to begin with. (I can almost guarantee that this comment will reach at least -3 at some point for example).
To make it worse, the downmodders aren't actually providing any interesting commentary either, they don't even post a rebuke or a comment chastising me for violating some imagined HN guideline because they know that they have no grounds to do so and are only downvoting out of malice and disagreement.
So, on the same day that I meta-commented that non-topical-HN posts that show up on reddit and immediately show up on HN right after that and then got my ass handed to me for pointing that out (of course with no commentary), an actual post regarding reddit->HN posting shows up and even offers a technical solution to solve this problem shows up not only on HN in the new bin, but on the front page near the top.
So of course I meta-meta-meta-comment that this is rapidly becoming ridiculous. It's not the slide to reddit that the HN community should be worried about, it's the slide to schizophrenic insanity.
There, so that's the topical explanation since the pithier ones didn't satisfy you.
So as not to just complain about the problem, but to offer solutions:
HN is a news agreegator, but more importantly it tries to drive interesting and informative discussion. I believe that the modding system as is creates an environment where the HN community is slowly moving towards an echo-chamber-like groupthink a la reddit or digg or some other aggregator. The reasons for this are actually relatively few and are largely addressed in guidelines, but otherwise ignored by the community at large:
Sorry pal, if a clearly political post can appear on HN with copious upmods even though such a post is clearly against guidelines, I can break guidelines as well and meta-comment about its lack of relevancy to HN in general.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics...If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You are precisely the type of person I mention in relation to the wikipedia effect.
> ...that of people that feel it is their god-given right to arbitrate some self-selected rules of the community they inhabit and prevent all newcomers from playing in their playground.
So we can either follow guidelines to the letter, in which case pg should rename that to rules, and we should all flag posts like the China/Copenhagen one (and my posts regarding reddit and about half your posts for not being of interest to business technologists)
I think you're still missing the point, now obsessively so. The intent behind the guidelines is much more complicated than the words of the guidelines themselves.
Then that intent should be on the guidelines page, and not in the imagination in your head...period. I think pg does a good job at relaying the intent of how he thinks things should work in his various essays. I disagree with him on some fine points. He wants more civility, I want more directness. I also don't want people to pretend to be civil in voice and absolutely uncivil in action.
Furthermore, guidelines are not rules:
Since you have trouble understanding the difference betwixt the two:
I think you can probably tell by now I really don't give a rats ass about my karma, to the chagrin of people that think I'm only whining about mod points -- but I do care about interesting discussion (which includes meta-discussion). You seem to think discussion is only interesting if it follows some rule-set you've invented that really has nothing to do with the intent or words of the guidelines of HN or even in most cases (as provided by citations) to yourself unless it's particularly convenient for you to pull them out to suppress voices you don't want to hear -- such as mine.
As I've outlined, mod points and abuses of the voting system can suppress interesting discussion exactly as it has done here both by encouraging non-interesting discussion and by discouraging dissenting voices. You are even aware that the voting system is open to abuse! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013389 Yet here we are, with you participating in your own support and participation in an abuse of the system.
You've provided nothing even remotely interesting along the lines of meta-discussion regarding this topic in all of your previous posts that I could be bothered to read through except pedantic reference to the guidelines page from time to time. At the very least I supplied an alternate voting and comment scheme (which is perhaps a poor scheme, but I'm open to it being up for debate, at least it's some ideas). Most assuredly you don't like it since it would force people such as yourself to be bothered to provide some commentary and not just whore karma.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding parts of this, I am laying in bed right now going through my daily wind-down and slowly falling into "sleep mode".
It sounds like one of your gripes is that the post about Copenhagen showed up on reddit, then immediately showed up here. This is not a valid complain, I'm sorry.
Reddit and HN are completely different types of communities. To complain that a story appeared on reddit, then appeared here completely disregards the fact that many people that read HN no longer visit reddit.
As far as the story you were whining about (and yes, you were whining), it absolutely is relevant to the HN community (at least from what I'm seen in the last 1.5 years or so here). HN seems to be comprised mostly of people who have a very strong interest in sciences of all kinds. This is why psychology, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and computer science articles make the front page and that is why HN is seeing such a strong uptick in usership.
Your comment was originally downmodded because it was contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion regardless of how many people responded to you (I'm talking about the one stating that the copenhagen story had already appeared on reddit).
I guess to summarize: you were downmodded because your comment, which contributed nothing to the discussion, pointed out something that most people found completely irrelevant.
What you saw was the moderation system working perfectly.
> It sounds like one of your gripes is that the post about Copenhagen showed up on reddit, then immediately showed up here. This is not a valid complain, I'm sorry.
My complaint is that a clearly political post is showing up on HN. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
My second complaint is that for going through to trouble to point this out, I get my karma hammered.
> Reddit and HN are completely different types of communities. To complain that a story appeared on reddit, then appeared here completely disregards the fact that many people that read HN no longer visit reddit.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I don't think your comments have contributed much to discussion either.
I vote for something like this. I'm new here, but far too often I see thoughtful posts like this being hit hard.
Here's a guy, obviously with some ideas banging around in his head, who feels (rightly or wrongly) that the system as-is is broken. He complains about it, then offers a solution. It seems a reasonable solution and with some tweaks to his/her basic parameters (I think +3/-1 are too constrained) this could work well.
I agree that the spirit of HN seems to be to have good chats on topics and subtopics, and some of the abuses I see around here really scare me off from posting more.
Hacker News is my first resource when I wake up in the morning, I check it before my emails. Shortly thereafter, I also check /r/programming on reddit. Sometimes, I see content pop up on reddit after it appears on Hacker News. It is not a one way road, as you suggest.
It might be interesting to write a script to watch both sites and pull data, determining where content appears first - possibly using modified code from the OP. If I get some time, I might do just this tonight. Somewhat useless, but the information might determine what is a better real time resource for topics relevant to my interests.
Sorry. Got tied up last night, but I am still interested in this data and appended it on my to do list. Ping me @ any of my contact info in my profile and I will link you when it's done!
Well, it's obvious that, a very large percentage of HN users are reddit users. I prefer HN for the better, startup and technical oriented commentary and community. I think reddit devolves too fast as the discussion length grows (plus I like HN's simple layout better).
Right now I check reddit before I check HN, but mainly for topics other than those covered by HN. It's disheartening to see cross posts reddit->HN though, since the communities are virtually the same. But I'll admit that the same topic will get better discussion here.
Related note: I wrote a program that collects all the HN, Reddit, and Digg Technology articles and ranks them. It was a fun quickie-project in F#
Instead of stripping the intersection, I find that dupes usually indicate a more important story, so I check on those first.
I find that by indicating relative movement (is the story moving up or down in rankings?) and relative comment change I can get an indication of what's hot or not. Whenever I'm bored and want to do a bunch of reading, I can control-click my way into dozens of useful stories pretty quickly! It was a fun project.
18 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] thread127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011277
warning meta-comment, queasy people that can't handle introspection should stop here
There is a constant meta-discussion on HN, with HN being on top of course, that social news aggregation sites tend to devolve along the following lattice, HN->reddit->digg->4chan. Various signals are referenced that this is happening, typically in the form of people behaving outside of the established site or community guidelines. HN's guidelines for example state that this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011258 runs counter to the guideline:
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
So not only was the post counter to guidelines and very clearly not a topical HN post, it was a repost, just a short while after appearing on reddit's main page. In addition, the title:
> How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
(while it is the original article title) blows threw at least half of the guidelines for submissions.
I added the meta-comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011258
which was immediately downvoted to something like -5 at one point and all of my subsequent comments, even topically related and without violating any HN guidelines were immediately hammered. Some additional people responded to my meta-comment, all non-trollish, one guy is now +8 and another is enjoying time at 0. This is schizophrenic.
The guidelines for voting on HN (at least at one time but I can't find any such guidelines anymore) clearly state(d) that upvotes should be for comments that create interesting discussions and should not be due to agreement with the poster. The converse should also be true, essentially, downvotes should be for trolls. But since I was meta-commenting, something that has been well documented and relatively cherished on this site as a way of maintaining quality and preventing the typical downtrend of other aggregator sites...my comments shouldn't have been downmodded to begin with. (I can almost guarantee that this comment will reach at least -3 at some point for example).
To make it worse, the downmodders aren't actually providing any interesting commentary either, they don't even post a rebuke or a comment chastising me for violating some imagined HN guideline because they know that they have no grounds to do so and are only downvoting out of malice and disagreement.
So, on the same day that I meta-commented that non-topical-HN posts that show up on reddit and immediately show up on HN right after that and then got my ass handed to me for pointing that out (of course with no commentary), an actual post regarding reddit->HN posting shows up and even offers a technical solution to solve this problem shows up not only on HN in the new bin, but on the front page near the top.
So of course I meta-meta-meta-comment that this is rapidly becoming ridiculous. It's not the slide to reddit that the HN community should be worried about, it's the slide to schizophrenic insanity.
There, so that's the topical explanation since the pithier ones didn't satisfy you.
So as not to just complain about the problem, but to offer solutions:
HN is a news agreegator, but more importantly it tries to drive interesting and informative discussion. I believe that the modding system as is creates an environment where the HN community is slowly moving towards an echo-chamber-like groupthink a la reddit or digg or some other aggregator. The reasons for this are actually relatively few and are largely addressed in guidelines, but otherwise ignored by the community at large:
a. When people post otherwise interesting c...
>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Sorry pal, if a clearly political post can appear on HN with copious upmods even though such a post is clearly against guidelines, I can break guidelines as well and meta-comment about its lack of relevancy to HN in general.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics...If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You are precisely the type of person I mention in relation to the wikipedia effect.
> ...that of people that feel it is their god-given right to arbitrate some self-selected rules of the community they inhabit and prevent all newcomers from playing in their playground.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The relevant word is guidelines.
Despite the guideline on the topic. There is an very vigorous and ongoing discussion about this effect.
Works Cited: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303605 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575032 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406293 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164901 (perhaps one of my favorite posts on the topic from about 2 years ago). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=744475 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409659 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88898 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994418 and on and on and on...at least since I've started reading HN a couple years ago.
So we can either follow guidelines to the letter, in which case pg should rename that to rules, and we should all flag posts like the China/Copenhagen one (and my posts regarding reddit and about half your posts for not being of interest to business technologists)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011368 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011306 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011337 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009130 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009177 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007640 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007289 etc.
or your submissions
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007183 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1005924 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002837 http://news.ycombinator.c...
Now back to arguing about something...
Then that intent should be on the guidelines page, and not in the imagination in your head...period. I think pg does a good job at relaying the intent of how he thinks things should work in his various essays. I disagree with him on some fine points. He wants more civility, I want more directness. I also don't want people to pretend to be civil in voice and absolutely uncivil in action.
Furthermore, guidelines are not rules:
Since you have trouble understanding the difference betwixt the two:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define%3Aguidelines
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define%3Arule
I think you can probably tell by now I really don't give a rats ass about my karma, to the chagrin of people that think I'm only whining about mod points -- but I do care about interesting discussion (which includes meta-discussion). You seem to think discussion is only interesting if it follows some rule-set you've invented that really has nothing to do with the intent or words of the guidelines of HN or even in most cases (as provided by citations) to yourself unless it's particularly convenient for you to pull them out to suppress voices you don't want to hear -- such as mine.
As I've outlined, mod points and abuses of the voting system can suppress interesting discussion exactly as it has done here both by encouraging non-interesting discussion and by discouraging dissenting voices. You are even aware that the voting system is open to abuse! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013389 Yet here we are, with you participating in your own support and participation in an abuse of the system.
You've provided nothing even remotely interesting along the lines of meta-discussion regarding this topic in all of your previous posts that I could be bothered to read through except pedantic reference to the guidelines page from time to time. At the very least I supplied an alternate voting and comment scheme (which is perhaps a poor scheme, but I'm open to it being up for debate, at least it's some ideas). Most assuredly you don't like it since it would force people such as yourself to be bothered to provide some commentary and not just whore karma.
It sounds like one of your gripes is that the post about Copenhagen showed up on reddit, then immediately showed up here. This is not a valid complain, I'm sorry.
Reddit and HN are completely different types of communities. To complain that a story appeared on reddit, then appeared here completely disregards the fact that many people that read HN no longer visit reddit.
As far as the story you were whining about (and yes, you were whining), it absolutely is relevant to the HN community (at least from what I'm seen in the last 1.5 years or so here). HN seems to be comprised mostly of people who have a very strong interest in sciences of all kinds. This is why psychology, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and computer science articles make the front page and that is why HN is seeing such a strong uptick in usership.
Your comment was originally downmodded because it was contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion regardless of how many people responded to you (I'm talking about the one stating that the copenhagen story had already appeared on reddit).
I guess to summarize: you were downmodded because your comment, which contributed nothing to the discussion, pointed out something that most people found completely irrelevant.
What you saw was the moderation system working perfectly.
My complaint is that a clearly political post is showing up on HN. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
My second complaint is that for going through to trouble to point this out, I get my karma hammered.
> Reddit and HN are completely different types of communities. To complain that a story appeared on reddit, then appeared here completely disregards the fact that many people that read HN no longer visit reddit.
That is absolutely correct. As per: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I don't think your comments have contributed much to discussion either.
Hence, it was downvoted; it was noise.
Here's a guy, obviously with some ideas banging around in his head, who feels (rightly or wrongly) that the system as-is is broken. He complains about it, then offers a solution. It seems a reasonable solution and with some tweaks to his/her basic parameters (I think +3/-1 are too constrained) this could work well.
I agree that the spirit of HN seems to be to have good chats on topics and subtopics, and some of the abuses I see around here really scare me off from posting more.
Hacker News is my first resource when I wake up in the morning, I check it before my emails. Shortly thereafter, I also check /r/programming on reddit. Sometimes, I see content pop up on reddit after it appears on Hacker News. It is not a one way road, as you suggest.
It might be interesting to write a script to watch both sites and pull data, determining where content appears first - possibly using modified code from the OP. If I get some time, I might do just this tonight. Somewhat useless, but the information might determine what is a better real time resource for topics relevant to my interests.
I'm bored. :P
Right now I check reddit before I check HN, but mainly for topics other than those covered by HN. It's disheartening to see cross posts reddit->HN though, since the communities are virtually the same. But I'll admit that the same topic will get better discussion here.
Instead of stripping the intersection, I find that dupes usually indicate a more important story, so I check on those first.
I find that by indicating relative movement (is the story moving up or down in rankings?) and relative comment change I can get an indication of what's hot or not. Whenever I'm bored and want to do a bunch of reading, I can control-click my way into dozens of useful stories pretty quickly! It was a fun project.
Here's the site if anybody's interested:
http://project-management-methodologies.net