2 things :
1) I am making this developer discussion platform. Results of this survey will be helpful for the product design.
2) I will publish the results on HN itself after 48 hrs.
I was wondering how you think Hacker News achieves those things. Why do people keep coming back? Why is there rational discussion [at least sometimes]? Why is there good content?
What prompted my question was the survey asking about tags. It seemed premised on the idea that tags are a useful feature. But Hacker News does not have them.
The community was seeded from people who found out about it through either Paul Graham's essays or Y Combinator. After that deterioration was prevented by strongly discouraging low quality discussion.
Yes, the high caliber of HN participants is what really sets it apart, and the great moderation by dang et al that stops it from descending below a pretty high bar has prevented the normal attrition-for-attention that drives the best users away. I think the spartan design has also helped keep out people who aren't committed to a high level of online discourse.
Most platforms are going to have a chicken and egg problem. HN didn't because this guy who had millions of dollars told the people he gives it to to use HN. Pretty effective way of seeding a community.
IMO the absolute best thing about HN is that when we're discussing a news event, often the newsmakers will materialize in the thread. Spontaneous stuff like the Alan Kay AMA just happens. That is what really makes HN invaluable, and it only happens because we're able to maintain the type of community that those people want to hang around in.
Yes, started with a good core that has a group set to be nice, thoughtful, and post smart things. Moderation by deng is pretty amazing, I seldom things go off the rails.
I personally don't know how hacker news achieved these things.
will have look deeper into its history and moderation , ranking mechanisms.I personally think that tagging should be allowed on HN. Tags can be very limited in number but will be helpful for its audience to separate out interesting links.
The reason HN still managed to do good without tags is the culture itself.The hacker culture is not limited to any domain (tag). What stimulates a human brain to think becomes part of HN discussion.
Are there any popular HN clients that support tagging? It seems like something a good number of people want. Maybe it could be added on top of HN by a third party if a client app/site had enough people to support it.
It's never been something I've wanted, but I can see the appeal.
Focus and good moderation. It's better to think of HN as a mid-sized, well moderated subreddit, than a comparison to Reddit as a website. You'll see that as subreddit grow bigger and become "default", content quality often slides. This can often be stemmed by good moderation, but they only have so much power with the limited tools Reddit gives them.
HN's moderators are also the programmers of this website, so if they need a new tool? Bam, new tool.
The quality of experience, technical knowledge, curiosity, moderation, and general conflict-free discussion along with a style of site that intentionally dissuades a mainstream audience [1] is what I've always seen as setting HN apart. Frequently HN will be the source of many unique insights into stories, personal anecdotes from those familiar with companies mentioned, and other tidbits that often can't be found elsewhere.
Low quality posts on the other hand such as fluff replies, memes, or the odd rude post will get downvoted or simply not upvoted to demonstrate to others it's not something the community wants to see, with more thoughtful posts especially from those with experience in a topic rising to the top and sparking engaging discussions and questions.
I appreciate that all users until they reach a certain karma level don't see a downvote button. Rather than downvote something to influence the order of comments most users will upvote ones they like, which is subtly a more positive system. Over time all these things cultivate a certain culture that spreads and attracts other like minded users.
All this and the community has still managed to not become generally snarky, patronizing, or too insular itself. The life experience, focus on more technical topics, along with still retaining some humor helps.
[1] Paul Graham:
"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."
> Also HN is a place for rational discussions not trolls
This forum is however subject to groupthink. I have witnessed participants being downvoted and hellbanned simply for having a dissenting opinion. Unless by "troll" you mean anyone who disagrees with the popular views on this forum.
Strongly seconded. Such ancillary features are useful for social signaling, and there's value in that, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the primary reasons HN's quality of discourse tends so high is because there's really nothing here to put thought or effort into, when participating, other than what you actually say in your comments.
(On the other hand, the same is very much true of 4chan, and the quality of discourse there is hardly what anyone would seriously describe as "high", so on reflection I think I'm probably pretty far off base here.)
If I can piggyback. "Other" responses should be trimmed from less-than/greater-than questions. This is pretty binary (unless you've been on HN for EXACTLY one year, but then you should just pick which category you want to be in) and allowing "other" just leaves a group that's undefinable; might as well call it "prefer not to answer".
- adding to the timeframes I've been here 4 years and know there are people here much longer
- breakdown of how much people read show, comments, new, etc. I do front page 2 to 3 times a day but only do show, comments about once a week. New is only when I have some extra time to burn off, so about two times a week (and mostly on the weekends).
- Breakdown on commenting. I try not to comment unless I'm going to add value to the comments. But if I have a comment when I ask a question I make more of an effort to get back to get the answer.
- Add a question about how often do you go back to old threads you were interested in.
- Add a question about how much you use search. A few times a month I search on things that interest me (Lua, Robots, Rockets, Raspberry Pi, etc) to see if there was something I missed.
Since the HN community is data oriented at its heart, it would be very interesting to have everything out in the open, in real time, for users to have their own model of ranking.
All the data: comments, stories and most importantly each upvote linked to its user. People would build their own model for tagging, filtering.
I'd personnally try ALS-WR [1], or maybe try to tinker with distance metric learning [2].
It would help everyone get exposed to the exact content they might upvote.
If it were I'm the open it would be too obvious how much "management" and curation happens. From artificially boosting some articles to artificially nixing others, there isn't just 'an algorithm' there is a bunch of human intervention that also happens.
HN claims that it is the algorithm 'detecting' and flagging controversial threads but they've never posted their methodology there and it doesn't explain how some posts artificially leap up the rankings.
It is common knowledge that hn ask people to resubmit some stories, why is it those stories always hit the front-page the second time around?
Hn is a curated news source. It's better for being that way but it is presented as being driven by algorithm.
Sometimes it is better not to see the man behind the curtain.
I think HN is great and has some of the best discussion on the web, at least for tech related stuff.
One thing I do think is broken is the ranking system. Here is my comment:
'It's too... exponential. A post seems to get either 0-5 votes, or 100 from hitting the frontpage. Implement a feature that puts 'highly' rated new stories (3-5 votes) in a slot on the frontpage for a sample of users, giving them a chance to explode.'
Posts either die or reach the frontpage, where they have a run with lots of upvotes and comments. Unless a post hits the threshold of the frontpage then it doesn't get noticed at all.
Edit:
Didn't expect to be the top comment, clearly some people agree. I've had a few frontpage submissions on HN and there is a nack to it. You find the right title and you submit at the right time, and if you don't get more than 3-4 votes you delete and re-submit again a bit later. Once it gets 5 votes unless your post isn't that good it will hit the frontpage and stay for a while. Passing that threshold is the hard bit and I think a lot of quality articles don't hit that threshold and don't get seen. Which is a shame.
I know they already do something like what I'm suggesting but there are 30 rows on the frontpage, couldn't 4-5 'new' articles be randomly interspersed rather than 1?
It's also very hard for quality comments to get visibility after a certain point. The points seem to be weighted a little too heavily in the comment sorting algorithm which makes it hard for newer posts to stay at the top.
This could also just be that most people who may have voted have already checked the comments and don't come back.
Perhaps I should have suggested a "new highly-rated comments!" indicator as a useful feature. It doesn't seem like I can go back and edit my response, though, without taking the whole quiz again, and I don't want to skew results.
I agree, but I'd go further and say commenting here is largely a waste of time. If you make a comment on r/programming, others will respond and you can have a reasoned discussion, with trolls getting downvoted. If you disagree with someone, you can state your position and others will jump in and state theirs. Responses on HN are generally few in number, and if you challenge a high karma user, he and a few of his friends will downvote you with no intelligent discussion.
I'd say the comment system here has resulted in a pissing contest where the goal is to say something really cute so that you get upvotes. There are good discussions, but they happen in spite of the comment system, not because of it.
Funny, I'd say the exact same thing with the variables reversed.
Commenting on reddit is a waste of time. Here however, fresh comments actually get promoted to the top very regularly, which gives them a chance to be seen. I much prefer the ranking here than on Reddit.
When I look at the dead and grayed out comments (you can turn on "showdead" in your profile to see the dead ones), I usually consider them to be lower quality than the comments that have not been downvoted and flagged. Do you feel otherwise? If so, could you link to some examples?
I've heard from multiple people who had their projects (software, electronics, organizations) make the rounds in online communities that HN was the worst experience.
They did implement something like this a few months ago. Rising new comments are randomly shown on the frontpage. Try refreshing the frontpage a few times and you'll see various submissions with ~5 upvotes appearing and disappearing at random.
I agree it could be better though, and I like the idea of putting them in a highlighted section rather than randomly sprinkling them in the middle of the page where they don't stand out.
The interesting thing is, I'm frequently on the front page, and am in the top 100 list for HN. I don't time posts, and I almost randomly post them. Yet, here I am.
I've had posts that crossed the 5 vote threshold and didn't make it to the front page.
Are you sure you post at random? Have you measured it? It could be that, besides posting interesting content, your time zone and life style just naturally maps to the majority of voters.
Another idea: if a new submission (but not older than some threshold, maybe 24h?) did not reach the front page, each up-vote resets the submission time. Now if a story is noticed and upvoted when it is already reaching the bottom of the 'new' category, it is unlikely that it will accumulate enough votes fast enough to reach the front page.
The thing is, it's complicated. No one can confidently predict the interplay of all the algorithm factors and user behavior.
Hacker News should be hackable (and it's ironic that it's not). The only way to evolve a better system is though lot's of empirical experiments. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc). Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. See how much experimentation the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.
For this to happen Hacker News needs to make vote data available in the public API, or if that is a no-go, go with another option such as accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and and allowing it to present an alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.
HN and all its users, and even Paul Graham, know that a better solution for promoting quality knowledge sharing and healthy discourse is needed. What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If Hacker News were hackable, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment ranking, and users would vote with their feet, err... clicks.
There definitely needs to be a more fluid/integrated means to discover new stories. The home page could be split down the middle, showing new stories to the right, or there could be a more feature-rich (and visible/accessible/usable/seductive/natural/etc) "upvote" page that allows searching, browsing, and filtering through submissions to discover ones to vote on. There could also be a slight weighting of votes (though not much) to create a bias toward more reliable (or longstanding) voters, or to infer which submissions the currently viewing user is likely to upvote. The bias likely has to be slight, as one part of the game is to show the global/absolute top stories, while also getting in stories the specific user is likely to find "upvote worthy."
Also, randomly surfacing new submissions to get a sampling of up or down votes seems essential. This would allow a greater spread/certainty when a submission does make it to the front page, and would also be fairer to promising submissions (they won't die prematurely due to lack of opportunity to be upvoted). It would also minimize gaming of the system and the relevance of "time of day."
Also, the gravity concept is good (so stories eventually die), but it's a bit too absolute/aggressive.
There should also be normalization by total number of impressions and up/down votes, such that raw volume doesn't overwhelm quality with lower volume. That is, even if confidence intervals are used (which I don't really like), then up/down votes are an estimate of overall up/down vote percentages, which is what's relevant (the submissions most likely to be upvoted (meaning "best") are what should be shown first). Also, maybe volume matters somewhat (many votes implying a lot of interest), but it's better to separate this out and factor it in independently.
For example, each signed in user that clicks on a link has a probability/likelihood they'll vote, so that could convert their impressions into an expectation which could then be compared to reality (how many upvotes are actually recorded). The higher the upvotes (compared to what was expected), the better the submission. This can then be combined with the other scoring methods (and slight personalization-- maybe a certain percentage of front page entries are personalized and the rest based on absolute rankings, rather than having everything be personalized, or breaking them up into separate sections) to stabilize, refine, and make more accurate submission ranking/sorting.
There isn't a problem with a downvote button. And there isn't even a problem with it being abused (it being abused negatively affecting rankings is a sign the ranking algorithm is poor). The problem is with downvotes not being properly factored in (and weighed up or down depending on the source of the vote, and the user viewing the resulting front page articles). In fact, adding a downvote button would make it easier to rank new submissions (and it's also straightforward to filter (or normalize) out abusers of upvotes or downvotes).
Also, maybe passive actions could be factored in (or things could be added that would serve as good "signals" for "front page worthiness") to increase the overall number of votes, such that a handful of users don't control what makes it to the front page and to allow each article score to be more reliable/accurate.
If I remember correctly you start with a karma of 1 on a fresh account, so I guess it makes sense if the goal is to allow downvoting after gaining 500 - have another one, by the way :-)
For some reason I forgot and thought I was using HNES for that. Sorry to whoever is analyzing this data, this is why you get bad data: people (read: me) are dumb.
HN works because it is simple to use. Please keep it that way. Tagging introduces a whole new set of issues and off topic discussions. People are going to debate semantics, taxonomy and the proper labels for each and every thread. Every time someone dies, there are a few users asking the mods to put up the black bar. Tags are going to be much worse.
Agreed. The only way I can think around it is if the tagging is automated somehow. Shouldn't be too difficult to have some intelligent system. That way people don't argue with people.
As I wrote in my reponse, I use http://feeds.feedburner.com/fullhackernews to read a representative sample of what appears on the front page. It (tries to) include the content of the link, so I don't have to visit HN itself unless I want to see/participate in the comments.
I also use hnnotify.com to get notification emails when my comments are replied to.
I use it mainly through http://hackernewsroom.com/ which is awesome, because it lets you see a preview of an article without leaving the site or even read it right there. I only go to the original site when I want to add a comment or favorite an article.
I just want to say that I've been reading HN for about 7 years now, and it has been invaluable to my personal and career development. Being able to read well informed commentary about a variety of subjects makes it so much easier to reach for the right information when I need to learn something new. I'm sure I wouldn't have been exposed to many of the esoteric technologies that make my life interesting without it. I consider it one of the most valuable resources on the internet and I would be devastated if it went away.
'Always show original article title on hover' (in front page and other listings).
> Feedback on HN (if you got some time)
The 'Avoid gratuitous negativity' guideline is still not being followed and often gives the whole community a negative-nancy vibe. Perhaps a simple rule such as "if the entire content of a comment is about how the OP idea is bad/won't work/etc. (and is marked as being so by a mod[/high-karma-user - implementation detail]), it wouldn't be allowed to rise to be the top comment" will go a long way.
That's actually a great idea. I had built a discussion forum prototype a few months ago, that incorporates similar ideas. Unfortunately, social media has severe network effects, making it hard for new products to displace entrenched platforms.
It's widely known that on Reddit, if you arrive several hours late to a discussion, your comment has very little chance to make it to the top. Exceptions do exist, if your comment is exceptionally good. But if it's just "significantly better" than the existing content, forgetaboutit.
The reason for this is simple: Reddit's system takes only 2 factors into account - the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes. So if post A has been viewed by 1000 people, and accumulates a net score of +10, it will still be shown over post B which has been viewed just 50 times and accumulated a net score of +8.
Even more insidious: a single downvote is all it takes to doom a post on Reddit. If you went to great trouble to write a moving and eloquent post, and someone who disagreed with you downvoted it as soon as it was posted, it will immediately get moved to the bottom of the pile, and no one else will get the chance to see it and reverse the trend.
Is it really fair to prioritize content that just happened to be posted at a better time, and thus, picked up more views? Is it really good to bury a content at the bottom of the heap just because one person downvoted it right after it was posted?
At Caucus, we don't think so. In addition to the sophisticated reputation systems mentioned above, we also take into consideration the number of times a content was seen, and guarentee each content sufficient opportunity to been seen and prove itself. This ensures that all newly posted content is given a fighting chance to reach the top, regardless of when they happened to get posted.
re: suggestions:
After submitting the form it crossed my mind that I'd like to be able to identify (sub)comments in a thread that have been made after my last visit. It's a bit time consuming to scan the comment section every time I come back to it anew.
Other than that I am with the "keep it simple"-folks :)
I came to HN after leaving Slashdot. The main reason is the community. Slashdot got worse and worse in the last 5 years, with just trolls and polemics and bullies.
HN community is instead great, and discussions are always very respectful and insightful.
I would really like alerts (like reddit does...an orange envelope or something similar)...when someone replies to my comment I don't want to have continually check to see if there are replies. I know there are a lot of people that don't want this for some reason or another. For this reason there should be an option to turn them on/off.
I use it through second level abstracting site hnapp.com
I don't care about the Y Combinator self promotion of their startup incubators, nor do I care about Y Combinator's own blog content. I also don't have time to read the entire firehose of content that comes through daily from the "new" feed. I self limit to posts that have at least a score of 50. I also use a RSS feed so I can dip in/out as needed.
84 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadWhat prompted my question was the survey asking about tags. It seemed premised on the idea that tags are a useful feature. But Hacker News does not have them.
Most platforms are going to have a chicken and egg problem. HN didn't because this guy who had millions of dollars told the people he gives it to to use HN. Pretty effective way of seeding a community.
IMO the absolute best thing about HN is that when we're discussing a news event, often the newsmakers will materialize in the thread. Spontaneous stuff like the Alan Kay AMA just happens. That is what really makes HN invaluable, and it only happens because we're able to maintain the type of community that those people want to hang around in.
Nice place to visit!!
It's never been something I've wanted, but I can see the appeal.
HN's moderators are also the programmers of this website, so if they need a new tool? Bam, new tool.
For example, I have posted ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) on Reddit (and it is often upvoted), but I wouldn't do so on HN. The cultures are different.
Low quality posts on the other hand such as fluff replies, memes, or the odd rude post will get downvoted or simply not upvoted to demonstrate to others it's not something the community wants to see, with more thoughtful posts especially from those with experience in a topic rising to the top and sparking engaging discussions and questions.
I appreciate that all users until they reach a certain karma level don't see a downvote button. Rather than downvote something to influence the order of comments most users will upvote ones they like, which is subtly a more positive system. Over time all these things cultivate a certain culture that spreads and attracts other like minded users.
All this and the community has still managed to not become generally snarky, patronizing, or too insular itself. The life experience, focus on more technical topics, along with still retaining some humor helps.
[1] Paul Graham:
"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."
http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
This forum is however subject to groupthink. I have witnessed participants being downvoted and hellbanned simply for having a dissenting opinion. Unless by "troll" you mean anyone who disagrees with the popular views on this forum.
(On the other hand, the same is very much true of 4chan, and the quality of discourse there is hardly what anyone would seriously describe as "high", so on reflection I think I'm probably pretty far off base here.)
-allow me to choose two options for question one
-allow multiple answers for how do you use hn and make each answer a single action, not multiple.
-add a "zero" answer for how often I submit links
- adding to the timeframes I've been here 4 years and know there are people here much longer
- breakdown of how much people read show, comments, new, etc. I do front page 2 to 3 times a day but only do show, comments about once a week. New is only when I have some extra time to burn off, so about two times a week (and mostly on the weekends).
- Breakdown on commenting. I try not to comment unless I'm going to add value to the comments. But if I have a comment when I ask a question I make more of an effort to get back to get the answer.
- Add a question about how often do you go back to old threads you were interested in.
- Add a question about how much you use search. A few times a month I search on things that interest me (Lua, Robots, Rockets, Raspberry Pi, etc) to see if there was something I missed.
Interested to see what the results are
Since the HN community is data oriented at its heart, it would be very interesting to have everything out in the open, in real time, for users to have their own model of ranking.
All the data: comments, stories and most importantly each upvote linked to its user. People would build their own model for tagging, filtering.
I'd personnally try ALS-WR [1], or maybe try to tinker with distance metric learning [2].
It would help everyone get exposed to the exact content they might upvote.
[1] http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/~mary/cours/stats/centrale/...
[2] http://papers.nips.cc/paper/2164-distance-metric-learning-wi...
HN claims that it is the algorithm 'detecting' and flagging controversial threads but they've never posted their methodology there and it doesn't explain how some posts artificially leap up the rankings.
It is common knowledge that hn ask people to resubmit some stories, why is it those stories always hit the front-page the second time around?
Hn is a curated news source. It's better for being that way but it is presented as being driven by algorithm.
Sometimes it is better not to see the man behind the curtain.
I think you've drastically underestimated the ability of people to abuse systems like that.
even the invite system is transparent.
I thought that was very impressive.
One thing I do think is broken is the ranking system. Here is my comment:
'It's too... exponential. A post seems to get either 0-5 votes, or 100 from hitting the frontpage. Implement a feature that puts 'highly' rated new stories (3-5 votes) in a slot on the frontpage for a sample of users, giving them a chance to explode.'
Posts either die or reach the frontpage, where they have a run with lots of upvotes and comments. Unless a post hits the threshold of the frontpage then it doesn't get noticed at all.
Edit:
Didn't expect to be the top comment, clearly some people agree. I've had a few frontpage submissions on HN and there is a nack to it. You find the right title and you submit at the right time, and if you don't get more than 3-4 votes you delete and re-submit again a bit later. Once it gets 5 votes unless your post isn't that good it will hit the frontpage and stay for a while. Passing that threshold is the hard bit and I think a lot of quality articles don't hit that threshold and don't get seen. Which is a shame.
I know they already do something like what I'm suggesting but there are 30 rows on the frontpage, couldn't 4-5 'new' articles be randomly interspersed rather than 1?
This could also just be that most people who may have voted have already checked the comments and don't come back.
Perhaps I should have suggested a "new highly-rated comments!" indicator as a useful feature. It doesn't seem like I can go back and edit my response, though, without taking the whole quiz again, and I don't want to skew results.
I'd say the comment system here has resulted in a pissing contest where the goal is to say something really cute so that you get upvotes. There are good discussions, but they happen in spite of the comment system, not because of it.
Commenting on reddit is a waste of time. Here however, fresh comments actually get promoted to the top very regularly, which gives them a chance to be seen. I much prefer the ranking here than on Reddit.
I agree it could be better though, and I like the idea of putting them in a highlighted section rather than randomly sprinkling them in the middle of the page where they don't stand out.
I've had posts that crossed the 5 vote threshold and didn't make it to the front page.
It'd be neat if someone posted a graphic of my posting times.
Hacker News should be hackable (and it's ironic that it's not). The only way to evolve a better system is though lot's of empirical experiments. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc). Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. See how much experimentation the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.
For this to happen Hacker News needs to make vote data available in the public API, or if that is a no-go, go with another option such as accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and and allowing it to present an alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.
HN and all its users, and even Paul Graham, know that a better solution for promoting quality knowledge sharing and healthy discourse is needed. What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If Hacker News were hackable, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment ranking, and users would vote with their feet, err... clicks.
The HN FAQ[1] says:
"Please don't delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
There definitely needs to be a more fluid/integrated means to discover new stories. The home page could be split down the middle, showing new stories to the right, or there could be a more feature-rich (and visible/accessible/usable/seductive/natural/etc) "upvote" page that allows searching, browsing, and filtering through submissions to discover ones to vote on. There could also be a slight weighting of votes (though not much) to create a bias toward more reliable (or longstanding) voters, or to infer which submissions the currently viewing user is likely to upvote. The bias likely has to be slight, as one part of the game is to show the global/absolute top stories, while also getting in stories the specific user is likely to find "upvote worthy."
Also, randomly surfacing new submissions to get a sampling of up or down votes seems essential. This would allow a greater spread/certainty when a submission does make it to the front page, and would also be fairer to promising submissions (they won't die prematurely due to lack of opportunity to be upvoted). It would also minimize gaming of the system and the relevance of "time of day."
Also, the gravity concept is good (so stories eventually die), but it's a bit too absolute/aggressive. There should also be normalization by total number of impressions and up/down votes, such that raw volume doesn't overwhelm quality with lower volume. That is, even if confidence intervals are used (which I don't really like), then up/down votes are an estimate of overall up/down vote percentages, which is what's relevant (the submissions most likely to be upvoted (meaning "best") are what should be shown first). Also, maybe volume matters somewhat (many votes implying a lot of interest), but it's better to separate this out and factor it in independently.
For example, each signed in user that clicks on a link has a probability/likelihood they'll vote, so that could convert their impressions into an expectation which could then be compared to reality (how many upvotes are actually recorded). The higher the upvotes (compared to what was expected), the better the submission. This can then be combined with the other scoring methods (and slight personalization-- maybe a certain percentage of front page entries are personalized and the rest based on absolute rankings, rather than having everything be personalized, or breaking them up into separate sections) to stabilize, refine, and make more accurate submission ranking/sorting.
There isn't a problem with a downvote button. And there isn't even a problem with it being abused (it being abused negatively affecting rankings is a sign the ranking algorithm is poor). The problem is with downvotes not being properly factored in (and weighed up or down depending on the source of the vote, and the user viewing the resulting front page articles). In fact, adding a downvote button would make it easier to rank new submissions (and it's also straightforward to filter (or normalize) out abusers of upvotes or downvotes).
Also, maybe passive actions could be factored in (or things could be added that would serve as good "signals" for "front page worthiness") to increase the overall number of votes, such that a handful of users don't control what makes it to the front page and to allow each article score to be more reliable/accurate.
- You can collapse comments (click the `[-]` next to the comment)
- You can unvote (click "unvote", which shows up after voting)
- You get the downvote button after 500 karma
That's how I found out.
For some reason I forgot and thought I was using HNES for that. Sorry to whoever is analyzing this data, this is why you get bad data: people (read: me) are dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
><6 months
>6 months -1 year
>more than 1 year
>Other
Why?
I also use hnnotify.com to get notification emails when my comments are replied to.
FYI I use Gnus as my email and RSS reader.
> What features do you want in HN?
'Always show original article title on hover' (in front page and other listings).
> Feedback on HN (if you got some time)
The 'Avoid gratuitous negativity' guideline is still not being followed and often gives the whole community a negative-nancy vibe. Perhaps a simple rule such as "if the entire content of a comment is about how the OP idea is bad/won't work/etc. (and is marked as being so by a mod[/high-karma-user - implementation detail]), it wouldn't be allowed to rise to be the top comment" will go a long way.
http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103
It's widely known that on Reddit, if you arrive several hours late to a discussion, your comment has very little chance to make it to the top. Exceptions do exist, if your comment is exceptionally good. But if it's just "significantly better" than the existing content, forgetaboutit.
The reason for this is simple: Reddit's system takes only 2 factors into account - the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes. So if post A has been viewed by 1000 people, and accumulates a net score of +10, it will still be shown over post B which has been viewed just 50 times and accumulated a net score of +8.
Even more insidious: a single downvote is all it takes to doom a post on Reddit. If you went to great trouble to write a moving and eloquent post, and someone who disagreed with you downvoted it as soon as it was posted, it will immediately get moved to the bottom of the pile, and no one else will get the chance to see it and reverse the trend.
Is it really fair to prioritize content that just happened to be posted at a better time, and thus, picked up more views? Is it really good to bury a content at the bottom of the heap just because one person downvoted it right after it was posted?
At Caucus, we don't think so. In addition to the sophisticated reputation systems mentioned above, we also take into consideration the number of times a content was seen, and guarentee each content sufficient opportunity to been seen and prove itself. This ensures that all newly posted content is given a fighting chance to reach the top, regardless of when they happened to get posted.
Other than that I am with the "keep it simple"-folks :)
HN community is instead great, and discussions are always very respectful and insightful.
Per visit or per day?
> Should HN implement tagging?
Kinda hard to answer without knowing what tagging on HN would look like.
I don't care about the Y Combinator self promotion of their startup incubators, nor do I care about Y Combinator's own blog content. I also don't have time to read the entire firehose of content that comes through daily from the "new" feed. I self limit to posts that have at least a score of 50. I also use a RSS feed so I can dip in/out as needed.