HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is It Me, Or Is Submission Quality Suffering?

6 points by doki_pen ↗ HN
I've never spent much time upvoting submissions in the past, but the quality of posts has, IMO, gotten so rotten in the past couple of months that I have made it a point to go through the new submissions a few times a day and upvote links that are worthy of HN. I call upon the HN veterans to please do the same. Maybe it's time for a week of Erlang posts?

10 comments

[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 92.2 ms ] thread
bhavin
When I thought about the issue, it became clear to me that one person's 'quality post' might be other persons unnecessary spam..

If you look at all the top stories from RSS, its difficult to call any of them universal spam.

benologist
He's talking about the new section:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Lots of spam, dupes etc. There's even at least one 'social media guy' who's added HN to his link dumping.

bhavin
yeah, i definitely agree!

I would say its the curse of getting bigger... in good old days (before HN got wide attention), only genuine hackers joined. When it gets so popular and big that every major tech blogger reads/acknowledges it and HN threads show up in first page of google search within 40 minutes of starting, there's bound to be some 'Media Sluts' coming over who's not concerned with being a Hacker!

fgjhryhty
While you're correct, IMHO, this type of post is getting more and more common too. Do none of you complainants realise that filtering is a life skill? ;)
olalonde
Why not crowd source it and add a down vote arrow for submissions? We could even disable the ability to submit for people with karma below X.

Edit: Not sure why this is getting down voted, I proposed the exact same thing a few days ago and got 4 up votes (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853851).

jpadvo
The down votes may be because there has been some discussion of the idea, with pg coming down against it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507970

> "The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners."

That was written almost two years ago, though. Does anybody know if there has been a more recent discussion?

olalonde
Thanks for the clarification. I'm somewhat surprised though that people use the down vote when they disagree with something quite subjective. I usually down vote comments when they are factually wrong or out of place.
HackyGeeky
From what I've seen in the last 6 months, a lame submission just gets quickly overlooked and lost in the new ones that are coming. Now there might be good ones which roll of the page due to the flood of submissions, but many HN users RSS and read them anyways. Hence it seems to be working.

But I agree, more fluff coming in.

rewind
The only thing worse than crappy submissions is people complaining about crappy submissions.
mrduncan
The easiest way to do something about it is to vote up quality articles on http://news.ycombinator.com/newest. If you think something is spam or a dupe, flag it. Posting that quality is suffering does very little to improve quality (in fact, I'd argue that it only adds to the noise).