Poll: Which S/N improvements do you think would most improve HN?
Special bonus round: think of something else (something simple! extra-special bonus points if you read news.arc before suggesting it!) and I'll add it to the poll.
Super-bonus extra special bonus round: if you've been here for more than 500 days and think HN's S/N hasn't degraded over the last 6 months, tell us all why! My perception is that most veterans think it has.
103 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadAlso, why isn't flagging for comments more visible? I suspect many are unaware that it's even possible. I routinely flag "obligatory xkcd", "looks like your database isn't scalable enough to host your blog post about database scalability", "correlation does not imply causation", and other recurring noise.
To be honest, I don't even know how comment flagging works. I know there's a button there (it's buried and shouldn't be), but I have no concept of what happens when I hit it.
To whatever extent it does work, I think an automatic N-week hellban after getting more than one comment flagged off the site makes sense.
(Not that I would touch it if I knew, I am averse to punishment as a form of socialization as I think it's less effective than encouragement and gentle correction.)
Remember, all the threads that germinate from these stories tend to generate more karma in the aggregate than the submission itself.
My guess is that people submit stories from certain sources, no matter what the content is, to try and be the first submissions and get the karma. If ~15 people do this, the submission is going to rise rapidly, not because of it's content, but because of people trying to cash in on a well-known name. For instance, I think an Arrington article is going to get a lot of votes right away because of people trying to be the first submission, not because of the content article. If there was no karma associated with submissions, people wouldn't race to get these types of articles submitted.
Again, just a guess.
Looking at the submission history for some users easily confirms this.
Along with other adjustments to incentives for submitting content, some sort of check for whether most of the user's submissions come from the same domain name could potentially be useful - especially for domain names with the top X% of all submissions site-wide (e.g. techcrunch).
So much good stuff spills off the front page just because it didn't get several votes within the first half hour (and/or wasn't submitted at prime time for EST or PST readers).
2) Weight upvotes on comments from people with high comment karma more than people with low comment karma
3) Weight upvotes on submissions from people with high submission karma more than people with low submission karma.
4) Remove upvote counts from stories and comments, or display a function of the weighted upvote count.
5) Display user's comment and submission karma on their public profile.
Probably too complex of a solution, but it's an idea.
(4) is already up there (hide some or all scores). This is my most wanted feature for the site because holy hell do we all waste a lot of otherwise valuable cognitive resources thinking about the little numbers next to comments.
(2) and (3) worry me, because HN is an echo-chamber site. I get way more karma for the same unit of comment quality than you do, and it's not because my opinions are any more valuable than yours.
The quick (and probably flawed) solution I came up with was to have a tiered base amount that is determined by the karma percentile of the upvoter (eg, 75th percentile might get you an additional 2 points, 25-75 1 extra). Furthermore, there is an additional potential bonus based on the karma delta between voter and votee (ie, upvotes from top HN'ers are more valuable to newbs than to other top HN'ers). As an example, we'll say that we add one point for every 25% tier between the voter and votee (no bonus if they are the same). Using this example, a top-tier vote would be worth 5 points to a newb but 3 to a veteran.
This would allow high-quality posters with more recent accounts to quickly gain the necessary karma for voting, polls, etc without causing such massive karma inflation on the high end.
I wonder if attaching some kind of reason to a downvote would be useful, or even being able to reply privately (visible to the original author, admins/mods and maybe other downvoters?).
Of course, it's possible that it's my judgment that's off, but I get the feeling I'm not the only one.
Oh, and: I've had an account here for ~3 years and lurked for longer, and I'm still not sure I'm using the "flag" feature correctly. I also don't know what happens when I press it, exactly. This sort of thing really ought to be more obvious.
What does flagging do? Remove a post? What would more of it accomplish? What are some sample posts on which it would be used? Are the dangers that such a mechanism would be used to punish unpopular opinions, or even punish correct statements when the consensus is wrong?
Having only been here about 500 days, I'm newish, but it seems like quality is degrading. I don't see why your solutions would fix that. The only thing I can think of that might be interesting to examine is advogato's model.
In the end, it's a hard problem. People want to hang out and discuss news items with all their friends, not just the ones we wish they'd bring around to show up.
My comment is that I read the proposals in the form of a poll and do not see what they are expected to do to solve problems. Perhaps more explanation of their expected virtues is in order. I asked about one in particular as an example, the flag.
I know flagging from youtube, it is used much for erotic and violent content which after being reviewed manually by employees of youtube (which undoubtedly has significant labor costs) has a warning label assigned and age sign-in or click through added. Perhaps it means the same thing here. If so it's not clear what sorts of posts it would be used on since I have not seen violent or erotic posts here, or even spam. So that is why I asked how does it work and please give some examples of actual posts is should be used on. Also discuss how introducing new punishment features will not have unintended consequences. A discussion of these sorts of things should precede any vote on what actions to take, that's how they do it in various congresses and parliaments.
(Regarding the other topic, I don't know if there is a S/N problem or not. There are different kinds of posts than there were a year ago. There are more people here and different people. This is not what my comment was addressing at all though. I assume as a starting point that there is a problem with wrong posts and here are some proposals to solve it. I don't know if that is the case but I am assuming it to move on and discuss proposed changes to the board. The question I had was how will these solve the problem. The mechanisms of how these would work to improve things is no doubt clear to the OP, but is not obvious to me. Then again, since we are being asked to rank them, perhaps it is not so obvious even to the OP. If it is very obvious and clear to all we would just be told these should be implemented, and not asked which ones we have a gut feeling might work.)
I am against putting Karma restrictions to upvote or post Ask HN. It insulates us from attracting newer and possibly better members.
† Two examples of people who weren't here at the beginning of the site, both of whom are notable company operators.
* infographic spam still has an appalling attraction to many HN users who should know better * the 'new' queue is thoroughly full of junk * hardly anybody looks at the 'new' queue so that good things don't get promoted out of it * it seems very likely to me that almost all successful posts involve a voting ring of some sort * all too often, three or more stories about the same topic dominate the home page * certain people are running "made for HN" blogs where they quickly pound out a quick (but banal) response to a controversial article and then get voted up.
If you really wanted to improve matters, you'd want some A.I. filtering against infographic and 'me too' articles, protection against voting rings, and some mechanism to force people to moderate the 'new' queue in order to accomplish what they want to accomplish.
The 500+ karma stuff is a joke; that keeps new people out, except for the ones who don't have a life. That kind of thinking is a big reason I don't participate on StackExchange.
From one angle HN is just a traffic source for user submitted content and that makes it a target for people/sites/companies who aren't invested in the community that is the value.
Great poll, though we may be missing some information here.
Hiding score is also a great idea since it reduces upvote-downvote wars.
It is quick to load which is key and I use it as almost a newspaper each morning going to college.
I have my own sense of what's off topic, but lots of people seem to like to play the "7 degrees of hacker news game", exemplified by this post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241455
In a few hops, you can make anything hacker news!
My own opinion is that politics and other topics that give people that "riled up" feeling ought not to ever be here, whereas the occasional random story about something really unique and interesting might pass muster. But ultimately my opinion counts for little: is PG going to leave the site to 'mob rule', or come down on those kinds of stories? I guess a decision either way would be good in that we'd avoid some of the meta-discussion.
I agree that "7 degrees of reddit" or whatever is bending the rules too much.
Something like a hard ban on politics might lose things that are of interest. For example, what role are technical tools playing in the arabic revolutions right now? Obviously Wikileaks, reddit, youtube, twitter and facebook are playing major roles. And what role are hackers playing? Assange, Anonymous, and the Egyptian Google guy are all using technical skills to create worldwide revolution. That's pretty exciting, using technology to make political change. But should discussing it be banned? Is it necessary to ban that to get rid of the various latest cop shooting incidents reposted from reddit where technology is at most a minor role.
How is this not politics.
(b) Because one minute there was a 200+ story at the top of the page less than a day old, and the next minute there was no such story at the top of the new page, and yet the story hadn't been flagged.
BTW, tagging a story as political doesn't cause it to disappear; it just ranks lower, but would probably still be on the frontpage if it had a lot of points.
There are no repercussions for upvoting or submitting questionable content at the moment. While my proposal is only a small penalty, hopefully it gets people to at least think before actions that potentially increase noise.
Edit: I meant "when a submission gets successfully* flagged", ie killed. Thanks davidw for pointing out the ambiguity.
This is a huge factor, IMHO - a much higher signal/noise ratio in the articles on the front page would probably set up positive feedback, helping with other issues. Unfortunately, there are positive incentives for being the first to submit anything that could potentially be voted up, drowning out interesting content.
One way around that would be that if a story is killed, then and only then does the penalty occur, and it's sharp.
I think it really comes down to a human solution to a human problem: tech only goes so far to fix problems like these.
As it works now, this advantage is an incentive for users to jump in early with low-quality comments that just get votes by pointing out the obvious.
An example of a partial fix for this: show upvotes for comments as normal, but when calculating a comment's contribution to the user's karma, give lower weight to early comments, to reflect the advantage they had in getting upvotes.
HN has a lot going for it. The sparse look and scary name keep out most of the undesirables. It's hard to turn a place called "Hacker News" into yet another funny cat pictures board.
Looking at the front page right now, I'd say things are still very much on topic: Collision detection, hash tables, Amazon S3, C++ style guide, etc, etc... Sure there's a couple lame Techcrunch articles, and maybe a bit of current events, but if you go back and look, those things have always made the front page in limited numbers.
If there's one thing I'd do, it's make the "new" page time-based, instead of strictly limited to 30 items. Everything should get an hour to percolate before being pushed to page 2.
I've always believed that best way to improve the quality of contributions is to make the opportunity to contribute seem finite. It'd be interesting to see what happens if you cap submissions at 2 per user per day and max comment thread participation out at 5 or 10 per day. With a limit in place, people may do a lot more thinking before speaking or submitting.
Change voter weight depending on how much it correlated with PG's votes in the past. Vote can even change direction if inverse correlation with PG's votes was observed.
Next step would be to create personalized page for every user when new submission is sorted according to correlation with that user (instead of PG).