Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
I was just asking RiderofGiraffes if he had any suggestions for fixing the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403449) and it occurred to me that I might as well ask everyone.
Anyone have any suggestions? We're on mostly uncharted territory here.
The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted.
728 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadIn fact, there's lots to be learned from MetaFilter. Two long but useful videos containing Mathowie's wisdom:
- http://vimeo.com/11916466
- http://vimeo.com/21043675
The only way to truly guarantee it would remain high quality would require credentials to use the site, or require invite/referrals, but then that has a whole host of its own problems.
I'm relatively new so I don't know what HN "used" to be like, but in the short time I've been here I've noticed it decline. It seems to me that more and more people who aren't knowledgable or have insights to offer are joining and people like jacquesm and riderofgiraffes are leaving. It was inevitable and has happened in every community I've ever used.
I think that the reason that it has happened to other communities you've seen is because they all had similar incentives. Also, I believe that requiring credentials to use the site (or using referrals/invites) like you suggest is in fact changing the incentives, as people are more accountable to a smaller community/feel more compelled to have a higher standard due to being invited there, rather than just using it as they would public infrastructure (see how people treat a public WC compared to how people treat toilets in homes they've been invited in to).
Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?
Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.
How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.
Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.
This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.
Short "i agree" or "i disagree" type of comments are usually discouraged on HN, as they don't really contribute to the discussion. Usually.
Also, username hiding is a good idea in some cases, but I think it's worse overall. It encourages snarkiness, some posters are actually worth looking out for (grellas on legal threads, pg on HN, etc), and it makes back and forth discussions difficult to follow unless you give each user a unique ID per thread. Impersonation can also be a problem. Overall, I think it adds up to more problems than it solves.
Started logs. [f(x) = log(x+1) or log(x+3)]
Perhaps there should be a "best comment in thread" indicator or something as well?
a vague indicator instead of discrete values. People enjoy seeing their karma for a comment tick over from 3 to 4, but seeing a little thermometer rise by 1px is less noticeable and isn't so much something you can keep track of.
When you see your comment score increment, you know it's because a real human decided it was interesting - that's a good feeling, but it can encourage karma-whoring/playing karma like a game.
I was one of those complainers. And that was then; this is now. I'm not sure I'd complain if the points went away again.
Today I find that comment scores are no longer a reliable guide to anything I care about. Something has changed -- most likely just the scale of the whole system.
Have you thought at all about discerning between vote value based on some metric? You'd need something that doesn't disproportionately disadvantage new users.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266
I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain?
BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?
Yes, if and only if "good" and "bad" comments are defined (intensionally or extensionally).
"Common sense isn't all that common"
Start up and hacking are emotive subjects.
Have you ever seen a typical political debate? Those are driven by emotion. They're full of catchphrases and insults, and nothing of merit.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402027
politics? I don't think so. Economic inequality is a very interesting social phenomenon, though it is often written about in a heated/political way.
Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?
That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.
Obviously if the discussion on these threads is purely political then they probably shouldn't have a place here.
One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.
I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."
Aren't founders as busy as they are in part because they hope to reach the top 1 percent of income in their country? I would want to know what my country's policies are toward high-income people, and what social trends are influencing those policies, if I were pursuing a high-wealth business result, as at least some founders are.
The comments should count as much as the articles do in determining if a particular topic is allowed on HN or not. Because the comments are just as important. To me, at least.
A big part of why I first started reading HN is the the comments in the articles. I could find the articles in half a dozen other places. Still can. But, the comments here aren't usually anywhere else.
And the best comments are typically better than the article itself. If the comments turn political and into people arguing politics with one another, thats not interesting to me anymore. I don't usually find the article being commented on to be very good, and the comments are even worse.
Seeing people argue politics just makes me close HN and find something else to use to kill the next few minutes. I've actually avoided reading articles that I likely would have otherwise found interesting just to avoid seeing the vitriolic comments that inevitably follow.
I think that if you look at the resulting conversations on those sorts of articles, it usually retreads extremely familiar territory.
Also, 90% of that kind of article I've ever seen tends to be someone "broadcasting" a view they agree with ( "hey, this guy's right on!" ) rather than presenting actual new research in economics.
Also, any article like that tends to be something anyone can have an opinion on, tending to attract people that are more interested in those sorts of discussions than about "hacker news".
IMO, at least.
The when these submissions popup all you need is someone to tag them as one of these things. You could either assign people to do this or weight it by karma or something.
Hang out on the front page more and vote there, like RiderOfGiraffes mentioned in his farewell post (or the ensuing discussion, can't remember). It is really important that if you are dissatisfied with the quality of HN (as I currently am) you should do something about it.
Besides, I don't agree with the notion that mean-spirited or dumb comments or ideology-based downvoting/upvoting are limited to politics and current events. Any thread about iOS, Android, Microsoft etc. is also likely generate a lot of those comments and ideology-based up/down voting :)
. Econophysics, fuzzy logic, systems theory -- are those really serious fields? Could they become serious? The answers are subjective.
. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning -- too specific? is this just a journal that someone started to enhance her reputation in a self-defined field? how long has it been around and how long will it be around?
. Douglas Hofstadter -- scholar or dilletante?
. the blog of Terence Tao -- it is serious but is not published in a journal
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Jormakka_J/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who claimed to solve more than one Millennium Problem and is widely considered a crank. Articles were published in journals.
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Perelman_G/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who did solve a Millennium Problem. Articles were not published in journals.
Listen to Frank Wilczek talk about his feelings about not having his genius recognised: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Science/Physics/The-Univ... (Q&A at the end).
Academics play the karma game with much higher stakes.
Problems in politics have led to startups like Votizen and OpenCongress.
Where there is a problem there is a startup. And where there is a problem that people are willing to pay money for a solution there is a business model.
If readers are willing to tag stories not just as "good" or "bad" but with categorical labels, then suddenly the news aggregator "knows" a lot more about the data its serving up. You could have categories at the top, preferential sorting for users, and more.
Note this discussion is exactly akin to deletionism on wikipedia – if we can categorise information effectively, why reject any of it?
maybe ensuring the articles are at least a week old, that instantly removes 99% of the current events which are generally irrelevant and if it is relevant it will still be so in a week.
You might want to consider just shutting it down for 2 months, the great users will likely come back. It will definitely lower the dunbar number quite a bit.
Past political essays, e.g. by Cicero, will generally be intellectually interesting.
Two main problems: 1) everything is politics and current events. That is, everything touches in some way on what's going on in the world and how you feel about it. Maybe I'm applying too broad a brush, but I can see politics and current events in every post on HN -- and always have. About the only exceptions would be the driest of technical articles. If you want a board of Erlang innards, go for it. Other than that, it's always going to be Steve Jobs, EFF, which VC trashes which other, etc -- all gossip. (And gossip is just a broad term for current events and politics)
People post, comment, and vote based on emotional response. You can pretend to cut that out by banning, say, any mention of political parties or politicians, perhaps any pending legislation, and past legislation, how economics prevents or helps startup creation, etc -- but I think you'll just trade one monster for another.
2) I've been thinking about this for a while, and the key problem here is that the commenting system promotes learning how to fit into a community of hackers, not actually doing anything useful. We think of the system as being some sort of logical function to take all kinds of input and provide the "best" stuff for hackers, but it's exactly the opposite: it teaches hackers how to get votes from other hackers. In other words, spend 3 or 4 years on here, like JacquesM did, and if you're lucky you become an expert on what to say and do to make large groups of hackers agree with you. The karma system and large crowds isn't training the material to be more targeted to hackers -- it's training hackers on how to target other hacker's response with their material: how to fit in, what to post to get a rise, how to succeed without really trying, etc.
You can blame the topics for being too emotional, but I think it misses the point. We've always had all kinds of issues on here. What we're getting is a larger pool of people actively gaming the system in hundreds of ways: what kinds of snide comments might sneak by, what's the best time to run flame-war submissions, who to praise, what topics to champion or deride. That's a function of forum size, not system parameters. And that's not even getting into the fact that with a large enough audience, somebody is going to get pumped about just about anything that appears on the front page.
There's nothing nefarious about this. It's all just people being humans. After all, if you are in a conversation, do you speak in order to provide factual information? Or do you speak based on your current emotional state and to effect the emotional state of others? Why would we expect HN to be any different?
Nyah. That proposed rule -- if you could somehow miraculously define it with the precision required -- wouldn't give you the results you desire.
We're getting politics, in short, even if by a different name.
Eliminating the exciting news of the moment would make the site less entertaining for those not seeking intellectual stimulation. It would also make the site less popular. Both are good.
A ban would logically include YC company launches - revealing the conflict between YC's business interest and intellectual interest. It would be a defining moment, for what HN is.
"Startup news" could be a sister site, if important.
Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your total number of comments) you'd actually get kicked off the site temporarily.
alex is right that automatically escalating based on #flags is a blunt instrument. You'd need to perform the escalation manually, you'd need multiple people doing it, and you'd need the decision-maker to attach their name to it ("kn0thing marked this uncivil") so the watchers can be watched in a lightweight manner.
My perception of the flag button now is that it's the bat-signal; it means that something is so bad that it actually warrants individual admin attention.
However, I don't see an algorithmic way to use flagging in such a situation. The new control mechanism would be subject to the same problems that led to the comment being upvoted in the first place.
I'd like to see the mods experiment with a more authoritarian approach. When a comment sucks, I want the mods to impose their will upon the populace, informing everyone that the comment sucks, regardless of its upvotes. Flags could play a role.
Old guard would prefer to vote on a "Contributes/Detracts" axis, while new users vote on an "Agree/Disagree" or "Like/Dislike" axis.
Arguments about this erupt in threads, with newer users generally saying, "It's a democracy, this site is what the majority want it to be, and if most of us want it like this, your loss." But such an approach devolves into pop pablum.
I believe most other ideas here would be unnecessary if the meaning of the up/down arrows could be resolved either socially or algorithmically.
The "correct" solution would be to offer a quadrant, with contributes/detracts on one axis, and agree/disagree on the other. But that would require a rewrite.
Instead of a rewrite, I'd experiment with temporarily changing the arrows to say something explicitly supporting well reasoned comments:
Some would undoubtedly still interpret these as a rightness axis like "agree/disagree", so perhaps an even more familiar pair of terms: However, the term "content" might lead to voting up every valid content remark, so the positive word should be something with more of a value judgment, while still being a word that can apply to points of view with which one disagrees: The idea with the vocabulary choice is that a neutral comment would not be clicked on, and "interesting" is directly in the HN charter.I think this type of vocabulary is more in line with the desire to see well reasoned or contributory discussion flourish.
* Mouse over the word "interesting" could tooltip: "This comment made me think."
// This account is ~400 days old, but a prior anonymous account is ~800 days old, giving some perspective on the trend over time.
A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
But this?
the duplicate posts which happen a few months later
Once we're up to a timescale of months, or even weeks, we're no longer being sensible. Instead we're exhibiting FAQ Syndrome: The irrational fear that someone, somewhere, is saying something that isn't entirely original.
I think the cult of originality is actually a big problem at HN, and other "news" sites as well. The important things in life are not particularly original, and they do not change particularly quickly. A site that is determined not to re-discuss previous topics is doomed to discuss nothing but ephemeral trivia. The great thing about celebrity gossip is that it is always new! We can manufacture celebrities at whatever rate is needed to keep the front page fresh. But we can't manufacture Knuths as needed; we've only got the one set of Maxwell's equations; new books on the scale of K&R or SICP don't come along every day. But if we discourage the constant reexamination of these classics they will get placed on the dusty shelves and we'll see nothing but discussions of the latest gossip and bling. You know, like we have today.
I always wished HN would feel more like academia, which cycles like the seasons. Every year, you discuss all the classics again for a new audience of newbs. After a little while, you've heard all the classics and are ready to graduate, or become a professor. This is what makes me miss the days when this was "Startup News" and was more explicitly tied to the YC cycle, the time when you could tell that a new YC class was starting by watching for the influx of new people.
Perhaps there should be a "hard merge" that prevents duplicates from sharing the front page, and a "soft merge" that multiplexes comments from duplicates at any time range under any of the submissions?
I wish there were places to go online to teach or be taught about topics in a discussion-forum kind of way. I'd love, for example, a Lambda the Ultimate for newbs. LtU is an awesome, high-quality site, I just wish I could understand more than 10% of it.
I tend to use HN when I'm too tired to work or just waking up. Those are also the times when I'm not interested in buckling down and studying a hard subject. But surely I could do better than the kind of learning I get from HN (and other casual internet use), which is random access to shallow, scattered tidbits, as if training for a massive Trivial Pursuit tournament you never signed up for. If only there were a community where people devoted themselves to teaching and learning classic topics in a sustained way, but that still had the social and casual aspect. News as such doesn't interest me that much. I'm mostly just consuming it by default. If anyone's read this far - my apologies for adding a mostly off-topic comment to an already crowded thread.
I think a more useful metric than "number of votes since submission" would be "number of votes in the past hour/day/whatever." That way an item could be submitted days in the past, but still get on the front page if it had enough upvotes recently. For testing purposes, this could be an alternate front page like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Another option would be to have moderators manually de-dupe stories or fix them to link to the original source. While they're at it, the mods could ban or reduce the karma of users who submit blogspam or duplicate stories.
I suspect a "closed as duplicate" system, ala StackExchange, could work well here, assuming a high enough bar were to be set for who could do (or vote for) such a thing.
Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussions up, but I think enough people on here care about the quality of the community to help out.
I kind of like how YouTube does their voting system (showing both the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes).
Please label it "the gruseom button".
I think some people here are learning that hugely self-confident, strongly opinionated, obvious writing tends to spark a strong agreement reaction on the readers, who quickly upvote a comment that adds nothing to a discussion. These are a problem, as they encourage snark and posing over effectively arguing things out, but they are very hard to treat as disagreeing with them is likely to cause knee-jerk reactions in many upvoters.
While I agree with the general case, in my specific case I called somebody an "idiot" out of anger and tptacek called me on it. It was quite mortifying and I've tried to watch my words since.
I never see "nice" tellings-off. A "nice" telling-off might be: "reader123, this comment is mean. please be nicer"
When someone points one of these issues out, I often feel bad about it. However, I usually don't edit my comment to remove or reword the offending portion because I think it's rude to the person replying and, oddly enough, those who later read it. Because they've made a good point, if I fix up my post it breaks continuity, possibly makes them sound like an idiot, and feels like I'm trying to cover up my lameness.
If I got a similar note that was private I'd feel free to make the changes without as many of those worries. Especially without concern for how they'd take it as presumably they're looking for me to shape up not score points on my misbehavior. I also think that some people that might say something are loathe to reply publicly in fear of just making it worse.
Of course it could seriously backfire if people used it just to be mean back without fear of the community observing. But it seems like it might be worthy of trying.
But anything that encourages feedback and discourages defensiveness will be effective.
Sometimes I don't know if I am being downvoted because I am being too vicious (I get carried away from time to time) or because I am just completely wrong.
I make a lot of lousy comments, because I don't really have a lot of respect for the quality of discussion here. But, you know, if I got private feedback a few times -- even from people who were powerless to punish me -- that my comments were bad, then I would actually stop.
I don't agree. You'll just create another incentive to game for karma and that's what I've seen at sites with karma-linked features.
I'd suggest that either
* nobody has the feature
* everybody has the feature
* only paying customers have the feature
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215549
The quality of discussion was much higher than on most posts today. And that was only a year ago.
Instead you have people ranting "content should be free", "paying is an outdated model", "the nyt are stupid" without any kind of coherent argument.
Once upon a time Hacker News was called Startup News, it was a place to share links and discuss between people passionate about startups. Good links and discussions stayed around for days, every aspect of startup life was discussed.
Sadly that time has long gone. As I write this, on the front page of HN there are maybe 4-5 stories out of the top 30 that relate to startup topics.
Articles relevant to startups are being pushed out by generalist tech and programming articles that are better served by the many many subreddits on these topic. While it's open to debate whether these are on-topic on Hacker News or not, HN is far less about startups than it used to be.
Many contributors to HN don't even see it as being about startups anymore, even contributors who've been involved in HN for over a year are talking about it as a tech or programming site. The startup stories that reach the frontpage tend to be on technical topics, the non-startup tech audience of HN now means stories focused on the non-technical aspects of startups such as marketing and raising money make it to the front page far more rarely than they once did.
I remember complaining at one point about the number of stories about A/B testing on the front page. I wish I could complain about that now.
Take a look at Gabriel's Ask YC archive - it was created to address the startup questions that frequently turned up on HN, for many of these topics I can't recall when I last saw them discussed on HN.
There are a hundred social networking sites that serve the tech community from proggit to dzone, what differentiated HN was the focus on the startup community. That focus is dying out, and we're becoming just another tech social news site.
I don't think we can make HN be more about startups again, the audience has changed too much for that, and it wouldn't be fair to the non-startup tech community that's come to rely upon HN.
So instead I'd like propose that HN stays as it is, but pg creates a new HN called Startup News, which has startups at it's heart as HN once did.
I don't value HN as a resource for entrepreneurship anymore. There are some interesting technical conversations here still; but you can find those all over the place.
(Of course there is still a lot of information of value for entrepreneurs here... it's just buried under the flood of everything else.)
You seem to dislike the non-startup material, yet those older members who were around at that time must have liked the discussions sprouting from the "more generalist tech" posts, else the name wouldn't have been changed.
Thus, I reason that it is not the range of topics submitted that is the problem, but the quality of the posts and subsequent comments. I believe the older members valued intelligent discussion on any topic (centered around tech-startups).
I think a solution should concentrate on improving the discussion of topics, promoting those that spark the "best" (for some definition of "best") conversations. Therefore I suggest:
More liberal use of the downvote button by those that have the ability (over 500). Number and score of comments should play a (larger?) factor in ranking stories. More aggressive moderation of "off topic" or vacuous submissions and comments.
But over time people took it to mean hacker in the technology sense of the term, and thus we now get reviews of Ubuntu on the front page, which you would never have seen a few years ago.
How would have all of the now-members of both HN and the greater 'community' have stumbled upon this resource if it was invite-only?
One thing I've noticed repeatedly in the online communities that have scaled succesfully (in a cultural sense) is that the founders/owners/admins tend to take a very active role, both proactively by being role models and also by stepping in and settings things straight whenever they feel the community is straying too far from their vision. Reddit is a good example of this. Joel's forums at joelonsoftware, which fostered a very tightly knit entrepreneur community, were also heavily influenced by the omnipresence of the site owner.
Unfortunately this is not an elegant technical hack, just simple hard work on the part of administrators.
A community stands or falls on the quality of the interactions. Therefore to a certain extent, you have to let it thrive or die on its own.
Solely my opinion, but I see points as getting in the way, motivating bad behavior, and not relevant to why I come to HN.
For instance, I've seen many instances of newbies making an "lol" or "wtf?" comment only to be quickly downvoted in to oblivion.
Hopefully it doesn't take much of that for them to get the point.
Also, the downvoting provides a quick and easy way for the community to express displeasure at someone violating the community's norms, without needing to write a long post explaining just why a comment consisting solely of "lol" or "wtf?" isn't appropriate.
On the othe hand, it's clear that karma is not a panacea, that it can be gamed, that it can encourage an echo chamber effect, and that it scales poorly when a site becomes as large as HN.
Anyone who's smart should be able to contribute w/o passing some sort of exclusionary bar.
The difference is that to get even one or two stories a week on the front page of Digg, you basically had to devote your entire life to the site. Whereas getting 100 karma doesn't take more than a couple weeks of casual use.
This seems to have worked well for stack overflow. Just spitballing here pg, but what if you extended this to commenting as well? HN could be open to browsing, but to comment, you needed to be invited by another member with x karma? You could quantify this by requiring 10 karma to comment and 100 to post, and allowing a user to gain x karma by getting an 'invite' from an existing user with 100 karma.
Of course, without data, it's hard to draw conclusions about the fundamental issues.
Some of these people just create an account to make a few contributions on specific threads and then they're gone. Having an invite system would increase the friction in being able to do this.
If voting on a comment gives karma to the commentator and it takes karma to vote, then people would need to comment to vote. I think this type of zero sum game would increase the number of poor comments from people who want to vote and an increase in poor comments is what we are trying to prevent.
I think that an initial 100 karma level for submissions will make the site more difficult to use for the not native English speakers.
Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all.
I'd say:
* create some real cost to making comments
* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time
* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly
A karma penalty is a very soft slap on the wrist, at best.
It won't stop trolls, or assholes, or anyone with an agenda.
Subtracting a fixed amount of karma also gets less effective the more karma one has accumulated. So people with a lot of karma will be able to get away with more than people with less karma.
This has an upside, in that it allows more valued members of the community to express themselves more freely. The downside is that they can act like assholes without much repercussion. If the community winds up rewarding them for acting like assholes (by, say, upvoting their assholish comment) then that's even worse.
Of course, any community that not only tolerates but encourages assholes is not a community I want to be part of, and I've left a number of communities over that sort of behavior.
But there are other solutions short of "love it or leave it". I describe one such alternative in another comment in this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266
Why is seniority good in and of itself? Privileging seniority seems anti-democratic and anti-newbie.
Stackexchange kind of does this. You need a certain (low) amount of karma before you can post certain types of submissions.
I think it's important to let new users have a visible voice, but giving older users greater powers for moderation might help preserve the older attitude of the site.
Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.
It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't correlate with good.
I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some that don't. See how this affects the results.
This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.
I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.
I think in general you already have most of a filter in that bad comments get pushed down and the lower sections of comments seem to be read much less often.
I've got no citation at all, but I'd bet that people who have N comments left in the next week will be more miserly about using them. You could also make exceptions for replying to replies and that kind of thing, so as not to artificially limit back and forth (which is sometimes a good thing; for example, tcptacek and zedshaw always have good conversations, if a bit argumentative).
It'd cut back on people who shotgun "funny" comments and have them land occasionally without disrupting people who try to only comment when they have something valuable to say.
A set of super voters would also be good, but, again, not super democratic.
Also, on the 'less democratic' idea, up-votes from users with more karma could be weighted heavier. Quality comments would rise up faster.
For example, bloggers who write insightful stuff on a regular basis should get some sort of bonus when content from their domains is upvoted early on. Maybe each upvote would internally count as 1.5 upvotes for the first 100. Similarly, bloggers who have a reputation for writing linkbait should get some sort of penalty.
Right now you can easily spend ten hours writing an amazing blog post and have it not even make the front page. This provides an amazingly strong disincentive for intelligent people to contribute, especially when the front page is dominated by vapid current events gossip. The heart of the problem is that the current system is set up to reward people for submitting garbage from TechCrunch and to punish people who try to make thoughtful contributions of their own.
Similarly, content that takes longer to read should stick around on the new page for longer. Otherwise the front page gets dominated by fluff. Again, there are lots of people who would be willing to spend 10+ hours writing a 3,500 word essay designed to benefit the HN community, but they don't because they know that there is essentially zero chance of it hitting the front page. Right now by the time the first few people finish reading, it's no longer on the new page so any upvotes basically count for nothing. This problem gets vastly worse as the amount of content submitted increases, so if nothing changes then we're probably only a couple more iterations away from having the front page be dominated by pictures of cats.
On the other hand, I've been ridiculously productive the last few months now that HN is basically unreadable, so maybe the decline in quality isn't such a bad thing after all.
The idea is to reward people who are writing good stuff but who aren't making the front page, not to reward people who already have all their stuff upvoted.
I can't see it working here, for a number of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
That might work when there are a small number of participants and everyone has met everyone else face to face or when there's at least someone to vouch for the identity of every participant, but it doesn't scale very well to a community the size of HN.
I used to participate in the comments because the conversations were stimulating and the community was small. The community's too large for everyone to talk now, but HN has been the best tool for the intellectually curious to date and that doesn't have to change. The bar for commenting just needs to be higher.
When I read the top comments nowadays I'm expecting them to be written by:
- the author of the submitted article - the subject(s) of the article - employees or close relations to the subject(s) of the article - experts in the subject matter
At the bottom I expect to find comments such as product feedback or links to the print version of the article and minor but useful stuff like that. Smart people with interesting things to say shouldn't leave comments here--the community's too big for that now.
I'm not sure how you programmatically enforce that. It might be as simple as changing the commenting policies and have the users adjust their self policing.
That way the information is still accessible to everyone, and if someone new has something to interesting to contribute, that info will still surface if it's picked up by vetted users.
The positive mods can promote stories and comments beyond normal up-voting and the negative mods do something similar with down-voting/flagging.
People can become 'supermods' based on karma, election, or something more arbitrary.
Reddit has subreddits and you can choose the ones from which stories appear on the front page. HN can start with allowing users to 'frontpage' other users aka whitelisting by showing stories from only these users on the front page. The next logical step is allowing blacklisting. Version 2.0 of this would allow whitelisting and blacklisting of content-sources (sites), in addition to users, so that I could blacklist certain blogs if I wanted to.
This will result in some fragmentation of the community, but in my opinion, it will keep HN interesting for everyone. This may also reduce the need to answer subjective editorial questions such as - we don't allow politics, but is open-source-politics politics? Is coverage of world-changing-elections allowed?