Notice: Experimenting with HN
Over the next few weeks I'm going to be experimenting with some of the ideas discussed here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back.
218 comments
[ 651 ms ] story [ 4048 ms ] threadI hope it leads to less of the mob voting mentality which seems to take hold every so often in some of the more popular threads and less of the "Sorry I downvoted you" comments that appear every so often.
On the other hand, comment scores are a very quick and easy way to see what's popular, which is still normally an informative comment. Having to wade through a lot of highly voted comments may take a bit more effort but will expose people to a greater variety of opinions.
Intriguing. But I'm glad you're working on keeping the quality of HN up.
Also, clickable link for the discussion you mention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
edit: some comments still have points. Is that just a transition period?
OTOH, I'm in the habit of scanning for double-digit comments when I want to save a little time, so I miss that.
In these cases, I have a neutral feeling about the comment, but upvote it because 0, -1 etc. seem unfair.
Hiding the points will mean that HN will lose some of its self-correcting capacity (when it comes to comments that were downvoted unfairly).
Anyway, it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment.
When my number changes, I click threads and scan for a different number than I recall for my posts.
This tells me which ones are still being read.
If there was a visual indicator of posts that had the arrows ticked since I last looked - this would be solved.
Otherwise, it is akin to throwing your comments to the wind with no indicator of how each is received unless they get greyed out by down voting.
EDIT: I don't feel like I have any incentive to click the arrows on anything if I cant see the result of that click. This really really is a bad design choice.
At a minimum we should be able to see our own scores.
EDIT #2: Also, assuming two people reply to a questions asking for a recommendation for X with a link -- you have no idea what the crowd's opinion may be of the links without them replying.
Typically good content is VOTED UP as an indicator that it is, in fact, good content.
The more and more I think about not seeing content scores, the more obvious it is that this is just flat wrong to not show them.
Edit:
And there are other comments with negative points where the number doesn't show. And still other comments with positive score that are showing up. Consider me confused.
"so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back."
The orange dots / hidden points change has probably been temporarily reverted, that's all.
Edit: On further inspection, it appears I'm wrong, there are users there who are not green. The newest users I could find that are not green created their accounts 6 days ago. Users who created their accounts 4 days ago are green. I haven't had any luck in finding users who created their accounts exactly 5 days ago. So the threshold is either 5 or 6 days.
At first, I would try out HN and the effect on me was quite mild. I simply didn't see what the fuss was about. But the most I experimented with HN, the more I realized how powerful it is.
Nowadays, I use HN daily, sometimes more than once daily.
Sure my relationships with people who don't use HN have suffered. But who cares? They don't understand. That's why they don't use HN.
Take parent comment for example. I disagree with it and if it had a score of 2+ I would've downvoted it, because my gut reaction was not "extremely positive". Now however I look at it and do not know if it's 1 or 2+, and so I cannot cast my disagreement vote without potentially pushing the comment into non-positive range.
(edit) Actually... what if there was separate agree/disagree indicator for each comment. As in "I was going to say something, but this comment is exactly that -> agreed". This will turn up/downvoting back to its original role of interesting/junk quantifier.
The agree/disagree voting stated above would give people insight into what others personally think about their comment and possibly push people to ask themselves, "Is this a useful, interesting comment, but I don't like it because I fundamentally disagree with it? Or is this a bad (meaning - does not contribute or against rules) comment?"
If this system worked, some of the most interesting comments could be ones that are voted up a lot, but very disagreed with.
Although looking at it from the other side, I could say it would make it harder for new users to participate/get up to speed, voting types could be confused, and it would add another step to a somewhat complicated process. (Plus people just might not like it)
edit: Fixed grammar and clarified some of my ideas
A link to his comment would be really appreciated. I find such statement, which is so contrary to guidelines, hard to believe with proof.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." - pg, 1150 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 "Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement." - pg, 852 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 "IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score." - pg, 665 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
Discussions will end up quite boring if people use votes to agree or disagree rather than expressing their point of view in a reply. I tend to think of votes on HN similar to the options for moderation on Slashdot: vote up for insight, vote down for off-topic or flamebait.
pg from 1150 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
I have had this bookmarked for more than a year, as this issue comes up over and over and over again. Sometimes downvotes to express disagreement with the stated position in a comment is the most concise way, the way most friendly to other readers of HN, to indicate that the comment didn't add value to the community.
Of course, pg is experimenting right now to see if different software settings make upvotes, downvotes, flags, and so forth have better or worse effects on the community as a whole and on particular threads.
Maybe what's needed is to try an explicitly enable both these behaviors. Something like let the arrows become "popularity/reddit-mode" and add a separate "excellent" button next to "flag". Then you have two metrics without the annoying slashdot vectors. You can then either use the up/down votes or just leave them there as placebos.
The crux is of course in the choice of adjectives. I wonder what would happen if one would let the users choose free-form tags...
For example Slashdot current top article is: Headline: "Celebrating Yuri Gagarin's 1961 Flight Into Space" Author : "from the to-go-boldly dept"
For instance, deliberate trolling is far better downvoted and ignored than engaged with directly. If a troll gets twelve replies going "Actually I disagree with your Hitler-was-great comment and here's a few reasons why..." then the troll has won.
Alternatively, a truly stupid opinion, even if honestly held rather than trollishly put forth, can derail a conversation. If every time the moon landing is mentioned it results in a big long conversation about whether it was faked or not (with the "yes" side argued by one random idiot) then that's not enhancing the discussion, it's just derailing it.
There are many issues on which sensible people may disagree, and many issues on which they may not. Sensible people should be able to figure out which are which, and downvote or reply accordingly.
PS. I think this comment is great, and I'm sad that I have no way of seeing whether anyone upvotes it or not.
Sometimes people post long, multi-paragraph comments. Seeing a comment like that at 2 points makes me less inclined to read it than if it were at 30 points. Not being able to see points will make skimming comments slower.
Having more articles on the front page that aren't based on a scramble for duplicate-submission karma would probably improve the overall discussion threads, too; those posts tend to draw a lot of shallow comments.
It would also help with spam. Win win win.
I also wonder what percentage of upvotes for submissions comes just from duplicate submissions - maybe those should be counted differently (or not at all)? If the front page is already full of threads about some news about Apple (or whatever), being first to submit a redundant (but distinct) post is disproportionately rewarded, yet reduces the signal/noise ratio even further.
... but that's not what you want people to think. You want them to think "is this interesting and on-topic for HN?" They're not the same question, as much as the former tries to approximate the latter.
If people focus too much on points, you're likely to get more groupthink and more industry buzz (since that stuff always gets a gazillion upvotes) instead of interesting articles.
Certainly, people think about link karma already, but I think this would make it worse. Creating a cost will cause even people who don't think about karma to think about it, even for just a moment -- which is probably not what you want.
I find myself wondering, "if I submit this now, will enough people be awake/etc. to notice it before it spills off the page?" That has deterred me from submitting more interesting content than costing 2 or 3 points ever would.
Also, a lot of those upvotes come from duplicate submissions. I don't have detailed info, but probably a significant percent, likely enough to lift them out of the new feed and onto the front page.
Or, maybe duplicate submissions shouldn't give the original an automatic upvote? I don't know.
Why shouldn't they? The fact that someone else indepedently thought the article was good to submit seems to be at least as strong a sign of interest as a click of an arror.
1. Multiple people independently submitted a content they found, because they found it interesting. This is (generally) good. Maybe it's not the community's cup of tea, and gradually fades away, but that's fine.
2. Somebody notices some fresh, overtly linkbait-ish article. They post it ASAP, hoping that fifty other people will be slower on the draw, netting them fifty upvotes. (Those people may be doing it for the same reason.) Either way: fluff gets submitted. Maybe it has fifty upvotes, maybe there are fifty others that just crowded out something really fascinating. This sets up a feedback loop that rewards posting things because they're linkbait, not thought-provoking.
I suspect that rewarding duplicate submissions too much tips the scales towards rewarding submitting linkbait. Looking at the new page basically ever backs this up. I don't know if adding a cost to submissions, reducing duplicate-submission karma, penalizing everybody involved for flagged->deleted articles, or what will help, but that seems like the root of the problem, so let's talk about it!
Everyone thinks about karma to some extent as it is, given that you can only do certain things with a certain amount of the stuff (downvoting, flagging, etc).
I don't think so. "Topicality" matches "lack of flagging", not "many upvotes". Or at least, it should -- there should be some standardized way, used by most HN members, of marking that they don't think a submission is good HN content.
This actually brings us to a very common problem on HN caused by the fact that you can't downvote links. It works like this:
Suppose you have two links, Link A and Link B. Link A is stupid TechCrunch linkbait, and Link B is an interesting scientific article. Link A is something everyone on the site understands, and 100 people upvote it. But in reality, suppose 2/3 of the people on HN actually would have downvoted it for being a terrible article -- but couldn't -- because there's no downvote.
Link B doesn't have as wide an appeal and gets only 20 upvotes, but nobody thinks it's a bad link. Yet despite 2/3 of the people on HN thinking that the TechCrunch article is terrible, Link A rates way higher than Link B.
While downvotes have their downsides, the fact that HN has no link downvotes basically guarantees that stupid linkbait industry buzz fills the top stories constantly. This is basically the HN equivalent of the Bikeshed problem.
It also gives people an incentive to submit the most linkbaity, overdramatized links possible, because the goal is not to submit good links: it's to submit links that get lots of upvotes. And when there's no downvotes, the best way to get upvotes is to get as much attention as humanly possible.
However, the other type includes articles that provoke people and cause discussion. It doesn't just include contributing comments, but rather it contains debates and opposing opinions. These types of articles need a balance between a low and high ratio. However, the religious arguments you speak of are usually easy to find. These arguments are usually found in a deeply nested comment thread. Once you discard of fourth level comments and all the noise below, you should find that the ratio of comments is a pretty good signifier of the quality of the article.
You usually can only get that much noise on a topic by poking people such that they NEED to correct some injustice done by the article. Sometimes good articles poke people like this, but in either case the comment thread ends up sucking.
And I assure you that people who don't think about karma (I couldn't care less) will continue to not think about it.
Unless a link is linkbait attention-whoring or breaking news, it's basically luck whether it gets that first upvote in its first few minutes to cause it to hit the front page. If you patrol "new" often, you'll see this constantly: tons of things in "new" are relevant articles, but still have no upvotes.
This problem only gets worse as HN grows in size.
Now, obviously, I have >4k karma and I shouldn't care at all about such a small karma cost. But the psychological effect exists regardless.
If each of us is so confident of our own abilities to rate articles impartially, be objective, etc., why are we putting so much thought into how to ensure that we can keep each other objective? If I believe that I can do it, why can't I believe that you can do it too?
Is anybody claiming this? I certainly am not. Quite the opposite.
1. How about not displaying the karma of new users for the first year?
2. The second insight is multiple postings from a news site. HN was good at recommending "hard to find" articles or esoterica. Where there are multiple people submitting the same link, it is probably not going to be hard to find or esoteric in the first place.
I like to see what other people think of my opinions and if I've touched a nerve. And I guess average comment score could conceivably be useful. But Total Karma just seems pointless. If the idea is to identify the oldtimers, then show their join date and be done with it.
Aside, I like not showing the points on articles.
I'm actually surprised at how much I like not showing points at all. I generally pride myself on carefully considering people's arguments and voting accordingly (if at all), but I've found myself reading comments much more carefully. It's too soon to tell what the effect will be in aggregate, but I my initial reaction is to hope the change is permanent.
If you just polled new submissions and cataloged the number of upvotes over time, you could establish the best time to submit an article. If you want to get fancy, you could add some sort of categorization to the metric and break it down by category (like: "articles about node.js seem to get the most attention when submitted Tuesdays at 3:00pm")
My earlier proposal (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242453 ): deduct karma from submitter and _anyone who upvoted_ on submissions that were successfully flagged. That should get people to think the way you mention not only when submitting, but when upvoting as well.
Improve the submissions and comments will naturally improve -- submissions that are one-sided/gossipy/demagogic tend to attract similar comments. Whereas submissions full of technical content are often rich with links to further reading, contrasting viewpoints with cited evidence, etc. (Disclaimer: observations in this paragraph may be subject to fundamental attribution error).
We might take this concept further and make it a "wager" of karma with a minimum bet, and you get gains at some rate proportionate to the size of the bet. But extending it in this way, it would probably also have to have some effect on the front page algorithm for a large bet to ever make sense. Which in turn could lead to a stagnation where elite posters are constantly sinking thousands of karma points into "sure things" and nobody else can compete.
Something to think about, in any case.
Rewarding first submits is the real problem, IMHO. It's like, "first post!", except it also drowns out good submissions.
As for duplicate articles, I'm not even really sure what the problem is. Is it duplicate articles (same url, slightly different) that clog up the system? Or is it the same subject being covered from many different sources? There have also been a few times within the last month where two stories about the same topic will be right next to each other on the front page--amazon/apple/other big industry announcements like to do this.
(Not to imply new accounts are always unwanted of spammy — we were all new once…)
The problem is that the main page of the new feed frequently has a max age under an hour (44 min., currently) - if something doesn't get any upvotes by then, it falls off the page and becomes drastically less likely to get any further upvotes. It also can't be resubmitted for several months. Slowing this down would almost certainly be good - quite a few interesting posts get submitted at the wrong time and never get noticed.
I'd suggest trying just eliminating awarding karma to users, at least for submissions - just use the submissions' points for the ordering on the page. It takes way more effort to write a valuable comment than to hit submit for a link, so let comments become the sole determinant of users' karma. I think users would still submit pages they find particularly interesting for HN out of desire to share interesting things.
EDIT: Aaand negative karma. I like the changes already.
I recently wounded up criticizing a start-up pitch in a thread, and it turned out that the person I had the conversation with was one of the founders. At least the OP - and preferably the coworkers - should be highlighted. The latter could be achieved by letting the OP include user names, when s/he creates a thread.
I'm much more likely to take tptacek's advice on security more seriously than someone else's. Likewise with grellas's legal analysis, Patio11's small business/SEO advice, etc. That their names along might cause high karma for them isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, it causes their comments to be pushed to the top, which is almost always a good thing, as they're consistently the best comments in those threads.
It gives some measure of ability to gauge trustworthiness.
But I'm saying that the first impulse impression/reaction for a comment should be based on what it says, not who's doing the saying. After you read it, you can qualify it by its author. It's not like I'm suggesting we hide the author or anything - it's right there, when you need to find out who wrote what. But don't make it stick out any more than it already does. Put the content front and center, and make it the focus of attention. After you've read the comment and judged it for what it says and how its written, then reflect on who wrote it and what kind of weight that will give it.
It should at the very least be easier to scan the usernames when reading large threads. Now, it's either a strain or something you forgo entirely. I'd be interested to see an eye movement analysis of HN users in relation to the username displays.
Either:
Otherwise it is too close to a commonly pressed button. Particularly on a touch screen.a) Thanks for doing all this work b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality.
I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall:
Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit
Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face.
To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line.
Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement.
All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!
They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would also provide a means for people to decide how to assess.
As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week goes.
If we could get a dump of all the comments tagged with submission time that would be a nice starting point for people to throw their algorithms at.
The community has done a very good job of providing links to earlier discussions and has generally accepted that occasional repeats of old content are nothing to get worked up about and may even be desirable.