I think this lays the real issue out but buries it:
> The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content.
HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory.
I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.
Yes high submissions with no or low involvement in the community. Either they really, really, really, really love submission karma or they're here to exploit the site.
Average votes/submission seems a better gauge than raw number of submissions. Maybe there are people who are just really good an finding and posting a lot of stuff that's interesting.
It should be pretty hard to automate spam comments (without the comments getting downvoted to hell). Whereas automated submission of stories is super trivial.
> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory.
that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about.
and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many more git and fabric tutorials do we need, or why should I care what every blogger on the planet thinks of twitter.
Dude, I'm happy when I see a git / fabric tutorials. I'm always looking for new tips.
Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency things, but mostly the submissions wouldn't even be worthy of Slashdot.
when it comes to technical knowledge on HN, I'm happy when I see a talk f.ex. how huge companies solve tech problems, or conference talks around specific technologies, because it's knowledge very hard or sometimes even impossible to acquire on my own - no matter how hard I would try, I won't have a clue how facebook handles massive deployments or how twitter scales unless somebody from the company publishes it and the community shares it. there is a vast ammount of technical advice/news to share, but toolset tutorials are one google search away, you don't need hn support for that, rtfm.
I don't think they're different issues. I think there's a bunch of people who want to be spoon fed arstechnica/torrentfreak/extremetech/etc just like they were on digg and reddit who cannot even pretend to be impressed by weekend projects or early stage startups.
That's why I like the idea of going after the users and sites that are better suited to other social news sites - the crossover in stories and topics between HN and http://www.reddit.com/r/technology is significant when it should be incidental.
> HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory.
I think this article falls exactly under the heading of a pandering submission strategy. It's link bait. It's a semi-controversial topic trending on HN, better jump in and vomit up a blog entry to get some traffic! Nevermind that it says nothing at all.
Here's a thought for improving your image of HN: Read less of it.
Read a few submissions with interesting titles, post a comment or two and go back to doing something worthwhile. I know I waste too much time on HN as it is but many HN'ers spend way more time on here than me. With some topics pushing 200+ comments who has the free time to read everything? Don't. You'll have less noise to signal. You also won't get so emotionally caught up in the drama that inevitably accompanies human interaction.
Stop crying. HN is fine.
EDIT: 'Stop crying.' isn't directed at Benologist. Just realized it may come off that way.
I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat abstract reward nonetheless).
Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs. Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own. "You get what you measure."
"Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs."
Maybe some sort of comment karma normalization based on the upvotes for the topic as a whole or the total number of votes on the topic, to try to adjust for popularity of the topic vs quality of the comment...
I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average karma.
The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it.
I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively.
I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.
I thought the sorting of comments was based on the votes for that comment in that thread, not based on the average karma of the poster. Is that not the case?
If 5 of us post in a thread at the same time, and no one upvotes any of the comments for an hour, then the ranking of the posts is going to have some kind of dependency on our karma metrics, rather than a "first come first serve" ordering.
Wow, I had no idea average karma sorted people higher/lower.
But you actively try to protect your karma? After my karma hit 1000 I basically stopped caring anymore. What incentive do you have to protect your karma (serious question, I'm not sure I understand why it matters)?
I didn't know this, either. This idea will only work if karma measures what we want it to measure. If karma isn't associated with quality but with site-gaming, or snarky commenting, or other bad stuff, this system creates a positive feedback loop for sending the site in the wrong direction. Yikes!
I suspect the average karma preference has a negative effect on quality, as you've pointed out. There is incentive for the best commenters to only comment occasionally, when they'll get a lot of karma for it.
Digg kept piling on stuff like that, making some users more valuable than others according to the algorithms, and I think it hurt rather than helped. I'm not sure it hurts on HN, but it doesn't seem to solve the core problem, either.
I think it does come down to a social problem being tackled by technical solutions. It may be that the only way to make this problem go away is to empower moderators (of which HN has more than a few) to simply remove the most negative stuff before it has a chance to alter the tenor of a thread. Hostility breeds more hostility and it spirals ever upward, until the conversants are more frustrated than talkative.
I always thought it would be interesting if you're 'average karma' number was rounded (floor(avgK)) to the nearest int and then applied as an upvote (or down vote) if that would change things. It is always dangerous though to embed in the system a feedback mechanism like this.
I downloaded the source once again to see how hard it would be to implement my 'directional multi-root' sort of karma system in HN [1]. Its one of my 'spare time' projects.
How about a mathematical reward system for new threads? Something like:
Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))
That way if you contribute something great in a new thread and someone upvotes you, you'll get more karma from it.
A warning though, this reward system would encourage equal distribution of comments, versus the typical 80/20 rule. Not sure if that is what is best for the community.
Fuck average karma. Who even looks at it (besides the owner of the karma)?
I post a relatively high volume of comments on articles that get little visibility. Sometimes I answer an Ask HN type question with what ( I thik) is a good/useful answer and don't even get an up vote from the asker (but I have gotten 'thanks!' replies).
Oh well, I come here to discover new things and try and return knowledge I've contributed over the years. Karma has zero inherent value to me. The day I can spend it at Starbucks, the gas station, a sushi bar, or any place else I'll start go give a fuck.
I guess some people hope, that high Karma will improve their chances when they apply to Y Combinator.
Actually, I vaguely remember a post or essay from pg, which suggested that one of the reasons to create HN was to assess potentially good founders based on the content they post on HN.
I'm not saying YC is actually skimming applications based on user Karma. But even if they don't, people might believe it.
Actually, I vaguely remember a post or essay from pg, which suggested that one of the reasons to create HN was to assess potentially good founders based on the content they post on HN.
Hahaha. PG should be doing the inverse. If someone is spending enough time on HN to have a really high karma then they aren't spending that time building something.
Fuck karma in general. I can't think of a practical use for publishing the karma number. Real karma ripples throughout the world on it's own, you don't need a number to record it.
There's far too much ego worship in communities like HN, where nerds are often too concerned with it to begin with. The whole 'honoring the most popular community members' is the same. It's horrifically vain and just gives otherwise normal people's commentary much greater weight than it needs. Good comments will stand on their own.
Though you are correct in theory, I think the karma points are beneficial in driving the community. I didn't know what it was before I signed up, but now I check it out every now and then (though you can tell by my score, I don't obsess over it). Though maybe having a user know their overall score is a detriment.
It doesn't matter how much Karma is accumulated overtime, but consistently benefiting the community is valuable. Maybe we shouldn't be shown an overall karma score, but just how your karma has changed over the last month. While keeping th e overall score hidden from users.
I think levels would be better, taking the idea of a veteran to the next level. But I think the levels should be based on time and "karma". So you start off green, if you stopped on the site 5 years and never added anything you would be green but the same would be said if you were on the site for 5 minutes and got 1000 karma in a day, you would then move up a level or something but didn't get the "veteran" accolade. You then wouldn't be able to receive such higher levels without being a member for a certain period as well.
Maybe the overall levels relate to how much you can help moderate the site?
I know karma doesn't matter but I do find myself looking when I come onto the site and equally I don't post as often as I should because I find idiots down voting something for the sake of "happy clicking".
Life is too short to worry about votes and karma. If it really matters to you, just timing posting the right stories will net you hundreds or thousands of karma at a time. Then you can burn a couple karma expressing what you wanted to say even if it's unpopular.
But I don't understand the need for identifying who is a veteran or not. People who use the site will know who is a veteran and who isn't. In addition, someone without much of any karma will be treated probably poorer than many other users, or their ideas dismissed. Just because someone is new to the community doesn't make their comment less valuable.
The site will take care of the sorting/displaying of comments. There's no need for me to see the numbers that make the site run. It just ends up giving some people a false sense of importance. Keep the karma, but hide it, and maybe people will stop changing what they say just because of who they're talking to.
Yeah, I like to see my absolute Karma score tick upwards (it's how I know that I'm adding value to the community) but I don't stress out about saying something that might not be a huge hit to my average karma.
I'm actually amazed at the amount of time that happens actually. I've had the same experience. And I tend to upvote people who respond to my comments as long as they don't trash what I've said.
> I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"
Why not have the 10 or so newest submissions on the top or bottom of the main page, so that everyone gets to see them, without having to explicitly click on a different page?
e.g. if the new submissions are at the bottom of the main page, the "service to the community" of reading the new submissions is done almost automatically once you have gone through the list of the top submissions.
Why is karma tracked at all? I know that it's used to unlock features of the site, but that doesn't need to be visible. The point of voting is for ranking comments and stories (which is great!), but it seems to have negative effects when public.
I disagree. I put a lot of effort into finding good stories and posting more useful comments when the /leaders page was a big deal, solely because I wanted to reach the top half of the page.
Not everyone is motivated by point scoring but some people are, and that's not always a bad or selfish thing.
The title of your piece suggests a satirical tone and I was ready for a delicious morsel. Alas, I could not detect the slightest hint of sarcasm or of a darker, ulterior aim. It could still be there, mind you, but on subtler wavelength than my resonant cavity can detect. It might as well have been titled "HN Considered Harmful", I suppose.
I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone will not be enough though.
Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?
I agree with showing certain users in certain colors. I don't think karma is the right metric for it.
I'd like to see green for new users, maybe some specific color for throwaway accounts of someone with a real account, let people with special other colors reveal that color if they wish, and maybe good and bad colors for people who meet other requirements -- there are some people who probably deserve a "red flag" for 30+ days, but not hellbanning, and others who deserve the honorary purple.
The only karma related way I'd award purple is for submission points, or for being early upvoters on submissions in /new which are later upvoted by a lot of other people. Sheer accumulated comment karma is probably not a great metric, since someone who is on HN a lot, chooses to write "populist" comments, etc. is likely to accumulate a lot of karma without adding much value.
> I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone.
Why should we set apart veteran users? Only because they are longer here doesn't mean they have a more important opinion on a certain topic.
Setting them more apart is like having village elders. Even if they talk about something they have no idea of they are still right because they are so old?
While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green.
Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem has always been around. I wonder if this problem is cyclic and peaks at different times during the year or during certain events, such as summer or demo days.
Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")
You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid controversy (as that is not my aim).
The original - Swift, 1729: A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country,
and for making them beneficial to the publick.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem:
before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment)
after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank))
another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))
EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1")
This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community.
This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life.
Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.
The problem here is that someone who consistently provides high-quality (or at least frequently-upvoted) comments / submissions will likely have less of a contribution than someone with significantly lower karma. For instance: you would have (slightly) more influence than someone with 3000 karma and an average of 5.
Then this will reduce the amount of impact they have on the community as a whole. They will be doing us a favor by starting out ruining their karma.
Also, to state the obvious, every member here was a new member at one time and I'm not ready to say that is "typical" behavior. It's just very memorable behavior.
The whole reason why I submitted this was because PG said it wasn't the comments that cause issues but that bad comments were getting upvoted too much.
The problem with average karma is stat it strongly discourages people from posting replies to less popular or older messages. I've made a conscious choice to ignore my average karma. I dont think it is conducive to good conversation, as it tends to be heavily biased towards the first few posts.
I wonder if we should go the other way -- I always liked slashdot's system of a 5 point cap on any post. Is a 500 point post really enter than a 100 point post, or is it more likely it is seen more often?
Actually, karma is very good market indicator for any board and filter bubbles tend to be specific to filtering out certain types of content. This won't be filtering anything by content.
This is true, but it is a problem that currently exists.
For orthogonality's sake, I would suggest that if most of your posts come from 1:1 conversations, post by post, then perhaps there is a better medium to communicate with that person than through a board like HN.
The people that I have those conversations with are people I only know through HN, and the discussions come out of what happened here. Those discussions would not have naturally happened in another medium.
As an example I give you this discussion. In this thread I have 2 posts, both with 1 karma right now. I do not expect them to go up much if at all. Where would you suggest that I should have gone for this conversation with you?
EDIT: I changed the evaluation to not make the avg karma relative to total karma but instead to the median value of average karma of all users. The downside to this is that Median(AvgKarma) would need to be calculated quite often throughout the day because I doubt pg wants to pay for the resources to run that everytime someone votes.
I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National Enquirer style headlines.
There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.
I agree that multi-directional voting is worth exploring and that promoting karma points leads to more sensationalism. Possibly even some form of democratic tagging?
I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and actually reading it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim.
One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.
Could you incentivize people that upvote new items that ultimately cross some threshhold (front page/votes) such that their upvotes translate into some kind of karma or reward points of some sort? The earlier you are as an upvoter the bigger the reward? Of course that may just incentivize people upvoting everything in sight :) Perhaps historical upvoting patterns on the New Page could be incorporated to penalize that kind of behavior. Just throwing it out there. I do agree, I occasionally browse the new page but there is just so much cruft there that looking for the gems is time consuming so I generally just (lazily) wait for them to hit the front page.
Edit: Once again bitten by reading HN comments before the article as he proposes something along these lines in the post, doh! :)
It's unlikely that a purely algorithmic ranking solution will be adequate. HN should better leverage the judgment of the site's veteran members across the board, rather than only for article ranking. Awhile back I posted a self-organizing way to filter comments that works in this way: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753.
The 'more' link regularly fails to render on my IPhone 4 leading to a further long term aversion to going there. Not sure if anyone else has had the same experience? Just saying if it's affecting many devices this Is just compressing the issue further.
I have a different problem in that the 'more' link uses some crazy key instead of 'page=2'. If you press it a relatively short time after being loaded, you'll get 'unknown or expired link', meaning you need to backtrack, reload the page, scroll again, click... it's trained me out of bothering to do it anymore.
In my experience the _more_ link works for about 5 to 10 minutes. If you slowly scroll down the page reading things on it, by the time you get to the bottom of the page it no longer works. You have to reload the page to get the link to work.
Add to the list: Keep HACKER NEWS FOR AND BY HACKERS..stop posting other useless content. I want this place to learn and read about new coding practices, api's, only technically relavent stuff.
I think "reward for browsing New" could be a good idea yet very difficult to implement it well. What I'd like to see is a front page with various lists of submissions according to different criteria, some ideas: 1st| most votes this month - this week, 2nd| "Hot today" (this'd be similar to the current front page I believe), 3rd | "Promising" (Posts from New section that begin their momentum), 4rd | Most commented month / week. Basically a bit of filtering.
While reading this article through HN, (http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/) I thought it will be a good idea if HN can be moved inside an onion network like tor. People need to go through tor in order to access the site. It should not be visible via normal http/ip addresses. This can reduce the number of users coming on HN, and hopefully HN maintains the authenticity.
"What doesn't matter"
...
"Complaints of 'too much startups, not enough tech' or vice-versa"
Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making software and hardware do interesting things.
The site was originally called startup news. I think that in retrospect the rename to HN was a bad idea, because it changes peoples expectations of what the site is for.
Regardless, what you are describing would be much appreciated.
Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked. Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-thread.
This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5 twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.
192 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread> The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content.
HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory.
I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.
that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about.
and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many more git and fabric tutorials do we need, or why should I care what every blogger on the planet thinks of twitter.
Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency things, but mostly the submissions wouldn't even be worthy of Slashdot.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive...
That's why I like the idea of going after the users and sites that are better suited to other social news sites - the crossover in stories and topics between HN and http://www.reddit.com/r/technology is significant when it should be incidental.
I think this article falls exactly under the heading of a pandering submission strategy. It's link bait. It's a semi-controversial topic trending on HN, better jump in and vomit up a blog entry to get some traffic! Nevermind that it says nothing at all.
Here's a thought for improving your image of HN: Read less of it.
Read a few submissions with interesting titles, post a comment or two and go back to doing something worthwhile. I know I waste too much time on HN as it is but many HN'ers spend way more time on here than me. With some topics pushing 200+ comments who has the free time to read everything? Don't. You'll have less noise to signal. You also won't get so emotionally caught up in the drama that inevitably accompanies human interaction.
Stop crying. HN is fine.
EDIT: 'Stop crying.' isn't directed at Benologist. Just realized it may come off that way.
This is an interesting suggestion.
I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat abstract reward nonetheless).
Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs. Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own. "You get what you measure."
Maybe some sort of comment karma normalization based on the upvotes for the topic as a whole or the total number of votes on the topic, to try to adjust for popularity of the topic vs quality of the comment...
The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it.
I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively.
I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.
But you actively try to protect your karma? After my karma hit 1000 I basically stopped caring anymore. What incentive do you have to protect your karma (serious question, I'm not sure I understand why it matters)?
Digg kept piling on stuff like that, making some users more valuable than others according to the algorithms, and I think it hurt rather than helped. I'm not sure it hurts on HN, but it doesn't seem to solve the core problem, either.
I think it does come down to a social problem being tackled by technical solutions. It may be that the only way to make this problem go away is to empower moderators (of which HN has more than a few) to simply remove the most negative stuff before it has a chance to alter the tenor of a thread. Hostility breeds more hostility and it spirals ever upward, until the conversants are more frustrated than talkative.
I downloaded the source once again to see how hard it would be to implement my 'directional multi-root' sort of karma system in HN [1]. Its one of my 'spare time' projects.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563430
Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))
That way if you contribute something great in a new thread and someone upvotes you, you'll get more karma from it.
A warning though, this reward system would encourage equal distribution of comments, versus the typical 80/20 rule. Not sure if that is what is best for the community.
It's complete dumb luck whether or not something makes it out of there now, tons of great content that never gets seen.
I post a relatively high volume of comments on articles that get little visibility. Sometimes I answer an Ask HN type question with what ( I thik) is a good/useful answer and don't even get an up vote from the asker (but I have gotten 'thanks!' replies).
Oh well, I come here to discover new things and try and return knowledge I've contributed over the years. Karma has zero inherent value to me. The day I can spend it at Starbucks, the gas station, a sushi bar, or any place else I'll start go give a fuck.
I'm not saying YC is actually skimming applications based on user Karma. But even if they don't, people might believe it.
High karma does not make up for an application that does not resonate with the reviewers.
Hahaha. PG should be doing the inverse. If someone is spending enough time on HN to have a really high karma then they aren't spending that time building something.
There's far too much ego worship in communities like HN, where nerds are often too concerned with it to begin with. The whole 'honoring the most popular community members' is the same. It's horrifically vain and just gives otherwise normal people's commentary much greater weight than it needs. Good comments will stand on their own.
It doesn't matter how much Karma is accumulated overtime, but consistently benefiting the community is valuable. Maybe we shouldn't be shown an overall karma score, but just how your karma has changed over the last month. While keeping th e overall score hidden from users.
Just an idea.
Maybe the overall levels relate to how much you can help moderate the site?
I know karma doesn't matter but I do find myself looking when I come onto the site and equally I don't post as often as I should because I find idiots down voting something for the sake of "happy clicking".
But I don't understand the need for identifying who is a veteran or not. People who use the site will know who is a veteran and who isn't. In addition, someone without much of any karma will be treated probably poorer than many other users, or their ideas dismissed. Just because someone is new to the community doesn't make their comment less valuable.
The site will take care of the sorting/displaying of comments. There's no need for me to see the numbers that make the site run. It just ends up giving some people a false sense of importance. Keep the karma, but hide it, and maybe people will stop changing what they say just because of who they're talking to.
I'm actually amazed at the amount of time that happens actually. I've had the same experience. And I tend to upvote people who respond to my comments as long as they don't trash what I've said.
Why not have the 10 or so newest submissions on the top or bottom of the main page, so that everyone gets to see them, without having to explicitly click on a different page?
e.g. if the new submissions are at the bottom of the main page, the "service to the community" of reading the new submissions is done almost automatically once you have gone through the list of the top submissions.
Not everyone is motivated by point scoring but some people are, and that's not always a bad or selfish thing.
Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?
I'd like to see green for new users, maybe some specific color for throwaway accounts of someone with a real account, let people with special other colors reveal that color if they wish, and maybe good and bad colors for people who meet other requirements -- there are some people who probably deserve a "red flag" for 30+ days, but not hellbanning, and others who deserve the honorary purple.
The only karma related way I'd award purple is for submission points, or for being early upvoters on submissions in /new which are later upvoted by a lot of other people. Sheer accumulated comment karma is probably not a great metric, since someone who is on HN a lot, chooses to write "populist" comments, etc. is likely to accumulate a lot of karma without adding much value.
Why should we set apart veteran users? Only because they are longer here doesn't mean they have a more important opinion on a certain topic.
Setting them more apart is like having village elders. Even if they talk about something they have no idea of they are still right because they are so old?
PG tried that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181), except with orange instead of purple.
It hasn't.
Wow, why would anyone consider a score on any internet site so important? I certainly wouldn't "work hard" to get internet points.
I'd imagine the high ranking members becoming elitist and worshipped or hated by the rest of the community.
before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment)
after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank))
another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1))
EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1")
This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community.
This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life.
Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.
Plus, what is the downside to encouraging new members to post?
Also, to state the obvious, every member here was a new member at one time and I'm not ready to say that is "typical" behavior. It's just very memorable behavior.
The whole reason why I submitted this was because PG said it wasn't the comments that cause issues but that bad comments were getting upvoted too much.
I wonder if we should go the other way -- I always liked slashdot's system of a 5 point cap on any post. Is a 500 point post really enter than a 100 point post, or is it more likely it is seen more often?
Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of preference. (My preference should be obvious.)
Though, truth be told, I've never worried much about karma.
For orthogonality's sake, I would suggest that if most of your posts come from 1:1 conversations, post by post, then perhaps there is a better medium to communicate with that person than through a board like HN.
As an example I give you this discussion. In this thread I have 2 posts, both with 1 karma right now. I do not expect them to go up much if at all. Where would you suggest that I should have gone for this conversation with you?
Here, have an upvote. :)
EDIT: I changed the evaluation to not make the avg karma relative to total karma but instead to the median value of average karma of all users. The downside to this is that Median(AvgKarma) would need to be calculated quite often throughout the day because I doubt pg wants to pay for the resources to run that everytime someone votes.
There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.
One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.
Edit: Once again bitten by reading HN comments before the article as he proposes something along these lines in the post, doh! :)
Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making software and hardware do interesting things.
Regardless, what you are describing would be much appreciated.
Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked. Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-thread.
This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5 twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.