Concerning trend in commenting on news.yc submissions
Based on the few number of comments in most discussions on this site, you'd assume everyone's just reading for the links. Which is cool, I guess. Anyway, the only exception, it seems, are threads on Paul Graham essays in which everyone and their mother has something to say. We're talking something like an average of around 1 comment for most front page items vs. probably and average of 40 comments for anything PG's written.
Is everyone just sucking up/karma whoring by agreeing with PG? Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here? As I think the real value of having a community of hackers is talking, I'd really like to see more general chatter. Am I alone here?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 91.8 ms ] threadedit: it's slow enough that I don't think pg's planning for many people to be looking at it...
I don't think people are karma whoring, because that would mean commenting on lots more stories. The average comment is more likely to be upvoted than downvoted, so a karma whore would comment as much as possible.
I don't want to see more general chatter. I just want interesting comments. I'd rather see no comments than uninteresting ones.
Actually, now that I think about it, the karma system could be the reason people don't post as many comments. If you submit, you're looking at all upside. But you can hurt yourself by saying something dumb, so people opt to say nothing at all.
I too would enjoy more general chatter (of the thoughtful, interesting kind).
I think there may also be a general reluctance to post things which are challenging or negative for fear of either being downvoted like crazy, or looking bad in the eyes of YC if you have plans to apply. I wouldn't go as far as calling it sucking up, but it could refrain some people from saying whats really on their mind.
The rate of submissions seems to be increasing too, which can make sifting through the new postings more difficult. It also dilutes commenting I've noticed. This could be why major posts like a new PG essay seem to gravitate more discussion. I would personally be game for the idea of limiting the number of new submissions a user can post over a given time. Maybe scale this value based on karma. This would at least make people think more carefully about what they are about to post. I understand this starts to limit the "anyone can post" nature of the site, but it could reap an overall benefit for all users by reducing information overload and concentrating discussion on fewer, good submissions.
But you bring up a good point.. I'll make a conscious effort to post more challenging, thought provoking comments. I've got karma to burn :)
Also, some of the most interesting postings to me personally never got upvoted by others very much. Was I not watching the new queue all the time I would have missed them completely..
There's a line between being challenging or negative and being hostile. I've seen pg prune hostile comments, but never challenging or negative ones (and I've made quite a few of both--I don't think I get a special pass because I have a YC funded company). And I also strongly doubt challenging pg or anyone else here with a well-thought out argument would have a negative impact on applications for funding. There are plenty of strong personalities in YC companies, many of whom are not particularly intimidated by pg--I strongly doubt the YC folks have a problem with that, at all. Not being cowed by challenges from your investors and advisers is probably even a necessity for success, and pg has mentioned it in several talks and at least one essay.[1]
Of course, that doesn't invalidate your argument. Maybe folks are hesitant to challenge folks for fear of hurting their chances with YC. It's a mistake to hesitate for that reason. But it's entirely possible that people do.
1: Search for the word "adult" in this essay: http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html
I think the volume of comments is at least partially because everyone reads them and thinks about them.
Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here?
Hardly, but given that it was his essays that brought many (most?) of us here to begin with, it's something we all have in common. So his essays generally get more attention. Furthermore, his essays tend to attract attention from all over, and visitor comments probably wind up on news.yc.
I've noticed that accompanying the larger amount of posts, the quality has been more spread out. It's no surprise that PG related posts attract more of that quality.
To you perhaps, but pageviews per visitor are conspicuously up since that change.
To tell the truth, it seems that things have "got back to normal" - the meta discussions have died down, thankfully not too many political discussions have been started, and things seem to be going pretty well.
There is an element of suck-upness ("I hear what you're saying but what I think Paul Graham is looking for in a submission is XXX") that is off-putting, but, I mean, it's Graham's site.
Yes, it does: the comment tag is defined in each item.
If you click "Sources" -> "Add a Source Not on this List" -> "Search for Sources" and type "Hacker", you'll see the news.yc feed.
No more than five minutes stale compared to the official feed.
I come here mostly for the discussions, essays, and new idea posts, not to learn what I can get on google/news
But I don't think there is any karma whoring going on. I think PG articles come with a pretty safe bet of being a good read. Whereas you aren't sure what you are going to get with the others. Im assuming pretty much everyone reads the PG essays, and thus there is more discussion to be had. Whereas I would like to know the proportion of people who read all the other links submitted, as opposed to just their titles.
Seriously, is the 100 karma points gained through linking to a pg essay worth as much as the 100 earned through 10 informative (in the classic suprising sense) links? We seem to be converging to this eigenvector [a(1) a(2) ...a(n)] where a(1) == pg_essay_link, a(2)== mattmaroon_essay_link...etc.
The reason I believe pg converted this forum to hacker news is that the learning machine was stuck on the search surface in a local minimum and he wanted it to 'learn' new things. We can't learn more if we reward behaviour that is not truly informative. He could put a damping coefficient on karma obtained from known links, but a better bet would be for the community to not reward the links as much.
I have done my share of dumb, uniformative submissions and will try to make better contributions in the future. [end sermon] [get off soapboax]
Our make or break moment is in the next couple months as we launch. Here's hoping...
- my 2 cents