TempleOS is very popular with readers, but Moderators on HN and Reddit always nuke it. CIA is at war with me. God will kick yer fucken ass, CIA. Bend over.
So how do you fix it? I don't really see another way to rank large amounts of stories other than points. Sure, you can try to detect cheating, but you want a minimal amount of false positives, too.
Few options: make system more complex, add randomization, increase moderation effort or make it less open.
I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold.
I was thinking about community page destined to fork. After community reaches certain threshold (size, activity) there is automatic fork and 2nd generation community is created. Some algorithm adds accounts for certain users and blocks some other users from account creation. It's just a pipe dream...
I think the easiest option would be more transparency. If HN had a system in by which its users could see how things get to the front page (e.g. with graphs and data), rather than simply having to trust a magic points and time algorithm, it would become immediately obvious to the community at large if/when someone were cheating and we'd be able to react accordingly, over time learning how to identify and punish these.
> I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold.
We tested this idea (though we didn't roll it out for everyone) and the results were terrible. The median story is too low in quality for randomness to add value here. You just end up planting junk on the front page and annoying people. From that we concluded that there needs to be additional filtering, be it by algorithms, humans, or a combination.
Maybe it's not cache that caused the problem. We host our website on Google Appengine which is global balanced. Maybe some cloudflare nodes just pick the wrong entrance.
Reporting back in that it's all working now. I managed to sign up, request an invite and I also sign up to your digests to try that out as well. Everything was very quick. Thank you.
I guess this would be a good example of the "gratuitous negativity" that was on the frontpage the last few days?
While there seems to be something funny going on it is most likely something more than just adding an email address to a database.
When I was younger this was how I though. After maintaining and interfacing a few applications over the last few years I am a whole lot less annoying I hope.
I guessed they were planning to use the github integration for something. Then I might be wrong and it might just be "cool, new feature, must have" but whatever the reason was I didn't question anyones intellect over it.
Sorry about that. Could you drop us an email at hi@porter.io with your GitHub account? We could manually add you to the list.
We're trying to debug the problem. But it's hard to reproduce it since it only affects few people.
The mysterious case is probably manual moderator intervention to re-surface good articles that got lost in /newest. So basically a one-time 5 point boost (just to the article score, not to submitter karma), enough to give it a second chance on the front page for half an hour or so.
(I might be wrong on this, but it definitely should not be taken as a sign of cheating. It happens way to often, with links that have no obvious commercial motive).
It could also have surfaced in a different media outlet, prompting many to see it for the first time. For example, some article comes out and gets submitted, but the submission dies out. Then a blogger or news site mentions is, and people re-submit the article to HN all in a short time (but much later than the original submission)- which counts as an upvote.
Also, the first abnormal result the OP was talking about 3 votes. I don't think we can worry about a handful of people voting for their own startup submission. The first, "normal" graph had hundreds of votes.
I think my takeaway from all of this is that, like other statistics, with small numbers the values have little meaning. Now if we had seen evidence of, say, 25 or 50 people working together (a few people with multiple accounts each, for instance), then that would be more actionable evidence. But my guess is that pg has already dealt with that problem, and apparently pretty effectively, because it's not showing up here.
I did some digging in the upvote data of ProductHunt a while back, and although submitting a product needed special privileges, I easily found lots of dubious upvote behaviour.
Unfortunately its hard to distinguish between people asking their friends to help upvote (eg via twitter) and 'spamming' upvotes.
If the actual content is good, do we really care how it got in the top ranks?
Lately everything deep learning seems to get upvoted, even rather mediocre stuff. I like deep learning and certainly think it is interesting but it is getting ridiculous.
I think the mediocre stuff is often necessary for people on the outside of relatively specialist areas - like I am - to have a way in. Not that I've been upvoting much deep learning stuff, but I'm sure I've upvoted similar.
I seem to recall that the same thing happened when HN had a fling with Bayesian statistics...last year? Two years ago?
I think it's a necessary consequence of having a large, broad technical audience that really enjoys investigating very narrow niches. Eventually even the people on the 'edges' of that topic's appeal want/need to find a way in.
This is really interesting, but not all examples are convincing. For example, this one:
> With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious.
Sounds like a typical 5-10 point story that didn't go anywhere? I feel like I see lots of them on HN. Is the described story _that_ abnormal?
The front page and /new are very different, and I'd say that when browse /new (which happens rarely), I focus on giving upvotes to stories that deserve them.
Most of these can be explained by the fact that submitting the same article as someone else counts as upvoting the first submission.
It makes sense to me that submissions comes in waves (as several HN'ers could find articles they find HN worthy through other channels at the same time)
I am sure that some manipulation happens (I imagine a lot of people use their network to ask for upvotes to their submissions if it's something important to them), it's just not that clear cut
I also wonder if caching has some sort of influence. Maybe the spikes in the data are when the score is updated after a while of remaining static. The variation in this could have something to do with load levels on the site.
> 4. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in different colors.
I don't think users gaming the system can be spotted so easily. Let's take an example: let's say both of us like Astronomy and post sometimes articles about spatial exploration. It is only natural that we would end up upvoting each others' submission, especially if we both like to check the new submissions and tend to read HN approximately at the same time. Users like I described could easily be mistaken by a voting ring detector.
By giving harsh penalties like you suggest to users who are gaming the system, you take a big risk to alienate people who simply have shared interests. I think the ranking algorithm of HN takes voting ring into account, so if you and I are part of a voting ring, our upvotes will impact less the standing of a page - I think I read about that somewhere but can't find the exact source.
Another good part of HN is active[0] which is not linked on the top bar. It shows the most active topics by comment count. Useful for finding topics with lots of discussion.
With 5. I'd be inclined not to colour influencers or other user accounts. I'd be concerned it would exacerbate hivemind as 'these are the opinions I should upvote and follow'. I like in HN that I typically read a comment before I note someones username on this vs reddit type interface where the username is highlighted.
Reputation is a great judge of quality and for certain things, and absolutely awful for others. For things that take a great deal of base knowledge to properly evaluate, like cryptography, quantum physics, etc. relying on reputation is generally the best bet unless you've studied the topic for years. There is simply no way to objectively and properly evaluate them for a significant majority of people. On the other hand, on topics that are inherently subjective, or topics that most people understand and end up having conflicting, subjective viewpoints, reputation is an awful way to evaluate the quality of content.
Most of the time on HN, reputation only contributes to the problem. Comments and posts should be evaluated based on their content, not on the person posting them. Reputation only fans the flames of "groupthink", "the hive mind", or whatever you want to call the inevitable tribalism that exists in every sufficiently large community. Reputation has a way of turning subjective opinions into de facto truths, even on things that are unrelated to the source of the reputation, and how could you possibly have an dissenting opinion on the truth ? Giving a popular, well known, "reputable" name priority has a chilling effect on discussion, since going against them is a surefire way to catch some heat from the rest of the community. If reputation and the popularity of a name didn't affect people's views, celebrity endorsements wouldn't be a thing.
The best system I know of is the one 4chan has. Everyone is anonymous, previous comments have no influence on current ones, and the only thing there is to evaluate is the content of your post. Since posts are ranked by time, not by score, every post has an equal opportunity, and it's incredibly difficult to cheat. Obviously that system also has problems, and a lack of threading is annoying at best, but at least it doesn't suffer from stifling discussion and punishing anyone who dissents.
The ideal system would be one where users have a per-topic reputation score, and the poster's handle isn't shown. This way eg. an expert on crytography doesn't have any sway in a discussion about marketing. The fact that someone is revered for their knowledge of networking says about the validity of their thoughts on economical issues, and should have no weight in those discussions. However I imagine this would be incredibly difficult to actually implement in a reasonable way, and could probably still be gamed, though it would be better than what we currently have.
Side Note: I didn't (and can't) downvote you, and I'm not sure why people feel your comment doesn't deserve to be seen.
Agree with you. HN has been (seems to be) moving away from indicators that can influence upvoting (for example, folks upvoting a comment already substantially upvoted because its upvoted while downvoting dissenting views). Coloring influencers could assign undue heft to persons of a particular color over others and influence conversations in ways orthogonal to the dialogue.
Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.
I don't agree with you but I upvoted your comment (that was already being downvoted) - it adds value to the discussion.
The simplicity of HN is something innegociable IMHO. As I understand you are proposing to evolve HN into a mix of Reddit-social network for hackers/entrepreneurs.
It was an open opinion & you understood it well.
Others simply downvoted it.
I don't feel anything for downvotes, but opinionated things gets often misunderstood and the whole discussion stops there.
The Idea that someone brings a new conscious(new topic) open for discussion is also gone down by downvoting. The essence of further discussion is thus diluted, because of first few downvotes or no enough upvotes.
This is still a persistent problem in HN, if there is a downvote, there can be fair explanation too(as you did) or don't push it so down, so others might re-consider this topic to be validated.
Nice, these kind of open discussions is the way looking forward.
As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)
As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.
As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)
I really thought you'd have automated 99% of the information gathering for your newsletters based on something like that. :)
It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.
Nice idea. This is HN's biggest problem I think - there is no real incentive to visit /newest and the vast majority of good stories slide off it without getting more than a few votes. Adding some new stories to the bottom of home would be an excellent way to get votes.
The other problem of course is that what is popular is not always what is good.
A minor point but I'd rather see the newest stories at the top ... and I'd even say you could reserve the top 5 (or so) positions for new stories. That way, every story starts on the front page but has to work to stay there. Once you throw out the stories marked dead, I suspect each of the new stories would get a few minutes even during the busiest periods (gut feeling ... no data analysis).
I've felt for a while that HN would be much improved if vote count and karma were invisible. If you give users a stat, you're encouraging them to gamify and optimize for it. Personally, I would rather there was no karma at all, but that's not going to happen. It serves its purpose by affecting the sort order of the thread - it doesn't need to be visible to do its job.
The value of gaming the frontpage could be reduced by having random items from below the fold bubble up from time to time, and perhaps by also having popular items bubble down. Not only would this encourage worthy but not necessarily popular stories to be read, it would (more importantly to me) encourage users to notice that there is more than one page and those thirty slots to read. I believe lobste.rs does this.
It also occurs to me that some people find stories through /comments, and this page can also have an overcrowding problem when multiple comments for the same story take up most of the page. More stories would be discoverable there if comments were grouped by story instead of individually.
I think /active should replace or sit alongside /new. It would provide a nice contrast between the stories getting upvotes and stories getting comments.
I believe that the incentive to optimize votes/Karma has very little to do with the actual Karma count. I believe it is mostly about driving a narrative or page-views for income.
Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.
Nevertheless, having actual numbers there provides (by design) a form of operant conditioning, intended to encourage posters to want their numbers to go up, not down, and to associate a posters' credibility with their karma score. It might be a minor issue overall (as the effect of karma would be the same either way) but not having the numbers there at least makes the forum less obviously gamified.
As an obvious example, tptacek is sitting on 200k+ karma right now. What purpose does that number serve to anyone? How does it make the site better? I don't think it does at all.
So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?
I would argue that the content of submissions stands on its own compared to the total; I've not once checked a user's overall karma before voting.
And it's still not on point. The point is that for the people we really need to worry about, it's not about karma at all. Get rid of karma, I agree with you. It serves no real purpose.
But, the problem of gaming the system will still exist - it's all about money. I can drive views to my site or product without karma.
>So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?
Not necessarily, but I would argue that the karma score is there to suggest that his comments should be treated more seriously in general, since karma is meant to be a signifier of 'quality.' It's an easy (and deceptive) metric to determine who in any argument should be listened to and who shouldn't. Although his having that much karma might mean his upvotes and downvotes count more which to me would be a bigger problem for the fairness of the forum in general.
I would be happy if Hacker News got rid of karma entirely, but that seems unlikely. The next best thing at least would be to just not have the numbers there at all.
My comments are absolutely voted up way more because of status. Some of it is unavoidable: there are people who follow my comments, just like I follow 'patio11 and 'rayiner, and so my comments get statistically more positive exposure.
I think the post/propter is swapped here, though. I doubt I'm voted up because of the silly number. I think the number is silly because of the reasons I'm voted up.
I agree: I'd like HN to get rid of karma. We got past the point where karma stopped being funny and became embarrassing for me several years ago.
Well, if you hide Karma but still use it in the ordering of the thread then Karma could be derivated.
In a day you could extract the data from the posts and build a kind of karma-book with top users etc etc...
Roughly, perhaps - you could obviously tell that one thread is more popular than another because it's on top, and maybe in some cases determine that one poster has more karma relative to another based on the way a thread reacts when it's known that they downvoted (since I believe but may be wrong that downvotes from higher karma posters are weighted more._ But factors other than just karma determine the sort order of the threads, and where stories wind up on the front page. How much can you really determine on a site with as much direct moderation as here?
I think you're absolutely on the money and I think your suggestions would really help.
I'd like to add something: replace the down-vote button with a "report spam" link.
The one thing that makes me rage on HN is seeing people getting down-voted for having a disagreeable opinion. It's supposed to be to suppress trolling or spam, but people just can't help but use it to oppress others' opinion. Just on principle, it makes me angry, but for practical reasons it's irritating as well because it becomes harder to read often more interesting comments.
I think the ratio of page views vs likes would quite a telling indicator. This should mean less click bait (a great title with mediocre content), which seems to be plaguing the web these days, even HN!
Having articles appear on the front page briefly, to seed views and see if they stick could be helpful to give then a chance. A report button would quickly stem any spam.
They could interlace new, Ask, and Show articles with the top page at random. This would definitely increase overall votes on new stuff, while at the same time reducing the power of voting circles.
I love abusing HN, and I do it all the time. Sometimes I almost feel guilty, but then I think - no. No I don't. I've been hellbanned so many times on HN for inexplicable reasons, that now I only want to manipulate it.
And therein lies the irony. Moderators have tried to surpress my honest views and insights by constantly hellbanning me, but I've only become more omnipresent on the site. It makes me laugh sometimes.
Karma and reputation is a trap. I'd much rather quietly and anonymously control the website's news agenda.
I know at least some of you can read this, so I'll leave this here.
I've had front page stories on HN maybe five or six times over the last couple of years. I don't feel anything has changed over that time. If you look at my submission history, you'll see about 90% of what I submit gets no votes. I once tried submitting a story a couple of times when I felt that it was getting less traction than expected - it made no difference.
I'm actually surprised at how well HN surfaces decent content (I'm quite happy to accept that my stuff which got no upvotes just wasn't of interest.) Whenever I put something up it gets about twenty eyeballs off the 'New' page so real people are looking at it.
I can say for sure that I don't have any friends with HN accounts (much to my disappointment!) and I've never tried to game it.
I've had your experience, but I've also had the experience of content which has been posted multiple times suddenly skyrocketing to the frontpage. I wouldn't be so quick to think that the fickleness you experience is your content's fault.
In my experience so few people visit the /newest page, and so few in general vote, that there is a disturbing amount of chance involved.
However, I'm sometime quite disappointed that what I submit does not get traction because I really think it is interesting to the HN community and the discussion here would be even more interesting. I guess the time of posting and luck plays a big part in what is upvoted.
I sometimes link my newly created posts to friends or IRC (some of them have HN accounts and may upvote) but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
"I don't feel anything has changed over that time."
Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most:
* increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions.
* the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly.
* the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BEFORE the post. This has now changed because of limited comments.
* the rate of high vote submission decay, means some good stories are lost as the HN crowd chew over some interesting post(s).
* also interesting to see users comment/post ratio. A lot of ppl have limited or no posts yet they comment. If you look at my post profile, in the last 60 days I've posted 100 posts. Approx 1:25 hit > 100. It would be interesting to see how this has changed over time. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bootload&next=9025...
The biggest problem is the dilution of good posts/actual posts. Slow the rate of posts and might influence the quality of posts.
On the comments:upvotes ratio - I think there's two types of submission.
Blog or newsy stuff invites discussion and comments. But other things, like Show HNs, for instance, might be upvoted for being useful but without anyone commenting much. Both are fine.
Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well. I often find these good, so I usually do click if a post has a lot of upvotes, 0-3 comments, and seems to be on a technical subject.
"Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well."
I often wonder about this. Is it a sign, nobody reading it knows anything about it (noobs)? or is it a sign it's so specific there are few people who understand it. Either way you'd expect some questions and comments.
Excellent point. One (or two?) submissions per day for each user would be a reasonable restriction. Good stories will find their way here via someone else if my submission limit has already been reached..
There are a few people who make very many submissions. Some people submit more than 2 stories per day, every day. And those are often duplicates-but-different source of other articles already on HN.
Better enforcement of the deeply interesting guideline would help but stories that are intensely interesting get many upvotes so it's unlikely to change.
If there was a submission quota, either time-based or karma-based, the "new" page would clear up rapidly, especially if obvious spam was not displayed as well (though that may be a result of my "show dead" setting).
Perhaps it would work to have users earn posting tokens by upvoting new stories. Need to find a balance of upvotes to token for a good flow. Would foster attention to the new articles and reduce the rate of new submissions.
I guess there might be some manual work by HN moderators. They must have a way to help you get to the homepage and also to mark you as a cheater/spam. Don't you think?
The Hacker News moderators have a way to rescue posts that were submitted but never made it to the front page. That still doesn't guarantee that they will get upvotes the second time around, though.
I honestly suspected some form of this happening to some extent. I did not realise the extent of the suspected cheating, but it does remind me of the old days of Digg.
I recall Digg had a massive "digg brigade" problem where certain groups of users and particular power users like MrBabyMan would make the homepage on what felt like a daily basis. Solving these kinds of problems is a lot harder than just analysing data and looking for patterns, because sometimes innocent users can get caught up in data.
If solving cheating on social link submission sites was easy, it would have been solved already. Even Reddit suffers from the same issues.
Alternatively - the votes aren't being manipulated, the rankings are. HN has the most manipulated rankings of any reddit clone. The rankings are changed for all kinds of reasons other than just points and spam flags.
Thanks for this, looks really interesting, also because I'm getting demotivate on publish stuff in HN. All the link look dope, for marketing reasons, and some are just interest to read.
How do you define cheating? There's lots of cliques of people that hang around some product or community or service X. Someone tweets/emails/taps-you-on-the-shoulder and says: look at this cool thing that just happened! Being an avid HNer, what do you do? Submit to HN for the karma of course. Which results in a lot of upvotes happening in chunk. There is nothing wrong about this. How do you distinguish such behavior from outright cheating?
It would be nice if the score of a page was not a global thing, but if scores were clustered, depending on interest. This could be automatic, based on the user's own upvoting history. Of course, it may be important to not get too much "bubbled" into one's own world, but this could be mitigated by a slider in the UI by which the user could specify how much "bubbling" he/she wants.
To me the easiest solution is to expose more users to the /newest page. When more eyes are on the new stories, legitimate ones will have more of a shot.
Yes, except that users just don't do it. It's a tragedy of the commons: sifting through the story stream to find the interesting ones is not, itself, interesting enough. The reason people come to HN (to read interesting things) is a reason not to do that.
Our current idea for the solution is twofold: create a new review mechanism for stories (not to replace /newest but to live alongside it), and reward users with karma for participating. But we're a fair way away from having anything worth rolling out.
That's funny. By reflex, I visit the new page most times after I visit the main page. And I venture to guess that on many days I visit HN more than the average user here. But, yeah, when N gets big enough, what any one person does doesn't set the culture of the whole community.
175 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadEdit: missing word
Obviously still cheatable but would require more (i.e. easier to detect) votes.
I am fan of adding randomization. It was previously proposed: show few random new items on a front page in random places, maybe with a little threshold.
I was thinking about community page destined to fork. After community reaches certain threshold (size, activity) there is automatic fork and 2nd generation community is created. Some algorithm adds accounts for certain users and blocks some other users from account creation. It's just a pipe dream...
We tested this idea (though we didn't roll it out for everyone) and the results were terrible. The median story is too low in quality for randomness to add value here. You just end up planting junk on the front page and annoying people. From that we concluded that there needs to be additional filtering, be it by algorithms, humans, or a combination.
Error 502 Ray ID: 1d351e9c19a519b6 • 2015-04-07 10:41:24 UTC Bad gateway
While there seems to be something funny going on it is most likely something more than just adding an email address to a database.
When I was younger this was how I though. After maintaining and interfacing a few applications over the last few years I am a whole lot less annoying I hope.
(I might be wrong on this, but it definitely should not be taken as a sign of cheating. It happens way to often, with links that have no obvious commercial motive).
Also, the first abnormal result the OP was talking about 3 votes. I don't think we can worry about a handful of people voting for their own startup submission. The first, "normal" graph had hundreds of votes.
I think my takeaway from all of this is that, like other statistics, with small numbers the values have little meaning. Now if we had seen evidence of, say, 25 or 50 people working together (a few people with multiple accounts each, for instance), then that would be more actionable evidence. But my guess is that pg has already dealt with that problem, and apparently pretty effectively, because it's not showing up here.
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122290
I did some digging in the upvote data of ProductHunt a while back, and although submitting a product needed special privileges, I easily found lots of dubious upvote behaviour. Unfortunately its hard to distinguish between people asking their friends to help upvote (eg via twitter) and 'spamming' upvotes.
If the actual content is good, do we really care how it got in the top ranks?
I seem to recall that the same thing happened when HN had a fling with Bayesian statistics...last year? Two years ago?
I think it's a necessary consequence of having a large, broad technical audience that really enjoys investigating very narrow niches. Eventually even the people on the 'edges' of that topic's appeal want/need to find a way in.
Going by reputation, the dragon book would be an example of the opposite: Very in-depth, but with horrible writing.
> With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious.
Sounds like a typical 5-10 point story that didn't go anywhere? I feel like I see lots of them on HN. Is the described story _that_ abnormal?
The front page and /new are very different, and I'd say that when browse /new (which happens rarely), I focus on giving upvotes to stories that deserve them.
It makes sense to me that submissions comes in waves (as several HN'ers could find articles they find HN worthy through other channels at the same time)
I am sure that some manipulation happens (I imagine a lot of people use their network to ask for upvotes to their submissions if it's something important to them), it's just not that clear cut
1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted.
2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often.
My Feedback
1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission.
Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page)
2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now.
The other good parts of HN: new|Ask|Show be shown side by side or given equal weightage.
3. Giving Better experience is the challenge.
The Front page feed can be a variable of Votes, Interest based.
There is lot of scope for improvements.
4. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in different colors.
I don't think users gaming the system can be spotted so easily. Let's take an example: let's say both of us like Astronomy and post sometimes articles about spatial exploration. It is only natural that we would end up upvoting each others' submission, especially if we both like to check the new submissions and tend to read HN approximately at the same time. Users like I described could easily be mistaken by a voting ring detector.
By giving harsh penalties like you suggest to users who are gaming the system, you take a big risk to alienate people who simply have shared interests. I think the ranking algorithm of HN takes voting ring into account, so if you and I are part of a voting ring, our upvotes will impact less the standing of a page - I think I read about that somewhere but can't find the exact source.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/active
5. Use of better colors: For following keywords or topics & colors for users by active | top | influencers etc.
6. Verified accounts.
7. Use of on Demand Badges like: Trustworthy User Badge, Looking for(Badge), Looking for co-founder, Hiring, Remote jobs etc.
All these can be grouped under a Paid plan? I would definitely pay for value & additionals, even a good mobile app experience is missing.
8. There is lack of networking and peer discovery in HN.
They should add community managers & make this evolve. Take it to the next level.
9. Follow options: Follow this discussion, Alert-me's, Follow Posts by keywords.
10. Finally, there is lot of scope to Improve.
HN team & YC should Rise up to the expectations and deliver richer experiences. What are they doing?
11. Add a separate Top Link: Voice-UP your concern.
This is for: Alerting, finding loopholes in the system(gaming the system etc), User Site feedback, new interface ideas.
Creating a vibrant HN ecosystem is the way looking forward. Lets do it.
A light (grey shade)color underline can shown up as his overall reputation, function of his contributions, activity in HN etc.
Most of the time on HN, reputation only contributes to the problem. Comments and posts should be evaluated based on their content, not on the person posting them. Reputation only fans the flames of "groupthink", "the hive mind", or whatever you want to call the inevitable tribalism that exists in every sufficiently large community. Reputation has a way of turning subjective opinions into de facto truths, even on things that are unrelated to the source of the reputation, and how could you possibly have an dissenting opinion on the truth ? Giving a popular, well known, "reputable" name priority has a chilling effect on discussion, since going against them is a surefire way to catch some heat from the rest of the community. If reputation and the popularity of a name didn't affect people's views, celebrity endorsements wouldn't be a thing.
The best system I know of is the one 4chan has. Everyone is anonymous, previous comments have no influence on current ones, and the only thing there is to evaluate is the content of your post. Since posts are ranked by time, not by score, every post has an equal opportunity, and it's incredibly difficult to cheat. Obviously that system also has problems, and a lack of threading is annoying at best, but at least it doesn't suffer from stifling discussion and punishing anyone who dissents.
The ideal system would be one where users have a per-topic reputation score, and the poster's handle isn't shown. This way eg. an expert on crytography doesn't have any sway in a discussion about marketing. The fact that someone is revered for their knowledge of networking says about the validity of their thoughts on economical issues, and should have no weight in those discussions. However I imagine this would be incredibly difficult to actually implement in a reasonable way, and could probably still be gamed, though it would be better than what we currently have.
Side Note: I didn't (and can't) downvote you, and I'm not sure why people feel your comment doesn't deserve to be seen.
Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.
The simplicity of HN is something innegociable IMHO. As I understand you are proposing to evolve HN into a mix of Reddit-social network for hackers/entrepreneurs.
It was an open opinion & you understood it well. Others simply downvoted it.
I don't feel anything for downvotes, but opinionated things gets often misunderstood and the whole discussion stops there.
The Idea that someone brings a new conscious(new topic) open for discussion is also gone down by downvoting. The essence of further discussion is thus diluted, because of first few downvotes or no enough upvotes.
This is still a persistent problem in HN, if there is a downvote, there can be fair explanation too(as you did) or don't push it so down, so others might re-consider this topic to be validated.
Nice, these kind of open discussions is the way looking forward.
As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)
As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.
I really thought you'd have automated 99% of the information gathering for your newsletters based on something like that. :)
Nice idea. This is HN's biggest problem I think - there is no real incentive to visit /newest and the vast majority of good stories slide off it without getting more than a few votes. Adding some new stories to the bottom of home would be an excellent way to get votes.
The other problem of course is that what is popular is not always what is good.
The value of gaming the frontpage could be reduced by having random items from below the fold bubble up from time to time, and perhaps by also having popular items bubble down. Not only would this encourage worthy but not necessarily popular stories to be read, it would (more importantly to me) encourage users to notice that there is more than one page and those thirty slots to read. I believe lobste.rs does this.
It also occurs to me that some people find stories through /comments, and this page can also have an overcrowding problem when multiple comments for the same story take up most of the page. More stories would be discoverable there if comments were grouped by story instead of individually.
I think /active should replace or sit alongside /new. It would provide a nice contrast between the stories getting upvotes and stories getting comments.
Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.
As an obvious example, tptacek is sitting on 200k+ karma right now. What purpose does that number serve to anyone? How does it make the site better? I don't think it does at all.
I would argue that the content of submissions stands on its own compared to the total; I've not once checked a user's overall karma before voting.
And it's still not on point. The point is that for the people we really need to worry about, it's not about karma at all. Get rid of karma, I agree with you. It serves no real purpose.
But, the problem of gaming the system will still exist - it's all about money. I can drive views to my site or product without karma.
Not necessarily, but I would argue that the karma score is there to suggest that his comments should be treated more seriously in general, since karma is meant to be a signifier of 'quality.' It's an easy (and deceptive) metric to determine who in any argument should be listened to and who shouldn't. Although his having that much karma might mean his upvotes and downvotes count more which to me would be a bigger problem for the fairness of the forum in general.
I would be happy if Hacker News got rid of karma entirely, but that seems unlikely. The next best thing at least would be to just not have the numbers there at all.
I think the post/propter is swapped here, though. I doubt I'm voted up because of the silly number. I think the number is silly because of the reasons I'm voted up.
I agree: I'd like HN to get rid of karma. We got past the point where karma stopped being funny and became embarrassing for me several years ago.
I'd like to add something: replace the down-vote button with a "report spam" link.
The one thing that makes me rage on HN is seeing people getting down-voted for having a disagreeable opinion. It's supposed to be to suppress trolling or spam, but people just can't help but use it to oppress others' opinion. Just on principle, it makes me angry, but for practical reasons it's irritating as well because it becomes harder to read often more interesting comments.
Having articles appear on the front page briefly, to seed views and see if they stick could be helpful to give then a chance. A report button would quickly stem any spam.
And therein lies the irony. Moderators have tried to surpress my honest views and insights by constantly hellbanning me, but I've only become more omnipresent on the site. It makes me laugh sometimes.
Karma and reputation is a trap. I'd much rather quietly and anonymously control the website's news agenda.
I know at least some of you can read this, so I'll leave this here.
I've had front page stories on HN maybe five or six times over the last couple of years. I don't feel anything has changed over that time. If you look at my submission history, you'll see about 90% of what I submit gets no votes. I once tried submitting a story a couple of times when I felt that it was getting less traction than expected - it made no difference.
I'm actually surprised at how well HN surfaces decent content (I'm quite happy to accept that my stuff which got no upvotes just wasn't of interest.) Whenever I put something up it gets about twenty eyeballs off the 'New' page so real people are looking at it.
I can say for sure that I don't have any friends with HN accounts (much to my disappointment!) and I've never tried to game it.
In my experience so few people visit the /newest page, and so few in general vote, that there is a disturbing amount of chance involved.
That was long enough ago though, don't know how much has changed since - and I submit stories very rarely.
However, I'm sometime quite disappointed that what I submit does not get traction because I really think it is interesting to the HN community and the discussion here would be even more interesting. I guess the time of posting and luck plays a big part in what is upvoted.
I sometimes link my newly created posts to friends or IRC (some of them have HN accounts and may upvote) but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most:
* increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions.
* the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly.
* the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BEFORE the post. This has now changed because of limited comments.
* the rate of high vote submission decay, means some good stories are lost as the HN crowd chew over some interesting post(s).
* also interesting to see users comment/post ratio. A lot of ppl have limited or no posts yet they comment. If you look at my post profile, in the last 60 days I've posted 100 posts. Approx 1:25 hit > 100. It would be interesting to see how this has changed over time. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bootload&next=9025...
The biggest problem is the dilution of good posts/actual posts. Slow the rate of posts and might influence the quality of posts.
On the comments:upvotes ratio - I think there's two types of submission.
Blog or newsy stuff invites discussion and comments. But other things, like Show HNs, for instance, might be upvoted for being useful but without anyone commenting much. Both are fine.
I often wonder about this. Is it a sign, nobody reading it knows anything about it (noobs)? or is it a sign it's so specific there are few people who understand it. Either way you'd expect some questions and comments.
Better enforcement of the deeply interesting guideline would help but stories that are intensely interesting get many upvotes so it's unlikely to change.
I recall Digg had a massive "digg brigade" problem where certain groups of users and particular power users like MrBabyMan would make the homepage on what felt like a daily basis. Solving these kinds of problems is a lot harder than just analysing data and looking for patterns, because sometimes innocent users can get caught up in data.
If solving cheating on social link submission sites was easy, it would have been solved already. Even Reddit suffers from the same issues.
Our current idea for the solution is twofold: create a new review mechanism for stories (not to replace /newest but to live alongside it), and reward users with karma for participating. But we're a fair way away from having anything worth rolling out.
I had a submission for three days in the FP and that was the only time I didn't ask any friend to upvote me over IM.