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Would you consider forking the entire site into multiple HNs? e.g. where one site encourages civility and another encourages nastiness? Along a similar idea,

by bhousel 17y ago

Would you consider forking the entire site into multiple HNs? e.g. where one site encourages civility and another encourages nastiness? Along a similar idea, I once started work (and since abandoned it) on a social news site where the idea was to auto-partition all the users into Dunbar's Number-sized buckets based on their commenting style. You could still see everything if you wanted, but you'd be placed into a "swarm" of people whom you'd get to know better than general population. So assholes would end up in asshole swarms, spammers in spam swarms, etc.

pg 17y ago
What did it mean in practice to be in a swarm? What could you do with people in your swarm that you couldn't do with people in other swarms?
- Mathnerd314 17y ago
  On another thread, I thought it might be a good idea to keep around who voted for what. You use a recommendations system (perhaps from the Netflix contest) to determine how much you will like other comments, and then filter based on that. This might result in something similar to swarms; the idea is that your "swarm," the group of people where you like their comments and you like theirs, is the only source of intelligent conversation.
- bhousel 17y ago
  We intended to make online communities (swarms) work more like real-life communities. A user could belong to multiple swarms. People who don't feel like they belong in a swarm could leave (or be forcibly voted out by the group) and join another. When swarms get too big (above, say 150-200) they could splinter into smaller ones. In practice, each swarm would have their own stories and comment threads. e.g. Swarm 'A' hates TechCrunch stories and always votes them down, Swarm 'B' feels that the people in Swarm 'A' are uncivil, Swarm 'C' just loves to make jokes about everything, Swarm 'D' is extremely priggish and has very strict rules about what types of stories should be posted. A user could choose to experience the raw unfiltered site, or just stick to swarms where he or she mostly knows everyone else. We intended to use voting and tagging statistics to suggest swarms in which an unattached user might feel like they belong. Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) was the inspiration.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  The first year or two on HN, when the community was smaller and tighter knit, I found that when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them. The userbase was smaller, and thus, easier to say, "Oh, it's nostrademons. I like him. I'll reply to his comment". I felt that familiarity facilitated a sense or cordiality and camaraderie in our discussions. I think that was largely a function of group size. I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users. If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too. The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.
  - Xichekolas 17y ago
    > when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive. Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands. I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it. We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.

by bhousel 17y ago

pg 17y ago

What did it mean in practice to be in a swarm? What could you do with people in your swarm that you couldn't do with people in other swarms?

Mathnerd314 17y ago
On another thread, I thought it might be a good idea to keep around who voted for what. You use a recommendations system (perhaps from the Netflix contest) to determine how much you will like other comments, and then filter based on that. This might result in something similar to swarms; the idea is that your "swarm," the group of people where you like their comments and you like theirs, is the only source of intelligent conversation.
bhousel 17y ago
We intended to make online communities (swarms) work more like real-life communities. A user could belong to multiple swarms. People who don't feel like they belong in a swarm could leave (or be forcibly voted out by the group) and join another. When swarms get too big (above, say 150-200) they could splinter into smaller ones. In practice, each swarm would have their own stories and comment threads. e.g. Swarm 'A' hates TechCrunch stories and always votes them down, Swarm 'B' feels that the people in Swarm 'A' are uncivil, Swarm 'C' just loves to make jokes about everything, Swarm 'D' is extremely priggish and has very strict rules about what types of stories should be posted. A user could choose to experience the raw unfiltered site, or just stick to swarms where he or she mostly knows everyone else. We intended to use voting and tagging statistics to suggest swarms in which an unattached user might feel like they belong. Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) was the inspiration.
iamelgringo 17y ago
The first year or two on HN, when the community was smaller and tighter knit, I found that when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them. The userbase was smaller, and thus, easier to say, "Oh, it's nostrademons. I like him. I'll reply to his comment". I felt that familiarity facilitated a sense or cordiality and camaraderie in our discussions. I think that was largely a function of group size. I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users. If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too. The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  > when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive. Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands. I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it. We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.