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How do you use HN?
- pvsukale3 10y ago2 things : 1) I am making this developer discussion platform. Results of this survey will be helpful for the product design. 2) I will publish the results on HN itself after 48 hrs.
- brudgers 10y agoCurious as to why you think Hacker News is successful.
- pvsukale3 10y agoA lot of people check hacker news daily. Good content gets upvoted and spam is removed. Also HN is a place for rational discussions not trolls
- brudgers 10y agoI was wondering how you think Hacker News achieves those things. Why do people keep coming back? Why is there rational discussion [at least sometimes]? Why is there good content? What prompted my question was the survey asking about tags. It seemed premised on the idea that tags are a useful feature. But Hacker News does not have them.
- bemmu 10y agoThe community was seeded from people who found out about it through either Paul Graham's essays or Y Combinator. After that deterioration was prevented by strongly discouraging low quality discussion.
- cookiecaper 10y agoYes, the high caliber of HN participants is what really sets it apart, and the great moderation by dang et al that stops it from descending below a pretty high bar has prevented the normal attrition-for-attention that drives the best users away. I think the spartan design has also helped keep out people who aren't committed to a high level of online discourse. Most platforms are going to have a chicken and egg problem. HN didn't because this guy who had millions of dollars told the people he gives it to to use HN. Pretty effective way of seeding a community. IMO the absolute best thing about HN is that when we're discussing a news event, often the newsmakers will materialize in the thread. Spontaneous stuff like the Alan Kay AMA just happens. That is what really makes HN invaluable, and it only happens because we're able to maintain the type of community that those people want to hang around in.
- AstroJetson 10y agoYes, started with a good core that has a group set to be nice, thoughtful, and post smart things. Moderation by deng is pretty amazing, I seldom things go off the rails. Nice place to visit!!
- pvsukale3 10y agoI personally don't know how hacker news achieved these things. will have look deeper into its history and moderation , ranking mechanisms.I personally think that tagging should be allowed on HN. Tags can be very limited in number but will be helpful for its audience to separate out interesting links. The reason HN still managed to do good without tags is the culture itself.The hacker culture is not limited to any domain (tag). What stimulates a human brain to think becomes part of HN discussion.
- jswrenn 10y agoHave you seen https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ ? I think they get tagging basically right.
- skewart 10y agoAre there any popular HN clients that support tagging? It seems like something a good number of people want. Maybe it could be added on top of HN by a third party if a client app/site had enough people to support it. It's never been something I've wanted, but I can see the appeal.
- swampthinker 10y agoFocus and good moderation. It's better to think of HN as a mid-sized, well moderated subreddit, than a comparison to Reddit as a website. You'll see that as subreddit grow bigger and become "default", content quality often slides. This can often be stemmed by good moderation, but they only have so much power with the limited tools Reddit gives them. HN's moderators are also the programmers of this website, so if they need a new tool? Bam, new tool.
- witty_username 10y agoI think it's because of how the discussion already is influences new participants. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory) For example, I have posted ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) on Reddit (and it is often upvoted), but I wouldn't do so on HN. The cultures are different.
- Springtime 10y agoThe quality of experience, technical knowledge, curiosity, moderation, and general conflict-free discussion along with a style of site that intentionally dissuades a mainstream audience [1] is what I've always seen as setting HN apart. Frequently HN will be the source of many unique insights into stories, personal anecdotes from those familiar with companies mentioned, and other tidbits that often can't be found elsewhere. Low quality posts on the other hand such as fluff replies, memes, or the odd rude post will get downvoted or simply not upvoted to demonstrate to others it's not something the community wants to see, with more thoughtful posts especially from those with experience in a topic rising to the top and sparking engaging discussions and questions. I appreciate that all users until they reach a certain karma level don't see a downvote button. Rather than downvote something to influence the order of comments most users will upvote ones they like, which is subtly a more positive system. Over time all these things cultivate a certain culture that spreads and attracts other like minded users. All this and the community has still managed to not become generally snarky, patronizing, or too insular itself. The life experience, focus on more technical topics, along with still retaining some humor helps. [1] Paul Graham: "So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there." http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
- CodeWriter23 10y ago> Also HN is a place for rational discussions not trolls This forum is however subject to groupthink. I have witnessed participants being downvoted and hellbanned simply for having a dissenting opinion. Unless by "troll" you mean anyone who disagrees with the popular views on this forum.
- okket 10y agoAlso worth considering for the success are anti-features like not allowing inline GIFs, signature lines, avatar images, etc.
- throwanem 10y agoStrongly seconded. Such ancillary features are useful for social signaling, and there's value in that, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the primary reasons HN's quality of discourse tends so high is because there's really nothing here to put thought or effort into, when participating, other than what you actually say in your comments. (On the other hand, the same is very much true of 4chan, and the quality of discourse there is hardly what anyone would seriously describe as "high", so on reflection I think I'm probably pretty far off base here.)
- soared 10y agoInterested to see how this compares with engagement in Reddit. I bet even more people are lurkers here. Survey design suggestions: -allow me to choose two options for question one -allow multiple answers for how do you use hn and make each answer a single action, not multiple. -add a "zero" answer for how often I submit links
- tgb 10y agoAnd change the wording: "more than once a week" I think was meant to be "less frequently than once a week". That whole question is pretty confusing.
- pvsukale3 10y agoremoved that question. As most of the replies were "there is no specific pattern". and question was confusing
- pvsukale3 10y agook.
- tedmiston 10y agoYeah, this is a critical flaw in the design. I'm sure many of us use HN on multiple platforms.
- pvsukale3 10y agoedited the form.
- cookiecaper 10y agoIf I can piggyback. "Other" responses should be trimmed from less-than/greater-than questions. This is pretty binary (unless you've been on HN for EXACTLY one year, but then you should just pick which category you want to be in) and allowing "other" just leaves a group that's undefinable; might as well call it "prefer not to answer".
- 10y ago
- BenoitP 10y agoPosting my suggestion here: Since the HN community is data oriented at its heart, it would be very interesting to have everything out in the open, in real time, for users to have their own model of ranking. All the data: comments, stories and most importantly each upvote linked to its user. People would build their own model for tagging, filtering. I'd personnally try ALS-WR [1], or maybe try to tinker with distance metric learning [2]. It would help everyone get exposed to the exact content they might upvote. [1] http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/~mary/cours/stats/centrale/reco/paper/MatrixFactorizationALS.pdf http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/~mary/cours/stats/centrale/... [2] http://papers.nips.cc/paper/2164-distance-metric-learning-with-application-toclustering-with-side-information.pdf http://papers.nips.cc/paper/2164-distance-metric-learning-wi...
- throwawayReply 10y agoIf it were I'm the open it would be too obvious how much "management" and curation happens. From artificially boosting some articles to artificially nixing others, there isn't just 'an algorithm' there is a bunch of human intervention that also happens. HN claims that it is the algorithm 'detecting' and flagging controversial threads but they've never posted their methodology there and it doesn't explain how some posts artificially leap up the rankings. It is common knowledge that hn ask people to resubmit some stories, why is it those stories always hit the front-page the second time around? Hn is a curated news source. It's better for being that way but it is presented as being driven by algorithm. Sometimes it is better not to see the man behind the curtain.
- pjc50 10y agoeach upvote linked to its user I think you've drastically underestimated the ability of people to abuse systems like that.
- sandGorgon 10y agoThe opensource Lobsters - https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations (and my own fork of it with lots more cool features http://www.hackergully.com/ http://www.hackergully.com/) builds transparency into its core. even the invite system is transparent. I thought that was very impressive.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- orf 10y agoI think HN is great and has some of the best discussion on the web, at least for tech related stuff. One thing I do think is broken is the ranking system. Here is my comment: 'It's too... exponential. A post seems to get either 0-5 votes, or 100 from hitting the frontpage. Implement a feature that puts 'highly' rated new stories (3-5 votes) in a slot on the frontpage for a sample of users, giving them a chance to explode.' Posts either die or reach the frontpage, where they have a run with lots of upvotes and comments. Unless a post hits the threshold of the frontpage then it doesn't get noticed at all. Edit: Didn't expect to be the top comment, clearly some people agree. I've had a few frontpage submissions on HN and there is a nack to it. You find the right title and you submit at the right time, and if you don't get more than 3-4 votes you delete and re-submit again a bit later. Once it gets 5 votes unless your post isn't that good it will hit the frontpage and stay for a while. Passing that threshold is the hard bit and I think a lot of quality articles don't hit that threshold and don't get seen. Which is a shame. I know they already do something like what I'm suggesting but there are 30 rows on the frontpage, couldn't 4-5 'new' articles be randomly interspersed rather than 1?
- grey-area 10y agoUpvoted so that you stay at the top forevermore. Same thing happens with comments after they pass a threshold of votes.
- andrewstuart2 10y agoIt's also very hard for quality comments to get visibility after a certain point. The points seem to be weighted a little too heavily in the comment sorting algorithm which makes it hard for newer posts to stay at the top. This could also just be that most people who may have voted have already checked the comments and don't come back. Perhaps I should have suggested a "new highly-rated comments!" indicator as a useful feature. It doesn't seem like I can go back and edit my response, though, without taking the whole quiz again, and I don't want to skew results.
- bachmeier 10y agoI agree, but I'd go further and say commenting here is largely a waste of time. If you make a comment on r/programming, others will respond and you can have a reasoned discussion, with trolls getting downvoted. If you disagree with someone, you can state your position and others will jump in and state theirs. Responses on HN are generally few in number, and if you challenge a high karma user, he and a few of his friends will downvote you with no intelligent discussion. I'd say the comment system here has resulted in a pissing contest where the goal is to say something really cute so that you get upvotes. There are good discussions, but they happen in spite of the comment system, not because of it.
- quacker 10y agoLooking at some of the suggested features in the survey results, keep in mind that: - You can collapse comments (click the `[-]` next to the comment) - You can unvote (click "unvote", which shows up after voting) - You get the downvote button after 500 karma
- EdSharkey 10y agoArgh, I'm at 499! I wondered what the secret was to downvoting...
- brownbat 10y ago
- Red_Tarsius 10y agoHN works because it is simple to use. Please keep it that way. Tagging introduces a whole new set of issues and off topic discussions. People are going to debate semantics, taxonomy and the proper labels for each and every thread. Every time someone dies, there are a few users asking the mods to put up the black bar. Tags are going to be much worse.
- bArray 10y agoAgreed. The only way I can think around it is if the tagging is automated somehow. Shouldn't be too difficult to have some intelligent system. That way people don't argue with people.
- tsjackson 10y agoPeople would just argue about the rules and logic embedded in the tagging algorithm.
- bArray 10y agoYeah, but as long as it isn't humans fighting humans I would consider that a better place for now.
- combatentropy 10y agoAgreed. The words themselves in a story are the tags. You just need to do some kind of text vector index. For example: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/textsearch.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/textsearch.html
- drdaeman 10y agoI believe StackExchange had resolved this with moving such discussions to Meta.
- tlo 10y agoShameless self plug: I read HN mostly on mobile via my twitter bot @hn_bot_top1 https://twitter.com/hn_bot_top1 https://twitter.com/hn_bot_top1
- curiousgal 10y ago>How long you have been using HN? ><6 months >6 months -1 year >more than 1 year >Other Why?
- pvsukale3 10y agochanged it! removed other
- chriswarbo 10y agoAs I wrote in my reponse, I use http://feeds.feedburner.com/fullhackernews http://feeds.feedburner.com/fullhackernews to read a representative sample of what appears on the front page. It (tries to) include the content of the link, so I don't have to visit HN itself unless I want to see/participate in the comments. I also use hnnotify.com to get notification emails when my comments are replied to. FYI I use Gnus as my email and RSS reader.
- pjc50 10y agoThrough a computer. But that's not important right now.
- disneycember 10y agoI use it mainly through http://hackernewsroom.com/ http://hackernewsroom.com/ which is awesome, because it lets you see a preview of an article without leaving the site or even read it right there. I only go to the original site when I want to add a comment or favorite an article.
- fabrigm 10y agoThere is too much info. Sincero i hace installed getpocket I just save articles and never read nothing :(
- pault 10y agoI just want to say that I've been reading HN for about 7 years now, and it has been invaluable to my personal and career development. Being able to read well informed commentary about a variety of subjects makes it so much easier to reach for the right information when I need to learn something new. I'm sure I wouldn't have been exposed to many of the esoteric technologies that make my life interesting without it. I consider it one of the most valuable resources on the internet and I would be devastated if it went away.
- sundarurfriend 10y ago(Pasting my textual answers publicly:) > What features do you want in HN? 'Always show original article title on hover' (in front page and other listings). > Feedback on HN (if you got some time) The 'Avoid gratuitous negativity' guideline is still not being followed and often gives the whole community a negative-nancy vibe. Perhaps a simple rule such as "if the entire content of a comment is about how the OP idea is bad/won't work/etc. (and is marked as being so by a mod[/high-karma-user - implementation detail]), it wouldn't be allowed to rise to be the top comment" will go a long way.
- whack 10y agoThat's actually a great idea. I had built a discussion forum prototype a few months ago, that incorporates similar ideas. Unfortunately, social media has severe network effects, making it hard for new products to displace entrenched platforms. http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103 http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103 It's widely known that on Reddit, if you arrive several hours late to a discussion, your comment has very little chance to make it to the top. Exceptions do exist, if your comment is exceptionally good. But if it's just "significantly better" than the existing content, forgetaboutit. The reason for this is simple: Reddit's system takes only 2 factors into account - the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes. So if post A has been viewed by 1000 people, and accumulates a net score of +10, it will still be shown over post B which has been viewed just 50 times and accumulated a net score of +8. Even more insidious: a single downvote is all it takes to doom a post on Reddit. If you went to great trouble to write a moving and eloquent post, and someone who disagreed with you downvoted it as soon as it was posted, it will immediately get moved to the bottom of the pile, and no one else will get the chance to see it and reverse the trend. Is it really fair to prioritize content that just happened to be posted at a better time, and thus, picked up more views? Is it really good to bury a content at the bottom of the heap just because one person downvoted it right after it was posted? At Caucus, we don't think so. In addition to the sophisticated reputation systems mentioned above, we also take into consideration the number of times a content was seen, and guarentee each content sufficient opportunity to been seen and prove itself. This ensures that all newly posted content is given a fighting chance to reach the top, regardless of when they happened to get posted.
- cJ0th 10y agore: suggestions: After submitting the form it crossed my mind that I'd like to be able to identify (sub)comments in a thread that have been made after my last visit. It's a bit time consuming to scan the comment section every time I come back to it anew. Other than that I am with the "keep it simple"-folks :)
- kaplun 10y agoI came to HN after leaving Slashdot. The main reason is the community. Slashdot got worse and worse in the last 5 years, with just trolls and polemics and bullies. HN community is instead great, and discussions are always very respectful and insightful.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- justinlardinois 10y ago> How much time do you spend on HN? (average) Per visit or per day? > Should HN implement tagging? Kinda hard to answer without knowing what tagging on HN would look like.
- thisismyhnuser 10y agoI would really like alerts (like reddit does...an orange envelope or something similar)...when someone replies to my comment I don't want to have continually check to see if there are replies. I know there are a lot of people that don't want this for some reason or another. For this reason there should be an option to turn them on/off.
- lwhalen 10y agoRSS reader, for days.
- throwaway2016a 10y agoSame. This survey doesn't really account for RSS reader users. I never check the front-page.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hasteur 10y agoI use it through second level abstracting site hnapp.com I don't care about the Y Combinator self promotion of their startup incubators, nor do I care about Y Combinator's own blog content. I also don't have time to read the entire firehose of content that comes through daily from the "new" feed. I self limit to posts that have at least a score of 50. I also use a RSS feed so I can dip in/out as needed.