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There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one. Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google lately.
by pg 16y ago
There are also too many meta-posts, which is why I almost killed this one.
Yes, there have been a lot of fluff posts about Facebook, Apple, and Google lately. These posts are not so harmful in themselves. The problem is that they are too easy to upvote.
But it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal.
It may happen that one day things never return to normal, of course, but based on experience so far I'm inclined to give these runs of bad stories time to run their course before worrying about them.
I have been gradually adding protections against fluff posts. E.g. "Ask HN" posts like this have for a long time had an automatic penalty applied when being ranked on the frontpage. I'm always mulling over other things I could do. But we're definitely not out of options.
- akkartik 16y agoI gather you're against just excluding both categories entirely. Why? (I don't have an opinion.)
- mattmiller 16y agoI like the 'Ask HN' post a little more than the average post. I did not know there was an automatic penalty to an 'Ask HN' post, maybe that is why I like them a little bit more... only the really good ones float to the top.
- percept 16y agoI thought he was referring to the meta-type 'Ask HN' posts . . .
- philwelch 16y agoThe problem is that we seem to go from one soap opera (App Store 3.3.1) to the next soap opera (Faceboook privacy settings) with barely any break for sanity in between.
- branden 16y agoThis might be a matter of recent circumstance. iPad release, Apple's new developer guidelines, Gizmodo iPhone scoop, the Facebook privacy hubbub, and Google IO happened one right after the other. We could just be experiencing an uncommonly dense (and hopefully short) sequence of sensational tech news events.
- electromagnetic 16y agoI notice the patterns a lot because I frequently check HN, I'm sure the people who check only daily rarely actually see a pattern on a long basis. If it takes 2-3 readings of different subject articles to get your fill, we who check frequently have read all we want or need on Facebook Privacy Settings on Monday, however those who only check daily are only getting their fill on Wednesday. At least that's my perception of the pattern.
- MikeCapone 16y agoIf you don't like it, the best way to do your part is to submit lots of great stories of the kind of stuff you'd like to see, and to upvote good stories in the "new" queue. If more people did this, the overall quality of the site would benefit.
- nhooey 16y agoI think there are too many stories, it's like a firehose. We should concentrate on killing more bad stores so the amount of stuff on Hacker News is a reasonable amount for someone to read. Quality, not quantity.
- indigoviolet 16y agoHere's a suggestion: figure out the 'topic' words in the subject (shouldn't be too hard to do a moderately good job by looking at word frequencies in the titles submitted so far and whitelisting/blacklisting some); start attaching a penalty to each topic word based on how many stories were submitted recently, how many votes/comments they got, and a time decay. The goal is to make it so that a story about a very frequently seen topic will need more upvotes to climb higher in the rankings.
- philwelch 16y agoI don't know whether this is good or bad, but that would also protect against Erlang floods.
- Zak 16y agoThere might even be some room for auto-moderation with regard to the both the quality of the content (for links) and the subject matter (being the tenth post in an hour linking to an article on the same subject would result in a lower position on the front page). I'm working on a maybe-startup involving text classification that might be able to do just that.
- jacquesm 16y agoA lot of these 'soaps' can be rolled in to one, if there is a significant overlap between stories linked on the front page and a new entry it could just count as a comment in the existing thread and an upvote for that thread instead of getting a new thread of its own. That way the number of stories is limited to one per soap per day. Tricky to build though. But at least that would concentrate all the relevant discussion to a single thread.
- Locke1689 16y agoBut it often happens that HN gets stuck in a rut of some particular kind of stupid story for a bit. This causes people who haven't been through one of these cycles to say that we've jumped the shark. (This belief is such a constant we should considering making it the site's tagline.) And then things return to normal. Agreed. Perhaps restricting self posts to those who have been active members in the site for a long time (karma count?) could help that. Given that upvotes have a karma min, I don't think that putting a karma min on self posts is unreasonable.
- fleitz 16y agoDo you think it might be possible to do individual scoring? As an example for what I'm getting at, lets say I upvote a story that jondoe also upvoted, when I see a another story upvoted by jondoe instead of his vote counting for one, it counts for two just for me. Is there any way to get this data so that I might be able to do a greasemonkey script to do the calculations in the browser?
- endtime 16y agoI think one important distinction is between stories about companies/products and stories about people. Perhaps you could penalize stories with "Zuckerberg", "Jobs", etc. in the title?
- quizbiz 16y agoWhat if there was a way to label topics into some sort of folder-like system? I think the hacker news community would be happy to self enforce a categorization so when we go through one of these cycles, all related threads would show under one trending topic thread. I'm not sure how this could be programmed in. But it's an idea. If a thread on the home page has a keyword like Google or Facebook or Apple or iPad then there should be a high penalty for other threads with the same keywords.