3 ms·

The reason I resist doing something like this is that it's sort of like dealing with getting fat by buying bigger pants. I'd be willing to introduce categories

by pg 16y ago

The reason I resist doing something like this is that it's sort of like dealing with getting fat by buying bigger pants. I'd be willing to introduce categories to make HN a better site, but I wouldn't want to do it as a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap. I'd rather attack that problem directly. Also, it seems to me the problems with crap posts on the frontpage are not as old as 6 months. In fact they're so recent that I'm by no means sure that it's not just random variation. The frontpage was ok today.

blizkreeg 16y ago
I think as HN has become more mainstream (in spite of its focus), I surmise the diversity of the audience has increased too. I like the idea of a self-correcting community (just as the markets should correct themselves in a capitalist economy) but from time to time outside intervention is needed when they stray too far. Perhaps I should rephrase my OP. Sub-HNs not to solve the front-page problem but as a way to segregate related posts.
staunch 16y ago
Ask HN is already a sub-HN. Jobs is the next logical one. I don't think we need create-your-own like Reddit, but a few major categories would be awesome. The "ask" page has already become my favorite part of HN.
cperciva 16y ago
I'd be willing to introduce categories to make HN a better site, but I wouldn't want to do it as a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap. I think separating temporal from non-temporal would be useful. The latest news about the iPhone and a wikipedia article about deep-sea crustaceans are both interesting, but the former is likely to be irrelevant after a few days while the latter is likely to be just as interesting next year as it is right now. If you take the non-temporal articles off /news and take the temporal articles off /best, it would probably clean up both quite significantly.
adrianwaj 16y ago
If there was one simple thing that could improve the quality of HN, it would be a new section of all recent moderator actions whether they be automatic or manual: bans, privilege removal, etc. People would know the right things to do and why (by seeing the wrong things), and they also see the implementation of the guidelines. The only issue is that protests may be raised, but the benefit is transparency. Also, something good may come of the protests anyhow.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  I think thats the wrong direction, the community should be in a self-policing equilibrium with a demphasis on moderator action. If moderator action has to become frequent enough to have a news feed on it, then the community isn't being given enough opportunities to police itself. Downvoting above a certain karma on comments has worked wonders as Hacker news has great discussions. It gives an easy way for the community to state they value insight over snarky observation or trolling. I think the same feature needs to simply be added to submissions as well. It will allow the community to inform members that they do not value resubmissions of things already on the front page or linkbaiting to old topics, without requiring moderator action.
  - adrianwaj 16y ago
    It'd be interesting to see an up/down tally on karma for any given comment score, like at http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ You'd see the controversy or variability around a comment. On Digg, I think submissions reaching some threshold of buries get killed, even of already obtaining lots of digs.
metamemetics 16y ago
>a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap add downvoting to submissions and the community will take care of it
- mooism2 16y ago
  When I used Reddit, some people said they downvoted submissions on niche topics they weren't personally interested in, e.g. a Rubyist downvoting Haskell articles. There are enough Haskell enthusiasts here that I don't think Haskell submissions would suffer, but who knows what niche topics would?
  - edd 16y ago
    I used to be on Reddit in the Lisp days (before it had many users). The day that they introduced the `my.reddit` was when the quality of posts massively fell. The recommended behaviour at that point was to try and train your recommendation engine by voting for things you liked and down vote things you didn't. The `my.reddit` then showed your own personal homepage. From that point votes no longer became a quality control as people would vote without thinking based on a headline. I am all for some way of adding meta-data to links so a user can filter based on them. But you have to be really careful to not turn votes in to a meaningless action and keep them as a way of voting on quality rather than opinion. (ps. I stopped using Reddit shortly after that change and as such haven't seen/used it recently and don't know how the sub-reddits are doing to manage that situation. Also it was one of many changes that negatively effected signal-noise but one I always feel was the turning point)
    - jokermatt999 16y ago
      Nowadays your best bet is to find a smaller subreddit with a tight focus, essentially starting a new community. The main community has major issues with quality control, but the splintered subgroups are generally much better overall. Really, it does seem like small size is the best quality control, unfortunately.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
TrevorBurnham 16y ago
I'd like to see tagging, with a page and corresponding RSS feed for each tag. I usually read HN via RSS, so maybe I don't have a pony in this fight (is that the expression?), but I suspect most folks who visit the front page are there for things that could plausibly be tagged "news", and those complaining about clutter want to avoid things that would be tagged "humor" or "rant". I think having non-exclusive, optional tags would be much less of a leap than having to assign each post to a single category. Perhaps all users with karma above a cerrtain threshold could have authority to remove a tag from a post, ensuring that the "news" page would only contain things that are clearly considered to be news. Or there could be a "tagflag" link under each tag. The biggest problem I'd expect to see with this scheme is that editors would have to add tags to items missing them. But important news items are typically submitted multiple times. So perhaps the tags from multiple submissions could be aggregated.

by pg 16y ago

blizkreeg 16y ago

I think as HN has become more mainstream (in spite of its focus), I surmise the diversity of the audience has increased too. I like the idea of a self-correcting community (just as the markets should correct themselves in a capitalist economy) but from time to time outside intervention is needed when they stray too far. Perhaps I should rephrase my OP. Sub-HNs not to solve the front-page problem but as a way to segregate related posts.

staunch 16y ago

Ask HN is already a sub-HN. Jobs is the next logical one. I don't think we need create-your-own like Reddit, but a few major categories would be awesome. The "ask" page has already become my favorite part of HN.

cperciva 16y ago

I'd be willing to introduce categories to make HN a better site, but I wouldn't want to do it as a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap. I think separating temporal from non-temporal would be useful. The latest news about the iPhone and a wikipedia article about deep-sea crustaceans are both interesting, but the former is likely to be irrelevant after a few days while the latter is likely to be just as interesting next year as it is right now. If you take the non-temporal articles off /news and take the temporal articles off /best, it would probably clean up both quite significantly.

adrianwaj 16y ago

If there was one simple thing that could improve the quality of HN, it would be a new section of all recent moderator actions whether they be automatic or manual: bans, privilege removal, etc. People would know the right things to do and why (by seeing the wrong things), and they also see the implementation of the guidelines. The only issue is that protests may be raised, but the benefit is transparency. Also, something good may come of the protests anyhow.

metamemetics 16y ago
I think thats the wrong direction, the community should be in a self-policing equilibrium with a demphasis on moderator action. If moderator action has to become frequent enough to have a news feed on it, then the community isn't being given enough opportunities to police itself. Downvoting above a certain karma on comments has worked wonders as Hacker news has great discussions. It gives an easy way for the community to state they value insight over snarky observation or trolling. I think the same feature needs to simply be added to submissions as well. It will allow the community to inform members that they do not value resubmissions of things already on the front page or linkbaiting to old topics, without requiring moderator action.
- adrianwaj 16y ago
  It'd be interesting to see an up/down tally on karma for any given comment score, like at http://www.urbandictionary.com/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/ You'd see the controversy or variability around a comment. On Digg, I think submissions reaching some threshold of buries get killed, even of already obtaining lots of digs.

metamemetics 16y ago

>a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap add downvoting to submissions and the community will take care of it

mooism2 16y ago
When I used Reddit, some people said they downvoted submissions on niche topics they weren't personally interested in, e.g. a Rubyist downvoting Haskell articles. There are enough Haskell enthusiasts here that I don't think Haskell submissions would suffer, but who knows what niche topics would?
- edd 16y ago
  I used to be on Reddit in the Lisp days (before it had many users). The day that they introduced the `my.reddit` was when the quality of posts massively fell. The recommended behaviour at that point was to try and train your recommendation engine by voting for things you liked and down vote things you didn't. The `my.reddit` then showed your own personal homepage. From that point votes no longer became a quality control as people would vote without thinking based on a headline. I am all for some way of adding meta-data to links so a user can filter based on them. But you have to be really careful to not turn votes in to a meaningless action and keep them as a way of voting on quality rather than opinion. (ps. I stopped using Reddit shortly after that change and as such haven't seen/used it recently and don't know how the sub-reddits are doing to manage that situation. Also it was one of many changes that negatively effected signal-noise but one I always feel was the turning point)
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    Nowadays your best bet is to find a smaller subreddit with a tight focus, essentially starting a new community. The main community has major issues with quality control, but the splintered subgroups are generally much better overall. Really, it does seem like small size is the best quality control, unfortunately.
- metamemetics 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

TrevorBurnham 16y ago

I'd like to see tagging, with a page and corresponding RSS feed for each tag. I usually read HN via RSS, so maybe I don't have a pony in this fight (is that the expression?), but I suspect most folks who visit the front page are there for things that could plausibly be tagged "news", and those complaining about clutter want to avoid things that would be tagged "humor" or "rant". I think having non-exclusive, optional tags would be much less of a leap than having to assign each post to a single category. Perhaps all users with karma above a cerrtain threshold could have authority to remove a tag from a post, ensuring that the "news" page would only contain things that are clearly considered to be news. Or there could be a "tagflag" link under each tag. The biggest problem I'd expect to see with this scheme is that editors would have to add tags to items missing them. But important news items are typically submitted multiple times. So perhaps the tags from multiple submissions could be aggregated.