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The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the communit

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen made people - often busy people - spend time to write very thoughtful comments, which could then raise to the top. A positive, self reinforcing loop. Which is getting slowly, but surely, less effective with the years. I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not. /rant

mikekchar 8y ago
There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guys are the real geeks" a few said, "Wow. These guys are amazing" and joined the group. Eventually there was a small club of highly dedicated model railway enthusiasts who knew practically everything about model railways. One day there was a person who like model railways, but wasn't really that into it. However, he noticed the model railway club and realised right away that these people are amazing. He would go to the meetings just to bask in the glory of the incredible things that these people built. Eventually, he couldn't keep it to himself. He told a whole bunch of his friends and they all showed up too. The model train club started to get bigger and the original members couldn't be happier. When they first started most people looked down their noses at them. Now they were downright popular. One day some of the members said, "This really amazing stuff is really amazing, but I wonder if there is a way for me to approach this without being quite so geeky. I have a family and I don't have so much time. I want my train setup to be super awesome, but I don't really care that much about the details". Lots of the other members were in the same boat and so they worked hard to have a kind of "scaled down" setup that would appeal to people who didn't have the time or energy to devote themselves completely to model railways. The club became even more popular due to this and lots of people who really liked trains, but weren't that interested in model railways started to show up. Eventually several of the members started to have outings to visit train museums and to have photo competitions on train themes. To raise money they even made a calendar with pictures of trains. The model side of the club was a little bit less accessible to most of the membership because the core group of enthusiasts were interested in highly technical details that most other members were not interested in. Eventually, it was decided that the model railway club should change it's name and purpose in order to be more accessible and welcoming to new members. It would now be the train enthusiasts club. Of course model train enthusiasts would have a place, but it would be appreciated if they refrained from having heated discussions about highly technical and inaccessible topics like programming train simulations and the like. Eventually, the original model railway enthusiast stopped going to the club. He liked the people. They were great and friendly, but he was, after all a model railway enthusiast. If you take something that appeals to 1% of the population and scale it to include 20% of the population, it morphs into a thing that the 20% group likes, not the 1% group. Can't be helped. It's just a matter of numbers. It happens everywhere.
- iliketosleep 8y ago
  Thank you for presenting such a vivid example. Something that appeals to a minority, will, by definition, stop appealing to them when it morphs into a form that appeals to the majority. I have seen this happen even with TV series. Is there a name for this phenomenon? I do agree with the article where it says "we can’t discuss what we never named"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- natmaka 8y ago
  It could be tied to Leopold Kohr's observations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy and to the way our typical political party hacks his platform in order to gain votes. In some ways 'quantity kills quality'.
- _hardwaregeek 8y ago
  This is a fantastic way of describing the CS "culture" of my school. So many people who like talking about tech without ever bothering to learn the actual underlying skills. And yet they're nominally CS majors...
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    And he didnt even start to talk about the people showing up because it became lucrative.
- theoh 8y ago
  A similar discussion: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
- keyle 8y ago
  I love this story. This applies to most hobbies, I'm seeing it happen. Thank you.
- 8y ago
Simple_Guy 8y ago
One man's noise is another man's signal. The reason the internet has more noise than signal is because there are many people, and they don' all want to talk about the same thing as you.
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
  Comment sections are like a bus without addressing. Everyone needs to scan the content of a message and decide if it's for them.
  - harmful_stereo 8y ago
    How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet. As someone who has only ever succeeded in bringing down the level of every discussion i have ever been in and never in contributing anything useful, it would be very helpful if i could just be automatically directed to the appropriate content sewer by posting my thoughts directly into a search engine that could dump them in the most suitable location.
    - DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
      Sounds like you're describing current year social media.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  The point is that, for many years, there was a well shared understanding of what was signal and what was noise on HN - even if there were hot disagreements on the content of that signal. This is changing.
BenoitP 8y ago
> I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not. I've been toying with this idea. My go to would be to do a pagerank on the vote graph. The intrinsic quality of a webpage was transitive enough to make Google win the search engine war; surely people can be viewed as websites that have links indicating quality to other commenters: HN accounts and votes to someone else's comments. If only HN could release the vote/down dataset... That could be a privacy violation. Maybe they could do it themselves, or try to disclose it to select trustworthy parties. Maybe they're doing it internally and they're keeping it to themselves. After all, YC is in the business of detecting precisely individuals that are capable of articulating high quality ideas.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  So, you would prioritise comments from those who on average made upvoted comments?
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight. Whether it would improve the quality of the comment sections is an interesting question. I'd be interested to see that tested somewhere ...
    - danmaz74 8y ago
      I think it would only help marginally, but it would be interesting to be able to experiment with something like that.
lmm 8y ago
I feel like there was a real step-change when dang introduced a policy of requiring comments to be more positive (and I think implying people hadn't read the article was banned at the same time)? If you look at old HN comment threads you'll see a lot more caustic replies to wrong/stupid comments, and while superficially cruel I really think that was what kept the quality ratio high.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  Yes, I understand the rationale behind that decision, but I've been chastised a couple of times for comparing the tone of comments to those on Reddit. Which didn't look to me as offensive :)

mikekchar 8y ago

There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guys are the real geeks" a few said, "Wow. These guys are amazing" and joined the group. Eventually there was a small club of highly dedicated model railway enthusiasts who knew practically everything about model railways. One day there was a person who like model railways, but wasn't really that into it. However, he noticed the model railway club and realised right away that these people are amazing. He would go to the meetings just to bask in the glory of the incredible things that these people built. Eventually, he couldn't keep it to himself. He told a whole bunch of his friends and they all showed up too. The model train club started to get bigger and the original members couldn't be happier. When they first started most people looked down their noses at them. Now they were downright popular. One day some of the members said, "This really amazing stuff is really amazing, but I wonder if there is a way for me to approach this without being quite so geeky. I have a family and I don't have so much time. I want my train setup to be super awesome, but I don't really care that much about the details". Lots of the other members were in the same boat and so they worked hard to have a kind of "scaled down" setup that would appeal to people who didn't have the time or energy to devote themselves completely to model railways. The club became even more popular due to this and lots of people who really liked trains, but weren't that interested in model railways started to show up. Eventually several of the members started to have outings to visit train museums and to have photo competitions on train themes. To raise money they even made a calendar with pictures of trains. The model side of the club was a little bit less accessible to most of the membership because the core group of enthusiasts were interested in highly technical details that most other members were not interested in. Eventually, it was decided that the model railway club should change it's name and purpose in order to be more accessible and welcoming to new members. It would now be the train enthusiasts club. Of course model train enthusiasts would have a place, but it would be appreciated if they refrained from having heated discussions about highly technical and inaccessible topics like programming train simulations and the like. Eventually, the original model railway enthusiast stopped going to the club. He liked the people. They were great and friendly, but he was, after all a model railway enthusiast. If you take something that appeals to 1% of the population and scale it to include 20% of the population, it morphs into a thing that the 20% group likes, not the 1% group. Can't be helped. It's just a matter of numbers. It happens everywhere.

iliketosleep 8y ago
Thank you for presenting such a vivid example. Something that appeals to a minority, will, by definition, stop appealing to them when it morphs into a form that appeals to the majority. I have seen this happen even with TV series. Is there a name for this phenomenon? I do agree with the article where it says "we can’t discuss what we never named"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
natmaka 8y ago
It could be tied to Leopold Kohr's observations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy and to the way our typical political party hacks his platform in order to gain votes. In some ways 'quantity kills quality'.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
This is a fantastic way of describing the CS "culture" of my school. So many people who like talking about tech without ever bothering to learn the actual underlying skills. And yet they're nominally CS majors...
- wallace_f 8y ago
  And he didnt even start to talk about the people showing up because it became lucrative.
theoh 8y ago
A similar discussion: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
keyle 8y ago
I love this story. This applies to most hobbies, I'm seeing it happen. Thank you.
8y ago

Simple_Guy 8y ago

One man's noise is another man's signal. The reason the internet has more noise than signal is because there are many people, and they don' all want to talk about the same thing as you.

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
Comment sections are like a bus without addressing. Everyone needs to scan the content of a message and decide if it's for them.
- harmful_stereo 8y ago
  How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet. As someone who has only ever succeeded in bringing down the level of every discussion i have ever been in and never in contributing anything useful, it would be very helpful if i could just be automatically directed to the appropriate content sewer by posting my thoughts directly into a search engine that could dump them in the most suitable location.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
    Sounds like you're describing current year social media.
danmaz74 8y ago
The point is that, for many years, there was a well shared understanding of what was signal and what was noise on HN - even if there were hot disagreements on the content of that signal. This is changing.

BenoitP 8y ago

> I wish there was a simple formula to reproduce the original mechanism. But I'm afraid there is not. I've been toying with this idea. My go to would be to do a pagerank on the vote graph. The intrinsic quality of a webpage was transitive enough to make Google win the search engine war; surely people can be viewed as websites that have links indicating quality to other commenters: HN accounts and votes to someone else's comments. If only HN could release the vote/down dataset... That could be a privacy violation. Maybe they could do it themselves, or try to disclose it to select trustworthy parties. Maybe they're doing it internally and they're keeping it to themselves. After all, YC is in the business of detecting precisely individuals that are capable of articulating high quality ideas.

danmaz74 8y ago
So, you would prioritise comments from those who on average made upvoted comments?
- swish_bob 8y ago
  You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight. Whether it would improve the quality of the comment sections is an interesting question. I'd be interested to see that tested somewhere ...
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    I think it would only help marginally, but it would be interesting to be able to experiment with something like that.

lmm 8y ago

I feel like there was a real step-change when dang introduced a policy of requiring comments to be more positive (and I think implying people hadn't read the article was banned at the same time)? If you look at old HN comment threads you'll see a lot more caustic replies to wrong/stupid comments, and while superficially cruel I really think that was what kept the quality ratio high.

danmaz74 8y ago
Yes, I understand the rationale behind that decision, but I've been chastised a couple of times for comparing the tone of comments to those on Reddit. Which didn't look to me as offensive :)