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Giles Bowkett: Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?
- paulhart 18y agoI presume you posted this in an attempt to piss him off? :)
- gaika 18y agoMy startup is not making this mistake, but does anyone care? People seem to prefer trolls and fun social noise to high signal streams that demand your attention.
- paulhart 18y agoThe majority of society demands to be entertained, not to entertain. Those that entertain are put on pedestals to be worshipped (either with praise or scorn).
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- allenbrunson 18y agoallow me to summarize: giles bowkett is impolite on social sites such as this one, therefore they're all doomed. also, there are people on the internet that cause him trouble, like tim bray and cory doctorow. whew, such a heady brew of straight-up TRVTH that guy is dishing out. i'm still reeling from the force of it.
- gaika 18y agoHave you read the post? You missed the most important 3 paragraphs in the middle about repeating the mistakes of slashdot, digg, reddit. Tell me, what is news.YC doing to not repeat the same mistakes?
- pg 18y ago1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here. 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves. 3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments. 4. Votes on comments affect karma. 5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking.
- gaika 18y agoThese are really nice measures, but I think they still do not address the most important problem - people who have more time on their hands have disproportionate effect on the site. I guess #6. vote weighting will be required soon.
- pg 18y agoI have some internal metrics to warn me if the top stories get bad, and there has been no degradation I can detect. Nor do I personally notice a difference. There were a bunch of crappy submissions after we got that big influx of users from TechCrunch (both I and my software agreed about that), but the quality is now back up to where it was before.
- johnyzee 18y agoThe HN system works better than any other I have seen (it's kept me in line whenever I was tempted into adding noise rather than value). I don't think degradation of HN over time is unavoidable, clearly a lot of smart people here put energy into resisting this force of nature. One challenge is how to preserve the HN code of conduct. I've noticed some misunderstand the voting system as an agree/disagree button. I think the software should notice patterns that don't look right, such as both up- and downvotes on the same comment (popularity contest alert). Good people + good tools = good HN.
- davidw 18y ago> 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves. Yesterday we had both a "global warming" story, and a "you can't soak the rich" story. Those kinds of things are far more interesting and accessible to random non hackers, than say, this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196425 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196425
- swombat 18y agoInteresting that the very post in question is a pristine example of a flash of genius insight ("What's broken about the social news model and causes every social news site to turn into hogwash eventually") buried in the middle of a tedious rant. To Giles: If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change! The value of this post could have been communicated in about 3 paragraphs, with no dubious pictures and ranting nonsense. That said, a very interesting point.
- nonrecursive 18y agoI actually liked the rambling, ranting quality of the post. "People are asking themselves how to save Hacker News, and they need to realize there is only one technology which can save Hacker News, and that is the time machine" <- priceless :) I probably wouldn't have read the post if it were shorter and dryer, though it looks like it had the opposite effect on many.
- carterschonwald 18y agoI have to agree, all the rambly cultural references made it really fun to read!
- icey 18y agoGiles, I know you're reading this. We refuse to take you seriously until we see pictures of Paul Graham in a sombrero.
- iamwil 18y agoI replied, and ended up writing more than I had anticipated, and put it in a blog post: http://webjazz.blogspot.com/2008/05/segmentation-of-social-news-sites.html http://webjazz.blogspot.com/2008/05/segmentation-of-social-n...
- Herring 18y agoHe's right about delicious. After an hour browsing, I'm rather in awe of that site. It has a very good signal/noise ratio. Almost as high as dzone & much more readable.
- menloparkbum 18y agothe guy who made delicious purposely didn't include "community" features like ratings or comments. http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt
- gojomo 18y agoBest idea inside: If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. Regarding: I want my blog banned from Hacker News. I'm not even kidding. Suggestion: don't leave it up to News.YC to implement this. Set up a mod_rewrite, or even just a JS insert, which checks for a news.ycombinator.com referrer and bounces traffic to an error (or gross-out) page. Voila -- submissions will be rare, and those that are submitted won't be promoted.
- jrockway 18y agoThere's 15 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. He has a good point, though, Hacker News is barely worth reading these days. Good job screwing it up, everyone.
- pg 18y agoCan someone give us (or at least me) the gist of what he's saying?
- ambition 18y agoSystematic factors inherent to social news sites degrade their quality over time. Voting is broken because of the nature of the people who vote the most and thus have the most influence on the front page: They are people with too much time on their hands. That is, anyone with a worthwhile opinion is off doing other things more important than commenting or voting on a news site. This isn't to say I agree, I'm just trying to summarize the relevant bits as best as I can.
- Spyckie 18y agoYes, this is the gist of it. The other aspect is that he thinks there is only 1 type of source that's ok for information consumption, which is the type that spews out brilliance. All the other sources are worthless, including the people that never say anything meaningful and the people that say something brilliant once in a lifetime.
- sah 18y agoI don't think that's what he was saying. He was just complaining that he needs better filtering mechanisms, so he can find the 1 in 100 posts by e.g. Cory Doctorow that he would enjoy, without having to read the other 99.
- jcl 18y agoAnd he wants other people to find them for him, but not the people who have the time to do so. :)
- sah 18y agoSimplifying the key observation: free votes put more power in the hands of users who vote more. Users who vote more are, in his estimation, users who waste their own time. So social news sites based on free voting tend to promote articles that are a waste of time.
- Xichekolas 18y agoAside from the pseudo-zed-shaw rant, I think he had a very interesting and enlightening point about the karma-as-video-game problem, and the general less-productive-people-have-more-time-to-influence problem. I would like to think we solve this here by being too boring for the "Hordes Of Moronic Imbeciles Expressing Their Opinions About You" (his term for it). However, being a jerk to people here and then being smug about it makes it hard not to consider one part of that group. If you don't want to see your own site, block it: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
- stcredzero 18y agoWe need a word for "being a jerk to people here and then being smug about it" online. I think it's basically the same kind of problem as trolling. It doesn't help the signal to noise ratio of a site by generating another bit of rude noise, no matter how emotionally satisfying you think it is at the time.
- ph0rque 18y ago> We need a word for "being a jerk to people here and then being smug about it" online. meta-trolling?
- deathbyzen 18y agoThis story gets all my upvotes ever.
- engtech 18y agoFYI, I'm working on a Greasemonkey script that will let you keep a personal banned site list on reddit/hacker news. ETA this evening.
- engtech 18y agoI've posted the script here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198216 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198216
- sethg 18y agoAm I a bad person for upvoting this?
- porfirion 18y agoWell, then, how about making it that the more you vote the less your votes matter?
- sah 18y agoThis post is the best analysis of the problems of content filtering and social news that I've ever read. Fun, too!
- sabat 18y agoReally funny! Sure, he makes some good points. But funny! And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Doctorow is Mostly Worthless.
- ambition 18y agoA jumble of thoughts on social news site quality: What are we measuring, exactly? It's hard to talk about without defining what we're measuring. A stab at defining some quasi-objective metrics, or, How I think about social news quality: Are all the good stories getting submitted? (Sometimes the real question is: Are there any good stories on a given day, at all? HN usually nails the stuff I would choose to read in my blog reader. There is good volume here.) How many bad stories are submitted? Does it matter? Are the good stories being voted up? (I'd say 'usually' for HN. Though some gems are missed by the upvoters. Bowkett had his example. There was an awesome PDF earlier today that wasn't voted up. I blame a shoddy headline there.) Are the bad stories being voted up? (I'd say sometimes for HN. There was that bad bout right after TechCrunch. And lots of Ask YC posts that bore me make it to the front page.) How good is the discussion? (HN is the best I've seen for a site of this wide scope. People are harsh on lazy English, good at ignoring trolls, good at pointing out logical fallacies politely.) How easy is it to choose good stuff to read? (On the front page, points and # of comments are great indicators. Lots of entries means there's plenty to scan from.) One consideration is that I come back to HN at different times for different purposes. Sometimes I'm bored and looking for some short fluff to tide over a compile. Sometimes I'm bored but energetic and trawling for something interesting to learn. Sometimes I'm in the mood to check out what other people think about some issue, sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I want to bust 3 minutes on a quick tidbit, sometimes I want to bust 30 minutes on a paper or good Gladwell article. I can't judge HN for my mood swings, only for how easy it makes it for me to satisfy the varied cravings. All in all, I like HN just fine, and I encourage Giles Bowkett and people like jrockway below to vote with their back buttons.
- sc 18y ago> People are harsh on lazy English, good at ignoring trolls Wouldn't it be preferable to be good at ignoring lazy English? If the lazy English comes with trolling, it's ignored completely; if the lazy English comes with sincerity, everything's handled politely.
- demallien 18y agoI think he has an interesting point about why these types of sites don't work very well. But I think he's wrong to say that there isn't any technological solution - you just have to do away with the idea that everyone is equal. How about this as a solution: * Everyone can write comments. * Only moderators can vote on comments * Only moderators can submit articles * The number of moderators is fixed (at say... 1000?) * If a moderator hasn't moderated in the last 3 months, they are removed from the moderator list, opening up a vacancy. * The person that replaces the removed moderator is the commenter with the highest average point score for their comments (ie total points/number of posts), provided they have posted in the last month. It may be necessary to add a minimum total points score as well (say 100 points, and then it's the person with at least 100 points, and the highest average that becomes moderator). This type of system should ensure that only things that interest people that themselves have been found to have interesting things to say will get voted up. There will still be trolls, but they won't be voted up.
- stcredzero 18y agoHow is this different from Slashdot? (Other than the submission part)
- demallien 18y agoWith Slashdot, anybody can vote. Often, trollish behaviour gets rewarded with points, because, well, because trolls can vote too! Before being able to vote in the system I proposed, you have to have demonstrated to the current moderators (voters), that you are someone that on average posts interesting, thought-provoking stuff. I don't know whether this would actually work, but it seems at least reasonable, and as far as I'm aware, it has not yet been tried
- stcredzero 18y agoOnly moderators can vote. Anyone can be a moderator. But isn't moderation frequency controlled by Karma and meta-moderation scores?
- 18y ago
- rms 18y ago>Reddit was created as a better Digg No.
- shiranaihito 18y agoSo because Giles doesn't want to see his posts mentioned on HN, no one else should see them either, despite the chance that some of them might be worth reading? Ingenious! Oh, and he's a jerk on HN, but it's alright because it's intentional. I'm not sure that deciding to behave like a jerk is any more noble than happening to..