6 ms·

My favorite part, which clearly shows that PG understands what the dynamic of a news site and it's users, is when it states: "The worst thing to post or upvote

My favorite part, which clearly shows that PG understands what the dynamic of a news site and it's users, is when it states: "The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting." Frankly, I think this happens way too much. Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary. While they have definitely created interesting things, the product is probably more important than the person.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
You could almost make a rule that any article that had a famous person's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction. Don't get me wrong, some of these articles are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.
- logicalmind 16y ago
  You could almost make a rule that any comment that had a high profile user's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction. Don't get me wrong, some of these comments are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I agree that there's a problem, but I don't think that celebrity is it. If you took away the comments' scores and removed the names, I could probably still tell if they were made by high-karma members. I think the problem is that the way they think and post is more in line with the majority of users on here. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. I think the problem is that we (like any other group of people) tend to focus more on "I agree with that comment" and less on "That comment is insightful and brings a fresh perspective on the issue whether I agree with it or not". I wish I could say that I'm innocent of this, but I'm just as guilty of supporting my own point of view as anyone else is.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    Sounds like you meant that in some kind of snarky way, but absolutely yes. A thousand times yes. I could care less about brand, whether from commenters or famous people in titles. Just give me good content. I don't come here to join some kind of fan club, either for authors or commenters. And of course the reverse is true. We have folks purposely downvoting based on authors or commenters. Which is just as whacked.
    - logicalmind 16y ago
      No snarkiness was intended. I was agreeing and expanding your comment. Nothing irks me more than seeing a very insightful discussion between "high profile member" and "regular user" and seeing a drastic difference in the point total of the comments when they are equally interesting. People should upvote content and not commenter.
      - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
        Amazing how people project their own mood onto internet comments. Sorry about that. Thanks for the explanation. Yep, I'd much rather read a dozen guys that nobody knows that help me out in life and help me make terrific changes than become pen-pals and an expert on the top 17 people in the tech industry or on HN. This herd mentality stuff drives me nuts at times. You know, I also feel that people should own their comments, but something as simple as hiding the name until the mouse hovers over the pseudonym would prevent a lot of abuse. It's not like we all have to become anonymous. I think the board just needs to take steps to prevent automatic up or down voting. There are lots of solutions to choose from.
        rorymarinich 16y ago
        The problem with celebrity in this field is that very frequently celebrities are known more for their personality than they are for the things they say. You have the Asshole, the Motivator, the Snarky Sassplant... etc. They become famous not because they're intelligent or say smart things — let's face it, almost every person in this community is bright and most of them are well-spoken, yet plenty of them still struggle for recognition — but because they adapt a certain tone that's instantly and comfortably recognizable, so that when we see their name we can sink ourselves into whatever's expected of their writing without having to put in too much effort. The celebrity writers always have a certain personality. Whether it's John Gruber or Paul Graham or Dave Winer, they've established exactly what sorts of things they're gonna talk about and how they're gonna talk about it. When we see their names, we know what to expect. Whether it's a good post or a shit post (and everybody has some of each), we still feel like we got our click's worth and are satisfied with that. If I had a choice to see a new DaringFireball essay or another essay, completely unknown, completely at random, I'll probably go with the DF one. It sells me a certain level of quality, a topic that I usually am interested in, a writing style that I very much enjoy. The unknown essay might be more valuable or relevant, but I'm not as instantly willing to give it a chance. ...unless, of course, the author makes an effort to grab me, by titling his essay provocatively or writing in an entertaining style. But then once he finds success with that method, he's not going to want to drop the shtick and risk becoming unknown again. He'll continue with it. At a certain point he'll become a celebrity poster. Then we're back to dealing with the same old shit as we did before. Part of the problem is that HN displays us both POINT VALUE and USER NAME before it even gives us the essay. There is no way to read a comment without seeing the author and the point value before hand. So we're unavoidably biased before we see a word.
  - sdrinf 16y ago
    Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question. See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 ), knowing the background he's coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter. And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch, or, more likely, other Random J Blogger. The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot (following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all, this way I see only the things they care to comment about. The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these "celebrities". It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.
    - brlewis 16y ago
      I also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much time.
      - rcfox 16y ago
        http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
        RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
        It used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not the same thing.
    - logicalmind 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
DanielRibeiro 16y ago
It is also said that these guidelines are an effort to prevent the Eternal September that afflicted Usenet (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News) What can happen in practice: more and more people filtering the posts they comment on using any of the techniques described on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960762
Alex3917 16y ago
"Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary." While true, the much bigger problem is not that these posts get too many upvotes, but rather that they're the only posts that reliably get any upvotes at all. It's hard to justify even bothering to submit stories since for even the best posts it's a complete crapshoot as to whether or not they get any votes.
- ams6110 16y ago
  The motivation to submit a story should be "this is really interesting" not "this will get me a lot of votes."
  - UrLicht 16y ago
    ...which on HN should mean the same thing, right?
    - rorymarinich 16y ago
      In theory, yes, upvotes indicate valuable content and downvotes indicate irrelevancy. This worked brilliantly for Digg and Reddit, after all, right? In practice, the people that designed the upvote-downvote system and presented it to us as Web 2.0's way of making the Internet perfectidealolympus forgot that they were dealing with human beings. They assumed they were dealing with computers or something for which there's a such thing as "optimal". As a human being, sometimes I feel like a selfless contributor of optimizing upvotes and downvotes, other times I feel like upvoting because hey I like this guy, other times I feel like downvoting because fuck the world and fuck you buddy, and still other times my Dadaist urges kick in and I vote entirely randomly to sow discord and paranoia among the otherwise content bourgeoise. Or at least that's how I imagine some people vote. The thing about dealing with vague information like "links" and "comments" is that there is no agreed consensus on what's optimal. Back when I first joined Hacker News two or three years ago, there was a faction of users (myself included for a time) who disagreed with snark replies and witty one-liners. That's almost all gone now; we accept that the community feels the need sometimes to be clever rather than overwhelmingly in-depth. There have been people who complain about HN's start-up news/technical news/YCombinator-related news/breaking news/programming news/obituaries/spammy motivational blog posts that tell you you should be happier than you are/Paul Graham's thoughts on his local deli's chicken salad. None of them are "right" per se; they all simply have a different vision of what they want. If YCombinator wanted to evolve Hacker News, they could attempt to install solutions to this perception problem, and come up with clever alternatives that would help each of us see only the things we want to see. But I'm guessing they're happy with HN as it is, warts and all; I'm also betting that most of us are accepting of HN as it is, or at least we suspect any attempts to fix problems will only make them worse. So in the end ironically the votes up and down don't matter. Downvoted content is sometimes great. Upvoted content is sometimes really terrible. The lucky thing is that Hacker News is meaningless enough that we won't be shedding tears over its imperfections. Or at least we shouldn't be.
ojbyrne 16y ago
I think the problem is that you run out of things that are deeply interesting while the "urge to post" continues to grow among users. It seems to me to be an inherent limitation of social news sites that want to keep their front page refreshing with new stuff. As journalists would probably phrase it, it's difficult to fit deep thought into the news cycle.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Some of the "urge to post" comes from the nerdy "somebody's wrong on the Internet" impulse, but a lot of it comes from gamification. HN is just gamified enough to breed competitiveness.
sili 16y ago
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
PaulHoule 16y ago
If it were my site, I'd add a document classifier that makes articles about certain topics face a headwind, or better yet, creates a kind of repulsion between recent articles... If there are already two articles on the front page about Assange on a given day, that's enough. If documents are clean, you can compute the repulsion from the bag-of-word dot products between documents, but web pages often have a lot of noise in the outer template, so getting good results with web pages means you need some kind of template drop-out.
- tptacek 16y ago
  This already exists on HN; it's just sub rosa. If you read 'pg comments carefully, you'll get a sense for what's being done.
jokermatt999 16y ago
I think one of the main problems with celebrity/current events stories is that one article will rarely contain a good, complete overview. Weeks/Months/Years later, there will be great, in depth, interesting articles that cover all the fascinating aspects of a story, but the day to day news and blogs on a subject are more prone to shallow analysis of one aspect of a situation. For example, the whole Wikileaks/Assange situation has many aspects that would be interesting to hackers: IT security failures, a paradigm shift in how effectively governments are able to keep things secret, calls for Internet censorship, small groups of people/hackers/script-kiddies DDoSing major credit cards in an example of asymmetric warfare, transparency vs secrecy, and (to some extent, but less so) the contents of the cables themselves. However, because these are being revealed over a course of weeks, HN instead gets flooded with dozens of articles about small facets of this event, rather than a larger and more in depth analysis. Does this make sense to anyone else, or am I completely off target here?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

You could almost make a rule that any article that had a famous person's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction. Don't get me wrong, some of these articles are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.

logicalmind 16y ago
You could almost make a rule that any comment that had a high profile user's name in (including pg) should get some kind of karma deduction. Don't get me wrong, some of these comments are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.
- j_baker 16y ago
  I agree that there's a problem, but I don't think that celebrity is it. If you took away the comments' scores and removed the names, I could probably still tell if they were made by high-karma members. I think the problem is that the way they think and post is more in line with the majority of users on here. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. I think the problem is that we (like any other group of people) tend to focus more on "I agree with that comment" and less on "That comment is insightful and brings a fresh perspective on the issue whether I agree with it or not". I wish I could say that I'm innocent of this, but I'm just as guilty of supporting my own point of view as anyone else is.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Sounds like you meant that in some kind of snarky way, but absolutely yes. A thousand times yes. I could care less about brand, whether from commenters or famous people in titles. Just give me good content. I don't come here to join some kind of fan club, either for authors or commenters. And of course the reverse is true. We have folks purposely downvoting based on authors or commenters. Which is just as whacked.
  - logicalmind 16y ago
    No snarkiness was intended. I was agreeing and expanding your comment. Nothing irks me more than seeing a very insightful discussion between "high profile member" and "regular user" and seeing a drastic difference in the point total of the comments when they are equally interesting. People should upvote content and not commenter.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      Amazing how people project their own mood onto internet comments. Sorry about that. Thanks for the explanation. Yep, I'd much rather read a dozen guys that nobody knows that help me out in life and help me make terrific changes than become pen-pals and an expert on the top 17 people in the tech industry or on HN. This herd mentality stuff drives me nuts at times. You know, I also feel that people should own their comments, but something as simple as hiding the name until the mouse hovers over the pseudonym would prevent a lot of abuse. It's not like we all have to become anonymous. I think the board just needs to take steps to prevent automatic up or down voting. There are lots of solutions to choose from.
      - rorymarinich 16y ago
        The problem with celebrity in this field is that very frequently celebrities are known more for their personality than they are for the things they say. You have the Asshole, the Motivator, the Snarky Sassplant... etc. They become famous not because they're intelligent or say smart things — let's face it, almost every person in this community is bright and most of them are well-spoken, yet plenty of them still struggle for recognition — but because they adapt a certain tone that's instantly and comfortably recognizable, so that when we see their name we can sink ourselves into whatever's expected of their writing without having to put in too much effort. The celebrity writers always have a certain personality. Whether it's John Gruber or Paul Graham or Dave Winer, they've established exactly what sorts of things they're gonna talk about and how they're gonna talk about it. When we see their names, we know what to expect. Whether it's a good post or a shit post (and everybody has some of each), we still feel like we got our click's worth and are satisfied with that. If I had a choice to see a new DaringFireball essay or another essay, completely unknown, completely at random, I'll probably go with the DF one. It sells me a certain level of quality, a topic that I usually am interested in, a writing style that I very much enjoy. The unknown essay might be more valuable or relevant, but I'm not as instantly willing to give it a chance. ...unless, of course, the author makes an effort to grab me, by titling his essay provocatively or writing in an entertaining style. But then once he finds success with that method, he's not going to want to drop the shtick and risk becoming unknown again. He'll continue with it. At a certain point he'll become a celebrity poster. Then we're back to dealing with the same old shit as we did before. Part of the problem is that HN displays us both POINT VALUE and USER NAME before it even gives us the essay. There is no way to read a comment without seeing the author and the point value before hand. So we're unavoidably biased before we see a word.
- sdrinf 16y ago
  Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question. See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 ), knowing the background he's coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter. And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch, or, more likely, other Random J Blogger. The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot (following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all, this way I see only the things they care to comment about. The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these "celebrities". It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.
  - brlewis 16y ago
    I also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much time.
    - rcfox 16y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
      - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
        It used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not the same thing.
  - logicalmind 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

DanielRibeiro 16y ago

It is also said that these guidelines are an effort to prevent the Eternal September that afflicted Usenet (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News) What can happen in practice: more and more people filtering the posts they comment on using any of the techniques described on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960762

Alex3917 16y ago

"Any post about Zuckerberg, Assange, Arrington, and others probably gets way more upvotes than necessary." While true, the much bigger problem is not that these posts get too many upvotes, but rather that they're the only posts that reliably get any upvotes at all. It's hard to justify even bothering to submit stories since for even the best posts it's a complete crapshoot as to whether or not they get any votes.

ams6110 16y ago
The motivation to submit a story should be "this is really interesting" not "this will get me a lot of votes."
- UrLicht 16y ago
  ...which on HN should mean the same thing, right?
  - rorymarinich 16y ago
    In theory, yes, upvotes indicate valuable content and downvotes indicate irrelevancy. This worked brilliantly for Digg and Reddit, after all, right? In practice, the people that designed the upvote-downvote system and presented it to us as Web 2.0's way of making the Internet perfectidealolympus forgot that they were dealing with human beings. They assumed they were dealing with computers or something for which there's a such thing as "optimal". As a human being, sometimes I feel like a selfless contributor of optimizing upvotes and downvotes, other times I feel like upvoting because hey I like this guy, other times I feel like downvoting because fuck the world and fuck you buddy, and still other times my Dadaist urges kick in and I vote entirely randomly to sow discord and paranoia among the otherwise content bourgeoise. Or at least that's how I imagine some people vote. The thing about dealing with vague information like "links" and "comments" is that there is no agreed consensus on what's optimal. Back when I first joined Hacker News two or three years ago, there was a faction of users (myself included for a time) who disagreed with snark replies and witty one-liners. That's almost all gone now; we accept that the community feels the need sometimes to be clever rather than overwhelmingly in-depth. There have been people who complain about HN's start-up news/technical news/YCombinator-related news/breaking news/programming news/obituaries/spammy motivational blog posts that tell you you should be happier than you are/Paul Graham's thoughts on his local deli's chicken salad. None of them are "right" per se; they all simply have a different vision of what they want. If YCombinator wanted to evolve Hacker News, they could attempt to install solutions to this perception problem, and come up with clever alternatives that would help each of us see only the things we want to see. But I'm guessing they're happy with HN as it is, warts and all; I'm also betting that most of us are accepting of HN as it is, or at least we suspect any attempts to fix problems will only make them worse. So in the end ironically the votes up and down don't matter. Downvoted content is sometimes great. Upvoted content is sometimes really terrible. The lucky thing is that Hacker News is meaningless enough that we won't be shedding tears over its imperfections. Or at least we shouldn't be.

ojbyrne 16y ago

I think the problem is that you run out of things that are deeply interesting while the "urge to post" continues to grow among users. It seems to me to be an inherent limitation of social news sites that want to keep their front page refreshing with new stuff. As journalists would probably phrase it, it's difficult to fit deep thought into the news cycle.

tptacek 16y ago
Some of the "urge to post" comes from the nerdy "somebody's wrong on the Internet" impulse, but a lot of it comes from gamification. HN is just gamified enough to breed competitiveness.

sili 16y ago

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

PaulHoule 16y ago

If it were my site, I'd add a document classifier that makes articles about certain topics face a headwind, or better yet, creates a kind of repulsion between recent articles... If there are already two articles on the front page about Assange on a given day, that's enough. If documents are clean, you can compute the repulsion from the bag-of-word dot products between documents, but web pages often have a lot of noise in the outer template, so getting good results with web pages means you need some kind of template drop-out.

tptacek 16y ago
This already exists on HN; it's just sub rosa. If you read 'pg comments carefully, you'll get a sense for what's being done.

jokermatt999 16y ago

I think one of the main problems with celebrity/current events stories is that one article will rarely contain a good, complete overview. Weeks/Months/Years later, there will be great, in depth, interesting articles that cover all the fascinating aspects of a story, but the day to day news and blogs on a subject are more prone to shallow analysis of one aspect of a situation. For example, the whole Wikileaks/Assange situation has many aspects that would be interesting to hackers: IT security failures, a paradigm shift in how effectively governments are able to keep things secret, calls for Internet censorship, small groups of people/hackers/script-kiddies DDoSing major credit cards in an example of asymmetric warfare, transparency vs secrecy, and (to some extent, but less so) the contents of the cables themselves. However, because these are being revealed over a course of weeks, HN instead gets flooded with dozens of articles about small facets of this event, rather than a larger and more in depth analysis. Does this make sense to anyone else, or am I completely off target here?