3 ms·

Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed as a "Live

Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed as a "Live Bookmark" in Firefox, which links right to the story URLs (not the discussions), so sometimes I'll go a few days just reading the stories, not upvoting/discussing anything, all the while thinking, "Jeez, there hasn't been anything good on HN lately." Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN-worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the discussion of an article. My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi-regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like 3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Actually the decay rate is set the other way, right? The Ask/Show/Tell stories get whacked sooner. Can't remember exactly why though. It occurs to me that any story that takes a long time to consume -- say a long TED talk -- has a built-in disadvantage to a story that can be quickly consumed. That's because of the way the decay rate works. Ideal HN-bait story? A long-ish story with several technical-looking drawings, charts, and graphs, all around some flame-bait brand/fanboy thing like Apple or Google, loaded with personal drama that involves some famous tech person. If it has some technical googledegook or obscure jargon, all the better. I don't mean that as a criticism of HN, just trying to flesh out what commonalities I'm noticing. Seems like that would be a first step to critiquing site. For all I know, this is exactly the kind of story pg wants to see. Beats me. EDIT: This idea of trying to come up with the silliest hn article title in order to demonstrate community trends was so interesting to me that I followed up with a HN Contest http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844
- profquail 16y ago
  Yep, HN is currently set up so that the Ask/Show/Tell stories decay faster, which just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there used to be so many more of those posts, but it's really that there are more now and they just rarely show up on the frontpage (which is probably the only thing that most people look at). I think you're right about the HN-bait stories -- in fact, I have a feeling that a number of people tend to upvote sensational stories (actually, just the titles) without even reading them, which makes the problem even worse.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I've noticed in myself a trend: I'll read the first few graphs and then, once I figure out whether I agree with the author or not, either ditch the whole story or just go upvote it. I assume other people do the same. It's not a good thing to do. I think the site would be much more useful if it were just Ask/Tell/Show HN stories with some kind of meta filtering on top. How do I find a cofounder? What's the best way to measure traction? How do all these startups get so much media attention? Is there some way to navigate from those questions to all the discussions about it that we've had on HN? If so, and if you could do that with a 100 startup-related issues, it'd be a hell of a more useful site than all the gossip and drama that we end up with.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Actually the decay rate is set the other way, right? The Ask/Show/Tell stories get whacked sooner. Can't remember exactly why though. It occurs to me that any story that takes a long time to consume -- say a long TED talk -- has a built-in disadvantage to a story that can be quickly consumed. That's because of the way the decay rate works. Ideal HN-bait story? A long-ish story with several technical-looking drawings, charts, and graphs, all around some flame-bait brand/fanboy thing like Apple or Google, loaded with personal drama that involves some famous tech person. If it has some technical googledegook or obscure jargon, all the better. I don't mean that as a criticism of HN, just trying to flesh out what commonalities I'm noticing. Seems like that would be a first step to critiquing site. For all I know, this is exactly the kind of story pg wants to see. Beats me. EDIT: This idea of trying to come up with the silliest hn article title in order to demonstrate community trends was so interesting to me that I followed up with a HN Contest http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844

profquail 16y ago
Yep, HN is currently set up so that the Ask/Show/Tell stories decay faster, which just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there used to be so many more of those posts, but it's really that there are more now and they just rarely show up on the frontpage (which is probably the only thing that most people look at). I think you're right about the HN-bait stories -- in fact, I have a feeling that a number of people tend to upvote sensational stories (actually, just the titles) without even reading them, which makes the problem even worse.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I've noticed in myself a trend: I'll read the first few graphs and then, once I figure out whether I agree with the author or not, either ditch the whole story or just go upvote it. I assume other people do the same. It's not a good thing to do. I think the site would be much more useful if it were just Ask/Tell/Show HN stories with some kind of meta filtering on top. How do I find a cofounder? What's the best way to measure traction? How do all these startups get so much media attention? Is there some way to navigate from those questions to all the discussions about it that we've had on HN? If so, and if you could do that with a 100 startup-related issues, it'd be a hell of a more useful site than all the gossip and drama that we end up with.