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Solving The Hacker News Problem

• mcav 16y ago
  HN would be better if it were invite-only like Dribbble. I'm not a member of Dribbble, but it's a good example of why restricting community growth is beneficial. We're too late for that here. I don't think PG has enough bandwidth or interest to truly solve the problem. New users will continue to join, adding noise to the signal, unless HN changes course. It's going to become more generic and more biased the longer the site stays open. I hesitate to suggest more moderation as some posters suggest. I'm already uncomfortable with the murmurs of unfair moderation in the system here.
  • pg 16y ago
    Actually HN is the reason I don't have enough bandwidth for other things, not the other way around.
• tianyicui 16y ago
  IMO, a tag system like StackOverflow or Quora seems a good way to go.
  • tptacek 16y ago
    Tags concede defeat, fragmenting one dysfunctional community into a whole spectrum of subcommunities. How will we handle the tag for "good enough for '08 Hacker News"?
    • dschobel 16y ago
      If you can sideline all the people who want to bullshit about how the ipad2 is the future of personal computing or the quality of the writing at TC, you've already won.
    • tianyicui 16y ago
      No, what Reddit does is fragmenting community. How much does the tag system in StackOverflow or Quora fragment them? Tags helped people to somehow filter their already overwhelmed input stream, focus on what they really interest in, and more importantly, ban the items they genuinely don't like to see.
  • toddh 16y ago
    That was my thought too, they both have quite stringent moderation, but that doesn't solve the increasing the quality of participation, unless of course it's decline is what drove some people away.
• vidar 16y ago
  Perhaps pg is too busy these days to really tend to HN? God knows I would be if I were carrying his load.
  • dools 16y ago
    Nope, I got an email from him the other day telling me not to editorialise in submission titles after I posted that Nissan Leaf HTML5 extravaganza with the heading "Behold: We don't need flash for anything anymore. Ever". I'm sure that post itself rankled our OP.
    • rudiger 16y ago
      Question: Why'd you give it such a sensational title?
      • dools 16y ago
        Well, I guess because I was editorialising!! I found it sensational at the time. That was the first time I had looked at a site and said to myself "well that must be Flash(TM)", and then a second later in my head thought "well fair enough, you'd HAVE to use Flash(TM) to get that kind of experience for a major brand", then right-clicked on the page only to see the standard context menu... no "Zoom in"!! I was really quite blown away. I could have just put it on my blog then posted that to HN (which is actually what pg said I should have done when he emailed me), but my initial thoughts, were that I really just wanted to share this with my pals on HN (similar to the way someone else had posted Ben the Bodyguard as a "Gorgeous HTML5 implementation" or something) and that putting it on my blog then linking to my blog from HN would just be viewed by the community as me jockeying for traffic and being self-promotional!
  • kmfrk 16y ago
    Did you forget all about the "More" debacle? Gods know it was a terrible decision, but it showed some active participation by pg.
    • 16y ago
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  • mcav 16y ago
    If he wanted to advertise for BankSimple, he could've done a heck of a lot better than a passing reference in a blog post about HN.
• tptacek 16y ago
  For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that most high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses. In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
  • YuriNiyazov 16y ago
    Did you forward those essays to the powers that be?
    • tptacek 16y ago
      No. I'm high-drama enough as it is.
      • YuriNiyazov 16y ago
        Well, based on what I've seen so far, PG usually asks for datasets that support the point that one is making about the degradation of the community. If the essays that you have are just long rants, they will be easy to ignore. However, if there exists a dataset that supports those various points, as well as suggestions on how to change HN, PG usually seems very reasonable about trying them out.
    • JonnieCache 16y ago
      If there is one thing that causes an internet community to break down, its when a subsection of that community has too muh communication out-of-band in another medium that the rest of the members are unaware of. Especially if that other medium is more synchronous than the primary medium. Many forums have been driven to civil war by a clique plotting on a secret IRC channel. (Note: I am not suggesting that is happening here! Just that I've seen it before.)
      • tptacek 16y ago
        What was the point of this comment? (I'm asking seriously; I want to know what it is you're specifically trying to communicate here).
• jcsalterego 16y ago
  It seems there's always been reluctance to add features, for the sake of simplicity. Personal messages, for example, would have been useful in many, many instances, but instead we find ourselves checking out the plain-text profile and finding alternate methods of communication. This limitation has also sprouted ancillary sites attached to the HN Tree of Life, such as searchyc.com, hackermonthly.com, and hnrecap.com as mentioned in the post. In a similar vein, carving out a sub-HN seems to be: a) downloading the source code, b) bringing it online at another domain and c) announcing via "Tell HN". All in all, unless someone with >10^5 karma decides to take the time and add some community features to HN (for various values of "community" and "features"), we're all going to continue and see more noise and many different signals. As an aside, I wholeheartedly appreciate the name, "Bloomfilter."
• jmm57 16y ago
  As a low-karma, long-time lurker, I'm not sure I've ever really seen the kind of submissions he is looking for. Can someone provide examples of submitted content that would meet his criteria of deeply technical discussion worthy news?
  • mikeleeorg 16y ago
    I keep reloading this comment because I'm in the same boat as jmm57 and would love to see some examples as well. Out of curiosity, is Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/) what al3x and other long-time members want? Or is it the kind of discussion & content seen on a StackOverflow?
  • paulbaumgart 16y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321443
• sachinag 16y ago
  As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation. As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible for what's on the front page and what's in the comments. Having a handful of humans who are responsible for curating the front page (and possibly also pinning really good stories from new onto the front page) would solve most of these problems. Is this less democratic? Sure it is. Would the unfairness be worth it? In my opinion, yes. This problem just isn't solvable with code; it takes benevolent dictators.
  • tptacek 16y ago
    What's the threshold HN crossed where it started needing active moderation? Because '08 HN threads were just better than '11 threads. Is it just a number of users, past which no set of guidelines restrains pathological conversations? Why? If you can trace it back to what thing happens when you get to your 50,000th user, maybe there's some passive moderation mechanism you can identify to keep it in check.
    • _delirium 16y ago
      I'm not sure it's number of users--- Kuro5hin's downhill slide roughly coincided with a net loss of users, and its heydey was probably also its most populated era. '08 HN seemed pretty similar to me, though, though I was just a lurker. It was a mixture of good technical content, startup-scene celebrity watching, too many TechCrunch posts, a vaguely political thread every few days (sometimes with a weak "hacking" justification), and the periodic thread once every 3-4 weeks about how HN is dying / has too many political posts / is turning into reddit. Just fewer total comments and votes (by a good margin). Some random examples: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179755 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179755 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105739 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105739 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109052 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109052 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80234 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437727 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437727
• gabaix 16y ago
  what about tagging? automatic or crowd-powered. Seems a great way to sort through the noise. tags could be "technical", "startup", "YC" etc.
• jacques_chester 16y ago
  Ah yes, the cycle of website life. * Hot new community forms at Site X. * Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3! * Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users. * Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa. * Site X begins to exhaust natural topics of conversation. Denizens of more than 3 months standing become sick of 100th "What does Site X think about AlphaGamma?" post and begin to slap down newbies. * Someone reminisces out loud about the Golden Days of Site X. * Discussions on Site X become more and more about Site X. Extremely intelligent individuals begin to earnestly argue that their proposed feature will save Site X from itself. * Someone proposes or launches Site Y. A how new community begins to form there ... I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.
  • tptacek 16y ago
    This comes across as snide. Slashdot circa 2011 is largely unreadable. So is Digg, so is main Reddit. The cycle may be real, but so is the phenomenon driving it.
    • jacques_chester 16y ago
      Sure. All sites experience regression to the mean[1]. Usually this starts happening about 12 months after I decide to become a regular. In HN's case I've come in halfway through the cycle, about 3 months ago, so apparently the magnitude of my destructive powers is increasing. [1] and also the snide.
  • JonnieCache 16y ago
    >I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with. "Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
• reedlaw 16y ago
  Could this phenomenon be in any way attributable to nostalgia? Personally, I find any online community loses attractiveness after a certain period of time.
• pg 16y ago
  I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.
  • dools 16y ago
    It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical". I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the true Hacker Mentality. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1 http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1
    • achompas 16y ago
      The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though. As OPs go further from tech/startups (and towards econ and policy), commenters display a poorer understanding of basic concepts. Bottom line: sure, hackers care about many problems. But that doesn't make up for the poor discussion quality surrounding many non-tech articles here.
      • dools 16y ago
        The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though I've seen what looks like fantastic advice and discussion on a range of non-technical topics (particularly things like venture capital/financing and laws around starting a company and that kind of thing). Of course, not being an expert in any of that stuff I'm at a loss to make a judgement as to it's veracity ;)
• mkr-hn 16y ago
  Sounds like (s)he wants a Less Wrong for startups.
• zaidf 16y ago
  Or may be after a while our perception about something changes disproportionate to the actual change? That's basically boredom--and it can happen even if you consume something good for a long time. That "good thing" doesn't change so much as your perception of it.
• jaekwon 16y ago
  Hi, I'm taking on this challenge. Al3x, can you send me an email at jkwon.work@gmail.com? Also, I'm taking suggestions for seed users. There will also be a HN Karma cutoff where everyone above a threshold can join. You can nominate HN users or yourself here.
• teyc 16y ago
  Where is the data that shows HN has degraded? We aren't seeing kitten pictures. A scan of the front page shows the mix of articles being programming, startups, tech. I'm not sure what Alex wants? More discussion around PG's hackers and painters?
• SeanLuke 16y ago
  This was discussed before: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934367 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934367 I had a comment which I guess I should link to rather than repost: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605
• mickeyben 16y ago
  Very well written article. I think he has some good points. I'd really like to see a 'deeply technical' alternative to HN and hope he'll find the good guys !
• p90x 16y ago
  This.
• malandrew 16y ago
  Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost. Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product. My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, first engineer hire and first design hire) of YC startups would probably make the best moderators and admins. In fact, I would say that it's probably time that PG spin off YC as a full-time startup, assigning control of the design and codebase to one talented UI designer, one talented developer and one talented product manager. For the site to keep growing in a way that maintains quality, it needs more functionality that it has. The two features that lack the most are filtering and combinatorial game mechanics. Filtering is necessary so it is easy for the the hardcore tech articles to be easily found by high-karma members, so they can vote those articles up. If it's not findable, it's not voteable. Filtering is also necessary for people to extract the most value out of hacker news. Most users don't want 100 front-page articles everyday. They probably want 10-20 of the highest value articles. Less is more. Combinatorial game mechanics like those on StackOverflow would help as well. Upvoting/downvoting is limited in that it will always fall victim to the masses. Giving special voting/tagging/burying rights to distinguished members (very high-karma users and YC founders and employees) would go a long way to helping eliminate the crap. I think I speak for most members here, when I say that I don't want Hacker News to be a democracy. I want it to be a technocracy. I want the smart and accomplished people to control what is good and should be visible to all. I've got only 260 karma points, and personally I don't think that should be enough karma points to allow me to upvote a submission. 500+ karma points should be the threshold to be able to vote an article to the frontpage.
  • Dylanlacey 16y ago
    Even game mechanics have a problem. Say your valued members have a certain mindset, ethos and style. Let's call it YC-meme. Everyone with YC-meme contributes in a manner that exemplifies YC-meme. If someone comes along and doesn't have that meme, their posts tend to not be what the memesters want. So, members use their voting powers to reduce that person's karma. Eventually they either leave, get ignored by all, or become infected with YC-meme. Now, open up the community to everyone. At first, YC-meme is still dominant. Only 1% of people without it are able to write posts in a style similar enough to gather karma. Let's say they have RD-meme, which has about 80% overlap with YC-meme. Great. The problem is, soon, there isn't 1% of the community with RD-meme, there's 10%. Who can (and do) re-enforce RD-meme posts, because it's what they want. People can even get lucky and simply contribute 'good' posts, long enough that they get a decent karma score, and so can re-enforce different memes. What makes it WORSE is that what's acceptible is what's visible, so with more RD-meme posts, RD-meme posts become more likely, as the probability that they get 'punished' decreases. End result: Community-dilution runaway. There are a few 'cures' I can think of, but most are fairly prescriptive: 1. A concrete set of rules and behaviors that anyone can reference to moderate from. Gross. 2. A very high bar for moderation, with active participation. Given that the people most likely to have YC-meme are also likely to be busy, this might be doomed by design. 3. "Proof" required for contribution. Great way to kill off your community. 4. Invitations. Either so easy to get as to be meaningless, or so hard as to stagnate the community. 5. Close ranks to just people at/gone from YC. Sadly, that'd mean I was out. May still be the best alternative. Maybe the community is self-aware enough to start consciously moderating better. Perhaps a post like this every so often might serve as a gentle reminder. That'd be the best outcome, but needs to be chosen by a majority of the user base. Do YOU want a stricter HN?
• doron 16y ago
  The Illustrated Guide to Flame Warriors is a handy reference: http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm
• jpwagner 16y ago
  Well, obviously posts/discussions like this can actually be contributing to the "problem" as some see it, but I'll make one point I don't see made here. For me personally, I've learned a lot and grown a lot over the course of the 4 years I've been lurking and occasionally contributing here. So for me, a smaller percentage of the stories/articles/posts/discussions appear as insightful as they once did. I don't mean to knock HN in any way, in fact my point is that that fact is not a "problem" to me. New users are joining everyday and everybody who makes the effort to learn and contribute gets something out of HN. It's what brings me back 17 times a day.
• redthrowaway 16y ago
  All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place, the cruft in another. Let's face it, the people who are complaining about lack fo deep tech are also likely to read and enjoy one of Spolsky's blog posts. There's no need to ban the latter to protect the former, just keep them in separate sections. Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand. I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.
  • lwat 16y ago
    We have become exceedingly efficient at ruining online communities.
• dschobel 16y ago
  How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal. Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else. As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.
  • groby_b 16y ago
    Hm... Story upvotes modulated by users Karma might be good enough. It's an interesting concept... Stackoverflow operates under this principle, more or less, but it doesn't seem to entirely stop the slow decline.
  • SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    The problem with using karma is that it is affected by the regression to the mean. As more "average" people come in, more "average" people will give them karma. Solve that problem, and you might have a solution to the whole problem (I, for one, am not smart enough for that ;).
    • mkr-hn 16y ago
      Maybe some mix of karma, account age, and the number of upvotes received from first-year members to give a person's votes weight.
    • richchan 16y ago
      Alternatively, perhaps we can let users select (follow) a set of like-minded people and make the up-votes of the people they pick weigh more on a "customized" front page. But then people may have not like having their up-votes be so transparent..
  • jackolas 16y ago
    But the interesting issue here is that those who write interesting commentary may not be good at discerning good quality. (according to whatever standard we're holding)
• rubashov 16y ago
  The basic complaint is that social sites grow into mobs. The solution is rather obviously: halt growth. You have to limit the number of active users to some vaguely Dunbar-ish number or you inevitably wind up with a lowest common denominator mob. Metafilter did this, right? For a couple years they said "No new accounts." I think scaling a social site to a very large number of members without deteriorating badly is impossible. It's a matter of human nature and mobs.
• petercooper 16y ago
  It's definitely not what Alex is semi-proposing but I've been running RubyFlow - http://rubyflow.com/ http://rubyflow.com/ - for a few years now and it totally stole the MetaFilter model, just for Ruby-only stuff. No "votes" and points scoring - just interesting posts from people in the Ruby community coupled with me editing posts for format and deleting anything that's blatantly spam or offtopic. Seems to work though I have been tempted to go in the voting/Reddit/HN direction with it.. maybe I shouldn't!
  • mechanical_fish 16y ago
    So long as you have the personal bandwidth, you will almost certainly be a better editor than any algorithm you can come up with. Thanks for the link, by the way.
• Mz 16y ago
  I'm probably one of those darned newbies who isn't a real hacker and is screwing the place up. (Sorry.) So I wasn't around in 2008 (or whenever the Glory Days were). I don't feel like this article or other discussions about the issue have really given me a good idea of what HN supposedly once was that it isn't anymore. I wish I could get such info. I think that kind of information would hold out some hope of figuring out a real solution -- a means to raise the bar or deepen the discussion or whatever it is that people are wanting. I know there are other large forums on the internet but this is the largest one I have personally participated in. I think such large forums are breaking new ground, socially, in ways that do not compare to sites like Facebook. Where else can I actually speak with my 80K closest friends? If I am in a room of 500 at work (and not on the stage, because I am not one of the big wigs), only a handful of people around me can hear anything I say. We all can listen to the presentation, but we cannot converse. Here, any and all of us can converse. It is unlike anything you can do "IRL". I suspect that is part of the issue: No one really has a model for how you manage that kind of social interaction. And the models we do have break in that setting. Just thinking out loud.
  • groby_b 16y ago
    Part of "the glory days" was a much more interesting debate. Currently, lots of HN comments are either going for the cute/snide/sarcastic joke, or argue dogmatic points. Worse - the snide remarks get modded up. Being guilty of them myself, let me post an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202958 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2202958 The discussion was about Google's two factor auth. Somebody asks for a good API, poster #2 suggests OpenID. I joke "you read the part about 'good' API". It's by far the highest-modded comment I have. (Which makes me feel guilty every time I see it). Sure, I don't have a lot of comments or karma, so it might be a fluke, but it exemplifies what's wrong with the discussion. HN'08 would've modded me to 0 for that and moved on. HN'11 rewards playing to the audience.
    • Mz 16y ago
      A couple of real quick and dirty thoughts: A) Meatier comments/debates require a certain level of trust that the debate is about ideas and not about pecking order. That is enormously hard to achieve in most settings. It gets harder when the community grows. A smaller group is much more able to know each other and all that. B) My best understanding is that formality is what older cultures with larger populations moved towards as a solution for such problems. I know I find some stuff at work endlessly annoying because of the disconnect between the setting and the social behaviors/assumptions. My mom is European and my dad was career military and my ex husband was career military. Europe and the American military are both more formal cultures than the American Deep South where I grew up (and live currently). I find some of the assumptions of more 'casual' cultures to be very uncouth. I don't know how to raise the bar on formality for a place like HN but my best guess is that would help with this particular issue. I like a good, healthy debate. I rarely engage in it because most "debates" are really fights (ie they are "arguments" in the other sense of the word -- emotional, social, ugly), not intellectual discussions. Anyway thanks for tossing me a clue. That does help me think about the issue, unlike most of what I read in these discussions.
• danenania 16y ago
  I'm fairly new, but I think HN is great. The level of discussion is way, way higher than other similar communities I've seen, and I think the general focus on tech issues with splashes of other topics is perfect. Seems like a successful self-regulating community if I've ever seen one. People just like to complain.
• johnrob 16y ago
  Another reason HN may be boring: we've beaten a lot of the common topics to death. It only takes a handful of articles about "how to pitch a VC" to soak up most of the relevant advice on the subject. While posts often present a unique combination of previously mentioned ideas, it's becoming increasingly rare to actually find something new if you are a regular here.
  • robryan 16y ago
    This may also explain why even older members are posting things further away from the core hacker news topics. Something about health care or law or economics might seem more interesting than a pitch a VC article because we have all read many many opinions on the latter. I think good technical stuff though is evergreen because there are always new languages, libraries and techniques.
  • erikpukinskis 16y ago
    It's worth noting that this is also true in Magazines, where they have strong editorial review, and an actual staff of people creating content. Once you've read 12 months of Runners World, you've basically read every Runners World that has been, or ever will be, written.
• Pooter 16y ago
  The solution, ultimately, is for the site to wither and die, and be replaced by something else that will have the same fate. This is what happens to all things, and to all human social groupings in particular, from ancient Rome on down to your nuclear family. If you're tired of it, start something else. Or hang out and jump ship when the next great thing comes along. Trying to preserve the golden age is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.
• jefe78 16y ago
  I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit. Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.
  • tomrod 16y ago
    Agreed completely.
  • astrange 16y ago
    Please cite examples. Your post is practically an example of karma-whoring without them - anyone can make this claim.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
• peterbraden 16y ago
  I think that if you stay at any online community long enough, you begin to perceive a drop in quality - even if that drop does not exist. IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information. On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.
• ericbrunstad 16y ago
  If you look at the classic page he references (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic), the articles are nearly identical, with slightly different ordering. That seems to suggest the problem is smaller than he indicates.
• ypirate 16y ago
  The points system has been gamed. There's some organized down voting for critiquing some big players (MSFT,APPL). There's clear fanboyism that gets inexplicably upvoted. It's mutated from "slightly cynical hacker" to "astro turf public relations".
• doron 16y ago
  Gated communities are effective means of preserving the identity of communities, they all employ some bar of entry whether racial, religious, ageist, or economical.There are many social maladies that are also unique to the gated community, the insularity often breeds all sorts of creepiness. Preservation all to often morphs to Stagnation. Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be. I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so. The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture. When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery. When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground. It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation. More people, more heat, Entropy.
• mthreat 16y ago
  Case in point - this article.
• bootload 16y ago
  "... I think HN does a crappy job with general tech news and a so-so job with content that’s specifically relevant to startup founders and employees. These days, HN does a downright terrible job with deeply technical topics; that’s the area I hear the most complaining about on Twitter and in private. Since deep tech is HN’s weakest point, let’s go after it. ..." The weakness of the argument is that the engineer/developer/programmer view is a subset of the interests hackers, founders and entrepreneurs. I draw a clear distinction between tech guns for hire who only want depth as opposed to those who want to solve technical problems and maybe innovate which requires both depth & breadth.
• d0m 16y ago
  Maybe experienced HN (read as a mix of high karma + there since the beginning), could have a bigger impact on which articles are chosen. I honestly don't mind a "dictatorship" selection where chosen members could remove useless post / select useful one.
• hammock 16y ago
  Everyone here has seen this same lifecycle play out at just about every online community there ever was. Doesn't matter whether it was open or closed. It's a fact of life. The solutions offered are top-down culture modification and just plain don't work. Adapt, and wait for the next HN to come along. You can't stop the train.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• tomrod 16y ago
  Wait... he complains on his post about not submitting his blog posts to the community.. which then gets submitted to the community and upvoted (albeit probably not by him). Does that sum it up?
• kedi_xed 16y ago
  It's simple really. Digg was good, then it got popular, Reddit was good, then it got popular. I've increasingly visited HN more than Reddit to get my old Reddit fix, as I assume others have, and so popularity has increased and now the quality is degrading as people want their karma fix or 2 cents. There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll. The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments. Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...
• dave1619 16y ago
  Another HN challenge... as discussions get longer (like this page), it gets more chaotic and more difficult to follow.
• icey 16y ago
  I would very much like to have http://startups.ycombinator.com/startups/ http://startups.ycombinator.com/startups/ and have a more narrow focus on startup related news and entrepreneurship. The constant stream of front-paged political arguments and noticeable increase in mean-spirited commentary in the threads has caused me to spend most of my time on HN logged out. It used to be that I'd read the comments before I'd even read the story to see if the story was worth reading. I wonder if it's possible that pg doesn't notice the degradation in comment quality as much because the trolls have been here baiting him since the very early days. I don't think HN is irrevocably broken; I'm glad that pg is helming the ship and I think he's doing an admirable job of it so far (I think the ranking algorithm in use for the front-page stories is one of the best anywhere). But HN used to be great, and now it's merely good. I think that a lot of people who have been here for a long time have thought about what's changed here, and how it could be fixed. I know I've littered more than a few mailboxes with lengthy emails about what I think is wrong, and what I think the solution is. Reading this thread kind of tells the story - a point has come where the community is large enough to have factions that value different things. "Anything that good hackers might find interesting" works when you have a small group of people engaged in conversation. It's less useful when you have mobs of people who have come with different ideas of what they want to get out of this site. In the early days, HN felt like it was a problem solving tool; a way to find out what cool things people were working on, and occasionally to ask for advice. The community was humble, competent, and full of people who actually made things. Those people are still here, but there's a self-aggrandizing element here as well. The group of people who seem to think that someone else's success somehow reflects poorly on themselves, the bloviators and blowhards who believe that a volume of arguments somehow makes up for the measurable factuality of arguments. I don't really know what the solution is to this. I thought if there was a way to ignore people it might make a difference, but after some experimentation I think that that's a dead end - there is too much chance of missing something truly interesting from doing that. All this being said, HN has had an immeasurable positive impact on my life - The people that I've met through HN (both in person and virtually) are some of the smartest, most amazing people I've known. I'll get to use the things I've learned from HN (and more importantly from the people in it) for the rest of my life. I can't think of another site on the net that has come even close to making such a huge impact. I can't imagine missing out on all of this if HN had been invite-only when it launched. I didn't know anyone when I first came here. I didn't even know who Paul Graham was. Instead of complaining about it, I think those of us that have been here for awhile owe it to pg to actively try to improve the community. It's become too large for him to handle on his own. Yes, there are moderators, but they're an invisible hand that only act as a corrective force. We're a creative lot. I'm sure we can figure out some way to improve this community from the inside.
• aDemoUzer 16y ago
  Part of the problem is the basic UI look, hence I am working on a new UI for it: http://peri.me/2B1A/ http://peri.me/2B1A/
• pdaviesa 16y ago
  Pretty soon you guys will be telling the kids to turn down that damn music and stay off your lawn :)
• alexknight 16y ago
  Honestly I'd love to pay for a Hackernews account if it meant weeding out some rather distasteful people. Not saying that is the be all/end all solution to the problem though.
• wyuenho 16y ago
  Why can't HN force categories on every posts? Have the community create and curate the categories, and select their own categories on HN to read. Just a blanket vote up/down button hardly measures how valuable anything is for any particular group if that group is not constant.
• georgieporgie 16y ago
  If sites want to claim some sort of community and continuity, they're going to have to place newbies into virtual reeducation camps. Want to see the newest links? You have to read through 10 comments from an '07 post first. Posted a link to an internet meme? Back to the virtual reeducation camp with you.
• doorhammer 16y ago
  If the crowd has cycled so much, I wonder if maybe this isn't the best solution for the desired outcome. Granted, I haven't been visiting tech-specific boards for more than a few years, but I'd generally agree that the more technical articles are what I'm interested in. I think I'd be interested in a board that was geared toward programmers/hackers, but didn't use a typical karma/point system. I'd like to see one that perhaps utilized karma, but under a collaborative filtering system. So, in a simple for-instance, if a small subgroup of people tend to upvote articles that I do, those articles would be given more weight, and similarly those who downvote articles I upvote would be, from my perspective, given less downvote weight, while at the same time there might be a different subgroup that was weighted to value their downvote more. Perhaps give people the ability to tweak the tolerances of their collaboration. Give them the ability to say "if this guy has X karma and ignores someone's articles and votes, then I want to ignore them too" Of course, this might be 1. a completely naive idea, 2. an idea that's already been tried and failed 3. an idea that's already being used 4. something to time-consuming for people with real work to do or 5. an idea that's unworkable and that I'm only having because I just started reading books on, and experimenting with, machine-learning ;) Though even if it existed, I probably wouldn't use it. I already waste half my day reading the few articles that interest me on hacker-news, heh it sucks that when you design any system or any set of rules, and humans are going to interact with it, you have to think "how are these shady bastards going to subvert my beautiful creation?"
• krschultz 16y ago
  In theory, centrally planned things make a lot of sense. In practice, democracy usually comes to a better solution, even if it is not perfect. HN is driven by votes, the community is getting what the majority wants right now. The only way to really improve HN is to change or limit the community. You can tweak the rules only to limit certain actions to high-kharma users, but if there is pent up demand for some kind of story it will make its way to the front page.
• JoshCole 16y ago
  One thing worth noting is that reversion to the mean doesn't have to be a bad thing. For example todays mean level of education compared to the mean level of education a few hundred years ago is very different. A good question to ask might be, would submitting this increase the mean level of discourse on Hacker News? It is the same sort of thing as what is in the guidelines, but reworded for greater relevance.
• mkramlich 16y ago
  My suggestions for tweaks to improve the site: 1. hard ban on purely political news ("Egyptian leader stepped down! OMG!") 2. hard ban on gender-specific things ("i'm female, went to bar during hacker conference, got groped, OMG!" -- yes it was hacker conference, but gosh subtract the 'during hacker conference' and you have real life, it's independent of tech, not specific to it or due to it, just a life thing with guys and gals) 3. particularly if hard bans (enforced by a set of trusted admins) on the above topics are not added, then allow submitters and admins to add/edit content tags for each post; then allow logged-in users to submit content filters so that when they see, eg., the front page, it can suppress all posts with certain tags (eg., pure-politics, gender, sports, religion, etc.) 4. optional for-small-periodic-fee premium accounts, which allow those users to exercise extra features like smarter content tagging/filtering, sorting, user following, user submission/comment filtering (so you can blacklist blowhards and pedants from what you see, even if they are not banned from the site overall)... I'd personally love to blacklist anybody that ever does a comment reply to me that is (a) rude, or (b) idiotic, or (c) overly pedantic (some is fine, we're nerds, goes with territory, and some precision is valuable, sometimes). Blacklists could be flat files, one user per line. We could share them among each other privately. I've bookmarked a few "ahole-or-idiot" users but I'd love it if I could have them automatically stripped from anything I see on HN in the future. Actually, I'd love to have this feature on all social/forum/news sites I visit. 5. fix the "type comment, hit submit, get error page saying something doesn't exist, so you have to go back, copy your text, hit Refresh, paste the text back in, hit Submit again" bug/feature. that drives me nuts. feels like impl side-effect rather than intentional UX 6. don't have the up/down arrows so close together when viewed on iPhone 7. don't allow just anyone to downvote any comment. or at least, they can't downvote it beyond 1 point, below which is penalty land. right now, any dumbass can downvote a comment of mine from 1 to 0, which then reduces my overall lifelong site karma by 1. Just because they disagreed with me. Or they're an asshole. Or they accidentally hit the downvote button (see 6). Instead, have a minimum karma requirement to issue downvotes, and/or only admins. HN is great, despite it's imperfections. But I'd gladly pay up for premium features. HN Gold? HNGold.com (YC-W11)? EDIT: added a few items
  • spicyj 16y ago
    (In response to 7,) you already need 500 karma to downvote anything.
• nhangen 16y ago
  I just want to speak up as a relative newcomer that feels I've learned enough about this place to speak my mind without being afraid of retribution and can do so with a basic understanding of what works/doesn't work here. I really like it here, and it's my 1st stop after Gmail every day, and often more than once per day. Nothing is perfect, but as far as I'm concerned, this is as good as it gets.
• ddkrone 16y ago
  Reeks of elitism.
• T_S_ 16y ago
  Put some teeth into karma. Make more karma mean bigger upvotes and downvotes, say 1 extra point for every 500 points of karma. It doesn't have to be linked to when a person joined. It's elitist like a journal or university, but at least anyone can read HN, and good posters will rise. Problem solved? EDIT: Oh yeah. 1 week comment lockout for negative karma, with a grace period for newbies to learn how to comment.
• edw519 16y ago
  Quality of HN Comments Over Time | . . | . . q| . . . . u| . . . . . . a| . . . . . l| . . . . . i| . . . . . t| . . . you are here -->. . y| (that's all) |________________________________________________________ N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F '09 '10 '11 (It must be that time of year again...) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871
  • oconnor0 16y ago
    The question is, of course, are we entering the Eternal February?
    • buro9 16y ago
      As of now (9:10GMT) I've read every post on this page, and I think as short as it is, the parent (Eternal February) perhaps is the one that is closest to what I think has happened. I think this is a people problem, not a technology one. For those who haven't heard this phrase before, the "Eternal February" apes the "Eternal September". Pre-1993, each September would herald the start of a new university year and an influx of new students who would suddenly gain access to the internet. Whilst their presence was being integrated by existing on-line communities, the standard and quality of debate in Usenet was perceived to decline as the same questions got asked again and the conversation standard was forced again. The same problems came forth until such a point that the existing communities had assimilated the newbies and by October or November things had returned to where they were, just a bit bigger. Then along came AOL, giving out free/cheap internet access to all and lowering the technical barrier to getting on-line. A good thing for the world, but a bad thing for those Usenet communities who suddenly had to assimilate an influx greater than a normal September, and also an influx that didn't subside. At some point the ability of those in Usenet to assimilate was surpassed by the people getting on-line and finding Usenet. The term "Eternal September" was coined to describe this problem and the general failure of Usenet to keep up with the flow and the lowering standards that are the result of this. I think HackerNews has no technical problem. The discussion around karma and mod points is a distraction, the same goes for invite only systems and "classic" view. I'm going to speculate that the problem is purely the size of the population and the growth rate, and that the community gravity is now such that this is not going to stop. Anyone who has been here for years, and anyone who has a shed load of karma points... those who give in time, effort... there's no questioning that we/they all want to have a place such as this, and few really want to leave it. But it's hard to see how staying is going to help, and here's why: Time is valuable to us, and our expectations have risen as our experience and knowledge increased, and we feel defeated by that influx and we sense the gravity (that if anything increases the rate of influx). Due to the growth, the noise level is so much higher (even if only 0.1% of the population post new things or respond, 0.1% of hundreds of thousands rather than thousands is still a far higher noise level). How can we cut through the noise to find the good stuff (subjective to the individual) given this noise? I read the firehose (/new) in an attempt to not miss the good, but realise that I've amplified the volume of everything to try and not miss the gems. The influx is such that it feels non-correctable to some degree. We can look back at the side-splitting Erlang day as a humorous attempt at a correction (which it was, but we probably didn't perceive the bigger picture then... the "Eternal February"). The thing is, most old-timers are aware there is still a lot of value in learning from new people, of passing on knowledge to new people... it's a two-way street and some good comes from growth and closing the gate isn't the desired thing. As the noise levels get higher closing the gate seems tempting, but it's silly. Shutting the gate is not going to help. There is a natural contribution rate at which the noise levels are manageable, and there's a natural growth rate at which people can be assimilated such that the noise doesn't go above manageable levels. When either rate is crossed it can be difficult, when both are crossed we end up here. My suggestion would be along Alex's lines... to not divide by date registered (just those with early registration dates), to not exclude by network (an invite only boys club), nor to kill HN (which still serves as a really important hub by bringing us all together, and I'm sure some would feel that anything new is a conscious threat to the old). Instead we should create some thing (or multiple things) that is so much more narrowly focused that it doesn't have much appeal beyond a smallish number. That focus needs to be narrow enough that growth is naturally limited too. I think that defining that 'thing' is where it gets interesting. What that narrowly focused topic is, well that is going to be different from person to person. It's likely that many small communities would spring up; maybe one focused on devops + computer science (a bit like the ACM SIGACTS-SIGOPS), maybe one focused on purely the business side of startups, etc. HN is rare because it encompasses all of these, but I'd suggest it may be better to not be so far encompassing and instead to have a set of communities (subreddits vs stack overflows vs unconnected sites) more narrowly focused and people would join subsets that interested them rather than have them all exist in a global scope (where the noise level is that of the whole set). The hardest part of doing anything comes down to the people. Ultimately it's the mix of people here that is so awesome, it's what acts most as gravity to those outside of the community. Having this calibre of people choose to invest in smaller communities is going to be the hardest thing when staying on just HN, or just opting out altogether, is so easy to do. I too think it's time for something more focused and smaller to emerge to tackle the noise level. That this is likely to be many smaller things and that I'd miss part of the debate is kinda fine, I'm fine with missing some stuff if the standard on the bits I'm more strongly interested in can be raised and I don't miss that stuff.
• newguy889 16y ago
  Political stories simply need to be killed with prejudice.
• alienreborn 16y ago
  One solution can be to give read-only access to new users and charge a very low one time fees for upvoting, submitting and commenting. Only people who are serious about contributing will pay for it.
• ck2 16y ago
  Remove points from users (keep on submissions/replies for positioning). Problem solved by changing motivations/behaviors.
• adrianwaj 16y ago
  Does anyone here think crowd-sourcing due-dilligence on startups would be a good idea?
• pclark 16y ago
  Come now, I can't be the only one that finds the Hacker News quality "good to great"? If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's good that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled. There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied. I think there is a vocal minority of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...) Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a huge amount of those people visit Hacker News every day - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.
• jsmcgd 16y ago
  I now check 'new' articles more often. There are a lot of gems in there that are not voted up.
• adrianwaj 16y ago
  I agree with Alex, I think the success of HN has led to an overflow of people dissatisfied with HN who have made HN a success in the first place (and some with YC itself.) I posted two ideas that could be of interest to such people here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253752 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253752
• cfontes 16y ago
  Every single community driven website on earth have being thru this kind of cycle the only way to stop this is to start a new one that will end getting into this cycle again. It's a matter of the amount of people using it, on the beginning only very early adopters and people passionated about that specific topic (here tech startups)are in, as years go by more people that have more interests start to join and post things they think is good, and then the topic changes to a more general subject. I like this community and I think the quality will always fluctuate but the most of it will always be very good content for people in a hurry. Thanks for all of you who help this place being nice.
• nbashaw 16y ago
  It's important to separate concerns, and I think there are three main things people are complaining about: 1) quality of submissions 2) quality of comments 3) quality of community It's the second and third that I think have declined. It's not because the people are any less smart, it's that there are just too many of them. It becomes difficult to keep a mental model of everyone in your head, so you start seeing everything as disembodied text, rather than human beings speaking to one another, with a history of shared experiences. IMO, this is a solvable problem. You can use avatars and display our locations next to our comments, or even just make our names a little bigger. Anything to humanize the conversations.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• davidhollander 16y ago
  Simplest solution Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1. Why Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day. Further Analysis Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links). HN already gets the independent code submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by webzines\newspapers with builtin linkbait titles. This reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.
• foljs 16y ago
  """For the vocal minority that isn’t happy with what the site has become, the powers that be offer the facepalm-worthy hidden concession of classic mode, which only pulls in submissions from longtime members. “Classic” is probably the single biggest sign that something isn’t healthy in the HN community.""" How come the classic-mode is "facepalm worthy"? It sounds ingenious: 1) The expanded, current crop of members are mostly idiots. 2) Longtime members are known to be worthy. 3) Filter the crap out. 4) Profit. Does Al3x have any other solution to propose? Like "educating the general public, so that any random selection of HN members will be equally worthy"?
• RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  In response to some of the points being raised in the thread, and to provide some sorely needed data, here are some snapshots of the HN "newest" page taken since Feb 2009: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254397
• cmars232 16y ago
  There is no hacker news problem if you realize that all sites up to this point in internet history are either heavily curated for quality and limited in scope or self-moderated with a one-dimensional, imperfect karma game, and thus chaotic and ephemeral. Such is the nature of suchness until someone figures out a better game that more properly engages human nature. Crying over the demise of HN is like crying over a naive hill-climbing algorithm when it gets stuck.
• howlingmime 16y ago
  This has probably been said before (and/or above), but perhaps each article should be tagged and users should subscribe to only those tags of interest to them. In addition, a social component to HN would be useful -- for instance, allow me to recommend a story for someone or for stories of interest to my friends to be ranked above the norm. Our friends make great filters!
• protomyth 16y ago
  Almost all sites that have comments and user moderation concentrate on the comments and up voting / down voting them. Normally, when dealing with people, I don't remember the individual quote that made me think they were brilliant / a troll, I wrap that up into my sense of them. If I'm flipping channels and see someone who has struck me as a brilliant commentator, I stop based on the visual cue of their face. Names are kind of hard (is this the guy who called me a $%$% or was he the one who really knows python?). I guess I wonder if the same thing keeps happening on "comment moderation" sites, isn't it time to look at the ways your view could be based on your (not the group's) opinion of your fellow commentors? I don't have a technical suggestion, but I will probably think a lot on it.