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I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comme

by pg 16y ago

I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.

icey 16y ago
HN used to feel like it was full of artists and now it feels like it's full of critics.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone. Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.
  - pg 16y ago
    Meta posts and comments may be boring, but based on pretty close observation I don't think they're setting the tone. I fear it is nothing so exciting. The most likely explanation is simply that HN is reverting to the mean for forums.
    - jedsmith 16y ago
      Standing my ground. Common sentiment is now comments are declining in quality. Wherever that came from, that's now parroted fairly often and is undoubtedly planted in the back of everybody's head as they go about their business. That cannibalizes some comments, because people now think "am I contributing to a decline?". That makes people more inclined to snark, to discourage others from adding to the decline. This is the exact sort of thing I watch happen all day long in the comments now. Take one recent example. Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it[1]. They presented no original thought on it themselves, they simply quoted it verbatim. Some asshole came along and berated him for it, as if he'd committed some kind of grievous sin. The fact is, I enjoyed the quote in question, and I upvoted him because I'm glad somebody else noticed. Worse comments have happened, but now there's such a fixation with "quality" that people are starting to up the snark. Which adds to the very problem we're trying to fix. Look at that entire thread. The rub is that rather than focus on opportunities for improving going forward, this community has an inane fascination with returning to the way things were. Your thread was too late, I'm afraid, as the negativity has accelerated any decline that exists. You're dead-on; HN is reverting to the mean. This navelgazing lament about the times that were is setting the pace for the future evolution of HN, though. The high-karma users have spent so much time wondering how to get back to the past -- a now completely unattainable goal due to growth, I'm sorry -- that there has been immeasurable lost opportunity on focusing on where to go from here. I'm not sure that technological improvements are going to fix it, either. Even if the negative trend is as pronounced as believed (and I don't think it is), acknowledging it and spending countless comments focusing on it has cost precious time in reversing it. Rather than embracing the inevitable evolution, understanding it, and finding ways to make the evolution more positive, we've established blood-curdling fear at the mere prospect of evolution. Now, that glacial evolution is sliding along on a trail of fear instead of a trail of positive outlook. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486
      - icey 16y ago
        If it helps - people complain, then they leave. You won't have to endure it much longer, I'm sure.
        jedsmith 16y ago
        Your comment is ironic given the comment that you started with. I am speaking from the perspective of improving HN, so I'm startled (should I be?) to find that the first reply is an admitting that the community will eventually split apart.
        sgift 16y ago
        From my experience (which was as a developer of a browser game) this is not true. People who complain are people who care. And people who care will stay. People who really want to go will not complain. They will stop contributing and go without much fanfare. In the end you stay with all the complainers, but none of the non-complainers. This is a real risk for a community. (In the case of the game it was 'simple' to fix this: change the game. It is far harder for something like HN)
      - jdp23 16y ago
        > Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it.... I may well the guy you're talking about who was berated and then downvoted -- even though two others besides you had posted that they liked my comment. And when I replied to the post that berated me, I was once again downvoted. At least one comment has been deleted but it's still a pretty interesting snapshot of what the mood is on HN these days http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225
        jedsmith 16y ago
        Thank you. I looked for it and couldn't find it, and actually did mean yours.
        jdp23 16y ago
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      Since you posted your thread asking the community for suggestions, I've been mulling over an idea that I'd now like to share. I think jed is right; the navel-gazing is part of the problem and the more meta-discussion occurs the lower overall quality gets. This belief is informed by my experiences on a variety of fora, and is not HN-specific. Tackling the problem then, should occur in a way that doesn't draw attention to the fact that there is one, but fixes it silently in the background. This is partly why I like hidden karma scores; they (in theory) reduce groupthink and handwringing about karma. My suggestion is this: pick a few dozen people who you think are good contributors, and write a quick script to dump their voting patterns. Take a look at how they're voting, and choose some number whose votes you think best represent what you'd like HN to be. Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. Neither they nor the rest of HN should know they've been tapped. I envision the superusers as being vote accelerators. Their votes would not only confer the typical +/- 1 karma, but would tag the comment they voted on. An up-tagged comment would gain, say, 2 karma for every upvote, and a down-tagged one would lose 3 for every downvote. Those values are provisional and arbitrary, and should be changed. Tags could stack or cancel each other out, but that's something else that should be experimented with. If the superuser scheme seems to be having a positive effect, consider making it viral. That is, if some receives, say, 200 positively tagged comments, they too become superusers. Again, that constant should be chosen carefully. The idea behind making superuserdom viral is that it scales automatically (given a wisely chosen threshold), and offers insurance against decreased contribution from the original set of superusers. Karma can be a very effective way of cultivating the kind of interactions the community desires, but can also lead to gaming and groupthink. By increasing the value of trusted users' votes, but keeping that mechanism hidden, I believe you should be able to maximize karma's benefits while minimizing its drawbacks. Anyway, I apologize if this post is off-topic or should be addressed elsewhere. I figured a meta-thread was as good a place as any to introduce it. I also wanted to say in postscript that although HN may be suffering the growth pangs of any forum, it still offers far better discussion than most sites I've found, so the doomsday-ery is perhaps premature.
      - frossie 16y ago
        Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. That actually reminds me of the metacritic scheme. IIRC they take reviews and then (a) translate them into a numeric score according to some method they don't tell you about and (b) weigh each critic by a different weight, of which they don't tell you about. So your idea is not only interesting, it is probably workable.
- SriniK 16y ago
  It is the same reason I am commenting less and less.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  This is very well put, and unfortunately I have to agree.
- mdg 16y ago
  I would say posers instead of critics (myself included)
- citricsquid 16y ago
  Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.
  - MrMan 16y ago
    let's not get things confused - just because I am not a "maker" on HN does not mean I am not productive when I swivel my chair over to do my actual work. my god.
- techiferous 16y ago
  This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.
  - rimantas 16y ago
    There was a study somewhere stating that those criticizing are perceived as being smarter. I guess we know that instinctively. And I think this applies to self view to: when criticizing someone's else point we appear smarter to ourselves.
  - rhizome 16y ago
    There's too much bubble talk lately and people's projects are still half-baked and aren't ready for the bubble to pop, so they're trying to slow it down by cutting each other down. Crab mentality.
- gamble 16y ago
  HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.
  - MrMan 16y ago
    exactly - I attribute much of the priggishness of the HN community to this mercenary fact. Most folks who are obsessed with forging a strong online identity on HN are deeply invested in selling something to the rest of the group. I do not by any means disagree with this, but one of my first thoughts upon finding HN was how easily it might be lampooned. Everyone seemed to be self-promoting while trying to act casual. I will probably never have any kind of reputation here, because I spend my day either deep in thought at my computer, or reading/commenting HN. I don't forsee becoming a member of the web entrepreneur community, and because of my personality type I will probably never have a blog. But I know a lot.
ihodes 16y ago
Idea: track the upvotes/downvotes/flags of users and compare them to your upvotes/downvotes/flags (and maybe other respected users). If there are striking similarities, take a closer look. If things still look good (observe comments, submissions), you've identified at least a few potential moderators. (Also, since I'm sure anyone commenting on the state of HN will have their account scrutinized, my first account is nearly 2 years old, and I've been looking at HN for around 3 years total.)
- jedsmith 16y ago
  That your last parenthetical is necessary to have an opinion about the direction here is telling, to say the least.
- pg 16y ago
  There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.
  - ihodes 16y ago
    Depending on how much you trust them, they could liberally delete comments, or knock them way down in their weighing. Of course, you run the risk of pissing people off. Concurrently, you could use the votes (esp negative) of the users tracked and identified as described above as notifiers to the moderators. That way you leverage more volunteers, but with less power (and they wouldn't know they had it, either).
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - vessenes 16y ago
    Slashdot went down this road as you may well know. Moderators, then meta-moderators. ("Was this a fair moderation?") based on karma. I have a low 5-digit UID on slashdot, and registered well after I started reading, so I was sort of in the second wave there. The discourse quality fell off and leveled out, but my experience is that low digit UIDs generally contribute at their historic high quality levels. In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created. I don't know how this might translate to HN; "Filter by age of account?" What if by default you only showed comments and posts from accounts older than two years? (This would disqualify me, by the way, so maybe one year..) :) People could select to see comments from younger accounts if they liked, or perhaps very well seasoned accounts (two years on the site) could promote up comments to general visibility. This would be patently unfair, in that new awesome commenters would not get to contribute to the discourse immediately, but it would almost certainly immediately increase the quality of discourse. Slashdot's system has some echos of this, but they made it far, far too easy to become a moderator as they wanted to spread the work out. They also I think created a mental expectation with the '-1' score which created a trolling subculture, that is, reading slashdot at -1 is a cesspit, and so nobody does it, hence people use it as a cesspit, hence.. What I'm suggesting is making it the strong default to do the equivalent of reading slashdot at say 4 and higher, but using age of account as the heuristic. This would be a reasonably easy chrome extension, but obviously easier to do on your side. If you demo this yourself, I'd be curious to hear if you think the quality is improved. In real life, we might call this an apprentice system, that is, you have to sit in the back, and only occasionally get your answers while you prove you wish to belong and that you deserve to belong. It's a known effective way of maintaining quality of members in a desirable group, from religious to musical to .. I imagine secret societies?
javert 16y ago
If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer. My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote. For example, consider the following: Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in. One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct. For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot. Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment. I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.
- pg 16y ago
  Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.) Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.
  - 16y ago
irahul 16y ago
I remember you saying somewhere(or was it someone else) about high number of comments representative of argumentative topics whereas high-quality content having lesser comments - not much to argue about and people agreeing with article. From that viewpoint, if the articles posted haven't changed much, not much have been lost. The perceived quality may be only representative of increase in number of users, and new users trying to earn karma or new users unfamiliar with guidelines. So may be the high quality comments and articles are still there, but some low quality content/comment is skewing the perception.
xiaoma 16y ago
I've had a lot more upsetting experiences in the comment threads here in the past year and a half than I did a few years ago. I find time on the site occasionally brining out my worse side as well. A few times, it's lead me to shut down my whole browser and go out for a walk. As far as the stories are concerned, I don't think they ever all resonated with me. To be honest, I probably got more out of Reddit in early 2006 than I ever did out of this forum. Part of that maybe been because of one time benefits of becoming an online junkie-- finding your essays, seeing some of Steve Pavlina's older pieces, learning about a wide variety of niche interests, etc... Since getting to HN, I'd say that about 1/3 to 1/4 of the front page has been consistently interesting. Too much of the rest has been self-promotional blogging, valley gossip and current fads (diet, exercise, productivity, etc). I still wouldn't say that I see the site in a bad light. Both the stories and the discussions are a valuable resource. I'm just diverting a bit more focus towards stack exchange sites and screencasts.
netcan 16y ago
A lot of the discussion whenever this comes up seems to be over discouraging bad comments. I'm more concerned with the a decline in the quality of good comments. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems to me like the top 10% of comments I read and discussions I participate in here has declined. This is really the part that I care about most. I care about the median or worst comment mostly because of how they affect the best ones.
cageface 16y ago
My dissatisfaction stems from the shift from articles about science and tech to articles about entrepreneurship. Edit: and rampant, childish downmodding.
- roel_v 16y ago
  I don't understand where this impression comes from - HN used to be about entrepreneurship much more than it is now, and it's what drew many of the first waves of users. There are so many science/tech sites, but very few (just two afaik and one is almost dead...) about software/tech entrepreneurship (at least in the 'DIY' sense - where it's the technical people driving the business rather than being a resource).
  - cageface 16y ago
    I don't have stats but I've been here since the beginning and I remember a much higher ratio of hard tech/comp sci articles to tech business articles.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      I don't have stats either, maybe it's observation bias.
anigbrowl 16y ago
It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost. I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_culture.htm http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_cul... http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144 I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.
HelloBeautiful 16y ago
IMHO the reason is obvious. The first few thousand users have very high IQ, so they would post interesting links and comments. After many more ppl joined the average IQ dropped sharply and so did the average quality of content.
lhnz 16y ago
I think an interesting experiment would be to let people pick the top-five most useful posts in this thread. Then consider that to them the rest is noise, do the top-five posts represent the top-five that you would yourself have picked? For the record (and in no particular order): 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812 2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254 3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990 4. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004 5. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967
- vessenes 16y ago
  I like 1-4. I consider Jed to be trolling in this thread, so I'd skip 5. Or perhaps I just disagree strongly enough with his overall perspective that we should let things degrade that I don't think it's worth engaging.
pygy_ 16y ago
I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues. I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores. As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically. I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive. I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed. I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers. Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow. Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads. Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account. The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number. Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma. I'd suggest two distinct scores log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread ) log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission ) Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much. Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.
nikcub 16y ago
pg I believe that the simplest and most effective feature you could implement to resolve some of the comment issues would be to kill multi-accounting. I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points. In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute. Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink) Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.
revorad 16y ago
Close new user registration. It might hurt YC a bit, but it's worth experimenting with.

by pg 16y ago

icey 16y ago

HN used to feel like it was full of artists and now it feels like it's full of critics.

jedsmith 16y ago
What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone. Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.
- pg 16y ago
  Meta posts and comments may be boring, but based on pretty close observation I don't think they're setting the tone. I fear it is nothing so exciting. The most likely explanation is simply that HN is reverting to the mean for forums.
  - jedsmith 16y ago
    Standing my ground. Common sentiment is now comments are declining in quality. Wherever that came from, that's now parroted fairly often and is undoubtedly planted in the back of everybody's head as they go about their business. That cannibalizes some comments, because people now think "am I contributing to a decline?". That makes people more inclined to snark, to discourage others from adding to the decline. This is the exact sort of thing I watch happen all day long in the comments now. Take one recent example. Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it[1]. They presented no original thought on it themselves, they simply quoted it verbatim. Some asshole came along and berated him for it, as if he'd committed some kind of grievous sin. The fact is, I enjoyed the quote in question, and I upvoted him because I'm glad somebody else noticed. Worse comments have happened, but now there's such a fixation with "quality" that people are starting to up the snark. Which adds to the very problem we're trying to fix. Look at that entire thread. The rub is that rather than focus on opportunities for improving going forward, this community has an inane fascination with returning to the way things were. Your thread was too late, I'm afraid, as the negativity has accelerated any decline that exists. You're dead-on; HN is reverting to the mean. This navelgazing lament about the times that were is setting the pace for the future evolution of HN, though. The high-karma users have spent so much time wondering how to get back to the past -- a now completely unattainable goal due to growth, I'm sorry -- that there has been immeasurable lost opportunity on focusing on where to go from here. I'm not sure that technological improvements are going to fix it, either. Even if the negative trend is as pronounced as believed (and I don't think it is), acknowledging it and spending countless comments focusing on it has cost precious time in reversing it. Rather than embracing the inevitable evolution, understanding it, and finding ways to make the evolution more positive, we've established blood-curdling fear at the mere prospect of evolution. Now, that glacial evolution is sliding along on a trail of fear instead of a trail of positive outlook. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486
    - icey 16y ago
      If it helps - people complain, then they leave. You won't have to endure it much longer, I'm sure.
      - jedsmith 16y ago
        Your comment is ironic given the comment that you started with. I am speaking from the perspective of improving HN, so I'm startled (should I be?) to find that the first reply is an admitting that the community will eventually split apart.
      - sgift 16y ago
        From my experience (which was as a developer of a browser game) this is not true. People who complain are people who care. And people who care will stay. People who really want to go will not complain. They will stop contributing and go without much fanfare. In the end you stay with all the complainers, but none of the non-complainers. This is a real risk for a community. (In the case of the game it was 'simple' to fix this: change the game. It is far harder for something like HN)
    - jdp23 16y ago
      > Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it.... I may well the guy you're talking about who was berated and then downvoted -- even though two others besides you had posted that they liked my comment. And when I replied to the post that berated me, I was once again downvoted. At least one comment has been deleted but it's still a pretty interesting snapshot of what the mood is on HN these days http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225
      - jedsmith 16y ago
        Thank you. I looked for it and couldn't find it, and actually did mean yours.
        jdp23 16y ago
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    Since you posted your thread asking the community for suggestions, I've been mulling over an idea that I'd now like to share. I think jed is right; the navel-gazing is part of the problem and the more meta-discussion occurs the lower overall quality gets. This belief is informed by my experiences on a variety of fora, and is not HN-specific. Tackling the problem then, should occur in a way that doesn't draw attention to the fact that there is one, but fixes it silently in the background. This is partly why I like hidden karma scores; they (in theory) reduce groupthink and handwringing about karma. My suggestion is this: pick a few dozen people who you think are good contributors, and write a quick script to dump their voting patterns. Take a look at how they're voting, and choose some number whose votes you think best represent what you'd like HN to be. Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. Neither they nor the rest of HN should know they've been tapped. I envision the superusers as being vote accelerators. Their votes would not only confer the typical +/- 1 karma, but would tag the comment they voted on. An up-tagged comment would gain, say, 2 karma for every upvote, and a down-tagged one would lose 3 for every downvote. Those values are provisional and arbitrary, and should be changed. Tags could stack or cancel each other out, but that's something else that should be experimented with. If the superuser scheme seems to be having a positive effect, consider making it viral. That is, if some receives, say, 200 positively tagged comments, they too become superusers. Again, that constant should be chosen carefully. The idea behind making superuserdom viral is that it scales automatically (given a wisely chosen threshold), and offers insurance against decreased contribution from the original set of superusers. Karma can be a very effective way of cultivating the kind of interactions the community desires, but can also lead to gaming and groupthink. By increasing the value of trusted users' votes, but keeping that mechanism hidden, I believe you should be able to maximize karma's benefits while minimizing its drawbacks. Anyway, I apologize if this post is off-topic or should be addressed elsewhere. I figured a meta-thread was as good a place as any to introduce it. I also wanted to say in postscript that although HN may be suffering the growth pangs of any forum, it still offers far better discussion than most sites I've found, so the doomsday-ery is perhaps premature.
    - frossie 16y ago
      Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. That actually reminds me of the metacritic scheme. IIRC they take reviews and then (a) translate them into a numeric score according to some method they don't tell you about and (b) weigh each critic by a different weight, of which they don't tell you about. So your idea is not only interesting, it is probably workable.
SriniK 16y ago
It is the same reason I am commenting less and less.
abstractbill 16y ago
This is very well put, and unfortunately I have to agree.
mdg 16y ago
I would say posers instead of critics (myself included)
citricsquid 16y ago
Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.
- MrMan 16y ago
  let's not get things confused - just because I am not a "maker" on HN does not mean I am not productive when I swivel my chair over to do my actual work. my god.
techiferous 16y ago
This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.
- rimantas 16y ago
  There was a study somewhere stating that those criticizing are perceived as being smarter. I guess we know that instinctively. And I think this applies to self view to: when criticizing someone's else point we appear smarter to ourselves.
- rhizome 16y ago
  There's too much bubble talk lately and people's projects are still half-baked and aren't ready for the bubble to pop, so they're trying to slow it down by cutting each other down. Crab mentality.
gamble 16y ago
HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.
- MrMan 16y ago
  exactly - I attribute much of the priggishness of the HN community to this mercenary fact. Most folks who are obsessed with forging a strong online identity on HN are deeply invested in selling something to the rest of the group. I do not by any means disagree with this, but one of my first thoughts upon finding HN was how easily it might be lampooned. Everyone seemed to be self-promoting while trying to act casual. I will probably never have any kind of reputation here, because I spend my day either deep in thought at my computer, or reading/commenting HN. I don't forsee becoming a member of the web entrepreneur community, and because of my personality type I will probably never have a blog. But I know a lot.

ihodes 16y ago

Idea: track the upvotes/downvotes/flags of users and compare them to your upvotes/downvotes/flags (and maybe other respected users). If there are striking similarities, take a closer look. If things still look good (observe comments, submissions), you've identified at least a few potential moderators. (Also, since I'm sure anyone commenting on the state of HN will have their account scrutinized, my first account is nearly 2 years old, and I've been looking at HN for around 3 years total.)

jedsmith 16y ago
That your last parenthetical is necessary to have an opinion about the direction here is telling, to say the least.
pg 16y ago
There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.
- ihodes 16y ago
  Depending on how much you trust them, they could liberally delete comments, or knock them way down in their weighing. Of course, you run the risk of pissing people off. Concurrently, you could use the votes (esp negative) of the users tracked and identified as described above as notifiers to the moderators. That way you leverage more volunteers, but with less power (and they wouldn't know they had it, either).
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- vessenes 16y ago
  Slashdot went down this road as you may well know. Moderators, then meta-moderators. ("Was this a fair moderation?") based on karma. I have a low 5-digit UID on slashdot, and registered well after I started reading, so I was sort of in the second wave there. The discourse quality fell off and leveled out, but my experience is that low digit UIDs generally contribute at their historic high quality levels. In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created. I don't know how this might translate to HN; "Filter by age of account?" What if by default you only showed comments and posts from accounts older than two years? (This would disqualify me, by the way, so maybe one year..) :) People could select to see comments from younger accounts if they liked, or perhaps very well seasoned accounts (two years on the site) could promote up comments to general visibility. This would be patently unfair, in that new awesome commenters would not get to contribute to the discourse immediately, but it would almost certainly immediately increase the quality of discourse. Slashdot's system has some echos of this, but they made it far, far too easy to become a moderator as they wanted to spread the work out. They also I think created a mental expectation with the '-1' score which created a trolling subculture, that is, reading slashdot at -1 is a cesspit, and so nobody does it, hence people use it as a cesspit, hence.. What I'm suggesting is making it the strong default to do the equivalent of reading slashdot at say 4 and higher, but using age of account as the heuristic. This would be a reasonably easy chrome extension, but obviously easier to do on your side. If you demo this yourself, I'd be curious to hear if you think the quality is improved. In real life, we might call this an apprentice system, that is, you have to sit in the back, and only occasionally get your answers while you prove you wish to belong and that you deserve to belong. It's a known effective way of maintaining quality of members in a desirable group, from religious to musical to .. I imagine secret societies?

javert 16y ago

If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer. My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote. For example, consider the following: Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in. One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct. For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot. Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment. I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.

pg 16y ago
Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.) Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.
- 16y ago

irahul 16y ago

I remember you saying somewhere(or was it someone else) about high number of comments representative of argumentative topics whereas high-quality content having lesser comments - not much to argue about and people agreeing with article. From that viewpoint, if the articles posted haven't changed much, not much have been lost. The perceived quality may be only representative of increase in number of users, and new users trying to earn karma or new users unfamiliar with guidelines. So may be the high quality comments and articles are still there, but some low quality content/comment is skewing the perception.

xiaoma 16y ago

I've had a lot more upsetting experiences in the comment threads here in the past year and a half than I did a few years ago. I find time on the site occasionally brining out my worse side as well. A few times, it's lead me to shut down my whole browser and go out for a walk. As far as the stories are concerned, I don't think they ever all resonated with me. To be honest, I probably got more out of Reddit in early 2006 than I ever did out of this forum. Part of that maybe been because of one time benefits of becoming an online junkie-- finding your essays, seeing some of Steve Pavlina's older pieces, learning about a wide variety of niche interests, etc... Since getting to HN, I'd say that about 1/3 to 1/4 of the front page has been consistently interesting. Too much of the rest has been self-promotional blogging, valley gossip and current fads (diet, exercise, productivity, etc). I still wouldn't say that I see the site in a bad light. Both the stories and the discussions are a valuable resource. I'm just diverting a bit more focus towards stack exchange sites and screencasts.

netcan 16y ago

A lot of the discussion whenever this comes up seems to be over discouraging bad comments. I'm more concerned with the a decline in the quality of good comments. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems to me like the top 10% of comments I read and discussions I participate in here has declined. This is really the part that I care about most. I care about the median or worst comment mostly because of how they affect the best ones.

cageface 16y ago

My dissatisfaction stems from the shift from articles about science and tech to articles about entrepreneurship. Edit: and rampant, childish downmodding.

roel_v 16y ago
I don't understand where this impression comes from - HN used to be about entrepreneurship much more than it is now, and it's what drew many of the first waves of users. There are so many science/tech sites, but very few (just two afaik and one is almost dead...) about software/tech entrepreneurship (at least in the 'DIY' sense - where it's the technical people driving the business rather than being a resource).
- cageface 16y ago
  I don't have stats but I've been here since the beginning and I remember a much higher ratio of hard tech/comp sci articles to tech business articles.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    I don't have stats either, maybe it's observation bias.

anigbrowl 16y ago

It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost. I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_culture.htm http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_cul... http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144 I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.

HelloBeautiful 16y ago

IMHO the reason is obvious. The first few thousand users have very high IQ, so they would post interesting links and comments. After many more ppl joined the average IQ dropped sharply and so did the average quality of content.

lhnz 16y ago

I think an interesting experiment would be to let people pick the top-five most useful posts in this thread. Then consider that to them the rest is noise, do the top-five posts represent the top-five that you would yourself have picked? For the record (and in no particular order): 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812 2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254 3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990 4. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004 5. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967

vessenes 16y ago
I like 1-4. I consider Jed to be trolling in this thread, so I'd skip 5. Or perhaps I just disagree strongly enough with his overall perspective that we should let things degrade that I don't think it's worth engaging.

pygy_ 16y ago

I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues. I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores. As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically. I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive. I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed. I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers. Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow. Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads. Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account. The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number. Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma. I'd suggest two distinct scores log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread ) log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission ) Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much. Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.

nikcub 16y ago

pg I believe that the simplest and most effective feature you could implement to resolve some of the comment issues would be to kill multi-accounting. I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points. In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute. Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink) Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.

revorad 16y ago

Close new user registration. It might hurt YC a bit, but it's worth experimenting with.