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Ask HN: What's stopping HN going the way of Reddit/Digg/Slashdot?
I'm fairly new here (I'm a refugee from Reddit) and occasionally I read comments where someone complains that a post isn't appropriate or that the standard of conversation has gone down recently. And whenever I read those comments I'm troubled by a nagging sense that nobody has a plan. That things will gradually get unbearable and that when they do the people who built up this site will just move on and found a new community and the whole process will start over.
Is there a plan? What's stopping 100,000 Digg users hearing about HN on TV and showing up with posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats?
Clearly there's the code behind the site, the karma system and minimum thresholds for downvoting and so on. I've also seen people linking to the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) occasionally, to try shame people into behaving themselves.
I've got to be honest though, I can't see anything that's fundamentally different about HN that means it will avoid the fate of those other sites. You let me register, what's to stop others? Do you have to "Accept" the guidelines when signing up? I can't remember, even if you do though, let's be honest, nobody's going to read that.
I don't know, do you think HN is structure well enough to prevent it happening? Is there a special plan? Or do people just expect to have to move on when things go down hill?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- brk 18y agoHere's my thought on the matter... The "Killer feature" here is the lack of killer features. There are no buddy lists, stupid picture icons, special groups, or karma-whoring incentives. It's just a simple place to exchange news that is generally relevant to a hacker community. The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of Digg and Reddit refugees. BTW, welcome to hacker news...
- tstegart 18y agoWhat? there's no karma-whoring incentives? Damn! I totally thought I was going to get to change the color of the toolbar...
- Readmore 18y agoThe only hope is our elitist comment trolls. Also the fact that HN has far fewer users makes it much easier to deal with the problem. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.ycombinator.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+news.yc...
- PieSquared 18y agoI'm mildly pleased that HN shrank, not grew, this month. Not by a lot, but still. Hopefully that won't reverse. If the community doesn't grow, it can't turn into another digg.
- pmjordan 18y agoNote that the statistic isn't for HN only, but also includes the rest of ycombinator.com. I suspect HN didn't shrink; instead YC got press hits in April + May after registrations and kicking off the summer cycle. Also, for that level of traffic, I'd be wary of compete.com stats. More so than usual in any case.
- pg 18y agoTraffic actually grew last month. It went down at the beginning of the summer though.
- noodle 18y agothe quick and dirty answer is the userbase. it doesn't, at least right now, turn into digg/reddit/slashdot because the people who want to see a digg/reddit/slashdot are already at digg/reddit/slashdot. the community here likes how things are and has a vested interest in keeping HN like it is. so thats what they do, try and push out the bad where they can and promote the good.
- davidw 18y agoPG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high quality.
- gwc 18y agoThis is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem. I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?
- parenthesis 18y agoThere is the difference between HN and reddit/digg etc. that pg and co. do HN for love, whereas, whatever other motives they may have, the other sites are trying to make money.
- hpr122i 18y agoClassic counterexample: kuro5hin.
- tokipin 18y agoi wonder if performing a restart... something like what The Architect from The Matrix talks about... i wonder if simply restarting the entire software would help a bit. in other words, deleting the entire database and starting from scratch every n years. meaning the front page would be blank, people would have to 'register' again with their karma at 1 if it takes making a new community, a restart might be a good approximation, among having other effects (eg the effect on karma whores)
- gm 18y agoAmen to that! It's the only refuge from all the trash out there. Hopefully fanboys will never invade it...
- queensnake 18y agoA good first step is, when you catch yourself making a comment that contributes nothing except maybe some sentiment, to not make it.
- gaika 18y agoPG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 : "1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here. 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves. 3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments. 4. Votes on comments affect karma. 5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking."
- jon_dahl 18y agoI'm hopeful - but there was a time when #3 was true of Reddit, too. Now if your Reddit comment includes the word "fap", you're about guaranteed to be upmodded.
- boredguy8 18y agoIt probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. -> k5 -> reddit -> HN. At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.
- tstegart 18y agoExcept a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!
- crazyirish 18y agolisp? you mean arc good sir. I'm not sure how effective a bayesian filter would be at classifying news stories as interesting/non-interesting though. Has anyone tried this?
- ricree 18y agoYou say that jokingly, but spam filters would probably work if someone was willing to slog through the digg front page long enough to build up a decent set of training data.
- emmett 18y agoThis is why hacker news has a collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click.
- boredguy8 18y agoDon't underestimate the power of mass stupidity. It's killed many sites in the past. Even with a "collection of editors with the power to kill cat pictures with a click."
- pg 18y agoI don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.
- deepster 18y agoAs long as the desire for excellent content outweighs the desire for growth and the users vote down irrelevant stories, then we are good to go.
- Hexstream 18y agoWe can't downvote stories here...
- jmatt 18y agoYou can when you get a high enough karma.
- PieSquared 18y agoReally? What's the number?
- joeread 18y agoExtreme censorship.
- foulmouthboy 18y agoI read all the answers, and I'm now convinced that there's nothing keeping this site from eventually going down that same path. Death. Taxes. Gentrification.
- attack 18y agoYes, the majority of people here just support banning, harsher punishments, and locking out all outsiders. Those are very poor solutions! #1 and #2 cause strong negative backlash. As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it. #3 Locks out a lot of useful expertise. For sure, HN could use a lot more knowledge about programming. So far, this site has attracted lots of people who want to learn but much less so people who already know a lot and have wide experience. We still very much need to be inviting to the latter. Another point that very knowledgeable people are very opinionated, stubborn, and generally assholes. Linus Torvalds is the stereotypical example. This is not to excusing the behavior, but the correlation exists and we will all have to try not to get so offended and ban people like immature children. If you try to hold onto the past forever instead of trying to improve then you will fail. I hope this was useful.
- astine 18y ago"As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it." I'd say that a jackass active on the site is more damaging than one banned. If you ban someone, you have only upset one user. If you allow a spammer/troll/flamer/etc to continue unchallenged, you have upset all of them. The thing with online communities is, this is Web 2.0, your users are your product. The better the users, the better the product. If you have a good community, smart, helpful people will be attracted and will thus improve the community. If you have a bad one, they will be warded off. Scum breeds scum. Think broken window theory.
- attack 18y agoIf that could be achieved then, yes you would be quite correct. However, it is very hard to completely cut people off on the Internet. Furthermore, they can start disparaging you through other mediums (eg blogs) and influence people they still know to be using your site.
- azharcs 18y agoI think just not compromising is good enough to keep the quality of the site. I don't see HN doing any deals with NY Times or getting a ad deal with Google. They have kept it simple, just pure news and it is surrounded by smart bunch of people who want to keep it that way.
- jon_dahl 18y agoThe most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community positive, is this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines: Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video, picture... The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is "Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate. Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking site at the moment.
- acousticiris 18y agoI think there are a few things going on here that differentiate it from Digg/Reddit (I'll leave out Slashdot for the moment, because I think they have different concerns). On Digg and Reddit, there is no "focus". Digg started out as a tech news site and degraded slowly until they opened up the doors to include all news, which brought what you have refered to as posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats. On reddit, the day I stopped reading was the day I saw a post on the front page encouraging folks to not post political stories on the politics sub-site because they don't get enough attention that way. That would imply that both sites have a problem with "activists". To me, that sufficiently explains why the front page of HN "works". What I can't figure out is why the comments on this site tend to be so civil. The HN community seems to lack the hostility that plagues virtually every other site of its kind. Is it fewer angry people? Older, or more mature audience? Maybe it's migrants from the three sites you mention who were fed up with the poor behavior exhibited there?
- reazalun 18y agoLimit the number of news submission per user in 24 hours. I suggest max 5 news/24 hours. That way, we can guard HN from spammers.
- jcl 18y agoIf this were actually a problem, they could circumvent this restriction by simply registering many accounts. A better solution -- as others have pointed out in the past -- would be a karma threshold for posting articles, but since it's not a problem yet, why bother?
- hpr122i 18y agoIf you think your website is "worth enough", you can make it a paysite and raise the barrier very much: see Metafilter (which has a 1 post/day hard limit, except for the owner)
- mixmax 18y agoThat would be a bad idea since submissions follow a powerlaw , meaning that the majority come from a relatively low number of users that submit a lot. Check http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb for an example.
- stcredzero 18y agoAre you saying that those posts wouldn't be made by someone else? I doubt it.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- adambard 18y agoAs a fellow Digg->Reddit->here refugee, I think we're the problem. Judging by the fact that you didn't defect from Reddit sooner, it can be reasoned that you enjoy a dash of offbeat humor, politics, and funny pictures with your programming (and in this case entrepreneurial) articles and news. In other words, you're like me, and the rest of the early majority. We go from social news site to social news site, dragging down article quality with our penchant for less-than-total fact saturation and off-topic posts. The only responsible thing is to get your hacker news here, and your funny pictures elsewhere. Refrain from contributing posts or articles and let the people that make this site great continue to make it great. Wait, crap. Except for this post and that post.
- jlouis 18y agoThe main difference is very simple, yet effective: HN has a specific goal. It is not a place which will just flow with whatever is posted. Some things are allowed, and some things are not. Hopefully, the choice of content will keep people interested in that kind of content, and remove those that don't. They already got reddit/digg/foobar for their stories. Comments would take more time to moderate, if we think of users up/downvoting as a differential equation that slowly is moving towards the "intelligence of the masses". So in time, the level of comments will degrade. The way of keeping that from happening is, of course, to mercilessly kill bad comments and keep them out with overpowering ;)
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoDon't make your posts too entertaining. Don't make your posts too short. A community of people who post large chunks of dense text about esoteric subjects will keep the horde out.
- gunderson 18y agoI can't believe nobody has mentioned collaborative filtering. Simple collective voting and new/hot/controversial are very unsophisticated measures of how much any particular user will like something. For an example of how powerful collaborative filtering is, check out movielens.org The key is to take each user's votes and use them to figure out based on other peoples' votes what stories and comments to display. Then the community doesn't really "grow". Sure you may get some niche communities that grow, such as people who all tend to upvote cat pictures, but the "thinking person" doesn't have to worry, b/c as long as there is a weak (or negative) correlation between cat pictures and your upvotes, the system will never recommend any to you. Imagine rather than one massive community, an infinite number of beautifully overlapping ones. I think the ideal system would consider votes for stories and comments, and show each person mostly content that had a high probability of being enjoyed. The "new" tab might show things with less of a strict filter to prevent false negatives. The research group that built Movielens has some papers on the web and the math isn't that tough. With a properly design collaborative filtering system there simply will not be the digg/reddit degradation where the site gets so big and noisy and low quality. Sure there may be stories that are hugely popular, but as long as the algorithm gets enough quality input (votes) on a variety of things, no user would get too many duds. Ironically Reddit's redesign only increases noise by tending people away from the subreddit niche communities that had existed -- I would more likely click on a weak title if in a quality subreddit than if it's the #4 item on the screen. At the rate it's going, news.yc will surely become the next reddit, and eventually the next Digg. As others have pointed out, we'll all have probably moved on by then to the next site (or hopefully one that implements CF!). It seems odd to me that nobody has implemented a site like this with CF... As with most of my posts, if anyone wants to collaborate to do an experimental site like this just let me know. There are some cool ruby libraries out there and of course gsl.
- captain-m 18y agoIf growth isn't a concern why not force people to wait a certain amount of time after signing up before they're allowed to post? That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.
- xenoterracide 18y agoI don't think anything... the algorithm that decides what's on the front page is currently just so so, and no one wants to improve it.