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I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reas
by benlivengood 6y ago
I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order.
In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.
- joering2 6y agoWould actually like to see a list of largest karma-wise HN members who left. By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please: SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100
- the_lonely_road 6y agoBe the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire history of the site before for a past project. If you don't want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.
- minimaxir 6y agoData analysis note: the public datasets only have submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they quit HN. Lurking is fun.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoSome people have simply changed their handle and that likely wouldn't be obvious from the public data set either. My old handle has 25k. It has been inactive since I moved to this one.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoCurious, why did you create a new account?
- DoreenMichele 6y agoMy old handle unfortunately and innocently looks like (or can be interpreted as) "I'm just here to start shit!" It did not occur to me it might be misinterpreted a certain way until six weeks after I started it and I didn't think it important at that point. As I gained more karma, I did a blog post at some point explaining the completely innocent origin story for it (typo and all). After I hit the leaderboard, I decided, basically, "Oh, brother. This is so not worth the hassle involved. Yeesh." And changed to my actual first and middle names.
- brewdad 6y agoAnd now, by commenting, you've reset your activity clock. Time to lurk for the next 6 months so you look inactive.
- robocat 6y agoThat would give no information about the reason someone left: there are a lot of reasons to stop interacting with hn that have nothing to do with the “best people leave in short order” theory.
- krapp 6y ago>SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100 Ah, Hacker News is too cool to use something as pedestrian as a database ;) But there is a Google BigQuery dataset[0,1]. I don't know how up to date it is. [0]https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-data&d=hacker_news&page=dataset https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502
- downandout 6y agoI used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points over the last 18 months or so. So the things that I have to say weren't always unpopular. I didn't change - the community did. It became a hostile, vindictive place. I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold. I can now accurately predict the content of many of the comments on a given story by simply reading its title. It's sad to see.
- 0x737368 6y agoIt's hilarious how your comment got immediately downvoted for sharing a personal anecdote about the very same thing. Must really be rubbing the people who downvote for political difference reasons the wrong way.
- 0xEFF 6y agoDown voted you because of your about me.
- downandout 6y agoI believe it's an honest assessment of the current state of HN.
- ascar 6y agoI remember you because of the about me. I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you and then visited your account page probably to check for sibling comments in the same post. Your about me definitely changed how I feel about your comments and probably the source of your recent experience.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CDRdude 6y agoI think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightful’ or ‘offtopic’.
- TheManInThePub 6y agoFrankly, I couldn't agree with this more. I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.
- robocat 6y ago> down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. Every tool will be abused sometimes. I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure. Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
- joseluisq 6y agoAgree. And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
- II2II 6y agoI suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.
- jvanderbot 6y ago>The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.
- LinuxBender 6y agoI've had similar experiences on ServerFault part of StachExchange. If I simply answer a question with the correct technical answer, my answer is basically ignored. If I take that exact same answer and add a bold title, some cute paragraph formatting, some no-format text boxes, add some flowery wording like I am giving a Ted Talk, then people love my answers. So that is what I do and why I rarely answer questions any more. They also try to encourage me to edit other peoples posts, but I already have a day job.
- rhizome 6y agoI feel like a lot more people qualify to do metamoderation in the SO network than ever do it. This is essentially sabotage in the form of benign neglect.
- LinuxBender 6y agoVery true and it gets even more complicated when there are small circles of full time editors that invoke elitism around document writing styles as well as chiming in on highly subjective answers and invoking dogmatic principals. In Unix/Linux, there are millions of ways to solve a problem, but the solution must fit into their perceived right way. Before long, people not in those elite circles or who do not get the hint are discouraged from editing or answering anything.
- noizejoy 6y ago
- rurp 6y agoThis matches my experience as well. HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.
- ipband 6y agoIt's not just downvoting that makes HN strong, it's IP banning. Right now I'm commenting via a new user I created via my work VPN, because nothing on my home network is allowed to create new users on HN now or effectively comment, since I always did so using temporary accounts. I'm getting so much more done, so- thanks, HN!
- striking 6y agoYou can usually be un-IP-banned by going to a particular URL. It's usually not permanent. As for the thing you were banned for, do you feel like HN owes you the ability to make an account per comment?
- ipband 6y agoI made the mistake of practicing free speech in a way that didn't meet the standards. Specifically, I called something out for being stupid in one comment with 1-2 expletives and in another comment I shared a paranoid experience I had with my vaccine, stating clearly it was probably paranoid. If those two things aren't a reason to take away my free speech, I don't know what would be. Go, HN! Up with the valley!
- ascar 6y agoAre static ips a common thing in the US? Here in Germany getting a fresh ip is as easy as restarting the router unless you explicitly pay for a static ip.
- ipband 6y ago
- FalconSensei 6y ago> people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse Hello Reddit. Unfortunately now I basically just use Reddit to browse and don't comment much, because of that behaviour
- frongpik 6y agoThe broken concept is downvoting for others. Instead, it should be downvoting for yourself. If somebody downvotes of flags something, I don't want that something to be hidden from my view, unless I've upvoted the downvoter in past. The "global downvoting" model feeds the wannabe censors who feel entitled to impose their opinion on others.
- jayd16 6y agoIronically reddit has solved this by having terrible search facilities. Subs can stay small and hidden.
- ford_x 6y agoI don't see how absence of downvote button helps. Popular topics without moderation get flooded with garbage sooner or later.