4 ms·

Thoughts on using news.YC (please contribute, please read)

• jwecker 20y ago
  Moderate submission volume + high volume of intelligent comments = very nice site to come and visit for a while. High submission volume + no comments or hundreds of one-liners = might as well set up a news aggregator.
  • python_kiss 20y ago
    There is a similar "karma" system on my social network, and one of my users suggested that we limit the amount of karma a user can receive within a give day. On YC, it makes sense to limit the submission volume according to the person's karma level. Someone with high karma is unlikely to be spamming the site.
    • jwecker 20y ago
      Well, there's also signal-to-noise ratios. There are some people who have high karma by submitting dozens and dozens of sites knowing that one or two has got to stick. To me that degrades the quality of the site as much as spam does. I guess your solution might solve that in a round-about way as well.
      • python_kiss 20y ago
        I would abstain from complicating the user experience, though. In my experience, posting a topic has much more potential in gaining points than writing *thoughtful* comments. A good strategy to rise above that ranks is to post a bunch of interesting links; upon achieving high points, the user can then take a defensive stance by defending his or her opinions through posting comments instead. The point is, from a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments.
        • notabel 20y ago
          That is certainly the status quo; I would ask, however, whether it is desirable. I think the system should provide more incentive for thoughtful comments, or at least some sort of disincentive for shotgun-style submissions. It is difficult to build karma by posting lots of comments; you have to put the effort into generating good content to get karma. The same should ideally be true for submissions; the difficulty, of course, is that since the content of submissions is generated by someone other than the submitter, simply posting lots of them /will/ eventually result in a karma-boosting hit.
          • python_kiss 20y ago
            We had a similar problem on our social network where users abstained from giving karma to thoughtful comments. Consequently, we coded an algo to add "+0.1 karma" to every user that gave another person "+1 karma". That was enough to take care of the problem.
    • notabel 20y ago
      This, combined with a burying system to get rid of junk stories, could clean up the 'new' section substantially. It would also be useful to factor snr into the computation; the nature of the karma system, which makes it more advantageous (at a marginal level) to submit a story than a comment, encourages a shot-gun approach to submission; SNR would combat that. EDIT: Ha, points to jwecker for posting about SNR while I was writing about it.
      • dfranke 20y ago
        I've never used Digg, but from what I read of them, their burying system is working out rather poorly. Burying a story on Digg requires an O(1) number of votes, so anything controversial gets buried even if 90% of users agree that it's an excellent article. A simple up/down model like Reddit's seems like a better idea, but see the top-level comment that I'll have posted in about two minutes.
• jwecker 20y ago
  I automatically click on a submitter's name if I don't recognize it. If that submitter has only 1 karma point and is obviously new to the site, that submission gets extra special scrutiny- meaning if it is even remotely promotional I assume it's spam. If you want to jump into the community here, esp. if you've already been lurking for a while- don't do it by doing a submission (unless it's a killer submission)- add some nice comments please!
• mattculbreth 20y ago
  Well I think we're at the former right now. Probably need a few more comments per post, but that will happen I think. What we want to avoid at all costs is what happened at Reddit yesterday with the impeachment business. That's no good. I know they're working on it (spoke to them last night) but it was annoying there for a while.
  • jwecker 20y ago
    Good point. On an unrelated note, however, your comment reminded me of another note I want to make: If your post is in response to a comment- please make sure and thread it. Because the site shows comments in the same nested level in different positions (either random or rotating or something, I haven't figured it out yet) each time the comments are loaded it gets real confusing if the comments aren't threaded correctly. There's plenty of horizontal space in the site's design so we shouldn't be reluctant to use it. The alternative, of course, is to quote what we're replying to.
    • danielha 20y ago
      I'm not a fan of threaded nature of comments. It's done to faciliate exactly that -- commenting, and does not provide for a proper discussion environment. It's difficult to follow a discussion from start to finish when popular comments are placed at the top.
• jwecker 20y ago
  The word karma in the context of this site has two meanings to me- one is that if you give a little of yourself and write a thoughtful comment or needed submission then you'll be rewarded. The other meaning to me is this- give a lot of it out and it'll come back to you. So if you care about karma, be liberal with it. (and I'm not talking about moderating this comment up). If there is a constant flow of karma, it's much easier to see a differentiation in comments. There's nothing more irritating to me than seeing a comments board full of great thoughts and lots of responses where everything is either 1 or 2 points. [upd] - and, of course, the old slashdot rule- focus on modding up- have a very good reason to mod down. Sure wish the digg community had followed that rule (back when I still used it).
  • danielha 20y ago
    "[...] constant flow of karma [...]" I like how you put it because I've always thought of "karma"-type points in social networks as money -- social currency. We want to stimulate the "economy" by having an active exchange of karma through the community, encouraging more and more discussions and contributions. python_kiss's comment about limiting karma is also an interesting thought. Inflation is something to ponder about in this analogy.
    • dfranke 20y ago
      There is no absolute Right supply of either fiat money or karma. If every dollar bill in everyone's wallet magically turned into two, the price of everything would double and nobody would be materially affected. Similarly, doubling everyone's karma and causing the up arrow to give two points rather than one would have no material effect. Inflation matters when you factor in time. Inflation encourages risk. It makes your current savings become less valuable in the future, encouraging you to try to increase your wealth to compensate. Too much inflation encourages too much risk, and you get a bubble. Money is valuable because it can be exchanged for scarce resources. Karma is valuable because it gets you attention, which is a scarce resource. There are two kinds of attention: visibility of articles and visibility on the leader board. Karma is the cause of the latter, but only a byproduct of the former. There are a fixed number of articles on the front page and a fixed number of spots on the leader board, but both become more valuable as the community grows, because more eyeballs means more attention. At this point, the money analogy breaks down. Money is both a unit of accounting and a medium of exchange. Karma is only a unit of accounting. It tells us how wealthy we are, but we can't exchange it for other wealth. Attention doesn't behave like a commodity either. If we give and receive the same amount of attention, that's not the same as simply doing nothing. So, news.yc really doesn't behave anything like a conventional economy. If any analogy can be drawn at all, I'd say that we're in a state of deflation. As long as the community continues to grow, producing articles now is less profitable than producing articles later.
• python_kiss 20y ago
  Has anyone noticed that submissions tend to receive more points around 4 to 10 am GMT, Eastern Time? Posts that I make after 9 pm usually remain at "1 point" throughout the day. This probably has something to do with the Silicon Valley's working hours.
  • notabel 20y ago
    I was pondering this phenomenon earlier today; it would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of post and moderation rates (this would require access to the backing database). I have noticed that there tend to be definite hot times, and that posts made outside of those hot times tend to never get modded.
  • jwecker 20y ago
    I can tell you that at least for me that's when I try to read a chunk of new submissions regardless of existing score. Once something has a couple of points it is much more likely to continue to grow if it is worthwhile, but it takes slogging through a lot of crap sometimes, it seems, to find that underrated 1-point submission- even though there are plenty of them in there.
    • notabel 20y ago
      I'll be honest, I've not been nearly so good about doing my time on the 'new' page. In your experience, are there any strong patterns in good submissions? What I'm getting at is basically: are there any views on the new submissions list that would make finding the under-rated ones substantively simpler?
      • python_kiss 20y ago
        Cain, if you're looking for up to date startup news, it is better to simply subscribe to rss blogs. Here are a few good ones: TC, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, OnStartups, PaulGraham, Startup Reviews, The Startup Journey, etc. On YC, it sometimes helps to simply sift through a user's past posts and comments.
      • 20y ago
• notabel 20y ago
  One thing I find interesting about news.yc is the relatively small set of active contributors to the comments, and their rather high availability: case in point, this thread, which is feeling to me rather more like an ongoing conversation than a /. style shout-fest. Anything that can be done to encourage this feeling of intellectual discourse is a win, in my opinion.
  • python_kiss 20y ago
    Copy-paste from my reply to jwecker: "From a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments." Top users are more active in the discussion because they are already high above the ranks. The top user doesn't have to spam the site to gain karma, we already have enough.
    • notabel 20y ago
      This is an interesting notion; there is an implicit assumption that the low-karma user has something to lose by posting comments. Am I missing something here? I do see your point, though, wrt top users not spamming the site. That's largely why I liked your idea of throttling submission rates based on karma. New users should have to develop karma by being useful, rather than just prolific.
      • python_kiss 20y ago
        Exactly, the user with low-karma is better off posting topics than comments. Comments don't receive nearly as much points as topics do. Even worse, comments require far more thought than blindly submitting links. What is the economic gain the user with low-karma receive from posting comments? Not much. I know I suggested it, but throttling submission rates based on karma might not be fair to the end users. Once a karma-archy is established, the rich will get richer at the expense of the poor.
        • notabel 20y ago
          Well, I certainly hope that news.yc users are a bit more than Ricardo-programmed economic optimization automata. :) One solution to older users having a perpetual advantage would be to implement some sort of aging of karma, or at least of the karma value used to determine throttling. Such a thing would actually be a win in terms of SNR--it doesn't really matter how karmic someone was a year ago, if they have only made low-quality posts/comments in the past month, they should be treated (in the submission system) as a low-karma user.
• danielha 20y ago
  What we need is more incentive for active discussion among topics instead of a flurry of ho-hum links. The community built around the "news" is the most compelling part of YC News. Incidently, the project I'm working on relates to this in many ways.
• dfranke 20y ago
  I think there are a couple reasonable assumptions about high-karma users that we can work to our advantage: 1. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" queue than average, because they spend enough time on the site to exhaust "top" and want to read more. 2. They're more likely than average to be open-minded about controversial stories as well as less tolerant of inane ones. If they spend more time on the site, then it's more to their advantage to promote interesting stuff rather than promote an agenda. It's dumb to piss in your own pond. Here's what I propose: high-karma users get more voting power over *young* stories, to enable them to police the "new" queue and out-muscle spammers and voting rings. After stories are a few hours old, high-karma users no longer get a boost if they haven't voted on them yet. If high-karma users have already voted on a story when it reaches the aging threshold, the boost goes away for upvotes but not for downvotes. That way: 1. Bad stories never see the light of day, because high-karma users bury them and they stay buried. 2. Controversial stories will make the front page, but they don't stay there long if the rest of the community doesn't like them. 3. Good stories make it to the front page slightly faster.
  • pg 20y ago
    We have some software for dealing with spammers and voting rings. It's not that visible, but it's there.
    • dfranke 20y ago
      Dang, already? Sounds like Arc is working out well. Still, though, any statstical approach (which is what I assume you're using) is going to have some lag because you have to wait for a statistically-significant sample. You can catch any given offender after he's caused an O(1) amount of trouble, but if the offenders don't correlate with each other, you can get overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of them. Spammers certainly do correlate with each other, but it's not obvious that voting rings do.
      • notabel 20y ago
        I'm prone to think that pg's algorithm is, to some extent, content based. I have no real evidence to support this, just the evangelism in "A Plan for Spam."