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I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?
- SilasX 3y ago
  HN doesn't have downvotes on topics/submissions, which IMHO is part of the problem. You can only flag. But there are a lot of stories that don't rise to the level of "this is totally inappropriate/spam", but also aren't very good either. In any case, I don't get the hate for comment up/downvotes: yes, some people will try to game it, but overall, it tends to get good stuff to the top, and is better than having to wade through comments randomly.
- vulcan01 3y ago
  Click-through rate optimizes for clickbait titles and controversial topics. Comment volume optimizes for controversial topics as well, since people would be arguing in the comments in those. It also optimizes for comments that don't add value.
- 6510 3y ago
  HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. Interestingness is a poor goal, if it even is a goal. For what purpose are we looking for interestingness? "Why?" I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds. If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people would be able to bench their publications in advance and create the SEO click bait hell all over until eventually (like google) success has it that the only remaining signal of quality is how high it was ranked previously back when the algo still worked. Counting click-though is specially terrible there. Only setting real goals and tuning against exploits could produce hard numbers. It's much easier if the goal is selling a product but even then there is the short and the long game.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. I don't know what the original site guidelines said, but the earliest version I could find in the wayback machine (July 2, 2014) starts exactly the same as the current content. [1] Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
LexiMax 3y ago
> I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now. Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviously mod flagging for things that break rules, but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  > but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with. I've elsewhere said that useful/not useful and agree/disagree should be two different buttons, similar to how LessWrong does it. However, it is a community with even higher SNR and a very different look and feel compared to HN, so I don't know if the same thing would work here.
marak830 3y ago
I read hn through hackernews.com, which is kind of the same? Yeah it's "frontpage" only, but it works well for me. I like to scroll through everything I missed. It would be more than difficult to figure out a way to do this without a "frontpage" but anyone who cracks that, would have me as a user.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

SilasX 3y ago
HN doesn't have downvotes on topics/submissions, which IMHO is part of the problem. You can only flag. But there are a lot of stories that don't rise to the level of "this is totally inappropriate/spam", but also aren't very good either. In any case, I don't get the hate for comment up/downvotes: yes, some people will try to game it, but overall, it tends to get good stuff to the top, and is better than having to wade through comments randomly.
vulcan01 3y ago
Click-through rate optimizes for clickbait titles and controversial topics. Comment volume optimizes for controversial topics as well, since people would be arguing in the comments in those. It also optimizes for comments that don't add value.
6510 3y ago
HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. Interestingness is a poor goal, if it even is a goal. For what purpose are we looking for interestingness? "Why?" I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds. If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people would be able to bench their publications in advance and create the SEO click bait hell all over until eventually (like google) success has it that the only remaining signal of quality is how high it was ranked previously back when the algo still worked. Counting click-though is specially terrible there. Only setting real goals and tuning against exploits could produce hard numbers. It's much easier if the goal is selling a product but even then there is the short and the long game.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  > HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. I don't know what the original site guidelines said, but the earliest version I could find in the wayback machine (July 2, 2014) starts exactly the same as the current content. [1] Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

LexiMax 3y ago

> I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now. Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviously mod flagging for things that break rules, but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
> but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with. I've elsewhere said that useful/not useful and agree/disagree should be two different buttons, similar to how LessWrong does it. However, it is a community with even higher SNR and a very different look and feel compared to HN, so I don't know if the same thing would work here.

marak830 3y ago

I read hn through hackernews.com, which is kind of the same? Yeah it's "frontpage" only, but it works well for me. I like to scroll through everything I missed. It would be more than difficult to figure out a way to do this without a "frontpage" but anyone who cracks that, would have me as a user.