4 ms·

Make it slower and harder for your users

2 points by siavosh 15y ago

unimpressive 15y ago
Most non-trivial posts in most conversations will take at least minute or two to write. And honestly, that's probably the highest that you can set a post time limit before people get fed up with you. We've finally created the medium that lets written communication occur in near or real time and you want to slow it down? Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts; account signup asks for a username and password only, the only features not available to new users are (As far as I can tell.) downvotes and flagging. And as you no doubt know HN has better quality discussion than at least 90% of the web. With virtually no barriers to entry. The focus topic probably helps, trying to keep the trolls out through aggressive downvoting also helps. Delays on posting? Not necessary.
- dfc 15y ago
  Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts; That is not true. As nested replies increase the reply link takes longer to show up under a post...
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    Thank you for the correction. It still takes a while to get towards anything like five minutes. (That or the pace of discussion on HN is slow enough that I didn't notice.) Another thing to keep in mind with this is that HN isn't really like a traditional web forum. If you were to put a limit like this on a more traditionally threaded bulletin board it would stall the whole thread for five minutes at a time. Which would be obnoxious. EDIT: One also has to keep in mind that the way HN handles your posts is also a bit different from most other sites. (At least the ones I've been to.) The ability to see who has replied to you anywhere on the site means that you can carry on conversations over a longer period than your attention fixates on the parent thread. I've seen replies to my posts made days after the fact. That just doesn't happen in most of the interfaces I've seen.
- siavosh 15y ago
  I understand it would be frustrating to some people some of the time. And HN is definitely a place with above average posting qualities. But I just can't help to think that even here (not to mention most other forums) a significant portion of visitors read something (on a superficial level), assume a bunch of things, then write down some comment/rant based on their assumptions. And the OP content may be lost, misinterpreted or discarded due to this sort of commentary. I'm not married to the idea of a delay mechanism, but the idea of making conversation real-time has a down side that I don't think I've heard anyone mention as being part of the problem.

2 points by siavosh 15y ago

Most non-trivial posts in most conversations will take at least minute or two to write. And honestly, that's probably the highest that you can set a post time limit before people get fed up with you. We've finally created the medium that lets written communication occur in near or real time and you want to slow it down? Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts; account signup asks for a username and password only, the only features not available to new users are (As far as I can tell.) downvotes and flagging. And as you no doubt know HN has better quality discussion than at least 90% of the web. With virtually no barriers to entry. The focus topic probably helps, trying to keep the trolls out through aggressive downvoting also helps. Delays on posting? Not necessary.

dfc 15y ago
Looking at HN itself, theres no limit on the time between posts; That is not true. As nested replies increase the reply link takes longer to show up under a post...
- unimpressive 15y ago
  Thank you for the correction. It still takes a while to get towards anything like five minutes. (That or the pace of discussion on HN is slow enough that I didn't notice.) Another thing to keep in mind with this is that HN isn't really like a traditional web forum. If you were to put a limit like this on a more traditionally threaded bulletin board it would stall the whole thread for five minutes at a time. Which would be obnoxious. EDIT: One also has to keep in mind that the way HN handles your posts is also a bit different from most other sites. (At least the ones I've been to.) The ability to see who has replied to you anywhere on the site means that you can carry on conversations over a longer period than your attention fixates on the parent thread. I've seen replies to my posts made days after the fact. That just doesn't happen in most of the interfaces I've seen.
siavosh 15y ago
I understand it would be frustrating to some people some of the time. And HN is definitely a place with above average posting qualities. But I just can't help to think that even here (not to mention most other forums) a significant portion of visitors read something (on a superficial level), assume a bunch of things, then write down some comment/rant based on their assumptions. And the OP content may be lost, misinterpreted or discarded due to this sort of commentary. I'm not married to the idea of a delay mechanism, but the idea of making conversation real-time has a down side that I don't think I've heard anyone mention as being part of the problem.