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It's a problem. I was just thinking about ways to mitigate it as I was driving home from YC. I'll spend more time on this problem between batches.

by pg 15y ago

read_wharf 15y ago
It may be inevitable as HN ages and gets more well known. Technical solutions would make HN less like HN, and more like Slashdot, Reddit etc. My impression is that the elders I'm used to seeing are gone or holding back. Maybe they've found somewhere else they like better, or maybe they've resorted to email among themselves. Whatever the solution, its goal would need to be to encourage more posts by wizards and elders, and discourage posts by, um, the rest of us. I think that would be most successful with social prompts rather than mechanical prods. You might think about making comment karma visible again. With invisible karma, the only thing one can learn from karma is how bad one's own bad posts are. If you can't see others' positive karma, you don't have the opportunity to see how strongly other people like positive posts. "Dang, he got a lot of karma for that comment. I wanna be like him." Or has hiding karma achieved what you'd hoped?
seeingfurther 15y ago
I'd be interested to hear what percentage of active HN commenters have also applied to YC. I'm not an active commenter on HN (or any other site) but if I was to be more than a lurker I wouldn't want my reputation for snarky comments to impact future opportunities with YC or any other startup group. HN/YC has the potential to back into a professional hacker reputation system in a similar way that Facebook has done socially. e.g. block commenters who haven't submitted a YC app... of course if the % of HN commenters to YC applicants is low this idea is dead on arrival.
- ig1 15y ago
  The reality of modern HN is that many people here don't even know what YC is.
jcr 15y ago
paul, the following might be helpful addition to your test/training sets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769027

It's a problem. I was just thinking about ways to mitigate it as I was driving home from YC. I'll spend more time on this problem between batches.

by pg 15y ago

It's a problem. I was just thinking about ways to mitigate it as I was driving home from YC. I'll spend more time on this problem between batches.

read_wharf 15y ago

It may be inevitable as HN ages and gets more well known. Technical solutions would make HN less like HN, and more like Slashdot, Reddit etc. My impression is that the elders I'm used to seeing are gone or holding back. Maybe they've found somewhere else they like better, or maybe they've resorted to email among themselves. Whatever the solution, its goal would need to be to encourage more posts by wizards and elders, and discourage posts by, um, the rest of us. I think that would be most successful with social prompts rather than mechanical prods. You might think about making comment karma visible again. With invisible karma, the only thing one can learn from karma is how bad one's own bad posts are. If you can't see others' positive karma, you don't have the opportunity to see how strongly other people like positive posts. "Dang, he got a lot of karma for that comment. I wanna be like him." Or has hiding karma achieved what you'd hoped?

seeingfurther 15y ago

I'd be interested to hear what percentage of active HN commenters have also applied to YC. I'm not an active commenter on HN (or any other site) but if I was to be more than a lurker I wouldn't want my reputation for snarky comments to impact future opportunities with YC or any other startup group. HN/YC has the potential to back into a professional hacker reputation system in a similar way that Facebook has done socially. e.g. block commenters who haven't submitted a YC app... of course if the % of HN commenters to YC applicants is low this idea is dead on arrival.

ig1 15y ago
The reality of modern HN is that many people here don't even know what YC is.

jcr 15y ago

paul, the following might be helpful addition to your test/training sets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769027