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Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN?
I'm growing weary of reading long posts which dispense advice or tell stories and then when I go to the users profile, it's blank.
It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.
Thoughts?
- pvillega 15y ago+1 I believe knowing what interests a user has, or what experience, may help a lot to filter people who speak without knowing the facts (when talking about programming or startups, for example) or whose interests conflict with the subject, so the comment may be strongly biased. Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.
- philjackson 15y agoWhat does "verified identity" actually mean? That a user has filled in their profile?
- davimack 15y agoWhat's next, then, "real names" a la Google? No, thank you.
- pagekalisedown 15y agoMaybe an acceptable compromise would be simply to indicate someone's age. It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.
- arethuza 15y agoAge? I think one of the good things about the relative anonymity in HN is that things like age aren't usually seen as a factor in rating someone's contribution to a discussion. [And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].
- Maxious 15y agoDare I say it but providing more identity hints has really improved reddit. Thanks to some css :after trickery (and now built in support for managing that), it became possible to put more identity information next to usernames called "flair". This ranges from the football team a user supports in /r/soccer, to being a Mojang employee in /r/minecraft/, to getting an AK47 flair for being a verified successful sender of candy in /r/snackexchange. And of course reddit employees, past and present get global flair avoiding awkward "do you know who I am" incidents ;)
- rsanchez1 15y agoBut HN is not reddit!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ryandvm 15y agoMercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit? Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...
- Jebus 15y agoThis! +1 I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.
- p4bl0 15y agoYour last remark is not incompatible with what OP asks for. Maybe HN could test that during a trial week?
- astrec 15y ago60 minutes doesn't seem quite long enough. I'd look at perhaps 0.5 * mean ttl on the front page.
- barefoot 15y agoThat sounds like an interesting idea. If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"? Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".
- route66 15y agoUser identification with the short comments usually found on HN might be difficult. The challenge still stands if I'm not mistaken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592
- 15y ago
- officialchicken 15y agoI guess independently verifying claims and facts is too hard, regardless of their origin. Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.
- hef19898 15y agoBeing quite new to HN, I don't think less anonymity would improve it, mittigating the "fatt finger" syndrome in mobile would help more :-) As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all". I think that's where the voting buttons come in.
- jcampbell1 15y agoWhat about optional links to github/linkedin/etc accounts in the profile and badges next to the comments to show what the person reveals in their profile? I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.
- davidw 15y agoSomething simple like asking if the user wants to make an email address and/or web page public on their profile would be nice.
- Tichy 15y agoWould be an easy hack to write a Greasemonkey script that displays user info next to their name. If you care, why don't you go for it?
- knowtheory 15y agoThis is an intermediate question. What is the actual symptom that euroclydon is concerned about? Verifiability of stories users relate? Trollish behavior? Something else? Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.
- kami8845 15y agoi feel it's pretty easy to find out who people are
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoThis is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story) As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same. As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.) This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities. I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread. Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.
- hef19898 15y agoSo I've been right about that whith the early votes, already doubted that. My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.
- rcamera 15y agoIf they left the profile empty, it was their choice. You can interpret that as if they simply don't want to be contacted. Doing what you suggested won't make HN any "better", it will only drive away the commenters that don't want to be reached out, or those who want to remain anonymous. For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.
- euroclydon 15y agoI used to think a comment should stand on its own too, but I now think that the benefit of knowing the background of the person speaking to you outweighs the downside of introducing your own personal prejudices. I mean, should HN be optimized toward mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?
- rsanchez1 15y agoWhat benefit is there to knowing the background?
- euroclydon 15y agoHow is having less information helpful, in this case?
- rbarooah 15y agoYou've already acknowledged that the intent is to reduce prejudice and priming and to allow comments to be judged on their merits.
- rbarooah 15y agoshould HN be optimized towards mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened? Unless you really think that increased prejudice on HN would enhance the experience for the 'enlightened', then this is a false dichotomy.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoHow about a function for sending a direct message to a user through the website? It could be enabled by default, but users could disable it if they don't want to be contacted. That way, users by default can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.
- rsanchez1 15y agoDoes a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories? To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.
- walru 15y agoI hate to be so disparaging, but this has to be one of the worst ideas I've seen thrown around here. Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting. If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically. I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for. Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type. Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?
- euroclydon 15y agoJust because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.
- drucken 15y agoThis has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true value. There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them. I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement). HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.
- paulsutter 15y agoI'm curious why you aren't posting under your real name?