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Hacker News (HN) – Part 1: analysis

138 points by sebg 3y ago

mtmail 3y ago
> Even more interestingly, there was negative karma. I don’t even know how this came to be. Brand new account commenting with very low value but not worth flagging. For example "I read the article yesterday" or "Why is this article even on HN?". I've seen a couple that had negative karma on the first days. Often though it's simply spam and the account soon gets shadow-banned though I don't understand the process that does that. Example user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151
- redbell 3y ago
  Well explained, Gracias!
- osm3000 3y ago
  Thank you for clarification. I think part of the confusion that I had was that I didn't know about the downvoting option at the beginning. I think it will be really great of HN releases the scores of the comments.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
omoikane 3y ago
Once new users gain the ability to downvote stuff, actively engaging in discussions increases the risk of losing karma, and lose the one ability that is not available to new users. So if users perceive the main value of Hacker News as a moderated news feed, it seems the best strategy is to earn their 501 points somehow and lurk after that. Maybe that's why user activity falls off after a few years.
- screenoridesaga 3y ago
  There’s also active downvote bots that search for phrases like GOP and flag them immediately… watch.
_xivi 3y ago
I didn't realize that the active user tenure is this low (one year) since I frequently come across veteran users. On a similar note, sometimes i wonder where the high profile users who leave the platform move into (if anything), there doesn't seem to be a lot of options. Do they switch to alt accounts? turn into lurkers? maybe go off the grid?
- fritzo 3y ago
  The average user in the dataset will have lower tenure than the average user you encounter, because long-tenure users will have more encounters.
tayo42 3y ago
I wonder if people rotate their accounts alot here at the one year mark. Which I should be doing...
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  if nothing else because they dont allow you to delete your account
  - bredren 3y ago
    You may want to use anti-stylometry tools in addition to account switching. There's already been evidence that analysis to identify and attribute authorship across accounts can work surprisingly well.
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      the agents enjoy my unique typos though!
username923409 3y ago
i mostly lurk HN, and don't post unless i feel like my contribution is useful in some way. from my perspective, it's relieving to see that the number of users has remained mostly constant in recent years. of course it's selfish to think in this way, but almost no "social media" or UGC-based platform that i've used has actually become better or more useful to me as it became (much) larger. this kind of fast growth in users (beyond some size) often leads to a shift in the culture that made preexisting users participate in the first place, leading to a loss in overall quality of the platform as a whole. if the growth is gradual enough, then new users eventually figure out how to fit into the culture or leave. i guess i've said nothing that isn't obvious to people who have used a computer before, basically "yay no eternal september for HN yet", but i digress.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Interesting point. I was watching The Synanon Fix on HBO, this weekend, and towards the end of the first episode, we see the original addicts, being replaced by the more lucrative "lifestylers," and I suspect that the next episodes will be downhill, from here. The app I just wrote and released, is picking up steam, but slowly. That's deliberate. We're not doing any promotion, and it's giving us a chance to make course corrections. By the time people start piling in (and they will, but it will never be more than a rounding error to many social media apps), I think it will be in extremely good shape.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  Growth assumes that older posters continue to post, which both according to TFA and my own analysis isn't true. In my own analysis, comments in a thread have a recent-user bias and roughly 30-40% of an article's comments will come from the last 3-4 years of users. I found this to hold true for many large threads over the past 5 years, though I haven't yet exhaustively demonstrated this yet simply because I don't do HN analysis that often. What that means practically is that the folks who post on this site are constantly changing. I also, generally, find that the most contentious threads on this site tend to have a relatively stronger recency bias among its posters. By that regard, eternal September is ever present: the posts on this site weigh toward recent posters. I'd be curious to see if that effect can be explained by throwaways and sock puppet posters but I'm not sure of any reliable way to identify those especially as historic karma counts aren't kept for users. While I have more robust models that work a lot better, a very simple method I've found is that the more recent the upper percentiles of posters are on a thread, the less I will like it: to me Eternal September is here. Of course my user here is ancient from 2009. The numbers just quantify that there's been a change in audience since I joined, a wholly unsurprising fact.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’ve significantly reduced my commenting recently because I realized that I’ve been using the internet to hone my discussion/argumentation skills since I got on the web in 1996 At this point there’s too much noise on the internet for good long term, long form discussion like we had on irc and forums and frankly I’m not sure where that lives today. HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang
- weinzierl 3y ago
  You've put into words exactly what I feel. "[..] frankly I’m not sure where that lives today" I wish I knew. Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I enjoyed it. "HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang" Amen to that!
- pickingdinner 3y ago
  These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse, even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to be. You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore. And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.
  - pickingdinner 3y ago
    Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it. But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse. Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse. Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.
tcmb 3y ago
If what they call 'consistency' is just the total number of stories posted, it's not really surprising to see a strong correlation with total karma points, is it? The more stories posted, the more karma gathered. Anything else would be a real head scratcher. You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later.
- osm3000 3y ago
  > You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later. Probably many people stop sharing in this case indeed. But for those who don't, I guess the idea is: eventually, if you keep sharing, you can collect upvotes here and there, and eventually the karma will go up
w-m 3y ago
Another curious data point: id =40000000 is up in a few hours. I thought it would be fun to try to make a submission pointing to that id, while trying to get that id right when it’s up. But it’s too late to start hacking on a script; I’m rather going to bed now. (Anybody else trying, please don’t kill the server or make dang mad). Edit: oh I missed a 9 in looking at an earlier link, it’ll be a little more than a day from now, unless sama announces a new product, triggering a comment storm.
- osm3000 3y ago
  Damn! I honestly didn't think about it! That would have been really cool! I can't believe how this completely escaped me :D
raviisoccupied 3y ago
> This finding suggests that the key to a high score isn’t necessarily landing viral hits, but rather consistently sharing stories. This is interesting. I find it's very difficult to predict which links do and don't perform on Hacker News, resulting in quite a diverse (to me at least) series of stories. Thanks for the analysis.
- osm3000 3y ago
  It is a very good point, and it is the subject of part 2: I want to understand if the title / website / time of sharing has an impact on the score
laurex 3y ago
> for those treating HN as a competitive platform where karma points serve as the score I have to imagine that people for whom there’s a primary motivation to be a “winner” in points must quickly lose interest? But maybe I’m just naive to how motivating status could be…
- screenoridesaga 3y ago
  You are doing that right now though because you want attention, don’t you see how ironic your comment is? You’re the noise.
- rezonant 3y ago
  I think there is a pronounced fall-off in the "gamification" interest too as a user progresses in karma. IIRC the last perk for high karma is downvoting comments at 501- no more fun perks to spend your Internet points on beyond that. I also don't get the sense that people habitually check the karma of people they are reading or replying to anyway, so it doesn't in and of itself grant much in the way of sway or gravitas in the community. That's much more about being notable or recognizable (other than the obvious "post good comments and stories"). And sure, it does help the sense of "being part of the community" to get to 500 where you are trusted to downvote, but let's be real- it only takes a few good story submissions to get you there if you want to get there fast. I only have 3 submissions that aren't Show HN or my own stuff, and 1 of those is 194 points (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38626454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38626454). And I only posted that story because I was hoping Matthew would elaborate on his position here on HN (as well as wanting to hear what HN thought of his take), since he is a well known HN user.
jll29 3y ago
The author "found out" that sama = Sam Altman nad pg = Paul Graham, by his surprise. It is well known that Hacker News owner company, Y Combinator had Altman as his CEO before he joined OpenAI.
Lerc 3y ago
I have long wondered about doing an analysis of HN comments to find correlations of opinions, instances where people have changed their mind over time, topics where the balance of opinion is out of proportion to the balance of comments due to a vocal minority. I have made some casual observations that it would be nice to know whether the broader data supports what I have seen. For instance, one weird thing that I have noticed, is that antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile. It may just be by imagination. Possibly more importantly, but also something should be approached with caution and sensitivity would be analysis of comments to identify people in mental distress. I know of a few HN users that have taken their own lives and have wondered if there was enough information in their comments to allow someone to provide pre-emptive support.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile While it's definitely preferable to encrypt private communications among all people including the "nothing to hide" types who generally behave well within societal norms, the types who don't behave as well feel a greater need to encrypt.
  - Lerc 3y ago
    I should clarify that I don't think that most these type of comments are from people deliberately violating societal norms (like a troll would). My hypothesis is broadly similar to yours, that comments like this come from individuals with a more adversarial view of the world.
- osm3000 3y ago
  I would be really curious to explore such correlations. Tbh, while I was working on this, I did struggle with forming hypotheses to test, or even a suitable manifold for the different items/users (e.g., I didn't know some of the users share the PGP keys). Unsupervised methods were not very satisfying in uncovering such hypotheses as well. There is also the point you raised about how to share (or what to do with) some of these correlations. For example, concerning mental illness, as much as I would love to uncover that due to my sheer curiosity, I am really concerned about what I would see.
germinator 3y ago
The "users ceasing to post stories after one year" metric seems a bit wonky to me. I mean, I don't doubt it, but it's probably skewed by accounts created for self-promotion or spam. If you look at front-page stories, I think that most of them are from long-time members. It would probably be useful to separate the churn of throwaway accounts and the ones that cross some engagement threshold - 50 comments or something like that.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Better yet just a graph of the ratio of comments vs posts over time.
- osm3000 3y ago
  That is an interesting point! It makes sense to have a criteria that identify real users / long-term members. I will look into that. Cheers
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  We humans are emotional. Users' submissions didn't get the desired reach, and comments were thrashed to oblivion- they got emotional and left/lurked without participating anymore. Besides the usual promotional accounts that crop up, this is one of the reasons people do not participate. Leave the emotion out of the equation, and HackerNews becomes way calmer for you. The same story you submitted that failed gets talked about/discussed when submitted by another -- eh! All the smart people shred your comment -- ah, let's take a walk.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Originally joined HN as a way to collect opinions for writing research. HN represents a certain slice of the tech world that's it's important to observe. I still find HN amongst the top places for engaging discussion. It's within the comments, not the postings, that I find eclectic nuggets of gold and learn new things. Moderation is generally very good. At least 10 books I've read in the last year came from HN comments. One thing I would change is the up-down voting. It adds little. Because I use a text only browser I (assume) don't see voting. So it never occurs to me and have never voted any comment up or down during my stay here. However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals.
- palata 3y ago
  I think that upvoting moves the post up in the list. So even with a text-only browser you get the messages sorted by their votes... right?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rezonant 3y ago
  > Because I use a text only browser I (assume) don't see voting. Well you would still see the effect of voting. As for the points on comments, only the poster can see it (other than the placement effects, and that low point comments become noticeably grayed out). If you enable showdead (in your settings), you can also see comments that have been flagged or downvoted to death, which I do leave on myself (cause I can take it!) > However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals. That's an easy stance to take, but I think it's more nuanced. Sure, when there's no explanatory replies at all it's frustrating to understand the manner in which other readers disagree. But when someone repeatedly posts statements that are very commonly posted by others, and with a basic look around at other interactions is obviously unpopular, disproven or even problematic, it's not exactly the responsibility of passers by to have to consistently regurgitate the same rationale for why it's unpopular or problematic every time the user posts- if the same debunked, disproven, or otherwise disagreeable arguments show up every time an article about Product A hits the front page, I don't think it's fair to measure how just, intellectual, or morally correct the two sides of the disagreement are just by how willing they are to expend energy arguing about it. In fact, the person with the less popular opinion is going to have an incentive and desire to post assertions of those opinions a lot more than others will have the energy to challenge them. Also there's no sense posting a sibling reply that says the same thing. If one person already has a reply capturing the essence of what's wrong with the comment and the comment is still being downvoted, it's probably because other readers agree with the reply. Finally, as I posted elsewhere, a lot of folks see the first changes to their comment's score as indicative of the overall community's opinion but that's rarely the case. Sure you may get a bunch of downvotes in the first hour of posting it, but then over the next few hours that balances out and goes in the other direction. And, complaining about downvotes usually gets more downvotes.
raymondgh 3y ago
I think there could be an aspect of social cooling contributing to decreased per-user engagement. I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Hard agree- a lot of people just opt not to at all- that's what I usually do (other than HN). And when you do decide to go ahead and participate, the energy it takes for each post is a lot higher- you have to consider every contingency you can think of and make sure they all check out. And none of us know if we're going to be wrong when they unearth these posts and pin them on us later, unfortunately.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  > I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I find myself doing this, but I chalked it up to aging and the reality that I may eventually have no choice but to work for one of the companies I have ridiculed online.
- osm3000 3y ago
  > I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I am curious, why is that? Is the medium less safe than before (e.g., unpleasant interactions)? Or is it a high effort to engage in a discussion, and perhaps there are other priorities now? Perhaps something else
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I have found myself doing the same. 1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can. 2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
tekla 3y ago
I always find it so strange that people here have such a high opinion of HN, but outside of this place, almost everyone I know thinks this place is terrible.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  2-3 years ago, I thought HN was amazing. Today, I think it's pretty terrible, measured in terms of the accuracy of information shared in comment threads.
- osm3000 3y ago
  I still like the simple interfact tbh ^_^ But I think it can be improved: personalized feed, allow following certain users, ...etc.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
The karma analysis completely ignores (after mentioning it) the karma gained from comments. I post almost no stories to HN, but have a karma of over 18k. Any sane, full analysis of HN culture needs to take this sort of thing into account.
- rezonant 3y ago
  I think of it as the easy way and the hard way to gain karma, but I'm biased as a "commenter" user. In reality, some people work hard to supply HN with interesting stories and that's important, but it's pretty easy to have sizeable karma without really ever engaging in conversation. I think the tradeoff there is that the HN submitter crowd are very fast to the draw. I'll often encounter a story elsewhere that I want to hear from HN about, so I'll do a search and find it was submitted 15 minutes ago, or even days ago (and I wonder what RSS fueled craze people must go through to find and post things so fast). Of course, for me those are the best cases, because I can go through and read what people think and reply without having to wait for the uptick. But no karma for the slow.
  - Brajeshwar 3y ago
    LOL! No RSS, no nothing for me. For me, it is just consistency at a specific timeslot -- wind-down evening for me (Europe's in Office, West Coast wakes up). I tend to fire and forget. I think the hit is less than 5%, but the consistency pays off in the long run. The best I remember is that 4 of my submissions were on the front page over a couple of hours, which is 13.33% of the front page stories.
- osm3000 3y ago
  Author here I do agree with your point, but unfortunately I was limited by what is available from the APIs: the upvotes for the comments were not provided. I couldn't find a proxy for it either. Thus, I couldn't include it in the analysis
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    You can build an analysis based on partial ordering. The Axios API gives you relative ranking of comments on a given level. Based on partial order you can build lattices and make assertions but that is really difficult and the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze.
eigenvalue 3y ago
Would be cool to see the leaderboard of consistent users (with highest median net upvotes per story). Karma conflates comment karma and post karma, so that’s not really the same thing.
- osm3000 3y ago
  I think the leaderboard is a cool idea! It doesn't need to be a leaderboard for "all the time", but over a recent window of time. > Karma conflates comment karma and post karma, so that’s not really the same thing. I agree, but the limitation that I faced is that I don't have access to the comments upvotes, and I didn't find a satisfying proxy for it either. That is why I dropped it from the analysis.
osm3000 3y ago
Author here Wow! I didn't expect that! I love these discussions and comments :) I will do my best to go through all of them :) Cheers everyone
- pvg 3y ago
  If you have a chance could you talk a little about the decreased engagement part of the analysis? The 2023 datapoint of idle users especially looks unusual, I commented on it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975875
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  This is super awesome and I spend my morning and breakfast reading it. Btw, you know how to hide real well. I would love to exchange emails but I failed to get a contact. Please email me, I would hopefully be able to learn more of your work. brajeshwar@oinam.com

138 points by sebg 3y ago

> Even more interestingly, there was negative karma. I don’t even know how this came to be. Brand new account commenting with very low value but not worth flagging. For example "I read the article yesterday" or "Why is this article even on HN?". I've seen a couple that had negative karma on the first days. Often though it's simply spam and the account soon gets shadow-banned though I don't understand the process that does that. Example user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151

redbell 3y ago
Well explained, Gracias!
osm3000 3y ago
Thank you for clarification. I think part of the confusion that I had was that I didn't know about the downvoting option at the beginning. I think it will be really great of HN releases the scores of the comments.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

omoikane 3y ago

Once new users gain the ability to downvote stuff, actively engaging in discussions increases the risk of losing karma, and lose the one ability that is not available to new users. So if users perceive the main value of Hacker News as a moderated news feed, it seems the best strategy is to earn their 501 points somehow and lurk after that. Maybe that's why user activity falls off after a few years.

screenoridesaga 3y ago
There’s also active downvote bots that search for phrases like GOP and flag them immediately… watch.

_xivi 3y ago

I didn't realize that the active user tenure is this low (one year) since I frequently come across veteran users. On a similar note, sometimes i wonder where the high profile users who leave the platform move into (if anything), there doesn't seem to be a lot of options. Do they switch to alt accounts? turn into lurkers? maybe go off the grid?

fritzo 3y ago
The average user in the dataset will have lower tenure than the average user you encounter, because long-tenure users will have more encounters.

tayo42 3y ago

I wonder if people rotate their accounts alot here at the one year mark. Which I should be doing...

sitzkrieg 3y ago
if nothing else because they dont allow you to delete your account
- bredren 3y ago
  You may want to use anti-stylometry tools in addition to account switching. There's already been evidence that analysis to identify and attribute authorship across accounts can work surprisingly well.
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    the agents enjoy my unique typos though!

username923409 3y ago

i mostly lurk HN, and don't post unless i feel like my contribution is useful in some way. from my perspective, it's relieving to see that the number of users has remained mostly constant in recent years. of course it's selfish to think in this way, but almost no "social media" or UGC-based platform that i've used has actually become better or more useful to me as it became (much) larger. this kind of fast growth in users (beyond some size) often leads to a shift in the culture that made preexisting users participate in the first place, leading to a loss in overall quality of the platform as a whole. if the growth is gradual enough, then new users eventually figure out how to fit into the culture or leave. i guess i've said nothing that isn't obvious to people who have used a computer before, basically "yay no eternal september for HN yet", but i digress.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Interesting point. I was watching The Synanon Fix on HBO, this weekend, and towards the end of the first episode, we see the original addicts, being replaced by the more lucrative "lifestylers," and I suspect that the next episodes will be downhill, from here. The app I just wrote and released, is picking up steam, but slowly. That's deliberate. We're not doing any promotion, and it's giving us a chance to make course corrections. By the time people start piling in (and they will, but it will never be more than a rounding error to many social media apps), I think it will be in extremely good shape.
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Growth assumes that older posters continue to post, which both according to TFA and my own analysis isn't true. In my own analysis, comments in a thread have a recent-user bias and roughly 30-40% of an article's comments will come from the last 3-4 years of users. I found this to hold true for many large threads over the past 5 years, though I haven't yet exhaustively demonstrated this yet simply because I don't do HN analysis that often. What that means practically is that the folks who post on this site are constantly changing. I also, generally, find that the most contentious threads on this site tend to have a relatively stronger recency bias among its posters. By that regard, eternal September is ever present: the posts on this site weigh toward recent posters. I'd be curious to see if that effect can be explained by throwaways and sock puppet posters but I'm not sure of any reliable way to identify those especially as historic karma counts aren't kept for users. While I have more robust models that work a lot better, a very simple method I've found is that the more recent the upper percentiles of posters are on a thread, the less I will like it: to me Eternal September is here. Of course my user here is ancient from 2009. The numbers just quantify that there's been a change in audience since I joined, a wholly unsurprising fact.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I’ve significantly reduced my commenting recently because I realized that I’ve been using the internet to hone my discussion/argumentation skills since I got on the web in 1996 At this point there’s too much noise on the internet for good long term, long form discussion like we had on irc and forums and frankly I’m not sure where that lives today. HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang

weinzierl 3y ago
You've put into words exactly what I feel. "[..] frankly I’m not sure where that lives today" I wish I knew. Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I enjoyed it. "HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation mostly cause of dang" Amen to that!
pickingdinner 3y ago
These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse, even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to be. You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun and for what, so you don't bother anymore. And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.
- pickingdinner 3y ago
  Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did it. But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for intellectual discourse. Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse. Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.

tcmb 3y ago

If what they call 'consistency' is just the total number of stories posted, it's not really surprising to see a strong correlation with total karma points, is it? The more stories posted, the more karma gathered. Anything else would be a real head scratcher. You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later.

osm3000 3y ago
> You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later. Probably many people stop sharing in this case indeed. But for those who don't, I guess the idea is: eventually, if you keep sharing, you can collect upvotes here and there, and eventually the karma will go up

w-m 3y ago

Another curious data point: id =40000000 is up in a few hours. I thought it would be fun to try to make a submission pointing to that id, while trying to get that id right when it’s up. But it’s too late to start hacking on a script; I’m rather going to bed now. (Anybody else trying, please don’t kill the server or make dang mad). Edit: oh I missed a 9 in looking at an earlier link, it’ll be a little more than a day from now, unless sama announces a new product, triggering a comment storm.

osm3000 3y ago
Damn! I honestly didn't think about it! That would have been really cool! I can't believe how this completely escaped me :D

raviisoccupied 3y ago

> This finding suggests that the key to a high score isn’t necessarily landing viral hits, but rather consistently sharing stories. This is interesting. I find it's very difficult to predict which links do and don't perform on Hacker News, resulting in quite a diverse (to me at least) series of stories. Thanks for the analysis.

osm3000 3y ago
It is a very good point, and it is the subject of part 2: I want to understand if the title / website / time of sharing has an impact on the score

laurex 3y ago

> for those treating HN as a competitive platform where karma points serve as the score I have to imagine that people for whom there’s a primary motivation to be a “winner” in points must quickly lose interest? But maybe I’m just naive to how motivating status could be…

screenoridesaga 3y ago
You are doing that right now though because you want attention, don’t you see how ironic your comment is? You’re the noise.
rezonant 3y ago
I think there is a pronounced fall-off in the "gamification" interest too as a user progresses in karma. IIRC the last perk for high karma is downvoting comments at 501- no more fun perks to spend your Internet points on beyond that. I also don't get the sense that people habitually check the karma of people they are reading or replying to anyway, so it doesn't in and of itself grant much in the way of sway or gravitas in the community. That's much more about being notable or recognizable (other than the obvious "post good comments and stories"). And sure, it does help the sense of "being part of the community" to get to 500 where you are trusted to downvote, but let's be real- it only takes a few good story submissions to get you there if you want to get there fast. I only have 3 submissions that aren't Show HN or my own stuff, and 1 of those is 194 points (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38626454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38626454). And I only posted that story because I was hoping Matthew would elaborate on his position here on HN (as well as wanting to hear what HN thought of his take), since he is a well known HN user.

jll29 3y ago

The author "found out" that sama = Sam Altman nad pg = Paul Graham, by his surprise. It is well known that Hacker News owner company, Y Combinator had Altman as his CEO before he joined OpenAI.

Lerc 3y ago

I have long wondered about doing an analysis of HN comments to find correlations of opinions, instances where people have changed their mind over time, topics where the balance of opinion is out of proportion to the balance of comments due to a vocal minority. I have made some casual observations that it would be nice to know whether the broader data supports what I have seen. For instance, one weird thing that I have noticed, is that antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile. It may just be by imagination. Possibly more importantly, but also something should be approached with caution and sensitivity would be analysis of comments to identify people in mental distress. I know of a few HN users that have taken their own lives and have wondered if there was enough information in their comments to allow someone to provide pre-emptive support.

hunter2_ 3y ago
> antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile While it's definitely preferable to encrypt private communications among all people including the "nothing to hide" types who generally behave well within societal norms, the types who don't behave as well feel a greater need to encrypt.
- Lerc 3y ago
  I should clarify that I don't think that most these type of comments are from people deliberately violating societal norms (like a troll would). My hypothesis is broadly similar to yours, that comments like this come from individuals with a more adversarial view of the world.
osm3000 3y ago
I would be really curious to explore such correlations. Tbh, while I was working on this, I did struggle with forming hypotheses to test, or even a suitable manifold for the different items/users (e.g., I didn't know some of the users share the PGP keys). Unsupervised methods were not very satisfying in uncovering such hypotheses as well. There is also the point you raised about how to share (or what to do with) some of these correlations. For example, concerning mental illness, as much as I would love to uncover that due to my sheer curiosity, I am really concerned about what I would see.

germinator 3y ago

The "users ceasing to post stories after one year" metric seems a bit wonky to me. I mean, I don't doubt it, but it's probably skewed by accounts created for self-promotion or spam. If you look at front-page stories, I think that most of them are from long-time members. It would probably be useful to separate the churn of throwaway accounts and the ones that cross some engagement threshold - 50 comments or something like that.

zamadatix 3y ago
Better yet just a graph of the ratio of comments vs posts over time.
osm3000 3y ago
That is an interesting point! It makes sense to have a criteria that identify real users / long-term members. I will look into that. Cheers
Brajeshwar 3y ago
We humans are emotional. Users' submissions didn't get the desired reach, and comments were thrashed to oblivion- they got emotional and left/lurked without participating anymore. Besides the usual promotional accounts that crop up, this is one of the reasons people do not participate. Leave the emotion out of the equation, and HackerNews becomes way calmer for you. The same story you submitted that failed gets talked about/discussed when submitted by another -- eh! All the smart people shred your comment -- ah, let's take a walk.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Originally joined HN as a way to collect opinions for writing research. HN represents a certain slice of the tech world that's it's important to observe. I still find HN amongst the top places for engaging discussion. It's within the comments, not the postings, that I find eclectic nuggets of gold and learn new things. Moderation is generally very good. At least 10 books I've read in the last year came from HN comments. One thing I would change is the up-down voting. It adds little. Because I use a text only browser I (assume) don't see voting. So it never occurs to me and have never voted any comment up or down during my stay here. However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals.

palata 3y ago
I think that upvoting moves the post up in the list. So even with a text-only browser you get the messages sorted by their votes... right?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rezonant 3y ago
> Because I use a text only browser I (assume) don't see voting. Well you would still see the effect of voting. As for the points on comments, only the poster can see it (other than the placement effects, and that low point comments become noticeably grayed out). If you enable showdead (in your settings), you can also see comments that have been flagged or downvoted to death, which I do leave on myself (cause I can take it!) > However I find gratuitous flagging and down-voting without the courage to venture a position to be very negative. It simply stymies more challenging discussion, and seems a knee-jerk reaction by an invisible cadre of anti-intellectuals. That's an easy stance to take, but I think it's more nuanced. Sure, when there's no explanatory replies at all it's frustrating to understand the manner in which other readers disagree. But when someone repeatedly posts statements that are very commonly posted by others, and with a basic look around at other interactions is obviously unpopular, disproven or even problematic, it's not exactly the responsibility of passers by to have to consistently regurgitate the same rationale for why it's unpopular or problematic every time the user posts- if the same debunked, disproven, or otherwise disagreeable arguments show up every time an article about Product A hits the front page, I don't think it's fair to measure how just, intellectual, or morally correct the two sides of the disagreement are just by how willing they are to expend energy arguing about it. In fact, the person with the less popular opinion is going to have an incentive and desire to post assertions of those opinions a lot more than others will have the energy to challenge them. Also there's no sense posting a sibling reply that says the same thing. If one person already has a reply capturing the essence of what's wrong with the comment and the comment is still being downvoted, it's probably because other readers agree with the reply. Finally, as I posted elsewhere, a lot of folks see the first changes to their comment's score as indicative of the overall community's opinion but that's rarely the case. Sure you may get a bunch of downvotes in the first hour of posting it, but then over the next few hours that balances out and goes in the other direction. And, complaining about downvotes usually gets more downvotes.

raymondgh 3y ago

I think there could be an aspect of social cooling contributing to decreased per-user engagement. I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms.

rezonant 3y ago
Hard agree- a lot of people just opt not to at all- that's what I usually do (other than HN). And when you do decide to go ahead and participate, the energy it takes for each post is a lot higher- you have to consider every contingency you can think of and make sure they all check out. And none of us know if we're going to be wrong when they unearth these posts and pin them on us later, unfortunately.
ryukoposting 3y ago
> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I find myself doing this, but I chalked it up to aging and the reality that I may eventually have no choice but to work for one of the companies I have ridiculed online.
osm3000 3y ago
> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I am curious, why is that? Is the medium less safe than before (e.g., unpleasant interactions)? Or is it a high effort to engage in a discussion, and perhaps there are other priorities now? Perhaps something else
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I have found myself doing the same. 1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can. 2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

tekla 3y ago

I always find it so strange that people here have such a high opinion of HN, but outside of this place, almost everyone I know thinks this place is terrible.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
2-3 years ago, I thought HN was amazing. Today, I think it's pretty terrible, measured in terms of the accuracy of information shared in comment threads.
osm3000 3y ago
I still like the simple interfact tbh ^_^ But I think it can be improved: personalized feed, allow following certain users, ...etc.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

The karma analysis completely ignores (after mentioning it) the karma gained from comments. I post almost no stories to HN, but have a karma of over 18k. Any sane, full analysis of HN culture needs to take this sort of thing into account.

rezonant 3y ago
I think of it as the easy way and the hard way to gain karma, but I'm biased as a "commenter" user. In reality, some people work hard to supply HN with interesting stories and that's important, but it's pretty easy to have sizeable karma without really ever engaging in conversation. I think the tradeoff there is that the HN submitter crowd are very fast to the draw. I'll often encounter a story elsewhere that I want to hear from HN about, so I'll do a search and find it was submitted 15 minutes ago, or even days ago (and I wonder what RSS fueled craze people must go through to find and post things so fast). Of course, for me those are the best cases, because I can go through and read what people think and reply without having to wait for the uptick. But no karma for the slow.
- Brajeshwar 3y ago
  LOL! No RSS, no nothing for me. For me, it is just consistency at a specific timeslot -- wind-down evening for me (Europe's in Office, West Coast wakes up). I tend to fire and forget. I think the hit is less than 5%, but the consistency pays off in the long run. The best I remember is that 4 of my submissions were on the front page over a couple of hours, which is 13.33% of the front page stories.
osm3000 3y ago
Author here I do agree with your point, but unfortunately I was limited by what is available from the APIs: the upvotes for the comments were not provided. I couldn't find a proxy for it either. Thus, I couldn't include it in the analysis
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  You can build an analysis based on partial ordering. The Axios API gives you relative ranking of comments on a given level. Based on partial order you can build lattices and make assertions but that is really difficult and the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze.

eigenvalue 3y ago

Would be cool to see the leaderboard of consistent users (with highest median net upvotes per story). Karma conflates comment karma and post karma, so that’s not really the same thing.

osm3000 3y ago
I think the leaderboard is a cool idea! It doesn't need to be a leaderboard for "all the time", but over a recent window of time. > Karma conflates comment karma and post karma, so that’s not really the same thing. I agree, but the limitation that I faced is that I don't have access to the comments upvotes, and I didn't find a satisfying proxy for it either. That is why I dropped it from the analysis.

osm3000 3y ago

Author here Wow! I didn't expect that! I love these discussions and comments :) I will do my best to go through all of them :) Cheers everyone

pvg 3y ago
If you have a chance could you talk a little about the decreased engagement part of the analysis? The 2023 datapoint of idle users especially looks unusual, I commented on it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975875
Brajeshwar 3y ago
This is super awesome and I spend my morning and breakfast reading it. Btw, you know how to hide real well. I would love to exchange emails but I failed to get a contact. Please email me, I would hopefully be able to learn more of your work. brajeshwar@oinam.com