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A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

304 points by sthatipamala 14y ago

benologist 14y ago
I think this lays the real issue out but buries it: > The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content. HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.
- ninetax 14y ago
  Sorry, for clarification, do you mean get rid of users who have a high submission/comment ratio, or low?
  - hypnocode 14y ago
    I'm guessing high, comments suggest involvement in the community.
    - benologist 14y ago
      Yes high submissions with no or low involvement in the community. Either they really, really, really, really love submission karma or they're here to exploit the site.
      - GnarlinBrando 14y ago
        That makes sense to me, but maybe this is just another place votes can be weighted, outright 'getting rid of' or banning seems excessive to me.
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Average votes/submission seems a better gauge than raw number of submissions. Maybe there are people who are just really good an finding and posting a lot of stuff that's interesting.
      - aidenn0 14y ago
        Wouldn't that just cause a lot of spam comments?
        franzus 14y ago
        It should be pretty hard to automate spam comments (without the comments getting downvoted to hell). Whereas automated submission of stories is super trivial.
- zalew 14y ago
  > spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about. and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many more git and fabric tutorials do we need, or why should I care what every blogger on the planet thinks of twitter.
  - wisty 14y ago
    Dude, I'm happy when I see a git / fabric tutorials. I'm always looking for new tips. Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency things, but mostly the submissions wouldn't even be worthy of Slashdot.
    - zalew 14y ago
      when it comes to technical knowledge on HN, I'm happy when I see a talk f.ex. how huge companies solve tech problems, or conference talks around specific technologies, because it's knowledge very hard or sometimes even impossible to acquire on my own - no matter how hard I would try, I won't have a clue how facebook handles massive deployments or how twitter scales unless somebody from the company publishes it and the community shares it. there is a vast ammount of technical advice/news to share, but toolset tutorials are one google search away, you don't need hn support for that, rtfm.
      - cstejerean 14y ago
        You don't need HN to find out how Facebook handles massive deployments either. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive+deployments https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive...
  - 14y ago
- tankbot 14y ago
  > HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. I think this article falls exactly under the heading of a pandering submission strategy. It's link bait. It's a semi-controversial topic trending on HN, better jump in and vomit up a blog entry to get some traffic! Nevermind that it says nothing at all. Here's a thought for improving your image of HN: Read less of it. Read a few submissions with interesting titles, post a comment or two and go back to doing something worthwhile. I know I waste too much time on HN as it is but many HN'ers spend way more time on here than me. With some topics pushing 200+ comments who has the free time to read everything? Don't. You'll have less noise to signal. You also won't get so emotionally caught up in the drama that inevitably accompanies human interaction. Stop crying. HN is fine. EDIT: 'Stop crying.' isn't directed at Benologist. Just realized it may come off that way.
dmlorenzetti 14y ago
Reward users for browsing "New" This is an interesting suggestion. I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat abstract reward nonetheless). Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs. Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own. "You get what you measure."
- majormajor 14y ago
  "Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs." Maybe some sort of comment karma normalization based on the upvotes for the topic as a whole or the total number of votes on the topic, to try to adjust for popularity of the topic vs quality of the comment...
- rauljara 14y ago
  I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average karma. The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it. I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively. I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
leed25d 14y ago
The title of your piece suggests a satirical tone and I was ready for a delicious morsel. Alas, I could not detect the slightest hint of sarcasm or of a darker, ulterior aim. It could still be there, mind you, but on subtler wavelength than my resonant cavity can detect. It might as well have been titled "HN Considered Harmful", I suppose.
jhuckestein 14y ago
I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone will not be enough though. Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?
- rdl 14y ago
  I agree with showing certain users in certain colors. I don't think karma is the right metric for it. I'd like to see green for new users, maybe some specific color for throwaway accounts of someone with a real account, let people with special other colors reveal that color if they wish, and maybe good and bad colors for people who meet other requirements -- there are some people who probably deserve a "red flag" for 30+ days, but not hellbanning, and others who deserve the honorary purple. The only karma related way I'd award purple is for submission points, or for being early upvoters on submissions in /new which are later upvoted by a lot of other people. Sheer accumulated comment karma is probably not a great metric, since someone who is on HN a lot, chooses to write "populist" comments, etc. is likely to accumulate a lot of karma without adding much value.
- franzus 14y ago
  > I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. Why should we set apart veteran users? Only because they are longer here doesn't mean they have a more important opinion on a certain topic. Setting them more apart is like having village elders. Even if they talk about something they have no idea of they are still right because they are so old?
dwwoelfel 14y ago
While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green. PG tried that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181), except with orange instead of purple.
- kapitalx 14y ago
  Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem has always been around. I wonder if this problem is cyclic and peaks at different times during the year or during certain events, such as summer or demo days.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    > Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem has always been around. It hasn't.
- franzus 14y ago
  > worked to get a high karma Wow, why would anyone consider a score on any internet site so important? I certainly wouldn't "work hard" to get internet points.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- reledi 14y ago
  Do you know why it was discontinued? I'd imagine the high ranking members becoming elitist and worshipped or hated by the rest of the community.
throwaway54-762 14y ago
I was a little disappointed that this wasn't sarcastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal).
jmduke 14y ago
Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")
- sthatipamala 14y ago
  You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid controversy (as that is not my aim).
  - pessimizer 14y ago
    Don't worry, it wasn't controversial or offensive, just a trope that signals satire - which is not what you intended.
- DodgyEggplant 14y ago
  The original - Swift, 1729: A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
ljd 14y ago
I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem: before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment) after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank)) another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1)) EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1") This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community. This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life. Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.
- vitus 14y ago
  The problem here is that someone who consistently provides high-quality (or at least frequently-upvoted) comments / submissions will likely have less of a contribution than someone with significantly lower karma. For instance: you would have (slightly) more influence than someone with 3000 karma and an average of 5.
  - ljd 14y ago
    You're right but because it's logarithmic, the difference is nominal and evaporates as a new member makes more posts. Plus, what is the downside to encouraging new members to post?
    - ryaf 14y ago
      Because newer members not familiar with the guidelines typically post the more inflammatory comments that we have seen as of late.
Terretta 14y ago
I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National Enquirer style headlines. There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.
- GnarlinBrando 14y ago
  I agree that multi-directional voting is worth exploring and that promoting karma points leads to more sensationalism. Possibly even some form of democratic tagging?
alpine 14y ago
Some things have a natural life then die.
obilgic 14y ago
What about putting front page and "new" page together into a single homepage?
_delirium 14y ago
I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and actually reading it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim. One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  Could you incentivize people that upvote new items that ultimately cross some threshhold (front page/votes) such that their upvotes translate into some kind of karma or reward points of some sort? The earlier you are as an upvoter the bigger the reward? Of course that may just incentivize people upvoting everything in sight :) Perhaps historical upvoting patterns on the New Page could be incorporated to penalize that kind of behavior. Just throwing it out there. I do agree, I occasionally browse the new page but there is just so much cruft there that looking for the gems is time consuming so I generally just (lazily) wait for them to hit the front page. Edit: Once again bitten by reading HN comments before the article as he proposes something along these lines in the post, doh! :)
donnaware 14y ago
Stop shadow banning all females that would be a start. Oh ya,no one will see this, can't have "girls" invading your club house.
vannevar 14y ago
It's unlikely that a purely algorithmic ranking solution will be adequate. HN should better leverage the judgment of the site's veteran members across the board, rather than only for article ranking. Awhile back I posted a self-organizing way to filter comments that works in this way: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753.
evolve2k 14y ago
The 'more' link regularly fails to render on my IPhone 4 leading to a further long term aversion to going there. Not sure if anyone else has had the same experience? Just saying if it's affecting many devices this Is just compressing the issue further.
- vacri 14y ago
  I have a different problem in that the 'more' link uses some crazy key instead of 'page=2'. If you press it a relatively short time after being loaded, you'll get 'unknown or expired link', meaning you need to backtrack, reload the page, scroll again, click... it's trained me out of bothering to do it anymore.
- danielweber 14y ago
  In my experience the _more_ link works for about 5 to 10 minutes. If you slowly scroll down the page reading things on it, by the time you get to the bottom of the page it no longer works. You have to reload the page to get the link to work.
shadowbanned 14y ago
Stop shadow banning all femail participants. Everyone please boycott hacker news until they stop their policy of shadow banning females.
suyash 14y ago
Add to the list: Keep HACKER NEWS FOR AND BY HACKERS..stop posting other useless content. I want this place to learn and read about new coding practices, api's, only technically relavent stuff.
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  There's lots of non-technical stuff that's relevant to hackers. Broaden your horizons.
- GnarlinBrando 14y ago
  If your definition of hacking is limited to technical details then you are misunderstanding the historical ethos of hacking.
shadowbanned 14y ago
Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.
salvadornav 14y ago
I think "reward for browsing New" could be a good idea yet very difficult to implement it well. What I'd like to see is a front page with various lists of submissions according to different criteria, some ideas: 1st| most votes this month - this week, 2nd| "Hot today" (this'd be similar to the current front page I believe), 3rd | "Promising" (Posts from New section that begin their momentum), 4rd | Most commented month / week. Basically a bit of filtering.
shadowbanned 14y ago
Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.
misogynists 14y ago
Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I don't think this can possibly be true. Can you give us some proof of this assertion?
  - GnarlinBrando 14y ago
    We could even start with some reasoned speculation instead of a blatant unqualified assertion.
  - Bvalmont 14y ago
    forums.somethingawful.com follows this model and it works incredibly well, I recommend you check it out.
hobbyist 14y ago
While reading this article through HN, (http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/ http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/) I thought it will be a good idea if HN can be moved inside an onion network like tor. People need to go through tor in order to access the site. It should not be visible via normal http/ip addresses. This can reduce the number of users coming on HN, and hopefully HN maintains the authenticity.
gue5t 14y ago
"What doesn't matter" ... "Complaints of 'too much startups, not enough tech' or vice-versa" Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making software and hardware do interesting things.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  The site was originally called startup news. I think that in retrospect the rename to HN was a bad idea, because it changes peoples expectations of what the site is for. Regardless, what you are describing would be much appreciated.
Steko 14y ago
One thing I'd like to see: Merged discussions. Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked. Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-thread. This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5 twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.
- GnarlinBrando 14y ago
  This would graduate HN away from the list of links model that is so prevalent. Certainly an interesting idea, but a big change as well.
gcv 14y ago
How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the submissions. Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would be a bargain.
- panacea 14y ago
  Metafilter's $5 entrance fee and active human moderation contributes to it being a polite and intelligent community.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  I would not blink twice at this. Few better ways to weed out the trolls. It would be interesting to devise a way to utilize money and karma in a way that basically says, "If you are provably improving the community significantly, this costs you nothing; but if you are average or, worse, a drag, you will pay."
- silvestrov 14y ago
  Agree. Creditcard payments, however small, seems to be the by far most efficient way of filtering spam. CC payments make banning have a real effect. Metafilter is the NIH syndrome on HN. The problem with the New page is the extreme volume of entries due to everybody being able to post. Voting only goes so far, it doesn't work when you have too much stuff and users feel that their time spent voting doesn't make any significant difference. The signal-to-noise ratio on the New page must increase before most users will go to the trouble of voting.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  And now all your opinions on the internet are linked to your credit card... while I'm not so concerned about HN, I don't think this is a great solution in general
silenteh 14y ago
I would also remove the duplicated content/submissions which create or could create fragmentation of good comments, besides a personal frustration for having just wasted time opening again the same link only because the title seemed different.
new_around_here 14y ago
This is a terrible idea.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuff. (I don't have any good science for this, but I've been spending too much time online since the dial-up BBS days, and community development is one of my interests.) Eventually every community needs one or more managers, or gardeners (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) -- people who have been around a long time, who embody the "spirit" of the site, and who have, not absolute, but special influence on the community. (RiderOfGiraffes immediately comes to mind; I really wish he was still around.) This is absolutely analogous to Google attempting to avoid customer service completely by piling on more and more automated systems. While those systems help, they can't yet replace an actual customer service department -- and I think the frequent complaints from people who've been impacted by Google's lack of customer service bears this out. I like some of the suggestions in this post, but I don't think that they can resolve the main issue with HN at the moment: it has grown to a size which needs one or more community managers. There are some architectural issues too. I think the current trend in online forums, where new things are always better than good things, is ultimately a step backwards in terms of encouraging thoughtful discussion (http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/ http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/). If a really interesting item comes up on HN that requires, say, a solid hour to compose a thoughtful response -- something very technical that would benefit from some number crunching -- there is very little motivation to commit the time to write that response. By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing. However, the first person to respond to an item with a quick, witty, or snarky response gets rewarded with lots of attention. And that is a problem that can not be resolved by any of the suggestions so far.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Sure, some of the suggestions are technological in nature (purple for distinguished veterans). The author seemed very aware that tweaking the algorithms wasn't the solution.
FrojoS 14y ago
>HN could benefit from implementing infinite scroll, so the next page is appended asynchronously to the current one. [...] The problem is only a small minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button on bottom of the page. Yes. More so, if I spend considerable time, reading the second or even third page I can't get to the third or fourth page because the "More" link becomes broken after a while.
hujjio 14y ago
Stop the censoring for a start...
- MartinCron 14y ago
  What kind of censorship are you talking about? I haven't seen any motherfucking censorship here.
- ericd 14y ago
  This is a good piece on why aggressive moderation is necessary to keep online communities from devolving into cesspools, even though it may attract cries of censorship: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
  - jmtame 14y ago
    I never thought about it until now, but the best IRC networks I hung out on in the 90s were ones with really good net admins who enforced the rules. Even when I was younger, I didn't belong on certain IRC networks, and I was quickly banned from them. That same rule applies to all the other communities (mostly gaming) that I was involved with. One problem with banning users is that they're not difficult to prevent from returning. At least on IRC, you had to pay for a BNC to change your IP address because whatever your dynamic IP resolved to, the hostname was fairly easy to reliably ban.
sendos 14y ago
What do people think of the idea of removing down votes and allowing only up votes? Has this been shown on other discussion boards to work?
- MartinCron 14y ago
  My immediate reaction is to say that the downvotes serve a useful purpose. They can indicate social disapproval without adding noise or fanning flamewars. The downside, of course, is that you see so many "WTF? Downvotes? Why" Comments.
polshaw 14y ago
>Distinguish veteran users I would much rather go the other way. It should be a meritocracy, not celebrity worship. For example give unique IDs for each user on each post. They could still link to profiles, and could optionally be kept for submissions.
DanBC 14y ago
There are a handful of domains that host pretty shoddy content - poor research, poor writing, link-baity titles, bias, etc. Banning those might be too extreme. But it'd be nice if there was an A list and a B list and then a A and B list. the A list would be carefully curated set of URLs proven to be of interest to the community (but a domain can easily be removed if they start getting too many bad stories); the B list would be everything else' the A and B list would be both.
finnw 14y ago
I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but most sites (including HN) with partially-automated moderation systems make the same assumption: *You only need one "karma" variable, for both posting and moderation*. That is, users who post popular content (i.e. comments that get a lot of upvotes) and those who moderate well (i.e. votes strongly-correlated with those of the admins) are rewarded in exactly the same way, that is by increasing the value that unified "karma" variable. IMHO this is not the best approach. For every prolific poster (who probably has decent karma already) you probably have 10 "lurkers" who have read most stories posted in the last month, know what they do (and don't) want to read, and are just as well-qualified to vote on stories and comments as those who regularly post comments (and earn karma from them.) So what would happen if you made "posting karma" and "moderation karma" independent of each other? (sort of a trick question, since it has been done.)
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
Change the front page to show 30 hottest articles plus 10 new, 10 ask, 10 show, 10 jobs and 10 startups. Run a contest to redesign the frontpage with all these sections. As I said earlier, adding a section with upcoming startups by batch would greatly benefit us all.
michael_fine 14y ago
I find that paradoxically, the biggest problem with Hacker News right now is the hot algorithm we use. It's great for bringing good stories to the attention of the community and having a burst of short lived discussion over those stories, and then dying out. What it's not great for is long term discussions. For example, with Quora, when someone answers a question, or posts a comment, you never care how long ago it was posted, because there are notifications, and the front page is based on what you follow, not how popular the questions are. This is a hard problem to fix, but a couple suggestions I have are to improve the threads feature, such that it resembles a real notification bar. Secondly, I think a new page should help, a mixture between the front page, and the saved stories, which shows active discussions, and an emphasis on one's that you have upvoted. I think those might help reduce the ephemerality of the discussions here.
smashing 14y ago
The Usenet readers had kill file's. That is the only solution which will have an overall improvement with no downside.
georgemcbay 14y ago
"It would be incredibly shocking to see a vitriolic HN comment coming from community leaders like tptacek" wat
- tptacek 14y ago
  I was wondering about that too.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  While I agree that tptacek can be blunt to the point of cruelty, his arguments are well reasoned. I've also never seen him belittle the efforts of anybody (though I have seen him torch week reasoning). Even if I've disagreed and silently wished he would walk away from a thread, his contributions to HN are worse the bluntness.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    I agree 100% (which is why I went with a silly "wat" instead of challenging the statement directly). Every forum has a small group of people who tend to lack social graces (or what passes for them online) but aren't just random assholes and are correct most of the time. As long as these people don't stray too personal too often, their contributions remain a net positive, IMO. tptacek certainly fits into that, he just seemed like a funny choice to lead off with in that statement.
connortomas 14y ago
I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides. It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world experience. To me, this matters. I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community - for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be brought front-and-centre somehow). Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.
- danielweber 14y ago
  I think there is a lot of identity associated with users. I'm relatively young, and often I will see one user identifying another user by their first name, which I don't know at all. People know each other here. This might be bad. If so, I'd say all comments should be anonymous for 2 days. Give out a pseudo-random pronounceable handle to each user for posting on each thread. People making dick comments will still have to deal with their commenting history as posts are "unmasked" in 48 hours. (This well could cause more problems that it solves.)
  - connortomas 14y ago
    That's interesting, and it's probably something I'll come to recognise as I spend more time here. However, from where I'm standing, it does seem as though the issue is that those ties are breaking as the community grows. I'm not totally sure adding a further layer of anonymity would strengthen discourse (though it could be an interesting experiment).
hackermani 14y ago
All comments can be made from Tweetbot only. Done.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
truth_dude 14y ago
What I cant wait for...."Why the new Hacker News sucks"
comatose_kid 14y ago
There is a tendency to upvote comments you agree with, and downvote comments you disagree with. This has two ill effects: 1) Witty and popular viewpoints rise to the top, creating an atmosphere of superficial groupthink 2) People with unpopular (but insightful!) viewpoints may be discouraged from posting them. Given this, would the level of comments improve with the following change? Replace the up/down vote buttons with a single button next to each comment that reads: 'insightful', and use that to vote up comments. Forget about downvoting stuff - the low content viewpoints and rudeness will both sink to the bottom. Or if you wish, add a 'flag' box for comments made in poor taste. Using such specific labels would make people think twice before voting, both about the purpose of their vote and if the comment needs a vote at all.
- woah 14y ago
  Do you think that the label would change people's behavior in the long term, or would they end up just thinking of it as an upvote?
  - comatose_kid 14y ago
    Not sure, but trying it out would be a good way to find out...
twelvechairs 14y ago
Surely one badly-needed feature is needed is more different views. As the community gets bigger, the single 'front page' doesn't cut it anymore. Reddit's subreddits have become enormously successful in this vein (probably to the detriment of its main page, which nobody in their right mind would read anymore). I'm not saying this system is perfect for HN, but other systems in the same direction might be very nice eg. tags for things like 'please provide feedback on my new page/product' (I'd love to see them on one page), or different types of comment view on a per-user-basis (how do I want to see comments, not one system for all HN). For my mind, an encouragement of diversity along these lines would help the site thrive whilst allowing users to keep (and define) their own community standards.
noblethrasher 14y ago
I suggested this on a previous 'improve HN thread' (instigated by pg himself): Shutdown HN for a week or so and when reopening only let a certain quota in per day/week/month. Give priority to old and/or high karma members. I think that it will have the effect of churning the low quality membership. Perhaps allow these elected to elect others to enter "promised land".
- hardwear 14y ago
  do you have a link to the thread?
  - noblethrasher 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
franzus 14y ago
> community leaders That's where I stopped reading. I don't need or want a leader who can lead my thoughts. Also: Meta discussions are never productive. They only waste time.
deleted 14y ago
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Bvalmont 14y ago
Introduce a one-time fee of 10 dollars when creating an account. This account offers you the ability to comment. Other contributions are rewarded for people not willing to pay the 10 dollar fine, for example; by submitting links. Then use the generated money to pay moderators. Ban people who are not following the rules or penalty them with probation time. This weeds out the bad apples, keeps the community relatively small and contained. It also improves the maturity of any community. It worked for something awful forums, I can see it working here.
buro9 14y ago
The hide button will not work for long. It is an attempt to treat the symptom and not the cause. I run large communities, and I've implemented "hide" and "ignore" functions for pretty much everything in my time. People rub each other up the wrong way, so they want to ignore anything the other person says. People get rubbed up by all threads on a certain topic, so they want to ignore the topic. When a topic hits the news in a big splash and half the front page is the same thing, they get annoyed and want to ignore the whole of that topic for a short while. Failing to hide/ignore all of that stuff results in them lashing out to the detriment of all. But, if you indulge it by providing the hide/ignore all you've done is hide the symptom. Now people think it's cured and it is not. The problem here isn't the content, it's the reaction to the content. The problem here is with the reader and contributor, not pg and the code base. The problem is that there needs to be a shift in attitude and etiquette from a lot of users. It's a people problem, and people need to be shown what isn't an acceptable way to behave.
DodgyEggplant 14y ago
Shirky 2003, about habitat, 1990. Nothing new here, really. Same issues, same lines of thoughts for solutions. A Group is it's Own Worth Enemy: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Honestly, I think this is kind of much adieu about nothing. On the original thread, one commenter looked at the OP's original submission and found a lot of praise etc. Similarly, wheher I see ShowHN posts with projects that seem trivial or even frivolous to me, there are usually many well wishers offering a lot of praise.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
"there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time." I'm of the opinion that arguments must be judged by itself, and not by the "Aristotle said" conformity method that so many problems brought to society in the past and in the present. I'm probably one of the older people here and had like 7 different accounts or so(I keep forgetting passwords and accounts when my machines change-update). I had a big karma on some of those accounts, but honestly I don't care the least. I have more important things in my life to do-care, and so most of the interesting people in HN. A great PhD with great things to say is going to have work to do better than collecting "karma" on Internet all day long.
reledi 14y ago
I think a lot of new users are unaware of the HN guidelines [1]. Linking to it from the nav bar could help showing what is and isn't an acceptable way to behave. [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OmIsMyShield 14y ago
No. I disagree that we need some sort of way to protect / alternatively value the old folks with valuable contributions. This is a bad idea. At first glance it seems good, since the old & upvoted are known entities - on average, they are valuable to the community. Thus, give them something that others can aspire to, even if it's just a purple link. I would caution that this will introduce strange, unforeseeable side-effects, not least would be that you would necessarily have to classify new users as dodgy, until such time that they have added enough data to be re-classified. Doing that to new users might even be beneficial in the short term. But in the long run I fear that adding any frictions and subtle "you-aren't-as-valued-yet" around new users might introduce subtle behaviours and keep certain types of people away - something not easily quantifiable until it becomes too late. I have a pet, untestable, and probably worthless theory that the tone of HN has slowly drifted toward the bitterness we see now because (a) you can't downvote links, so you have to express disagreement through the comments, thereby adding negativity to the comment thread that might have otherwise just been 'n downvote, and (b) the fact that comment scores are invisible doesn't give new adopters an idea of how strongly people agree or disagree with tone or topic in people's posts. So they don't learn by osmosis. Both these ideas gave short-term benefit but I believe (totally unscientifically) that they slowly, invisibly, led to the tone of the site as a whole. Be careful when changing the system, as the human part of it is difficult to manage via proxies like scoring and similar. And if we introduce a way that subtly penalises new people (or values old contributors, alternative view of the same idea) we might just change the way we attract new people - and a community needs all sorts of new people to stay alive.
chmike 14y ago
I have to disagree with most suggestions. What criteria would make someone purple ? Popularity ? Number of karma points ? What would be the incentive to respect them more then others ? And why would they deserve more respect than others ? I'm a long time HN reader and I don't have much karma. Its because I try to post and comment wisely. Why wouldn't I deserve respect ? My impression is that radical comments are more prone to votes since they pull on the emotional strings. It would be a bad idea to favor people voting in the new section because I bet people would vote blindly just for the benefit of voting.
geon 14y ago
> only a small minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button The size migh be an issue, but the greatee problem is that by the time I reach the bottom of the page, the link has usually expired. If you want your users to see the next page, that really is inexcusable.
jeffool 14y ago
Between the to bar and the content, for a week or so, place a centered link reading "A personal message about the future of HN from Paul Graham." Make it a thread maybe. Talk about the expectations of visitors. The need to build up, rather than drag down. To hold back the snarky comments, no matter how funny we find them. (And not to vote them up, no matter how funny we find them.) Talk about the virtues of reddit's better maintained communities if you're not looking for serious conversation. Make the post exactly what you want from the community. Treat them like the serious business and tech minded sluts you want them to be woke under your roof. And point that out too. You're choosing to engage, like you often do. You don't want to, and shouldn't have to, seek technological answers to people problems. Maybe you'll convince a few people to think before posting/voting.
- jeffool 14y ago
  ... "Treat them like the serious business and tech minded ADULTS". Last time I ever make a post on my phone with a time limited edit function. Especially when sleepy, with Swype.
dumbluck 14y ago
I think HN should be a democracy: 1. Don't let people create multiple accounts so easily. Switch to OpenID and have the ability to associate old accounts with the new ID or have the old account deactivated within 90 days. I don't even know how many accounts I've created, but it is a lot. This is basically anonymity. This does not work. 2. Don't filter comments and not hide topics that anyone disagrees with unless they are extremely offensive, and those could be marked as offensive and then PG and those with enough karma will check those and if they are offensive, they will hide them, but anyone could still see them, vote on them, and comment on them, if you clicked a flag to see them. You have to login to upvote, downvote, mark as offensive, post, or comment. 3. Show who upvoted or downvoted to everyone. This will make people think twice before downvoting. 4. Allow private communication between users so that if someone downvotes you without saying why, you can ask them why. 5. The new page is grouped by: last 24 hours, last 3 days, last week, last month, last 3 months, last year, and then by year. Everytime something is upvoted it goes to the top of the new list for the group it is in. I'm sorry that some people have complained that HN works fine technically as it is. It certainly does, for those it serves. However, people complain that there are negative views here. I think the changes I proposed will help with that. But a bigger problem is that people's posts and comments get whacked. If you handle things in the way I described, and stop silencing me and others, I think the community will be much happier.
tome 14y ago
Personally I think I'd raise the bar to moderator rights to those with several thousand karma, and encorage strongly to flag stories they think are inappropriate. That should get the site closer to what it was a few years ago.
lewisflude 14y ago
Why not show the "new" tab as the front page and put "top" as a menu option? I know it's one more click for a lot of us, but it could be a nice change! Or, at least make that the default.
revorad 14y ago
A proposal to improve Hacker News: shut it down for a month.
sktrdie 14y ago
But is there a "Hacker News Manifesto"? No there isn't. HN is what it is because of the community. Sure, there should be moderators to control the profanity level. But overall, if content is interesting and it's up-voted, it means it's meaningful to someone and therefore should maintain its place on HN. The content should be driven by the community - if it's too startup related or too technology related is really a subjective matter.
FixThisPOSSite 14y ago
Hey, how about fixing the technical incompetence of the site? Like the offensive "you're posting too fast" bullshit, when you haven't posted for hours? Yeah, that would be a good start.
austinlyons 14y ago
Sridatta, thanks for taking time to articulate your ideas on how to improve Hacker News. I enjoyed your post and really like the idea of distinguishing veteran users.
Tooluka 14y ago
> Distinguish users. Reward users. Wrong. Instead user karma system should be deleted completely. (Yes, I know that I am a "newbie" here. Think what you want.). I have seen too many portals died or degraded by the weight of "karma". The only working example is probably Stack Overflow and I think they won't last long because of it. Only reason why SO can survive is continuous strict moderation. I like "C++ vs Java", "Most influential book" and similar topics very much but they really don't belong to SO by their rules. The same should be applied to HN - ban those millions Twitter and FB topics. Ban topics with complaints (however reasonable). Ban SOPA/ACTA etc. topics. In short - filter everything that is not educational for IT specialists. Yes, it would be more boring that way (or not) but it would ensure HN quality and survival.
cremnob 14y ago
What about paying $5 to have a HN account? SomethingAwful and Metafilter both do this and it helps keep the quality high (along with good moderation).

304 points by sthatipamala 14y ago

I think this lays the real issue out but buries it: > The only way to guarantee any visibility is to time very carefully using HNPickup, be a celebrity like John Gruber or Dustin Curtis, organize an up vote cabal, or write sensationalist content. HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. I'd start by getting rid of every user who's submission to comments ratio is ridiculous and every website that would be better suited to digg or reddit.

ninetax 14y ago
Sorry, for clarification, do you mean get rid of users who have a high submission/comment ratio, or low?
- hypnocode 14y ago
  I'm guessing high, comments suggest involvement in the community.
  - benologist 14y ago
    Yes high submissions with no or low involvement in the community. Either they really, really, really, really love submission karma or they're here to exploit the site.
    - GnarlinBrando 14y ago
      That makes sense to me, but maybe this is just another place votes can be weighted, outright 'getting rid of' or banning seems excessive to me.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Average votes/submission seems a better gauge than raw number of submissions. Maybe there are people who are just really good an finding and posting a lot of stuff that's interesting.
    - aidenn0 14y ago
      Wouldn't that just cause a lot of spam comments?
      - franzus 14y ago
        It should be pretty hard to automate spam comments (without the comments getting downvoted to hell). Whereas automated submission of stories is super trivial.
zalew 14y ago
> spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. that's actually what bothers me more about current HN state than the 'harsh comments' everybody complains about. and one another thing: I remember when the frontpage was full of business and tech advice from experienced people who shared valuable knowledge hard to obtain on my own. now I wonder how many more git and fabric tutorials do we need, or why should I care what every blogger on the planet thinks of twitter.
- wisty 14y ago
  Dude, I'm happy when I see a git / fabric tutorials. I'm always looking for new tips. Looking at the current front page, the lonely VIM tutorial is literally the only thing a programmer is going to find useful right now. Oh, there's also a PCA overview using mostly Excel (two lines of actual code - from matplotlib.mlab import PCA; pca = PCA(x)), something about a new editor called "Lighttable" and a few sciency things, but mostly the submissions wouldn't even be worthy of Slashdot.
  - zalew 14y ago
    when it comes to technical knowledge on HN, I'm happy when I see a talk f.ex. how huge companies solve tech problems, or conference talks around specific technologies, because it's knowledge very hard or sometimes even impossible to acquire on my own - no matter how hard I would try, I won't have a clue how facebook handles massive deployments or how twitter scales unless somebody from the company publishes it and the community shares it. there is a vast ammount of technical advice/news to share, but toolset tutorials are one google search away, you don't need hn support for that, rtfm.
    - cstejerean 14y ago
      You don't need HN to find out how Facebook handles massive deployments either. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive+deployments https://www.google.com/search?q=how+facebook+handles+massive...
- 14y ago
tankbot 14y ago
> HN has become mainstream and it's subject to all the spam, pandering, submission strategies, power users and all the other bullshit that comes with that territory. I think this article falls exactly under the heading of a pandering submission strategy. It's link bait. It's a semi-controversial topic trending on HN, better jump in and vomit up a blog entry to get some traffic! Nevermind that it says nothing at all. Here's a thought for improving your image of HN: Read less of it. Read a few submissions with interesting titles, post a comment or two and go back to doing something worthwhile. I know I waste too much time on HN as it is but many HN'ers spend way more time on here than me. With some topics pushing 200+ comments who has the free time to read everything? Don't. You'll have less noise to signal. You also won't get so emotionally caught up in the drama that inevitably accompanies human interaction. Stop crying. HN is fine. EDIT: 'Stop crying.' isn't directed at Benologist. Just realized it may come off that way.

dmlorenzetti 14y ago

Reward users for browsing "New" This is an interesting suggestion. I think of looking at new submissions as a kind of "service to the community"-- more specifically, to the community I want HN to be. If the front page is filled with links I don't value, then it's partly my fault if I've failed to upvote submissions I would rather see on the front page (this, of course, means browsing "new" is a reward unto itself, but it's a somewhat abstract reward nonetheless). Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs. Intellectually, I know my average karma shouldn't mean anything to me, but the fact that it's there for all the world to see exerts a gravity of its own. "You get what you measure."

majormajor 14y ago
"Sometimes I wish HN wouldn't track average karma. That discourages me from commenting on new submissions that I believe won't get many eyeballs." Maybe some sort of comment karma normalization based on the upvotes for the topic as a whole or the total number of votes on the topic, to try to adjust for popularity of the topic vs quality of the comment...
rauljara 14y ago
I'm someone else who refrains from commenting in order to protect my average karma. The thing is, that it isn't as irrational as you are making it out to be. Posts from users with higher average karma are sorted higher. Presumably you are posting because you want your post to be read. Either you want it to influence people or you want your question answered, or whatever. If you didn't want it to be read, you wouldn't have posted it. I'm pretty sure this has a 'rich get richer' effect. On a page full of a lot of comments, most people will only read the first few. Being at the top leads to more up-votes, leading to more posts at the top, and so on recursively. I am totally guilty of gaming this system. I normally only post in threads where I think that I'll get up-votes, and I only post things that I think are worth posting. The latter effect is good. There are too many people on HN and it's a good thing to encourage us to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. But the former, the fear of posting in unpopular threads, or on comments near the bottom of the page, is awful.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

leed25d 14y ago

The title of your piece suggests a satirical tone and I was ready for a delicious morsel. Alas, I could not detect the slightest hint of sarcasm or of a darker, ulterior aim. It could still be there, mind you, but on subtler wavelength than my resonant cavity can detect. It might as well have been titled "HN Considered Harmful", I suppose.

jhuckestein 14y ago

I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. If the community rewards snarky posts with many upvotes, this alone will not be enough though. Perhaps marking up veteran users by karma and/or seniority and weighting upvotes by the same metric?

rdl 14y ago
I agree with showing certain users in certain colors. I don't think karma is the right metric for it. I'd like to see green for new users, maybe some specific color for throwaway accounts of someone with a real account, let people with special other colors reveal that color if they wish, and maybe good and bad colors for people who meet other requirements -- there are some people who probably deserve a "red flag" for 30+ days, but not hellbanning, and others who deserve the honorary purple. The only karma related way I'd award purple is for submission points, or for being early upvoters on submissions in /new which are later upvoted by a lot of other people. Sheer accumulated comment karma is probably not a great metric, since someone who is on HN a lot, chooses to write "populist" comments, etc. is likely to accumulate a lot of karma without adding much value.
franzus 14y ago
> I think showing veteran users in another color would really help a lot to set the tone. Why should we set apart veteran users? Only because they are longer here doesn't mean they have a more important opinion on a certain topic. Setting them more apart is like having village elders. Even if they talk about something they have no idea of they are still right because they are so old?

dwwoelfel 14y ago

While not all of us can spend the time to become an HN celebrity, there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time. HN should highlight the names of such users in purple, similar to the way it highlights newbies with green. PG tried that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181), except with orange instead of purple.

kapitalx 14y ago
Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem has always been around. I wonder if this problem is cyclic and peaks at different times during the year or during certain events, such as summer or demo days.
- philwelch 14y ago
  > Considering that the post is 3.5 years old, it makes me wonder if this problem has always been around. It hasn't.
franzus 14y ago
> worked to get a high karma Wow, why would anyone consider a score on any internet site so important? I certainly wouldn't "work hard" to get internet points.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
reledi 14y ago
Do you know why it was discontinued? I'd imagine the high ranking members becoming elitist and worshipped or hated by the rest of the community.

throwaway54-762 14y ago

I was a little disappointed that this wasn't sarcastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal).

jmduke 14y ago

Possibly off topic, but when you title a post "A Modest Proposal" it signals satiric content to a lot of viewers (as the original Modest Proposal was to defeat famine with cannibalism")

sthatipamala 14y ago
You are the second person to comment about this. I merely intended to humbly propose things, not allude to this historical work. I've changed it to avoid controversy (as that is not my aim).
- pessimizer 14y ago
  Don't worry, it wasn't controversial or offensive, just a trope that signals satire - which is not what you intended.
DodgyEggplant 14y ago
The original - Swift, 1729: A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

ljd 14y ago

I'm an algorithm designer, so I don't know about all of these changes but I do have a mathematical solution to PG's vote value problem: before edit: Value of vote = Log[base:TotalUserKarma](UserAvgKarmaPerComment) after edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:TotalUserKarma](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank)) another edit: Vote Value = (Log[base:Median(AvgUserKarma)](AvgUserKarma)) * (Log[base:(25)](ThreadTop50Rank + 1)) EDIT: added a +1 to prevent a 0 value for the #1 thread. (unless you actually want votes not to count for the number 1 thread, in that case you can just pull out that "+ 1") This would reward contributors with higher relative average karma per comment. If you have 0 karma your vote isn't worth anything and if you do have karma but your average is only 1, once again your vote isn't worth anything. You have to consistently contribute useful material to have a say whether or not someone else's material is userful to the community. This seems to be a decent reflection of social circles in real life. Try it out on users you think contribute very little and see if it is effective. Naturally, I don't have that data so I can only speculate.

vitus 14y ago
The problem here is that someone who consistently provides high-quality (or at least frequently-upvoted) comments / submissions will likely have less of a contribution than someone with significantly lower karma. For instance: you would have (slightly) more influence than someone with 3000 karma and an average of 5.
- ljd 14y ago
  You're right but because it's logarithmic, the difference is nominal and evaporates as a new member makes more posts. Plus, what is the downside to encouraging new members to post?
  - ryaf 14y ago
    Because newer members not familiar with the guidelines typically post the more inflammatory comments that we have seen as of late.

Terretta 14y ago

I shudder at the ramifications of some of these suggestions. Users do what you pay them to do. For example, paying people to up vote/down vote from New would result in just that -- not in people clicking the links and thoughtfully evaluating the content. And denoting high karma users more visibly would result in more karma boost activities. The end result of that is National Enquirer style headlines. There is a change that would probably help: allowing a difference in signaling between agree/disagree and signal/noise. The definition of up/down voting is closer to ham/spam than agree/disagree, but people tend to use the arrows for agreement instead. It's hard to behave otherwise, by up voting a well argued comment you think is wrong, for example. It would be easier to highlight quality if multiple axes were available.

GnarlinBrando 14y ago
I agree that multi-directional voting is worth exploring and that promoting karma points leads to more sensationalism. Possibly even some form of democratic tagging?

alpine 14y ago

Some things have a natural life then die.

obilgic 14y ago

What about putting front page and "new" page together into a single homepage?

_delirium 14y ago

I do think the "New" page is a significant part of the problem, but I'm not sure I would focus primarily on how to reward users for browsing /newest. I think I would lean towards trying to figure out how to improve its mix of content first. The often-low-quality content is why many people (including myself) have dropped off from reading it as much, so the two are closely related. The content needs to get to the level where someone reading /newest can rationally believe that giving each link a fair shake, by clicking and actually reading it (not spending 10 seconds skimming it), is worth their time. If people did that, more quality content would be unearthed, as opposed to just stuff that's appealing from the title and a 10-second skim. One part is just spam-filtering, which is a never-ending arms race. But it seems low-quality even past that. Something to lower the total volume of the firehose might help; some people who don't even really participate in the community submit 5+ articles daily, or more. And there is a lot of reblogged content as well.

ryanmolden 14y ago
Could you incentivize people that upvote new items that ultimately cross some threshhold (front page/votes) such that their upvotes translate into some kind of karma or reward points of some sort? The earlier you are as an upvoter the bigger the reward? Of course that may just incentivize people upvoting everything in sight :) Perhaps historical upvoting patterns on the New Page could be incorporated to penalize that kind of behavior. Just throwing it out there. I do agree, I occasionally browse the new page but there is just so much cruft there that looking for the gems is time consuming so I generally just (lazily) wait for them to hit the front page. Edit: Once again bitten by reading HN comments before the article as he proposes something along these lines in the post, doh! :)

donnaware 14y ago

Stop shadow banning all females that would be a start. Oh ya,no one will see this, can't have "girls" invading your club house.

vannevar 14y ago

It's unlikely that a purely algorithmic ranking solution will be adequate. HN should better leverage the judgment of the site's veteran members across the board, rather than only for article ranking. Awhile back I posted a self-organizing way to filter comments that works in this way: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753.

evolve2k 14y ago

The 'more' link regularly fails to render on my IPhone 4 leading to a further long term aversion to going there. Not sure if anyone else has had the same experience? Just saying if it's affecting many devices this Is just compressing the issue further.

vacri 14y ago
I have a different problem in that the 'more' link uses some crazy key instead of 'page=2'. If you press it a relatively short time after being loaded, you'll get 'unknown or expired link', meaning you need to backtrack, reload the page, scroll again, click... it's trained me out of bothering to do it anymore.
danielweber 14y ago
In my experience the _more_ link works for about 5 to 10 minutes. If you slowly scroll down the page reading things on it, by the time you get to the bottom of the page it no longer works. You have to reload the page to get the link to work.

shadowbanned 14y ago

Stop shadow banning all femail participants. Everyone please boycott hacker news until they stop their policy of shadow banning females.

suyash 14y ago

Add to the list: Keep HACKER NEWS FOR AND BY HACKERS..stop posting other useless content. I want this place to learn and read about new coding practices, api's, only technically relavent stuff.

peterwwillis 14y ago
There's lots of non-technical stuff that's relevant to hackers. Broaden your horizons.
GnarlinBrando 14y ago
If your definition of hacking is limited to technical details then you are misunderstanding the historical ethos of hacking.

shadowbanned 14y ago

Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.

salvadornav 14y ago

I think "reward for browsing New" could be a good idea yet very difficult to implement it well. What I'd like to see is a front page with various lists of submissions according to different criteria, some ideas: 1st| most votes this month - this week, 2nd| "Hot today" (this'd be similar to the current front page I believe), 3rd | "Promising" (Posts from New section that begin their momentum), 4rd | Most commented month / week. Basically a bit of filtering.

shadowbanned 14y ago

Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.

misogynists 14y ago

Please boycott ycmmbinator and hackernews for their misogynistic policy of shadow banning all female participants.

MartinCron 14y ago
I don't think this can possibly be true. Can you give us some proof of this assertion?
- GnarlinBrando 14y ago
  We could even start with some reasoned speculation instead of a blatant unqualified assertion.
- Bvalmont 14y ago
  forums.somethingawful.com follows this model and it works incredibly well, I recommend you check it out.

hobbyist 14y ago

While reading this article through HN, (http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/ http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web/) I thought it will be a good idea if HN can be moved inside an onion network like tor. People need to go through tor in order to access the site. It should not be visible via normal http/ip addresses. This can reduce the number of users coming on HN, and hopefully HN maintains the authenticity.

gue5t 14y ago

"What doesn't matter" ... "Complaints of 'too much startups, not enough tech' or vice-versa" Is there a place to go for real hacking articles and none of the startup news bullshit? I don't care if it's called Hacker News or not. I don't even care if it's /new/. I just want a place to discuss interesting articles about making software and hardware do interesting things.

unimpressive 14y ago
The site was originally called startup news. I think that in retrospect the rename to HN was a bad idea, because it changes peoples expectations of what the site is for. Regardless, what you are describing would be much appreciated.

Steko 14y ago

One thing I'd like to see: Merged discussions. Maybe instead of adding a comment, you could also have a button to add another link covering the same topic. Good for when someone links a BGR story that's just a linkbait headline summary of a BI article that's just a rewrite of a NYT interview. So let's say all articles for a common topic become linked. Allow upvotes on articles and the highest one becomes titular for the meta-thread. This would (1) condense topics so the front page isn't deluged with say 5 twitter api threads, (2) unify discussions and avoid repetition, (3) help enforce good net practices i.e. linking to the best source.

GnarlinBrando 14y ago
This would graduate HN away from the list of links model that is so prevalent. Certainly an interesting idea, but a big change as well.

gcv 14y ago

How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the submissions. Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would be a bargain.

panacea 14y ago
Metafilter's $5 entrance fee and active human moderation contributes to it being a polite and intelligent community.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
I would not blink twice at this. Few better ways to weed out the trolls. It would be interesting to devise a way to utilize money and karma in a way that basically says, "If you are provably improving the community significantly, this costs you nothing; but if you are average or, worse, a drag, you will pay."
silvestrov 14y ago
Agree. Creditcard payments, however small, seems to be the by far most efficient way of filtering spam. CC payments make banning have a real effect. Metafilter is the NIH syndrome on HN. The problem with the New page is the extreme volume of entries due to everybody being able to post. Voting only goes so far, it doesn't work when you have too much stuff and users feel that their time spent voting doesn't make any significant difference. The signal-to-noise ratio on the New page must increase before most users will go to the trouble of voting.
slurgfest 14y ago
And now all your opinions on the internet are linked to your credit card... while I'm not so concerned about HN, I don't think this is a great solution in general

silenteh 14y ago

I would also remove the duplicated content/submissions which create or could create fragmentation of good comments, besides a personal frustration for having just wasted time opening again the same link only because the title seemed different.

new_around_here 14y ago

This is a terrible idea.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

This, and many of the suggestions in the original thread, and pg's default response, are all falling into the same trap: they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions. Technology can make community management easier. Better algorithms and visual design and so on can improve the way that a community polices itself. But, I think eventually you'll run into vanishing returns from that kind of stuff. (I don't have any good science for this, but I've been spending too much time online since the dial-up BBS days, and community development is one of my interests.) Eventually every community needs one or more managers, or gardeners (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) -- people who have been around a long time, who embody the "spirit" of the site, and who have, not absolute, but special influence on the community. (RiderOfGiraffes immediately comes to mind; I really wish he was still around.) This is absolutely analogous to Google attempting to avoid customer service completely by piling on more and more automated systems. While those systems help, they can't yet replace an actual customer service department -- and I think the frequent complaints from people who've been impacted by Google's lack of customer service bears this out. I like some of the suggestions in this post, but I don't think that they can resolve the main issue with HN at the moment: it has grown to a size which needs one or more community managers. There are some architectural issues too. I think the current trend in online forums, where new things are always better than good things, is ultimately a step backwards in terms of encouraging thoughtful discussion (http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/ http://www.robsheldon.com/conversations-online/). If a really interesting item comes up on HN that requires, say, a solid hour to compose a thoughtful response -- something very technical that would benefit from some number crunching -- there is very little motivation to commit the time to write that response. By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing. However, the first person to respond to an item with a quick, witty, or snarky response gets rewarded with lots of attention. And that is a problem that can not be resolved by any of the suggestions so far.

MartinCron 14y ago
Sure, some of the suggestions are technological in nature (purple for distinguished veterans). The author seemed very aware that tweaking the algorithms wasn't the solution.

FrojoS 14y ago

>HN could benefit from implementing infinite scroll, so the next page is appended asynchronously to the current one. [...] The problem is only a small minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button on bottom of the page. Yes. More so, if I spend considerable time, reading the second or even third page I can't get to the third or fourth page because the "More" link becomes broken after a while.

hujjio 14y ago

Stop the censoring for a start...

MartinCron 14y ago
What kind of censorship are you talking about? I haven't seen any motherfucking censorship here.
ericd 14y ago
This is a good piece on why aggressive moderation is necessary to keep online communities from devolving into cesspools, even though it may attract cries of censorship: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
- jmtame 14y ago
  I never thought about it until now, but the best IRC networks I hung out on in the 90s were ones with really good net admins who enforced the rules. Even when I was younger, I didn't belong on certain IRC networks, and I was quickly banned from them. That same rule applies to all the other communities (mostly gaming) that I was involved with. One problem with banning users is that they're not difficult to prevent from returning. At least on IRC, you had to pay for a BNC to change your IP address because whatever your dynamic IP resolved to, the hostname was fairly easy to reliably ban.

sendos 14y ago

What do people think of the idea of removing down votes and allowing only up votes? Has this been shown on other discussion boards to work?

MartinCron 14y ago
My immediate reaction is to say that the downvotes serve a useful purpose. They can indicate social disapproval without adding noise or fanning flamewars. The downside, of course, is that you see so many "WTF? Downvotes? Why" Comments.

polshaw 14y ago

>Distinguish veteran users I would much rather go the other way. It should be a meritocracy, not celebrity worship. For example give unique IDs for each user on each post. They could still link to profiles, and could optionally be kept for submissions.

DanBC 14y ago

There are a handful of domains that host pretty shoddy content - poor research, poor writing, link-baity titles, bias, etc. Banning those might be too extreme. But it'd be nice if there was an A list and a B list and then a A and B list. the A list would be carefully curated set of URLs proven to be of interest to the community (but a domain can easily be removed if they start getting too many bad stories); the B list would be everything else' the A and B list would be both.

finnw 14y ago

I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but most sites (including HN) with partially-automated moderation systems make the same assumption: *You only need one "karma" variable, for both posting and moderation*. That is, users who post popular content (i.e. comments that get a lot of upvotes) and those who moderate well (i.e. votes strongly-correlated with those of the admins) are rewarded in exactly the same way, that is by increasing the value that unified "karma" variable. IMHO this is not the best approach. For every prolific poster (who probably has decent karma already) you probably have 10 "lurkers" who have read most stories posted in the last month, know what they do (and don't) want to read, and are just as well-qualified to vote on stories and comments as those who regularly post comments (and earn karma from them.) So what would happen if you made "posting karma" and "moderation karma" independent of each other? (sort of a trick question, since it has been done.)

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

Change the front page to show 30 hottest articles plus 10 new, 10 ask, 10 show, 10 jobs and 10 startups. Run a contest to redesign the frontpage with all these sections. As I said earlier, adding a section with upcoming startups by batch would greatly benefit us all.

michael_fine 14y ago

I find that paradoxically, the biggest problem with Hacker News right now is the hot algorithm we use. It's great for bringing good stories to the attention of the community and having a burst of short lived discussion over those stories, and then dying out. What it's not great for is long term discussions. For example, with Quora, when someone answers a question, or posts a comment, you never care how long ago it was posted, because there are notifications, and the front page is based on what you follow, not how popular the questions are. This is a hard problem to fix, but a couple suggestions I have are to improve the threads feature, such that it resembles a real notification bar. Secondly, I think a new page should help, a mixture between the front page, and the saved stories, which shows active discussions, and an emphasis on one's that you have upvoted. I think those might help reduce the ephemerality of the discussions here.

smashing 14y ago

The Usenet readers had kill file's. That is the only solution which will have an overall improvement with no downside.

georgemcbay 14y ago

"It would be incredibly shocking to see a vitriolic HN comment coming from community leaders like tptacek" wat

tptacek 14y ago
I was wondering about that too.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
While I agree that tptacek can be blunt to the point of cruelty, his arguments are well reasoned. I've also never seen him belittle the efforts of anybody (though I have seen him torch week reasoning). Even if I've disagreed and silently wished he would walk away from a thread, his contributions to HN are worse the bluntness.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  I agree 100% (which is why I went with a silly "wat" instead of challenging the statement directly). Every forum has a small group of people who tend to lack social graces (or what passes for them online) but aren't just random assholes and are correct most of the time. As long as these people don't stray too personal too often, their contributions remain a net positive, IMO. tptacek certainly fits into that, he just seemed like a funny choice to lead off with in that statement.

connortomas 14y ago

I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides. It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world experience. To me, this matters. I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community - for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be brought front-and-centre somehow). Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.

danielweber 14y ago
I think there is a lot of identity associated with users. I'm relatively young, and often I will see one user identifying another user by their first name, which I don't know at all. People know each other here. This might be bad. If so, I'd say all comments should be anonymous for 2 days. Give out a pseudo-random pronounceable handle to each user for posting on each thread. People making dick comments will still have to deal with their commenting history as posts are "unmasked" in 48 hours. (This well could cause more problems that it solves.)
- connortomas 14y ago
  That's interesting, and it's probably something I'll come to recognise as I spend more time here. However, from where I'm standing, it does seem as though the issue is that those ties are breaking as the community grows. I'm not totally sure adding a further layer of anonymity would strengthen discourse (though it could be an interesting experiment).

hackermani 14y ago

All comments can be made from Tweetbot only. Done.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

truth_dude 14y ago

What I cant wait for...."Why the new Hacker News sucks"

comatose_kid 14y ago

There is a tendency to upvote comments you agree with, and downvote comments you disagree with. This has two ill effects: 1) Witty and popular viewpoints rise to the top, creating an atmosphere of superficial groupthink 2) People with unpopular (but insightful!) viewpoints may be discouraged from posting them. Given this, would the level of comments improve with the following change? Replace the up/down vote buttons with a single button next to each comment that reads: 'insightful', and use that to vote up comments. Forget about downvoting stuff - the low content viewpoints and rudeness will both sink to the bottom. Or if you wish, add a 'flag' box for comments made in poor taste. Using such specific labels would make people think twice before voting, both about the purpose of their vote and if the comment needs a vote at all.

woah 14y ago
Do you think that the label would change people's behavior in the long term, or would they end up just thinking of it as an upvote?
- comatose_kid 14y ago
  Not sure, but trying it out would be a good way to find out...

twelvechairs 14y ago

Surely one badly-needed feature is needed is more different views. As the community gets bigger, the single 'front page' doesn't cut it anymore. Reddit's subreddits have become enormously successful in this vein (probably to the detriment of its main page, which nobody in their right mind would read anymore). I'm not saying this system is perfect for HN, but other systems in the same direction might be very nice eg. tags for things like 'please provide feedback on my new page/product' (I'd love to see them on one page), or different types of comment view on a per-user-basis (how do I want to see comments, not one system for all HN). For my mind, an encouragement of diversity along these lines would help the site thrive whilst allowing users to keep (and define) their own community standards.

noblethrasher 14y ago

I suggested this on a previous 'improve HN thread' (instigated by pg himself): Shutdown HN for a week or so and when reopening only let a certain quota in per day/week/month. Give priority to old and/or high karma members. I think that it will have the effect of churning the low quality membership. Perhaps allow these elected to elect others to enter "promised land".

hardwear 14y ago
do you have a link to the thread?
- noblethrasher 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

franzus 14y ago

> community leaders That's where I stopped reading. I don't need or want a leader who can lead my thoughts. Also: Meta discussions are never productive. They only waste time.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Bvalmont 14y ago

Introduce a one-time fee of 10 dollars when creating an account. This account offers you the ability to comment. Other contributions are rewarded for people not willing to pay the 10 dollar fine, for example; by submitting links. Then use the generated money to pay moderators. Ban people who are not following the rules or penalty them with probation time. This weeds out the bad apples, keeps the community relatively small and contained. It also improves the maturity of any community. It worked for something awful forums, I can see it working here.

buro9 14y ago

The hide button will not work for long. It is an attempt to treat the symptom and not the cause. I run large communities, and I've implemented "hide" and "ignore" functions for pretty much everything in my time. People rub each other up the wrong way, so they want to ignore anything the other person says. People get rubbed up by all threads on a certain topic, so they want to ignore the topic. When a topic hits the news in a big splash and half the front page is the same thing, they get annoyed and want to ignore the whole of that topic for a short while. Failing to hide/ignore all of that stuff results in them lashing out to the detriment of all. But, if you indulge it by providing the hide/ignore all you've done is hide the symptom. Now people think it's cured and it is not. The problem here isn't the content, it's the reaction to the content. The problem here is with the reader and contributor, not pg and the code base. The problem is that there needs to be a shift in attitude and etiquette from a lot of users. It's a people problem, and people need to be shown what isn't an acceptable way to behave.

DodgyEggplant 14y ago

Shirky 2003, about habitat, 1990. Nothing new here, really. Same issues, same lines of thoughts for solutions. A Group is it's Own Worth Enemy: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

Honestly, I think this is kind of much adieu about nothing. On the original thread, one commenter looked at the OP's original submission and found a lot of praise etc. Similarly, wheher I see ShowHN posts with projects that seem trivial or even frivolous to me, there are usually many well wishers offering a lot of praise.

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

"there are many of us who have worked to get a high karma over time." I'm of the opinion that arguments must be judged by itself, and not by the "Aristotle said" conformity method that so many problems brought to society in the past and in the present. I'm probably one of the older people here and had like 7 different accounts or so(I keep forgetting passwords and accounts when my machines change-update). I had a big karma on some of those accounts, but honestly I don't care the least. I have more important things in my life to do-care, and so most of the interesting people in HN. A great PhD with great things to say is going to have work to do better than collecting "karma" on Internet all day long.

reledi 14y ago

I think a lot of new users are unaware of the HN guidelines [1]. Linking to it from the nav bar could help showing what is and isn't an acceptable way to behave. [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OmIsMyShield 14y ago

No. I disagree that we need some sort of way to protect / alternatively value the old folks with valuable contributions. This is a bad idea. At first glance it seems good, since the old & upvoted are known entities - on average, they are valuable to the community. Thus, give them something that others can aspire to, even if it's just a purple link. I would caution that this will introduce strange, unforeseeable side-effects, not least would be that you would necessarily have to classify new users as dodgy, until such time that they have added enough data to be re-classified. Doing that to new users might even be beneficial in the short term. But in the long run I fear that adding any frictions and subtle "you-aren't-as-valued-yet" around new users might introduce subtle behaviours and keep certain types of people away - something not easily quantifiable until it becomes too late. I have a pet, untestable, and probably worthless theory that the tone of HN has slowly drifted toward the bitterness we see now because (a) you can't downvote links, so you have to express disagreement through the comments, thereby adding negativity to the comment thread that might have otherwise just been 'n downvote, and (b) the fact that comment scores are invisible doesn't give new adopters an idea of how strongly people agree or disagree with tone or topic in people's posts. So they don't learn by osmosis. Both these ideas gave short-term benefit but I believe (totally unscientifically) that they slowly, invisibly, led to the tone of the site as a whole. Be careful when changing the system, as the human part of it is difficult to manage via proxies like scoring and similar. And if we introduce a way that subtly penalises new people (or values old contributors, alternative view of the same idea) we might just change the way we attract new people - and a community needs all sorts of new people to stay alive.

chmike 14y ago

I have to disagree with most suggestions. What criteria would make someone purple ? Popularity ? Number of karma points ? What would be the incentive to respect them more then others ? And why would they deserve more respect than others ? I'm a long time HN reader and I don't have much karma. Its because I try to post and comment wisely. Why wouldn't I deserve respect ? My impression is that radical comments are more prone to votes since they pull on the emotional strings. It would be a bad idea to favor people voting in the new section because I bet people would vote blindly just for the benefit of voting.

geon 14y ago

> only a small minority of readers bother to click the tiny "More" button The size migh be an issue, but the greatee problem is that by the time I reach the bottom of the page, the link has usually expired. If you want your users to see the next page, that really is inexcusable.

jeffool 14y ago

Between the to bar and the content, for a week or so, place a centered link reading "A personal message about the future of HN from Paul Graham." Make it a thread maybe. Talk about the expectations of visitors. The need to build up, rather than drag down. To hold back the snarky comments, no matter how funny we find them. (And not to vote them up, no matter how funny we find them.) Talk about the virtues of reddit's better maintained communities if you're not looking for serious conversation. Make the post exactly what you want from the community. Treat them like the serious business and tech minded sluts you want them to be woke under your roof. And point that out too. You're choosing to engage, like you often do. You don't want to, and shouldn't have to, seek technological answers to people problems. Maybe you'll convince a few people to think before posting/voting.

jeffool 14y ago
... "Treat them like the serious business and tech minded ADULTS". Last time I ever make a post on my phone with a time limited edit function. Especially when sleepy, with Swype.

dumbluck 14y ago

I think HN should be a democracy: 1. Don't let people create multiple accounts so easily. Switch to OpenID and have the ability to associate old accounts with the new ID or have the old account deactivated within 90 days. I don't even know how many accounts I've created, but it is a lot. This is basically anonymity. This does not work. 2. Don't filter comments and not hide topics that anyone disagrees with unless they are extremely offensive, and those could be marked as offensive and then PG and those with enough karma will check those and if they are offensive, they will hide them, but anyone could still see them, vote on them, and comment on them, if you clicked a flag to see them. You have to login to upvote, downvote, mark as offensive, post, or comment. 3. Show who upvoted or downvoted to everyone. This will make people think twice before downvoting. 4. Allow private communication between users so that if someone downvotes you without saying why, you can ask them why. 5. The new page is grouped by: last 24 hours, last 3 days, last week, last month, last 3 months, last year, and then by year. Everytime something is upvoted it goes to the top of the new list for the group it is in. I'm sorry that some people have complained that HN works fine technically as it is. It certainly does, for those it serves. However, people complain that there are negative views here. I think the changes I proposed will help with that. But a bigger problem is that people's posts and comments get whacked. If you handle things in the way I described, and stop silencing me and others, I think the community will be much happier.

tome 14y ago

Personally I think I'd raise the bar to moderator rights to those with several thousand karma, and encorage strongly to flag stories they think are inappropriate. That should get the site closer to what it was a few years ago.

lewisflude 14y ago

Why not show the "new" tab as the front page and put "top" as a menu option? I know it's one more click for a lot of us, but it could be a nice change! Or, at least make that the default.

revorad 14y ago

A proposal to improve Hacker News: shut it down for a month.

sktrdie 14y ago

But is there a "Hacker News Manifesto"? No there isn't. HN is what it is because of the community. Sure, there should be moderators to control the profanity level. But overall, if content is interesting and it's up-voted, it means it's meaningful to someone and therefore should maintain its place on HN. The content should be driven by the community - if it's too startup related or too technology related is really a subjective matter.

FixThisPOSSite 14y ago

Hey, how about fixing the technical incompetence of the site? Like the offensive "you're posting too fast" bullshit, when you haven't posted for hours? Yeah, that would be a good start.

austinlyons 14y ago

Sridatta, thanks for taking time to articulate your ideas on how to improve Hacker News. I enjoyed your post and really like the idea of distinguishing veteran users.

Tooluka 14y ago

> Distinguish users. Reward users. Wrong. Instead user karma system should be deleted completely. (Yes, I know that I am a "newbie" here. Think what you want.). I have seen too many portals died or degraded by the weight of "karma". The only working example is probably Stack Overflow and I think they won't last long because of it. Only reason why SO can survive is continuous strict moderation. I like "C++ vs Java", "Most influential book" and similar topics very much but they really don't belong to SO by their rules. The same should be applied to HN - ban those millions Twitter and FB topics. Ban topics with complaints (however reasonable). Ban SOPA/ACTA etc. topics. In short - filter everything that is not educational for IT specialists. Yes, it would be more boring that way (or not) but it would ensure HN quality and survival.

cremnob 14y ago

What about paying $5 to have a HN account? SomethingAwful and Metafilter both do this and it helps keep the quality high (along with good moderation).