6 ms·

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 pro

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.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Well, he did say, "here is what I think would benefit the community the most." But, I wasn't really responding to him directly anyway. I just picked this particular thread because it was new. The other one was too busy and already halfway down the front page; the same comment there would have worse chances of actually being read.
graue 14y ago
I don't think it's fair to call any of the post's suggestions purely "technical solutions". They all involve changing the user interface and that can make a dramatic difference in how an online community functions. (In contrast, pg's idea to assign different weights to comment votes would be invisible, leaving the site UI as is. That is a purely technical solution.)
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution, especially in contrast to such a low-tech thing as a community manager. I didn't mean to imply that technical solutions wouldn't make a difference, even dramatic ones, just that they could not completely take the place of some manual effort.
  - erichocean 14y ago
    > I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution Because by "user interface", we mean "human interface" or "people interface". Such changes are human-/people-oriented, pretty much by definition. pg's "solution" is purely technical, since the human interface wouldn't change at all.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    If your definition of "technical solution" is as broad as to mean "any code change at all", then by definition, all changes will be technical. But at least the first two options here are social, not technical (though of course, as with any change on the site, they will require code to change them).
MartinCron 14y ago
The other thing is that his proposal was a proposal to "improve" Hacker News, not a promise to "fix" hacker news. Trying to do a grand massive "fix every problem" is more likely to introduce new problems than just making relatively safe improvements.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  This is essentially the old argument over whether it's better to patch old bad code, or whether it's better to rewrite old bad code. I think all of the same responses would apply, i.e., whether or not new problems might be preferable to the existing ones. Since much smarter people than I have written carefully-considered essays on that argument (and without coming to a clear conclusion), I'll just let them speak for me. :-)
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    It is OK to have an in-context opinion, though. My opinion on this is to change as little as possible, and one thing at a time. Let us not forget the object lesson from Digg's big redesign.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Danieru 14y ago
> By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing. I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5 minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the end). Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page. They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long. Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page, readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place among their non-frontpaged peers. The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive enough. Meanwhile people do like longer posts but reading a full essay is barrier to upvoting.
- ckcheng 14y ago
  Perhaps votes should be weighted by the length of the submitted post. So, e.g., votes on short submissions are worth less than votes on full essays. Length of the post can be gamed, but I guess when that happens some form of information theoretic measure can be used as part of the weighting. I don't suppose this is already being done, is it?
  - tommoor 14y ago
    I like this idea, clever!
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    It is going to be hard to make an algorithm which can't be beaten (e.g.) by just applying more adjectives and synonyms. Which can easily be automated.
    - 14y ago
Dn_Ab 14y ago
Yeah RiderOfGiraffes is cool. He is still around but was sort of hostilely driven into retirement. He goes by ColinWright these days. You're most likely to find him in math related topics. Don't have anything else constructive to say.
- itmag 14y ago
  He goes by ColinWright these days. Of exilelifestyle.com fame?
masterzora 14y ago
Just because a solution is implemented with technology doesn't mean it can't be a people solution for a people problem. There are a number of technological changes that will target the psychology of the people, guiding them toward different behaviour. I agree that the proposals in this post don't seem to address the actual issues very well but I think it would be a mistake to completely disregard technology changes as an avenue for affecting people changes.
catastrophe 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. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
jimmytucson 14y ago
>they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing? Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we're not throwing "technology" at the problem. But I'm glad for a selfish reason. I think adding features and modernizing the site would draw attention and users, probably the "wrong" kind.
- freehunter 14y ago
  A comparable social site, reddit, didn't draw attention from the wrong kind of user by changing their site. They drew attention from the wrong kind of user because their biggest competitor changed their site (Digg).
- mbesto 14y ago
  > That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing? Yes, and I cringe every time I see the next startup come in trying to do just that. The reality is the people putting money behind this whole movement don't see it as you and I may see it. So as long as people are making money and they continue to prey on people's cognitive biases then we will continue to see this happen.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
comatose_kid 14y ago
I appreciate your observation that the emphasis on newness can discourage deep discourse.
nandemo 14y ago
> 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. 1) Don't you think Wikipedia administrators and Stackoverflow mods fulfil that "gardener" role? (I think so). 2) Consider that above "gardeners" are often criticized harshly on HN (even though, in my opinion, they are a positive force on Wikipedia and Stackoverflow). Don't you think strong moderators would have a bad time on HN?
einhverfr 14y ago
Certainly some of the suggestions in the article have merit. Encouraging people to browse and vote on stuff in new would be good. But I agree with you. You don't fix human problems by adding technical controls. You fix human problems by adding technical measures designed to enable human controls. My proposal is relatively simple: figure out a high karma number (high enough few people have it) and allow these people to issue an incivility warning. If you get more than a certain number of incivility warnings in a month you get banned, first temporarily and on the second time perhaps permanently. These reprimands would be public. People need feedback. People need to know when they are stepping out. One of the real concerns I have with hellbanning (though I recognize in some corner cases it may be useful) is that it denies people this feedback and therefore does not encourage people to stay within the lines of acceptable conduct. So make hellbanning only for cases of people who are long-term repetitive problems or spammers. Implement a system that gives feedback to users for the rest. And allow the most senior people to enforce civility constraints. Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people.
- qubot 14y ago
  > "Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people." I agree, in a way. The only communities I have seen that associates numbers with human merit or trustworthiness are the ones populated largely by programmers. I feel this is telling. I always have low scores on these sites because I am just not motivated to contribute to them. While Jeff Atwood was on to something when he said that users can do a good job when they feel invested in the quality of content on a site, we just cannot expect numbers representing reputation or consensus to always be set rationally. That, and I just hate thinking I will be assigned a score for trying to contribute to a conversation when I have no idea how the site's culture will interpret what I do. We may as well carry those 1-10 judge cards around our necks and stick gold stars on outsiders' foreheads. It's absurd... but apparently it's necessary. It shouldn't be, but I know I can't handle 1 million+ users as a moderator. One of my old jobs was to facilitate a chapter of Socrates Cafe, a national discourse organization. We allowed anyone at all to come in and share his or her experiences. My job was to facilitate the discussion and put out flames fanned by conversations between opposing parties. So, when atheist/theists, right-wing/left-wing wars erupt, I was supposed to take varying measures to restore order without evoking enough negativity to scare away members. That is, I had to try and settle everyone down while making them feel BETTER about everyone else. I cannot begin to tell you how ridiculously hard this can be, and technology does not help unless you use it for shameless enforcement. Intuition and context-awareness helps tremendously, and there have been times where I simply could not think of any solution to one particular heated debate outside of, no joke, an air horn. I hated having to blast all of the words right out of the room, but the group we had (to me) represented a community gone wrong that needed flat out intervention. We never once used tools to try and change the rules of conduct. Instead, we used technology as a brutal and unapologetic last-ditch enforcement of existing rules. Now... That's a group where everyone saw each other in person. Clearly not the same thing as an online group. That's worse. In this setting, technology is the only thing you HAVE to mediate all interactions, even the "human" ones. I don't have a real solution to the sorry state of large, rude online communities. In fact, if you made me a moderator, I would probably go on a banning spree until everyone was too terrified to stay on their own accord. Even so, but I doubt anyone else really has a solution either... Including the OP. Improvement can only be measured until online cultures change in a way to push newly set boundaries.
Udo 14y ago
There are technological solutions to some of the problems. For example, there is an increasing tendency to create dummy accounts for the sole purpose of dissing another user without getting your own account dirty. I was recently at the receiving end of this, and I have since noticed this happening more often all over HN. The solution for this would indeed be simple: don't allow new users to post comments for, say, 8 hours. In general these kinds of measures aim to make destructive behavior less fun, and I think they do work to an extend. Then there are problems of style that can be solved by having guidelines. Getting rid of "lolwut", "ORLY", or "Pro Tip:" comments is something we should all agree on; yet those are regularly upvoted, as are remarks that personally attack other users. This can be solved by declaring a ban on these kinds of things, because I believe the majority of users would honor those guidelines of they were made clearer. Of course, the larger problem is that this even needs to be stated officially in the first place. It should be obvious that lolspeak, at hominem attacks, ridiculous trolling, and employing the basest rhetorical fallacies is not something that we reward here on HN, but nevertheless voters do reward them. That's indeed a problem of audience, not something that can be completely addressed by programming or guidelines. Then there are people who see destructive criticism as the main problem, which I don't agree with. Personally, I try to keep my criticism constructive if possible and I do appreciate others doing the same. But when I want to receive feedback, I'm glad about any kind of response really as long as the tone of the discussion remains civilized. The worst thing that can happen with feedback is not getting destructive criticism, it's the absence of any reaction at all.
- olivier1664 14y ago
  On the "don't allow new users to post comments for, say, 8 hours": Don't forget lot of people create a first account just to do a first reply. I would have feel not welcome the first time I try to comment if this protocol was implemented. More than that, I'm not sure that your proposal will resolve the fake-account problem: if I love to be a jerk I will play with 2 accounts, your 8 hours delay will not block me.

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.

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Well, he did say, "here is what I think would benefit the community the most." But, I wasn't really responding to him directly anyway. I just picked this particular thread because it was new. The other one was too busy and already halfway down the front page; the same comment there would have worse chances of actually being read.

graue 14y ago

I don't think it's fair to call any of the post's suggestions purely "technical solutions". They all involve changing the user interface and that can make a dramatic difference in how an online community functions. (In contrast, pg's idea to assign different weights to comment votes would be invisible, leaving the site UI as is. That is a purely technical solution.)

thaumaturgy 14y ago
I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution, especially in contrast to such a low-tech thing as a community manager. I didn't mean to imply that technical solutions wouldn't make a difference, even dramatic ones, just that they could not completely take the place of some manual effort.
- erichocean 14y ago
  > I'm not clear on how changing the user interface isn't a technical solution Because by "user interface", we mean "human interface" or "people interface". Such changes are human-/people-oriented, pretty much by definition. pg's "solution" is purely technical, since the human interface wouldn't change at all.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  If your definition of "technical solution" is as broad as to mean "any code change at all", then by definition, all changes will be technical. But at least the first two options here are social, not technical (though of course, as with any change on the site, they will require code to change them).

MartinCron 14y ago

The other thing is that his proposal was a proposal to "improve" Hacker News, not a promise to "fix" hacker news. Trying to do a grand massive "fix every problem" is more likely to introduce new problems than just making relatively safe improvements.

thaumaturgy 14y ago
This is essentially the old argument over whether it's better to patch old bad code, or whether it's better to rewrite old bad code. I think all of the same responses would apply, i.e., whether or not new problems might be preferable to the existing ones. Since much smarter people than I have written carefully-considered essays on that argument (and without coming to a clear conclusion), I'll just let them speak for me. :-)
- MartinCron 14y ago
  It is OK to have an in-context opinion, though. My opinion on this is to change as little as possible, and one thing at a time. Let us not forget the object lesson from Digg's big redesign.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Danieru 14y ago

> By the time it's written and posted, the site has moved on to the next new thing. I noticed this within the context of submissions and /new when I posted two blog posts of mine. Both posts were x000 words so minimum reading was over 3-5 minutes (average time on site was 1.5 minutes so not everyone read to the end). Both times neither posts got any upvotes until half way down the first page. They were surrounded by topical submissions, news or etc. Stuff that either had a simple message in the title or was only a few paragraphs long. Except a strange phenomenon occured when the posts fell to the second page, readership doubled. Whereas on the first page Google analytics real time reported 10-14 active readers this jumped to the low 20s. By this time the posts had received 5 upvotes. On page 1 they were maybe the 4-5th most upvoted submission but once they reached the 2nd page they stole 1st or 2nd place among their non-frontpaged peers. The lesson I took away from this is that short or topical submissions have a strong advantage. It is easier and quicker for someone to decide to upvote. In same cases they may upvote without reading at all if the title is descriptive enough. Meanwhile people do like longer posts but reading a full essay is barrier to upvoting.

ckcheng 14y ago
Perhaps votes should be weighted by the length of the submitted post. So, e.g., votes on short submissions are worth less than votes on full essays. Length of the post can be gamed, but I guess when that happens some form of information theoretic measure can be used as part of the weighting. I don't suppose this is already being done, is it?
- tommoor 14y ago
  I like this idea, clever!
- slurgfest 14y ago
  It is going to be hard to make an algorithm which can't be beaten (e.g.) by just applying more adjectives and synonyms. Which can easily be automated.
  - 14y ago

Dn_Ab 14y ago

Yeah RiderOfGiraffes is cool. He is still around but was sort of hostilely driven into retirement. He goes by ColinWright these days. You're most likely to find him in math related topics. Don't have anything else constructive to say.

itmag 14y ago
He goes by ColinWright these days. Of exilelifestyle.com fame?

masterzora 14y ago

Just because a solution is implemented with technology doesn't mean it can't be a people solution for a people problem. There are a number of technological changes that will target the psychology of the people, guiding them toward different behaviour. I agree that the proposals in this post don't seem to address the actual issues very well but I think it would be a mistake to completely disregard technology changes as an avenue for affecting people changes.

catastrophe 14y ago

jimmytucson 14y ago

>they are attempting to fix a people problem using technical solutions That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing? Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we're not throwing "technology" at the problem. But I'm glad for a selfish reason. I think adding features and modernizing the site would draw attention and users, probably the "wrong" kind.

freehunter 14y ago
A comparable social site, reddit, didn't draw attention from the wrong kind of user by changing their site. They drew attention from the wrong kind of user because their biggest competitor changed their site (Digg).
mbesto 14y ago
> That's catchy but isn't that what a large handful of pg's startups are doing? Yes, and I cringe every time I see the next startup come in trying to do just that. The reality is the people putting money behind this whole movement don't see it as you and I may see it. So as long as people are making money and they continue to prey on people's cognitive biases then we will continue to see this happen.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

comatose_kid 14y ago

I appreciate your observation that the emphasis on newness can discourage deep discourse.

nandemo 14y ago

> 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. 1) Don't you think Wikipedia administrators and Stackoverflow mods fulfil that "gardener" role? (I think so). 2) Consider that above "gardeners" are often criticized harshly on HN (even though, in my opinion, they are a positive force on Wikipedia and Stackoverflow). Don't you think strong moderators would have a bad time on HN?

einhverfr 14y ago

Certainly some of the suggestions in the article have merit. Encouraging people to browse and vote on stuff in new would be good. But I agree with you. You don't fix human problems by adding technical controls. You fix human problems by adding technical measures designed to enable human controls. My proposal is relatively simple: figure out a high karma number (high enough few people have it) and allow these people to issue an incivility warning. If you get more than a certain number of incivility warnings in a month you get banned, first temporarily and on the second time perhaps permanently. These reprimands would be public. People need feedback. People need to know when they are stepping out. One of the real concerns I have with hellbanning (though I recognize in some corner cases it may be useful) is that it denies people this feedback and therefore does not encourage people to stay within the lines of acceptable conduct. So make hellbanning only for cases of people who are long-term repetitive problems or spammers. Implement a system that gives feedback to users for the rest. And allow the most senior people to enforce civility constraints. Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people.

qubot 14y ago
> "Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people." I agree, in a way. The only communities I have seen that associates numbers with human merit or trustworthiness are the ones populated largely by programmers. I feel this is telling. I always have low scores on these sites because I am just not motivated to contribute to them. While Jeff Atwood was on to something when he said that users can do a good job when they feel invested in the quality of content on a site, we just cannot expect numbers representing reputation or consensus to always be set rationally. That, and I just hate thinking I will be assigned a score for trying to contribute to a conversation when I have no idea how the site's culture will interpret what I do. We may as well carry those 1-10 judge cards around our necks and stick gold stars on outsiders' foreheads. It's absurd... but apparently it's necessary. It shouldn't be, but I know I can't handle 1 million+ users as a moderator. One of my old jobs was to facilitate a chapter of Socrates Cafe, a national discourse organization. We allowed anyone at all to come in and share his or her experiences. My job was to facilitate the discussion and put out flames fanned by conversations between opposing parties. So, when atheist/theists, right-wing/left-wing wars erupt, I was supposed to take varying measures to restore order without evoking enough negativity to scare away members. That is, I had to try and settle everyone down while making them feel BETTER about everyone else. I cannot begin to tell you how ridiculously hard this can be, and technology does not help unless you use it for shameless enforcement. Intuition and context-awareness helps tremendously, and there have been times where I simply could not think of any solution to one particular heated debate outside of, no joke, an air horn. I hated having to blast all of the words right out of the room, but the group we had (to me) represented a community gone wrong that needed flat out intervention. We never once used tools to try and change the rules of conduct. Instead, we used technology as a brutal and unapologetic last-ditch enforcement of existing rules. Now... That's a group where everyone saw each other in person. Clearly not the same thing as an online group. That's worse. In this setting, technology is the only thing you HAVE to mediate all interactions, even the "human" ones. I don't have a real solution to the sorry state of large, rude online communities. In fact, if you made me a moderator, I would probably go on a banning spree until everyone was too terrified to stay on their own accord. Even so, but I doubt anyone else really has a solution either... Including the OP. Improvement can only be measured until online cultures change in a way to push newly set boundaries.

Udo 14y ago

There are technological solutions to some of the problems. For example, there is an increasing tendency to create dummy accounts for the sole purpose of dissing another user without getting your own account dirty. I was recently at the receiving end of this, and I have since noticed this happening more often all over HN. The solution for this would indeed be simple: don't allow new users to post comments for, say, 8 hours. In general these kinds of measures aim to make destructive behavior less fun, and I think they do work to an extend. Then there are problems of style that can be solved by having guidelines. Getting rid of "lolwut", "ORLY", or "Pro Tip:" comments is something we should all agree on; yet those are regularly upvoted, as are remarks that personally attack other users. This can be solved by declaring a ban on these kinds of things, because I believe the majority of users would honor those guidelines of they were made clearer. Of course, the larger problem is that this even needs to be stated officially in the first place. It should be obvious that lolspeak, at hominem attacks, ridiculous trolling, and employing the basest rhetorical fallacies is not something that we reward here on HN, but nevertheless voters do reward them. That's indeed a problem of audience, not something that can be completely addressed by programming or guidelines. Then there are people who see destructive criticism as the main problem, which I don't agree with. Personally, I try to keep my criticism constructive if possible and I do appreciate others doing the same. But when I want to receive feedback, I'm glad about any kind of response really as long as the tone of the discussion remains civilized. The worst thing that can happen with feedback is not getting destructive criticism, it's the absence of any reaction at all.

olivier1664 14y ago
On the "don't allow new users to post comments for, say, 8 hours": Don't forget lot of people create a first account just to do a first reply. I would have feel not welcome the first time I try to comment if this protocol was implemented. More than that, I'm not sure that your proposal will resolve the fake-account problem: if I love to be a jerk I will play with 2 accounts, your 8 hours delay will not block me.