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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
by 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.