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There is no way for the community to effectively exert influence on the behavior of new members. That is the problem. A complicated algorithm or formula will n

by tkahn6 14y ago

There is no way for the community to effectively exert influence on the behavior of new members. That is the problem. A complicated algorithm or formula will not fix this. New members have the ability to upvote. If there are enough of them with interests and standards contrary to the current culture of HN, they will upvote each other and bootstrap their own culture. Eventually they and the people they subsequently attract to HN will overwhelm the original culture. This problem will not be fixed unless there is a threshold system for upvoting or PG and the Y Combinator mods take a more aggressive approach in removing articles.

vannevar 14y ago
There is no way for the community to effectively exert influence on the behavior of new members. That is the problem. A complicated algorithm or formula will not fix this. Sure it can. If you hide low-scoring comments from low-ranking users, but show them to high-ranking users, the high-ranking users can exert influence on the low raking-users by upvoting quality comments and downvoting poor ones. It becomes a self-organizing system with a bias towards quality, rather than the open loop 'majority rules' system currently in place.