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Dear HN, I'm worried about us

• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• mdakin 18y ago
  All this experiment demonstrates is the extreme importance of style and presentation. If you say something negative in a joyful, entertaining way as opposed to a bitchy way people value your contribution more (enough more that the negative comment is all of a sudden considered a positive contribution to the discussion rather than a low-quality dig at someone).
• dmarques1 18y ago
  I have been on HN for almost 700 days now and read it almost daily, I rarely post, comment, or login but I think the content & community here is best in class. While there seems to be some discussion about the quality of the community lately, I think the quality of the submissions is still extremely high, and that the comments are still for the most part insightful and valuable.
• SwellJoe 18y ago
  I tried to think of a one-sentence witty sarcasm that would fit perfectly here, but couldn't. So, instead, I will point out that sometimes one line is all you need. I would much prefer a short reply that contains something new to a longer, very thoughtful, reply that adds nothing to the conversation. If it's even a little bit funny, all the better. In other words, "Omit needless words."
  • revelude 18y ago
    Pretty much all discussion boards are founded on the principle that "we'll actually have real conversation this time" or "don't say anything you wouldn't to the person's face." They eventually grow and grow, then turn into SA:Forums or Digg, and people run off to create new places like HN. These then grow, get too big, and the cycle continues. Let's try not to worry too much?
• tptacek 18y ago
  You have chosen a very elaborate way to ignore the Hacker News guideline that suggests "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.". Your first comment had no context; it could have been applied to any story. Your second comment suggested that you were wading into a debate about Agile Methods and XP without knowing who Kent Beck is. Your third comment actually appeared to pertain to the discussion.
• pavelludiq 18y ago
  I've been here for some time now. HN has changed, but so far the change is not very bad. In fact i think that we were able to steer the change in the community in a good way. HN is a living system, we see imperfections, good, that means we're still alive. Living organisms change all the time, we only have to do it right, so far we've done it well. Discussions like this one are a good sign, were not slacking off and leaving the site to just go downhill.
• jsmcgd 18y ago
  PG what about reducing new sign ups?
• mroman 18y ago
  I think the problem boils down to the presence of non-hackers in here. It's mostly the non-hackers that abuse the downmodding (anyone who throws a hissy fit like a little girl and starts the abusive downmodding by accusing someone of trolling over that someone expressing a negative opinion of an MSFT product, IS.NOT.A.HACKER . . . that is only an example, but I think it is clear that 99% of hackers are not the delicate, emotional creatures that are into the abusive downmodding) The solution would be to simply reject submissions that are obviously not hacker discussion material from being posted (yes, hackers are wont to talk about anything in the universe, but please, straight up MBA/Suit garbage HERE? . . . c'mon - a hacker interested in that can go somewhere else to discuss those topics if he/she wants) The nearly effeminate debate submissions about css vs tables, for example The MBA/Suit news Those go, and most of the undesirables around here go. The obvious problem with this is that censoring is both distasteful and can be counterproductive . . . I don't envy the position PG is in. I say readers protesting abusive downmodding in the threads themselves would be one positive step.
  • mroman 18y ago
    THIS PROVES MY POINT Hackers would have engaged me in discussion of what I wrote. Effeminate MBA candidate WANNABE HACKERS would downmod me. Thank you, you have proven my point.
• arebop 18y ago
  1. Joel makes disparaging remarks about Beck and his ideas without understanding those ideas well. If you're familiar with XP, you can see that Joel's argument is with more of a strawman than the substance of Beck's ideas. If not, Joel admits he doesn't really know what he's talking about right there in the podcast. 2. Beck responds, saying that Joel is uninformed and wrong. He doesn't give a lot of specific detail. He's written and said quite a lot already, and Joel's superficial caricature doesn't merit a detailed response. 3. You accuse Beck of ad-hominem. It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with Beck's ideas, and it's not even precisely about agreeing or disagreeing with your accusation. It's that the whole affair is based on a misapprehension, and you're steering the conversation down a sidetrack. Between your three distractions, the short and simple one-sentence witticism is less damaging than the emotionally charged and loquacious rants. Maybe that explains the votes. $0.02.
• mikeyur 18y ago
  I'm fairly new here, I think I've been around for 3 months or so now. I try not to down vote anything. A little bit of self control needs to be had to do so. I may disagree about user x's stance on programming language y - but he's adding to the conversation so I have to back away. However if we're having a discussion and someone decides to randomly throw in a lolcat reference that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, I don't have a problem down voting them, dousing them with gasoline and just watching them burn.
  • jacquesm 18y ago
    That's both a little harsh and by your own standards asks for a downvote...
• lpgauth 18y ago
  Invite only?
  • unalone 18y ago
    It's been discussed before, and rejected. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373789 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373789
• revelude 18y ago
  Honestly, I've stopped reading comments on HN altogether. The worldview that this group furthers is morally bankrupt and self-serving. The world doesn't revolve around you guys, really. The pro-business, lets-make-millions-in-a-year attitude is beyond suffocating, and blocks out much of the discussion we can have here. I realize that some of the qualities that drew me here in the first place are rooted in these attitudes, but its quite gross to be surrounded by it. I find myself wishing I could use HN as my main news aggregator, but really, its not any higher quality than the competition. This community could use a little sense of humor and humility sometimes...
• gills 18y ago
  I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable. This community has been over variations of this topic quite a few times. The conclusion I drew from reading those discussions was that telling people how you think they should behave, and expecting it to actually happen, is not going to work (regardless of the quality of your argument and/or the population). I've wondered for a while about the effectiveness of two different 'scoring' ideas. One is to make downvoting beyond some threshold (-1, perhaps) cost one or more point of karma for each downvote -- so if you really feel the need to drive something into the dirt, you have to give up some of your own karma as pennance for your obvious lack of self control and inability to follow the site guidelines. The other is to give up on global karma, and split the voting mechanism into categories such as 'agree/disagree', 'signal/noise', etc., so there are mechanisms to express a handful of the different reasons people have for voting. Just thinking out loud...
• tsbardella 18y ago
  I agree. I thought the vagina hacking story last week was out of place. Maybe we should discust this story too http://is.gd/ilUX http://is.gd/ilUX Breast Hacking. All of these shoule net the person like myself a lower karma some how preferable with some kind of number system Like this tweet lelafin Yay! 105% on my first math test of the semester! ...and where is today's snow??? Wed, Feb 04 09:46:23 from web Snow!
• dotan 18y ago
  There's discussion? I just read the links.
• patrocles 18y ago
  Insight #0: We're not all in the same room; instead of broadcasting a post, use our previous voting preferences to route posts to us. #1: We read what other people like us read; spread the workload of evaluating new posts amongst the people clusters. As posts gain traction in one group, show to other nearby groups. Anything wrong with this other than compute time and assuming that the solution costs less than our current social costs (say this was done secretly, is it pareto optimal if the troll doesn't know others don't read their posts?)?
• rm999 18y ago
  If you want to tell people how to use a self-moderating site, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Either hire moderators, go to Slashdot's system of rewarding certain behaviors with moderator points, or live with the digg/reddit consequences. Also, controlling how people downvote things is going to be really tough. Many people think comments that they disagree with do detract from conversation. I think one obvious rule should be you can't downvote comments on stories you comment on yourself.
• mhp 18y ago
  I feel that this is a function of the size of the community plus the type of people in that community. As it gets larger, it gets filled with more of the type you don't want. Compare the Joel on Software discussion forum with the Business of Software discussion forum. Same site. Same format. Completely different quality of discussion. We've done experiments to help raise the quality of discussion by limiting the number of posts, having active moderators, deleting rude and obnoxious posts... But I expect asking your community to shape up doesn't work too well. The comment about PG forking the discussion probably seems like the only solution. Start over every couple of months or years.
• michaelneale 18y ago
  Well don't you think its good the "angry sarcasm" was -5? I think it is very out of place here. the -4 and +9 difference is worrying though (although the points have changed since then... damn timezones !).
• pg 18y ago
  The magnitudes of the scores seem different than they might have a year ago, but the directions don't.
  • bk 18y ago
    Based on my sporadic use of reddit, short comments are the noisiest form of rot/cancer a in reddit-like engine/interface, such as puns and lame jokes that self-perpetuate into long threads. Perhaps the comment form should have a self-check note along the lines of: "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." Good heuristics for self-detection are: short and no substance. Perhaps mods need to nuke bad comments for a while to establish a noticeable standard.
    • pg 18y ago
      That's a very interesting observation. I noticed that too. Short comments are occasionally very useful. Occasionally they're the pin that pops the balloon. "What happens when x = 0?" But usually they're short on length because they're short on ideas. I wonder if there is some way to discourage short comments? I could for example bias the comment sorting algorithm to put longer comments higher among siblings.
      • mixmax 18y ago
        I think that bk has an excellent point with putting a small "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." note under the comment box. The psychology of such a note might help a lot, besides not all recent posters would necessarily know that thoughtless witty comments aren't highly valued here.
        • pg 18y ago
          I already put an invitation to read this http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html under every comment box for the first day of a new user's account. Maybe I should add an additional confirmation step for short comments.
• noodle 18y ago
  i tend to agree, and i follow the mantra of only dishing out karma for things that are either particularly helpful/insightful/interesting, and only downvoting things that are actually detracting from the topic at hand. everything else is neutral, which would, to me, include something that i don't agree with but doesn't actually detract from anything.
• vaksel 18y ago
  groupthink is an inherent problem with sites like this...nothing you can do about it.
• timf 18y ago
  "don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation" Maybe it's time to make the functionality different, make the mechanisms easier to not get wrong with respect to the guidelines. Perhaps you hit the downvote button and you are given two choices "off topic / detracts" or "I disagree" and the latter is a no-op with respect to karma.
  • jyothi 18y ago
    downvote <- disagree flag <- detract how about using it that way? May be PG can have some logic to screen all flagged conversation on flag score than a semantic scan or abusive content.
    • TomOfTTB 18y ago
      Why should anyone be penalized in any way for disagreeing? Is well thought out disagreement any less valuable than the opinion of someone who agrees with you? Why would we as a community even want people to know which opinion is more popular (provided both opinions are intelligent and well thought out)?
      • Xichekolas 18y ago
        As you implicitly point out, jyothi's suggestion is not how things are normally done here. Upvoting is generally for agreement or promoting something well written. Downvoting is usually for things that are outright false or trollish. Disagreement is expressed by... well... disagreeing (yes, that means via reply) OR voting up another comment that already expresses your disagreement (no point having many people say the same thing). I hadn't considered it until you pointed it out, but in the case of trolls, flagging is functionally the same as downvoting, so I really only downvote things that are blatantly false.
• menloparkbum 18y ago
  Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, so I downmodded them all, if that makes you feel better.
  • rokhayakebe 18y ago
    so I downmodded them all Frankly I do not see the point of downvoting or bragging about it, and your explanation does not make it right either. Each of your comments detracted from the conversation, You single handedly decided what detracts from the conversation, and I am sure you are not HN spokesman. It's like "an eye for an eye", but in this case you are hurting someone because you disagree with their opinion or the way they expressed it (and yes, I understand sometimes some users can be disrespectful). But even when someone is clearly not following the HN guidelines, they should simply be reminded of it, then ignored forever. The "free hand" in HN will auto-regulate them. That is the same free hand that does not upvote spam links. Downvoting comments "should not be" just as downvoting stories "is not". Silence is by far the best way to respond to ignorance.
    • daleharvey 18y ago
      This thread was specifically made for conversation about how those 3 comments were voted, I dont think that counts as "bragging" While they didnt add "in my opinion" I think its more than obviously implied that it was his opinion that he was stating, and was not attempting to speak on behalf of anyone else. and the original poster stated that comments detract from the conversation should be downmodded, I agree that all 3 were somewhat insulting and added no value to the conversation, while I may be a relatively new user, they all seemed out of spirit (in my opinion)
    • scott_s 18y ago
      Except the entire point of allowing users to downvote comments is to promote civility. If someone is not being civil, then they should be downvoted. This is a clearer and less distracting means of telling someone what's not appreciated. At least, this is my understanding of how pg intends the system to be used.
• ilamont 18y ago
  I wonder how these scores were affected by their placement on the thread. I've observed that many good HN comments that are added relatively late often fail to get any additional positive votes -- my guess is that people can't be bothered to scroll down, and/or assume that anything with a low score is not worth reading especially when there are other comments in the same thread with high ratings.
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  • axod 18y ago
    I think you're right here. Also depends on the timing. If you're the first commenter, and you're 'kinda' right, you'll get far more upvotes than if you're late to the party and very right. I think the reason the 3rd comment got upvoted was that it wasn't a direct comment, but a response to someone else. Having said that, I think we're reading way too much into this.
• aristus 18y ago
  McKinsey suggests and practices a rule about growth: don't grow more than 25% per year if you want to preserve your culture. I think once HN started having self-reflective posts it passed into "Shirky Completeness", a stage in communities where the old hats become preoccupied with preserving the culture and cannot keep up with training new users to fit their mould. Sub groups fork off to the point that the several concurrent streams stop interacting. My friend and I realized we were reading completely different aspects of HN. Karma is (or should be) a proxy for quality. But there are no mechanisms except social ones. I also suspect that there are certain commercial "reputation" companies that have HN in their sights now. Not spammers per se, but father along the continuum to PR. There have been quite a lot of activity geared toward "whipping the froth" and post-storms around specific topics. It may be time to fork HN. I actually also suspect PG has already forked HN for private YCombinator use. I haven't seen a post from RTM or TLB for over a year.
  • drewcrawford 18y ago
    I suspect that part of the problem is in the execution--our collective social will simply isn't sufficient to maintain an awesome community as time (and users) go to infinity. Along that line, I've been experimenting with some more direct controls for community control: scaling voting power with user intelligence as measured by an objective standard. I posted about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464700 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464700
  • silentbicycle 18y ago
    I wonder if calculating a user's karma as a weighted average of the scores of their last N comments, rather than a sum, would help. Inasmuch as karma scores affect anything, it might gently encourage fewer, more insightful comments.
    • silentbicycle 18y ago
      Also, some comments stimulate interesting sub-threads. In cases where something is voted way, way down but has positive responses, it's probably trolling; positive with a lot of positive responses could mean "thought-provoking". Of course, the real trick is to encourage interesting discussion and not just an echo chamber...
• dmpayton 18y ago
  Agreed. Perhaps it would help stem the groupthink if points on individual comments were hidden? That way, one would need to judge the comment based on its own merit, rather than going with the crowd.
• anuraggoel 18y ago
  Your post is on the front page. This means we are still actively introspecting as a community. That's a very healthy sign in my opinion, so I wouldn't worry so much.
  • unalone 18y ago
    It could also be signs of vanity. Reddit went downhill after a month of a ton of people writing Ask Reddit posts. I'm not saying we have that problem, but usually, the presence of a topic like this is just taking away from an external news story.
    • pg 18y ago
      I already penalize Ask HN posts (or more precisely, url-less ones) significantly in the ranking algorithm. That seems to keep them from taking over the front page.
      • anuraggoel 18y ago
        So 'pgrank' is much more advanced than we think.
• DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  People vote their emotion. Can't change it. You can pretend that people vote based on value of the article, whether it should appear lower or higher on the page, etc. But you're just fooling yourself. So the karma system rewards people who make the most people feel the best. You can call that cleverness, schmoozing, politics, or bullshit. Because of this, it promotes people thinking of like mind, not necessarily interesting things. It's "let's say happy, slightly interesting things to each other about information that doesn't challenge our worldview" Known bug.
  • thorax 18y ago
    This site has taught me not to downvote with emotion. I pretty much think "how many votes should this have? how great is the comment?" and I upvote or downvote it based on how incorrect their current rating is. Lately I find myself upvoting a lot of comments I don't agree with simply because people have downvoted them into oblivion just for having a different opinion.
    • unalone 18y ago
      I'll do that too. I'm much more lenient towards people with good opinions here than I am anywhere else. Even so, sometimes I'm tired and in a bad mood and I'll read somebody making a long, utterly wrong point and I'll downvote it instead of responding. Nobody's entirely innocent.
  • mixmax 18y ago
    One of the primary reasons I come here is to learn new things. A lot of this learning comes from people I initially disagree with, but that have good arguments or insights. And I upvote them, even if I don't agree.
    • DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      One of the critical factors in an aggregation site (or in a consulting relationship for that matter) is the ability for participants to step outside the norms. To disagree. HN has a better record of this than say, reddit. That's why I stay here. There's some opportunity for people with radically different opinions to meet and share. To the extent that the board supports that, I'm a big fan. But to the OPs point, you can say the same thing different ways and get different results. It's not about information. It's about emotional impact. So you end up doing this little dance whenever you'd like to correct somebody. There are lots of tactics, but it all boils down to presenting information to somebody they're not going to like in a format that's easily digestible. To some degree, that's just being civil -- treating people like you would if you were talking to them at a bar. But that's time intensive and most times I know I don't think it's worth the effort. Folks will argue with you ad infinitum anyway, and that's best-case. So you stick to short, catchy, terse comments that mix in a little information goodness. People upvote the comment thinking it's the information, but it's really the emotional impact of the message. It's the presentation, stupid. The content is not nearly as important.
• cchooper 18y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your experiment. You expressed the same thing three ways, so people clearly aren't voting differently according to whether they agree or disagree. They're voting on how you expressed yourself. Personally, I don't disagree with the votes much. The witty sarcasm has been up-modded too much, which is a problem on all sites, but it was the most concise and least agressive post.
• mark-t 18y ago
  I upvote things that I think are more important for other people to read -- that is, if I think it should be displayed higher on the page. I downvote things that I don't think other people should bother reading -- that is, if they're uninsightful, irrelevant, or somehow distasteful. The vast majority of things I just leave alone. I think the word karma itself is partly to blame. It makes you think you're rating whether the comment is good or bad, but the effect of the up/down arrows is merely to sort comments based on relative quality/value for people who view the thread after you. For a while, I've toyed with the idea of suggesting a new interface that asks users to sort comments, rather than upvote or downvote, but I haven't thoroughly thought about it.
  • jodrellblank 18y ago
    I was thinking about two sets of up/down buttons. "comment adds to/detracts from the thread" and "agree/disagree with the comment" The idea being to have fewer controversial yet contributing comments downvoted to unreadability.
• shiranaihito 18y ago
  > don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which detract from the conversation True, we shouldn't downvote something just because we disagree with it, but it's more difficult to define what's detracting from the conversation. Some may disagree with a comment, but since they "can't" just downvote because of that, they deem it "detracting" and maybe even say so. I think we should only downvote comments that are clearly inappropriate, not those that are somewhat off-topic. Everyone has their way of trying to contribute to conversations, and the conversations don't have to fall strictly under whatever topic is in the headline.
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• diN0bot 18y ago
  i like when users can customize the results. eg, categories rather than a single popular ranking. there are some technical/performance issues to consider, but in an ideal world, my ranking could be customizable on: * submitter karma or username * number of comments, links in comments (and links should be shown in a toolbox so i don't have to scroll for them) * max/mean comment karma * submission domain * submission key words or category * popularity-newness continuum position (edit: i keep forgetting how to make bullet lists, and help only tells me how to make new paragraphs. eit)
• TrevorJ 18y ago
  It really all boils down to each of us continuing to make an effort to maintain a level of discourse here that we all desire. Karma tweaks and algorithms are tools but they absolve very little of the actual hard work it takes from every member of a community.
• stuntgoat 18y ago
  Nice experiment; are you a scientist? ( one sentence witty sarcasm )
• giles_bowkett 18y ago
  design flaw.