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I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't look like it. There's surprisingly little difference between this and the regular f

• DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  I'd be more curious to see the difference on a highly-emotional news day -- election, war, disease -- that kind of thing. Would the old guard stick to tech-related material? Or are they as vulnerable to highly-charged stories as the noobs? In all honesty, there really isn't much going on in the way of external-to-hacking events in the world right now.
  • einarvollset 18y ago
    You mean like Obama deciding to fight the release of pictures of prisoner abuse by US Forces? or Sri Lanka's government shelling a refugee camp containing rebel fighters despite a no artillery pledge?
    • Zev 18y ago
      While both of those stories are important news, the former isn't new, and the latter doesn't (unfortunately?) have much of an appeal to most people in the West (which is where most people in HN are located).
    • Semiapies 18y ago
      Important general news is not automatically hacker news. This isn't Reddit, and this isn't CNN.com or BBC.co.uk.
• geuis 18y ago
  I'm not sure why, but my feeling is that I am personally less happy with the content a) being submitted and b) making it to the front page than I was even 6 months ago. Maybe since I'm not a newbie on HN anymore I'm remembering through rose-tinted glasses and yelling at the kids to get off my lawn. The things I care about are programming tips, new software, javascript/python/ruby/etc specific articles, new startup companies. There seems to be a lot less of this kind of content and more general tech news, which I can read at any number of other sites. I don't care about business stories(other than those related to startups) and rumors Techcrunch has started about something. On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still good. I would be great if there was a way to get easier access to the comments than the ity-bity link we have now.
  • joseakle 18y ago
    Perhaps some other kind of weighing system might work. Votes from high karma users could boost stories more than low karma users. Is there any way to downvote a story?
    • iron_ball 18y ago
      Bad idea. Remember the kerfuffle around the orange names? This would be worse, because high karma would have a numeric and measurable effect on the site.
      • mediaman 18y ago
        It seems slightly different than the orange incident. There, it was a highly visible symbol: either the poster's name was orange, or it was not, and it turned into a status symbol. A number however is far more opaque, because it masks two different factors: the number of people voting, and the assigned weight of those people. For a given number, it is impossible (or at least difficult) to tell the relative importance of each factor. Edit: This got me thinking: couldn't 'karma'-based voting help prevent the erosion that affects many other sites? If those dedicated members have high rank, there is a switching cost to joining another site, because they lose that elevated weight. That keeps them "in the game", whereas many other similar sites have lost the original members as average quality declined, which began a feedback loop of poorer quality. Then, if elevated weight gives those users greater influence, the original character of the site is preserved because (1) the original users don't leave and (2) those users exert great influence on the site. The only weakness is preventing low quality posters gaining karma weight through the voting of other low quality posters, thereby undermining the quality of high-karma users.
  • timr 18y ago
    Looking at stories at one moment, on one day, is probably not capturing the whole story. It would be interesting to see something like the RMS difference in story ranking between the two menthods over a long period of time. If the two methods are truly equivalent, that number should tend to zero.
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• randomwalker 18y ago
  In fact, the two views are almost identical -- I wonder if it is simply because there aren't that many votes from accounts less than a year old. Could you share what fraction of front-page votes came from new voters? Thanks.
  • swolchok 18y ago
    Maybe the new accounts hate almost everything that shows up. Remember, we can't downvote, so lack of vote is the way to express disapproval. (60-odd days old here, would be on a downmodding rampage if allowed) EDIT: By the way, the lack of downvoting means that posting any article that isn't so off-topic as to get flagged and removed is free karma. I've been working hard to get to the 100 karma so I can downvote and I'm still only at 78, and I'm thinking maybe it's because I don't submit articles.
    • Zev 18y ago
      You can't downvote on stories, only flag them, even after you get the downvote button for comments. And FWIW, I've managed to get 550+ karma without submitting any stories and only posting (what I hope turns are) interesting comments. So don't think you have to submit stories to get karma.
• icey 18y ago
  For things like this, it'd be cool to have a checkbox on our profile pages that lets us opt to use the classic or standard view as the default list. It's not that different a list today, but over time it might be nice to have the option.
• bouncingsoul 18y ago
  Doesn't surprise me. I don't know why some people here rag on new users so hard: everytime I've encountered a particularly low quality submission or comment it was from a 100+ day account.
• amichail 18y ago
  How do you measure quality?
  • stcredzero 18y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
• prakash 18y ago
  What inspired you to do this? As a quick & dirty test, can I see "HN Frontpage ranked using only votes from accounts over 2 years old"? Can you turn this into a feature, with a user-specified time period? -- would be an awesome filter to view HN by and to see, if, over a period of time there is any difference in quality? Thanks very much!
  • colins_pride 18y ago
    Yeah, when you think about it the general form is also true: it doesn't make a lot of sense to hard-code the sorting algos
    • Retric 18y ago
      Calculating that stuff on the fly is simple and fast with a single hard-coded algorithm vs using a custom view per user. You would also need to store a lot more information to be able to recalculate this stuff. Granted HN does not seem to cache it's pages, but it's one of the first options when looking to increase speed. PS: Even just limiting sorting to the top 1000 overall stories and top 1000 new stories could be a major speed bump.
      • colins_pride 18y ago
        I think I remember PG mentioning that with the new server everything fits in memory ... I see your point about speed, but I think that there are a bunch of shortcuts you can take (like your top 1k idea) that mitigate the issue, and if it is a feature you can switch off if you'd prefer to just go fast with the hard-coded, then ...
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
• andreyf 18y ago
  I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't look like it. I'm not sure if this measure means much... with no downvotes, if quality goes down, "classic users" will simply vote less often. That would be a decently interesting statistic: (page views)/(story votes) over the lifetime of older accounts. Not sure if that data is still available, though.
  • rw 18y ago
    I've been here long enough... since February or so I've drastically decreased my voting participation. I perceive that my votes won't counteract the effects of the (well-intentioned) flood of newcomers.
  • pg 18y ago
    Actually one of the surprising things is the huge percentage of votes cast by old-timers. For frontpage articles it is never less than 40% and sometimes as much as 80%.
    • stanleydrew 18y ago
      Doesn't this make sense? The people who are most likely to vote are those who feel like they're part of the HN community, and those people are much more likely to be old-timers. I guess this is somewhat surprising if there are many many more newcomers. What's the ratio of new voters to old voters?
    • jyothi 18y ago
      Definitely not intuitive given all the old timers are feeling the quality is gone down and yet they continue to contribute for the front page articles to stay on. Does this mean the problem at core could be with submissions and the moment it floats up to page 1 - which it would with just > 4 points in 3-4 hrs it gets reassuring votes even from old-timers. PG, You should dig out the data on how lazy old-timers are getting in digging out material for HN front page :)
  • Tichy 18y ago
    But it seems as if the new users vote on similar things as the old users, that is the interesting thing? Although it might be fun to create HN/postmodern where only votes from accounts less than a year old are counted, and compare that to classic?
• comatose_kid 18y ago
  This makes the assumption that 'senior' members' voting habits haven't degraded over time. Say a bad post hits the front page - would this subtly influence future votes (regardless of how old someone's account is), resulting in more bad posts making the front page? On a semi-related note, it would be neat to keep a history of the front page at regularly sampled intervals (say every year, starting at year 1) and see how the two measurements diverge over time.
• dfranke 18y ago
  How does it look if you set the cutoff to before the move from "Startup News" to "Hacker News"?
• ftse 18y ago
  Seems to me there are more Reddit-type comments submitted lately. It is something I have been very conscious of, much stronger than a hunch or gut feeling. I'm curious as to why you tried to measure this - do you still suspect a drop in the mean quality of the HN clientele despite what the /classic page might suggest?
• epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  The decrease in quality could be due to less good stories on the new page and not newer people upvoting. That is, newer people may be just as good at upvoting, but the real issue is that so few people upvote from the new page. If true, this change would further the problem because even less real votes from the new page would be occurring. To test this possibility, randomly reserve some of the places on the front page for new stories (perhaps in the bottom half). Then more people would be looking at and potentially upvoting the good stories from the new page.
• mlLK 18y ago
  Considering, [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231209 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231209] are you still evaluating what makes the front-page according to this algorithm? (p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5 It reminds me of the distance formula in a vacuum that evaluates [or rates] a submission as a ratio according to it's position out of 210 [basically any story with a non-zero karma value (p - 1) that evaluates <= 210 has made the front-page] I guess the gist of what I'm getting at is, how are you generating these lists? Are they all extended from this algorithm and filtered according to a condition? Have you ever generated a list that doesn't extend this algorithm? [EDIT] Ok, so while I'm here, in this meta-HN of a thread, I'm going to ask a question that might seem like absolute bat-shit: What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN?
  • mlLK 18y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609200
• greendestiny 18y ago
  What about articles submitted by over 1 year olds? A quick look of the front page shows we'd lose articles by: vorador, blasdel, kqr2, lrm242, ontilt, vijayr, markup, charlesmount and figured. On the whole those are pretty good articles, but a classic submits would be interesting to compare with.
• 10ren 18y ago
  I think it's the recent comments - their shallow attacks reduce the perceived quality of the submissions. Recent comments tend not to collaborate with the article - they aren't filling in gaps, adding further instances, extending the concept; discussing where the article is clear or unclear; correct or incorrect. And they are neither respectful nor kindly. They don't build on, or with, the article to create something better. Instead, comments compete with the article - they find spelling errors, logic errors, or denounce the article in a shallow, general, global and vague way, often labeling it with connotational language. They aren't trying to build value, but destroy it. The only criticism I enjoy reading is what you'd get from a kind and wise mentor. If someone hates an article, I'd prefer it if they just ignored it. But I can't make them do that - so, recently I've taken to ignoring the comments here, and going direct to the article to make up my own mind.
  • stcredzero 18y ago
    I think I have recently been wrongly profiled by someone who shares this view. I mentioned that certain patterns of behavior in internet consumers resemble those encountered in dating sites and used car dealerships. I know there have been economic studies of this. (Couldn't find it with Google, though.) However, I was attacked as if I was merely trying to associate Apple Computer with dating sites and used car salesmen. In my two decades online, I've found that those who attack others to try and "clean up" a news group actually end up trashing it with noise and junk. (In fact, I have been guilty of this as well.) Much better for everyone to act respectfully.
    • 10ren 18y ago
      I just found the comment you probably mean: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607638 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607638 I read it as you adding something to the discussion. But I have noticed that certain subjects tend to rile people up - I think it's to do with categorizing people, almost like an -ism (as in racism or sexism). PC/mac is one of these; but there's also vi/emacs, Windows/Linux, programming languages, and even Holden/Ford (apparently). The so-called religious wars, that tend to bring out emotions. Probably because people identify with the product, and so any perceived slight is taken as a personal attack, therefore there's a wish to defend against it or to counter-attack, grabbing whatever means are available. I've noticed that I've strayed into the area myself: without realizing it, I've used Mac/PC to make a point (about integrated hardware/software vs. modular components - the former is needed in the earlier years. It's an idea from Clayton Christianson, of the innovator's dilemma fame.) I wasn't attacked, but I got some odd responses... eventually I realized that it's just a touchy subject. Like sex, religion and politics. I think you might have caused offense with the earlier part of your comment, where you seem to be implying that Mac purchasers lack "the wherewithal to tell the difference." I can see that causing offense, even though you are a Mac user yourself, and you intended it in a neutral way. And that's coming from me, who's not a Mac user. I agree that the denotation of the statement is neutral - the same statement is true of evaluating professional work in general: dentists, surgeons, barristers, plumbers, car repairers, etc... and of course coding (for the non-coder.) How do you know if you are being ripped off? You don't.
• herdrick 18y ago
  But front page voters influence each other. How about doing the same thing for the 'new' page? That's a cleaner test.
• sayrer 18y ago
  the n00bs are making us dumber
• scorpion032 18y ago
  When U [said](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html), need to "weigh the votes" I thought you said considering votes from people with more than a certain points as more, rather than what now seems to be "older peoples votes only"
• pg 18y ago
  If we're going to keep this around, the threshold ought to be set at a particular time instead of 1 year back from whenever the request is made. So I changed it to use a fixed threshold set just before the infamous TechCrunch mention in March 2008.