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I think having some threads about politics--at least the main issues most people here care about--is very valuable. HN provides a particular perspective that is

by tikhonj 13y ago

I think having some threads about politics--at least the main issues most people here care about--is very valuable. HN provides a particular perspective that is fairly hard to find outside other tech sites. Sure, the comments are not always up to quality and are sometimes quite extreme, but they offer a very interesting and often reasonably well-supported perspective. The real problem is how many different articles and threads get upvoted on the same topic. One or two Snowden threads? Great! But ten or twenty? With more than one at a time? It's all too much. Not only does this take spots away from other relevant topics but it also fragments the discussion. And so we get repetition. Repeated comments, repeated ideas, repeated arguments... ad nauseum. I only have so much to gain from reading the same opinions over and over--especially if I agree with them! This happens with other common topics as well, but it seems particularly endemic with certain political themes. Moreover, the political articles tend to be fairly similar to each other in nature and content. Sure, we get a fair amount of Go and Haskell articles too, but at least the articles themselves tend to vary quite a bit. Of course, a very important aspect of HN is that everything is ultimately implicitly decided by the community. So here's my plea to everyone voting on articles: try to vote for fewer political articles, especially on "hot" topics. Don't completely ignore politics, but try to avoid having more than one every couple of days or at least more than one at a time. Now, how do we actually go about doing this? I actually have no idea. Hopefully somebody else can come up with something :).

derefr 13y ago
I've had the idea for a while for a new thread-management model for social bookmarking sites like Reddit or HN, and I think it would help to avoid this quagmire. • In the new model, multiple "posts" (outbound article links or textual self-posts) could be attached to a single comment thread. The thread, not the post, would be the root-level object tracked by the system: Thread HAS MANY {Post, Comment}. • New, hot posts which were started as their own threads, but which "should belong" to an existing thread, would get merged into that existing thread by the mods. • The combined thread would then appear, under the title of the newest "post" in it, on the index pages, with a single aggregate score from all the posts merged to create it (though any "freshness"-based calculations would presumably look at the age of the newest post merged into the thread, not the age of the thread as a whole.) • Clicking through from the index page would always take you to the thread page, not directly to the outbound link URL of the newest post. • On the thread page, you'd see a header section containing all the actual outbound links and/or textual self-posts, newest first; and then a single unified comments section (also merged from all the post-threads.) • Comments would be encouraged to take all the posts in the thread so far as prerequisite reading for their comment, rather than just the newest one. In other words, to speak to the accumulated knowledge of the thread so far. • Older topics, still attached to the thread, would remain open for dicussion; you'd never have to rehash your old comment about X from the old X thread in the new X thread, since your comment would still be there in the new X thread (it being the same thread.) --- So for example, in this model, there'd only be one "Snowden/NSA/PRISM" thread. When new articles came out regarding all that, they'd get attached to the thread, the thread would pop to the hot page (to roughly where the article-on-its-own was trending), and the previous discussion in the thread could be continued in light of the new article. Thoughts?
- angersock 13y ago
  Erm, not to be silly, but how'd you get that nice bulleted list?
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Unicode bullets. Here are some to cut and paste: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
- benaiah 13y ago
  Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but it looks like it's just a complicated description of tagging, with commenting on the tags instead of the individual articles. That said, it could still be interesting. The problem is, unless you're commenting on specific articles, you'll just end up with extremely general, "cheap" comments filling up the tag, with no specific topics to produce genuinely interesting conversations instead of blathering pontification. It would be interesting to see a system like that. I think it would require some very strong community norms to keep it in check, which is fundamentally unstable (e.g., HN today is very different than it was a couple years ago, when I started reading).
  - DanBC 13y ago
    > You'll just end up with extremely general, "cheap" comments filling up the tag, with no specific topics to produce genuinely interesting conversations instead of blathering pontification. I think that's the problem with a lot of the submissions to HN. Something happens, and 8 different tech blogs cover it, and 3 different newspapers, and 5 different bloggers. All of these get submitted to HN. Some of them make it to the front page, where people have the same discussion.
  - derefr 13y ago
    What I was going for was more like a traditional message-board design with "forum threads", each on a given "topic" that drifts over time along with the conversation. (Tags keep a discussion pinned to what the tag is "about", whereas a thread is just a cluster of posts, and the cluster's "topic"--its center of mass--can drift as more points are added to the cluster.) Except, with this "message board", some posts (text posts or links) could be granted a special status and "promoted" up to a pinned area at the top, to serve as a collection of "prerequisites and resources for discussion." The thread's "preview" on the index would then show newest pinned stuff.
davidw 13y ago
The problem with self-moderation is that it's not a stable solution. Political stories draw in people interested primarily in politics, and since it's so easy to be interested in, it draws in lots of people who are primarily focused on that. Anyone can have an opinion on politics, whereas finding people to discuss actors vs CSP vs threads as methods of concurrent programming is much tougher, and sacrificing that to reenact liberals vs libertarians for the 37898289261st time on the internet is a tragedy.
- brudgers 13y ago
  Self moderation is augmented by the cycling of stories off the front page. HN is in a news cycle where there is a nexus between the business of "high-tech" and politics playing out in a new way - or the same old way, depending on one's cynicism. As always the solution to a low ebb in HN quality is to post interesting content, or even better to write some.
  - davidw 13y ago
    > As always the solution to a low ebb in HN quality is to post interesting content, or even better to write some. This is an economics problem: * Posting an outrage story written by someone else, or a political article: cheap. * Writing good, interesting, and thoughtful content yourself: expensive. The relative quantities of the two goods, without any intervention, is left as an exercise to the reader.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      so ... if you wrote the original, you get karma, if you just post the original, you get 1/x Karma? seems, interesting. Would encourage less posting, more thoughtful commenting.
      - yareally 13y ago
        Perhaps amending to that a filter to that which gives less upvotes for submissions that are repetitive based on url, page title and article keywords during a certain period of time. Though the only problem with that would be if early submissions are of less quality and get upvoted while ones that come slightly later are of higher quality.
mjn 13y ago
> often reasonably well-supported perspective That's the part that's unfortunately often untrue. HN posters on political topics seem much less informed than on technical topics. On technical subjects, someone who's offering strong opinions while obviously not having read much background material will typically be sidelined, but in political discussions, people don't seem to feel a strong need to do background reading or support their claims with evidence.

by tikhonj 13y ago

derefr 13y ago

I've had the idea for a while for a new thread-management model for social bookmarking sites like Reddit or HN, and I think it would help to avoid this quagmire. • In the new model, multiple "posts" (outbound article links or textual self-posts) could be attached to a single comment thread. The thread, not the post, would be the root-level object tracked by the system: Thread HAS MANY {Post, Comment}. • New, hot posts which were started as their own threads, but which "should belong" to an existing thread, would get merged into that existing thread by the mods. • The combined thread would then appear, under the title of the newest "post" in it, on the index pages, with a single aggregate score from all the posts merged to create it (though any "freshness"-based calculations would presumably look at the age of the newest post merged into the thread, not the age of the thread as a whole.) • Clicking through from the index page would always take you to the thread page, not directly to the outbound link URL of the newest post. • On the thread page, you'd see a header section containing all the actual outbound links and/or textual self-posts, newest first; and then a single unified comments section (also merged from all the post-threads.) • Comments would be encouraged to take all the posts in the thread so far as prerequisite reading for their comment, rather than just the newest one. In other words, to speak to the accumulated knowledge of the thread so far. • Older topics, still attached to the thread, would remain open for dicussion; you'd never have to rehash your old comment about X from the old X thread in the new X thread, since your comment would still be there in the new X thread (it being the same thread.) --- So for example, in this model, there'd only be one "Snowden/NSA/PRISM" thread. When new articles came out regarding all that, they'd get attached to the thread, the thread would pop to the hot page (to roughly where the article-on-its-own was trending), and the previous discussion in the thread could be continued in light of the new article. Thoughts?

angersock 13y ago
Erm, not to be silly, but how'd you get that nice bulleted list?
- danielweber 13y ago
  Unicode bullets. Here are some to cut and paste: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
benaiah 13y ago
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but it looks like it's just a complicated description of tagging, with commenting on the tags instead of the individual articles. That said, it could still be interesting. The problem is, unless you're commenting on specific articles, you'll just end up with extremely general, "cheap" comments filling up the tag, with no specific topics to produce genuinely interesting conversations instead of blathering pontification. It would be interesting to see a system like that. I think it would require some very strong community norms to keep it in check, which is fundamentally unstable (e.g., HN today is very different than it was a couple years ago, when I started reading).
- DanBC 13y ago
  > You'll just end up with extremely general, "cheap" comments filling up the tag, with no specific topics to produce genuinely interesting conversations instead of blathering pontification. I think that's the problem with a lot of the submissions to HN. Something happens, and 8 different tech blogs cover it, and 3 different newspapers, and 5 different bloggers. All of these get submitted to HN. Some of them make it to the front page, where people have the same discussion.
- derefr 13y ago
  What I was going for was more like a traditional message-board design with "forum threads", each on a given "topic" that drifts over time along with the conversation. (Tags keep a discussion pinned to what the tag is "about", whereas a thread is just a cluster of posts, and the cluster's "topic"--its center of mass--can drift as more points are added to the cluster.) Except, with this "message board", some posts (text posts or links) could be granted a special status and "promoted" up to a pinned area at the top, to serve as a collection of "prerequisites and resources for discussion." The thread's "preview" on the index would then show newest pinned stuff.

davidw 13y ago

The problem with self-moderation is that it's not a stable solution. Political stories draw in people interested primarily in politics, and since it's so easy to be interested in, it draws in lots of people who are primarily focused on that. Anyone can have an opinion on politics, whereas finding people to discuss actors vs CSP vs threads as methods of concurrent programming is much tougher, and sacrificing that to reenact liberals vs libertarians for the 37898289261st time on the internet is a tragedy.

brudgers 13y ago
Self moderation is augmented by the cycling of stories off the front page. HN is in a news cycle where there is a nexus between the business of "high-tech" and politics playing out in a new way - or the same old way, depending on one's cynicism. As always the solution to a low ebb in HN quality is to post interesting content, or even better to write some.
- davidw 13y ago
  > As always the solution to a low ebb in HN quality is to post interesting content, or even better to write some. This is an economics problem: * Posting an outrage story written by someone else, or a political article: cheap. * Writing good, interesting, and thoughtful content yourself: expensive. The relative quantities of the two goods, without any intervention, is left as an exercise to the reader.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    so ... if you wrote the original, you get karma, if you just post the original, you get 1/x Karma? seems, interesting. Would encourage less posting, more thoughtful commenting.
    - yareally 13y ago
      Perhaps amending to that a filter to that which gives less upvotes for submissions that are repetitive based on url, page title and article keywords during a certain period of time. Though the only problem with that would be if early submissions are of less quality and get upvoted while ones that come slightly later are of higher quality.

mjn 13y ago

> often reasonably well-supported perspective That's the part that's unfortunately often untrue. HN posters on political topics seem much less informed than on technical topics. On technical subjects, someone who's offering strong opinions while obviously not having read much background material will typically be sidelined, but in political discussions, people don't seem to feel a strong need to do background reading or support their claims with evidence.