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I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not
by mbesto 13y ago
I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN.
There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community.
The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist.
> But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal.
It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know?
EDIT: grammar
- RogerL 13y agoI guess my main question is what is pg seeing that he doesn't like? He stated that comment quality was 'higher' after he turned this on briefly. I honestly have no idea what this means as it lacks specificity. From there I went with what the main complaints of posters in this thread and the other thread were complaining about. Vacuous comments, puns, and the like. I must admit to a high tolerance and enjoyment of witty zingers, so long as they don't dominate the discussion, so that colors my view re noise/signal.
- 300bps 13y agoThere are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity. This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the 10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times. From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying signals on HN than up/down voting.