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Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about the character of the comments. The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comment

by pg 17y ago

Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about the character of the comments. The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up. The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment. So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing. I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

tptacek 17y ago
You should do what you've been doing all along. Provide occasional reinforcement: post items urging people to look at the guidelines, urging people not to upvote naked snark, and perhaps urging them to downvote snark that seems to be catching on. One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either. I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.
- sganesh 17y ago
  Maybe the guidelines should be '0'th or the '1'st post once or twice a day.
  - Dilpil 17y ago
    If it is shown that often, it will lose its impact. Showing it only once, especially if the cause is listed, evokes a much stronger sense of shame.
- marcusbooster 17y ago
  How about if a comment is losing a significant amount of points then the author is required to view a simple guidelines page on the next visit to HN and sign off on it.
  - tomjen2 17y ago
    Like they sign the EULA for software?
    - marcusbooster 17y ago
      Yeah kinda, but designed to actually be read :P I was thinking it would contain the offending comment, a little message about it being flagged for not meeting community standards, then briefly list the community standards. A little word of encouragement and a button to show they've actually got the message- and off they go. I don't think it would need to be confrontational or make them actually agree to anything (since they might have good reason to disagree). But a gentle reminder about acceptable behavior could help new people get acclimated.
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    Aren't we discussing the problem that comments that should lose a significant amount of points actually get good scores? Moreover, it's easy to avoid reading bad comments with bad scores.
heed 17y ago
I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb. With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Thus ensuring that HN never gets a comment from Rob Pike or Daniel J. Bernstein, ever.
  - evgen 17y ago
    Its a cost/benefit tradeoff and you are suggesting a black-swan sort of event as the benefit to compensate for a decreased signal to noise ratio. These events have actually happened, or at least we have had authors of various packages that get noticed and startup founders create accounts just to dive into discussions about their new hotness which we all noticed, so this benefit can't be dismissed out of hand but perhaps we need to think of some way to keep the possibility of comments like this open while raising the bar for most other comments...
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Jason Fried from 37s comments regularly on stories that involve 37s. He wouldn't be an HN commenter at all if he had to jump through hoops to get here. But forget about the "black swan" event of Rob Pike posting here on a Go story. Think about the Zappos redesign story. It's not black-swan-crazy to think the UX guy from Zappos might comment here. And lo, he did! There are lots of "normal" people who are close to the stories we post that have a moment to comment on them.
- edw519 17y ago
  I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here Don't be! Another way of looking at it... Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there. and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb. So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day. Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.
jacoblyles 17y ago
Restrict suffrage. edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers. Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.
- mquander 17y ago
  If we make three reasonable assumptions about HN: - The community of readers will keep growing. - New readers will continue to find it easy to comment and participate. - New readers will mostly enjoy and prefer the kind of content PG and many older users want to discourage (not a big reach, since there are tech-oriented sites with millions of readers and participants having pretty shallow discussions.) Then we have a different problem; we're trying to suppress the majority of users and rule with the minority. Incremental rights with a simple "karma" model won't help us in any way I can see, because the majority will vote up people who contribute the kind of content we don't prefer, and those people will have the karma to perpetuate that content. (As I understood, that was your original point here, but I don't see how incremental rights is a good way of tackling that issue, at least not the way SO does it.)
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Minority rule will discourage the kind of content that you posit new readers prefer and old readers dislike. If new readers need to sit through hard tech articles for a period before they can influence content, this will keep away new readers that don't like hard tech articles. They won't be able to simply reshape the community to their preferences instantly. Imagine a 30-day waiting period between joining the site and being able to influence content. You won't stick around unless you like what is already there.
- allenbrunson 17y ago
  yeah, i agree with this. pg, you've done a hell of a job thus far. i've never seen an internet hangout get this big and this old, yet remain this polite and civil. but as external forces conspire to drag the site down toward the mean, fighting them off will require increasingly severe countermeasures.
req2 17y ago
You could set up a karma threshold to vote, or perhaps allot an increasing number of votes per day based on karma. It doesn't depart greatly from the present karma thresholds and would limit the drowning of commenter votes by reader votes.
m0th87 17y ago
In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while. I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community. Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali... Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)
  - m0th87 17y ago
    I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.
  - charlesmarshall 17y ago
    same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons. With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here! Great job btw pg.
    - NathanKP 17y ago
      I doubt we will ever have lolz cats on here. They would be flagged immediately.
axod 17y ago
What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma? eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score. Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies. (That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course). I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments. Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments". Just an idea...
- vaksel 17y ago
  I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points. Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.
  - axod 17y ago
    Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.
    - davi 17y ago
      You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like: w = ln(k * m) w = weight of vote k = karma of voter m = median points per comment by voter Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).
wglb 17y ago
How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.
- hxa7241 17y ago
  Some research (probably see Cialdini) shows significantly improved compliance when a question is asked that requires confirmation from the subject. So it would better as: "Will you add a thoughtful comment?". How that can be best realised in a web context is something for further consideration . . .
  - amichail 17y ago
    Here's something that is more likely to work: PG gets more voting power than anyone else. Moreover, his voting gives/takes away voting power to/from submitters/commenters, and their voting do likewise, and so on. In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.
    - Readmore 17y ago
      I don't know, that sounds like a Monarchy to me. If you wanted to go that way why not make a user's 'voting power' be based on their own karma / time on the site. This rewards users who have been around longer and have been 'peer reviewed' through their karma.
      - endtime 17y ago
        I'm not sure this is evolutionarily stable against an invasion of new users multiple times the size of the original population.
    - NathanKP 17y ago
      That wouldn't necessarily work because the next person below PG would be likely to be more willing to upvote someone who wasn't as focused. They in turn would be willing to upvote someone else who was worse and so on. I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.
Diederich 17y ago
After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot. I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality. So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though. I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.
- tumult 17y ago
  From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.
  - Diederich 17y ago
    Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working? Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to. I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.
imp 17y ago
To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.
- Kisil 17y ago
  I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.
alexgartrell 17y ago
So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users. Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power". Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior. There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.
- davi 17y ago
  be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.
  - alexgartrell 17y ago
    The voting scheme should bring good to the top and send trolls to the bottom.
    - allenbrunson 17y ago
      that's what people said about usenet. "just killfile the trolls." that didn't stop almost everybody from arguing with them. usenet was designed in a more naive time, and it has zero defenses against disruptions. and that's why it died.
davidw 17y ago
You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points. Good luck with that.
  - davidw 17y ago
    I liked raganwald's post, agreed with it, and think that he's generally a very bright and interesting guy, but I still flagged the article since I thought it wasn't really hacker news. pg can just up and kill stuff though, and doing more of that would set the tenor of the site.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      So, that makes two flags, it's still there. Similar sentiment on the flag by the way, it's a good thing he did but I feel it does not belong here. I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.
      - scott_s 17y ago
        If I recall correctly, pg made an addition that if a submission has over X points, it won't be auto-killed by flagging.
        jacquesm 17y ago
        Correct, but that means that an editor will look at it (as happened, see above) and has to decide whether to give the article a pass or not. I wasn't referring to the 'auto kills', but to the editor kills.
    - 17y ago
jodrellblank 17y ago
ooh ooh, time for me to dust off and drag out the suggestion for another set of vote buttons to separate "I agree/disagree" and "good/poor contribution"? That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.
lhorie 17y ago
>> The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up. How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives? I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad. *http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html
davi 17y ago
I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix. Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.
riffer 17y ago
Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site? I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?
zaidf 17y ago
As a new user, you should not be able to vote until you've read x number of posts or spent x number of days on the site to understand the culture. This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.
fhub 17y ago
Expanding on the idea of the 'classic' link, you could add a user selectable/configurable threshold for who's votes count based on age of registration. Newer users up voting meretricious comments would not impact those with a high set threshold.
pasbesoin 17y ago
How about making upvoting power (e.g. votes per day (or hour, or whatever) accrue with tenure and/or karma? New users start with a low number of upvotes per period. At the start of each period, their count is reset to this maximum. (Unused votes do not roll over.) The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped. I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population. Potentional problems with this: + In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy. + A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero. To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence. Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.
- Erf 17y ago
  Similar: Perhaps make downvoting power -- as opposed to upvoting power -- proportional to age/karma? That would empower experienced (indoctrinated?) members to discourage the undesired content, without too heavily influencing the discussion.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Most important part of this article: pg is now talking about how the site has quality problems. (For the noobs, I don't think this has happened before)
mlLK 17y ago
How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id. Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?
sown 17y ago
You could try and make membership a bit harder to achieve, similar to how demonoid will open and close memberships occasionally and have allowed them to maintain their unique culture (to say nothing of torrents).
endtime 17y ago
How about not letting accounts newer than, say, six months vote on comments? Perhaps you could also do something to ensure that those accounts are active (e.g. they click on links from time to time). It's a lot less sexy than eigenvector centrality, but I think it would have the intended effect. Most trolls don't have the patience to wait that long.

by pg 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago

You should do what you've been doing all along. Provide occasional reinforcement: post items urging people to look at the guidelines, urging people not to upvote naked snark, and perhaps urging them to downvote snark that seems to be catching on. One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either. I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.

sganesh 17y ago
Maybe the guidelines should be '0'th or the '1'st post once or twice a day.
- Dilpil 17y ago
  If it is shown that often, it will lose its impact. Showing it only once, especially if the cause is listed, evokes a much stronger sense of shame.
marcusbooster 17y ago
How about if a comment is losing a significant amount of points then the author is required to view a simple guidelines page on the next visit to HN and sign off on it.
- tomjen2 17y ago
  Like they sign the EULA for software?
  - marcusbooster 17y ago
    Yeah kinda, but designed to actually be read :P I was thinking it would contain the offending comment, a little message about it being flagged for not meeting community standards, then briefly list the community standards. A little word of encouragement and a button to show they've actually got the message- and off they go. I don't think it would need to be confrontational or make them actually agree to anything (since they might have good reason to disagree). But a gentle reminder about acceptable behavior could help new people get acclimated.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  Aren't we discussing the problem that comments that should lose a significant amount of points actually get good scores? Moreover, it's easy to avoid reading bad comments with bad scores.

heed 17y ago

I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb. With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.

tptacek 17y ago
Thus ensuring that HN never gets a comment from Rob Pike or Daniel J. Bernstein, ever.
- evgen 17y ago
  Its a cost/benefit tradeoff and you are suggesting a black-swan sort of event as the benefit to compensate for a decreased signal to noise ratio. These events have actually happened, or at least we have had authors of various packages that get noticed and startup founders create accounts just to dive into discussions about their new hotness which we all noticed, so this benefit can't be dismissed out of hand but perhaps we need to think of some way to keep the possibility of comments like this open while raising the bar for most other comments...
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Jason Fried from 37s comments regularly on stories that involve 37s. He wouldn't be an HN commenter at all if he had to jump through hoops to get here. But forget about the "black swan" event of Rob Pike posting here on a Go story. Think about the Zappos redesign story. It's not black-swan-crazy to think the UX guy from Zappos might comment here. And lo, he did! There are lots of "normal" people who are close to the stories we post that have a moment to comment on them.
edw519 17y ago
I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here Don't be! Another way of looking at it... Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there. and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb. So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day. Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.

jacoblyles 17y ago

Restrict suffrage. edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers. Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.

mquander 17y ago
If we make three reasonable assumptions about HN: - The community of readers will keep growing. - New readers will continue to find it easy to comment and participate. - New readers will mostly enjoy and prefer the kind of content PG and many older users want to discourage (not a big reach, since there are tech-oriented sites with millions of readers and participants having pretty shallow discussions.) Then we have a different problem; we're trying to suppress the majority of users and rule with the minority. Incremental rights with a simple "karma" model won't help us in any way I can see, because the majority will vote up people who contribute the kind of content we don't prefer, and those people will have the karma to perpetuate that content. (As I understood, that was your original point here, but I don't see how incremental rights is a good way of tackling that issue, at least not the way SO does it.)
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Minority rule will discourage the kind of content that you posit new readers prefer and old readers dislike. If new readers need to sit through hard tech articles for a period before they can influence content, this will keep away new readers that don't like hard tech articles. They won't be able to simply reshape the community to their preferences instantly. Imagine a 30-day waiting period between joining the site and being able to influence content. You won't stick around unless you like what is already there.
allenbrunson 17y ago
yeah, i agree with this. pg, you've done a hell of a job thus far. i've never seen an internet hangout get this big and this old, yet remain this polite and civil. but as external forces conspire to drag the site down toward the mean, fighting them off will require increasingly severe countermeasures.

req2 17y ago

You could set up a karma threshold to vote, or perhaps allot an increasing number of votes per day based on karma. It doesn't depart greatly from the present karma thresholds and would limit the drowning of commenter votes by reader votes.

m0th87 17y ago

In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while. I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community. Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali... Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.

NathanKP 17y ago
That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)
- m0th87 17y ago
  I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.
- charlesmarshall 17y ago
  same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons. With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here! Great job btw pg.
  - NathanKP 17y ago
    I doubt we will ever have lolz cats on here. They would be flagged immediately.

axod 17y ago

What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma? eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score. Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies. (That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course). I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments. Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments". Just an idea...

vaksel 17y ago
I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points. Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.
- axod 17y ago
  Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.
  - davi 17y ago
    You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like: w = ln(k * m) w = weight of vote k = karma of voter m = median points per comment by voter Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).

wglb 17y ago

How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.

hxa7241 17y ago
Some research (probably see Cialdini) shows significantly improved compliance when a question is asked that requires confirmation from the subject. So it would better as: "Will you add a thoughtful comment?". How that can be best realised in a web context is something for further consideration . . .
- amichail 17y ago
  Here's something that is more likely to work: PG gets more voting power than anyone else. Moreover, his voting gives/takes away voting power to/from submitters/commenters, and their voting do likewise, and so on. In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.
  - Readmore 17y ago
    I don't know, that sounds like a Monarchy to me. If you wanted to go that way why not make a user's 'voting power' be based on their own karma / time on the site. This rewards users who have been around longer and have been 'peer reviewed' through their karma.
    - endtime 17y ago
      I'm not sure this is evolutionarily stable against an invasion of new users multiple times the size of the original population.
  - NathanKP 17y ago
    That wouldn't necessarily work because the next person below PG would be likely to be more willing to upvote someone who wasn't as focused. They in turn would be willing to upvote someone else who was worse and so on. I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.

Diederich 17y ago

After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot. I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality. So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though. I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.

tumult 17y ago
From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.
- Diederich 17y ago
  Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working? Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to. I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.

imp 17y ago

To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.

Kisil 17y ago
I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.

alexgartrell 17y ago

So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users. Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power". Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior. There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.

davi 17y ago
be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.
- alexgartrell 17y ago
  The voting scheme should bring good to the top and send trolls to the bottom.
  - allenbrunson 17y ago
    that's what people said about usenet. "just killfile the trolls." that didn't stop almost everybody from arguing with them. usenet was designed in a more naive time, and it has zero defenses against disruptions. and that's why it died.

davidw 17y ago

You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.

jacquesm 17y ago
Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points. Good luck with that.
- davidw 17y ago
  I liked raganwald's post, agreed with it, and think that he's generally a very bright and interesting guy, but I still flagged the article since I thought it wasn't really hacker news. pg can just up and kill stuff though, and doing more of that would set the tenor of the site.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    So, that makes two flags, it's still there. Similar sentiment on the flag by the way, it's a good thing he did but I feel it does not belong here. I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.
    - scott_s 17y ago
      If I recall correctly, pg made an addition that if a submission has over X points, it won't be auto-killed by flagging.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Correct, but that means that an editor will look at it (as happened, see above) and has to decide whether to give the article a pass or not. I wasn't referring to the 'auto kills', but to the editor kills.
  - 17y ago

jodrellblank 17y ago

ooh ooh, time for me to dust off and drag out the suggestion for another set of vote buttons to separate "I agree/disagree" and "good/poor contribution"? That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.

lhorie 17y ago

>> The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up. How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives? I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad. *http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

davi 17y ago

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix. Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.

riffer 17y ago

Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site? I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?

zaidf 17y ago

As a new user, you should not be able to vote until you've read x number of posts or spent x number of days on the site to understand the culture. This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.

fhub 17y ago

Expanding on the idea of the 'classic' link, you could add a user selectable/configurable threshold for who's votes count based on age of registration. Newer users up voting meretricious comments would not impact those with a high set threshold.

pasbesoin 17y ago

How about making upvoting power (e.g. votes per day (or hour, or whatever) accrue with tenure and/or karma? New users start with a low number of upvotes per period. At the start of each period, their count is reset to this maximum. (Unused votes do not roll over.) The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped. I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population. Potentional problems with this: + In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy. + A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero. To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence. Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.

Erf 17y ago
Similar: Perhaps make downvoting power -- as opposed to upvoting power -- proportional to age/karma? That would empower experienced (indoctrinated?) members to discourage the undesired content, without too heavily influencing the discussion.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Most important part of this article: pg is now talking about how the site has quality problems. (For the noobs, I don't think this has happened before)

mlLK 17y ago

How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id. Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?

sown 17y ago

You could try and make membership a bit harder to achieve, similar to how demonoid will open and close memberships occasionally and have allowed them to maintain their unique culture (to say nothing of torrents).

endtime 17y ago

How about not letting accounts newer than, say, six months vote on comments? Perhaps you could also do something to ensure that those accounts are active (e.g. they click on links from time to time). It's a lot less sexy than eigenvector centrality, but I think it would have the intended effect. Most trolls don't have the patience to wait that long.