Programming Is Like Sex
codesnipers.com
codesnipers.com
The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on it. And if they like it, they upvote it. Sounds harmless enough, right? And yet repeat and the result is a disaster.
What is the solution? The Right Thing would be to somehow scale votes by how easy/hard it is to vote on something. Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.
Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.
This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian filtering for post importance.
This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN, so maybe you could experiment with it here.
1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments)
2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions)
3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems)
Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably almost more important than the comments themselves. Good users will put up with stupid links, but they'll leave if it becomes clear that their contributions aren't being valued and they start to feel alienated from the community.
Up until recently the discussion quality on news.yc has been in stage one, but I feel like it's been drifting toward stage two over the last couple of weeks. I'm especially worried as we get closer to the deadline for YC apps, since quality always goes downhill during those periods.
(Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form)
I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.
"Plenty of great arguments" Disagree. AFAIC, credibility is lost as soon as you resort to this. Many don't think like I do, but many do. Is cursing really worth losing those of us who do?
Some people upmod for relevance, others upmod for bookmarking purposes, and some upmod whenever they see something that makes them giggle.
Maybe more social news sites need to rise to the challenge of being opinionated in what the point of their upmods are.
For ordering purposes, a story's effective karma should be something like (total upmods / (1 + total antikarma)).
If you want YC to be, and stay, as a particular sort of thing, then unfortunately you have to actively enforce a particular culture. Since, presumably, you don't want to have to babysit the thing yourself all the time forever, that means picking a handful of people and 'blessing' them to do it for you.
So! Here's one way that might work -- though there're gonna be some objections to it:
Pick a dozen or twenty users that you think really 'get' what you want the site to be about. Set a special flag on them in your database. When they upvote a submission, it counts for a little extra, say 1.5 points; likewise if they downvote a submission. Then, you need to make sure that as people come and go, you still have this active core group of people tuning your site for you. So, if an 'unblessed' user gets habitually upmodded in their comments, or their submissions, by members of your blessed group, over a period of time that unblessed user gets automatically blessed, and their votes count for a little extra too.
This still leaves the door open for debates and arguments, while -- I think -- helping the site to stay on-subject without your active participation all the time.
I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:
1. the raising competence of the current user base & 2. the wave of new users
I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.
Yes.
I would have certainly used it on that burger thing yesterday.
http://digg.com/comedy/Coolness_2
...so far.
For example, I really do prefer to program alone . . .