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Comment by pwatsonwailes | Hacker News Reader

147 pointspwatsonwailes91 comments

What do you mean 'we', white man?

  user:	   petewailes
  created: 65 days ago
  karma:   33
  about:   ""

Did you even read the guidelines you reference?: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit

My account is close to 700 days old and I still wouldn't submit comments regarding that. I consider myself fairly new with respect to HN

Ditto, at over a thousand days. But I'm not a terribly active poster.

I just noticed my account will roll over to 1111 days tomorrow & I still don't consider myself a real part of the community. What I've learned from my bout of extreme lurking on this board is that these kinds of discussions pop up every few months and every time HN seems to auto-correct. No worries. We'll be fine.

Yes. In fact, I'm not even sure what prompted it this time around. I am not sure why these posts even show up.

You're not missing much. I've learned that karma is not about the quality of the post, but about how much time you're willing to commit to posting. People with high karma merely post a lot. That doesn't mean they aren't saying interesting things, but it doesn't mean they are saying interesting things either.

Also, I see far too many people repeating the same thing without anything new. It's far to easy to take the popular way out, preach to the choir, and get the karma votes.

Finally, when I do stumble on something and consider sharing it, I usually find it was submitted. In this case, I don't bother resubmitting. It's always amusing when I see the article resubmitted and on the front page days later, with a wittier/more intelligent headline, but oh well.

In general I think "local karma" in a thread is quite indicative of comment quality (with some exceptions).

Global Karma is somewhat linked to activity though, agreed.

One could make karma = "local karma." Just make one's karma an average of recent posts.

That's true, and I hadn't really thought of it that way. And of course, I was focusing on Global Karma. =)

I don't think a new headline will make it re-submit, it is based on the URL.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's not just the headline. It's also putting a blog post in front of the actual article. Their is a term for that I can't think of at the moment. Hopefully you're smarter then me and understand what I'm saying. =)

In my opinion his post was constructive and it doesn't really matter that his account is 65 days old. He could be in read-only mode before, or just developed the understanding he presents in those 65 days.

FYI: it's possible to use HN without being a member.

But it's not possible to contribute to HN without being a member.

If you haven't done so and gotten feedback via voting and replies you aren't a member of the community qua community.

You don't need to contribute to HN in order to appreciate what makes it special - the focus of submissions and quality of comments. Petewailes seems to understand this, so I see no reason to raise some silly "rule" (a general guideline, really) as an excuse to ignore the point he's trying to make. If you disagree with something he said, how about you say so and explain why. Pretend I said it, if that'll help.

The point he's trying to make is almost as old as HN itself. That's why the guideline is stated the way it is (from the founder no less). Instead of these metadiscussions it's much more valuable (but difficult) to show exactly how the community is changing, not simply claiming (or fearing) that it is. An analysis of those supposed changes would be informative and interesting.

If you can underline it with data, I'd read it.

It's possible to contribute to HN without being a member.

For instance, you can talk about it around you, share links with people outside of HN, either via mail, twitter etc.

I've been doing this for months before being more active, submission/commenting-wise.

Sure you can contribute tertially in the same way that happy users of open source projects contribute by attracting more happy users — except for the fact that more happy users is not an unqualified improvement — which happens to be the subject of petewailes' complaint!

My main point is that if you're not posting and getting feedback, your conception of the community is completely untested conjecture.

oh cool, so I can tell my friends about OSS and suddenly I am a contributer to OSS!

I know your probably being sarcastic but I would argue that evangelizing OSS is one way of contributing.

I think the counterpart to telling your friends about a news service would be getting them to change operating systems and start contributing patches to the new one: both the "userbase" and the "development" of a submission-driven news site are functions of the number (and activity level, and, certainly, quality) of its users.

His post was quite constructive, so I guess we can be lax here.

It's no more constructive than the last few dozen times this exact sentiment was posted in this manner.

It does serve to mark the passage of time. Thanks to submissions like this one, we don't really need calendars around here; we mark time by the periodic occurrence of RedditFear.

What's surprising to me is that Reddit has made it to the ripe old age of five, yet despite a highly competitive market it still appears to be the gold standard for "news sites that HN doesn't want to be like". Congratulations, Reddit folks, you're obviously doing something right! ;)

I guess it's because most of the old timers around here where active on reddit some time, ago. (Paul Graham put up a link to reddit from his site when reddit was started as one of the first yc funded companies was started. (Back in the day I even contributed a bug report to the reddit guys.))

Edited with a clarification

Wow, your first edit makes it even more clichéd than usual.

Also, the edit revision history only makes your post all the more reddit-like.

You're right, but rude. Please stop.

Could you suggest a better method of tracking updates?

1) If you're not being abusive, you don't need to track changes.

2) You shouldn't respond to or quote children from the parent. That's why we have threads!

3) You'll be locked out from editing the post pretty imminently (see point 1)

I think a better metric of community involvement should be submission quality, not longevity. petewailes has one non-dead submission: this one. Sorry, but if you're going to complain about declining submission quality, submit something of higher quality!

As I said above, "I'm not saying I'm an old-timer. But I've still noticed it, even in the two months that I've been around"

It's not that I think it's becoming Reddit, it's that some people seem to think it should be. I'd rather they didn't try. Subtle difference.

You just have to understand, for those of us that have been here for three years, this kind of thing gets old. It happens every month or so, and it's always the same plea.

You know, HN has changed... but everything changes as it grows. The original sense of tight community is hard to maintain with so many users, but c'est la vie.

And the submissions go in waves. I pretty much stopped coming here for two months because I got tired of a certain type of submission that seemed to be trending... but I came back one day and found we were in a technical submission era again, which, along with the insightful discussion, is the reason I come to begin with.

So really, it's better to demonstrate the standards through your contributions than spend timing talking about the standards. The welcome guide and FAQ talk about them plenty, and the point of the karma/flagging system is to allow the existing community to enforce those norms and traditions.

If you'd been paying attention in those two months you'd know better than to refer to comments spatially instead of by familial relationship.

Petewailes, with the greatest respect in the world your account is 65 days old - I suspect most people here would consider that fairly new. I myself am certainly nowhere near part of the original crowd - but I did join in here before the recent influx of reddit-like people.

You are right; the quality of articles has generally declined slightly (or more specifically bunk articles are hitting the top of the main page). But the point I take issue with...

We don't really want stuff on politics or whatnot on here.

It's natural to want to comment on political stuff; and (I guess your likely discussing the healthcare posts here) most of the political stuff here either satisfies the intellectual curiosity barrier OR is relevant to startups/entrepreneurs.

Bear in mind here the commentary is generally more interesting and insightful than elsewhere.

The real problem that has cropped up the last few weeks is comment quality. I run with showdead on (no reason, I just forgot to turn it off ages ago) and there are a growing number of (dead) jerk-comments. There are a lot more combative "troll" comments and worse voting behavior. In general the commentary - one of the most important parts of HN for me - is becoming diluted.

I've personally noticed the quality of submissions drop recently. I'm also nowhere near part of the original crowd (although today is my 1 year anniversary of registering), but there has been a steady degradation of submission quality starting probably two months ago. There was a time when I'd read practically every article on the front page. Now, I pick a handful that tend to be towards the bottom. It's done wonders for my productivity, though, so I guess it's not all bad.

It's probably a side effect of the quantity of submissions going up.

I've noticed that the last few submissions I made scrolled off the "new" page inside of 20 minutes. One of those articles made it to 100+ points on programming.reddit (and onto the front page), so it wouldn't be surprising to learn that a lot of good stuff is simply falling through the cracks.

Surprisingly, programming.reddit.com's "new" page is about 4-6 hours "tall" most of the time. HN has evidently become the new hot place to dump linkbait tech articles.

The fact that bad comments show up as dead is however a good indication that HN is coping with them well enough. As long as this pattern of voting down the worst comments remains the same, the commentary here should hold up fine.

Yes absolutely; but the mods can only do so much (I imagine) and a few do seem to be leaking in the gaps.

A lot more comments are at -4 recently - mostly one line agreements and silly meme's (this is the stuff that used to be "dead")

The problem is the commentary between there and the "good stuff". I contend that this has declined too (though I have no empirical evidence except my own opinion).

How does one know if one arrived before or after this Reddit influx? I first heard about Reddit from people who were complaining about it on hn.

It's fairly recent (2 months say): there may have been such influxes before I arrived (about 18 months ago). But recently I noticed a decline in the quality of comments, voting and (yeh) submissions.

The thing that makes me call it a "Reddit influx" is due to a comment posted last week , in response to "what's with all the redditlike commets", from an ex-redditor basically saying that a lot of redditors are coming over to HN because they prefer it now to the "new reddit".

Im sure that's been going on a long time - but it's more noticeable now. Certainly HN is completely different to when I first joined :)

Oh sure, I'm not saying I'm an old-timer. But I've still noticed it, even in the two months that I've been around. I like the fact that this place isn't Reddit, and I'd like it to stay that way.

We also discourage pithy one-liners, personal abuse (even witty personal abuse... although candidly speaking you're probably overestimating how witty you're being if you're thinking of fudging this one), memes, and the letters TL; DR.

and the letters TL; DR.

Can someone please kindly tell me what that means? I never saw that before coming here.

Thanks.

"Too Lazy; Didn't Read"

Basically it means "Summary", followed by a one- or two-sentence summary of your (much longer) post.

I think it originates from SomethingAwful, but I may be incorrect.

Originally, I think it meant: "Too Long; Didn't Read."

In reality, it means: "Too Lazy; (I) Don't Read."

In some cases people are simply to verbose when making their point. Many arguments or positions can be put across in fewer, less or not so many words as are being used in a particular situation. Such posts, being long winded, wordy, repetitive or simply grandiloquent in their rambling can lack focus and require more of the reader than they deserve. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, nor to wax over lyrical or beat around the proverbial bush this turn of phrase can provide utility and often does.

tl;dr this is useful sometimes and necessary at others

Thx!

We also discourage posts with no content, even if they're polite - such as just saying "thanks." It's not that we want people to be rude - quite the opposite - it's just that it adds to the noise.

That's not totally correct. From http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html :

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

Having said that, I very much prefer "Thanks." to "Thx!"

Too long; Didn't read.

Thx!

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tl%3Bdr&l=1

TL;DR.

Hate to break it to you but most of the people posting on politics this weekend weren't new. The one posting that got me annoyed (now dead) was posted by someone with 11,000+ karma points.

So I believe the issue is more people getting overly emotional than it is newbies not knowing the guidelines

Old timers acting out because of their xxx karma and ancient join date giving a perceived right are actually a bigger problem than newcomers who obviously don't know the rules.

For a while I played a game where I restarted new accounts from zero every time I managed to get a negative-scoring comment because it forced me to work "from within" and gain support for all of my views, rather than to post any screed I wanted. I haven't done that in a while, it might be fun to try again.

I think that the recent political submissions are a bit of an exception in that they are directly relevant to a lot of startup owners (and businesses in general) in the US.

A discussion of the merits or what the bill should have been doesn't really have a place here, whereas a discussion of the effects it will have on our businesses does. Unfortunately it's too easy to fall into the former (I am guilty of this). Hopefully people are downvoting those.

I don't think complaining to new users about HN turning into reddit helps. If you want to help, the best way would be to set higher standards with your own behavior, not by bitching about it.

Personally I don't like discussions on politics / crime / sports or on the latest hypes / fads for that matter, but I'm also guilty of commenting on such articles, because they are the easiest to read / reason about on a slow monday morning and I'm sometimes a lazy son of a bitch that's looking for cheap thrills from my morning news :)

And it also helps that I sometimes see a mindbogglingly high-quality comment on such topics that changes my perceptions and while it's many times just useless intellectual masturbation, I can't live without it :)

I keep coming back for the comments, the actual links are the least interesting to me. The only worrying trend on HN to me are the cheap ad-hominems / jerkiness that are so prevalent on reddit. Fortunately those comments are downvoted efficiently.

Agreed. I often find myself checking the comments on stories that I don't really have much of an interest in because I can be quite confident that I'll find a brilliant comment or two.

I attempted to be as non-bitchy as possible. Sorry if it came over that way.

Also a few links to be read by newer members:

1. Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

2. FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Can we also be a bit more judicious with the submission and upvoting of anything related to SEO? Some days, HN looks like a mini version of Sphinn.

Agreed. Much as I like the guy, I think that was Rand's fault, when he posted on the SEOmoz blog about liking the place.

See, now that's constructive! If you're going to complain about interlopers, identify the source.

I read this as "I saw news about healthcare reform here today, and I hate it when the government provides services to people in need, so please stop talking about it and maybe it will go away".

Am I right?

Personally, I like this sort of stuff (law, politics, general interest) on HN. But perhaps that's because I dislike the other social news sites, and want HN to be my one-stop shop for interesting reading.

Unlike on Reddit, I occasionally enjoy reading the right-of-center opinions of people here. If we remove the partisan materials, I won't have the chance to read that.

Not really. In fairness, it's probably a bad day to have posted this.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading that kind of stuff too. But I'd rather get it from the other sites, rather than on HN. I guess that's our point of contention, but that's cool. I knew when I posted this that there'd be people who'd have the PoV that you have, and I can completely understand where you're coming from. Part of me would like to agree.

However, I'd also like HN to stay as it is, and not to end up as a repository for everything your or I find interesting. I think it'd lose something at that point.

But to re-iterate, I can completely understand where you're coming from. However, I (respectfully) take the other side.

In the year and a half(lurked for quiet a while) I have read this site it's always had the kind of interesting stuff your saying that it shouldn't.

I have found most of the time that something that interests the HN community usually interests me, maybe that is just because my interests align with the site really well but I certainly wouldn't want this to change in favor of a few narrow areas.

I think HN promotes having a broad knowledge in a lot of different areas rather than reading about the same stuff all day.

I'm just confused as to why you have such strong opinions after 2 months here.

Partly it's because I've been around as a reader for a lot longer than I've been registered. But mostly because it's been bugging me for a while, and thought that even if stops one or two people, it would have been worth it.

The biggest threat I've seen to HN quality are submissions like this one. Do you really think a submission like this helps in any way? Stop whining and post ariticles that you find interesting.

i find this kind of thread to be the equivalent of a reddit becoming digg rant.. i know that im fairly new, but doesn't a thread like this perpetuate what the op was trying to change?

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/97sy0/redditors_h...

the hacker news value is in the community, not the submissions.

Agree, usually i'm more interested in the comments that follow than the original submission and sometimes even an uninteresting (at least for me) link leads to a great discussion. And regarding the community turning into something different or getting polluted by off-topic submissions, the ones who can down-vote shouldn't prevent this skimming off this kind of link?

I stand corrected, just read in the FAQ that links cannot be down-voted. Interesting.

They can be flagged (and are, at least by me), which is better, because then they get killed.

But the community can change as the submissions change to appeal to a broader base.

Could you clarify that? If submissions stop (or at leas the good ones do), there's not much community left, is there?

There may not be much left as it is now but I can say without question that I would rather find a way to maintain the community without the submissions than to have submissions without community (or a community of lower quality).

IF PG thinks its a problem, he can make it easier for long-time users to nix stories.

Do we really need threads like this? If you don't feel something meets the guidelines, flag it or don't vote for it. There's only one way for people to learn how to fit into HN: the school of hard knocks. People will do whatever we reward them for. Let's make sure we're rewarding them for the right things.

Yes, I also want to come here to read and talk about code/startups - that also means NOT reading and talking about HN itself all the time. I'm fairly tired of seeing so many "meta" posts like this voted to the top.

As much as meta-posting is discouraged in general, I believe part of the reason HN has stayed high quality for so long is that meta-discussion is occasionally tolerated. For example, when the community voted to ban valleywag stories.

That said, rather than starting meta discussions I prefer to submit good content. I felt like writing a rant about the state of HN last week, but I submitted a paper on red-black trees in Haskell instead. It seems like a more constructive approach.

Either the HN culture is so broken that every 2-3 months we need a plea like this one or people are just overreacting.

I have been here for about a year and only commented like twice, both in the last couple of weeks. HN is great. Prefer the stuff here as apposed to all the others.

Surely the correct (hacker) way to fix this is to alter the karma mechanism until behaviour falls into place. Assuming it's not there already.

That has been suggested by the site founder, except that the suggestion is changing flagging rather than changing karma allocation.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589

A community's culture is the aggregate decision of the members of that community. If users want it to go one way, then why not? If you don't want the users to define their own culture, then don't call it a community, because it's not.

Additionally, if you feel HN would be helped by having more posts of a certain type, then start sharing more posts of a certain type!

This is sort of like people who go to burning man, then go around talking about how the first year they went was the last good year.

yawn

Kudos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com