While this won't solve all the fluff related issues, it will still do a lot of good I think.
What do you think?
The same holds for explicitly favouring topics like programming, math, science or whatever. From ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (emphasis is mine):
"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
"This is what the up arrow should mean."
"This is what karma should be."
"This is how to get it to behave like..."
And we're all talking about OUR app, the one we all know and love. These are my favorite threads and one of the best ways to learn and get to know each other a little better.
What we already have is better than anything any one of us could have designed.
Keep the fluff coming (just not too much).
(EDIT: This was the 2nd comment posted. One hour later, there are 22 comments about OUR app. This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. Great thread!)
While I realize that the majority of users will be 20-40 year old web app creators buy don't alienate anyone. Going forward can we look to keep non-hackers away? I think everyone enjoys this community, let's not strangle the spirit of it trying to keep it from changing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121137
So far it's civil... But they're the kinds of things that end up drawing people into often lengthly, fruitless debates - they end up being philosophical differences that might be ok to discuss over a bottle of wine, but often end up badly on the internet...
Of course, some people will act like "mental 14yo's" no matter what, and others never visit reddit anymore - but it seems intuitive that most people are somewhere in between.
The decision to broaden news.yc's scope to include other "interesting" information instantly adds fuzziness to the selection criteria. I have seen submissions that fly over my head, but other submissions in areas where I know more than the author.
Next, "interesting" content usually involves a mental challenge just slightly beyond the comfort zone. And so, given greater breadth of topics, which compromises depth, there will be enough submissions that are "interesting" to most people, including the 14 year-olds. To phrase differently, my knowledge in Latin American history might be comparable to a 14 year old, so we both find similar articles interesting. A BBC documentary link can easily be top quality, but appeals to all experts and novices alike.
The way you write it, is like 14 yos have an aversion to knowledge. Even if many Diggers seem immature, I'd bet they are more educated and tech-inclined than most in the same age.
I think that safeguards need to be at least thought about to try and keep the quality of the site up. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121534
I suspect the site's already being gamed.
http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1884
However, I know this is a hefty hack, so is probably not feasible.
Ycnews is figuring how much they should control because the fact is that if you don't have controls, the content and user base becomes like reddit. Also, the extreme degree of control that you suggest is so ridiculous that you're doing nothing but insulting a lot of hard work that people have done to find a good balance between being super-exclusive and open to everyone.
Also:
While we may want to white list programming.reddit, there should be a way to keep off the fluff that prevails there. The fluff in programming.reddit are the "too popular" posts. We can flag the ones with too many points / too many comments. They scream "bicycle shed".
I do think that it's a sad state of affairs for Reddit, however, when we're considering Reddit's front page/karma system to be a fluff filter for Hacker News.
For instance, that "programming is like sex" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120816 article had good discussion in the comments and the title should have been changed to "what to do about fluff".
1) There are just so many shitty links and LOLcats out there that the chances a shitty submission to YC is also on the frontpage of reddit is very small
2) The problem with reddit is that the signal/noise ratio is so high, not that there are no good submissions that make it to the frontpage. For instance this http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/02/22/zero-sign-on-with-client... is currently on the frontpage of both reddit and YC.
There are much better ways of doing it than this proposal. For instance use a bayesian filter to measure the submitted site up against previous submissions with high ratings.
Submissions that link only to another Reddit post, and not the actual story would be debited even more severely (those of us that want to read reddit already go there).
At some phase, a "FoundRead" might become a "Digg", ie: it's fairly well understood that the majority of the News.YC user base knows of the site and goes there directly to consume content. But in the short term it would be credited points for most submissions.
This should have the effect of demoting submissions that are all over the net, and especially those that are just links to digg/reddit. It should also have the effect of causing people to dig harder and deeper for truly good content to post.
I'd discard ideas like allowing downvotes on articles. I do think the decision (by design) not to have downvotes reduces immature voting and also makes it clearer to detect suspect behavior, just like the fluff problem we're facing at the moment (e.g. 20 downvotes added to 40 upvotes brings a total of 20 votes, and thus reduces the alarm signal).
At Hacker News the admin have been pretty up front about what they will do; edit titles, penalize stupid people as defined by the admin, etc. I think the threat of intervention does a lot even if it's turned off at the moment. I'm sure it's in the cards to keep the site as good as possible and that objective is correlated with being community driven as much as possible, but there's a trade-off there and I'd bet sometimes it goes the other way.
(Even mentioning this, though, I theorize that, in the future, there will be a sort of Godwin's law that prevents sociologists from bringing up 4chan.)
The problem with digg and reddit is they allow anyone to join. In almost all UGC sites the users define the site. However if you define your users you define your site.
This is how Livejournal used to work, and it resulted in everyone knowing at least one other person, which was important for a community site.
And this didn't cripple the growth of Livejournal at all. You only get one invite a year, but you get it immediately on joining. I invite you, you turn around immediately and invite someone else, who invites someone else, etc. The 1/year rule is meant to make me careful about who I spend my one invite on.
most of the annoying 14-year-olds wouldn't be our friends
That's definitely the case here. :)
However, to me and to many others I know, "Hacker" is an ideal that we strive towards... an asymptote... (Stallman is there...Linus is there...I am not going to be there at least for quite some time. But I am trying hard.)
I disagree with that. There can't be an asymptote because there's no upper bound. You strive toward infinity and "hacker" is just a mile marker along the way.
The more I learn, the more questions I am coming up with - which seem to increase my mass as I accelerate. May be one day I might have a weird look on my face and be enlightened. ( Airport lady voice gently says "You have arrived" :-p )
I suspect you've already passed the "hacker" milestone without realizing it. The metaphors you're using are a good sign. How do you rate on this rubric?
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#hacker_alrea...
I am not sure of the answer for: "Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker?". But working on cool stuff will earn this soon or later I guess. So, thanks a lot for the encouragement.
It's not like (3) is some sort of formal induction ceremony. It'll just be an offhand comment that the speaker probably won't remember making a week later. Most often it'll take the form of "you should talk to Fred; he's an XYZ hacker too" during a technical discussion about XYZ. It also tends to occur more often in person than over the internet. If you're worried because it hasn't happened yet, but most of your socialization is on the internet rather than meatspace, then don't sweat it.
I think (MHO of course) that by "hackers" you should include what I would call the "startup hackers", ie: people that also know how to "hack" business and not just PHP/ROR/etc.
It all relies on perceptions -- our own (those who participate in this community), as our perceptions create the atmosphere of this site, and those of the outsiders (both the outsiders we'd like to join, and those we'd like to keep out), as their perceptions determine whether they decide to join and participate here or not.
As has been stated more simply by PG, we want to maintain the perception to unwelcome outsiders that this site will be a waste of their time, and one very good way to do that is for our active participants to keep the front page on-message and full of considered, reasonable words, which most 14-year-olds avoid like leprosy.
One thing I really like about this site is its lack of flashy headlines. As soon as people start screwing with post titles to make them juicy and full of the "10 secrets to X, Y, and Z", then we'll get trouble, because the 14-year-old minds won't even realize that they have no interest in what we think and write about. They'll just jump in and turn this calm abode of thoughtfulness into a garbage pail of dandruff.
i.e.: person A: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- OK
person B: submit: www.xyz.com/article1 -- <msword>"Are you /sure/ you want to submit this article? personA did this <date> ago."</msword>
person C: submit: www.xyz.com/article 2 -- Bug them even for this, just so people can get the idea that its in good form to stay fresh and not have 2 or 3 URLs in the main news feed that will be all from the same website. This isn't reddit or digg. This shouldn't be "oh I found this website slightly interesting and so i'll put up 3 or 4 submissions to specific articles."
Add a karma cost to actions affecting the headlines (submitting and voting on content). Make users think a little more about how they vote, and when submitting make them put some amount of karma on the line which, if the submission is useful, will easily be earned back.
The karma for all of this must come from somewhere, as it does now. For people such as myself with a pretty low level of participation, maybe this would also be an incentive to speak up more often and submit some interesting material.
I don't know, it's not a complete thought, maybe some folks can improve it.
It'd be a pretty contrary approach. Clicking on a link would probably have to open the story in an iframe within HN. Lots of people hate that, I know. Maybe it could be made optional? Would people sacrifice that for improved link quality?
The iframe would be set below whatever amount of HN chrome at the top pg wants plus an "I'm done" button. HN could keep track of time between clicking on the story and clicking "I'm done".
A big question I had was "what about fraudulent reports." It's interesting that this is somewhat self limiting because increasing ranking this way would, by definition, take more time. Also, using the existing anti-spam heuristics (E.g., mostly new accounts upvoting a story), HN could further filter out time reports from unreliable sources.
It occurs to me also that this could be done completely transparently if HN didn't have to deal with the so called "same origin" security policy. A plug in could probably be written for HN to get around it, but bypassing the single most important security policy of the web might just be an intrinsically bad idea.
By the time we make it back here, we'll be so distraught by our unexpected exposure to the histrionic twaddle of our enemy that we'll be in the mood to impulsively downvote anything that even remotely resembles fluff on our "home turf."
- HN is independant from Reddit, and has its own identity, let's deal with our challenges.
- it would probably not fix the fluff problem (as it is not a simple solution, and there exists articles on Reddit which do not fall in the fluff category)
Once you rely on centralized human intelligence, expect a decrease in speed. Of course there are other ways to do it. I prefer a market system. If I had critical mass at my disposal, no second thoughts about using such a system.
Would we see much of a difference?