Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by 20% like a step function, and since then I've noticed slightly dumber stories getting slightly more votes. I don't think getting rid of karma would solve the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission.

I may finally try turning on some kind of vote weighting. But there is a more organic solution:

Long-time users: please vote more.

If people voted up good stuff more often, that would fix the problem. And I know there is a lot of room to do that, because we now get around 12k unique visitors a day, and yet top stories rarely have more than 100 votes.

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The best voters are going to be the ones who take the time to read and evaluate what they're voting on. They're naturally going to get outpaced by people who vote reflexively based on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for short attention span content. So even if you somehow manage to convert habitual readers into active participants over the long term you're fighting an uphill battle in terms of numbers.

I, for one, would love for you to turn on vote weighting because I'm really curious how well it will work.

They're naturally going to get outpaced by people who vote reflexively based on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for short attention span content.

Perhaps a little javascript could be used to disable the article vote arrow until the page was actually read by the user, or maybe the arrows should only be on the comment page.

What about generating more 2 front pages versions:

- One page listing the top posts, but only counting votes from the leaders, say, 10% of all users. So if Hacker News has 100,000 users, only the votes from the first 10,000 users would be counted.

- Another page listing the top posts counting only votes from the oldest users. So from 100,000 users, only the votes from the 10,000 oldest users would be counted.

I'd like to see pages like that, and notice the differences between the actual front page and those counting only the fist 10% users slice by these criteria. And also, because of their antiquity or karma, the 10% slice would receive a sort of reward.

One thing that I've been thinking is that... there just aren't that many really good HN worthy articles out there. Are more people likely to each post at a more or less constant rate? If so, that's going to dilute the site, if the number of "good articles" is constant in a given period. No idea how to fix that.

Write an HN-worthy article and submit it.

Easier said than done, I admit. ;)

I've done a few in the last couple months. It's much easier to vote for the good ones than write your own.

"... It's much easier to vote for the good ones than write your own. ..."

More to the point you are rewarded more to post articles on a regular basis. Writing your own articles requires a far greater energy input. This is exposing a flaw in the system in a way. Maybe HN user submitted stories should get recognition in the submission process? Maybe a start at 2 points instead of one?

Maybe by implementing that gravity* slider alluded to in news.arc, or at least decreasing gravity so higher-rated articles last longer at the top of the front page.

A recycled idea:

Make submitting a story cost 1 point. If you have taken the time to reflect on the quality of your submission you should be confident that you will get at least 1 up vote to break even. Users with a negative point total would not be able to submit again until they have gained back enough karma through commenting.

I think one main problem, or a symptom, is that we now have a new page with the vast majority of the links having no up votes. No one wants to sort through uninteresting links to find the good stuff - even to "save" a favourite site.

I suspect that davidw is right: "the number of good articles is constant in a given period". If that is right then attracting more submissions will result in fewer "good articles" finding their way through.

I think treating karma like currency will only exacerbate the situation. I feel like the underlying problem is that the audience HN targets is a generally outspoken one - we have lots of opinions and little problem expressing them. That being said, what we say is not always accurate or worthwhile. So, the more people that are attracted to HN, the more comments there will be and thus, the more inaccurate/worthless comments there will be.

Most of the members of HN seem to have their own blogs, each with at least some readership. If it were just really insightful comments all the time, they would probably mention HN on their blogs, and word would get out. This isn't that hypothetical as that seems to be exactly how HN got where it is today. Anyhow, the growth will always be substantial, so the only way to keep it how it was would be to apply some sort of invite only membership or externally limit participation.

> what we say is not always accurate or worthwhile

Comments that are inaccurate or worthless can be voted down. An increasing number of low quality links has no real cost to the submitters but it has real cost to the quality of the site.

Right now there is nothing to stop the number of low quality submissions from continuing to grow. I don't think invites or membership is the answer. The challenge is to be open and high-quality.

How would treating karma like currency exacerbate the situation?

Before I vote more I need a "this belongs here" vote that is different from my "this is good enough that I might want to find it in my 'saved' list" vote. My saved list is already unwieldy as is, so I don't want to start voting more using the current system.

An adequate solution would be a way to prune items from my saved list without undoing my vote.

I second this. I upvote comments much more than I upvote stories, since there's no drag on my usage later. I usually only upvote stories that I really, really want to be able to find again later.

We don't need a second type of voting, just let us unsave stories later.

Here's some ideas:

Votes don't count until you've been a member for X months.

Weigh votes based on a function of join date and karma.

If you have less than X amount of karma, your votes don't count. That would force new users to submit worthwhile content and comments before they have been "accepted" into the community.

After thinking about this for a while, I really like that third option I listed. If you don't contribute to the community, why should you be allowed to vote on the content of others?

"... The site has been diluted a bit. The TechCrunch post increased our traffic by 20% ... I don't think getting rid of karma would solve the problem, though. The problem is voting, not submission. ..."

Take a look at http://www.perlmonks.org You can vote but are limited by a daily ration proportional to hierarchy. But permonks has a different DNA compared to HN, less hierarchy more structured anarchy. So maybe that's not an ideal solution.

"... Long-time users: please vote more ..."

Willco, but I don't scale well. Of course there must be plenty of better ways to manage voting. Sounds like a new problem to solve.

Give a down vote to selected users.

That strikes me as a really good idea, even if it only went to people already designated as editors. My guess is that there are borderline stories that editors are close to killing but ultimately don't because of (perceived) community support and wariness of out and out censorship. Giving them a less extreme negative option could help.

How about having a leader board like page, listing users sorted by votes cast + submissions?

I always voted up good stuff from the new page. I have since stopped, of course.

the voting system is wrongly designed. you should be able to vote while you are reading the post/site you are voting for.

it should be easy to implement as a bookmarklet.

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