Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines | Hacker News Reader

Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines

ycombinator.com

353 pointsandreyf133 comments

Yes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I joined two and a half years ago.

I agree, it's a fairly constant theme. But...

1) It's been a while, so worth the reminder; and 2) It's actually a submission from someone whose been here a while. The last several were from people with < 200 day memberships.

So: worth a little bit of +1 action, but I certainly hope it doesn't 'stay at the top for a while' as someone else said. Hoarding one of the 'above the fold' slots would be a bummer.

We're supposed to ignore the fold now aren't we? :)

Yes, but I don't see this as being helpful. Be honest. Did you reread the guidelines? And more importantly, do you think the people that didn't read the guidelines the first time around will reread it because of a thread like this?

All in all, I think this is less about helping newbies integrate into the site and more about giving "old-timers" a chance to vent.

I think the reality is more that it goes in cycles, and it does seem to be at one of its low points currently. A reminder of the guidelines seems in order.

What I find is that randomness produces the appearance of cycles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

The last couple days were particularly bad, with lots of articles about controversial but fundamentally boring topics. But I think it was a coincidence, as usual.

Do you collect any metrics on user behavior?

For example, it seem to me like downvoting (and particularly the abuse of downvoting) is on the rise. But this is just a gut feeling based on my particular comment history.

I don't think people are more apt to downvote than in the past. But there are a lot more voters. Plus I recently removed the -4 threshold on comment scores and instead merely never display a number lower than -4. So downvoted comments now cost more karma. (This was in response to people who would say asshole things, knowing they couldn't cost them more than 4 points.)

I don't know, I definitely think people a people a much more inclined to downvote for the wrong reasons. I've made a lot of posts in the last day, one of which was by far the longest post in a 200+ comment thread, none of which I think were in any way rude or anything like that, and despite that it's cost me around -10 karma overall (mostly because of one post in particular, which I don't think was that bad. A strong opinion, but no personal attacks or anything).

I've also observed a lot of posts being modded into oblivion for saying things like "thanks" and stuff like that. People generally seem to downvote posts which they disagree with, regardless of how polite or well-reasoned they are.

While I (obviously) don't think you deserved it, it was a very short, controversial post, with nothing backing it up. [1]

And the "thanks" posts don't get downvoted because of a personal disagreement, it's that a comment that just says "awesome, thanks!" doesn't add any value to the discussion. An upvote would suffice.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643726

Up votes instead of 'thanks' would seem to me to remove any kind of interaction that helps foster a community. If people knew who up voted their post then that would not be a problem.

Saying thanks in and of itself isn't bad, but some additional substance would be nice. Compare these two comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644924

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644906

Which would you rather see more of? One highlights something specific, says 'this is really important to me,' and gives thanks... and the other says nothing, really.

I understand what you are saying and I see the merit of having more content to a thank you post, but if it is not there is that in and of itself a warrant for a down vote? Sure you want more and more is sometimes great, but there is still a lot of substance in a simply 'Thank you' to be had. While the comment definitely does not merit an up vote, neither does it warrant a down vote. I would almost hazard to say that you no longer appreciate the value of the thanks itself and simply see it as a customary response that after being used so many times, no longer has any meaning. I see that you want "Thanks, (and here's why)" but what exactly are you worried about with having a few thank you posts?

> there is still a lot of substance in a simply 'Thank you' to be had.

I think this is where we fundamentally differ.

> what exactly are you worried about with having a few thank you posts?

They don't add anything to the discussion. They're meaningless. I'd rather see a story with 100 upvotes and 0 comments than a story with 1 upvote and 100 comments with a full text of "Thank you."

Ultra-short "Thank you" posts are basically spam. They clutter the page visually without adding any content. I tend to downvote them when I see them. If you don't have anything more than "thank you" or "I agree" or "lol wtf +1" to say, just upvote instead of commenting. Those types comments add nothing to the discussion but take valuable visual space that could instead contain a thoughtful, well argued comment.

If you're talking about [1] then I'm one of the people who down-voted it yesterday, for the reasons that steveklabnik [2] cites.

It's just an assertion with nothing backing it up, so it's not contributing anything to the discussion. It's an assertion that I happen to agree with in large part for my own reasons. But as long as you're not making a case for it it's just noise that deserves to be down-voted, while comments that back up their assertions and stimulate thoughtful argument deserve an up-vote.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643726 2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647505

What's also interesting is how the appropriateness of this particular metadiscussion seems to also come in waves. Today this is top of the front page. Tomorrow the same post might be flagged or comments downvoted into oblivion.

I think that reminding people to read the guidelines does not necessarily mean that HN is becoming bad.

I incur sometimes in posts that do not follow the guidelines and get a lot of downvotes. Half the time they are from new users that maybe do not even know about those guidelines, so maybe they do not even understand why they are getting downvoted. Of course they can learn it the hard way, but reading the guidelines is a lot faster and wastes less of everybody's time.

In the same way there are some posts that are not appropriate to this community. In the last days I did not find many interesting posts in the first page, but that's just my opinion and the community as a whole decides what goes up or not. Nonetheless some days ago I even found a link to thisisphotobomb.com (a websites of the cheesburger network, like the lolcats) and this is clearly against the guidelines. Again, there are the voting system and the flagging system, but it wastes less of everybody's time just to know the guidelines and it's better not to pollute the new posts section.

In each of these cases I think "you should read the guidelines", but don't write it because it's against them. But the fact that lately I've been thinking it more often, means that a kind reminder is not totally out of place.

Does this all mean that HN is becoming bad? I don't think so. It just means that we have guidelines we care about because they made HN a place we all like.

Does this all mean that HN is becoming bad? I don't think so. It just means that we have guidelines we care about because they made HN a place we all like.

Exactly. I actually haven't noticed any egregious infractions in the comments or stories, just thought it might be a good idea to point them out for those who might not be aware the guidelines even exist.

It would be nice if a brief summary of the guidelines appeared on the "submit" page if your karma is below say 20 just so you have a more constant reminder.

Indeed, though the worst trend I see is emotional comments getting voted up more. Maybe I'm seeing the past more warmly than it was, but it seems like clear, logical, consistent, coherent comments got voted up and emotional based comments stayed around 1 or got voted down. It seems like a lot of emotional reactions are getting voted up even when they're not coherent, consistent, and logical - which seems a bad trend.

The worst trend I see is comments getting downvoted based on opinions expressed within, not on how poorly they are expressed. No matter how thoughtful a comment, if it goes against the groupthink, you can expect it to hurt your karma.

I like /.'s tagging of comments. It's good feedback on why something was up or down modded.

It also forces a downvoter to justify why something is getting downvoted.

Yes. I think a simple tweak of having two ways to vote could be an interesting new dynamic: agree/disagree and valuable/not valuable. That way you can express that you disagree with a comment but still upvote them for furthering the discussion. And you can hit the "not valuable" button for insults, trolls, fluff comments, etc.

Now if they only allowed us to downvote stories, instead of relying upon tags such as "slashvertisement", "dupe", and whatever we tag those ridiculously-overhyped headlines...

Here is an example from 925 days ago of pg saying it is okay to downvote for disagreement.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

He is still thinking about tweaking the forum settings here to ensure good discussion. On my part, I'm a good bit more disappointed when a user asks a polite follow-up question (for example, "What would be a source I could check to confirm that fact?") and that kind of comment gets downvoted. Why do people disagree with trying to find out more information to enlighten the discussion?

Because interested parties can google it and in the reasonably likely case that the question goes unanswered, it's just noise.

Google is not always going to turn up the reference a parent post refers to though.

The 'citation needed' ones are another matter.

Far too often comments asking for a cite are voted up and comments that don't provide cites are voted down, even when the cite is trivially findable via Google. Take this thread for instance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552233

Regardless of whether I deserved to be downvoted, there is zero reason for the person asking for a cite to get upvoted considering the the relevant article is literally the first Google result for "old spice" "hormone disruptor".

I think it's bullshit that people regularly get downmodded for posting comments quoting basic facts that everyone should know, or at least know how to verify, without citing a source. If you don't know how to, say, look up the GDP of a foreign country yourself then you really have no business being on this site to begin with.

I can't speak for other readers of HN, but I often ask those questions after seeing that Google points to unreliable sources without scientific editing. I'd expect someone who RELIES on a fact being true knowing how to check that fact with more than just Google.

As a rule, when I see you do that though you qualify your request to that extent.

Most of the 'citation needed' comments say just that and no more.

In the end though, the example linked is a pretty good one in that the base claim ('old spice causes infertility') is indeed somewhat supported but not to the extent that you're in acute danger: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/browse.php?brand_id=705

I couldn't care less because I can't use aftershave anyway but I can see how that might be a problem if you used it every day (or even twice a day for the 5 O'clock shadow).

I think down voting comment for opinion is great once the comment reaches a few points. That's a discussion.

Down voting a comment to zero or negative based only disagreement feels the enforcement of opinion.

And I've noticed that a more often lately...

> No matter how thoughtful a comment, if it goes against the groupthink, you can expect it to hurt your karma.

So what? If you think that karma means something significant, you're doing it wrong.

As to whether "thoughful" comments get significant downvotes, I don't see it. Instead, I see a bunch of earnest twaddle.

Symptomatic of that is the belief that "thoughtful" is a worthwhile characteristic. It isn't.

> The worst trend I see is comments getting downvoted based on opinions expressed within, not on how poorly they are expressed.

Artfully expressed nonsense is still nonsense.

In other news, HN isn't intended to make you feel good about yourself, no matter how special your mother says you are.

>So what? If you think that karma means something significant, you're doing it wrong.

I find it interesting that expressing this opinion is one of the surest ways I know to gain a negative score for your comment.

I try to upvote/downvote based on how well a comment adds to the discussion, rather than whether or not I agree with it. Comments I am the most likely to downvote: jokes (they'd have to be really good for me to upvote); emotional responses without a shred of factual support; insults; and comments that are overwhelmingly demonstrably false and/or contain provably bad advice.

Right on, swombat.

Last year, upon Iteration 27 of this same subject, I threw something like this together in jest:

                 Quality of HN Comments Over Time
   |                   . .
   |                  .   . 
  q| . .             .     .
  u|    .           .       .               . . .
  a|     .         .          .           .       .
  l|      .       .              .      .           .
  i|       .     .                  . .               .    
  t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
  y|                                      (that's all)
   |________________________________________________________
    M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A
                    '09                     '10

I must have been on to something because so many didn't realize it was a joke. What fun that was. All I have to do is shift the x axis every n months: some things never change.

Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604

Sadly this is exactly what the CEO of a company (maybe all companies?) I worked for would do with his projected sales chart...and he still has his job. Now THAT's funny.

Good work :)

Holy crap I remember that plot. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926806

Damn, we're always in the same spot, the years just keep flowing underneath us.

This is the best way to measure change on HN I think:

http://news.ycombinator.com/best

The ratio of HN vs non-HN items as observed by any individual is of course different.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually keep track of the quality by some measure and thus validate your model? Things said in jest are often true, and I think you actually have a valid model.

It would be interesting to have some live feedback on the current quality level, and see if that affects the response of the community, but this would require some sort of metrics on quality, which is quite a subjective field.

I believe a while ago there was a submission about parsing text to see whether the author was male or female, and wonder if there is a similar algorithm to check whether a comment is positive or negative, technical or shallow and thus create some objective measure of quality.

This is completely off-topic, but how do you format your comment to force mono-spaced font?

I haven't been able to find an instructions on what formatting can be used in comments, like to quote a previous post, for example.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

What a coincidence, that's just like everywhere else too. It's like an eternal september or something.

It reminds me of the famous "Wear sunscreen" video :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=MX&v=0CVB8YSOLK4

Ugh, got decontextualized.

I meant the video reminded me about the recurring ranting (or praising) cycle that takes place when looking life in hindsight. :)

"... when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble ..."

One question I ask myself now before commenting is: Will this comment significantly improve this conversation?

I try not to comment if the comment is merely:

1. clever and amusing 2. expressing anger/disagreement 3. disproving a wrong but unimportant claim made by another commenter.

Besides these, submitting, upvoting, downvoting, not voting and flagging are enough to make HN more interesting for myself.

I find myself writing comments fairly often, but end up pausing before I hit the reply button to re-read what I'm replying to and to think if my comment is actually contributing to the discussion. A good percentage of the time, I just end up closing the window.

I may have good intentions to begin with, but if what I say reads as being one of the three points you wrote, there's no point in having other people argue against my invalid or ignorant claim. It just leads to semantical flame wars.

Me too. But the worst thing about commenting here is how all the context that you are replying to goes away and you can't re-read your comment within the context of the discussion, because all you can see is the immediate comment you are directly responding to. Interestingly, this is the only site I comment on that has that behavior.

I also try to stop myself from saying the same things that others have already said--i.e. "piling on."

Isn't that a pile on comment itself?

One of the biggest reasons I can think of for the eventual decline of HN are the result of these words;

>>>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<<<

The problem over here is that people's version of what gratifies their intellectual curiosity varies. What I find interesting is deeply subjective and I need to acknowledge that to contribute anything, anywhere. The same thing goes for HN in general.

HN is starting to attract people outside of its core audience and in doing so it inevitably leads to the point where people come in whose mean of what's interesting is different from the mean of what's interesting for the core audience.

It isn't their fault, but this process feeds into itself. So, if I see a post here on HN on death. I have this tendency to post up stuff related to death. Regardless of the fact whether or not they adhere to the spirit of the guidelines. People see that and they are more inclined to upvote it, since there is already content like that on the front page. So, it accelerates.

You might have noticed that the front page of HN always follows a pattern there are a series of similar posts which come up and stay there over the course of time. This is a good thing and a bad thing as well. The trick is in stopping it at the right time. That's where the community and the moderators come in, but if the majority of the community don't know any better than that. This means that the community can't self adjust. The moderators then have to play a stricter role, which is inherently negative in the longer run.

At the same time, if you define those words too strictly then HN won't be HN, anymore. This is the underlying paradox that needs to be solved to avoid that decline.

As long as someone has opened up a guideline discussion....

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Agreed in full.

However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2 of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.

So assume it's that your comment fell into the "noise" category and work harder on producing "signal" next time. We don't need to have a discussion every time someone felt that some post did not contribute sufficiently to the discussion.

How about this for a HN feature.

If your post is < 1, add a link to a page about downvoted comments.

That way, the person who was downvoted has an opportunity to read about some common reasons why a post was downvoted, read tips on making better comments, and has more time to emotionally process being downvoted.

Ironically, the comment above is an accidental implementation of this feature. It is currently at 0 points, and has a link to the HN policy as a link.

The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?

No, a discussion would create noise, which would not be valuable for the HN community. A voluntary, anonymous, tip about what made the downvoted comment noise would be more than sufficient. To avoid it becoming a discussion, no reply would be allowed. (Just to throw a half-baked idea out.)

Downvotes could easily become learning exercises that boost the comment quality over time.

    The noise category assumption is a fair one. "Work harder" is a vague recommendation. Are there more specific recommendations you could make?

Don't post just because you can. Don't echo comments others have made. Don't post "obligatory" comments or content-free Reddit memes. Say something meaningful that is not immediately obvious.

Don't treat post writing as an exercise in upvotability optimization.

I think if a post goes -1, anyone else downmodding should have to reply to be allowed to downmod them again. I am all for the karma system, but I have had situations where people misinterpret what I am saying and after requesting a "why," I find out changing one word makes people understand to the point of me not being negative. (And burying a dissenting opinion for no reason should need a defense.)

A tag feedback is more gratifying to the person getting downvoted. That person is less likely to be upset and produce a "boring discussion".

At its worst, Hacker News has continued to impress and inspire me as vastly superior in quality and consistency compared to other online communities.

I'm pleased to see that I am officially allowed to complain that HNN is getting to be just like Reddit.

I still have about 3 weeks left before I can make that complaint.

Luckily though, HN seems to be holding steady, and it has a long way to go before it becomes Reddit. HN is like having a conversation in your living room at a cocktail party with a lot of smart people in attendance. Reddit is like having a conversation at a sports bar with a bunch of random drunk assholes.

I think if we can get it to the point where it's like going out for beers with a bunch of smart people at a reasonably nice bar that will be perfect.

Yeah, but that's going to attract "hangers-on", isn't it? I think that's why that sort of community can either be stable or open but not both.

You should check out some of the smaller subreddit communities. For example, r/coding is extremely nerdy and has virtually 0 drunk assholes.

I came over to the comments just to see who would make this remark. ;)

I wish I had signed up when I started reading and not when I decided to stop lurking.

Then again, I'm pretty happy with the overall quality of the site and comments so I guess it doesn't really matter :)

Hacker News is starting to feel like programming.reddit.com a year ago. Now, Reddit is getting more and more like Digg a year before that. Digg certainly looks like Youtube comments one year before. Now, Youtube, that surely is now just like Myspace some time before. And Myspace now is somewhere close to what the AOL forums used to be. But AOL - don't look at the AOL forums! they now look as bad as Usenet did when everyone joined there, before they were Google groups, before they were called DejaVu, when all the newbies had just spoiled all the good old newsgroups.

We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there, and we could build a cozy place with no trolls and newbies, and share really interesting stuff and discuss it intelligently.

But I'm sure the dumbfucks will follow us around, from here to the end of time.

It'd be an interesting day when forum degeneration can be solved via circular migration around ring of sites vs. Linear migration like today.

"everybody barrel shift!"

That's the current approach to antibiotic drug resistance, actually. Antibiotic resistant drugs are supposedly treated with antibiotics that are too old for those drugs to retain a resistance to.

Let's hope pathogens don't figure out how to do heap allocation. That would be a lot of trouble. After all it wouldn't take too much extra storage for them to collect 'data' on enough antibiotics that we'd lose the race.

"We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there"

... except for spammers.

Youtube is improving.

They have votes now. I've seen a few insightful comments there (it depends on what kind of video you're looking at, of course - you being the crucial word here.)

A million monkeys banging on typewriters occasionally produce insightful comments by sheer random chance.

They still produce more insightful comments than Youtube commenters.

As someone who was previously a reddit guy (although I found out about HN via irc), I'll do my best to make sure that I don't contribute to the change. I came to HN because I liked the culture and the discussion here; changing that culture and discussion would defeat the purpose of coming here. Thanks to all you HN oldtimers (in internet-years) for creating and contributing to what HN is today (and hopefully will be for years to come).

Don't worry. The point is there's no change.

I was hoping not to find anybody from reddit here. It figures it's probably their second greatest place of cyber-congregation.

thanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc.

one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.

"one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart."

I don't. I think it is sometimes a symptom of a different problem. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847

I'm pretty sure if you try to submit the same link multiple times HN will show you the originally submitted story.

It doesn't always work though. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632572 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630579 were posted one day apart, with identical URLs.

Actually the link checker only checks vs. links that are currently loaded into memory.

links loaded into memory - how does that work? Can you please explain?

Anything that has been accessed within the past x amount of time and hasn't fallen out of cache yet. For more info, check http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc around lines 1485, 1550, 233.

That would probably work terrifically if there was an eviction algorithm other than crashing at least once per day. (If you try to comment and get "Unknown or expired link", it's because news.arc crashed between the page load and the POST)

I can confirm that this works if the URL is exactly identical - it happened to me and I was quite pleased.

Not only that, but if it does find a story to the same link, it will upvote it.

My main annoyance with HN posts lately is the use of profanity in post titles and occasional posts that are, in general, NSFW. For those of you in startup land this probably isn't an issue, but on behalf of those of us who are still "workin' for the man" please take a moment before hitting the submit button to imagine that you still have a boss and consider whether your imaginary boss who just walked into your office and saw this post title on your screen would be A) pleased that you are taking a moment to keep up with industry trends while you're waiting for your code to compile or B) wondering why you would waste your time reading such trash. If it's the latter, consider whether this is because the topic of your post is really inappropriate for a professional forum (if so, please don't bother posting it) or if it is an appropriate topic but you're using profanity as a crutch because you're too damn lazy to write an articulate, descriptive title (if so, stop being lazy and rewrite your title).

A reminder from the guidelines:

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

And some recent examples of comments here on HN:

"All you have is a pink blouse and a pathological case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644724

"I'm sorry, but even on HN I feel it is appropriate to reply to this jackass with only two characters: FU" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644606

So sometimes HN can feel like a pretty rough place and a reminder is in good order. To HN's credit, though, these comments tend to be few and tend to be downvoted. You can also find comments like this floating around:

"Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit; I'll buy you coffee." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641763

Everyone seems to be focusing on the voting of comments, but I think the tips on what to submit (and vote up) are the most violated, as seen by the now almost daily post about men vs women.

Not to mention a morbid fascination with death.

I must have noticed this too, because I switched my hackernews bookmark to go directly to the newest submissions a few days ago, since I didn't like what was on top. Reading and upvoting from newest is the most effective way to change what is on the frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Lamenting the bad is less effective than embracing the good. As in life.

My take is that hackers are sometimes gasp interested in discussing political issues. Thus, the best approach is not to have people constantly chastising topics/comments as off topic, but to keep the quality of each comment high enough that an intellectually curious person would enjoy reading it, even if it's about something not typically associated with hacking.

hey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is work.

So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.)

Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.

I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.

I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.

hm. What do you think of the other suggestion, a "submit this to hn/talk about it on hn" link that asked a user to do the submission for me? does that make it any more or less spammish, in your opinion?

While it may be a bit spammy, with the frequency you updat your blog, I personally wouldn't see it as such. However, you're tying yourself to HN for discussion (typically a good discussion), but I see it as "setting precedent" for others.

You remember the web rings? It reminds me of that. Perhaps a single platform for managing discussions of articles/posts/blogs similar to news list sites, but specifically for discussion of the posts, not specifically for news. I mean, we could all find a majority of these articles on our own if we wanted (eventually), but the community discussion about the topic/story is what really adds to it.

In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

>In short, I personally don't see an issue with YOU submitting each post, but I wouldn't post just to comment and would be disheartened if it became a standard way of providing discussion about your posts.

hm. well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't do it? I mean, really, what I want is to outsource the 'community management' stuff. As far as I can tell, hacker news has (for now) has the best community of any similar site I know of.

I could set up my own community site that other bloggers could use for comments... but that would defeat the point for me, as I wanted to outsource the community management bit.

Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently, but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.

hm. neat... and it wouldn't spam up the rest of reddit? hm. I don't spend much time on reddit, so I don't really know of the culture, well, much, but that might be the way to go, I mean, if that sort of thing is acceptable within the cultural norms of reddit.

I think that a "submit this to HN" link is less spammish, because if someone clicks it, the implication is that your blog post was actually genuinely interesting to someone. The issue I have with doing it yourself is that you're not competent to judge whether your own post is any good or not. Someone else is.

Yes, but my mother reads my blog.

My point is that if I put a 'submit to hn' link on my blog, no matter how low-quality my blog entry is, /someone/ is going to click the link, especially if that is the only way to comment.

Frankly, I agree, but I feel like my objections to this are so far out of the mainstream (in a world where every webpage is slathered in "Twitter/Digg/Reddit/Facebook this" links) that I am not even going to try to champion them.

Don't automatically submit each article to HN. Have your hypothetical reader click a "comment" link which, if the article is not submitted, prompts them to submit it (and then leave their comment), or if it has been submitted, goes directly to the existing discussion.

Yeah, I see that sort of thing a lot... "submit to digg' etc... It always seemed kinda funny to me, asking others to submit it rather than doing it yourself. But it does seem to be accepted practice.

I try to be a good new person who follows the rules. :)

The rating system is probably the only one I've seen work this well. When I see myself getting downvoted, it tells me pretty clearly that I need to go and reconsider what I posted.

The apparent degradation in quality is probably because the average quality of discussion on the internet has declined as more people entered the melee. It'll probably go back up as new combatants start to get better at expressing their ideas. That, or it'll become so hopelessly unproductive that everyone will collectively decide the internet was a bad idea.

I just can't believe the volume of new posts. I posted a link to my own python blog 23 hours ago and since then there have been 470 other postings. Perhaps an idea is that people should only post their own work or even it HN was limited to programming related posts only. I come here for insights into different languages and the programming profession. I'm not that interested in the politics of another country or parenting tips for New Yorkers.

It is August. A lot of people are on vacation - including writers of blogs and articles. Get used to it. We have X numbers of stories on the front page, we won't always have X amount of interesting stories. Some days we will have 0. The world doesn't fit into nice even patterns.

The title should say "please (re)read and follow the HN guidelines".

The title should say: "Reminder: Kindly (re)read and follow the HN guidelines." Describing one's own reminder as "kind" is presumptuous.

The only trend I've seen lately that's bugged me is people creating "throwaway" accounts with names intended to be a joke specific to the comment they've posted.

This is a nice public service announcement. It does make me think that these guidelines should be linked to more prominently somewhere, maybe on submit page?

Maybe there should be a link to this on the post and reply forms, at least for newer accounts.

So, where's nickb?

Oh, and Erlang, Erlang, Erlang.

That is all.

I don't see HN going downhill in terms of submissions or in discourse. Things are mostly the same as they were 2-3 years ago.

I do worry -- perhaps unnecessarily -- about the killing of submissions for no obvious reason. Apparently using a URL shortener is verboten, although the HN guidelines don't mention this. But using one will get your story autokilled.

Yesterday, I tried to submit what I thought was an interesting story about Scoble's Building43 and older founders, but the submission page kept calling me a spammer. I am by no means a spammer.

I really want to understand what causes stories to be killed, mainly so that I can participate in good faith. But even asking about this seems to make one persona non grata. I sense a chilling effect here. I hope I'm mis-reading all this, and that I'll be proven absolutely wrong. :-)

What do you need the URL shortener for? I find it very annoying to have to click in order to see who the author of the content is when I can just look at the domain name at the end of the HN submission.

What do you need the URL shortener for?

Actually I don't use them here; never have. I just noticed a post having been killed, and saw a followup from HN staff explaining that using a URL shortener will cause a post to be autokilled.

I don't care about URL shorteners. I am concerned about what the rules are, and particularly the rules that are not explictly stated in the HN Guidelines.

That's fairly logical though, a url shortener would allow re-submission of the same link over and over again and drops the hint of where the link goes to from the 'new' and 'news' pages as well as the ability to hover on the link for the full url.

All of which are useful. Url shorteners are ok for twitter or IRC elsewhere they're just unnecessary complications.

He's not arguing for URL shorteners to be permitted. He's arguing that the prohibition should be made upfront.

How much more up-front than seeing your link go 'dead' could it be?

After all it's not like anybody reads the guidelines linked above anyway before submitting a link, especially not if they're old hands (and most likely not even if they're not). Maybe a message could be added to the submission process that said: "You've used a URL shortener, bang, you're dead", but that's pretty obviously the reason why. After all, all your other links will get through just fine.

The URL shortener was just an example -- just one example. My point is not about bit.ly or anything like it.

My point is: there are apparently a bunch of rules, and I don't have the sense that I understand them. Worse, I have the sense that asking about the rules is frowned upon. I find this a little chilling, and it seems to fly in the face of the quasi-libertarian spirit I generally find on HN.

That's by design. The worst thing you can do is tell spammers why you flagged their thing as spam.

Right now, there are spammers repeatedly submitting shortened URLs to their WOW Gold sites and not checking to see if they're killed. That actually stops a good fraction of it, because frankly, they're not very smart people.

If you told them exactly why their current tactic is not working, they'd immediately move on to the next one and the next one until they find one that works.

My point has nothing to do with spammers or URL shorteners -- that was just an example. See above if you care to know my actual point.

But this is probably related. I think the anti-spam measures are probably going too far. I'm not a spammer. No site I've ever attempted to submit has been been a spam site, an ad site, or anything else self-serving. Yet my most recent attempts to submit have been stomped on, accusing me of "wasting my time" by attempting to spam HN.

Here's the most recent article I tried to post -- you judge whether I'm submitting spam sites: http://www.w3matter.com/journal/2010/8/29/startups-old-peopl...

If you browse a NYT article using their iPad app and want to submit it to HN, the NYT app will give you a like like this: http://nyti.ms/9Db1qc

While I realize this isn't the appropriate location for a feature request, but perhaps HN (or any news site) could dereference URLs before displaying them.

My interpretation is that there's a certain amount of faith in the user for figuring what is apropos. This can serve as a sort of gatekeeper - are you properly interpreting the point of the guidelines?

You don't have to be a longstanding member of the community to notice that every story is proceeded by a stub, and to deliberately circumvent this feature is, at best, disingenuous, and otherwise potentially dangerous (see http://mug.gd/). I actually think it's helpful to have a few of these implicit guidelines in place - it may steepen the learning curve slightly, but it does make the system harder to game.

Basically, submitting a story and gaining traction is a sort of agenda-setting power and I have no problem with a few implicit barriers to that power to keep it from being arbitrarily obtained by passers-by.

I think this is just a reminder to those that can't push their agendas on the new Digg to not come here and try to push it. Take it somewhere else.

Good riddance.

I blame digg

aside from this one, i never read the comments. i'm just here for the links not the community editorialization of them. but my faith in "communities" has dwindled over the years through my continued participation over the years in this thing called "the interwebs". as the japanese would say, ganbatte kudasai. keep up the good work/do your best.

in other words, please do not ruin this nice little community with your own baggage.

Still better than reddit.com/r/programming

Remember, it will be September soon. That's probably the point of this post.

Done. What do I win?

>> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

What if I make snide comments in face-to-face conversation?

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