Hacker News Reader

Comment by allenbrunson | Hacker News Reader

allow me to summarize: giles bowkett is impolite on social sites such as this one, therefore they're all doomed. also, there are people on the internet that cause him trouble, like tim bray and cory doctorow.

whew, such a heady brew of straight-up TRVTH that guy is dishing out. i'm still reeling from the force of it.

View on HN

Have you read the post? You missed the most important 3 paragraphs in the middle about repeating the mistakes of slashdot, digg, reddit.

Tell me, what is news.YC doing to not repeat the same mistakes?

Is that you, Giles?

1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.

2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.

4. Votes on comments affect karma.

5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking.

These are really nice measures, but I think they still do not address the most important problem - people who have more time on their hands have disproportionate effect on the site.

I guess #6. vote weighting will be required soon.

I have some internal metrics to warn me if the top stories get bad, and there has been no degradation I can detect. Nor do I personally notice a difference.

There were a bunch of crappy submissions after we got that big influx of users from TechCrunch (both I and my software agreed about that), but the quality is now back up to where it was before.

The HN system works better than any other I have seen (it's kept me in line whenever I was tempted into adding noise rather than value).

I don't think degradation of HN over time is unavoidable, clearly a lot of smart people here put energy into resisting this force of nature.

One challenge is how to preserve the HN code of conduct. I've noticed some misunderstand the voting system as an agree/disagree button. I think the software should notice patterns that don't look right, such as both up- and downvotes on the same comment (popularity contest alert).

Good people + good tools = good HN.

> 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

Yesterday we had both a "global warming" story, and a "you can't soak the rich" story. Those kinds of things are far more interesting and accessible to random non hackers, than say, this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196425

I voted up the Can't Soak the Rich story. It's a very interesting idea that tax revenues are a roughly constant fraction of the GDP. Not all stories about politically charged topics are merely political stories.

> Not all stories about politically charged topics are merely political stories.

I think between sources like the FT, The Economist, and various economics blogs, I run into a lot of stories that are interesting to me in that same way, that I would never consider submitting here, because they are pretty much guaranteed to degrade into the same old hashed and rehashed debates.

> 2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves

I really think keeping it boring is key: not only keeping the stories boring to your average teenager, but keeping the site looking boring, like a book. :)

I think you missed the point, too. There are no mistakes for Hacker News to avoid -- the devolution of the site is inevitable. Sooner or later the trolls will take over, and we'll all move to some new site, who will promise to be better than Hacker News. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

oh, i read the article, all right. and i disagree with his primary point. i've been reading hacker news for over a year now, quality has remained high, trolls have gained no traction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com