Tagmask – a new approach to organizing a programmers’ community | Hacker News Reader

Tagmask – a new approach to organizing a programmers’ community

tagmask.com

29 pointspankratiev23 comments

"The main feature of Tagmask is that you have the ability to see only the information that you want to see". Does anyone feel like they want the opposite, that the value in reddit, HN and others is discovery of new things, not more information on old?

I think the point is to discover new information, but by restricting the set to prevent only seeing the lowest common denominator. This is something I've wished for many times. There are lots of items and people on HN I find interesting, however there is also a lot of startup group think, Silicon Valley groupies and blogosphere wars (Hi TechCrunch!), which, frankly I couldn't care less about and tends to clutter up the front page. The ability to somewhat restrict new information to people I consider valuable seems useful to me.

I signed up and used a 30-character secure (alpha+symbols) password. The signup accepted the password, but now I'm unable to sign in, and the password reset isn't working. Help? My tagmask account name is dhess, and my contact info is in my profile.

Is there a common library that's being used which causes this behavior?

I've encountered it elsewhere, and it's amazingly annoying. Nothing says fun like having to reset your password 4 times in a row because the website is silently modifying it.

A common design pattern flaw is only hashing the first x characters of the password and storing the result during sign up but then hashing the entire password on log in which results in a miss-match during authentication.

If you use long passwords try removing the last character and seeing if you can still log in to your favorite website - on many you probably can.

Yeah, I'm aware the problem was truncation, it just took me a few tries to figure it out. My making a typo seemed much more probable than something that stupid being true.

In practice, what sort of process do you think would cause someone to implement this mistake? It seems obviously dumb to truncate something that you're hashing anyway. (To truncate it to something human relevant anyway, rather than like 512 characters).

That's why I asked if it was in some bugged library, it seems bizarre that the same totally boneheaded design would be recreated independently. It's not just that it truncates it, it's that it does it differently.

I encountered this issue with LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, they restricted the password length to something like 20 characters, but accept an input of arbitrary size.

There's a disconnect afterward based on the string they store vs the string that's generated when you re-enter the too-long password. Maybe they do a server-side encryption on initial creation, but subsequent logins use a client-side encryption? I'm not sure.

EDIT: I'm trying to sign up with a 20-character password consisting of uppercase and lowercase letters, and numbers, but I keep getting this error (which has a typo):

"Username can contains only letters, numbers and underscores."

This error means that something is wrong with the username. Note that you can use only lowercase characters in username. I agree that there is unclear error message, I'll fix it.

Thanks for the info. Yeah, it's confusing. On the Username input I was also getting the error, but the example shows: http://tagmask.com/yourName Which has camel case that's invalid. :)

I've sent to you an email.

I signed up and think the concept is great.

With minimal use, the first issue I had was that the tags to the left of the post (Link, Article, etc.) drew my eye and I found myself only skimming through those instead of the titles.

Second, clicking on the title of a LINK post takes me to the comment page where the only way to get to the link itself is the small link button next to the name. Seems like it should link directly to the article or at least the comment page should have a summary and/or link that is easier to find.

Looks great overall - keep it up

Sites like Hacker News and Reddit provide for their users one or more ‘front pages’ containing interesting posts that have been up-voted by the community and are popular at a particular moment in time. However, out of these posts, the user is unable to configure the topics on which he wants to see posts, and the themes that he doesn’t want to see.

that is exactly what subreddits on reddit are for. subscribe to the subreddits you care about, unsubscribe to the ones you don't. your front page will then be customized to show you stuff you'll want to read.

do many casual reddit readers not know about this?

the only difference here seems to be that a single link can be tagged with multiple tags, as opposed to reddit categorizing links with one category (though the same link submitted to multiple subreddits are linked together through the "other discussions" tab, but discussions are separated).

In some respects it sounds like you are building a programmer-centric version of Quora.

Great idea. Would definitely recommend doing some user testing. I found the Feed 1 and Feed 2 tabs quite confusing, especially as they seem to have identical content.

I would like to try puzzling out why SO has gradually become less useful over time.

I was really into SO about nine months after it started. It felt both exciting, functional and useful. I will be honest and say Karma certainly does and did motivate me. At that time also, I wanted to put together something like a "resume of answers". If a would-be employer wanted to see both my philosophy and my skill, they would just have to peruse my questions and answers.

So I "worked" answering SO questions for about a month, got to ~1800 Karma and stopped.

After that, I've mostly used SO to get questions answered. And I've noticed SO's quality has gradually gone down hill; I once could count on getting good answers to my questions and I just can't get answers to any substantial questions.

So what's going on? When I began with SO, it was really big already but nowhere as big as it is now. I'd classify myself as a senior-software-engineer, generalist. I pride myself on not just solving problems quickly but solving them "well" - how to solve the problem at hand in a way that's maintainable, etc, etc. "Working" on SO, I would look on the new questions. Skipping the really elementary ones, I'd find fairly challenging ones that were within "the purview of a generalist". To answer the ones I knew, I had to type pretty fast. I still put a fair amount of effort into my answers. I wasn't the fastest but I was fast that I was getting Karma.

The thing is, it feels like now, to answer a reasonably answer-able question, I'd have to bang it out in second or be behind ten other answers and be ignored regardless of the quality. So I just don't bother.

So, problems I can see.

Scale in question-answers: Many people answering questions means an answer comes up quickly and that might be good enough for a lot of question-askers. But there's a tendency for the super-quick answers to be garbage-answers. They only answer the question at hand - the super-quick answerers have become kind of the Demand Media of programming problem solving.

Scale in question-askers: Many more people asking questions result in lower quality questions. There are lots and lots of questions that qualify as programming questions but just barely. And there are lots of people very quickly banging out the answers to these and getting lots of Karma for it.

Scale in low-signal-to-noise-ratio: With so much quality stuff, the skilled question answers and askers have left. The guy who knows c++ inside and out just doesn't have an incentive to race to answer ten trivial questions and so they go away not wanting to compete with the guy does race to answer all this.

So my diagnosis is scale.

Further, I think the SO have noticed some of these problems but their efforts to solve them have more or less failed.

A while back, there was a large rearrangement of Karma in which the Karma for asking questions was halved. I suspect this was because they noticed that a lot of questions were going unanswered (part-and-parcel of the problems I mentioned above). I don't think this "incentivization" process worked. Rather than incentivize people to answer unanswered questions, I think SO needs to "put the fun back" into answering questions. SO was once like I game I could "win". Now it feels like a game I can't win, that's at a scale where it's impossible to win.

The badges I get just don't cut it. I think Joel & Jeff again realize the "you can't win" quality of current SO and try to compensate with badges since I find "I've gotten a badge" each I've logged onto to my otherwise moribund account in the last eight months.

What I think you would need to produce a programmers community which could stay viable longer is to do things to make sure that people could succeed in the meat of the matter - answering questions. For example, you might force a delay in people's answers or a delay in answers of people below a certain karma. You might actually limit the number of answers a person could give in 24 hours to force people to improve the answer they did give. You might give people more karma for answering higher valued questions.

You might also limit the ability of totally random questions to jump to the front after a while.

You might adopt a variety of "quality measures" to discourage building karma with only simplest answers.

I'm sure my analysis is imperfect, subjective and based on my own predilections. Perhaps some people just love the questions and answers I'm calling "low quality".

However it may go, these are my "rough notes" for an improved Stack Overflow.

I think your idea to limit the number of question that you could answer in a 24 hour period might be worth some thought.

Also, the stated reason for lowering the karma for asking questions was that there were some people who were earning massive karma gains by just asking tons of duplicate and "easy" questions (stuff like just going through the ruby docs and asking what each function was for).

There is already a daily reputation cap. You can still keep answering questions, but beyond 200 points or something around there, you stop earning points until the next day.

An actual limit to questions might do more than the reputation cap.

My vague, working hypothesis is that Karma gets people moving but habit keeps them going. The habit of rapid question question answering might carry the person well past what the incentive of karma does.

Also, the effect of having to answer quickly, before someone else does, directly reinforces quickness whereas a Karma limit is rather indirect.

Plus, each question answered can keep earning karma beyond the one day limit.

Of course I'm speculating in this whole process...

I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO community. In my experience, it's still a highly-functional community with a wide range of interesting questions and answers. As a developer, a lot of questions I see on there during the day challenge me and force me to push the boundaries of my knowledge. Because of this, I understand the languages I code in much better than I did just several months ago. Furthermore, I'm exposed to many other languages that I would've never taken a look at had it not been for that Stack widget on my Android giving my lots of interesting questions.

Just today, for example, I came across this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4619519/jquery-css-to-sho...

At first I wanted to ignore it because I didn't really have enough time, but then I remembered some CSS3 monstrosity I saw on HN once where they got really clever with border radii and I wanted to see if I could do something similar. An hour later, I had come up with a halfway workable solution to his problem and everyone comes out a winner. (If it's not clear, I'm treeface on SO too)

I typically don't care so much about karma...I care about being able to deeply understand the tools I'm using, and SO really forces me to see them from a huge number of angles.

I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO community.

Yeah, it's really hard to analyze the communities/applications that have sprung up on the Internet. A generality is a view of giant table - it's won't tell you everything but it's better than nothing. When an internet community gets seriously big, it can be highly functional and highly disfunctional at the same time.

Among other things, SO's current quality probably varies a lot depending on the language you use. I went from using Ruby to using Matlab and finally back to using c++ in the time I was writing about. That might have biased the sample I had of the infinite dimensional SO-space. SO/Ruby might be great still for all I know.

This overvaluing of quick, superficial answers implies biased, superficial voters. If I were king of StackOverflow I'd try making your upvote be worth more if you're reading in a new mode that lists answers in random order with current scores not shown. I'd like to make it worth more if you've read all the other answers, too, but it's not clear the site can effectively test for that.

By going with a competitive scoring system, SO set themselves up for endless headaches trying to stay ahead of people gaming the system while driving away otherwise valuable contributors who don't feel like jumping through hoops.

Wikipedia demonstrates that a cooperative model with minimal rules can work staggeringly well, even on a massive scale. There is such a strong intrinsic motivation to contribute. It's a terrible waste to subvert that shared interest in favor of a conflicting one.

Instead of tags, why not use a recommendation system?

Tags? Just a fad.

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