Super-bonus extra special bonus round: if you've been here for more than 500 days and think HN's S/N hasn't degraded over the last 6 months, tell us all why! My perception is that most veterans think it has.
* infographic spam still has an appalling attraction to many HN users who should know better * the 'new' queue is thoroughly full of junk * hardly anybody looks at the 'new' queue so that good things don't get promoted out of it * it seems very likely to me that almost all successful posts involve a voting ring of some sort * all too often, three or more stories about the same topic dominate the home page * certain people are running "made for HN" blogs where they quickly pound out a quick (but banal) response to a controversial article and then get voted up.
If you really wanted to improve matters, you'd want some A.I. filtering against infographic and 'me too' articles, protection against voting rings, and some mechanism to force people to moderate the 'new' queue in order to accomplish what they want to accomplish.
The 500+ karma stuff is a joke; that keeps new people out, except for the ones who don't have a life. That kind of thinking is a big reason I don't participate on StackExchange.
From one angle HN is just a traffic source for user submitted content and that makes it a target for people/sites/companies who aren't invested in the community that is the value.
There are no repercussions for upvoting or submitting questionable content at the moment. While my proposal is only a small penalty, hopefully it gets people to at least think before actions that potentially increase noise.
Edit: I meant "when a submission gets successfully* flagged", ie killed. Thanks davidw for pointing out the ambiguity.
This is a huge factor, IMHO - a much higher signal/noise ratio in the articles on the front page would probably set up positive feedback, helping with other issues. Unfortunately, there are positive incentives for being the first to submit anything that could potentially be voted up, drowning out interesting content.
One way around that would be that if a story is killed, then and only then does the penalty occur, and it's sharp.
I think it really comes down to a human solution to a human problem: tech only goes so far to fix problems like these.
HN has a lot going for it. The sparse look and scary name keep out most of the undesirables. It's hard to turn a place called "Hacker News" into yet another funny cat pictures board.
Looking at the front page right now, I'd say things are still very much on topic: Collision detection, hash tables, Amazon S3, C++ style guide, etc, etc... Sure there's a couple lame Techcrunch articles, and maybe a bit of current events, but if you go back and look, those things have always made the front page in limited numbers.
If there's one thing I'd do, it's make the "new" page time-based, instead of strictly limited to 30 items. Everything should get an hour to percolate before being pushed to page 2.
I have my own sense of what's off topic, but lots of people seem to like to play the "7 degrees of hacker news game", exemplified by this post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241455
In a few hops, you can make anything hacker news!
My own opinion is that politics and other topics that give people that "riled up" feeling ought not to ever be here, whereas the occasional random story about something really unique and interesting might pass muster. But ultimately my opinion counts for little: is PG going to leave the site to 'mob rule', or come down on those kinds of stories? I guess a decision either way would be good in that we'd avoid some of the meta-discussion.
I wonder if attaching some kind of reason to a downvote would be useful, or even being able to reply privately (visible to the original author, admins/mods and maybe other downvoters?).
Of course, it's possible that it's my judgment that's off, but I get the feeling I'm not the only one.
Oh, and: I've had an account here for ~3 years and lurked for longer, and I'm still not sure I'm using the "flag" feature correctly. I also don't know what happens when I press it, exactly. This sort of thing really ought to be more obvious.
Has someone attempted a hierarchy of choices? The HN frontpage works as it does because you have a relatively stable set of people voting on submissions to enter the front page. So to improve it you could constrain who can submit, who can upvote, and cultural norms about what is permitted (guidelines). Each of those could have specific concrete proposals. One of those I would vote on.
And so on and so forth. I haven't mentioned comments at all, but I think it's useful to light up this state space.
Hmm, I wish polls would separate comments based on how they voted.
Are some of the options too specific? Suggest ways for me to generalize them and I will.
What does "make the flag button more powerful" mean to you? I think that's the real distraction to me.
2) Weight upvotes on comments from people with high comment karma more than people with low comment karma
3) Weight upvotes on submissions from people with high submission karma more than people with low submission karma.
4) Remove upvote counts from stories and comments, or display a function of the weighted upvote count.
5) Display user's comment and submission karma on their public profile.
Probably too complex of a solution, but it's an idea.
(4) is already up there (hide some or all scores). This is my most wanted feature for the site because holy hell do we all waste a lot of otherwise valuable cognitive resources thinking about the little numbers next to comments.
(2) and (3) worry me, because HN is an echo-chamber site. I get way more karma for the same unit of comment quality than you do, and it's not because my opinions are any more valuable than yours.
The quick (and probably flawed) solution I came up with was to have a tiered base amount that is determined by the karma percentile of the upvoter (eg, 75th percentile might get you an additional 2 points, 25-75 1 extra). Furthermore, there is an additional potential bonus based on the karma delta between voter and votee (ie, upvotes from top HN'ers are more valuable to newbs than to other top HN'ers). As an example, we'll say that we add one point for every 25% tier between the voter and votee (no bonus if they are the same). Using this example, a top-tier vote would be worth 5 points to a newb but 3 to a veteran.
This would allow high-quality posters with more recent accounts to quickly gain the necessary karma for voting, polls, etc without causing such massive karma inflation on the high end.
I agree that "7 degrees of reddit" or whatever is bending the rules too much.
Something like a hard ban on politics might lose things that are of interest. For example, what role are technical tools playing in the arabic revolutions right now? Obviously Wikileaks, reddit, youtube, twitter and facebook are playing major roles. And what role are hackers playing? Assange, Anonymous, and the Egyptian Google guy are all using technical skills to create worldwide revolution. That's pretty exciting, using technology to make political change. But should discussing it be banned? Is it necessary to ban that to get rid of the various latest cop shooting incidents reposted from reddit where technology is at most a minor role.
BTW, tagging a story as political doesn't cause it to disappear; it just ranks lower, but would probably still be on the frontpage if it had a lot of points.
(b) Because one minute there was a 200+ story at the top of the page less than a day old, and the next minute there was no such story at the top of the new page, and yet the story hadn't been flagged.
How is this not politics.
Also, why isn't flagging for comments more visible? I suspect many are unaware that it's even possible. I routinely flag "obligatory xkcd", "looks like your database isn't scalable enough to host your blog post about database scalability", "correlation does not imply causation", and other recurring noise.
To be honest, I don't even know how comment flagging works. I know there's a button there (it's buried and shouldn't be), but I have no concept of what happens when I hit it.
To whatever extent it does work, I think an automatic N-week hellban after getting more than one comment flagged off the site makes sense.
(Not that I would touch it if I knew, I am averse to punishment as a form of socialization as I think it's less effective than encouragement and gentle correction.)
There is a reason communities fork themselves as they approach Dunbar's number. It's not that we lack the technology to talk to more than 300 people at a time, it's that we implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. The problem is sociology, not technology.
I've always believed that best way to improve the quality of contributions is to make the opportunity to contribute seem finite. It'd be interesting to see what happens if you cap submissions at 2 per user per day and max comment thread participation out at 5 or 10 per day. With a limit in place, people may do a lot more thinking before speaking or submitting.
What does flagging do? Remove a post? What would more of it accomplish? What are some sample posts on which it would be used? Are the dangers that such a mechanism would be used to punish unpopular opinions, or even punish correct statements when the consensus is wrong?
Having only been here about 500 days, I'm newish, but it seems like quality is degrading. I don't see why your solutions would fix that. The only thing I can think of that might be interesting to examine is advogato's model.
In the end, it's a hard problem. People want to hang out and discuss news items with all their friends, not just the ones we wish they'd bring around to show up.
My comment is that I read the proposals in the form of a poll and do not see what they are expected to do to solve problems. Perhaps more explanation of their expected virtues is in order. I asked about one in particular as an example, the flag.
I know flagging from youtube, it is used much for erotic and violent content which after being reviewed manually by employees of youtube (which undoubtedly has significant labor costs) has a warning label assigned and age sign-in or click through added. Perhaps it means the same thing here. If so it's not clear what sorts of posts it would be used on since I have not seen violent or erotic posts here, or even spam. So that is why I asked how does it work and please give some examples of actual posts is should be used on. Also discuss how introducing new punishment features will not have unintended consequences. A discussion of these sorts of things should precede any vote on what actions to take, that's how they do it in various congresses and parliaments.
(Regarding the other topic, I don't know if there is a S/N problem or not. There are different kinds of posts than there were a year ago. There are more people here and different people. This is not what my comment was addressing at all though. I assume as a starting point that there is a problem with wrong posts and here are some proposals to solve it. I don't know if that is the case but I am assuming it to move on and discuss proposed changes to the board. The question I had was how will these solve the problem. The mechanisms of how these would work to improve things is no doubt clear to the OP, but is not obvious to me. Then again, since we are being asked to rank them, perhaps it is not so obvious even to the OP. If it is very obvious and clear to all we would just be told these should be implemented, and not asked which ones we have a gut feeling might work.)
Hiding score is also a great idea since it reduces upvote-downvote wars.
1. There's a significant increase in the number of submissions over time while the number of frontpage articles remains the same (30). This leads to shorter articles lifespan. So if you visit HN as often as I do in a day, you will encounter a lot more good articles and also a lot more bad ones (the good to bad ratio may be the same, but our brain doesn't compute ratio intuitively, so it just gives more weigh to the majority bad articles). Note that 'bad' here just means stuffs I don't find interesting.
2. Wider range of topics (kind of related to the first point). So any given veteran will be less happy now that there are more articles that won't interest them.
3. Points inflation as the result of more users. 2-3 years ago, an article with score above 50 points is decent, now they're so common (may be a points exchange calculator to convert current score to score x days ago? ;-) )
Remember, all the threads that germinate from these stories tend to generate more karma in the aggregate than the submission itself.
My guess is that people submit stories from certain sources, no matter what the content is, to try and be the first submissions and get the karma. If ~15 people do this, the submission is going to rise rapidly, not because of it's content, but because of people trying to cash in on a well-known name. For instance, I think an Arrington article is going to get a lot of votes right away because of people trying to be the first submission, not because of the content article. If there was no karma associated with submissions, people wouldn't race to get these types of articles submitted.
Again, just a guess.
Looking at the submission history for some users easily confirms this.
Along with other adjustments to incentives for submitting content, some sort of check for whether most of the user's submissions come from the same domain name could potentially be useful - especially for domain names with the top X% of all submissions site-wide (e.g. techcrunch).
So much good stuff spills off the front page just because it didn't get several votes within the first half hour (and/or wasn't submitted at prime time for EST or PST readers).
Change voter weight depending on how much it correlated with PG's votes in the past. Vote can even change direction if inverse correlation with PG's votes was observed.
Next step would be to create personalized page for every user when new submission is sorted according to correlation with that user (instead of PG).
Maybe the voting in such topics would be symbolic. It would be visible, but would not really affect karma. StackOverflow addressed their similar concern with Community Wikis.
500 points isn't enough. It's just a poor proxy for moderator power, where what you really want is a couple dozen moderators, who think close enough to you, and wield most of the voting power.
And I agree with your general point. Some of those feature ideas do boil down to giving veterans more power on the site, and I'm not a huge fan of that idea.
But other ideas on the list aren't about biasing moderation; instead, they're about fixing some of the site features that lead to pathological comment threads.
It is quick to load which is key and I use it as almost a newspaper each morning going to college.
As it works now, this advantage is an incentive for users to jump in early with low-quality comments that just get votes by pointing out the obvious.
An example of a partial fix for this: show upvotes for comments as normal, but when calculating a comment's contribution to the user's karma, give lower weight to early comments, to reflect the advantage they had in getting upvotes.
Maybe it would help if you had to click through to the comment page to get to the external url - nobody's going to work hard to get a hundred visitors + the comments are often more interesting than the content.
I am against putting Karma restrictions to upvote or post Ask HN. It insulates us from attracting newer and possibly better members.
† Two examples of people who weren't here at the beginning of the site, both of whom are notable company operators.
Ban silly meta-discussions where people discuss how terrible HN has become and fantasize about what draconian measures they'll take to make it better.
Seriously. There are things about HN that I don't like, but I find these kind of discussions even more annoying.
Did I miss a lot of meta-posts over the last few weeks, or am I right that this is one of the very few active meta-discussions we've had in a little while?
† (which: for the record, I think this might be my second or third ever "Ask"-style post)
†† (neither of whom are normally prone to meta-negativity)
Bad submissions are usually made by users who simply haven't figured out (yet) what types of articles people are really interested in.
Great poll, though we may be missing some information here.
I don't like this at all and would down vote it if that were an option. I joined this forum so I could post an "Ask HN". That was the very first thing I did. And I have seen people do throwaway accounts to ask questions anonymously who are (presumably/apparently) members in good standing but have some valid reason to not want to ask under their regular account. I have in recent weeks been thinking that it might make some sense to let people post an Ask HN with a new account but not post other submissions until they have a certain karma threshold. The people who submit spam are frequently brand new accounts and seem to not participate in the forum at all. People who are new (or using a new account) and doing an Ask HN are much, much more often looking for legitimate feedback than folks who start posting other types of submissions from a new account.
The only hesitation I have is that in another forum I used to participate in, in place of karma, they used post-count as their measure and when they instituted a post-count threshold for getting certain privileges, people would join, make like 25 inane, pointless posts to hit the threshold and, voila, get the privilege they sought. However, since karma works very differently from post count, it is probably far less abusable.
Also, please do not limit comments per day.
For the most part, the options listed do not appeal to me. They are mostly a "big stick" approach to problems. There is a time and a place for that but please, please do not turn HN into some version of what people are complaining goes on at International airports in the US. Polite, civilized behavior is something which occurs by mutual agreement and is rooted in genuine respect, not fear of reprisal. You can model that and you can foster that but you cannot beat people into genuinely respecting you/each other or being sincerely polite.
Edit to reply to this piece:
Super-bonus extra special bonus round: if you've been here for more than 500 days and think HN's S/N hasn't degraded over the last 6 months, tell us all why! My perception is that most veterans think it has.
Not saying it "hasn't degraded" but it seems to me that a lot of the folks on the leader board are older members -- by that I mean they are not 23 years old but tend more towards their 30's and 40's. A recent poll of the age distribution of the site has caused me to stop and reassess "tone" of some of the comments. I'm 45. Most folks here are a lot younger than I am. "Young and clueless" sometimes sounds rude and disrespectful but often is not. If they are just youthful and exuberant and you reply factually to their erroneous assumptions, young people are typically way more willing to step back from their initial position than older people are -- unless, of course, you reply in an ugly way, in which case it rapidly degrades. So that has influenced my recent behavior to be a bit slower to assume someone is being an arse. It has helped make my recent experience more positive as well.
I don't know if the age distribution has changed or not from "the good old days". I just know that information made me look at posts in a different light.
I think we could all do without "the news" for a week. How about Erlang (or, Erlang and friends) week? Anything OT, we all vote down to hell.
I'd hate to lock someone out e.g. of needed feedback or launch publicity. Would a week be a sweet spot -- not too long, but long enough?
We could even have some fun at it. I'd love to have a week's worth of that good old "brand new HN" front page.
Note: Anyone who doesn't follow the community enough to know what is going on, is going to be in for a rude surprise if/when they post other content.
As for the hard coded rules, I'd proceed cautiously. For example, 100 point penalties seem a bit harsh for what might be 1 time out of 10, or even 20, an honest mistake. I've come to appreciate the way pg tends to do the minimum necessary/effective, in design but also in adjustments to the karma scheme.
Of course, my own proposal could well whack some people who pop up and contribute a "non-jErlanjure" story after some days' absence. Sigh, at least with live people participating, perhaps we could suss out and, um, moderate our response in such instances.
(Hmm, BTW, losing 100 points for an upvote cast on a thread that gets killed would likely lend new energy to the "arrows are too small on the iWhatever"... discussion.)