Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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I just got back from a two-month (well, 85000 minute) noprocrast-enforced HN break, and while I've been browsing the front page for the last few days I haven't felt motivated to comment on anything. I think there's been a drop in the quality of stories as well as comments.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I used to like the science-type stories, or other stories that taught me something interesting and novel from some branch of human knowledge. But I just checked the first 90 stories and there's nothing matching that description. Instead there seem to be an awful lot of "gossip" and "personality" type stories. Tesla vs Top Gear! Tech CEO shoots elephant! Trollish "What I hate about facebook" stories! The interminable "Is it a bubble?" discussion!

On the other hand, it might just be my opinion... obviously somebody is interested in the current front-page stories or else they wouldn't have been voted up. Do other folks think that the interestingness of the stories has declined?

Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding and submitting quality stories?

My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't maintain itself."

So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time.

Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

And submit stories you want to see here. Someone has to do it or they'll never show up here.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

This is the biggest one IMO.

One of the problems with new stories (for me at least) is when they are submitted. I often see something interesting in the rss feed that was submitted several hours before I got to it. Upvoting on a story that old is useless, if it hasn't reached critical mass by some time threshold, no one will see it.

It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.

It's the same with comments. I usually join discussions several hours late. Mostly because I live in Europe. Usually I get 1 or 2 up/down votes and almost no answers.

So I generally think that good stories shouldn't decay as fast as they do. And maybe also when there is some activity on them.

Maybe also we should have some category like "best stories of yesterday", putting some fresh attention to the good ones.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like.

I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.

Long-time lurker here. I really would appreciate that as I'd rather check a couple of new stories while at the same time glancing over the current top-stories. Reducing this by one click (I know, I'm lazy) would be great!

If you're using Chrome (or any other Chromium based browser) - you can try this extension - http://bit.ly/dTI5Oq - it displays new & top side by side.

It might be that the people that are reading the "new" stories and thus effectively making the decision which stories get at least a brief chance to see a wider audience, are not actually interested in the same things that the core is interested in.

This means that the community-at-large is effectively given the opportunity to vote on a sub-optimal selection of the submitted stories.

This can perhaps be fixed by briefly flashing all new stories towards the bottom of the top news page, to give them a brief chance at wider exposure. One way to do this would be to make a queue, and put every new story on the bottom of the front page for 5 minutes barring a certain number of down-votes for moderation.

This might really effect which stories actually end up on the top news page (though perhaps only for stories submitted during peak times).

Somebody may be interested in gossip, "IT celebrities" and cheap-prediction stuff, but why they started it here? There are lots of sites offering exactly that.

For me the only solution is to allow down-voting submissions by top contributors - because the lack of good comments is a byproduct of the lack of good submissions..

I have said this at least a few times and I will say it again -- a story and comment moderation model based on the way it is done at reddit truly would help.

I find it really odd that you cant downvote until 500 karma, and it appears you can never? downvote stories?

And then there are comments in this thread that say "its a really hard problem to figure out" -- no it isn't, you just need to have faith that moderation power will be used appropriately by the site's audience and give them the appropriate ability to do so.

Just like on quora, they seem to have blinders on to systems that work because they want to believe that only their design team could possibly come up with something novel and in that novelty find the best solution.

I think that a part of the reason nobody's receptive to that idea is because we've seen the community quality at Reddit.

Without trying to insult them, I know that it is a very close-knit and strong community, but the intellectual barrier is very low. The comment quality is very low. The notion that there is anything there that can help us is likely being spurned because, right or wrong, that's not what we're striving for.

While I was a little shocked to hear PG clarify that HN is a place for hackers and not startup founders (I kind of expected the opposite,) I think we can all agree that this isn't meant to be a site for the lowest common denominator.

I personally believe that quality control starts with the submissions. The higher quality submissions, the higher quality comments they'll attract. But that's just me, apparently.

Your argument is that the ability to submit, upvote/downvote and deep-thread comments affects the community?

I dont follow.

I am saying that having a better system for your community to converse allows the community to thrive.

You may think the intellectual barrier to entry is low, or the intellectual quality of what you read on reddit is low - and I would counter that maybe your looking at the wrong subreddits for you.

There are a ton of subs that I cant stand, dont read, dont follow etc...

I simply ignore them - but I am talking about the mechanics of the forum. The ability to have ongoing conversations, up/down vote comments and submissions and the ability to categorize content via the submission process.

You're talking about the community being beneath some HN standard, where I am talking about the characteristics of reddit's infrastructure that allow the community to interact.

For some reason, people think that we need automated tools to weed out those that would be beneath their interests, but I don't think that is possible.

Also, how would you accommodate people who are just learning, trying to learn or are experts in other subjects yet are trying to expand their base? You cant say that the intellectual barrier is too low such that people who don't know what we are talking about cant participate...

Your argument is that the ability to submit, upvote/downvote and deep-thread comments affects the community?

Actually, yes, I am. I firmly believe, for better or worse, that the more popular a site becomes, the more interests it has to cater to. Somebody else posted in the thread that the three options for a community to stay true to its roots is to either exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.

Allowing everybody an equal share participation on the moderation capabilities panders to the latter. If everybody can moderate out, and the site continues to grow, then I think it's only a matter of time before the harder-to-understand articles are filtered out in favor of more easily digestible pieces that appeal to a broader majority.

I think the main difference between here and the notion of subredditing is that effectively, HN IS a subreddit, targeted at Hackers. I'm obviously not the say-all authority, but I suspect that splintering it further is not only unnecessary, but runs contrary to the concept of a focused community.

In fact, that there are subreddits that work so well (again in my opinion) speaks primarily to the fact that subreddits aren't very easy to find or discover.

As for the people who are just learning? I honestly don't know how to handle that. Though HN has worked really well with a diverse group of experts. There are lawyers, doctors and professionals of all sorts that are able to contribute to the areas they are knowledgeable in -- the trick is in somehow enforcing the restraint for them to not comment on things they know little about, or at least to not comment unintelligibly. The more aware of the community ideal everybody is, the more easy that becomes; but the more diluted the population grows to be, the harder that becomes to enforce.

Like I said, I don't know all the answers, and I certainly don't mean to impugn anywhere else in favor of HN - Reddit has plenty of perks, I'm sure, but it is the rare community that is able to subsist through popularity. The closest that I can think of to have lasted is kuro5hin, and they certainly had their own communal warts as well.

>HN IS a subreddit, targeted at Hackers

However, we are talking about how the scale of HN is getting to the point where people are complaining about S/N ratios and as you say:

>exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.

I think this is shortsighted, elitist or both. First, you/whomever posted this has clearly left out a better option; ADAPT to newcomers/scaling.

While I agree that HN may have been like a subreddit, with a target audience, HN is growing, entrpreneurship is growing, the startup ecosystem in the valley is growing, our knowledge base is growing.

Eschewing newcomers and growth is to operate in fear of progress.

Taking the spill-over and iterating what HN is to accommodate is not to "lose its cred" so to speak...

Further, I am not advocating a straight adoption of reddit, but I do feel that HN can learn a lot from how they enable the community.

I had written a bunch of suggestions in my first reply, but deleted them, but I was suggesting some options along the lines of:

Validate SMEs in given areas and give them high-level moderation/influence.

Post a clear HN-etiquette that delineates posting format/commenting format that the stie wants.

Earn further features/user abilities through karma - such as allow SMEs/high karma users to only create HN-subs.

There are a lot of things we can do, but to cry in the corner over newcomers is never a winning solution.

There are a lot of things we can do, but to cry in the corner over newcomers is never a winning solution.

I'm not suggesting that we do, obviously. However, newcomers have the disadvantage of not knowing the history, the ethics, the goals/ideals. They only know what it was like 'when they joined'. When I joined, I was corrected a few times for missteps I made. The growth rate makes that less and less feasible. It isn't that I hold a grudge to new people, they are just disadvantaged when it comes to the communal etiquette standards.

I find your post to be exceedingly confused.

First, you say that you don't recognize that behavior is influenced by things like up-votes, down-votes, and deep threading. In the next breath you argue that a better system has a positive impact on the community. I don't see how you can have one without having the other. Making a community “thrive” is changing it. If you disagree with this please explain to me why communities like thriving, but don't like not thriving. If they are the same than they shouldn't care either way. If things have changed than you agree that the changes had an affect. Also a better system being better is something that I find to be true by definition.

Next you argue for downvotes, by saying that reddit has proved itself in virtue of subreddits. I don't think this is the case. I think that subreddits are harder to get to, creating a selection-bias in which only the people who are interested in that subreddit end up contributing to it. In other words I think you can explain the success of reddit's subreddits with subtle elitist bias. This creates a huge amount of irony, since your post is actually arguing against elitism.

You also claim that some people think we need automated tools to weed out things that our beneath are interests. This is another point that is sort of funny. We not only need those tools, we have them [1]. They are built into our minds.

In the end you ask rhetorically: can you ask someone who doesn't know what your talking about to not contribute to your discussion? This backfires too. Plato said: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” Proverbs continually tells the fool he should shut up (I'm almost done, really). The idea that you can ask people who don't know what they are talking about to be quiet isn't new or immoral.

I'm probably misinterpreting you, but that irony made my brain happy and I wanted to share it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention

Definitely. I used to see many stories that had long, in-depth analysis or insight into problems; stories that wouldn't find it onto the front page of any other site but HN. I remember being able to check HN front page once every morning and fill my instapaper queue with about 5 lengthy but interesting stories I could read throughout the day. Not so much anymore...

I don't think that the number of interesting stories have declined, but I think that they have become much harder to find because the number of non-interesting stories have definitely increased. Among the non-interesting stories, I often notice the same usernames over and over. Would limiting the number of story posts per day help the situation?

Uninteresting stories seem to come either from the same old accounts or from brand new accounts. I'm not sure why brand new accounts aren't banned from submitting stories until they get (say) 100 comment karma.

It it possible that the average quality of material on the net is dropping for the same reasons that we think post quality is dropping here?

Emotionally charged rants get attention. Careful reasoning gets eviscerated by pedants. So people are learning to write for the audience.

Sometimes I scroll down the "new" page and vote up all the hard tech stories I can find. Often I find none.

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