Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN | Hacker News Reader

Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN

georgesaines.com

122 pointsgsaines140 comments

I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.

HN used to feel like it was full of artists and now it feels like it's full of critics.

This is very well put, and unfortunately I have to agree.

I would say posers instead of critics (myself included)

Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.

let's not get things confused - just because I am not a "maker" on HN does not mean I am not productive when I swivel my chair over to do my actual work. my god.

What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone.

Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.

Meta posts and comments may be boring, but based on pretty close observation I don't think they're setting the tone. I fear it is nothing so exciting. The most likely explanation is simply that HN is reverting to the mean for forums.

Standing my ground.

Common sentiment is now comments are declining in quality. Wherever that came from, that's now parroted fairly often and is undoubtedly planted in the back of everybody's head as they go about their business. That cannibalizes some comments, because people now think "am I contributing to a decline?". That makes people more inclined to snark, to discourage others from adding to the decline. This is the exact sort of thing I watch happen all day long in the comments now.

Take one recent example. Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it[1]. They presented no original thought on it themselves, they simply quoted it verbatim. Some asshole came along and berated him for it, as if he'd committed some kind of grievous sin. The fact is, I enjoyed the quote in question, and I upvoted him because I'm glad somebody else noticed. Worse comments have happened, but now there's such a fixation with "quality" that people are starting to up the snark. Which adds to the very problem we're trying to fix. Look at that entire thread.

The rub is that rather than focus on opportunities for improving going forward, this community has an inane fascination with returning to the way things were. Your thread was too late, I'm afraid, as the negativity has accelerated any decline that exists.

You're dead-on; HN is reverting to the mean. This navelgazing lament about the times that were is setting the pace for the future evolution of HN, though. The high-karma users have spent so much time wondering how to get back to the past -- a now completely unattainable goal due to growth, I'm sorry -- that there has been immeasurable lost opportunity on focusing on where to go from here.

I'm not sure that technological improvements are going to fix it, either. Even if the negative trend is as pronounced as believed (and I don't think it is), acknowledging it and spending countless comments focusing on it has cost precious time in reversing it.

Rather than embracing the inevitable evolution, understanding it, and finding ways to make the evolution more positive, we've established blood-curdling fear at the mere prospect of evolution. Now, that glacial evolution is sliding along on a trail of fear instead of a trail of positive outlook.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437486

If it helps - people complain, then they leave. You won't have to endure it much longer, I'm sure.

Your comment is ironic given the comment that you started with.

I am speaking from the perspective of improving HN, so I'm startled (should I be?) to find that the first reply is an admitting that the community will eventually split apart.

From my experience (which was as a developer of a browser game) this is not true. People who complain are people who care. And people who care will stay. People who really want to go will not complain. They will stop contributing and go without much fanfare.

In the end you stay with all the complainers, but none of the non-complainers. This is a real risk for a community. (In the case of the game it was 'simple' to fix this: change the game. It is far harder for something like HN)

> Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it....

I may well the guy you're talking about who was berated and then downvoted -- even though two others besides you had posted that they liked my comment. And when I replied to the post that berated me, I was once again downvoted. At least one comment has been deleted but it's still a pretty interesting snapshot of what the mood is on HN these days http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225

Thank you. I looked for it and couldn't find it, and actually did mean yours.

ooops, yes, that's what I meant to link to. Thanks -- and thanks for mentioning it!

Since you posted your thread asking the community for suggestions, I've been mulling over an idea that I'd now like to share.

I think jed is right; the navel-gazing is part of the problem and the more meta-discussion occurs the lower overall quality gets. This belief is informed by my experiences on a variety of fora, and is not HN-specific. Tackling the problem then, should occur in a way that doesn't draw attention to the fact that there is one, but fixes it silently in the background. This is partly why I like hidden karma scores; they (in theory) reduce groupthink and handwringing about karma.

My suggestion is this: pick a few dozen people who you think are good contributors, and write a quick script to dump their voting patterns. Take a look at how they're voting, and choose some number whose votes you think best represent what you'd like HN to be. Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. Neither they nor the rest of HN should know they've been tapped.

I envision the superusers as being vote accelerators. Their votes would not only confer the typical +/- 1 karma, but would tag the comment they voted on. An up-tagged comment would gain, say, 2 karma for every upvote, and a down-tagged one would lose 3 for every downvote. Those values are provisional and arbitrary, and should be changed. Tags could stack or cancel each other out, but that's something else that should be experimented with.

If the superuser scheme seems to be having a positive effect, consider making it viral. That is, if some receives, say, 200 positively tagged comments, they too become superusers. Again, that constant should be chosen carefully. The idea behind making superuserdom viral is that it scales automatically (given a wisely chosen threshold), and offers insurance against decreased contribution from the original set of superusers.

Karma can be a very effective way of cultivating the kind of interactions the community desires, but can also lead to gaming and groupthink. By increasing the value of trusted users' votes, but keeping that mechanism hidden, I believe you should be able to maximize karma's benefits while minimizing its drawbacks.

Anyway, I apologize if this post is off-topic or should be addressed elsewhere. I figured a meta-thread was as good a place as any to introduce it.

I also wanted to say in postscript that although HN may be suffering the growth pangs of any forum, it still offers far better discussion than most sites I've found, so the doomsday-ery is perhaps premature.

Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly.

That actually reminds me of the metacritic scheme. IIRC they take reviews and then (a) translate them into a numeric score according to some method they don't tell you about and (b) weigh each critic by a different weight, of which they don't tell you about.

So your idea is not only interesting, it is probably workable.

It is the same reason I am commenting less and less.

This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.

There was a study somewhere stating that those criticizing are perceived as being smarter. I guess we know that instinctively. And I think this applies to self view to: when criticizing someone's else point we appear smarter to ourselves.

There's too much bubble talk lately and people's projects are still half-baked and aren't ready for the bubble to pop, so they're trying to slow it down by cutting each other down. Crab mentality.

HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.

exactly - I attribute much of the priggishness of the HN community to this mercenary fact. Most folks who are obsessed with forging a strong online identity on HN are deeply invested in selling something to the rest of the group. I do not by any means disagree with this, but one of my first thoughts upon finding HN was how easily it might be lampooned. Everyone seemed to be self-promoting while trying to act casual. I will probably never have any kind of reputation here, because I spend my day either deep in thought at my computer, or reading/commenting HN. I don't forsee becoming a member of the web entrepreneur community, and because of my personality type I will probably never have a blog. But I know a lot.

Idea: track the upvotes/downvotes/flags of users and compare them to your upvotes/downvotes/flags (and maybe other respected users). If there are striking similarities, take a closer look. If things still look good (observe comments, submissions), you've identified at least a few potential moderators.

(Also, since I'm sure anyone commenting on the state of HN will have their account scrutinized, my first account is nearly 2 years old, and I've been looking at HN for around 3 years total.)

That your last parenthetical is necessary to have an opinion about the direction here is telling, to say the least.

There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.

Depending on how much you trust them, they could liberally delete comments, or knock them way down in their weighing. Of course, you run the risk of pissing people off.

Concurrently, you could use the votes (esp negative) of the users tracked and identified as described above as notifiers to the moderators. That way you leverage more volunteers, but with less power (and they wouldn't know they had it, either).

Slashdot went down this road as you may well know. Moderators, then meta-moderators. ("Was this a fair moderation?") based on karma.

I have a low 5-digit UID on slashdot, and registered well after I started reading, so I was sort of in the second wave there. The discourse quality fell off and leveled out, but my experience is that low digit UIDs generally contribute at their historic high quality levels.

In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created.

I don't know how this might translate to HN; "Filter by age of account?" What if by default you only showed comments and posts from accounts older than two years? (This would disqualify me, by the way, so maybe one year..) :)

People could select to see comments from younger accounts if they liked, or perhaps very well seasoned accounts (two years on the site) could promote up comments to general visibility. This would be patently unfair, in that new awesome commenters would not get to contribute to the discourse immediately, but it would almost certainly immediately increase the quality of discourse.

Slashdot's system has some echos of this, but they made it far, far too easy to become a moderator as they wanted to spread the work out. They also I think created a mental expectation with the '-1' score which created a trolling subculture, that is, reading slashdot at -1 is a cesspit, and so nobody does it, hence people use it as a cesspit, hence.. What I'm suggesting is making it the strong default to do the equivalent of reading slashdot at say 4 and higher, but using age of account as the heuristic.

This would be a reasonably easy chrome extension, but obviously easier to do on your side. If you demo this yourself, I'd be curious to hear if you think the quality is improved.

In real life, we might call this an apprentice system, that is, you have to sit in the back, and only occasionally get your answers while you prove you wish to belong and that you deserve to belong. It's a known effective way of maintaining quality of members in a desirable group, from religious to musical to .. I imagine secret societies?

Filtering comments by account age sounds a bit too xenophobic to me. However, your idea of an apprentice system is interesting. This is a random idea based off that, but what if new users were given posting privileges only after demonstrating that they can recognize quality comments by upvoting them? Since HN no longer shows vote count for comments, if a user is able to consistently recognize quality comments, then there is a higher probability that he/she will also contribute quality comments. This would effectively require users to read and learn HN posting etiquette/standards before they can start posting themselves.

Intriguing. You'd need some way of providing feedback to them if they 'picked right'. Combining our ideas, this would mean 'picked like long-time users did'.

Re: xenophobia, it's not precisely that, as I'm not suggesting a date-joined-cutoff, just that it takes a long time for HN to be convinced you should contribute, rather than just learn.

I mostly agree. It reminds me of stop-and-copy GC: you have a root set (very old accounts, or maybe current moderators) and you see what you can reach from it (the accounts the root set consistently upvotes), and you chuck everything else periodically.

What it means for an account to be GC'ed is up for experimentation, but a reasonable default might be that it doesn't get any voting or submission rights. Arguably it's a bigger problem that stupid comments get upvoted than that stupid comments exist at all.

"... In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created. ..."

/. 2774/4UID user here, seniority doesn't necessarily correlate with quality as high performance users are a subset of early adopters just as they are with later adopters.

I completely agree, my suggestion is just that a) they're a much LARGER subset, and b) it's dead simple to find out who they were.

Do you disagree with my experience on slashdot, out of curiosity?

I would suggest multiplying the number of up votes on a article by 1 + log ( account age) vs some sort of fixed filter.

If there's no shortage of moderators, then have them moderate according to HN's missions and objectives like those in a startup does. This includes penalising comments that go against HN. If you're worried about the possible risks and outrage, then the alternative is to die slowly.

Here's a community that has really strict moderation: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_modfaq

The user is able to see reason for being censored and can complain, etc.

WP's a great example ... it's years since I've seen that site but as forums went it was and prob still is light years ahead of anything else that was around including the harsh but transparent moderation.

I like that idea. Penalize submissions (hype,linkbait,fud) that go against HN's mission with 20pts and bad comments with 10, 20 or even 50pts for spam.

Or something like that, if you get to negative score, you can't vote anymore until you go back to positive with nice comments and good submissions.

Maybe have them - delete posts that are meaningless (memes, 'me too', 'you suck', etc - aggressive post removal may 'feel' like censorship but I think it would be great, even if only to keep threads small - move 'meta' posts into a separate thread (each article would have two threads - the 'regular' comments, and the 'meta' or 'off topic' section - temp- or permaban accounts that post many comments that have to be deleted - more controversial - investigate algorithmically found voting patterns, e.g. the same accounts always upvoting comments by the same user(s)?

Combined with a 'you get two posts for each post that scores +2 or higher, or 1 post every 3 days' to limit the amount of posts and incentivize people to may high quality posts (or at least posts that they think will score well).

If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.

My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.

For example, consider the following:

Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.

One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct.

For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot.

Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.

I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.

Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)

Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.

This really bugs me. What defines mediocre to you? We're defining the problem in relatives. I mean, look at the exchange that just happened:

> Comments are getting worse.

>> What is worse?

> Comments are overwhelmingly mediocre.

So, I ask, what is mediocre?

Comments are the thoughts of human beings using your system, and there's no technological or psychological means to have any semblance of control over them. Their perceived quality is a direct reflection of the community you have. Any attempt to "fix" perceived quality is going to divide your community, and any disruption or improvement to the community is going to indirectly adjust perceived quality.

Just like none of us writes like Thomas Jefferson these days and a number of words have fallen out of favor, so has your community evolved and a new definition of "average comment" must be found. This is all a relative game, anyway; a comment that you call mediocre I might find to be a golden nugget of awesome, and why should my opinion matter any less?

As an aside, I wish I had a dollar for every suggested technological fix to the declining-comment problem. Based on how this thread is shaping up, I'd be doing better than my 401(k).

It's very reasonable to recognize quality.

I can distinctly remember several times the comments on an article were written by absolute experts in the material, full of insight and interesting content.

I could believe comments like those have become rarer.

That's your definition of quality, and I'm glad you shared it, but disheartened that you consider it the one true quality.

Reading your second sentence strictly, we can infer that to you, quality means (a) expert-level familiarity with a linked article, (b) insightful -- difficult to generalize because insight is different for different people, or (c) full of interesting content.

Of the three of those points, only one of them isn't dependent on the perspective, knowledge level, or interests of the reader. What is insightful to me might be common knowledge to you. What is insightful to you might be tediously stupid to me. What is interesting to you might be boring to me. On, and on, and on.

It's obvious there's no such thing as "true quality". But I am willing to value certain types of quality more than others.

I'm just expressing one vote that I agree with some peoples' consensus, that a particular type of quality of HN has decreased; and it's a type of quality that I value.

Example of a comment I find mediocre: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433896

It doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Snarky comments really don't belong here on HN and I've noticed a trend of them getting far more up votes than they used to.

Ah, but neither does yours!

Why does the mediocrity apply to the comment you're replying to, but not your own? Your comment is dripping with snark and someone called you on it (thankfully). I actually think your comment is shittier than the one you're replying to, because you put yourself on a pedestal of telling the rest of us what to do.

Was that comment at the top of the discussion before you snarked it to oblivion? Probably not. It was most likely already in the deep hell of very light gray, and your content-free comment just made it worse. Calling the kettle black, in my opinion.

Actually, this is an example of a "mean" comment.

I think it was fine to say the guy's comment was "dripping with snark" (a specific criticism), but not that it was "shitty," and not that he was "telling the rest of us what to do."

I would call those bits "mean" because the amount of insult they add is disproportionate to the amount of content they have. In other words, it would have been worthwile (IMHO) to find a better way to say the same thing.

Now, the whole point is that who am I to say what's mean? And I agree, hence the proposal I made to allow people to "vote" on what's mean, and have a threshhold. I mean hell, different communities find different things to be unacceptable "mean," and that's fine.

"Mean" for a girl scout meeting and "mean" for the LKML are pretty different; I think HN should probably be somewhere in between.

And the point is, if HN becomes like the LKML, we're gonna enjoy it a lot less; that's why we want to limit meanness, not because we're big softies.

And now you've just provided another snarky, content-free comment that consists of nothing but an attack. Further, it's longer (and therefor more intrusive) than the comment it addresses.

Can we please stop this silly fained-hypocrisy treasure hunt? There is certainly appeal to a game everyone can play, but it's a pointless waste of time. What exactly do you hope to achieve? A world where spammers and trolls say what ever they want and well meaning people just remain silent?

Sometimes the only way to stop immoral violence is with immoral violence.

PG, if you really want to get hard data on whether comments have gotten "meaner", I'd be happy to help with that.

It seems the chief complaint is that comments are no longer increasing the happiness and confidence of the community, but rather raising anxiety and hostility. My startup is based on an algorithm for measuring the emotional impact of text and does in fact measure these four emotions.

I'd be pleased to help measure how comments' effects on readers have changed over time. I would do it myself, but I know you don't want me anonymously scraping every comment for the last 3+ years, and it'd be much faster to just get a data dump from the server.

Drop me a line if interested. :)

Will you provide examples of mediocre comments? (Feel free to point any of mine out.)

Votes are a terrible way of getting feedback on comments - I'd genuinely love to know if something I've said is "off topic" for the community but I often feel that some of my worst comments (one liners, or attempts at humor) actually get the most votes.

Perhaps some way of visualizing the way distribution of the karma bands for the people who voted on a comment (both positive and negative) would be good - I would actually go and check this occasionally to see if I was getting too far out of step.

e.g. Something that told me that your comment may have a total score of 30 but the people that have a karma level over 10000 who voted all downvoted etc.

Yours, it may have been serious, but it comes off as trolling.

(This one, it's mean and full of snark)

Instead of having an arrow for downvoting comments (which has a different intended meaning on hn than on most other social newssites) couldn't we have a button next to "flag" that has a name on it, e.g. "content-free/snarky/witty but pointless comment/fanboy pseudo-argument", so that people have some clear guidance when to click on it?

And then would be very interesting to feed a Bayesian filter with this feedback, and see if that filter can pick up future "snarky" comments automatically.

If that works, then requiring a proof of work (a simple-ish logical puzzle) attached to a snarky comment could bring a scalable barrier.

Sometimes it can be difficult to reply to a comment without the possibility of being perceived as being snarky. For example a comment thread that I was involved in about jQuery recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429832

Fortunately the person I replied to took the comment in the sense it was intended, but I also know that people can be really defensive in this area and can perceive a comment as snarky even though it wasn't meant to be.

I read it and do not find anything snarky in it. But the way you mentioned it made me wonder: there are "intentions" and there are "results" - are there a lot of the comments that are intentionally snarky ? Or, the snarkiness is just a way a person would communicate ? And if that, is it worth hinting to that person that their written communication conveys not what they intended ?

Slashdot has had this for over 10 years, I don't think it adds much value. Well, you can easily find the '+5, Funny' comments, which is good; but '+5, insightful' or '+5, interesting' becomes meaningless quite soon (maybe I'm missing the nuances of the system, I've never moderated or meta-moderated - ironically, mostly because the whole system seems so complex that I never bothered to get to know it).

I wasn't aiming at having a comment be tagged as funny or whatever. It was just supposed to tell people that they shouldn't click on on the downvote button because they disagree with the conclusion of a perfectly well argumented comment -- which is what downvotes mean, e.g., on reddit. That's why I suggested to replace the downvote arrow with a few links/buttons.

> Meanness is moral mediocrity.

Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning. Remember this video?

http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters. The video is full of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong. It's probably one of the worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?

Eat. It. Up. Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing. You definitely didn't boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system. This is not how you tell people you don't like 'meanness'.

Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine. They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don't see anyone getting flagged or kicked off. If you pick someone unpopular to insult you're totally allowed to be a dick here.

Paul, HN is in decline because you don't actually enforce your own rules. If you don't want people to be "mean" or talk like idiots then don't let mean and idiotic crap on the front page. Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle. My jokes demonstrate what you've been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it's insulting your own ethos of the "uber hacker scientist ruling the world":

You guys love cruelty and insult, I'm proof.

In other words, HN needs a few simple laws and some light moderation. e.g.

- no personal attacks

- no "x is an asshole because" inflammatory comments

- ostensibly duplicate content should be deduped

- no flame bait?

I agree that people making personal attacks should be punished. Perhaps a reset of karma and a limited time ban? Obviously there isn't going to be a silver bullet, but I agree with Zed here about enforcement.

How about "no curse words"? Swears almost never improve writing.

Easy to monitor as well.

No, please not. Treat us like adults not children. Censoring words doesn't change a thing, people will just offend with other words.

People are very creative in being mean to each other if they really want. Also it's not specific words that hurt but the context in which they are used.

wlad, good point. I guess the "say it to my face" rule already covers what I was after.

I don't think it is as easy as you think it is. Consider for example the Scunthorpe Problem [1].

Also consider that people on this site are hackers and so naturally we can all speek Leet [2] ;-) In these days of unicode it's extremely difficult to prevent people posting words that look like swear words, but which on inspection are just unusual characters.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

arctangent, I was suggesting a lazy filter to set the tone. If you have to open the character map to put the 𝛍 in f__k that gives you time to consider whether it's worth violating the spirit of the forum.

I shortened my comment above but my full suggestion is to apply time-delayed negative karma to posts with Carlin swears rather than ban them. Who is going to spend 45 seconds finding the 𝛍 to avoid −2 karma?

My first point still stands, though. You can't apply a naive filter because people will end up getting penalised for using words like "scrape", "interstitial", "swanky", "spool", etc. ad infinitum.

Word boundary character.

You're very persistent but I'm afraid you're still wrong :-)

Firstly, I gave unicode as a simple example of the lengths that people could go to in order to swear. But it's actually even easier than that in practice. I you want to ban the word X then I can replace it with a slight misspelling which carries the same intent - and when you ban that a naughty user will just pick another one.

(Bad words aren't the problem we should address, it's the intention behind words which is the real problem.)

Secondly, the Scunthorpe problem is more severe than you realise and can't be solved by considering only whole words. For example, some words have more than one meaning: "tit", "gay", "sod", "knob", "cock", "prick", etc. Some or all of those words would be filtered out by a naive filter.

There's also the additional problem that people may not necessarily agree on whether a word is a swear word or not (even if it does not have multiple meanings like the examples I listed below).

For example, in 1977 the Sex Pistols won a court case about the title of their album "Never Mind the Bollocks" in which it was ruled that "bollocks" is not obscene in the UK (but may of course still be considered obscene in other countries!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Obscenity_court_ruling

And finally, some words mean different things in different coutries. For example, the word "fanny" means one thing in the US and quite another in the UK.

Naive filtering of swear words is never going to work.

never going to work

As I outlined above it's just about the incentive and setting the tone. If you have to write "siht" you'll think twice about whether it needs to be said.

I might do well to add that I am not suggesting this for prudish reasons. I took a creative writing class in college and the teacher banned curses and drugs. Intro to Creative Writing students otherwise substitute force for substance.

Monitor? Aren't people complaining about China's monitoring and stuff like that?

Well played, epic Rails guy.

> Remember this video? http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

I know it's off topic here, but could you either elaborate on this or point us to more detailed rebuttal?

Thomas made remarks about Zed Shaw probably causing companies to fail and not hiring him. At least, if it is the same video I am thinking about.

In fairness you probably attract more of that sort of thing than 99% of people. I mean, if you're going to act so aggressively alpha, you're going to get attacked often. So your view might be a bit skewed here.

I've been doing Ruby for a long time, and back when the mailing list's signal to noise ratio was better, I used to read it daily, so I've been reading Zed's flames for a while. ("The Chainsaw Logger Infanticide Maneuver" was a pretty great one; I still show it and the resulting thread to people.)

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that Zed's fully aware of this effect, and is doing what he does intentionally. He has informative content, but also knows how to push precisely the right buttons. It's often entertaining, but the abasive style is also a brilliant and effective form of self-promotion. (Think Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh.) He knows precisely what buttons to push to get a reaction, and (as far as I can tell) enjoys himself immensely. It's great to watch if you like to see flames written to people that take themselves too seriously.

So I don't think you're telling him anything new here. If you sit down at a table and don't know who the sucker is...

Have other sites done this? I think its a solid idea, very based on the real world as well as supply and demand. I have a large supply of mediocre(or worse) things to say but in the real world if I walk around saying those to people that provide me an opportunity to talk they will eventually stop providing me those opportunities. Seems that the devil might be in the details on this one though.

Is karma the right thing for this? Maybe there should be a new thing called a "leave a comment" ticket. Every comment will consume a ticket. Every comment that gains strictly greater than 1 karma will gain you 2 "leave a comment" tickets but you can never pool more than 4 "leave a comment" tickets. I've left pure supply and demand here though and I've capped profit, maybe its more like supply and demand with government oversight. Every 3 days (tunable, like all prior #s) if you don't have any tickets you get a ticket(Socialism?). I think people will either quit being mediocre or will stop coming to the site, for better or worse. All this is under the assumption that other hackers don't like to read mediocre comments. I think all is lost if such an assumption is false anyways. BTW I have no idea how the HN comment system works now so someone correct me if this idea is perpendicular to the current system.

I've been reading HN for a bit over one year, and I have felt the decline in quality of both comments and posts.

I consider myself a bit of a Reddit refugee, and given the kind of comments that are popping up lately, I think there are many of us here (and if you look at Reddit now, it has been similarly declining, with an influx of Digg- and 4chan-like content and comments). I think a large part of the problem is that people are flocking to HN, and somehow "colonizing" it without trying to integrate into the "local culture". Hence the mean-spirited comments, etc.

I originally came here because I respected pg's technical expertise, enjoyed a lot of his writing, and initially enjoyed an actual (and fleeting) "hacker" community.

Since then, I've periodically left HN for periods of time because of the disappointing shift in focus from science and tech to "entrepeneurship", whatever the hell that is.

Now half the posts I filter past are frankly just advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog. For a while there, we were even getting almost daily front page reposts of Wall Street Journal editorial psuedoscience.

I suspect there's a big chunk of us here who really could not possibly care less about getting rich quick.

I think there's a fine line to walk. "Hacking", if that's still what this place is about, means an intense curiosity to understand, the joy of discovery, and an equally intense desire and joy in creation. I don't see HN reflecting that as much anymore.

I think you were seeing what you wanted to see. As an example, I came here because of the great Entrepreneur community, twice as long ago as you came here for the comp sci.

I have the exact opposite experience. When I started reading here maybe 2 or 2.5 years ago, it was mostly about starting and running software businesses - all aspects of it, from interesting programming problems to HR and taxes. It was a refuge from the JoS 'Business of Software' boards when they started going down the drain.

Nowadays, it seems like there are much more people complaining about how articles about economics or making money aren't 'hackery' enough. It's what I dislike about Reddit for the few time I read it; HN is (used to be?) full of people who either run or want to run software businesses, and want to provide actual value with software (and have it validated by getting people to pay for it) rather than doing some code experiments for the fun of it with no other users than themselves in mind. There are many 'programmer' forums, the amount of 'software business' forums is minuscule.

Okay, point taken. But now ask yourself whether the following are things that you're looking for in the "software business" forum you describe:

advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog

- advertising: yes (I'm assuming this is 'how to do advertising', not 'advertising for someone else's product)

- SEO: yes (same)

- people selling useless web app: this is just how you look at it; in many cases, it's people who want feedback on their experimental ideas. Which I think is fine.

- ppl pushing affiliate links: no, but they didn't used to be here, either

- tax optimisation: yes

- blog promotion: as long as they're blogs on the topics of the forum, yes

Many things on the list are described in a negative way, so it's only natural that they're undesirable. But I don't see them that often (like affiliate links - they're quite rare as far as I can tell) and I used to think that Youtube was useless, too.

Out of curiosity... since HN is a news forum attatched to a capital investment funds' webpage, then why shouldn't it be entrepreneur focused?

How about showing a short list of the key guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) below the comment box whenever someone wants to make a comment?

A quick visual reminder that is "below the fold" - ie below the reply button, so easily ignorable for frequent users, but very visible for new commenters that may not have read the guidelines...

Could have a list of the key guidelines, or show one of the key points at random, or even set it based on what you think is one of the main issues affecting the type of comment on the site.

I remember you saying somewhere(or was it someone else) about high number of comments representative of argumentative topics whereas high-quality content having lesser comments - not much to argue about and people agreeing with article.

From that viewpoint, if the articles posted haven't changed much, not much have been lost. The perceived quality may be only representative of increase in number of users, and new users trying to earn karma or new users unfamiliar with guidelines.

So may be the high quality comments and articles are still there, but some low quality content/comment is skewing the perception.

I've had a lot more upsetting experiences in the comment threads here in the past year and a half than I did a few years ago. I find time on the site occasionally brining out my worse side as well. A few times, it's lead me to shut down my whole browser and go out for a walk.

As far as the stories are concerned, I don't think they ever all resonated with me. To be honest, I probably got more out of Reddit in early 2006 than I ever did out of this forum. Part of that maybe been because of one time benefits of becoming an online junkie-- finding your essays, seeing some of Steve Pavlina's older pieces, learning about a wide variety of niche interests, etc...

Since getting to HN, I'd say that about 1/3 to 1/4 of the front page has been consistently interesting. Too much of the rest has been self-promotional blogging, valley gossip and current fads (diet, exercise, productivity, etc).

I still wouldn't say that I see the site in a bad light. Both the stories and the discussions are a valuable resource. I'm just diverting a bit more focus towards stack exchange sites and screencasts.

A lot of the discussion whenever this comes up seems to be over discouraging bad comments.

I'm more concerned with the a decline in the quality of good comments. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems to me like the top 10% of comments I read and discussions I participate in here has declined. This is really the part that I care about most.

I care about the median or worst comment mostly because of how they affect the best ones.

My dissatisfaction stems from the shift from articles about science and tech to articles about entrepreneurship.

Edit: and rampant, childish downmodding.

I don't understand where this impression comes from - HN used to be about entrepreneurship much more than it is now, and it's what drew many of the first waves of users. There are so many science/tech sites, but very few (just two afaik and one is almost dead...) about software/tech entrepreneurship (at least in the 'DIY' sense - where it's the technical people driving the business rather than being a resource).

I don't have stats but I've been here since the beginning and I remember a much higher ratio of hard tech/comp sci articles to tech business articles.

I don't have stats either, maybe it's observation bias.

It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost.

I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_cul... http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144

I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.

I think an interesting experiment would be to let people pick the top-five most useful posts in this thread. Then consider that to them the rest is noise, do the top-five posts represent the top-five that you would yourself have picked?

For the record (and in no particular order):

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254

3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990

4. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004

5. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967

I like 1-4. I consider Jed to be trolling in this thread, so I'd skip 5. Or perhaps I just disagree strongly enough with his overall perspective that we should let things degrade that I don't think it's worth engaging.

IMHO the reason is obvious. The first few thousand users have very high IQ, so they would post interesting links and comments. After many more ppl joined the average IQ dropped sharply and so did the average quality of content.

I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues.

I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores.

As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically.

I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive.

I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed.

I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers.

Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow.

Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads.

Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account.

The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number.

Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma.

I'd suggest two distinct scores

    log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread )
    log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission )

Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much.

Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.

The problem is that commenting in posts that are several hours old, is penalized. If you write a really interesting comment, but the post is about to drop off the main page, you're karma score will be penalized (because no one read your comment).

Absolute karma score is a measure of how many people like your comment out of how many people have read it. There's just no way to determine how many people have read it.

One solution would be to compare how much total karma the comments in the post have accumulated when you post. Then compare it to how much karma there is once reading has stopped.

Yes, I think that there would be a way to correct for this too.

The karma doesn't have to be calculated immediately, btw. It could be evaluated when the thread is closed for new comments.

I'm not sure if this would work well or not, but I do like the out of the box thinking with this strategy.

pg I believe that the simplest and most effective feature you could implement to resolve some of the comment issues would be to kill multi-accounting.

I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points.

In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute.

Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink)

Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.

Close new user registration. It might hurt YC a bit, but it's worth experimenting with.

My main problems with HN of late are twofold:

1) It seems to be becoming a blog aggregator for the X, Y and Z 'celebrities' of HN. If I wanted to read all of their blog posts, I'd subscribe to their RSS feeds. Do we really need EVERY one of their (sometimes good, sometimes mediocre) posts showing up in the top 5?

2) There seems to be fewer practical posts aimed directly at helping start-ups (which is what I loved about HN when I joined). If I look at the top 10 right now, not one of the posts gives me any practical advice on building a web business.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but unlike many here, I do feel it's about the quality of the posts, not the comments (though the two are not separate). Certainly, as the community grows, it is difficult to maintain the focused niche that HN once had.

EDIT: Just to expand on that last point. I used to feel like I was 'hanging out' with other people who were serious about building a meaningful web start-up/business. As of late, my personal perception is of an increasing number of frivolous side projects ("I built a 3D teapot in 30 seconds!") and 'cool/interesting' psycho-babble. To sum up, it's becoming less of a professional resource for me.

I know it's really out of the question because of the amount of additional load it would create, but in some ways I'd like to have a more personalised home page. If I could just configure it with a:

-objective-c, -java, -hotz, -raises, -acquisition, -node.js, -drm -"considered harmful" (etc)

that would probably give me a 70% better home page.

Are those the topics you're interested in or the ones that you don't want to see? I'm not sure if your example uses command-line argument syntax or search engine query syntax...

I do like the idea, btw. The difficulty most likely is accurately categorizing articles. I know /. added tagging at some point but I'm not sure if that ended up actually being useful.

I can't help but feel like the recent flurry of "HN is declining" is saying to anyone who isn't part of the "old" crown that they are directly responsible for making HN a worse site. I know I feel like since I've created an account, its been all doom and gloom. I don't comment unless I feel that what I have to say would add something to the discussion, but regardless of karma it seems like the sentiment is that new users are dragging the site down.

I might be the only one who feels this way, but I doubt it. New users aren't all bad, and I can't imagine that the purposed decline is all our fault, either. However, the sentiment might be helping fuel the rate at which "bad" users join. Someone who has surfed for awhile and is thinking about creating an account is going to feel turned off for many of the same reasons why you don't jump on a sinking ship[0], but the trolls, etc. won't care either way. Just a thought.

[0] - I'm not implying that HN is in anyway a sinking ship, I derive a great value from it.

You're not the only one that feels that way. Sadly, the elitism implied by "wow, our community sucks now" is overlooked by everyone practicing it.

Indeed. Even when people bring it up :-)

I've been around since HN went public and I don't think new users are generally the problem. I also think the quality of articles is still quite high, and quality of discussion is usually pretty good.

My personal take is that I find there tends to be a subset of users at a particular time who dominate the site. I tend to feel there is an effect where the users with the least to gain from the site are the most valuable, and those seeking to build their reputation on the site can push out the interesting discussion.

Despite my misgivings, I'm starting to think the lack of comment scores could really help in the long run. I think comment scores give the site a feeling a mutual opinion and that mutual opinion starts to cluster too much.

My suggestion: heavy handed moderation without apology.

For example, the joke comments with lots of votes piss me off. Were I pg, I'd just delete them outright. If anyone noticed maybe they'd take the hint.

In other words: HN needs a benevolent dictator. "Democracies" on social news sites don't work because the average person is boring.

I don't get this frowning upon humor here on HN. It should be encouraged above all, not made into outcast.

It's not that we're humorless. It's just that we've witnessed what happens in communities where you jokes are encouraged in lieu of actual discussion.

Pull up a thread on programming.reddit.com or slashdot today and you'll find a 50 comment tangent devoted to silly puns. Often there will be four of those tangents to scroll past before you can find discussion about the actual article.

The quick and effective solution to this is to simply disallow silly, jokey comments. As you'll note by reading a typical thread here, it works quite well.

You can just hide the thread (*in Reddit). For me that's ideal, since it keeps these people busy when they could be adding noise. If they had something worthy to contribute, they would in another thread.

ITOH, people participate in both silly puns and important discussions. It's not good practice to downvote people who simply post stuff you're not in the mood to read, or not interested.

I've never seen anyone downvoted for an otherwise substantive comment that included humor. However, if a short, pithy comment offers nothing besides humor:

1. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiousity.

2. It's probably not original and probably not even very funny.

Humor tends to crowd out actual discussion. Why bother typing out a 5 paragraph comment on your thoughts on the article when you can just contribute to that pun thread or just post a quick one liner? In a forum where jokes are encouraged, they tend to take over the actual discussion. Pretty much anyone can contribute to a joke thread (especially when the bar is as low as just repeating memes), but not everyone can hold an actual discussion. Thus, you wind up with a lot more joking about a topic, and very little actual discussion. It vastly decreases the signal to noise ratio. While humor is easy to find on the internet, actual discussion is much harder. I'd like to keep HN focused on discussions.

As someone who recently joined HN, I think it would be very reasonable for new members to have lots of restrictions.

I won't pretend to understand the situation fully but I believe there is a learning curve with any new community before new users fully understand it.

I understand there is already a number of karma milestones for features but I think this system could be taken further to be even more beneficial.

- Perhaps a new user can do nothing for the first 30 days or similar. - Followed by original comments only, no replies (except to own thread). - Once some karma is achieved, allow replies and up-voting and slowly increase their abilities. - Once they have significant karma allow them to make submissions, this may stop lots of random submissions in the hope of quick karma.

In my opinion the greatest benefit from this is not in preventing new users from participating, but in slowing them down long enough to understand and respect the current community so they may participate in a constructive and non disruptive way.

I am actually surprised at how much the removal of karma from comments affected my feelings about hacker news.

I like to imagine myself as pretty laid-back and uncompetitive but once comments were removed, suddenly my motivation for posting and reading just seemed to vanish.

Maybe that's a good thing. Perhaps it will produce fewer comments but ones that people are more "honestly" motivated to make.

We shall see...

I think it gives the site a feel more like MetaFilter. Exactly as you say, your impetus to post is stripped of the karma motivation, and becomes more purely affected by actually wanting to make a contribution.

Well, my tastes are not evolving or changing, I am still interested in using primes for the background, or the latest hack with css transformations, or going from 0 to 10k users in a week. They were my interests ten years ago as they are today.

What I don't like is how larry page is already blundering, or facebook being sued, or how the ipad2 is the new paperweight2 and you should wait for ipad4 with cornea display.

I second heavy handed moderation without apology, and score penalties for every fault.

I was once a huge contributor at deals.woot! After awhile, though, I started to notice the decline in the quality of posts, as more and more users filtered in. I remember being extremely annoyed by corporate accounts that spammed the "fresh" page with worthless "deals". It seemed like deals.woot! was reaching it's eternal September...

But new users might have also blamed the crappy atmosphere on me--that bitching old guy with the superiority complex is everything that's wrong with deals.woot! We need to get rid of people like him!

We know which side we're on. Deals.woot! went one way and I went the other. HN is heading in one direction... and if you don't like it, I'm sorry to say that you may not be able to change it.

Disclaimer: I just want to clarify that I am one of those stupid HN noobs.

I am working on a startup which would benefit tremendously if there is a breakthrough here. And I do spend time thinking about this quite often.

Some thoughts:

1. Karma is a good indicator in smaller forums, but it doesn't scale with increasing popularity. It becomes easier to game the system then.

2. Qualifications (doctor, engineers, lawyers) on the other hand has worked well enough in the real world.

So is it possible to replace Karma with Qualifications? But before that, how would we define each? Karma is probably what we have now and needs no further definition. Acquiring Qualification should require investment of time and skill, which should be sufficient enough to keep mediocrity out; yet not overwhelming enough to keep willing people out.

I still have no idea how to go about this, and my examples here are only my vague ideas: - What is the logical equivalent of an exam in programming? Somehow quantify their contributions with code? Open Source? Ask people to do something measurable on HN's code? - For non-programmers, there will need to be other ways of qualifying.

The words I have used here might smell bureaucracy; but can we take this idea and simplify this?

[Edit: formatting, grammar, language]

The more you try to manipulate people, the worse the culture becomes. Karma and such are technical solutions, which are tools and have their uses but the problem here is one of culture, it is a people problem. And people problems aren't readily resolved with technical solutions. One factor here is growth: It has grown too fast to absorb new members at a rate which allows for inculcation with the culture, so the culture is being damaged. Another is "popularity": Comments are "worse" because you have a higher number/percentage of people who are not as educated/savvy/cultured/whatever. Punishing people for simply not being as well-developed won't develop them -- or, more accurately, will develop them in exactly the wrong way and actively encourage that which is reviled here.

I'm getting tired of howling into the wind and beating a dead horse. My thoughts on such things are essentially ignored here while everyone who is respected (mostly technical sorts, who all want a technical solution to a people problem) rehashes how to manipulate the people with some new technical solution. I only tossed this out in hopes it helps you with whatever startup you are working on (and because it is 4:24am and I am suffering insomnia).

Peace.

I don't think it's that people aren't interested in your ideas, it's just that they are very obvious and don't offer a solution. The only possible solutions tried so far are the technical ones, because that's the nature of the people. If you have ideas on how to solve the problems you list in another way, that would be a major breakthrough.

I do have ideas and it is a major breakthrough. And it likely won't get picked up on because I'm too low on the totem pole.

I joined a forum a few years ago at a time when I was very ill, doped to the gills and had major trouble "behaving" myself, so not at my best. It had been around for a few years and the owner whined constantly that he wanted to increase membership, especially international membership, and couldn't figure out how. I was there six months and membership began going up dramatically, especially international membership -- so much so that they eventually created some subforums aimed at the international members. But I don't think anyone really knew it was me that engineered it. I wasn't even a moderator at the time. You don't have to be a moderator to treat other people well. In fact, it probably helps in some ways if you aren't a moderator because then it is simply an example of a decent human being, not a person with a duty to set the example.

More recently, I joined a forum with 300 members and almost no discussion. After I joined, people began talking to each other. Last I checked, it had 1800 members and has probably become the Go To place for its niche, likely displacing a more long-standing group for that niche. Why? In part because I got thrown out of the long-standing place. The fact is that in some ways, where I am, that's where the action is. Except I'm not a hacker. I don't expect to be all that influential on HN. I come here because I get to be treated like a normal human being and people, oh, talk to me instead of dividing up between those that worship me like a rock star and those that desperately want to shoot me down and put me in my place. So I am content with being a Nobody on HN and I have diabolical plans to remain a Noboby on HN so that it can remain a decent social outlet for me instead becoming ruined for me socially like every place where I ever became Somebody and then after fostering discussion generally on the forum, I was the only person no one would really talk to.

Still, I'm compulsively helpful, I tend to care, I have this unusual expertise (or insight or some such) and it just annoys the crap out of me when I can't give it away. Maybe some day I will come to my senses and stop caring about others and just use it the way most socially insightful people seem to use their skills: As manipulative ass-hats, for personal gain, because they know something others don't know. But I'm not there yet.

Peace.

I think github is where the action is - HN these days seems more about navel gazing, posturing, karma chasing and down-vote wank-fests... and the result is uniformity.

In contrast, the people who want to get-shit-done are changing the world on github.

I do a technicolor yawn every time I see a post that talks about M$, Oracle or Java.. as if those topics have any kind of future.

Likewise I cant comment on Node.js or Ill get down-voted cause some asshole knows only the bad parts of javascript. [ I can say this with perspective, as I was that asshole 4 years ago :]

PG, stop being so nice and enforce your single minded vision on HN before it dies.

I think there's something to the premise of the article, although it's depressing.

It suggests that communities don't grow together. They just gather a new set of people in one place. Then the knowledge that's easy to disseminate, and of interest to all, is distributed pretty quickly. And thereafter there's not much to talk about. New information that's good for the forum is disseminated, but only at the rate it is acquired, which is pretty slow.

Are there other directions, other ways to grow?

- More specialized forums, different types of contributors and different topics? (The Reddit way.)

- Or, maybe the problem is that more structured data is needed to stimulate deeper information exchange. Should there be common resources, like TheFunded's database of investors, or point by point evaluations of programming frameworks? (The Wikipedia way.)

Neil, the main article has a link to the "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs" article by Eliezer_Yudkowsky [1]. Considering your post, I believe you will really enjoy it.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

While reading the article, I thought of another example of the described perspective. When reading one's own code from months or years ago, it can seem disappointing.

A friend mentioned to me earlier that this is likely a result of personal growth rather than a persistent state of confusion and bad coding. At least it's a nicer way to think of it.

When communities get bored, they turn on themselves (and turn meta). Some of the best flurries of interest on HN have arisen from innovation inside or surrounding the platform. It would seem that the better hack is to create more positives (and shift the community's attention to generative extensions of the platform) rather than to simply focus on mitigation and removal of negatives (such as deterring mediocre comments).

Almost all of the focus has been on filtering (true to Shirky's "publish, then filter" mantra), but perhaps equal or greater time should be spent extending the platform and enabling the community to create stronger signal. Karma is always the default attempt, but karmic schemes invariably reach a point where the negatives equal the positives. As the community shifts in personality, the currency of karma changes (500 points earned a few years ago is not the same as 500 points earned in the last few months). It's a different currency now, perhaps even a devalued currency.

An incentive for quality might be something closer to the highlighting of outstanding comments--the Best of Reddit approach--handed out not in a democratic way, but by a selected group of users who represent the kind of community we want. Karma goes private and perhaps is used only as a way of identifying future candidates for handing out highlighted contributions. This recognition is a kind of currency that could be better controlled and perhaps would be more valued.

In the case of a social news site like hn, the external factors have changed though. People now use such web sites for marketing purposes. So, they don't post a site to hn because they think hn readers could profit from it but primarily because they expect profits from visits by hn readers. (Since hn is about startups, this probably isn't that surprising and I'm most likely not telling you anything new. :-)

I think posting an article should have some "costs" or somehow "hurt" posters. They should be rewarded for posting an article if hn readers like it.

I've recently seen complaints about the lack of practical startup advice posts like there used to be. I think this submission highlights the nature of learning and how it ties into our satisfaction with Hacker News.

I think it's inevitable that we join in a flurry of excitement, learn a lot of new things, lose motivation (for whatever reason), and eventually use Hacker News as a way to pass time instead of working. What it comes down to is: How many practical posts do we need? After you've been here long enough, you know enough to fucking build something.

I definitely know enough, and I still haven't done it. I don't know why. I'm certainly not blaming Hacker News for not having good enough articles.

Just a few weeks ago I was giving my parents advice on their small business, and at some point in the conversation I realized, "Holy shit, I really have learned a lot more on Hacker News than I realized. It wasn't all just a highbrow waste of time."

I think that a lot of us internalize many of the lessons we learn here rather quickly, and it's not long before it begins to look like a repetitious echo chamber.

Eventually it's time to stop being a consumer of HN and be a producer. Write that app that you can "Show HN," write that blog post that has a new insight, be that example that defines a successful alternative lifestyle, leverage what you've learned here, and get on with life.

I think a lot of us just need to stop whining and start doing.

As the community increases in size, it's normal for this 'decline' to appear. I believe rather than focus on tweaking karma points or moderation is to introduce list functionality ala twitter so people can create their own HN within HN, as they see fit. As newer HNers start contributing, they can be tracked and eventually added to lists so it doesn't stagnate. Doing this will ensure old-timers will be happy while the community gets bigger and the quality 'declines' relative to x years ago.

That sounds exactly like Reddits, which in my opinion are necessary to make Reddit tolerable, so I don't think it would be a bad idea here. Maybe having a finite number could work, too, as opposed to allowing any user to create sections.

The guys at c2 have already figured this one out: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommunityLifeCycle

Also, if you're into how communities work and why how they succeed/fail/implode, you should definitely look at Meatball wiki: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/

Personally, I think the only thing hurting HN is this constant talk about the decline of HN. It's all I see in comments and now on the front page. If anything is hurting this site, it's the constant complaining. Get over it people - if you don't like it, move on or learn to deal with it - in the end you aren't going to find a community as good as this one.

I still think HN rocks.

I do get a little annoyed at the recycling of links from recent years (e.g. SICP book/videos, Yegge post #n,) that get greeted as some amazing new discovery, but fuck it, some things are always going to be new and amazing for a new crop of people. Yeah for people finding new and amazing stuff.

Are comments getting worse? Don't know. Might be that, over time, you start to notice certain things more, no doubt through some personal bias filter (e.g. comments praising Python, Apple, or Sinatra are almost automatic up votes, while even questioning those things means almost automatic down votes) but, again, fuck it, because there are still a good number of kick-ass comments.

Really, overall, especially compared to some other communities, HN has done really well in keeping up the quality discussion. Could it be better? Probably, but not worth too worked up over. Lots better things to discuss.

This article, one in a series of articles complaining about HN's decreasing quality, continues to reinforce two beliefs of mine:

(1) A new, better designed version of HN is needed, and (2) A design that does not "water down" from the perspective of EVERY reader MUST be based on reader's choices which will result in different users seeing different things (people don't have the same tastes, and these tastes evolve).

I have a very concrete proposal of how this should be done:

  http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1

What I don't know is this: If I were to implement the above news website, how would it take off the ground at first. Give me a convincing story and I will do it.

Ironically, the topmost article in the screenshot in his blog post[0] was lauded as "the perfect Hacker News article" in the most upvoted comment.

0: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2419347

I'd just like to register my vote in favor of a regime of fascist moderation.

This is the best take I have read on the "decline" of HN.

I won't quit until there is a better alternative. It seems that ultimately it's the popularity of any aggregator that becomes its doom. Maybe stories run too fast so it becomes pointless to comment, or it is because everyone who disagrees seems to be buried. I suppose some other hackers will come up with something better? Anyone have any suggestions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com