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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It's worth thinking about the question of whether this will make HN better or worse. I'm inclined to think worse. It will bring more random people to the site, and (to the extent it works) it will mean that an article's score on HN will depend partially on the completely random factor of whether the author included this button.

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As someone who has experience in this area, let me just say that it probably won't drive all that much traffic. Most people ignore those little buttons.

It will however put an insane amount of load on whatever server it is served from.

Supporting buttons was the first thing that drove reddit to getting a CDN. We also made it cache the score for a few minutes for non-logged-in users, which helped alleviate a lot of load.

I came in this thread to say exactly this. The value of HN is the thoughtfulness and conscious submissions people make to this site. I'd hate to imagine what would appear here if people just had to click a button in between the +1 and the Facebook like to submit and upvote articles. It'd become a different version of Digg.

Great idea, but this makes me scared.

I'm not sure it would make much difference on submissions. People and bots submit articles indiscriminately from a number of sources within seconds of them hitting their RSS feed:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+Ne...

What it would do is give the large-trafficked sites a significant advantage since they can leverage their own traffic. You could see that on Digg years ago, the front page was largely devoted to a selection of sites - Engadget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Ars etc.

I think jacquesm makes a really good point in his article (thanks for that link!). In the article, he explains how some incentives within HN are resulting in negative side-effects:

> the race to post my stuff in order to harvest the associated karma got a little out of hand

Points/upvotes on articles should not be allocated to the user who submits that article (unless perhaps, it's an "Ask HN" submission); points/upvotes should be allocated to users only on the comments they make. I agree with Jacques that this would improve the level of discourse on HN and also remove down-vote capability from those who have not earned it through quality comments.

There are a number of ways to make this change: (i) points received from article submissions could be retroactively eliminated from a users score (ii) or separated out from points received on comments--possibly an interesting new data point, (iii) or the points could simply be associated with the root URL of the content source and then displayed on a new page as a list of "Top Ranked Content Sources"--this might also encourage less duplicates and an effort to find the best source before submitting a story... (iv) or maybe this is all just wishful thinking?

edit: here is the associated HN discussion for that article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443

Is there a way to make it display only to people logged into HN?

I agree that this will lead to HN point inflation which in itself is not bad. The community has to decide whether the features out-weigh potential content quality degradation. I have maintained so far that I'll build this service IF the community desires it.

In any case, a button that displays the HN points (without upvote feature) for a given content is useful. The question is whether to include the upvote function in it or not.

update: there already is a bookmarklet and a Chrome extension for it so this is only an addition to the list in this regard

@sbashyal: Nice hack. That said, read pg's comment carefully: the issue here isn't simply about HN point inflation. It's about submitting stories thoughtfully, upvoting carefully (after evaluating signals such as the quality of the conversation around an article, alongside the article itself), introduction of random strangers to the HN community - these are potential factors tied in with the creation of the like button.

pg's raised these issues, and I must say I'd like to see some discussion about them.

I think if it never links directly to HN, we'll be safe.

Maybe a simple weighted vote (relative to how new is the member/karma) would solve the problem. Or at least the mean from random sample from older members and another sample from newer ones, and use variance to check if there is significant difference, and maybe register another sample from members who are voting through the like button (but haven't already gone to the article from HN). A simple comparison of IP timestamps would help doing that.

(these are just suggestions I have no idea how the current algorithm works)

It will make HN worse if there is no corrective, but a corrective could be to further devalue the upvotes of people with little or no karma. To implement this you would need to further differentiate between displayed points and true points or change displayed points to one of the suggestions received before for the point display on comments (e.g. gradations of color/hue instead of numbers).

This hidden valuation will probably also have to exist for user karma. Curiously, this is what is claimed in many esoteric schools concerning karma itself. The mechanisms are deliberately hidden "by the gods" so that one does good for the sake of good and not with any intent of gaming the system.

That's the first thing I thought when I read this. There's something about the current state of visitors where I'm seeing really good discussion and interesting articles. When Joe Random starts submitting and hanging out there I hope the content quality doesn't drop.

I've been reading hacker news for maybe two years (not much I know) without registering. It is noticeable that hacker news is becomming more of a so-called social marketing tool and less of a news source. This is not a blindly negative critique, I'm simply stating what I can observe. Possibly this is a milestone for what hacker news can become. I'm not sure that's the right direction either. Personally, I wouldn't mind if hacker news would put the foot on the break and become more content centered rather than community focused. It is my understanding that the site guidelines kind of state this too with different phrasing...?

Is it reactionary?

Could beginning more minds and data beget innovation?

Wherein here we innovate without sin, I do not understand why enabling new power is.

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