Is YC "Karma" hurting the relevancy of stories? | Hacker News Reader

Is YC "Karma" hurting the relevancy of stories?

10 pointstransburgh26 comments

I keep seeing more stories that are not relevant to startup news (like this, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30270) and users that will post 10 stories in a row that are pointless. Is the 'Karma' devaluing the YC news feature? I think it is a great resources and hate to see the stories become less and less relevant.

This is not offtopic. Stories about backbone providers and how they make money are relevant to startups. The more competition there is to users' houses, the more bandwidth users will end up with, and that affects what startups should build.

The example you state is both relevant AND has NO karma upvotes. How does this support your thesis?

No karma up votes because it is not relevant.

If it has no karma, then how does it support your thesis that karma is hurting the quality of YC news?

It goes back to members posting 7 stories at once just to gain karma points and pushing real stories off the limited new page. (that story linked to a group of stories submitted by the same person in a span of a couple minutes.)

I guess I am the "guilty" party in your complaint here. The reason I submit all in a row as I do is when I'm reading my daily news (typically in the morning) and see something relevant for YC, I submit it. This is why you'll get several from me in a row, especially since there aren't that many up at 5am or so posting. This is also typical of a few others.

then it doenst make it to the front page

Someone already said that and gave a response. Please read the whole thread.

I am the poster of this article: I found this particular article actually exciting. Why? I had no idea Verizon was laying fiber directly to customers and allowing all that bandwidth to be used at a very reasonable cost. I was very dissappointed, though, when I found out that the service is not yet available for my location. The big news for startups here: cheaper bandwidth! (maybe its available at your location?), and potentially a growing base of users with large bandwidth which will change the kinds of services that can be provided.

If you felt all that, could you try and put some of it in the title when you submit the link. It would help a lot to know why something thinks a post is relevant, it may not be obvious to others.

bootload has started doing this. I think it's good. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422

Good Point (I'll put comments in parens after the title)

I agree to a certain degree. If it were up to me, I'd remove "leaders" section completely and use karma to track down spammers etc.

That's pretty much the point of voting, only the relevant stories appear on the front page.

Good voting practices are probably more important than good posting practices. Unless, I suppose, the number of stories posted gets so large that people stop looking through the "new" page occasionally to vote up the good stuff.

If you want to be a good samaritan, you can routinely check the new stories to up-mod (sp?) the good stories.

The problem is when some post 7 stories in a row and you only have 50 slots before you fall off the site, good stories don't even get a chance to collect votes.

That can be a problem with sites like this, but it hasn't started to happen yet here. I watch the site quite closely and I haven't started to see good stories slipping unseen off the new page.

It is a major problem with reddit, and could possible over time become a problem for news.yc, but it is not necessarily an insurmountable problem. For instance, if you really get a lot of submissions, you could pre-select probably-interesting posts with a text classifier and shunt them into a probably-interesting queue. (A text classifier could be something like the ones used in spam filters, or, if you want, you can throw the whole machine learning book at it and use Markov chains, neural networks, &c.)

If Paul Buchheit were reading this thread, he would say that pg should focus on more immediately important things first, and only when it becomes a real problem come up with a way to tweak karma to disincent posting lots of irrelevant links. Except Buchheit's wouldn't be a run-on sentence.

Sounds about right :)

Limit the number of new stories you can submit per day... the other stories you would have submitted will likely get posted by someone else if they're really worth the time.

That is a good idea. How many stories do you really need to submit in a day?

That won't stop people who are trying to generate traffic; they'll just make more than one account.

Also a good point. Then moderate by IP address.

I've been writing web analytics software for the last couple of weeks, that tracks users statistics, etc. Safe to say that there is no foolproof way to track users who don't want to be tracked.

I can understand how this might eventually become an issue, but this is less unlikely because of the nature of YC (people here are trying to represent themselves well to the yc 'crew', and to others who they might work with one day). The size of the community is small enough that it is difficult to hide in the crowd.

If the community became much larger I think the most effective solution would be to require a minimum of X karma before you can submit. (To prevent 'gaming' you would have to couple this with preventing users with less than X karma from upvoting posts...)

As it is I think a exponential delay before posting (they would sit in a publication queue) would be reasonable, but probably unneeded.

Yes. My earlier reply to pg's question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499

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