I switched from Slashdot to HN a few years ago to hear more insightful, interesting debate on tech news topics, as opposed to flamewars.
Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?
(I'm a long time listener, first time poster)
For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331
I'd strongly suggesting policing OT posts more proactively. Like PG said in his essay about starting Hacker News, this is a social problem, not a technical one. We need to refrain from doing things that make jerks feel like this is the place for them.
It seems that hacker news may be getting too popular for it's own good. At which point, you start getting submissions from people who are more interested in promoting themselves or some agenda and finding ways to game the ranking system to get content on the front page.
My question was asking if there may be a correlation between the quality of the content and the actual name of Hacker News being misrepresentative due to the ambiguity in the definition of "hacker."
Which I asked because my thoughts seemed to wander a bit too far from what you were asking.
More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse threads.
Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.
Think about it. It wasn't like this when Hacker News was smaller, because when HN was smaller there were less people, less comments, and everyone had a voice that could be heard. Now that the place is bigger your "voice" is easily lost, your comment ends up at the bottom, you feel like your opinion won't matter. This stresses you out and pisses you off so you go and piggyback off of someone else's comment near the top and just vent.
We see this in political ralleys, demonstrations, protests. When humans feel they are NOT being listened to, they get loud and angry.
Also, as HN gets more readers, it becomes more diverse. I've seen doctors, medical students, lawyers...etc post. It's no surprise somebody like that is going to skip a post about using abstract mathematics to model programming or about optimizing lunch at your startup; they are probably gravitating towards the political articles. On the other hand, just being interested in start-ups and CS does not preclude looking at politics.
So really, I think this is a function of diversity: in a purely democratic system--everybody has an equal vote--less specialized things really have an advantage. This is why I don't bother reading the newspaper or front page of reddit, but still enjoy /r/haskell.
I'm sure there are also plenty of confounding variables; I just think it's more broad appeal than passion. (Seriously, have you read the responses to people's blindly disparaging functional programming? At least as passionate as most political posts ;).)
Here we find people of diverse tastes. I am an engineer and, given the possibility, I'd be designing processor architectures and instruction sets. I also like programming - and do it for a living, but I have lost some of my taste for algorithms and data structures and prefer to generate competitive differentials elsewhere on the stack. But I am also very worried by the political background, both here in South America, where I live, in Europe, where my ancestors came from, and with the US, which is a very fine country where a lot of dear friends live and that we shouldn't allow to be ruined by a bunch of crazy people. When I was a teenager, I read 1984 and the idea something like that could happen scared me a lot. It still does. Bad politics is contagious.
I think all is fine, as long as we remain civilized and don't forget to disagree in constructive ways. Community and relationships are important too - I have only one nickname, after all, one which is easily identifiable. All my friends know who I am, where I came from and what my opinions tend to be. I like to think that, in the many times we disagreed about things, we never ourselves a bad example.
It seems like an extremely difficult problem, and relevant to the problems many of us are trying to solve. I can come up with plenty of simple metrics, but they all fall apart pretty fast, especially if the community quality starts to tank hard. Think of the sheer number of upvotes that most inane meme references get on reddit.
Situations like an inflammatory comment sparking an insightful debate are one of the things that initially seems like a poor quality comment (and it quite likely is), but overall might be a positive thing for the community.
Quality is discourse, not peanut gallery, vacuum sucking commentary that builds on puns, memes, insults and karma whoring.
Inflammatory comments often devolve into nothing. No insights, no evocative call to action. However, constructive assertions backed by reason are not inflammatory and equally capable of evocative statements that can be challenged.
What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment.
Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people?
This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.
Yes I realize there is always the inevitable discussion of "HN is declining" and like most things, perception is reality.
Now, I think it has become too large and feels anonymous. Posting something offensive has no cost because it doesn't feel like a "know your neighbor"-type community anymore. The costs imposed by karma seem to be less significant. I even think that if you post a rude or ideologically motivated comment, there are other rude people who will agree with you, attenuating the negative signal.
The HN is turning to reddit mime is genuine. I think it's just a consequence of having a very large community. Although a lot of HNers may disagree, I think the herd must be culled. I'd be happier of participation was limited. If I was the benevolent dictator, I'd collect a list of people whose contributions are most valuable and remove everyone else. Then, give those high-signal / low-noise contributors the ability to invite other people. Continue to have all content publicly readable, but ration the writes.
(Disclaimer: Although I have many doubts, I do believe it is possible to have an HN-scale community that remains civil; however, without the data, I'm not very comfortable just enumerating implementation ideas.)
Different subforums have their respective groups, which you learn once you spend some time inside the subforum. Despite being a huge ecosystem, they have managed to keep many of the subforums feeling small.
On HN...I rarely notice who is posting. A few influential posters stand out but for the most part I do not remember names well. Everyone blends together.
Perhaps something should be done to alter the direction that the content is moving, too. I personally agree with tptacek that gossipy advocacy/techpolitic issues are now far too important to the site. I enjoyed them a little, too, but I feel like the community is now addicted to them. Honestly I don't want to see anymore gossip pieces from torrentfreak...
* For example, (1) give people limits on how often they can post while their average karma is low, (2) allow people to flag for more reasons (hivemind posts, aggressive posts, bigotry, rudeness), (3) give people a couple of weeks/months to time-out from the site if they get flagged and there turns out to be a problem with their behaviour. I think there is a danger on a site like this of people over-complicating the problem when there are simple things you can try. :)
Quora, which spoke very openly about the problem of mantaining a high standard of quality in spite of growth, is a prime example since the structured Q&A format makes inadequacies even more evident; as of today, it seems hard not to think that their efforts could simply fail. (If you are interested in this specific case, take a look at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_q... or, for a longer read, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1)
I think that HN is set up to only be as 'good' as the users, and I know that this is true of any community, but there are still issues that often spur from differing opinions no matter how awesome the community is. I believe that the best way to combat something that you don't approve of is to just ignore it. I think that the comments that people consider unfit for HN are few and when ignored will make the poster consider changing his posting technique to gain more popularity and give weight to his words, because after all we all want to be heard. That being said, is the present that much different from the past?
I opened up my username account here 1161 days ago, after lurking once in a while for at least several weeks beforehand. As far as I know, NO ONE has read every Hacker News comment exhaustively for years, although some members of the curating team and some of the high-karma participants may come pretty close to reading most of the most active threads. My general impression is that there have always been some instances of incivility here, and there has definitely been an increase in just-plain-dumb comments since the participation on HN greatly expanded, but on the whole HN still stays way ahead of most online communities in civility and in level of information on the part of the regular participants.
And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?
What I have seen as most helpful is users who observe breaches of civility pointing that out to users who perform such gaffes. That reaffirms the forum culture and identifies which overt behaviors are not helpful here. I have to acknowledge that from time to time I have learned from other participants pointing out my less-than-ideal comments, and I appreciate people taking the effort to help me learn from my mistakes.
Here are some links to earlier discussion (initiated by pg) about efforts made beginning in March 2010 to improve comment quality on Hacker News:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271
One way to get a reality check on how HN is doing is to look at the bestcomments view of the community
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
to see if all the most recently highly upvoted comments look like civil, informative comments or not.
Thanks for explaining what data points you and the curation team observe closely, and what trends you have noticed. You mentioned above about the goal of increasing comment quality that "There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory." I'll renew a suggestion here that I think would be helpful.
I've been a moderator one place or another online since 1993, and I've seen a lot of online discussion forums attempt to acculturate newbies to civil, thoughtful discussion. One of the most helpful practices that I have observed over the years is making sure that people who use factual assertions to back a position in a discussion are accountable for where one would look up the facts to verify them and ensure they are not made up. (A HUGE percentage of all real-world discourse about controversial issues is based on made-up factual premises.) With that in mind, I'm trying to encourage a culture here of asking people for sources when they make a factual assertion, and providing sources in a first comment when there sources on the issue. (I try to stud most of my comments with links to sources to exemplify this.) So any time any of us see a comment that is dumb, an essential thing to do is to ask the person who made the dumb comment what the basis for the comment is. ("Do you have a source for that?" or the more abrupt "[citation needed]" as occasion demands, or "What about [detail of assertion]?" if that is better for raising the quality of the discussion.) Another thing to do is to share the growing online literature about evaluating sources, such as my very favorite link for Hacker News discussions,
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
and links about constructive online participation.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
A lot of stupid comments (and, alas, I have a particular user's example in mind) result from the convenience of reading blogs rather than reading serious scholarly literature. And the paywalls around serious scholarly articles only exacerbate this problem. So I routinely upvote any comment that points to a reliable source, and especially comments that teach other HN participants how to find and access reliable sources.
In general, promoting an information-based culture here will have two effects that will help reduce the problem of dumb comments: (1) it will raise the karma and visibility of the better comments that include good information from reliable sources (or that ask for that as follow-ups to worse comments), and (2) it will be off-putting to people inclined to make it up when they are put to their proof for the things they say.
The whole deification of pg by some people on here is pretty weird if you ask me.
I don't see any "deification" of pg, personally. I see people being very respectful and grateful for him, for providing this site (which he certainly does not owe us) and for being an active supporter of the startup scene and promoting entrepreneurship. He also has established credentials as a sharp technologist and all-around smart guy, so why wouldn't he be respected here.
That said, you are allowed to disagree with pg, and people do it from time to time. It's not like you get auto-banned for not agreeing with everything the man says or anything. But you can disagree with pg (or anybody else) in a polite and respectful manner, without being rude or inflammatory.
"ass" doesn't seem to be that extreme...rude yes...but not that "bad"
It was uncalled for and it goes outside of the norms this community tries to maintain, IMO.
Personally I like the ass-comment (cue hackers fainting in the audience).
There's some passion and lifeblood in it that I'm missing on HN for a while. And he's obviously making a point beyond name-calling (the point I disagree with, just for the record).
What I'm growing tired of is quite the opposite. It's the politeness-police that demands fluffy padding around everything that is said and jumps out the woodwork at the slightest trace of "harsh tone" or (god forbid) humor that doesn't directly add to the discussion.
It's a fine line obviously, but having this particular comment spawn this particular Ask-HN is exactly what I mean. There's more than plenty echo-chambering and mutual shoulder-patting on HN as it is. Do we really need to throw a meta-tantrum every time someone opposes the hivemind with a strong, alternate opinion that is not coated in the finest super-gloss politeness?
Calling pg an ass is crossing the line for this community. Not because he's privileged, though we do owe him a bit of respect for hosting this community in the first place, but because we shouldn't resort to name calling ever. The appropriate response is to dissect his ideas and actions and demonstrate why they would be ineffective in achieving his purpose, or showing why that purpose is wrong. That's the only way you're going to convince anyone. Calling people names won't get your message heard by the person it's directed at, it'll just piss them off.
While I understand your problem with the fluffy padding, it's what allows for a respectful conversation. Look at the rest of the internet, the comment threads there are a terrible shouty mess filled with ignorance, with half the participants yelling into the wind. HN has standards, they're there for a reason, and they aren't respected, then in the immortal words of Chef Ramsay, "I've eaten here! You're going to kill somebody!"
That somebody is this site.
Edit: removed 'you' from next to last sentence to make it more impersonal.
There's still interesting discussion on HN for me (otherwise I wouldn't be here), but I'm finding it's drifting towards the latter. Now recently with a monthly meta-discussion bemoaning its own demise.
Name-calling is obviously not the way to go. But the immortal words of Dr. Strangelove aren't either: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
Respectful discussion prevents people from flying off the handle and getting distracted from the main topic. Me-too'ers and yes-men are too agreeable, but still on topic. I wonder if it's possible to analyze a paragraph for agreeableness and automatically reduce its visibility if it's too extreme on either end. That might force people to post a more balanced view (assuming that the people gaming the system are down-voted by human moderators).
This actually seems like something a machine could reasonably do. Agreeableness is vague enough that it wouldn't need domain knowledge of the conversation, and there are probably enough key words and phrases to train it.
I wonder what effect that would have?
Imagine logging in to HN one day and seeing a black screen or something with your comment and a small note saying it wasn't appreciated by the community because it was uncivil - then everything goes back to normal and you can continue browsing.
A gentle reminder may be all that is needed?
First you have the founder(s) of the community and the early adopters. These people all are like minded, and all appreciate the mission or goal of the community. They contribute great things which makes it an awesome place to hang out all the time.
The next group of people who come in hear about how cool this small community is. They for the most part have the right idea but sometimes they are too enthusiastic and want to contribute right away instead of building cred slowly. This causes them to do things that doesn't quite fit with the original intent of the community. This annoys some early members and they leave.
The next wave are people the enthusiastic 2nd wave people bring in through evangelizing the community. Unfortunately the 2nd wave choose to highlight not the mission of the community but the benefits of it. This 3rd wave group are often in it for self gain and promotion rather than to be contributing members of the community. The original mission of the founder(s) is lost in the shuffle as the number of people who "get it" are quickly being outnumbered by those who are new and "don't get it". More of the early community members, people who made the original community so great, leave leaving the 2nd generation as the elder members. The remaining original members get into confrontational debates about what the community is supposed to be with the newer members.
After that, the community continues to degrade, eventually most of the original community resort to just lurking instead of engaging with the community which is now pretty much filled with self promotion and self serving. The community from the outside looking in appears to be the same on the surface but is a shell of its former greatness and actually quite sad for the original members and the founder(s).
The sad thing is there are people who come in the new waves that do get it, and have appreciation for the original mission and purpose of the founder, but they are always outnumbered by the others.
:)
The pity with the ass comment was that a lot of its content was well written, its just the first line spoiling it all.
I think a lot of people need to look at their comments before they post them, take a breath and try and self moderate better.
I'm sympathetic to the discussion of promoting a civil and interesting community, however, in this specific example, I believe the lack of sensitivity towards the poster is actually worse than the crime itself.
Guidelines are exactly that, guidelines. When a long time contributor becomes emotional about the brutally honest instruction of killing an industry, which happens to be one he feels aligned to, I would figure the appropriate response is to explain rather than admonish. There is a propensity to over-regulate with respect to the guidelines, which I attribute to a lack of thought, really.
I'm not sure I have much to add other than "I'll try not to get in the way". Reddit was a drastic example of what happens when a system is inundated with users, and so I'll try and step back and observe the way things are run.
[1] Careful with the words I use. Not careful as I want to be, and I post too much. (I am managing to reduce the amount I post.)
Yup. No way to collect data to back it up, however. I do see more comments down-voted to the very bottom of threads lately.
I don't think calling PG an ass is indicative of a loss in quality, however. It is indicative of abrasiveness. Is he an ass? What was the reason for calling him an ass? Was there evidence given that could substantiate the claim? I mean, maybe there is a good reason to call him an ass. The internet is kind of abrasive, people are more opinionated and bigger jerks than they are in real life. I don't think this is a bad thing, it helps to stimulate discussion.
What we can do, as a community, is go through a checklist:
What is the claim made? Is it a ridiculous claim? If it isn't ridiculous, is well substantiated? If it isn't substantiated, is it purposefully inflammatory? (The difference between stupid and malicious).
Down-vote or up-vote accordingly.
Anecdotally, I just read an entire thread about whether 'nice guys' finish first or last. No clue whether it would have happened 3 years ago, but it is a very shallow topic.
I think the bigger issue is a proliferation of shallow discussions.
- Not saying this is what's happening here, but people tend to idealize the time they personally first arrived at a new community as being the most interesting, the most respectful, the most entertaining, the best of times.
- Familiarity breeds contempt. The more time you spend communicating with the same people, the less reverentially you view their thoughts.
- Communities evolve, particularly if the thing through which the participants got together evolves. This place is all about innovation.
I'd imagine the traffic's growing:
- When new arrivals show up in sufficient numbers that they overrun the environment in which they'd have been able to properly assimilate in fewer numbers, the environment changes.
- Anthropology 101 teaches us that larger numbers of humans interact with each other differently than smaller numbers. Moderation and forum policies have to evolve with the numbers to maintain civility and intelligent discourse. Still, because larger groups communicate differently than smaller groups, it'll never have the exact same feel, no matter what. It can, however, have the same intellectual value.
Create an official Hacker News API where every Hacker News client has an API key and plan on offering write access only through the API. This would permit a diversity of interfaces, from browser based apps to terminal based apps. Monitor quality level of the posts per developer API key. Revoke or throttle write access of a client which doesn't maintain a high post quality count.
For example, I would imagine that a client built for vim or emacs would have a high level of quality and that a browser based client would have a lower level of quality. Developers of clients which contribute a lower level of quality would have the burden of solving the quality problem. Basically "push" the problem to the clients. After all that is the origin of of the word "problem" (Old French probleme, via Latin from Greek problēma, from proballein ‘put forth,’ from pro ‘before’ + ballein ‘to throw.’) "Throw" or "put forth" the problem for other developers to solve.
Hacker News would be better off if you could only contribute to it via an interface likely to be used only by hackers. This strategy is not unlike those employed by companies when they require you to submit your resume via curl or to hack into an unsecured server to upload your resume.
Will we lose access to some types of content, like design focused posts? Maybe. Would it be worth it? Maybe. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.
Personally, I would rather see 25% percent as many contributions of extremely high quality than as many contributions as we have today of lower quality.
It's not poor quality contribution overload. It's filter failure ;)
http://blip.tv/web2expo/web-2-0-expo-ny-clay-shirky-shirky-c...
That particular comment conveyed a valid point, it was done effectively and added to the discussion. I'm rather concerned that this site becomes more and more of an echo chamber as I see dozens of comments from different people that could be easily compressed into one.
So I don't believe that the levels of civility are going down - but the level of vapid pointless comments is definitely going up. Fortunately I mostly see them being modded into oblivion.
My favorite forums are ones that don't allow the discussion of politics or religion. The same is true for real-life discussions with acquaintances that you don't thoroughly know yet. There is nothing to be gained from a discussion when everybody's emotions are fully inflamed.
I'm a reasonably bright person. On objective tests that are usually considered reasonably good indications of intelligence, I do reasonably well (99.6 percentile on the LSAT for instance). I managed to get a bachelor's degree in mathematics from a tough school (Caltech).
I find I prefer spending time, in real life or in virtual life, in the company of other bright people. In fact, I'm happiest when I'm generally outclassed by the people around me, but they are not so far ahead of me that I cannot understand what they are saying and make valuable contributions of my own. I do not like to be one of the smartest people in the room (real or virtual).
Reddit, at least the technical groups I had frequented when I signed up there over four years ago, was like that. But now those groups have 500k to 1 million or more readers. Just doing the math, you can't put together a group on an open forum like Reddit that is that big and still has enough smart people for me to be comfortably away from the top.
Such large groups tend to have many people who can't distinguish on their own between someone advocating a repellant position, and someone disagreeing with a flawed argument against a repellant position. It gets frustrating when someone says something, especially when they are advocating a position you actually agree with, that turns out to have some factual flaw, and then you spend 20 or 30 minutes working on a reply, and then you are massively down voted. On a lot of subreddits now I have stopped researching my comments--I just go from memory. If someone wants more information, or citations, they can use my comment for ideas to start their Google search.
HN when I signed up, a little under two years ago, was ideal. Nearly everyone seemed at least as smart as me, and I started recognizing a lot of people clearly my superior. It was like being back at Caltech. A down vote on HN actually meant something--if a comment of mine got a down vote it invariably meant I had done something really dumb and I'd learn from it.
And on HN you could post a devil's advocate argument without having to first explain that you are playing devil's advocate. You could take a contrary position just to get a good argument, and people would welcome it as long as your point was well written and logical.
As HN grows, it invariable is going to become more Reddit-like, but that behavior is more damaging here. Reddit has subreddits. You can skip the cesspools of stupidity like /r/politics and /r/atheism (my vote for the most disappointing subreddit) and at least get some good stuff in /r/programming (one of the few reddits to stay mostly reasonable despite growth) or /r/physics or /r/math.
HN doesn't separate things.
I'm using an add-on to inject custom CSS on the site, and I use that to highlight down voted comments in bright red so they stand out. I up vote any such comment if I can't see a good reason for the down vote. I've been finding lately that I have been up voting 90% of these comments. I up vote these even if I think the opinion in the comment is completely wrong, as long as it is expressed well and respectfully.
I don't know if this decline can be stopped, or if it is inevitable fate of every public discussion forum. One thing we can do is back off on things where they are adequately covered on Reddit AND the Reddit discussion is as good as the HN discussion. I've taken to flagging most of the political submissions unless something stands out to distinguish them. I've avoided this for a while, but in almost all of the discussion I've not seen any sign that the discussion here is better than that on Reddit.
Recall the advice from the HN guidelines:
-------------------------------------
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
-------------------------------------
Perhaps these could be tweaked a little. For the "Off-Topic", maybe "on TV news" could be expanded to "on TV news or on a large subreddit".
Again, sorry if any of this sounds elitist.
PS: they did not find Bigfoot.
"Hell no. You don't know what you're talking about"
;)
However the "ass" comment came from a relatively "senior" member, so it would be an imperfect solution, and may have other unforeseen (by me at least) consequences.