How does HN keep the signal:noise ratio high?

3 points·mims··5 comments

I'm a journalist and contributing editor at Tech Review. I've been lucky to have some of my work featured on HN, and I find it a consistently excellent source of thought-provoking ideas. I'm wondering how 1) HN keeps the signal:noise ratio high, and 2) whether this might be generalizable to other communities on the web. I hope to include any responses to this question in a write-up on Tech Review. Thanks.

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An army of human editors who filter out the noise.

And to add to this, give more control to regulate the comments/submissions to users with higher Karma points. it becomes a privilege to those people spending more time to give value to the community, to also curate the comments.

On the flipside, this also tends to promote group-think and echo-chamber symptoms. It's an interesting thought experiment how to best balance things.

i) A clear set things which are known to be off-topic. (Topics which are almost entirely polarising, where you're never going to change someone's opinion, and normally not welcome here.)

ii) Insisting on reasonable behaviour, letting users know what's expected, and being able to down mod them when they fail.

iii) Use of down arrows only to moderate unsuitable comments, not just comments with which you disagree.

iv) A niche target audience, who may need to buy / sell things to from each other, or who may work for each other, or who may need to raise money etc etc.

If you're interested in online communities I usually recommend "meatball wiki", but that's more about wikis.

Thanks! It seems as if, beyond the mechanics of the site, iv) is the most important. Reddit has all the tools of HN, does it not? Yet it's much more dillute, and still has trolls.

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