Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How do you feel about making HN invite only?

43 pointsvaksel80 comments

Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on.

In fact it seems like almost every day now, there is a new thread with people worrying that the quality of submissions has gone down.

The problem is that, getting frontpaged, is so damn easy. For example there is now a front page thread with 2 points. So once HN hits that threshold of crappy users, you'll see the quality take a sharp dive overnight.

So why not make HN invite only to keep the quality of posts up? If you want to read? Nothing will change. Want to post? Then you better get an invite from a friend or wait a few months for the registration to open.

View on HN

Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on.

People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user. And your proposed solution is also one that's been discussed since before you joined. So ironically this submission appears to be an instance of the type it seeks to prevent.

Incidentally, your second option is impossible. There's no downvote on submissions. The way to push a story down is to upvote other stories. Or if it's really lame to flag it for deletion.

maybe its just the case of grass being greener on the other side

Now that you're here, you feel entitled to exclude others...

How about not being able to submit and/or upvote submissions before you hit a certain karma threshold?

I disagree with that. My feeling is still that a democratic input with some sort of oligarchic oversight would be best.

The flagging system is almost there from that point of view, but it's still pretty hit and miss... I think if the flagging system was tweaked to give more weight to the flaggings of people on the leader board, the system would work extremely well.

Of course, this may be by choice - after all pg may not want to create an oligarchic moderator class on news.yc... up to him.

I don't know if I've ever seen an oligarchy in action online before. It might be an interesting experiment to some degree.

That's a point worth re-making... perhaps it would be worth doing this as an experiment for a week or two and seeing whether there are any negative side-effects, and if so, revert...

Would a few weeks be long enough for such an experiment? Keep in mind that HN is basically a massive non-linear complex system and in these systems, effects take a ludicrously long time to percolate. It may take a year before the effects settle down to a steady state (indeed if there is one).

Isn't every forum that has a few admins basically an oligarchy? Same with mods in IRC.

That's more like a jumbled dictatorship. A few people each have unlimited power.

I'd see an oligarchy as more of a site like Reddit or News.YC, but rather than every person having a vote, a set group of people are able to. Like if only the leaderboard could perform certain tasks.

The problem to circumvent then would be if the leaderboard became overtly political, but I think that a) that isn't going to happen on a site like this, and b) it should be easy to make the system balanced if we have Dictator Paul Graham around to make sure that the people in such a system don't turn into absolute jackasses.

That occurred on Digg for a while, where a group of 'power users' submitted basically all of the content, which turned into a self-reinforcing cycle.

The problem lies when normal people stop thinking that they can submit and get content to the top, the submissions tend to become rote, and you lose community interest.

(As an aside some of the power users on Digg started taking bribes and were banned en-masse IIRC, but I don't see that happening here.)

I agree: I don't think that the theoretical oligarchy should have complete control. But moderation control is different. We might get a more civilized community if the upvotes and downvotes were controlled somehow.

It won't happen, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.

It's called wikipedia

See my comment about forum moderators. That's not an oligarchy because each of the admins has near-unlimited power. An oligarchy would provide checks and balances.

There's two ways to build karma. Comments and submissions. So people would need to comment and get upvotes before they could submit anything? Why?

To ensure that by the time they're controlling the front page, they've shown that people like what they have to say and that they've proven themselves a fit for the community.

I thought that's already the case, though. Can't you not vote stories up until you have a certain karma level?

So they have time to get a feel for what's appreciated and what's not around here. If they can upvote right on arrival they might erode the culture without even knowing. Multiply that effect by X new users each day and you have a continuous degradation.

Dumbrella's party board (http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=cb8a89...) has a very interesting way of dealing with newcomers.

If I remember correctly, you're expected to lurk or use the newbie boards (http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=cb8a89...) for at least 6 months before posting on the party board.

Even then, if other members don't like what you post, you get harassed pretty quickly and often an admin will delete your thread, or lock it with an (often insulting) explanation of why it was locked. If someone continues to submit posts that members just don't like, that person will get banned pretty quickly. There's a certain culture there, and everyone, admins especially, will berate people who don't fit in.

That would work here, but it certainly works for them.

I think that pretty much holds true for any forum with activist admins. Problem is, it's not scalable, it's not even sustainable. It's a lot of hard work, it's hard to pass on "in the same spirit", and the larger the admin group, the more unreceptive to change it is.

Also, on HN there's a distinct "we" feeling - my (limited) experience is that admin-dominated forums are more focused on class (ie. looking up, even sucking up, to mods).

Or weigh your upvote power with your karma.

People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user.

That's true, and they were saying it before I joined... but is it true? I know that in the last month quality has certainly dropped a notch, particularly in comments. Certain stories are just awful (the guy that wrote the blog post mocking the job applicant who asked about salary, and the follow-up posts, come to mind). It's still an incredibly high level of signal to noise, better than any other site I know of beyond perhaps MetaFilter, but that doesn't mean it isn't slowly getting worse.

Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted? One story I flagged was deleted the moment I hit "flag." Does that work like Digg's "bury" button, or was that just coincidence?

Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted?

I've been wondering that too.

Yes, if enough do.

I have yet to see a popular forum or social news site or blog whose readers didn't all complain about the quality going down as it grew. Everyone seems to think that they're the last good member to join every community they're involved in.

Unpossible! I'M the last good member to join ;) But seriously, Matt is right. This sort of complaining happens to every community. The issue with HN is the 'audience' isn't the type that makes people a ton of money like Digg or Reddit. We're all pretty focused on only a few things here, and unless YC makes a play for the larger market it will stay that way.

I bet this audience has awesome demographics though. If PG wanted to monetize with some ads, I bet he'd be able to get a high CPM, especially if he had a survey done.

Average income here has to be pretty solid.

I suspect it's a bi-modal distribution. Which isn't good news for most advertisers, since the upper tier don't buy common things and the lower tier don't buy anything unless they have to...

What makes you suspect that? Advertisers drool over programmers who make $70-100k a year.

Yes, there are the programmers who are making 6-figures, and then there are the ones who are stretching the pennies trying to get their startup off the ground.

The rich ones are too smart to buy just any random stuff you put in front of them and the poor ones are too busy trying to get rich to pay attention.

That's so ignorant that I would downmod it if I could. People with a lot of money buy stuff all the time, they're very desirable to advertisers for that reason. That's why LinkedIn gets CPM rates that are over 100x Facebook's.

Advertising isn't just targeted at dumb people.

Wow, you totally miss my point; and you do so in the most abrasive and rude manner possible.

And it's kind of a moot point because this site doesn't carry ads. And if it did, would be less attractive to many of us.

Every time I see someone claiming the quality of HN has declined, I'm reminded of this blurb from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33086

I think it would help if a user's first few karma points could only be obtained through upvoted comments, and not submissions. Submissions should be disallowed until you reach a certain karma value, ensuring that you've contributed meaningfully to discussions for awhile before you can add your own. (This would avoid the all-too-common 1-karma-user posts of spam or stuff from Reddit that isn't even related to us.)

I don't think invite-only is a good thing. It probably would have prevented me from ever being here.

I agree with the suggestion that submissions should be disallowed until one reaches a specific karma value. It is becoming incredibly harder now to up-vote the right kind of posts from the 'new' section. A smaller sample space would be helpful in getting mostly the right content on the front page.

Writing thoughtful comments (even if they are disagreements) to get the desired karma for submissions is as good as a pseudo-invite.

The one tricky part would be whether to allow 'Ask HN' posts or not from new accounts that haven't reached the specific karma level yet. I think they should be allowed, as sometimes one needs to create a temp account, to get some useful feedback/suggestions for some situations where one cannot disclose the identity very obviously.

Possibly a new user would be allowed to submit but their vote would count for nothing. Only if a established users voted for it would it stand a chance if making the front page. Some people are bound to be better article finders than commentors and their input could be valuable.

"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."

The irony is that Groucho was almost immediately invited to join the country club that inspired that comment.

Fairly interesting article here http://www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm about the incident. According to the article, he was already a member (of the Friars Club) and this was actually his reason for leaving. Scroll down to 'The Friar's Club Incident' for the relevant information (although the stuff before it is nice too).

I know you don't really care, but, there you go.

"... How do you feel about making HN invite only? ..."

Group think at it's worst.

I like to think there is a place like this for those who need somewhere to think out loud. Where participation is devoid of clique's, popularity is not a requirement and intelligence is the true barrier to invitation.

Yes, I think this is an idea that's at least worthwhile experimenting with. Invitation based membership can be quite a powerful mechanism to ensure that HN remains a high-quality and civil place. A place where even the most controversial topics can be discussed without incivility, trolling, spamming and such.

Metafilter and Something Awful - IMHO two of the most successful general communities online - use another mechanism to weed out unwanted people: paid membership. Not only does this keep people out, but it has the psychological effect that members make an greater effort to live up to respective community's guidelines and ethos.

Now, I would gladly pay a one-time fee of around 10-15 USD to be a HN member, but I suspect that this solution wouldn't be accepted by many people. That leaves us with invitations. Knowing that I'm in some way responsible for the people that I invite to the community and that their actions reflects back at me, I will exercise more caution when handing out invitations.

Regards,

WarTheatre

Unfortunetly democracy does not work for big populations and digg.com is best example of it. Once it reachs critical mass we won't be able to police it just by voting, some level of moderation will be needed. The longer we delay the reach the better, so I vote for invite-only YC. MHO.

> The longer we delay the reach the better, so I vote for invite-only YC. MHO.

Well technically YC is invite-only already. You need to apply and go through an interview process.

I'm being slightly facetious, but there is a broader point in that - Part of the reason for HN was to build a community and to let YC get a feel for the people it takes into the programme.

Making HN invite-only would create a limited gene pool of startup talent - And whilst it's just my own conjecture, I suspect it would stagnate (not in terms of the individuals, but in the diversity of the ideas/topics/beliefs).

Part of the excitement of the startup area is getting something from left-field - someone in their garage building something nobody expected. Invite-only seems to go against that ethos.

Muhaha (looking at the results so far). It's way too late. I pretty much got on board the moment it started to go downhill - same time the reddit crown (me included) came here.

Communities like this have two big problems to solve when they grow up:

1. "The crowd" comes in, and dwarfes by sheer numbers the original community, pretty much diluting the original values to a fraction.

2. Same community, same members, same ideas - after a while you get stuck in a loop, and it's hard to bring truly original content.

Unfortunately these two problems don't solve each other, but rather make things worse. The crowd will assimilate only the most superficial and more repetitive values, while the true target for original content is lost pretty fast.

What I'm saying is things are pretty much doomed, and I'm not talking only about HN. Believe it or not, there was a time when digg was better then HN is now.

As for solutions, I have none. But do like the idea of invitation only... maybe with a twist. You still need to be able to get new members directly, not through aquintances. So how about having "full members" and "regular members". Regulars can't post stories, and their comments are somewhat at a disadvantage (graphically or by initial points. I's suggest both). Their comments have "invite" buttons visible to the full members, possibly with a window showing comment history in between. Full members have a number of invites logarithmically proportional to their karma.

To the HN today it's both too late and impractical to apply this, but a clone could be worth it. Maybe starting with the users with the most karma as of one year ago.

I joined later than you, and when I did it was incredible. It stayed so until the middle of October, as the election picked up steam. I actually think that it's begun to recover in terms of the stories that hit the front; the comments are getting worse, and the hivemind is acting up (I disagree with you, but I voted you up because you made a comment that invited discussion), and I think that's the big problem on HN right now.

I think that as far as the system goes, HN works better than both Digg and Reddit. Digg was killed by its emphasis on the "Digg" button, by its claim to be a bookmarking site early on, and by its poor comment system. (That, and the formula for displaying all posts that reached a certain level of popularity and only those posts.) Reddit's system was far more flexible, but its community got far too one-sided, to a pretty awful degree. Hacker News discourages that stuff in part by forcing karma gaps before you have access to features.

I think that if anything, the karma requirements should be increased again. Require higher karma for downvoting comments and upvoting submissions, require some karma for submitting stories. That way, the people who have the most control over the system are the longer-time users, who have contributed more and who have much less of an impulsive reaction towards things. That's the most important thing to keep in mind: impulse kills civilized community.

I think HN can be saved, but only time can tell. I think that it will have to be tweaked to balance things out.

Saved? I'm not really sure it needs "saving." I've been around since about a year after its inception, and like Paul said, people have always complained that quality was going down.

But honestly, it has stayed about the same. Sure, once in a while some trollish post gets to the front page, but the mods tackle it or people flag it or upvote other things within a day. The signal to noise ratio is just really high, and unless that's going down drastically, I don't see a problem.

Come back the day HN becomes Digg, because I don't think it'll happen...for a long long time at any rate.

Growth is good. It's only bad if you have people who fundamentally misunderstand this site, and by far I think most of the people who join News.YC understand what it is about. I mean, if they didn't understand, why would they even join or hear about it to begin with?

Quality is really subjective. The frontpage of any social news site will never be 'perfect' for everyone. But if you close off the site, you limit submission variety...you tend to see the same sources from the same people.

Opening it to the public allows more diversity in content/discussions. Honestly, I think Hacker News is doing great, the quality is terrific...at least compared to other sites that I visit often (digg/reddit).

slashdot has a neat karma system for evaluating, and thus altering visibility of, comments. If a user is active for at least some period of time, and that activity is not overzealous nor too infrequent, he or she is added to a lottery. Winners in this daily lottery are given karma points to spend on evaluating comments. There are many variables that one could tweak differently depending on the news site's situation.

I like the general concept for it's egalitarian giving of power.

New users still get that happy feeling from their comments getting 'up voted' (on slashdot comments are rated not voted for, but I see no reason why different schemes couldn't work in this context). On a site that's just starting out the win-the-lottery constraints are pretty lax, or at least everyone who follows the rules get karma points to hand out. Or maybe simply registering gives one karma points. I think it's important to encourage users to partake in many roles--low barrier to entry for good intentions; stay inclusive while still providing meaningful content.

Their system could be used for submissions, too, not just comments.

I think pg was on to something when he said 'make it boring for trolls/reddit users/etc...', but that won't work if he doesn't come down a bit harder on the off topic stories. No, not the "huh, that's interesting" ones, the ones that draw out the politics/economics/someone is wrong on the internet discussions. It's usually pretty easy to figure out which ones will go that way.

I personally find the problem of 'spam' or 'trolling' to be a small part of 'off-topic' posting. HN and digg don't have categories, right? So the on-topic material is quite broad. (Even better, personally, is permitting categorization such as sub-reddits, but with inheritance.) Still, the complaint is basically that one person thought article A was on-topic (hey it's my new blog! hey buy viagra!) and another person thought it was not.

An alternative to restricting the user-base--which I think will just reduce the variety of submission perspectives and depth, and only prevent off-topic-ness so much as the community is homogenous--is to

A. Make the "topic-ness" very clear. This might include reminder text or tutorials or mission statements, and it include the comments and voting mechanisms we already employ to pass-on the culture.

B. Use natural language processing and automation (at least for flagging) to reduce off-topic submissions.

Or, just do what somethingawful.com does, charge a one time account creation fee, like $10. I'd certainly pay.

Some YC news discussions remind me of the early days of Orkut. Their invite-only policy didn't prevent people from filling threads with spam.

I think the best way to keep the quality of YC news high is for committed people (like pg) to do what they can and slowly deploy heuristics when possible.

A speed bump ultimately doesn't stop drunk drivers...

Utimately it does, if it is concrete, 6ft high and has a locked gate in the middle.

One quick fix would be to de-list the site in search engines. This way people coming here are from referrals or word-of-mouth only.

Google shows about 160,000 pages indexed for YC, I'm sure some of those are leading to new users.

This is a silly idea for many reasons and I won't get into all them.

Turning HN into an invite-only site will radically change its nature and reduce the quality of posts and variety of opinions found here.

Apart from indulging in some serious groupthink, you'll keep out new or existing hackers that haven't found this site yet.

The site keeps growing and so the nature of the site changes. Instead of using draconian measures in a doomed attempt to recapture the 'good old days', make changes to the community system (karma points, modding, etc).

I'd say bad idea for now. I don't feel like we're yet large enough to really get the most value out of HN. We still see a lot of submissions go without comments, and with all the web apps we have to review these days, we could certainly use a few more people.

But if we ever notice quality falling dramatically, it may be time to move to such a model.

No, but I'd like to see a method of users banding themselves together a bit. When I read a particularly genius or stupid comment, I'd like to be able to not just rate the comment, but perhaps add in a personal rating for that username, either favored or disavored. Who knows if it'd work out, but it might make things better.

Encouraging a wide variety of viewpoints only adds to the discussion. Invite-only would limit the 'gene pool'.

So, make hitting the front page harder?

Alternatively, there's the Ban-Hammer. Simultaneously more crude and precise, as you only get the worst ones.

Works for Kotaku.

However, it'd require that we properly characterize what is and isn't wanted from users. Trolling's obvious, but there isn't much of that here.

Actually I think it is kind of nice that a submission can get to the front page with two votes. If it weren't so, the reason could be that there are too many low quality submissions drowning the good submissions.

HN is the only site I can reasonably allow myself to visit during a workday, because the quality of submitted articles are very high while the quantity and action is low. I haven't seen a decrease in quality of submitted articles.

I'd prefer the ability to downvote crappy articles in place of an invitation-only registration system.

The problem is, downvoting means that each user has more power. If you want one article to hit the front - if you are willing to downvote every article that isn't that one article - then you suddenly have twice the moving power. At best, that dilutes the votes of the people who try to be very sparing in upvoting. At worst, it brings in a group of like-minded people who start to edge people out.

Example: every time an Apple story is posted, somebody complains not about the post but about their hatred for Apple. If those people could downvote Apple stories, I think some of them would. And if we have more anti-Apple people than pro-Apple people here, then suddenly the Apple folk have their voice muted. That's not an optimal solution.

Good point. With that in mind, I think the ability to downvote articles should be an earned privilege based on a period of high-quality content submission.

That's a good metric, actually. Base it on only submissions or something similar, so that the people with influence are the ones who are active doing things like that? Might be tricky to code, but I like the idea.

This is kind of ironic coming from a user who almost exclusively submits stories from TechCrunch and Mark Cuban. Oh, I see a Photo Bucket submission in there too. Sheesh...

Invite only...voting/flagging users out is another option...but there's certainly a better way than making the site cultish. We're smarter than that.

The only threat to the site is people not submitting enough quality pieces. The low quality submissions and comments are easy enough to read around.

Or maybe there isn't enough quality pieces on the internet to submit.

I appreciate it as a possibility. However, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, there are 1.4B (rounded down) users of the internet. The distribution across cultures is fair. With all of the scientific research, politics, economics, etc. taking place locally, nationally, and globally at any one instant, and there isn't that much of interest on the internet? It seems implausible to me. Perhaps it's true, but it seems implausible. If anything, we should encourage people to join so we can increase the odds of a greater distribution of viewpoints and ideas. Exclusionary measures will more likely produce an insulated club house of group think.

Slashdot really rules as no. 1 site for hacker news and comments. I use HN primarily for start-up related news.

I stopped reading links with less than 25 points :-/. Do we have negative points, 'cause we need them.

what if some arbitrarily high (and moving) karma limit is set, above which you can downvote stories?

that way the biggest contributors of thoughtful comments are the ones doing the policing. hell you could just make it the leaderboard.

What would be the difference to any other News site then?

I think Hacker News needs "voting-down" functionality.

Doesn't work. Look at digg.

What about graduated voting? You need a higher level of karma to vote on stories when the reach a certain number of votes.

[gone]

nice idea

The signal-to-noise ratio on this site is exceedingly good, by Internet standards. Perhaps HN has "declined", although I've seen no evidence of this, and it's one of my favorite Internet forums. If it devolves into WallStreetOasis or Xoxohth, then maybe such a move would be in order. For now, I don't see a problem, and certainly not one requiring such a drastic solution. A more moderate solution would be to allow down-voting on submissions, which I'd support.

Bad idea!!

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