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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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

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