It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.
Thoughts?
Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...
If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"?
Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".
I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.
† The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.
Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.
Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.
If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically.
I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.
Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.
Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?
I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.
What is the actual symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?
Verifiability of stories users relate?
Trollish behavior?
Something else?
Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.
As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all".
I think that's where the voting buttons come in.
For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.
Unless you really think that increased prejudice on HN would enhance the experience for the 'enlightened', then this is a false dichotomy.
Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.
That way, users by default can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.
There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.
I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).
HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.
Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.
"...when I go to the users profile, it's blank."
As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.
As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)
This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.
I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.
Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.
My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.
I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.
To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.
It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.
[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].