I restored your karma. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do...
"Hey Paul, I keep getting all these junk email messages and they're filling up my inbox!"
"You're right. Someone went on an emailing spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."
"Hey Paul, my programs keep crashing and never get updated!"
"You're right. Someone went on a desktop software spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."
"Hey Paul, this C++ code takes ten thousand lines to get anything done and keeps doing a fandango on core!"
"You're right. Someone went on a blub spree. Now I'm going to have to show people how to avoid subjecting themselves to this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."
"Hey Paul, I am getting all these requests from YC clones to apply to their program."
"You're right. Someone went on a cloning spree. Now I am going to have to do something to prevent this kind of kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."
Edit: I apologize for not sensing teh humorz. It was not so blatant.
What's happening here is that troll decides he doesn't like startupgeek, so troll goes to the threads page for startupgeek and downmods every single comment on there.
If you think someone sucks, then downmod the sucky thing they said. Not all the non-sucky things.
It would be cool if there was some way I could nuke people, so I wouldn't have to see posts or comments submitted by people like juwo, tracksuitceo, or one of guy kawasaki's sock puppets.
If you dislike something someone has said, the best way to deal with that is to reply explaining why. That's more work than just downmodding them, but it can pay off in the long term if you can turn someone into a useful contributor to the site instead of just making them leave.
Wasn't this forum created partially because reddit was overwhelmed by the hordes and all the interesting startup information was lost in the noise?
But no, it was created primarily as a test for Arc. The fact that it's so beneficial and awesome is a wonderful side effect.
http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html
Yes, because of reddit. Yes, because of Arc. But mostly because it's a good way to learn about people.
"I'm straying off topic, but the point is, the users are what make YTMND. Crappy users make the site crappy, and rather than trying to delete crappy content, it would be far easier to just keep users who create crappy content off YTMND. The hard part is figuring out who to let in and who will add value to the community and the site as a whole. "
We'll never get the onslaught of 14 year olds they got at digg and reddit because most of them aren't interested in startups. You don't get idiots in your comment threads till you have this on your frontpage
http://power-robot.blogspot.com/2007/08/when-in-rome.html
so as long as we kill offtopic submissions, we should be safe.
(Thinking out loud, just skip the rest of this.)
Posts like that do attract fourteen year olds, and once you do you can never, ever get rid of them. It's self-reinforcing.. Fourteen year olds attract other fourteen year olds, who create submissions like the one above, which attracts more fourteen year olds. One way to fight it is to implement a harsh banning system, the way Facepunch Studios did. Check out their ban list: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showbans.php ... I count 93 bans today alone. Most for a week or longer, complete with reasons and viewable to the public.
And yet, a brute-force approach like that only sorta works. What's needed are strong community values combined with a strong punishment system. But not so much as to stifle conversation innovation - just enough to filter the noise.
Karma works, but some people need to be made more equal than others in that case; someone that's been with a community from the beginning is a hundred times as valuable than a newcomer (not an exaggeration), because they help enforce community values. It follows that they should get a karma vote weight proportional to their contributions. This means karma points with a decimal value instead of an integer.
To decide how much vote weight someone gets, you could use a simple factor like 10% of total karma. But much more interesting would be: If you upvote foo's comment, you boost foo's vote weight by 5% of your vote weight. If you downvote their comment in the future, that 5% becomes negative to their vote weight. What that does is ensure that at any given instant, foo only has as much power as he should have. Time with the community only gives foo a small power bonus, since his power is mostly determined by current public perception. And it forces people to really back up what they say. If they say something horrible, they may be rendered powerless tomorrow.
If everyone's karma starts at zero, and everyone's contributing 5% of it, then how does anyone gain karma? Ahh, well.. That's where being with the community from the beginning plays a part. For each day you make a comment that is upvoted, you get one karma point which can never be taken away.
If you're a part of something small, you feel like you're a part of something special. So one way to fight noise is to stay small, or divide your community into sub-communities (almost imopssible).
But I think most important is a goal, the kind Startup News has (you better be submitting stuff related to startups). With a community goal, it's at least an order of magnitude easier to filter out the noise.