Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News.. | Hacker News Reader

Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

871 pointssw007431 comments

I joined Hacker News around 5 years ago. I used to wake up and do the grim commute each morning to London from my home and the only thing that made it vaguely ok was Hacker News. It was a great place to go and find interesting articles from genuinely passionate people. It also used to be a really safe place to launch a startup that you'd spent days, weeks, years on - your project. It was a place where you could launch your startup and know you'd get great constructive feedback. People may not necessarily like your site but they'd admire you for having the balls to launch it, for spending time developing something that you hoped could benefit people in some way. They'd want you to succeed and they'd try and help you succeed with feedback that would ultimately help you. Unfortunately, today's Hacker News audience is no longer the same. Today's Hacker News is a place where users want to snipe at other users and find negative aspects to anything thing submitted. No longer does someone say 'This and this I like but this needs work'. Oh no, now the response is 'Hate this, hate that, this is pointless.'. Hacker News now is about correcting grammar and points scoring. It is pointing out anything negative at all that anyone has done, has said. It is no longer a safe place. It has fast become an acidic forum.

I've launched 2 projects (11kclub and Favilous) on here over the last year - both got a similar response. There was nothing constructive, it was just sniping - they saw someone had put themselves up there and they just shot them down. It's a real shame. I hope one day the site returns with the kind of audience it once had. Until that happens, I won't be going on my favourite site anymore - the commute just got a whole lot longer.

For now I wish you all the best...

Thanks

Steve

View on HN

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.

I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more.

The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.

Considering it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is, I'm assuming you'll figure out whether a comment is good/bad based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and penalize those who voted against the grain.

I get this, but wouldn't this lead to making HN more conformist than it sometimes already is? "Either you agree with the majority of us about X, or..."

it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is

I've actually been working on that problem with a bot that assists in moderating a subreddit using a text classifier. It's tricky, and needs more work, but it is not impossible.

Out of curiosity, what subreddit is it?

/r/ronpaul

As you might expect, a subreddit about a politician with (in)famously devoted followers attracts its share of strife. It can be difficult to distinguish legitimate arguments from flamebait, and there's no shortage of people eager to take any bait offered. I should note that I'm not actively running the moderation bot at the moment.

I'm sure a bot that algorithmically classifies mean comments is possible. I'm not sure that the same can be said about trolling. Poe's law? Deep cover trolling?

When one of the criteria of trolling is the hidden intent of the person writing, then there's no physical process that can reliably find a trolling, short of looking inside their head.

A well-executed troll is, by definition difficult for humans to detect.I don't think there's much chance of reliably doing it with software. Fortunately, most political squabbling on reddit consists simply of people expressing scorn or outrage that someone would post something on the internet that disagrees with their deeply-held beliefs. That's a bit easier to detect.

If you do ever get a moderation bot running (especially in something like /r/ronpaul) I would be eager to read a writeup of your experience.

Improving the quality of discourse is a subject close to my heart, and I've never thought about how robots can help us act more human to each other.

I plan to. I've been doing a lot of work with text classification over the past couple years and would like to base a startup on it. I just need to come up with a product that's commercially viable and non-evil.

it's not that hard. Those that work with classifiers, this kind of thing is pretty easy. Identifying sarcasm and irony are hard, but 'nasty comments' can be identified pretty simply using the well known text classifier algorithms. You find the training data and use it to train something like an SVM.

I'd be surprised if pg hasn't experimented with it at least a bit given his history with text classification algorithms.

I'm sure that the author of "A plan for spam" (introducing the idea of bayesian filtering to recognize spam) can find a way to classify nasty comments.

One thing that would solve the problem with growth would be partitioning the "community" into smaller groups that are manageable by each user. Reddit does it through subreddits and it works somewhat. I would favor an approach where users could white/gray/blacklist other users, and use these as modifiers to the overall score.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

maybe the new kids don't know any better? can we crowd-educate them as to acceptable comments? stackoverflow has used strict categorization of "reasons for flagging post" to great success in influencing how the crowd moderates.

  "-1, poor tone"
  "-1, offtopic"
  "-1, factually incorrect"

Yeah, the slashdot approach to mods might also be worth looking into. They do a sort of randomized statistical moderation thing that makes its less autocratic than other schemes, while still retaining the human nuance.

Extra information in the upvote might help a lot. Right now I can only say "more of this" when I click the up-arrow. But does that mean I like the comment? I like the user? I like the tone? Sometimes I agree with one of those but not the other.

Slashdot has been doing something similar for a while. I like their commenting system.

That's a neat idea. -1 doesn't mean much without a comment explaining why.

I do have a concern, though. If this system is implemented, doesn't that mean that the "new kids" will also have access to this system and may use it to exasperate HN's "new kids" problem?

What about modifying the existing HN guidelines to include comments and promote the guidelines more? For example, cite a downvote with an appropriate quote from the guidelines.

But with a clear cut system like the one mentioned above, why shouldn't new members get to downvote as well? The system would clearly convey its intended usage, and in the process bring new members up to speed faster. If you still want to impose a restriction, it definitely shouldn't be karma based. I find it a bit counter-intuitive. [Assume maximum evil] You're going to allow someone to downvote others based on how quickly and effectively he can troll the hivemind to give him 500-1000 or heck even 5000 karma?

"New" members shouldn't downvote because they might not downvote the right things, or for the right reasons. I do not consider lurkers "new members."

I also disagree with the idea of karma-driven downvote system. However, I wrote the above with the assumption that those who can downvote know HN values and enforce them. As you pointed out, yes the karma-downvote thing doesn't quite accomplish it's goal (assuming the goal is to allow senior members to act as enforcers). It should change. However that wasn't quite the point of my post.

My original point is: if you gonna say smack, gimme a damn good reason why.

Ah yes. You've got a good point. I find it confusing on how to allow downvotes then. Is age of the account a fair measure? Then what about people who've been here without registering, or people who actually have good discretion.

Maybe enforce a stealth downvote. This would be a case where the downvote button is visible but you use heuristics and probabilistic models to determine to whether actually accept the guys' vote or not, and if yes, what weight to assign it.

If the current rule applies that says you don't get to down-vote until you reach N karma, the "new kids" don't really get to do much. I for one would value a system that forced a down-vote to be accompanied by some sort of explanation of why. I suppose at less than a year old I am still a "new kid" so I will say in my infancy (a few months old) I had a comment down-voted for reasons that were not obvious to me. I was polite. I didn't say anything negative. Yet I was down voted. When I commented on begin down voted and inquired why, that too was down-voted. Some one was kind enough to explain to me that my original comment was "a generic compliment" and basically useless. It was a pleasant compliment (something the OP seems to be advocating here)... yet still garnered down votes. Ironic, huh?

Good point about the karma limit. I was writing under a different assumption.

What I was proposing in my earlier post was exactly as you say: explain the downvote.

Maybe let everyone downvote, but have tiny radio buttons with reasons next to them. :-)

The tone of that comment came across badly. You pointed out they had made a typo - that was your only feedback. You suggested they might not be a human. You used the word "regret", but you clearly have no regret.

There is no irony as to why you were voted down. It was entirely justified.

I think you may have misread my comment here and are addressing the wrong comment. I was talking about months ago... not in this thread. I understand why I was down voted on the comment you are talking about. Clearly I was being a smart ass... taking the OP's suggestion to the extreme. Some people got it.

> So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.

Why don't you automate this process? All of the people you upvote have the most credibility, the posts they upvote have a little less, and people who upvote those posts gain a little credibility too, and so on. Tuned right, voting itself becomes a function of whatever the base of the community is.

New users -- depending on what kind of posts they upvote and who upvotes their posts -- must be able to gain credibility quickly, not just by upvoting the top posts, but picking winning and losing comments in the long term.

That, and assign a couple people he knows well that will make similar good judgement calls the same privileged, that way you increase the amount of work being done.

I think a method like this is necessary, as I really don't think you could determine post quality with an algorithm itself. You can't automate that type of intelligence.

If the client allowed us to pick someone other than pg as the root, then people could comment however they like and more easily view the comments they value.

Given HN's current latency, though, you'd need a few orders of magnitude more resources.

Would Kaggle be a good fit to help solve this problem?

What if people who up-vote nasty comments don't really do it consistently, they just vote a lot? Maybe votes need to be precious, so people use them more carefully. Slashdot addressed the problem by limiting the mod points available and introducing meta-moderation. Meta-moderation won't work in an up/down voting system like this, but limiting votes, for example to a certain number per day, is a powerful option. You could even have tiers, where people with more karma would get more votes per day. Maybe every 100 karma points gets you an extra vote per day.

Interesting - also, if it is as you suspect and voting is easier and thus part of the problem, perhaps adding more friction to the process of voting would be useful. Something like having to spend karma to vote, or having a limited number of votes per day to spend.

I posted a friend's start-up here (she wants traction), and her effort was summarily eviscerated. But not until after I'd already sent her a link to the thread. I feel terrible about that now. I think nasty comments tied with a product or site announcement might be a low-of-lows to look for? Or at least finding site announcements might be easier than finding "all nasty comments" and then evaluate that subset first?

I see exactly one comment on your friends post and its rational.

It seems rational from the outside, and when my brother and I played out customer #1, we provided similar feedback, but with a lot more nuance. It's quite a bit more demoralizing when a someone on HN dismisses it out of hand in one sentence. The tone was was not neutrally rational, it was dismissive. Not supportive. For example, lead with something positive, anything, then challenge her on why is the price what is is.

One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members.

To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into the hands of the older users. However, HN has a different philosophy and it might make sense here.

To say it one more time, reddit doesn't do this and never did.

On one hand, it seems like having the value tied to the voter's karma would make more sense, since someone here from the beginning with little karma says very little about their contributions or judgement.

On the other hand, either of these solutions seems destined to increase the inevitable echo-chamber herd mentality groupthink that already tries to creep into any community.

But that would only work to a certain extent. All you would need is one lucky submission (think Steve Jobs' passing) to get around this.

Perhaps only consider the karma earned from comments and exclude the karma earned from article submissions.

Wasn't Digg killed by "power users" with all the power? I worry this might happen here too.

I don't think so. HN has been hell banning for some time, often quite unjustly, but the general quality hasn't been affected by it.

Are you sure? I can see a correlation between the rise of hell banning and the decline in general quality.

While it is often unjust, it is often extremely just also. Personally, I don't know if the tone has really changed. I do know that I see less demonstrations of work done on the front page. That's a shame :(

I recently started browsing with dead links active and have noticed a couple of seeming hellbans on people where it really didn't feel warranted to me based on the recent history around where they got hellbanned.

Of course, this forum isn't a public commons so the moderators can ban whoever they want, but there are some cases where it seems fairly arbitrary.

That would leave people like me out.

I often find the news here, so I'm very unlikely to submit something. And I only comment when I feel like I'm going to add value to the community or discussion, which isn't that frequently. So I have a clear judgement on when I contribute, it's not much or often, but it tends to present some value.

I've had an account for 2.5 years, and used the service for even longer, yet my karma is still less than 300.

I echo this sentiment. I have been here longer and does not comment unless I have something of value to say, but do actively vote on stories or comments. People whom I know in real life and frequent here have the same usage pattern too. I would hazard a guess that there is a substantial amount of people in this category. So a purely karma based approach may not be sufficient.

About the same here. I'm a member for ~3.5 years and don't comment very often, not to say very seldom (my karma is at 23 points). When I write down my thoughts, I really want to add value to a thread, which I also feel isn't very often. Humble or shy - don't know.

I do frequently vote up good articles regarding programming, hacking, startups, and such things. That's the things I'm interested in since I was a young boy and that's my daily life. I'm a freelancing coder (yes, I see that term as positive, same way as hacking) since '96 and tried my own startups since then over and over. That said, I value good and constructive and sometimes also funny comments and being able to upvote them I frequently do so.

Are my upvotes even counted? I don't know, I don't really care. But I admit it gives a bit of a strange feeling to be "less worth" in a community where you participate - we can argue about that - daily.

Nevermind, just wanted to say.

Small addendum: After submitting this comment I remembered that I wanted to add that I'm from Europe and people not being from the States and therefore in a different timezone often experience to comment on already discussed topics (this also happens on Reddit a lot). Maybe this is also a part of why I'm not commenting that much.

Having things tied to the users karma will result in the StackOverflow type issues. There are some high score moderators that close questions that really should be left open. e.g. i don't agree with most of their decisions however i don't have enough karma ( or time to chase karma) to become the same level.

I see the necessity of moderating however there has to be other considerations. i.e a number of lower karma users can override the high karma users decisions.

I agree with this. It degrades relatively quickly into a Wikipedia core group of elite editors kind of thing, where the disconnected ideals of a clique dominate.

Too few votes for the number of comments. Lack of feedback is disenfranchising (unless you fake vote counts for comment-makers to see, which could have a worse effect of giving the wrong signals.)

Also, you can't count on there being proportional amounts of activity among the earlier users currently. Any cross section of the earlier user group could have stopped being active on the site.

It will never be as simple as throwing in a single tweak like that.

Google is the best example to learn from. Search is a misnomer, Google is about ranking. They've put many PhD-centuries of effort into deciding which of the three million matches to put first (ranking). Choosing the three million matches (search) isn't where Google adds its value.

Lots of lessons have been learned there, I'm sure HN can tap into that pool of knowledge by opening up data to the right people.

HN is an awesome resource. I often read the comments before the articles because I expect them to be more useful. It's completely worthwhile to invest a lot of effort in maintaining that greatness as it scales.

...says the new guy to the old guy.

Sorry I couldn't help myself.

(haha - I totally misunderstood, my apologies)

EDIT: (total rewrite)

The cool thing about using metrics and machine learning is that the results speak for themselves and opinions and factions are less important. Intead of guessing what matters in advance, you get to discover what matters after the fact.

Relax buddy. No need to get so defensive. It's just a notable coincidence when debating the merits of age-weighted voting.

My thought is that each registered user should be able to choose their own weighting of comments (from age-of-membership, average-karma-per-post, combinations of upvotes and downvotes, etc). Would this not make HN much more vibrant and allow a broader-range of discussion within the same thread?

That would be an ideal case, but turns out to be extremely difficult at scale.

Interesting because I'm experiencing part of the problem that others are discussing here. You see I disagree with your idea but there is no way to indicate that w/o downvoting (which I didn't do). And to simply reply by saying "I disagree" isn't appropriate either. And maybe I don't want to take the time to detail exactly why I disagree but would like you to know that? But you don't because all you see is a net number positive or negative.

(By the way I would summarize why I disagree now that I've written the above as simply that it seems like a "last man over the bridge" advantage. I mean it's entirely possible that some distinguished person whose vote should count would be greatly disadvantaged by the weighting system you propose.)

I hate to complicate things but there doesn't appear to be anyway to solve this issue w/o the ability to indicate more clearly what you feel is positive or negative about a comments. One up/down button simply can't cover everything.

Thanks for your response, I appreciate you looking into it. As I say I'm a huge HN fan but with the growth of the community there has been a sharp rise in people seeking to make a name for themselves and seeking to criticse rather than critique constructively.

I think the cause is simply growth.

Absolutely, the more the original community is diluted, the more anonymous people feel, and the less restricted they are by perceived norms (as there are none). You can see this in extreme form on some forums like Kuroshin (remember that?) which have been abandoned to the trolls and are now overrun.

The problem with most systems to control quality is defining what is good, and what is not good. That's not a simple problem and I'm not convinced you'd ever be able to get a crowd to decide on it satisfactorily - there's a reason that mass-entertainment panders to the lowest common denominator, and a crowd's votes are likely to trend the same way and any automated system is subject to gaming and the ignorance of crowds as soon as you let a lot of people have input, however small. Another solution used by sites like reddit or stackoverflow is to segment the communities into small enough groups to be self-policing.

Another approach I wondered about recently was along the lines of 'A plan for Spam' - it'd be interesting to use the massive comment base of HN to build up some sort of corpus of good and bad comments and apply Bayesian filtering to comments. You could use this to:

Set an initial point score for comments based on their content

Weight comment votes from users who consistently scored highly

You would have to seed the corpus of course, and let it learn from trusted users' votes, but otherwise this sort of system would in theory continue to work as long as there were enough good comments being posted.

I think those a great ideas. One question I would have is how would one prevent people from karma burning? Could enough poor comments form a high-karma person make them forfeit their karma/gravitas --thus highly discourage such behavior?

I'd like to make a somewhat unrelated observation as a new user and someone who is new to programming.

I've noticed a submission might get a huge amount of upvotes yet the highest voted comment goes against the article/post submitted.

I understand there are a few things that could be going on: you can learn from bad articles/posts; those who like the article/post submitted find it unfair to downvote just because they don't agree on a contentious issue; or it becomes a what side can out-vote the other side (the one against vs. the one in favour of the submission).

Is there a commonly held view on why this happens? Sometimes I click upvote to save an article I've not read yet, not necessarily because it is a great or good article. However, I also sometimes click upvote because there is a comment inside it that I find very enlightening. Would it help at all to be able to save comments like we 'save' submitted articles? My apologies if this is too unrelated and meant to go somewhere else (email). Please let me know if this is the case. Thank you!

This happens quite frequently on reddit as well. I'd imagine it's due to the fact that the set of people who vote on a story are different than the set who vote on comments. For example, people could find a title appealing and upvote without actually reading the article or any of the comments. At the same time, the people who take the time to read the article (and corresponding comments) vote up the comments criticising the article. Since it takes relatively more time to read and understand an article, the knee-jerk reaction voters cause the story to be highly rated even though the top comment is critical.

It seems lile that could be fixed by tracking which articles a user clicks and disregard an upvote if they didnt read the story or they read it 5 seconds ago.

What if they already read the story from a different source?

I'm in the same boat with you on upvotes. If my voting activity is going to be tied to the quality of my posts and comments, please decouple the upvotes with the saving.

Two issues here:

1) Stories become popular despite negative sentiment in comments, or stated another way, some of the most popular stories on the front page of HN have little support in the comments. This indicates that the people who up-vote the stories in question are either not actually in support of the story's premise, or choose to remain silent in the discussion.

2) People are using up-votes as a way to bookmark stories, since that's the only flagging mechanism available to them.

The root of the first problem as I see it is that it is too easy too up-vote stories. This creates a low threshold for groups of organized users, i.e. friends of the poster, to get stories on the front page. Perhaps limiting the ability to up-vote stories in particular would have a positive impact here.

The second problem has an extremely simple solution: add a way for users to flag stories without up-voting them. Maybe a star icon that adds a story to their 'saved' directory.

> People are using up-votes as a way to bookmark stories

Whoa... mind blown. I never noticed that feature before. Thank you Wise Weasel. (Not that I would up vote a post just to save it. but it is nice to know I have a list of all articles I've up-voted.)

+1 on having a "save" feature. However, I would shy away from using the term "flag" as a way to get something into the saved list. Flagging a post is already available and has a very different meaning.

I suspect that people often post negatively about a submission and then upvote it so their negative comments will be seen and upvoted by more people.

Why not simply limit the size of the community? Heck charge a membership fee...

Making it invite only would have (IMHO) improved things a massive amount. Have people do a test to gain entry.

Any community that is free and open will just deteriorate over time.

The problem with invite-only is that you get an exceptionally inbred set of ideas and it becomes little more than a self-congratulatory circle jerk.

I wouldn't mind a small membership fee which would confer voting rights.

Metafilter seems to be doing alright with its $5 membership fee, but then they also have pretty hands-on moderators (as opposed to community votes)

How about weighting votes from veteran members more, and if new members consistently vote similarly to veterans, their votes are fast-tracked to being weighted the same?

I can see it bubbling up quality content without punishing promising new members.

One idea I've had to help mitigate this problem is to develop a sort of "intelligence" score, where you weigh votes from high scoring individuals over votes from low scoring individuals.

The easiest way I can think of to do this is to use a Flesch-Kincaid grade level test, which uses sentence length and word length to estimate reading level. A quick and dirty calculation for any post might look like: (character count / word count) + (word count / sentence count) = Writing Level.

The problem, of course, is that it's only a tiny subset of users that actually comment with any frequency so you can quickly kill the democratic appeal of the site, but I'm frankly less concerned that my vote is actually counted and more concerned with seeing quality content on the front page.

* wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...

I actually like this idea. The idea of Flesch-Kincaid tests. There was a guy on reddit who analyzed the words on different subreddits and he came to the conclusion that the average word was 'because', and average word length was around 6.7

I would think we could modify the scoring system a bit where common English words are penalized, and uncommon words are weighted a bit more. The only problem I see is, if someone plans to post code, that's going to wreck their score. Another thing would be that most of our programming names/terminologies contain very few letters. So, an exclusion/inclusion list would definitely be needed.

To (a) and (b) I would also add (c): The signal to noise ratio goes down, so it's more difficult to find and upvote the best comments. Moreover, when there already are a lot of comments - and this can happen very fast - new comments, even very good ones, have a very difficult time emerging, and I guess this creates a disincentive.

One solution to try could be to give more time "up there" to comments from commenters with a high karma (only considering the karma from comments, not that from stories, which IMHO is a completely different signal).

I have noticed a bit that the top ranking comment will then contain a bunch of fragmented, semi-unrelated sub-conversations and the top comment almost becomes an OP of its own.

Yes, I noticed the same thing. Sometimes the first comments becomes so long, that it's almost impossible to reach the other comments - I even built a Chrome extension to be able to collapse them, but when the first comment is really too long it becomes difficult to manage anyway.

Sometimes saying an idea is pointless is positive feedback, there are a lot of people here that 'launch a startup' which basically means some half-assed website that does something utterly pointless and then expect the community to be like some kind of benevolent uncle and pat them on the back and say what an awesome idea and execution. Many many ideas really are pointless and negative criticism is very much a part of being an adult. This isn't grade school where it's all about self esteem boosting.

The OP sounds like he should find some other support group, this is a community of smart people that will quite happily - and quite rightly - rip any pointless idea apart.

If you're going to editorialize and discount any comments/votes you consider not aligned with boosting anyone's self esteem, or what you consider negative you will create an artificial community - one that is the website equivalent of the old boys network, where the old timers consider themselves superior to the newcomers. Negative comments can be as useful as all the back patting attaboys.

If you really want to do this, the simplest solution is one I am sure you're aware of. Pick a few dozen people you 'like' (their voting habits) to train a Bayesian classifier, then you can weight those those that don't fall in-line with the way you'd like to see you community behave.

Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments - possibly even learn from the? Do we really need to protected from snarky comments?

This reminds me of a comment thread I saw earlier about people getting bent out of shape by cell phone usage in restaurants! I find lots of things are annoying, loud trucks/buses, cyclists that ignore road signs, rude people etc etc, but I am not going to complain and try to stop buses or give discounts to people who drive to discourage cycling. People need to start learning to cope with the real world and not expecting 'the system' to protect us from ourselves. It's embarrassing to be part of a community that needs voting bias that only encourages positive comments.

I joined Hacker News 1,570 days ago (~4 years). I launched my first two ventures here. One of them, Feedback Army, was concieved and built entirely from my interaction in this community. Three years ago, the feel of this community was very much one of support and maybe, a little self esteem boosting. It certainly worked for me and I was very grateful to this community for what it contributed to helping shape me as an entrepreneur.

I still come here for the articles and I occasionally read the comments but I don't participate much. I feel the same way as the original poster. I see someone post something genuine and then I see someone else rip it apart in a condescending way.

I used to come to HN and on the other side of the usernames, I pictured the leaders in our field, the pioneers of the next steps of our information age, and people who I wanted to emulate.

It's not this way for me any more.

Here's a thread from 847 days ago full of people being mean and negative about Groupon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288116

Today, Groupon stock is worthless, and the company is doomed. Should the people in that thread be penalized for being right, but mean?

There's a way to be negative (right or wrong) without being mean. I think that's the heart of the problem here.

a la pg's "I worry, though, that..."

Most companies fail. It's a safe bet to predict failure. It's pretty lame to celebrate that failure from the sidelines.

Vision is not "how is this guaranteed to fail?" but how could it possibly succeed despite the odds?

Which voice do you want to bring to this community?

Groupon didn't "fail", instead it has been astonishingly successful.

However, around the time of it's IPO it was receiving so much undeserved hype that in comparison to THOSE lofty goals it appears to have failed. HN readers at the time were pointing out the hype, and I think that is a GOOD thing.

Nevertheless, I agree that the tone of the community could be better and I will strive to adjust my own comments to reflect that.

Thank you for the correction. My intent was not to speak to the state of Groupon. Groupon has had far more success and impact than anything I have created to date. I felt it best to not argue with the parent and focus on the attitude behind the comment and not an assessment of Groupon.

Those comments are mean?

I can see they are skeptical, but I would hardly describe them as "mean".

I agree with you. Maybe I'm part of the problem, but I actually see nothing wrong with those comments.

Now, if that were a 'Show HN' post I could see where people may want the comments to offer constructive feedback, but that thread seems like a matter-of-fact discussion of the business model of the business.

If Groupon is a failure, I'd like to have several of those...

There's a difference between merely hostile, negative commentary and constructive, well-founded criticism.

The problem that HN faces is that because of the voting system those drive-by valueless negative comments are getting amplified all out of scale relative to their value.

Imagine being in a restaurant. It's not so bad if there is someone in the far corner having an argument that you can just barely overhear or something a few tables over having a cell phone conversation. However, if the volume of those conversations were amplified such that you could barely continue conversing with the person across the table from you then it starts to become a very serious issue, and if that became the norm at that restaurant you'd probably stop going there as often.

Part of the problem with HN (and reddit) is that the format is still linear. A comment system results in multi-dimensional conversations both in subject and in tone.

Some comments are on-topic and are helpful, some are on-topic and humorous. Some are off-topic and also helpful, some are off-topic and worthless. As so on, and so on.

With only one direction we can "push" a comment (and only one direction with which we can view comments, up & down), there is not all that much filtering that can go on.

Sometimes I enjoy reading the "funny" responses. What if this was a separate comment axis that I could view? Others may not be interested in such a thing, and could ignore it.

In any case, the format of HN doesn't lend itself well when people from all over the world bring their own views into a single topic. I don't know if a good way of solving it easily other than being ruthless about removing content that doesn't belong.

I did always like Slashdot's commenting system for precisely these reasons. It seems like their meta-mod system worked pretty well too to ensure that people's votes were actually meaningful. Oh, and the limit on the number of votes you could give really made it feel like your vote mattered and you couldn't waste it.

Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments

Actually I find that harsh comments are more common among children and noobs than adults and experts. A random fan watching a football game in a bar is far more likely to use harsh language about a player who misses a pass than another professional football player would.

What's happened here is itself evidence of this trend. The comments haven't gotten more negative because we were all a bunch of fools initially, and now the real experts have arrived; rather the opposite.

Maybe you could attack this directly. Put a field the profile form for "something I've made." Don't allow anyone without an entry there to vote.

Half of the benefit would be from filtering out people who aren't really invested in the community. The other half would be from making people think about the magnitude of their own contributions before they criticize someone elses.

Trust me, there are a lot of creative trolls.

I usually just watch and read the articles but I've been wanting to get more involved for a while. I know I have a future doing the kinds of things you guys have done, and someday very soon I hope that I will. By keeping people like me who haven't yet accomplished anything out, you would be denying a real chance at digital mentorship.

I know how much I've learned and how grateful I am for having the chance to learn from this community, I'm sure there are many others as well that feel the same.

So to the community as a whole thank you for the chance to learn until I've mustered up the courage to take the plunge.

You would still be able to comment and submit. Your voice would still be there. This would just test the hypothesis that people who have put themselves out there are more sympathetic to other people who have put themselves out there.

I think it's also important to distinguish "negative" from "critical thinking".

While we can probably mostly agree that sniping (especially personal attacks) are rotten, I suspect useful insights, that are critical in nature, often get thrown in with the dirty laundry, and labelled as "negative". "Awesome site dude!! SO happy for you :) :)" and a whole bunch of potentially fake, shiny superlatives can also become a turnoff.

Quite likely this is a minority viewpoint.

It's not a matter of handling negative comments or constructive criticism as an adult. That's been here for at least as long as I have been here (5+ years). It's a matter of those comments being derisive, abrasive potshots (oftimes at the person rather than product) providing no value. Assholeism for it's own sake, the net effect of which is to lower the level of discourse here a la the broken window theory.

> Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments - possibly even learn from the? Do we really need to protected from snarky comments?

Being able to function in the face of people making negative comments about you on the Internet is one of the basic survival skills of the 21st century.

> People need to start learning to cope with the real world and not expecting 'the system' to protect us from ourselves.

This perspective directly contradicts many HN'ers political leanings.

> Being able to function in the face of people making negative comments about you on the Internet is one of the basic survival skills of the 21st century.

While this is true, it does not justify overly negative comments. I'm reminded of hecklers who yell at stand-up comedians that they should be able to deal with heckling if they're on stage; they might be correct, but they're still being a jackass.

I don't think the problem is so much negativity as it is tone. I think HN is still a very civil place (relative to many other communities), but anyone can see that hostile jabs are gradually getting more popular, and hostile jabs are, for whatever reason, an infectious meme and when you are seeing a lot of them, it takes a lot of restraint to keep from tossing them in yourself.

A particular example of a recent top-voted comment comes to mind (I'm not going to identify it because my purpose is not to name and shame), which was full of perfectly legitimate and constructive criticisms, but the tone of the comment was, well, mocking.

And what's the point of that? Making legitimate criticisms and dressing them in derisive language is a great way to raise an army of contempt against someone, but why?

If you want the target of your criticism to take the criticism into account, you need to express it civilly. You don't need to find positive things to say, or even claim that you think there's a kernel of good idea to be found (although genuine compliments are great too, of course). All you have to do is be polite and respectful. Imagine that the creator of what you're criticizing has just shown it to you excitedly. Read your comment, and decide if what you're writing is something that an acceptable member of society would say to that person face to face. Not the content, but the actual words.

And if you don't want the target of the criticism to listen to you? Then maybe you should just keep your thoughts to yourself.

I have a sneaking suspicion it was my comment. If it wasn't, then you've made me think very hard about what I wrote (it was a mock email). It was pretty harsh, and now I think of it the tone was unwarranted. I thought it was amusing at the time and held truth to power, but now I think it was a dick move.

I can't remove the comment now, but I can consider making my criticism more constructive and positive. With the email, my concerns were legitimate, but I could have just expressed what those concerns were, not satirized the original email.

That wasn't the comment that I had in mind, but I'm glad my comment made you think about it. I'm certainly not going to claim immunity to this effect myself. I'm sure if I went through my comment history, I'd find some harsh comments of my own. I do make a conscious effort to notice it before I submit, but it's easy to slip up.

There's no denying that writing a smackdown is fun. We just have to remember that it's not harmless fun.

YC relies on a constant flow of grist for the VC mill.

If YC News doesn't encourage budding entrepreneurs to throw themselves at long-shots, and into the VC startup culture, then it doesn't serve pg's interests.

Why don't you charge eg 10 cents per comment?

What if the poster had an option to restrict the ability to comment on a submission to members with a certain threshold of karma or account age, not to exceed the poster's own level?

Please consider releasing a dataset, even to a limited set of qualified folks under NDA.

There are lots of ways to spread the work out. A number of the people here have backgrounds in search (which is really all about ranking and not much about searching). Even a closed Kaggle competition could yield some really interesting algorithms (Anthony is a great guy and would be happy to discuss it I'm sure. Note that a closed competition is done under NDA by only the most qualified participants).

Spreading it out might be fun, hope your consider it. Lots of smart guys love HN and would probably want to help.

I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms.

It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without change, the optimal guidelines for the site in 2012.

It's also the case that the things you say to guide the tone of the community, for better or worse, have a huge impact on how the community works.

If it should be a norm of HN that criticisms be kept constructive, and that the community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm. --- why can't you just say so? Not in comments, buried in random threads, but in somewhere prominent on the site. Like, for instance, the guidelines. Which you need to update. Please.

I'm sympathetic to your point, but I fear that the worst offenders are among those least likely even to read the guidelines, much less adhere to them.

It's good that you bring that point up. I disagree with you, and if I could be so bold, I'll paraphrase tptacek's post above: communities are built on principles that goad people to excellence, not forbid them from mediocrity. Communities are built by principles, not by laws. I firmly believe this, and it's why I agree that more good will come on HN from stating what people OUGHT to do instead of listing the kinds of behaviours they oughtn't engage in.

Unfortunately I agree, it is no big secret that tech as a segment has a fairly sizable portion of it's population with smartest guy in the room syndrome. The problem with smartest guy in the room syndrome is they already know the answer. Therefore they are not information seekers and they disregard anything that is objective to their world view. It is what killed Slashdot and sadly it is becoming unbearable here. Self policing does not help with this personality type, because they have no vested interest in anything other than everyone seeing them as the smartest guy in the room. Their concern about the community only extends to their recognition. It is a self centered world view and therefore I don't think that self enforced measures will work on this personality type. I almost think a third measure is needed, like a flag as abusive. Knowing that they can be flagged as abusive (even if the system dumps the flag and does not use it in any calculations). Will cause them to reflect on the policy, as it directly threatens their ability to use HN as a platform for self glorification.

HN does have up votes, down votes, and a third flag option.

You have to view an individual comment to get the flag option. I'm not sure what the down votes are for. "This comment does not belong on HN", maybe.

I have no idea what the flag is for. "This content is so bad it needs to be removed, not just hidden", perhaps.

I agree with your post though! I'd be wary about having too many options for marking posts.

Currently downvotes are simply "I disagree" (causing plenty of good comments to pile at the bottom, side-by-side with spam/hate/douchebaggery).

"Currently downvotes are simply "I disagree" "

My observation is that downvotes also signify comments that have one of more errors of fact. Of course "fact" is also open to interpretation and not absolute.

You could say "you can only be President for two terms of 4 years each" but someone could dispute that because Roosevelt was President for longer or because in their country that is not the case. Etc.

A downvote because of inaccuracy without a comment isn't very helpful of course.

Originally a downvote meant that the comment was impolite, stupid humor, or way off topic. If it was incorrect or you disagreed, you were expected to say why. I personally dont like driveby downvotes.

I like this post a lot. It perfectly sums up why I quit reading Slashdot. There was a time when reading Slashdot posts could expose you to new ideas, real world examples of technical solutions, and other people trying to learn more. Now it's mostly pedantic sniping, and lame cliched jokes from socially frustrated wankers.

I do most of my reading on Reddit (front page reddits are just cotton candy, but there are good ones to be found). I only started reading HackerNews about a year ago, and mostly just for the articles from lesser known blogs that don't get posted on Reddit. Being something of a HackerNews newbie I haven't been around long enough to notice a change, but I hope it doesn't go the way of Slashdot.

True, but wouldn't it better rally the rest of the community to keep those offenders in line? If their harmful comments don't get upvotes, they lose their audience.

Yes, that's true. However, giving proper guidelines can help in a lot of cases. When a person uses a site for the first time, he'd search at least somewhat for some basic guidelines. After that, he'd be tied to the same routine, and might not easily change with the changing guidelines.

I know that the worst offenders won't read the guidelines, but a little faith in the rest of them would go a long way improving the quality of content on this site.

Exactly.

There is not going to be a "one-size-fits-all" solution to this problem. A multi-faceted solution including both technical and non-technical elements would likely work best.

The easiest part of the solution to implement would of course be the text in the vicinity of the comment box. This text would establish certain core tenets that we can all vote on with Paul.

The technical aspect of the solution could monitor how often certain users are being down voted. The down-vote history of an account could then be used to "weigh it down" somewhat, so that it takes more up-votes in the future to bring their comment to a higher position on the page.

That is okay, they don't have to do that.

So long as it is a group norm to do adhere to the guidelines those who don't will be downvoted and their conduct will have little influence on the community.

Ok, I'll try that too.

As an example, Tim Ferris has this right above the comment submission box (getting to users right when they're about to take an action):

  Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s 
  how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re 
  rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in 
  the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or 
  initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off 
  like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the 
  conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration).

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/Ipex Guidelines are nice, but most people won't see them. It might work better to get to them right when they're taking the action.

How about just adding a flagging option for each comment and making the flagging weight related to the karma of the account. Therefore the opinion of people who have in the past made high quality contributions are weighted stronger than those of the others. And this is something I am suggesting with an almost pathetic karma...

That sounds like a second voting system, or am I understanding incorrectly?

If you would ever consider putting a quote in the guidelines, I heartily recommend and humbly submit Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points 
  out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds
  could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man
  who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
  and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who
  comes short again and again, because there is no effort
  without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
  to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great 
  devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the
  best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and
  who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring
  greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold
  and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic

I really enjoy that, that is a great quote. It is the last thing I read before posting this comment and I instantly started looking for a more diplomatic way to tell you that I think it's a bit poetic and would likely be skipped by people who don't have the time to decipher the metaphors. Then again, it seems to have worked.

We can always make the understanding of metaphors a required step for signing up.

Tongue-in-cheek, how hard would be to make a captcha?

Examples from [1]:

Metaphor: Argument is war I shot down his argument He couldn't defend his position She attacked my theory

Love is a journey: Our marriage is at a crossroads We've come a long way together He decided to bail out of the relationship

[1] http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2006_09_30_then...

The man in the arena. Classic. And fitting with the theme of entrepreneurship too, at least for me. When I started my first company I went to a business after hours event to meet and learn from people who'd done it before. One very bright woman took me aside into an office away from the party, told me there's one thing I need to know about business and that it's about the journey, not the destination then she turned on a computer, went online, and printed out this exact quote. She said its what got her through the hard times and after having to read it many times I can say it gets me through them too.

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." -- Oscar Wilde

Great stuff, love TR, should be read by all entrepreneurs and my kids too. But I would point out, snark off, that the Man in the Arena in ancient Rome was a slave, butchering another slave while rich citizens watched.

Not to deter you from the social standards approach, but I thought the concept of measuring comments was clever.

The problem I see is - How do you know if a comment is negative or not? Surely, you can tell, but problematically that might be tough.

Maybe swap out the "post comment" button for 2 "commit" buttons 1 that says "Positive" the other that says "negative". (This could be done a myriad of ways, but you get the point)

You could then measure a users tenancy to post useful positive/negative comments based on the average votes that type of comment receives.

posters that consistently have low average scores for their comments could lose posting rights, for a period.

I could see keyword association much like PG's email spam filter working for this.

Also I should be allowed to veto at least one YC applicant per batch.

May I please be the first to say "WTF"? I know who you are, I know what you contribute, but... WTF?

It's an old joke. You make a request and somebody acquiesces more easily than you expected, so you follow up with an absurd request like "Also, can I have a million dollars?"

And now I went and explained it. Sorry, tptacek.

That too, but also, I'm going to wear him down with this someday.

Ah, got it (humble pie eaten, apologies tptacek).

People should stop piling onto you with downvotes. No apology necessary.

Well in every joke lies a bit of truth: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25450984/Freedman-Compliance-WITHO...

To add to your thought when negotiating it's always important to offer nominal kickback generally. Lest the person feel they left money on the table.

If I am selling something and asking $1000 and the person comes back with an offer of $500 and assuming I am willing to take that offer (because I was shooting high) I need to offer some "kickback". This could be as simple as saying something like "well, if I accept can you pay within 5 days?" Or perhaps, "can't do $500 but I'll consider $600". Otherwise the buyer feels perhaps "hmm wow that was to quick and to easy" and might back out of the deal. Strictly my experience over many years.

Oh, thanks. Now I get it. I think the problem was I missed that this was a reply to pg's acquiescence. It was several pages down by the time I read it so the joke was lost.

Given the risk/reward tradeoff for a YC investment, vetos are pretty worthless. Even if you were the most brilliant vetoer ever, there is very little upside for YC.

Instead you should ask to be able to green-light one applicant per batch. That way, it would be possible for your contribution to be very valuable.

whoosh

You of course are allowed to joke because more people know who you are and allow it (so your comments aren't greyed down for everyone to see). (I've noticed this a few times at least). So now the poor puppy of a newbie user thinks it's ok to tell a joke (because he doesn't know who you are) or be funny and then BAM he gets slapped with a newspaper full of downvotes and runs away yelping all confused with his tail between his legs. What happened what did I do so wrong?

Now personally I'd rather be able to tell jokes on HN than be able to veto. But then again I'd have to sift through the bad jokes that other's tell.

In any community like this it takes some time to learn the rules. I'm sure there are quite a few people who don't necessarily know who "pg" is for that matter.

Maybe overthinking this one a little.

Apart from the content itself, I would suggest to place the guideline link more prominently. Maybe even at the top, directly before the "New" link.

To support this proposal: When I first arrived here (from your homepage), I didn't notice anything about guidelines until I stumbled upon a comment which mentioned them. Then I eventually found them on the bottom of the page (which can be quite long), where I seldom look at.

I think they're mentioned when new users sign up, and also when they make their first post.

I'm not keen to make a new account to test this out though.

I'm going to resubmit an idea that has been brought up before (it's not mine- it may be yours, in fact): two buttons for voting. One for agreement/disagreement and one as a rating specifically for quality of the comment.

In the "old days," there was more-or-less agreement that the vote was for quality of comment -- feedback about the value of the participant to the community -- and agreement/disagreement was voiced (if necessary) in comments. As a rule I (and others) would upvote comments we disagreed with as long as they were thoughtful. There were exceptions, of course, as you have aknowledged, but this was a pretty good guideline.

Now I think things have turned around a bit, and votes have started signifying agreement/disagreement more than quality of comment. I think this takes the community in the wrong direction.

"Cool, now there're two ways for me to punish someone I don't like." The flaw, if you want to call it that, with this suggestion is that it is a mechanism based on the idea that people are decent, reasonable, and well-informed. Which is not a bad thing, but it is not well suited to fixing a problem caused be people behaving indecently, unreasonably, and/or with little experience being "Good HN Citizens."

How the votes get turned into "punishment" will have to be tested and tweaked. I think it is worth a try, because it sets the expectation for what your votes mean be the nature of the button that you are about to press.

You seem to be thinking that this is largely trollish behavior. I suspect, however, that most of it comes from ignorance of the expectations of the community. I'm not sure there is a fix for the trolls. But for noobs that watch reality tv shows and want to come here and be the acerbic judge I think we can stop it by keeping the behavioral expectations in the forefront.

The flaw with the idea isn't what you say. I think it's important to expect decent, reasonable behavior. The flaw is, 'ok, we have two buttons. Now what?'

I would start with having the quality score 'float' the article and pretty much ignore the agree/disagree score in karma metrics. But I would probably keep that a secret.

True, unfortunately. But the flipside of having more people on the site is that there is no longer any need to ensure that everyone's comments become public on every story. You can afford to be choosier about what actually shows up, you just have to come up with a proper filtering mechanism. I think karma can be adequate, there just needs to be a more effective system of distributing and using it than what HN uses currently.

It could be too radical, but we could end anonymity in the sense of keeping public track of who upvoted, downvoted or flagged what.

The obvious fix for that is to have slashdot style moderation where you have a single vote to assign to one of many categories: offtopic, flame bait, funny. Insightful, etc.

Why not make the upward facing arrow be text like "good quality" or "useful" or "thoughtful"?

Also remove the downvote button and replace it with "flag this comment"

People would click on [flag] too often, making it hard for mods to monitor the queue of flagged content.

What I do personally is keep a (relatively short) file of hn usernames I find particularly good and those I find particularly bad. I go and read comments from those I find good sometimes, in addition to encountering them through the normal course of articles.

The bad ones, I reevaluate whenever I see another comment, but I've never yet seen a good reason to remove someone from that list. Sadly they never seem to end up hellbanned. It's uncorrelated largely with agreeing or disagreeing with views; it's just that there are a group of people who are, as the OP said, really negative, irrational, and destructive to civil discourse.

Having used to be mod/admin on a rather busy and strife-filled SMF-forum the past 6-7 years, I can confirm that this works surprisingly well.

I say "surprisingly" because, like a lot of tech hackers, I often think about a technical solution before I think about the simple social one. But I've noticed time and time again just how much effect the simplest changes in user-interface can have on the entire "mood" of a community. And "simple change in UI", includes the guidelines, or--I don't know--there's actually a lot of space for a notice below the comment submission form where you can give people the "right" idea (what you want to see in this community).

The personal anecdote goes a little something like this: We have a real solid group of mod/admins with a hands-off approach (way more hands-off than the invisible ones at HN, but that's a different gripe), so we had our fun with the innocent tiny changes, like changing the descriptions of individual sub-forums ever-so-slightly, like a pun, or a little in-joke. After a few years however, all of the descriptions had mutated into something that was not at all descriptive anymore. All the "old" members (which includes the mods of course) knew perfectly well what the sub-forums were meant for. But the new members did not. As new members look to older members for social context, there was a sort of generational loss in relevance, and at some point people almost entirely just posted whatever, wherever. It was chaos! And so I had the brilliant idea that, hey we can change those descriptions so that they're both descriptive and somewhat funny (utter genius, I know).

The amazing thing is, that it took only about 2-3 weeks before people starting posting on-topic things in the right sub-forums again.

The moral of the story is: people really tend to respond really well to just flat-out being told what to do. Really well. Amazingly well. Frighteningly well.

Better than some tech solution that tries to subtly "guide" them, in particular (or at least much easier to implement).

The SMF forum? Or another forum running SMF? I only ask because SMF (well actually its predecessor YaBB SE) was what got me active in contributing to open source projects. Solid software that SMF.

No, no, another forum running SMF.

But solid software, really? I give them one thing: it works. Can't recall encountering any real big bad bugs either, so yeah in that sense, quite solid.

But given that you contributed to it I assume that you've seen the code? I've had to make some modifications/hackery here and there myself and the amounts of time I've cursed at it for being a tangled and obscure mess... combine that with the childish language in the comments, urg.

I guess that's one important thing it taught me: never be flippant or rude in your code comments because it'll invariably end up making you look like a fool. Kind of like that "Muphry's Law[sic]" someone quoted in another thread. In "production code", but I found it easier to change my habit to "in general" because you never know who's going to see your code, and even your 3-months-future-self might as well be a different person when reading code is considered (except future-me does tend to share my sense of humour).

Because of that, all my own modifications ended up looking like rather ugly hacks as well because there was simply no "coding style" to join in step with.

(and the templating system (that is neither). and the amount of semi-duplicate subroutines and their names!!. "post", "post2", "message". And trying to guess in which of the five "/∗ probably the most important module of SMF ∗/" giant includes you're going to find a certain routine is about as predictable as trying to guess the name of a PHP library array function without reading the docs ... I really should stop, sorry :) )

It does work very well, I must repeat that. But only as long as the original magicians are still there taking care of it I'm afraid.

I've not contributed for a good number of years. I just didn't have the time. I assumed it was still running smooth. Maybe it has fallen off in recent years. Sad. But they had a pretty good MOD system I thought for the time. But I agree that the code was not organized all too well.

We used it since at least 2007 (not exactly sure, we switched from PhpBB around the time exploits were discovered every other week or so). It's still quite smooth and works fine, I just don't like looking at the code, nothing changed in that respect :)

Your experiment matches Dan Ariely's experiment very well. In his book, "Predictably Irrational" when people are made to remember the ten commandments or even the thought of ten commandments, or any such honesty pledge, their dishonesty level drops drastically.

One of these days, I'm going to make a chapterwise summary of that book so that I can remember the experiments and behaviours at a glance.

I wonder why such a phenomenon occurs, when five of the commandments have nothing to do with morality.

Also, in the Army we had the Warrior's Ethos, the Army Values, the Soldier's Creed, and the Creed of the Non-Commissioned Officer crammed down our throats daily. While are some awesome people in the Military, I've run into just as many dishonorable people as I have in the general population.

"I've run into just as many dishonorable people as I have in the general population."

Can you think of any group this would not be true for given a sample size or population as large as the military?

The point was that I can't. The study mentioned above claims that people act more honestly when they are reminded of a set of values to which they are supposed to adhere. I was simply stating that while I was in the military (for about a decade), we were constantly reminded of the set of values which we were supposed to follow, yet I saw no signs that such a practice has any effect whatsoever on an individual's behavior.

Honest, decent people who join the military (or any other group) will likely remain honest and decent. Dishonest people will most likely remain dishonest until their actions prevent them from getting what they want.

Did you hang out with those people during civilian life? How can you say the various credos had no effect on them if you do not have the same experience without the credos.

I was clearly speaking from my personal experiences and perceptions, which are obviously not intended to be considered the equivalent of a formal scientific study.

But since you asked, why would one have to have experience with that exact group of people prior to coming to a conclusion? I agree that it would be ideal if that was the case, but there are many studies considered to be scientifically valid that use one group of people who come from similar circumstances as a control, while only testing on another group. In my example I suppose the control would have been the people I know from outside the military. As I stated though, my comment was just an anecdote from my personal experiences, not a peer-reviewed, published article intended to expose the author of the other study as a fraud.

And SoftwareMaven said that you don't have a control. What he meant is that, if these values hadn't been reminded there's a very high probability that honest people might have done dishonest things, and dishonest people might have done dishonest things of far greater magnitude.

In simple, harsh words, basically you say that teaching of good values has no value. I think that the things are much more complex that that.

Perhaps those values from military doesn't have/had any resonance because they weren't, in fact, good? Or, told in a good way? (I'm thinking now that tyranny in teaching generates repulse not acceptance)

Also, if we consider that the teaching was correct (both as content and form - I dunno of course) who knows if the "soldiers who didn't change" would be worse if this teaching would be applied?

I think that the human being is the victim of influence and good influences play a determinant role on his behavior. But now what means "good" - this is entirely another chapter...

I said no such thing. The teaching of good values entails quite a bit more than merely repeating a set of values or a specific creed.

While people may or may not like what the military does, most of its creeds/values are for the most part positive things. The Army values for example are Duty, Loyalty, Selfless Service, Respect, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage - pretty generic and not nefarious at all.

You make very good points. There could obviously be people who had rose-tinted view of the military only to have it shattered in the first week. That could have easily made them bitter about the whole teaching process.

Secondly, I don't think the ideals help if you don't agree with them. You choose to become an Doctor and remember the Hippocratic oath. Same with Engineers and Lawyers. If you find half way through, that you don't want to be an Engineer or a Doctor, you can always bail out and switch. But with the military, bailing out is completely out of the question.

You are missing a control, so you can't really judge. Maybe it would have been a stinking, fetid den of iniquity and moral puss had they not.

Or, more likely, they might be somewhat worse, for some reasonable definition of somewhat.

How is it inaccurate to state that the morality of military members was the same as the general population, but not inaccurate to suggest that only degenerates who need constant supervision join the military in the first place?

There was someone who knew that before Dan Ariely: every priest of the past two thousand years, who led a congregation on daily prayers or confession.

The priests did not write research papers and publish it in peer-reviewed journals. Neither did they bother with controls in experiments. So please don't be snarky.

This makes a lot of sense, and is worth experimenting. The comment/reply box should have some simple placeholder text, along the lines of: Don't be a dick.

How about "Be kind and constructive." instead?

Oh definitely something more like that. I was not serious about the exact wording I used, I just wanted to convey the point.

"... community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm."

I disagree and find such a community engineering approach dangerous for the health of the very community it's trying to "save". I think there are two big problems with it: (i) It gives too much power to the gatekeeper(s), be it software or human, and (ii) it creates a bias for positive comments.

This is the typical dilemma: Bad comments and a free forum are two sides of the same coin. Although I hate snarky, nonconstructive comments as much as everybody else, I think that trying to curtail one may also damage HN's innovative and free atmosphere, which is its main asset.

> Although I hate snarky, nonconstructive comments as much as everybody else

Sure, I sorta agree, but ... there's snark, and then, well, there's snark.

Sometimes snarky, non-constructive comments can be really funny and/or satisfying. I don't want them to dominate the conversation, and a lot of snark is just sort of stupid, but ...

It seems to me that the (arguably) best discussion sites are those governed by benign dictatorship: firm moderation and clear guidelines. Yes, there are edge cases where judgement must be made but clear guidelines make this easier.

Whenever I think of a good example of a community that has managed to stay pretty high-quality for some time, I can't help but think of Matt Haughey's Metafilter. I'm sure the nominal charge for membership helps, but the (paid) moderators are very good.

The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem.

I think the principle that (give or take passing a karma threshold) all contributors are equal and one vote is one vote has probably outlived its usefulness.

Perhaps up and/or down votes from established, positive contributors should simply carry more weight.

Another possibility might be to give a handful of extremely highly regarded contributors a third option to super-downvote a comment by a new or low karma contributor, such that just a couple of those (or even just one) would cause the offending comment to be killed immediately. I'm thinking that rapidly killing off things like Redditesque extended joke threads that obviously don't suit the culture on HN might help, by the "broken windows" theory.

Although I want to agree with you, I'm highly skeptical on the super-downvote feature. In my relatively short time here, I've seen comments by certain top contributors being argued viciously(is that the word, English is not my first language sorry). People made good points and even attacked the top commenters points, quite a lot of which I felt was valid. Now on a purely egotistical basis if he/she wanted to superdownvote the entire thread nobody could possibly do anything to prevent it. Basically what I'm saying is that even they are humans.

I'd rather have a system where instead of simple up/down vote you have an elaborate system of 'Offtopic', 'Poor taste', 'Incorrect' as mentioned in a comment somewhere above. But also, I'd like to add positive halfs of these such as 'Insightful', and maybe one or two other labels. The idea being that they can select only one out of the total, and each label should secretly have different values. So maybe flagging a comment as Incorrect isn't as penalizing as putting one as Off-topic or Poor taste. Insightful may have different positive value as compared to maybe something labelled as 'Excellent advice' or something.

With a lot of options, I don't think newbies would actually click randomly on any button without knowing the meaning and context of each button. Anyway, the buttons need not have full names, simple short letters like P/OT/I/EA/X may be enough. Of course, this automatically requires to have a way to retrieve your vote, if you accidently click on the wrong button, but it should still allow only one option to be used.

An alternative idea to technical countermeasures is to do it the way the SA forums have doing it for 10+ years. $10 to get in. Appoint moderators who can ban or probate users at will if they post trash or break the rules. If you're banned you shell out another $10 if you want to join again.

(And no, this is not comparable to app.net. The money isn't sufficient, you need the moderators just as much. You need both.)

pg, I have notice two (2) recent trends that have, in my opinion, degraded some of the quality of this site:

1. Postings that are more advertising than informational, which I briefly commented on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350447; and

2. Members who submit their own postings.

Briefly, while I appreciate the sharing of information, any content that becomes an obvious sales pitch doesn't belong on this site. When I read a posting from this site, I want to learn and be informed - I do not want be sold on something. And - there may be disagreement with my second point - I do not find any significant value when a member submits their own positing, because I feel they're trying to sell me on something. (Please understand this does not apply to "Show HN" - just to articles and blog postings.)

Overall, I really appreciate members asking for feedback on their projects. They should be challenged and not degraded or insulted. This is a great community with great insights, so it's up to everyone to be "good neighbors".

Edit: Grammar.

I did have one idea. I don't know if it would work. I've often wished that Reddit had an "adult table", which is NOT a separate place, but a separate DIMENSION of comments in the SAME thread.

Let me explain. Currently everything has one score. So, give it a second score that also starts at 0. Instead of score "1 point" it would score "1 point (1 point at adult table)."

Then the adults at the adult table would immediately downvote anything that isn't adult (this only concerns its score at the adult table) and can upvote highly reasoned but nuanced posts, and so forth. However, there are not so many at the latter table. So, the former table might go from -2 to +100 maybe the second score has most comments untouched (at 1), with a few downvoted, and a few upvoted.

This way, you could have a children's table (current reddit) with its thousahds of votes, and good comments languishing at 0, and the adult table, where the same 0 normal score comments can have high votes at the adult table, and so forth.

So, here on hackernews, you could have a "serious" or a "founder's" table. And you could have a snarky table for people that just like having everything picked apart - where, "correctly" (per policy) we (the serious table) would vote the snarky comments down.

So, to illustrate. Here is a snarky comment "Oh, I see. So it's like a coupon system where you insert yourself into a transaction and book the whole transaction as revenue, deducting the actual 'rest of the transaction' as cost. So even though you lose on every transaction, you make it up in volume! Hey, it worked for groupon, right? :)"

This starts at 0, 0 for the snarky and serious table respectively. The serious table immediately gives it a downvote, so it is now at 0, -1, and then another, 0, -2, and soon it's hidden here: 0, -3. Meanwhile the people shifting through the trash say, "hey, ZING!!" and promote it, it gets to 5, -3, then 10, -3 then - if this place degenerates into reddit, hundreds of points, -3 respectively.

The serious or adult table is not impacted. It's not even visible. Meanwhile the snarky guys can have their children's talk.

-----

(here is the rest of my comment. I shifted the above to the top for more visibilty.)

like many others I had a "rude introduction" to hackernews, not from real connections in the startup world (which I have) but from low-quality forums. In my case I regret even the choice of username, and would change it if I could (maybe indicated to show that it's new). I wouldn't now shirk away from using my real name or a close alias - something I never do online.

So, in my case what would have mitigated my behavior is seeing where my traffic was coming from and treating accordingly. I certainly wasn't typing it into the browser URL bar. Secondly, you could have a prominent button "New to hackernews? Learn about this community, which is a more serious one than most online communities: a lot of personal connection is on the line". Then explain why, and what we get out of behaving the way we do.

Finally, as of now I can either upvote or downvote a nasty comment. There is no right answer. But you can change this in a minute. If defining the correct way to vote as "downvote any negative comment not leavened by positivity - we need all the positive thinking we can get", then I would start voting correctly. It's like Wikipedia. I don't add what I know - I add what I can prove with a reference. I don't delete uncited folklore because it's not a good read - I do so because that's the correct action.

So, policies (as is the case with Wikipedia) help immensely.

I had an idea, similar to your suggestion, to vote on the link and the discussion separately. Although my idea would not separate children from adults (an idea I like very much), it would allow good links to rise without endorsing snarky and low-quality commentary on the link. Likewise, readers would feel more free to upvote quality discussion without necessarily endorsing the subject.

It is too bad that more than a couple voting toggles would be too cumbersome; otherwise both ideas could co-exist as four sets of up and down arrows.

Rather than trying to identify nasty comments, how about weighting votes in such a way that it's proportional to how often a person has voted over time. I would think that a vote from someone who upvotes something occasionally is worth more than someone who has a tendency to upvote more often. Of course, this won't be perfect in that you will have people trying to game the system with idle accounts, but I think with some work it could be doable.

'Nasty' comments can be difficult for humans to spot, let alone machines. A lot of important information is lost when we go to a strictly text only medium. If we're going with the group to decide what's good and what isn't, then we run the risk of group think as well. So I am a little cautious about endorsing any automatic filtering of content in this way.

People who are new also, have the ability to upvote but not downvote. I think this might be causing a disproportate amount of upvoting, which may also pertain to 'nasty' comments. Perhaps maybe disabling upvoting for new people for a certain period and/or after a receiving a certain karma score might alievate this a little?

how about a 'quarantine' period. users can only comment after being registered, after voting and after viewing a certain number of posts/comments. I believe communities change (sometimes for worse) when new users don't get what the community is about and just hit the ground posting/commenting.

It seems plausible that lazy voting is identifiable as a user-specific signal, and that lazy voting (contrary to the welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"don't be rude or dumb in comment threads") is a big part of the reason why comments that don't fit the community culture stay so visible. May I suggest that it may also be possible to identify good comment voting (upvotes on comments that link to reliable sources to answer questions, or that say "I'm sorry" or "thank you" as part of a comment) as a user signal? It will be interesting to see what happens to comment scores over time if more overt thoughtfulness (in all senses of the word "thoughtfulness") is upvoted often and comment rudeness or stupidity are (net) downvoted as the software tweaks are implemented.

P.S. I have been puzzled by a downvote and upvote pattern I seem to be observing in this thread itself, with of course only my own score on my own comment being DIRECTLY observable to me as I revisit this thread from time to time.

How about an "outside community norms / not nice" vote on any comment? If a user accumulates too many of them (relative to positive votes?) their comments get pushed down.

I think it's different from the existing "flag", or at least how I understand it: Currently, I'd only hit flag if something is deeply offensive / illegal / spam. And I think flag only exists on posts?

Another simple idea (that you've no doubt thought of): using Twitter (or App.net) authentication. That way people are a bit less anonymous and more accountable. I can imagine people would hate this, but they might be the same people who are the haters to begin with.

I don't think this phenomenon is just on Hacker News. I believe the recent negativity shift is an actual change in the startup community's perceptions of the world.

When things are "hot" in our industry, and seemingly trivial companies are exiting for billions, the people who are still struggling start to develop a somewhat bad attitude. I see it all the time particularly from people who are working on "serious stuff" and then lash out when they see Instagram's success (which they've been saying for years: "sure, but what's their revenue model??").

I don't condone it and honestly think it's genuinely strange. Now is as amazing a time as any to be founding a startup. Success of others (no matter how trivial) only makes things better.

I think it should be a more aggressive approach.

Delete insulting comments that cross the line. Trolling is like pornography. You know it when you see it.

After three offenses, delete that person's account. After 5, ban their IP address.

Moving the snarky comments from the top of a comment thread to the bottom won't help much. The snark sets the tone of the thread and disuades better comments. You need a way to remove them.

I've observed that simple, positive feedback like "Looks good, keep it up" gets downvoted as nonconstructive. Karma is more than internet points here since the thresholds drive so many features, so I bet people who would otherwise comment in the affirmative simply don't. Paradoxically, nit picking and verbose argument can score a lot.

I don't want to offer any particular suggestion because I don't have any data to support anything. A hunch, though, based on your idea: if someone want to downvote, a comment must be provided.

I have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :)

PS: I hope

Wasn't OP's 11kclub.com post dead'ed by mods?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323459

You could view this as a UX issue. New members don't get enough information from the HN interface to infer how to behave. Now we've got a theory, how can we address it?

(a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members

Try to make it obvious who distinguished members are, so people can emulate them. Colour-coded usernames based on age/reputation, starred 'high quality' comments, reputable upvoters (quora-style).

(b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.

Try to reduce anonymity. Tiny little grey names are fine for 100 users, but after a point they all look the same. We're visual animals - maybe we need recognizable avatars, symbolic or otherwise, so we recognize the people we're replying to. Even allowing users to choose a single unicode symbol in addition to their username might be enough.

You could color code people who are in the current (or past) YC cycle. You could also make quality participation an element to the application process (like it once was) - the forum has been cannibalized in a way.

Make upvotes and downvotes visible (i.e. not the final number the actual list of users). Knowing that no one will know fosters petty up/down votes.

I'm sure you already do, but just to get it off my chest: please use unusual amounts of caution when implementing a technical solution like this.

My gut feel is that your example of the voting system tweak will make users like me might not count. Granted, I don't comment nor contribute directly by providing links. I have various reasons for my silence like the fact English is not my first language (nor even my second language, so it takes me forever to compose something in English, and I still run the risk of my comment turning into grammar crit, with the point I try to make being lost in that noise), a lot of people on the site is intimidatingly intelligent, my points have already been made, etc, etc.

But. I do vote. Due to my non-existent karma I cannot downvote, only upvote. It's limited power, but I try to use it wisely. I cannot downvote the horrible negativity I saw, for example, in the wikipedia design thread (a submission I found fascinating even though it was flawed, as it was lovely to see how their thought process worked as they redesigned the visuals), but I did upvote one or two comments that I thought were thoughtful and added to the discussion. I would like to believe that I made some difference to the tone of the thread, even if it's in a very limited way.

Those that see the world as all shades of gray are not generally very vocal - you don't see a vocal middle ground in most arguments. But this doesn't mean we don't exist. And I don't know how "negative" comments will be classified, and I think people like me run a very real risk of silently becoming false positives when we stupidly upvote things using our own dodgy rules.

So - please consider unexpected side effects such technical things introduce. I guess what I'm saying is I'm already put off by some of the unwritten rules I perceive on this site, if the voting system is also rigged to make some people silently powerless I don't see how to be useful at all. It is off course your prerogative to decide that my type, the silent-but-voting user is unwanted, and if so, that's fine. But I hope I contributed something from time to time.

As I mentioned below, I've run a social network called Scribophile for about 5 years now. What I've learned is that you simply can't engineer away a social problem. People will always find a way to be jerks; the only way to mitigate them is either through:

1) Social pressure: the community must evolve in such a way that its members as a whole frown upon negativity. Hard, because it takes time and can go wrong. Or,

2) Moderation: a group of members you trust is tasked with actively deleting useless comments and threads and banning useless contributors. A zero-tolerance policy for stupidity. Is that elitist? Maybe. But an elite community is hard to grow when idiots are tolerated.

There is literally no way to engineer away jerks. A social problem requires a social solution.

>identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments

What's your definition of a "nasty comment"? How do you distinguish between a "nasty comment" and a comment that voices an unpopular opinion?

I understand what you're trying to accomplish, however I worry that a side effect will be the further silencing of opinions that go against the HN popular consensus.

There's also a UX component to this: I have accidentally upvoted nasty comments and downvoted comments I liked because the touch targets for the vote icons are so small on my phone. Even worse, it appears that I can't undo my mistaken votes either.

Perhaps you could have a system where users vouch for other users who make good submissions, and then have submissions ranked with something along the lines of PageRank, with "vouching for" taking the place of "linking to".

The advantage of identifying good users over identifying bad ones is that recognition of goodness can propagate: if you believe A to be a good user and A believes B to be a good user, that is some indication to you that B is a good user. Replace "good" with "bad" and this no longer holds.

Have you read the PageRank paper? It's mostly intuitive so it's not painful to read:

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

Note expecially section 6, "Personalized PageRank", where they replace the random jump with a jump back to some basis pages. Your own up votes/downvotes probably make a pretty good set of reference points, so a PageRank-like algorithm could be heavily weighted according to your own judgement.

To be totally clear, I'm not suggesting everyone get personalized results, but rather that HN is the same for everyone, one view "personalized" according to your judgment (and obviously that propagates through to include the judgement of the people you respect, and they respect, etc).

Yes this is a handwave, and Google has gone lightyears beyond this early paper. But intuitively it may help you think about the problem. It's really going to be some iterative algorithm that flows through all the upvotes and downvotes to determine the authority of each vote, perhaps in a similar way to how the authority of each link on the web can be calculated.

A couple questions:

1. Why not assign karma by running something like pagerank over the vote graph? I think giving overwhelming weight to high karma old-timers would make HN more like them, which would be an improvement, right?

2. What about assigning karma not by your comments, but by the responses to them?

I figure karma-from-replies would shift the conversation to "what should we be asking about this", whereas karma-from-comments incents "what can i say that the masses will like".

Given commenting has a higher work threshold than voting, it might be "manipulated" less. Gaming it would be more obvious. And subjectively, posts that are questions seem to lead to higher quality discussion (more genuine?). Maybe you'd have to put more work into getting users to not feed trolls and assholes, and ask/reply more to excellent comments. Not sure if practical...

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

(2) probably would not work. Commenters could troll, and then the community replying in disagreement would up-vote their comment.

Here are my ideas: (A)Not showing someone their karma score ever, unless it is negative.

(B)Leaving a line between the comment field and the reply button saying, "Stay constructive."

(C)That line of text could link to the guidelines.

(D)Detect if someone says 'idiot' and then change the line to, "You said 'idiot', do you still want to post?"

I actually quite like those suggestions. Subtle but I could see them working well.

(D)Detect if someone says 'idiot' and then change the line to, "You said 'idiot', do you still want to post?"

I like this idea. In particular, I like the idea of analyzing content - but not programatically rejecting the post completely. Another forum that I frequent tries to keep things civil by banning certain words. Sounds good on paper, but then you try to use the phrase "knee-jerk reaction" and the system rejects your post because it has "jerk" in it. D'oh.

Pointing out the possible (but not definite) incivility, but allowing the post anyway (after a confirmation step) could be a nice way to remind people to be polite, but without being overly draconian.

Real Names. I believe that I am much less a jerk on HackerNews than I am on Reddit, where I post under a pseudonym.

How about giving an option to OP to judge which comment is being helpful for him one way or other. If a member is constantly being penalized by OP for giving negative/useless comment then revoke voting rights.

Stackoverflow model could also work.

My 2 Cents.

Good. Something needs to be done. Every time I click on a link about a start up or a new site, I see the negative feedback and I cringe at the thought of putting anything I do on here only to reach an inevitable fate that could permanently damage the reputation of the project during its launch phase.

Are people banned/ghosted here? I'm assuming so, because that's how most forums work, but I'm not sure since this seems to be custom built.

While I don't think that HN has hit this level yet, one solution that I've read about involved people who trolled or posted general nastiness. When people had reached a certain threshold or pissed off the wrong high-level mod, they got "ghosted". What this meant was that people who were "alive" or considered "living" could see "living" contributors' posts, but could not see "ghost" posts. Ghosts, however, could see other ghosts' posts, so they could, for what it was worth, writhe in their own debauchery and piss each other off, but not the pleasant and constructive members. I thought it was an interesting solution and apparently it worked very well.

There is a hellban system in place.. your posts are hidden but you don't know it. You have to explicitly go to your options and enable "showdead" so these work.

Problem is it's not entirely clear what some people have done to get hellbanned sometimes.. I'm not sure what the requirements for getting it reversed are, either. I've seen some very constructive comments in that mess before..

I would agree, the ideal solution would be a self-organizing trust network where higher-quality comments tended to be promoted. I've previously suggested one way to implement such a system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 .

Some thoughts,

Communicate the influencers more... most people follow leaders, and it would help set the tone for new members.

HN's guidelines should be turned into LightBox style documentation. Put it where it matters right next to the input boxes (and in the case of dupe-checking do it by AJAX and communicate it inline).

Guidelines should encourage the positive, and where something is negative then it should be pointed out that they should attack the argument and not the person.

Have a very small set of very clear rules that are enforced transparently, openly and brutally. The lines will only trip up the worst offenders. If you move these lines, only do so because you've listened to the community and they believe the lines are wrong. I use a system on one of my sites in which I track how much a thread is read, and if a post is flagged by more than a certain number of people then I know the community is saying something got through and the rules either aren't being enforced or might not be right.

Mostly: This is not a technical problem. It's a people problem.

There may be some tools you can build to help, but it is people who will use those tools and it is they that make them effective. Even then, there's only so much you can do without fully empowering others.

One ends up realising that a forum is a microcosm of society, and the owner/leader either chooses a form of government in which the citizens will be happiest and yet the aims of the government are achieved, or the owner/leader delays such a decision whilst the population grows and increasingly friction occurs.

I agree with tptacek - I think a forum can benefit from posting its guidelines somewhere prominent, especially during signup for new people.

That way, the community knows what the values are, etc. To be honest, looking at HN I'm not sure where on the site to find these values right now, myself. I just try to be my own reasonable self :)

Another technique could be to split the ranking into two modes, a general mode and a power mode(where rules are much strict and biased towards a filtered set of core community users). Using the power mode, readers would view the community core (who defines the site ethos) but may not be able to interact (vote,comment and submission not appearing here without upvote from core members).

Such an approach should be taken with a goal to gradually adhere the general user behavior towards the community core. May be add a tab for this.

The thinking is based on the premise that the site still has a lot of its core users and community values have not changed over time.

I would like to see agree/disagree buttons -- no other voting site has this but I think it would solve the disagree=downvote / agree=upvote problem that Hacker News and Reddit have. By separating out the two options, you might get people more to upvote good comments and downvote poor comments.

Pg: here is an idea I have been keeping inside me for over a decade:

User-account reputation karma.

Based on the voting system that slash of had, but on the character of the account rather than the comment the account made. Here is how it works:

You have your comment up down arrows, then username, then a drop down to mark the character of the account at the time they made the post.

So you could see a comment by samstave and upvote/downvote it, and then also tag my character as [insightful|helpful|abrrasive|troll] etc (whatever the tags are you want to make)

These tags affect the overall account. So if I were tagged by a ton of people as a troll account the more troll votes I get, the worse my account experience is... And eventually too many could lead to hellban.

On the other end, having a very high positive account character would make for a better experience - see stories esrlier, be able to affect other accounts in some way etc. or just a leader board of who is the most technical, helpful, insightful, innovative etc...

pg - I'm curious if you've ever given thought to the idea of exposing a filter or ranking Domain Specific Language to us ... something that we could enter in a spot in our user-profile ... so that we could either choose the current ranking algorithm or could write our own.

It seems that HN may be different things to different people, so perhaps allowing the presentation to be customized might put people at ease?

1) Define moderators as subset of voters that you trust. One of such moderators would be you.

2) Rate every other voter against moderators' votes. If voter upvoted the same as moderator, then increase weight of such voter in the future. If voter upvoted against moderator vote -- decrease future voter's weight.

3) For every comment calculate weighted upvote/downvote total based on voters clicks and weights calculated in #2.

How about just getting rid of this upvote / downvote point system? I have to say, when I first joined, I didn't get it. Now I do. It's a competition. But not one that seems to improve the quality of the posts or comments. One that improves ... not sure what. So is it valuable?

Remember the BBS forums and forums of old days when you didn't have points and rankings? Yeah. The forums often degenerated there too. Points didn't seem to help or matter. But moderated forums worked well. If you want high quality, you'll need a walled garden. But walled gardens rarely work and stifle creativity. However if you think a point system is a substitute for moderated comments. Well, then, the results speak for themselves.

So, points and voting be gone, maybe? I doubt the quality would change much. Even PG admits that it's not the voting per se, but the entrance of a larger volume of people.

I don't agree with this comment, but ironically someone voted him down and neatly highlighted the problem. Why did they downvoted the post? It is a constructive suggestion, and has its merits. That it got downvoted is pretty much what is wrong! It might not be a snarky response, but it's still a nasty way to criticise!

What about consistently downvoted decent comments? Voting is anonymous, which isn't bad. But if you got people to explain why they downvoted, then that would help.

Paul, what about making votes have values diferent of +1|-1 depending of who is voting?

People who have been longer in the community and have a good kharma would have the power to vote +1|-1, while people who have less kharma or have joined the community recently would be able to vote, say, +0.1|-0.1, and there would be a lot of people in between (+0.3|-0.3, +0.5|-0.5, etc.)

It just makes sense that your upvotes/downvotes should have more voting power than the ones coming from, say, myself.

There is no agreement on exactly what a vote in either direction means as there is no restriction on anyone doing either for any reason. And to different people it means different things.

As far as "who is voting" for arguments sake a member of SCOTUS joins HN and decides to cast a vote. Or a member of SCOTUS joins HN and after a period of 2 years has low karma, because, they don't have much time on their hands. I'm not exactly sure why someone who has not been a member for a long time or doesn't have a high karma score isn't to be trusted with voting. And why someone who decides to spend a lot of time on HN should be given more privileges.

Hey PG - Honest feedback from someone in one of the largest tech communities in the world (Linux). Technical solutions won't solve the problem. Even things that various communities have tried around governance won't solve the problem.

It basically takes strong leadership, preferably from one person or a (very) small group of people.

Look at GNOME these days. They are rudderless and mostly because they have absolutely NO leadership either from community people or RedHat (GNOME is basically RedHat). They are dying slowly.

Look at the Kernel, though. Linus controls it, sets the tone (often harsh!) and it hums along.

Look at Ubuntu. People may hate the direction, but Mark runs that show and they people know what they are doing and where they are going.

IMO, the idea that the community will govern itself has never held up. Communities are formed around ideas or interests, but are led by people (leaders).

With a big site like HN I don't know how you can control it. However, in a more focused site, the answer would be hands-on involvement. It doesn't take that much involvement, just a little.

The thing about systems is that we tend to think of them as if people are not a part of them. But people are a part of them.

One thought I would suggest is that it might be worth giving people with very high karma (maybe high enough that only a few people have this) an ability to post highlighted reprimands, and an automatic banning of a user if he or she gets more than, say, 5 of these in a month. These could then be reviewed of necessary.

One thing I would think about is that rather than having a system where computers try to control people, have a system which empowers the community leaders to set standards of interaction.

It’s hard to encourage and nurture positivity on the web. Tumblr’s done it by not explicitly building comments into the product—so if you’re going to say something critical, it shows up in your personal space. It's conflicting to build a growing community vs. a good one. One of the only ways to do it is to have some sort of asymmetric follow relationship that allows all users to create their own smaller communities.

Clay Shirky: “The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.”

David Foster Wallace: “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

David Foster Wallace: “We should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”

http://christmasgorilla.com/post/29694673248/its-a-genuine-p...

I haven't been here in quite awhile, and immediately I see meta-threads about how this site operates...

But the latter half of your comment intrigues me...

I've thought about this for quite a while and have concluded: you could start a community and weight comments based on concurrence with the community (most likely from the get go) but unfortunately it's a fine line between stagnation and simplification.

I think it would be worth taking a look at the Slashdot voting system, which IMO does the best job I've seen of getting the best signal out of the noise of mass voting.

Private comments and automatically fold/collapse long/low-point threads and negative-comment scoring comments.

Optionally mark your comments as private for grammar/spelling/technical errors, way off topic comments and personal requests.

I think graying out works for comments scoring 0 or maybe -1, but beyond that, might as well fold/collapse them.

I also think something like xkcd's Robot9000[0] would be useful to prevent some clutter like "me too!", "awesome!", "Thanks"

[0]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions:

- Rumors about what Apple will do next week, and the ensuing flamewars between Apple fans and Android fans

- TorrentFreak articles of any kind

- Overbearing hype about the latest fad (App.net at the moment)

- Mindless hatred towards the latest villain (Twitter at the moment)

- Anything political that's posted under the justification that "all hackers need to care about politics"

Sorry to see you go, I hope that you find somewhere with more civil discourse.

I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions:

Agreed. "Show HN" posts are probably the most important part of HN to me. I don't always comment, but I always enjoy seeing them, and I love it when you see somebody post something that is incredibly useful to the OP. It warms the heart to see one of those conversations that goes:

somerandomuser "I like this, but FOO seems kinda wonky. We did something similar once, and found that BAR increased our conversion rate by 12.9%"

submitter "Holy shit, that's a great idea. I never thought of that, but I'm going to implement that tonight! Thanks for sharing."

As someone who just recently found HN, all I can say is that the percentage of constructive feedback VS such 'stories' as described above is still great in comparison to the rest of the net. It may have been better in the past but shallowness is what you get when you get more exposure I guess. I do not know if the score system adds to that but up voting great articles or comments is a must. Wish I could down vote to uninteresting stories. But on that matter, what is uninteresting? Surely, nobody needs duplicated stories where each adds only a minor thought. Even spam like stories that float around currently about app.net are pretty 'uninteresting' because the value they add to HN is just non existent. Looks like the typical HN visitor changed, too? Like from founders & entrepreneurs in the past to todays everyday-websters, developers, snarky people and founders?

I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions

A separate, heavily moderated forum on HN dedicated to product launches and feedback. Non-constructive criticism like "Your product sucks, it's a terrible idea and you're a terrible person for thinking of it" results in an HN hellban/permaban.

Myself - I'm not opposed to receiving negative feedback. It's the worthless, non-constructive feedback that riles me. Say something positive and/or insightful. Meaningless, parroted comments are what ultimately sinks an online community.

Hi Steve,

I don't know if you are going to read this, but I'm going to write it for the rest of the audience too.

I think the trend of dismissing critics and commenting along the lines of "sour grapes" or "haters" very disturbing. Yes I go against your commentary. The great thing about internet and communities based on pseudonyms is that you get the first reaction that people have. Very few will take a few minutes to give their opinion, weight the different possibilities etc... It's brutal, it's direct. If you have run a service online you certainly know that you receive very angry/ threatening emails from people that use your services and are displeased. If it disturbs you it means that you are not ready for having a personal project on display, it's as simple as that. People in life and particularly on the internet are very angry and you have disturbed individuals. Opening a service with your name and your address is becoming some kind of "celebrity", people will HATE you for no good reason.

To come back to what I think is bad/annoying on Hacker News is of a different nature and I'll list a few:

* Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored )

* Stardom: No matter what they post some ""famous"" people around here get their post on the front page. By courtesy I won't list who they are but everybody can spot it pretty easily. I'm very disappointed by this attitude personally, and it doesn't speak highly of a place that is supposed to be almost a pure meritocracy.

* Fads/ Jealousy: A lot of people here want to be rich and famous thus it creates tension. It allows me to come back to your point: these people are likely going to dismiss your ideas based on jealousy.

* Over-repetition of some stories ad nauseum: dumb benchmarks to see the number of req/s, analysis App.net, Education sucks...

All that being said it remains an interesting community but with some drawbacks. I guess nothing can have it all.

Fads/ Jealousy: A lot of people here want to be rich and famous thus it creates tension. It allows me to come back to your point: these people are likely going to dismiss your ideas based on jealousy

Maybe I've just missed it, but I haven't seen a lot of responses here that seem to be obviously motivated by jealousy. I get the feeling that, despite how many of us there are, most of us are working on different things. I mean, there are so many ideas, and potential ideas, I don't feel like I've seen a lot of overlap.

And when I have seen it, I feel like a lot of the comments have been of the "Hey, this is similar to what we're doing, shoot me a message offline and let's talk" variety.

> Maybe I've just missed it, but I haven't seen a lot of responses here that seem to be obviously motivated by jealousy.

Those are never obvious. Jealousy, unless in a romantic personal context, is never displayed directly. It is hidden behind multiple layers of rationalizations or a barrage of negative comments (jab at small detail, over emphasis of small mistakes for ex.: "Oh you just worked 5 months on this website, well it sucks because you use the wrong serif font").

>> * Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored )

I would say this is the biggest issue for me - I am just not into that habit.

I would suggest putting a header into the orabe bar:

"Please generously upvote if you think something is intelligent, well written or inciteful or otherwise postiviely contributes to the conversation"

That said, here is a +1

Could this be a side effect of comment scores not being displayed publicly any longer?

With all due respect, I think you missed the point of this post. The OP is not dismissing critics with claims of "sour grapes" and "hating". He is saying that the community is no longer a "safe place" where he feels OK to share work in its early stages.

In other words, he was not saying that negative criticism should be dismissed. He was saying that there is too much negativity for him to find the site enjoyable and that he thinks the change in attitude is for the worse.

That said, I also think that you're off the mark when you say the OP is not ready for having a personal project on display. The premise of OP's note is that he considered HN to be a more positive, supportive community than the larger Internet. There is nothing wrong with wanting to associate yourself with people who will build you up rather than tear you down. If Steve's been using HN for five years, he's probably well aware of how vicious people can be on the Internet. It sounds like he's sad that HN isn't a haven from this viciousness like it once was. And just because he's sad that this one community has deteriorated, that doesn't mean he's not capable of handling the slings and arrows of the wider Internet population.

Well said, there's nothing more I come to HN for than a positive, supportive community, even where something is wrong and needs to be improved.

I have noticed in the last year on here it's become a lot more like other sites with more general hacker interested threads and (maybe I'm wrong) less and less startup relevant stuff. I know HN is for both, but I personally come here for startup signal.

Maybe we need a new headline. Instead of "Show HN" it's "Get Constructive Criticism from HN," and it's intended for products in the early stage.

that would be awesome. maybe a hotornot for hackernews

It also seems to me people's online opinions will tend to extremes. If there is an average reaction, either like or dislike, that might not cross the "click the reply button and write a comment" threshold. So there could be quite a bit of positive reaction, some moderate opinion, but people just won't feel the need to comment on it. So due to this bias one would expect to see more sharply negative or strongly positive responses.

Also I guess HN was mostly about the startup ecosphere, and now that goal shifted. Now it is about technology, programming, social issues _and_ startups.

Announcing a new startup might get a positive reaction from people interested in startup but will get no or negative reaction from those not interested in startups.

I'll raise my hand and admit that I am not interested in startups at all at the moment. I try not to comment negatively or positively on them I just skip those topics.

Should I feel guilty for not being interested, and are characters like me perceived as destroying the HN culture?

Point by point:

Well thought comments are often ignored and not read ( not up/downvoted, just ignored )

You cannot tell if they were read or not. Exhorting users to use their 'mod points' is a challenge (yes its a slashdot reference). The community is larger and only the opinionated seem to vote.

Stardom: No matter what they post some ""famous"" people around here get their post on the front page. By courtesy I won't list who they are but everybody can spot it pretty easily. I'm very disappointed by this attitude personally, and it doesn't speak highly of a place that is supposed to be almost a pure meritocracy.

Except it isn't a meritocracy is it. Its a place for Y-combinator folks to share links they are interested in. Both current and past members of YC have a few more options than available than folks who just happened by here. One of those is that YC launches always make the front page.

I've heard this a number of times but I'm not sure I buy it. Some people are angry at themselves because they haven't launched and they lash out at those who have in attempt to position their own failure better. Constructive criticism takes time, a jab takes only a few seconds. So you're looking also at a time penalty.

Over-repetition of some stories ad nauseum: dumb benchmarks to see the number of req/s, analysis App.net, Education sucks...

Well given the way the karma system works this would seem to be a reflection of what is important to the community at large vs perhaps some individuals. There are a couple of great add-ons that knock out stories about things you don't care about (I believe Bitcoin was the motivation but could easily be wrong about that).

hmmm, has anybody studied reading patterns of people when reading from a screen? It may be possible to fairly accurately estimate the probability of a section of text being read.

For example if there are 6 comments on display at anyone time and they are on display (without scrolling away) for 2 minutes, one might arrive at a probability of how much of that page was read, and how much time was equally spent on previous/subsequent parts of the page.

Especially when factors like, people tend to scroll text to be at the top of the screen to read it, or like me, highlight text I am currently reading with the mouse. Using these factors, we might be able to know what is/isn't read...

before improving something, try to measure it first!

Is there an easy way to capture scroll activity on a mac app? I'd love to analyze a data dump of scroll activity and active window.

You hit the nail on the head about what bothers me about HN, after 4 years of using it: "Its a place for Y-combinator folks to share links they are interested in."

news.YC is biased and will always be biased towards YC-oriented stories, which means it will never be as good as it could be. The status quo doesn't mean that news.YC isn't any good - it's just suspect and you have to filter everything through that lens - the story rankings, comments, and job posts are not ordered by merit, there is a sub-filter in place.

I hope there is eventually a start-up news site that isn't architected and gardened to benefit a small group above all else.

Disclaimer: I was a YC reject, and you can chalk it all up as sour grapes if you like.

News will always be biased, my friend. For as long as it is human generated.

If the people submitting links have different biases, then the overall news site might not have any particular bias overall, even if individual stories do.

>The great thing about internet and communities based on pseudonyms is that you get the first reaction that people have. Very few will take a few minutes to give their opinion, weight the different possibilities etc... It's brutal, it's direct. If you have run a service online you certainly know that you receive very angry/ threatening emails from people that use your services and are displeased. If it disturbs you it means that you are not ready for having a personal project on display, it's as simple as that.

Well that's all available on the internet at large. You don't need any kind of catered community to have that experience. What he's bemoaning is the loss of the intermediate, the more thoughtful and useful type of honesty.

> Education sucks...

This is my main gripe with HN right now -- the anti-intellectualism of the community. I recall an article submitted where the author claimed "Academic papers are shitloads of crap. Want to read something? Read some beautiful source code instead."

Nearly all breakthroughs in computing sprung up from an academic context; why would you be so cavalier in dismissing it? You might actually find out what a Y Combinator is!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator#Y_combin...

Hacker News is far from anti-intellectual; the opinion of a single author does not constitute a community trend.

I would guess that anyone who describes academic papers as not being full of "crap" or who describes source code as "beautiful" has read neither.

To learn something, I read books, like textbooks. But maybe that's just me.

Textbooks are a great source for what little knowledge has been digested well enough and is popular enough to warrant a textbook. If your interests are a little more technical, you often don't have a choice but to read academic papers. On a very rough scale: to learn something you might learn at a university as an undergraduate, read a textbook, but to learn something usually only PhDs know, you need to read papers.

It's true that many papers are badly written, but (1) to emphasize: sometimes there is no other source for something, and (2) most books are pretty awful, too, you have to be selective with anything.

There's also the possibility that they simply don't subscribe to the sort of attitude that makes sweeping generalizations about topics with vast depth and breadth.

The trend was already well established by the time you got here. If you go back three years, you do see a different site that is far more accepting and far less technical. Early in the HN world, when I read an article, my first thought wasn't "let's see how HN have dismantled this".

For many things (especially raw information), I appreciate that cynicism. For launches and discussions around early products, it annoys me to no end. I think it really shows the character of a person who, when somebody puts themself out there, their first reaction is to tear them down.

Alas, there is probably nothing that can be done. It is the tragedy of the commons, where goodwill is the resource being depleted.

The Internet is not a hugbox. People launching products and companies need criticism more than anything else, because if they get it now, they can fix the problem before a customer or a funding source spots it.

The Internet is not a hugbox

Surely there's a some balance point between "hugbox" and "hatefest". Also, we're not talking about the Internet, but a small self-selected community of humans that happens to connect via the internet.

The Internet is not a hugbox.

HN is not "the internet". I don't think HN should strive to be as terrible as most of the internet can be. If I want "the Internet" I can go to /r/all. That is a much better snapshot of what "the Internet" actually is. I don't see why it's a bad thing to want HN to be better than most parts of the Internet.

I also think your type of attitude really brings communities down. People who treat others with disrespect and insults like to defend their actions as "This is the internet. Deal with it." I've never thought it to be a particular worthwhile argument.

You said a lot of what I just posted except shorter and better. One thing I missed that you got and that's worth expanding on is stardom. The stardom breeds a lot of the groupthink and hive mind around here I think.

I agree that there's a problem with fads and jealousy but I disagree with what that problem is. I think the jealousy comes from us nobody's and not the stars. It's the proletariat, so to speak, that are jealous of not just the stars but anyone who has the guts to put something cool they made in front of HN.

Fads again are just what promotes groupthink. Why does everyone on HN love Ruby but most people outside HN don't have any strong feelings for or against it? Because it's trendy. I work at a company in Chicago where we run our sites and apps on either Java, PHP, or Ruby. No one in the company ever looks down their nose at anyone else not using the language their primarily working with because that shit doesn't matter. The fads on HN aren't real. They're specific to HN and possibly Silicon Valley but people talk about it here as if it mattered somehow.

Overall though, you nailed it. And your very last line definitely holds true.

I spent the time and read your post for reviewing Favilous* and I have no idea why you think there was nothing constructive there. Frankly, it looks like mostly constructive. Most of the comments are even in your format of 'I like this but this needs work' for goodness sakes. I don't know what you expect. If anything, they pulled a lot of punches.

I've had the exact opposite reaction as you. I disliked the old HN community. It felt like a circle jerk who would hype each other up and offer little to no constructive criticism. Products that clearly had no defensible business models or clones of clones that would rely on kickbum business execution to see any adoption. You still see the same thing today, but at least there is some dissent.

I'm glad HN is no longer a place where clones of other platforms cobbled together in a few hours gets praised as the greatest thing since the memristor.

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060022

There is a difference in tone between the commonts of the favilous site and the newer one 11k...

I wondered though, if the new site was a significant part of it. People don't seem to like signing up for something they don't know anything about.

The 11kclub post (mod deleted, it seems)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323459

BTW it seems OP has multiple accounts sw1205, sw007 and mdoyle at least. So it's a bit tricky to get the context of what is this about.

It seems the sour end of the 11kclub thread was about a witch hunt by some HN users finding out the submission had conflict of interests. (Myself, I don't see it and I don't care)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4325159

Sigh.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people being negative. 99% of startups fail, and I think it's worthwhile reminding people of that every now and then. Hacker News shouldn't live in some magical land where everyone is going to make the next billion dollar company.

If you truly, genuinely, believe in your idea then you can take the negativity in your stride. There will be plenty of constructive feedback buried in there somewhere. If you can't take a little negativity directed towards your project, then maybe you're in the wrong business. And maybe it is a bad idea. Sometimes it's best to find that out and move onto a new idea, rather than bathe in the vague compliments of your peers.

I agree. Perhaps ppl need to preface their posts by saying they're doing a project for fun, and not to make money. That would soften some of the comments. But if ppl really think a project is doomed as a business, I'd prefer it they tell me the truth, even if it hurts.

If anything, the quality of the posts here are starting to suck because very few actually help you make money. I don't care about the latest PhantomJS technology, etc. There needs to be more ppl like patio11.

If this is the case, why even allow for comments? Just have a bot that auto-responds a bunch of times with randomly generated comments that 99% of the time is "Your idea sucks. You should do something else that is worthwhile."

Because despite the OP's lament, not all feedback is negative. I posted a project and got both positive and negative feedback, I found both useful.

untog also wrote There will be plenty of constructive feedback buried in there somewhere..

Constructive feedback is generally what you want. Positive vs negative is more about mood than content - and there is plenty of worthless positive feedback out there.

At first I wanted to disagree with what you'd said and I'd half written a reply about how being negative is an opportunity to learn how to be positive.

However, when I considered your point of view, I choose to agree with you. This is what I like (and find maddening at the same time) about HN it's a great way to get a totally different perspective.

> And maybe it is a bad idea.

^This.

Sometimes people feel very passionate about something and they get tunnel vision. They invest hours, weeks, years on something and to them it is going to be the next big thing that will get the girl, kill the baddies... and save the entire planet[1]. But guess what? Sometimes... sometimes... it really is just shit. Sorry to tell you this but your idea sucks... or the execution sucks... or both. [strawman alert] If all you want to hear is how awesome it is, then go show it to your mum. I'm sure she'll tell you how special you are and that you can do no wrong.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aD3XSOBCxk

If all you want to hear is how awesome it is, then go show it to your mum. I'm sure she'll tell you how special you are and that you can do no wrong.

Sounds like a strawman to me. Who here has said anything about wanting nothing but positivity, or to be told how awesome they are? Even negativity can be combined with encouragement and support. And it doesn't really cost anymore to do that.

A. "Your idea is pretty bad. You suck. Kill yourself."

B. "Your idea is pretty bad; have you considered XXX? At any rate, best of luck to you!"

OK, to be fair, (B) cost a few more characters of typing for the pedants in the audience. But there's no significant extra cost involved with throwing a little encouragement and support someone's way.

Mindcrime hits the nail on the head. I don't want people telling me how awesome my project is - no where in my OP have I said that. My mum would be my toughest critic but she'd also be my fairest and explain to me what she liked but more importantly how something I'd done could be made better. That's what HN was to me - a place for amazing constructive feedback. Constructive feedback is something much different to criticism - which is where HN finds itself today imo.

The 11K Club: I like the site design. I think the muted wood grain back ground is kind of cool. I have no idea what the site is for. The ToS scares me (The more people you refer ... the higher your chances of becoming a member ~ o_0)

Favilous: It looks like a bookmarking site. Solid site design and layout. Not too cluttered. I don't use bookmarking sites so I can't really comment on how it is different/better than other bookmarking sites.

Edit: Ok I see from posts here what 11kclub is. I'm not sure why user napillo is hellbanned but [s?]he makes a good point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397318

> Sounds like a strawman to me.

ya... probably is. Thanks for the feedback. ;) Although, the OP pretty much says "I hate you all because all you ever say is mean things" so there is that.

If all you want to hear is how awesome it is, then go show it to your mum. I'm sure she'll tell you how special you are and that you can do no wrong.

Your account was created a little short of a year ago. We are talking about how the newer crop is rude and sarcastic and how that has ruined the quality of the old HN and then you post this. There is no call for it, you could have easily worded your post to say "hey everyone thinks their idea is great, but sometimes we have to help them see reality". Instead you reinforce the very issue, that has caused the decline. Seriously it's sarcastic, condescending and rude.

Dearest Sir or Madam, thank you for providing me with this valuable feedback. I value your opinion as a fellow HN member and Human (if I may make that assumption). However, it is with deep regret that I inform you that the very first word of your comment contains a typo. Sincerely, Jack.R.Abbit

tl;dr: *Your

You personify the problem, this kind of valueless snark is not welcome here.

As the OP was suggesting, I'm just trying to provide my feedback in a more pleasant way. On the other hand, your feedback seems to be rather harsh and all negative. Unless you were trying to be ironic. In which case I say brilliant!

ORLY?

You:

* implied the possibly they might not be a human (perhaps a bot?)

* used exceedingly formal language in an informal setting, fully knowing this appears like you are talking down to someone

* noted they made a typo - the "valueless" part mentioned

* say it is with "deep regret" that you noted that typo - I doubt you had any regret whatsoever

In short, your comment does highlight the issues fairly well.

You lost me for a minute there with parts of your comment until I realized you were thinking this was a different comment from months ago. But you got it for the most part. I was not suggesting they were not human. I was trying not to offend them if, in fact, they turned out not to be human (I was thinking alien... not bot... bots don't get offended). While formal language can be thought of as lofty these days when no one really speaks like that, it is also how people used to speak. It always cracks me up when I see movies set in that day and the people say the most absurd, inane things yet seem to do it so eloquently and with a smile. They make it seem so pleasant. I was going for old-timey pleasant... not current day lofty. True, pointing out a typo is largely useless, but it was necessary due to my previous point about lofty/pleasant language. True, I had no regret. Really, I was just trying to illustrate that rolling a turd in chocolate and nuts does not make it an Almond Roca.

Right, a community of "haters" may be better than a community of "lovers." That goes against every fiber of my being, but the fact is, life's tough, and you're more likely to be right if you're negative.

However, it does shock me how Hacker News just hates absolutely everything. I was so shocked when Nexus 7 first came out and the thread piled up with hundreds of negative comments just blasting Google for it. It was a break-through to have such a tablet at $200, and there should have been at least equal levels of hate and love.

> Hacker News just hates absolutely everything

I think the accurate statement would be: Absolutely everything will find some people on Hacker News that hate it.

If someone wants to build a billion-dollar company they deserve (and need) a lot of criticism.

However, if someone just wants to get a couple hundred thousand dollars over the next 2 years, the same level of criticism is not needed.

I wonder if we are being trolled. sw007 has been a member for just 18 months[0], not five years, and in that time he has only submitted "Ask HN" or "Show HN" posts and written only a handful of comments, half of them being on this post.

Steve never participated in the community. He used the community when it suited him to get advice, and after 18 months of not liking the advice he received, he quits.

I am not defending negativity, but participating in a community is essential in understanding it. Maybe Steves expectations were far to high, or he come here looking for positive affirmation. I would prefer HN to stay honest and objective, providing constructive criticism and encouragement, rather than just praising each other.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sw007

I don't think it's beneficial to this discussion to be so cynical about sw007's intentions or motives. Many contributors to the site have multiple accounts, or have moved from an older to a newer one. Attacking his/her credibility doesn't further the conversation, especially as a number of people seem to agree that it's a point worth discussing.

It's almost besides the point, but if you'd researched a bit further you would have found a post confirming that this is an alias of another account.

For what it's worth I've been here for about 3 years, and have commented often and submitted here and there. For the most part I agree with sw007. HN is not the same and has been in decline for some time now. All online communities suffer from this. If anyone can figure out how to negate the gradual erosion communities suffer from, they'd have my money for sure.

I was going to post the same thing. I felt physically sick reading some of the vile comments to the makr.io team. They took it with a smile, and I applaud them for it, but that stuff hurts.

I've noted a substantial drop in show HN posts, which I love, over the past weeks and an increase in bullshit media sensationalism :"twitter says : drop dead".

Reasons? I say a rise in celebrity users and those seeking to impress them and a lack of recent presence from Pg. He needs to whip that front page back to what it's all about - hackers and startups.

I felt physically sick reading some of the vile comments to the makr.io team

You're not the only one. I have, in the past, tried to say things like "hey now, we can do better than this" to people being negative in a malicious way. Maybe we should all be more persistent in nudging people toward civility?

You think the problem with celebrity users will be solved by having pg take a bigger role?

I think the way to remove the low-value posts would be to ban all the self-promoting bloggers; daringfireball, 37signals, 42floors, asmartbear... we don't seem to get these problematic stories either from "proper" news sites (even techcrunch et al) or from bloggers unrelated to YC who don't post here regularly. Of course, that would be a dramatic change to the character of HN, and I suspect pg himself would end up on the wrong side of such an exclude list.

In my view, the main thing to change about this community over the last 5 years is that it's simply gotten bigger. As a result, the range of individuals you see is more diverse and the more there are a greater range of interests represented.

There is a nostalgia associated with when the community was smaller and more intimate and I think that's what drives people to make claims about how things are declining. And I can relate to that. But, the fact is that there have always been "negative" people here, as there are in any community, and there always will be. But there are also a lot of people who have a lot of positive feedback to contribute. I know that it is increasingly difficult to get your ideas heard by those who are willing to provide feedback, but that's to be expected as a community grows.

This site remains, for me, the go-to source for intelligent, thoughtful, informed discussion on tech/hacking-related issues.

I've been here 5 years as well, and there's always been an element of knee-jerk negativity, but if anything I've noticed less of it lately. The community has always valued intellegent discussion over mindlessly cheerleading eachother. I do see unconstructive negativity here and there, but it tends to fall to the bottom pretty quickly.

I think the difference now is, the negativity was dealt with by the community pretty severely. I lurked for a long time, then joined and now I rarely participate, in total I have probably been reading HN for over 5 years, and actively commenting for over 3. To me it seems like the community policing itself, and the individuals that helped have been overrun by a larger community that is apathetic to the negativity.

An interesting aspect of HN, I think slightly different from some other communities I've been in, is how this sense of decline has been there pretty much since the beginning. Here's a discussion thread from HN's first year worrying about the decline: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767

I suspect part of it is that it's been a very meta/self-aware experiment from the start, whereas many communities sprout up accidentally for various reasons, and only later get more self-conscious about it.

HN is just like any other social network.

I've run a social network for writers called Scribophile for almost 5 years now. People have said exactly what you're saying in this post about my site, all the way from day 1 to the present day. Too much negativity, people are out to get me, everybody is mean, person X is poisonous but I'm actually very nice, things used to be better in the "good old days".

But as an impartial observer (I, strangely enough, don't really participate in my own site), I can say that things haven't really changed that much in 5 years. There were nice people then, there are nice people now. There were jerks then, there were jerks now.

Any place you get messy, emotional people together in an anonymous social situation, this is going to happen. What is also guaranteed to happen--and I think your post is illustrative of this--is long-timers will grow bored and decide to drift off. A guy (I can't remember his name right now) wrote an insightful post about this and called it "evaporative cooling". It happens to every single community, in mine, and in HN.

Does that mean HN is on an irreversible slide into decadence? Not really. It just means you're over the community, and it's time for you to move on. In reality I doubt the general vibe of HN has changed that much over the years. Otherwise nobody would be here.

However as an administrator of a community, I can tell you that I certainly do not appreciate disappointed, emotional, "it's not the good old days"-style, long-winded farewells. If people aren't finding a site useful, then just leave, or send a private note to the administrator with your thoughts. Absolutely nothing good comes out of a public complaint-fest. Sorry if that sounds harsh and brutal.

long-timers will grow bored and decide to drift off

This is why the community needs to always bring in new users. I see some people talking in other comments on this page about how to stop the new users, but if you aren't bringing in anyone new you are only shrinking.

In HN brings in no new users, it will be dead in 5 years.

Just wanted to share my perspective as someone who is relatively new to HN, but has had some successful (if that's the right word) threads about my projects.

The first post I submitted was a most-mortem about my startup. IIRC, it make the top 5 briefly. The doors opened to me because of that were shocking. I had many job offers, phone conversations with a few well-known tech personalities, and tons of traffic.

At the time, I felt the comments on HN were extremely negative. But, many opportunities and contacts arose from that thread outside of HN.

Later, someone posted my new ebook landing page to HN. The ensuing traffic built up my email newsletter and is still one of the main sources for my sales. Again, the comments on HN were very negative, but I met lots of positive, supportive, excited folks when they signed up to my newsletter or followed me on twitter. All because they found me on HN.

From these experiences, here's what I've learned about HN. It might not be very surprising:

-There is a very negative and very vocal minority that comments actively.

-There are many more positive, helpful people lurking. (If you can find them.)

-If you post your project to HN, you better have thick skin.

-HN is not only a great source for news, it's a powerful resource for founders.

-Because of all the strange and hidden rules about up-voting, getting your project in front of people on HN is all about luck. It has nothing to do with you.

*edited for bullet point fail.

Here's the thing: Not everyone is super confident, not everyone has a thick skin. So when people just snipe it really damages that person and potentially their idea.

It would be fine if ALL the good ideas were made by super confident thick skinned people but they are not. So we, as a species, just lose the potential of the less confident, thin skinned people. This is a HUGE waste of talent. This community should be here to fix that.

Now it's true that in the wide world, thin skinned people need to 'toughen up'. THIS community should be here to help them by helping, guiding and supporting. After all that is what communities are for.

I agree with sw007 that this community is atm worth less than it was a few years ago due to this.

However, if they are thin-skinned, a tech startup is not the place to be. Better to weed out the insecure before they invest their entire life into something. If anything HN has made me stronger -- if one of my ideas flies well among this crowd, then talking to a skeptical VC is cake. And, it would seem that most of the harshness is well meaning. In NYC, bluntness isn't considered rude, it's actually doing the other person a favor -- we don't have time for smoke to be blown up one's ass.

I think my main complaint about HN is the cyclical obsession with the Torrent/Kim Dotcom/Wikileaks side of things. There is a sizable minority that seem to have some ignorant idealism that everything should be free and that developers/musicians/filmmakers ought to just produce content simply out of the joy of doing so, while neglecting that if you give away the store, you can't pay your bills. The recent story about the 200,000 downloads game devs who were now homeless illustrates what happens when that logic is actually implemented.

As Fred Wilson has said, the key to reducing piracy (and the need for it) is the frictionless, low-cost ability to acquire desired content.

I'm am glad that the Bitcoin fad seems to have faded from the HN pages. The fringe types (constantly looking for conspiracies, no problems with "warez" and very "hack the planet" (i.e. Hackers (1995)) seem to provide some interesting "color" but also occasionally drown out the original purpose of HN -- startup-related news and the technologies involved therein.

I was a late comer to the party, so perhaps I'm part of the problem, but still, on the whole, HN, even with its snark, is a great place to be and I'm proud to have earned a few Karma points over the last year.

"Unfortunately, today's Hacker News audience is no longer the same. Today's Hacker News is a place where users want to snipe at other users and find negative aspects to anything thing submitted."

You base this statement on a sample size of N=2. On many Show HN submissions I tend to see just the opposite, people act as test users/engineers/etc for free and then write their impressions.

The problem that you faced, I think, is one I (and others) have noticed before: HN response dynamics is not stationary, i.e. it tends to change quite a bit with time of day (different moods or geographic audiences?), time of week (TGIF or the reverse effect), and even by time of month (full moon?). There are many posts analyzing the optimal time to post.

Having your project (or thoughts) bluntly criticized publicly can be painful. One solution could be: (i) Closely read and re-read comments offering constructive criticism (ii) ignore "snarky", etc. comments but note their ratio to the constructive ones, if the SNR is low then you have to think what on your product triggered such an outpouring.

Can someone provide an example of an online community that has an appropriately positive attitude?

Hacker News is the most civil, useful and intelligent conversation on the internet, period. HN is easily two standard deviations less cruel or petty than any other discussion site you could name. The rest of the internet makes us look like Miss Manners.

I'm sorry that people weren't supportive of your personal projects, sw007. But do you have any idea how much worse things would have been on reddit? TechCrunch comments? God forbid, 4chan?

HN is an amazing resource and I'm glad to have it. The top comment is always 1) the other side of the argument being presented in the story or 2) information from someone on the inside (ie, "I work at fb and here is what is really going on"). If there's any online discussion site that's significantly more positive than Hacker News, I'd love to hear about it.

Gotta agree with this. Most of the really bad comments I've seen on HN wind up downvoted to light grey. Here, negative feedback directly to a creator is almost always constructive, even if you don't like the tone.

It's still the best you're going to get on any public forum I'm aware of.

> TechCrunch comments?

And those have real Facebook identities attached to everyone. I'm amazed at the things people will say even when it has their name on it and will be out there forever.

I actually find 4chan to be a very good source of constructive feedback. The ratio of constructive to unconstructive comments is much worse, but the unconstructive comments tend to be very obviously so, and the anonymity and general culture make it easy to brush them aside without much thought.

This is not something specific to hacker news IMHO. The "cool kids" are ruining the hacking culture, that is, there is an emerging cultural movement of programmers with big stress on critiques, trolling, culture of image (hipster-alike dressing), technology as fashion (always use the latest thing), drink at confs or you are a l00ser, no respect for other people's work, and so forth.

Resist to this guys, stay on HN and provide worthwhile comments and votes. They are their selves a brief fashion that will go away in some time.

Also my feeling is that while stupidity accounts for 99% of all this (as usually), there is a small part of it that is driven by interests about polarising social medias where there are many programmers so that technology X or Y looks cool and technology Z looks lame.

Recently it seems like Hacker News is just a place people use for marketing and posting links to other blogs, it's truly more like a social bookmarking site by now than it is about the feedback and community. I still have Hacker News in my Google Reader feed but it's becoming more and more about people who find an interesting page and posting it, even if the post was from 4 years ago and was on Hacker News 10 times already, it is still posted. There are no moderators, but if there were it would be restrictive. Can you think of a better solution to save Hacker News or would it turn into jumping from one site to another and trying to have the startup community follow but leave behind the unwanteds?

I read HN in Google Reader as well. Do you use the regular or big RSS feed?

I use the Google Reader chrome extension and just get the updates.

OK, here are some recent Show HN posts that I randomly picked (with more than 2 comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382846 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4381905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4379278

Skimming through the comments I didn't see much support for the condescending, snarky attitude, many user seem to genuinely help the OP.

You can probably find examples of the other kind (but please do, rather than just saying "I feel like ...") but this at least shows, I think, that the attitude is not very common.

Hi Steve,

I have to disagree. Over the past year or so I have launched two things on HN, both of which got incredibly positive feedback and a whole bunch of suggestions for improvements.

One of the launches went so well, I actually made money off the project - from HN users.

However, I think it probably depends on how you frame the launch, on whether HN is in fact the right community for the product and whether you don't do this when everybody is looking another way or worrying about something else.

For instance, it would have been a terrible idea to launch something when ACTA was going on.

Cheers, ~Swizec

What projects are you working on now?

If you're still stuck with a long commute and you are looking for something to build, you could try your hand at a Hacker News replacement. There are certainly enough people here jaded by the toxicity that would make the jump someplace new.

My only piece of advice, if you decide do this, don't post it as a "Show HN". Reach out to smart people privately to beta test it.

Still somewhat under the radar (and it's not mine, nor am I even a user) but https://lobste.rs/ seems to be something along those lines.

So I shut down (albeit people can still sign in) a site called favilous which was a bookmarking site. And recently I read a book called Join Me by Danny Wallace and thought it would be cool to see if that translated to the web so I created www.11kclub.com but got castigated by HN for being unoriginal, for being a rubbish idea and for the manner in which it was posted. I accept people will be negative and won't like everything that's published but I feel the old HN crowd used to seek the positive first and then give their negative feedback which was always done in a constructive way. I'm a young guy who is just trying to follow a passion and work for myself - but I find myself increasingly demotivated but hey Maybe that's more down to me than HN

Hmm, I just pasted the 11kclub URL into my browser. The front page has no info on what this is about, but you still go ahead and ask for some personal info.

I looked at the favilous front page. It looks pretty decent. Good luck.

11k is part of a social experiment to see if people will sign up to something they know nothing about just because it is exclusive. And thanks, appreciate it.

I think that hate and negativity in the face of an obvious bald-faced lie is to be expected. I agree that the negative reaction to 11kclub.com was over-the-top, but also I could have easily predicted that reaction.

Bruce Perens used to have a tech site (I can't even remember the name of it now), but he shut it down years ago due partly to the degeneration into faction-based sniping and general cliquishness. Hopefully HN won't end up going the same way. There's still time to turn things around.

Charge $50 for it. Keep out the riff-raff.

Then you just end up with the riff-raff who have $50 to blow. Something Awful charges $10 for an account, but there are plenty of moderators who will ban you if you're a shitheel; you then have to pay another $10 to re-activate your account. It works for them, but I think HN is too self-moderating for that to work--imagine if they auto-banned you when your karma dropped below 0, think of the system gaming that would occur to get others banned!

Sadly I am starting to believe a invitation based HN would be the only solution to the problem but it comes with it's own set of problems. The biggest being that it would become an echo chamber.

I've also noticed this negative trend and was thinking of writing about it. I was going to try and quantify it, but never got around to it. I don't post on HN very frequently, but I've read it several times a day for the last 4+ years. Lately it does seem like the tops of comment threads are almost always negative dismissals of the post, rather than additions or constructive contributions. It's made the comments threads much less interesting to read.

Especially in the case of Show HN posts, like you mention, it seems like people put themselves out there and most of the comments shoot them down, often without really exploring or trying to understand what they've spent their time on. Negative feedback is often quite helpful, but knee-jerk negative feedback almost never is.

Obviously it's a tough game, and you've got to have thick skin, but it did used to seem like this was a place to go to learn to succeed, and lately it kind of seems like a place to go to learn that everything sucks.

As for what to do about it, I'm not sure. I'll just keep reading it every day until a new, smaller, more constructive community pops up. I am (and I suspect many others on this site are as well), basically just an education junkie, and as the community becomes less educational, it becomes less attractive than alternatives.

Steve,

In my personal opinion, receiving negative responses is good for your startup because learn to deal with them. I do agree, that if that is all you are getting, it is disconcerting. But, maybe there is something wrong with your startup/project.

Think about this, I have a lot of friends, and when I showed them my project, they all said: "That is amazing!" "It is going to change the world" So on, and so forth.

See I love my friends, but that doesn't help me. I am not building a startup to get fame, I am trying to solve a problem. My friends love me and don't want to hurt my feelings, but honestly, my feelings are not part of the startup equation. My friends will not help me improve my vision to solve a problem.

HN has been good at showing a lot of negatives when projects are shown here, but you have to really try to understand what they are saying. Listen to the negatives, they are the best response you are going to get, because they will highlight the flaws on your business model, your project or even your idea.

Instead of looking at those negative responses as a way to get you down, listen to them, and try to get the best out of it. Deep inside a negative is just another way to tell how to succeed.

Hope this helps, Alex.

Here's a perfect example from a few days ago. Read the most voted-up comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340014

That is such a perfect example, although it's a good example of replies trying to encourage more positive discussion. I wonder if there's a small group of people who just don't care about social disapproval.

The bar for entry is so low when it comes to many types of startups today that the grand majority of "Show: HN" posts are completely unimpressive, unoriginal, and just plain boring. That is just the reality. This entire idea that people should be supportive regardless is ridiculous when the amount of people entering the market is enormous. Maybe getting great supportive feedback on mediocre projects isn't what HN is for anymore. IMO that is a good thing. The industry has evolved, so has HN, maybe you should as well.

And I still see great supportive criticisms, and general fluff "great project" on the ACTUALLY GOOD projects.

Just building something isn't impressive anymore.

If people agree with this, what are some strategies for countering the trend? People could put more effort into down-voting unconstructive comments. Maybe up-voting should also be unavailable until a karma threshold is met. Maybe up-votes could be made precious by limiting the number per day. Maybe there could be honeypot content that's bad on purpose, or determined to be bad after the fact, and everyone who up-votes it gets their voting privileges revoked. The nuclear option might be to hide scores even from ourselves.

So if all the negativity and people complaining is what made you hate HN so much you are leaving it, why do I have to read about it on... HN?

Thank you for so perfectly demonstrating my point..

That was deliberate, it's called irony. I really don't think using HN to complain about people complaining on HN is a very good move. Sorry, but I can't make anything else of it.

During a job interview I was asked what would be a personal goal of mine in the next five years, and my answer was 'understand completley all the technical postings I read on HN'

Today, there are less and less technical posts, and more fanboyism, rumour, gossip.

I guess Gail Wynand took over YC ---- Let's let Roark back.

Steve, we understand that you probably bitter with your recent experiences on HN and wanted to vent out. no problem. We are all humans. But I am a more recent user on HN and find it very interesting. A lot of Show HN posts get positive and negative feedback equally. I personally always add any valuable feedback if I can, even if critical. Do not be discouraged and keep trying. You need to continously inspire yourself. I hope you still wake up everyday waiting to get back on HN.

Steve,

Have you considered this is due to the overarching change in the startup society as a whole? I mean, have you HAD an actual conversation with other startup founders/CEOs/early employees lately? :) Either they have nothing to say (because they're so new to the scene and probably have an IQ of around 100), or they are ubercritical (because they've seen SO many microcompanies come and go and they're still around - so everyone wants their advice).

Don't take it personally - their meaning isn't what's changed, it's their wording. Saying "I hate your UI" is essentially the same as saying, "Your UI needs to be cleaner." Look at extremely negative comments as a way to start an excellent conversation:

Them: "I hate your UI." You: "I know! I wish it was cleaner. What do you think about this toolbar?"

If someone is willing to give you honest "I hate" or "I love" feedback, they're ASKING you to want their opinion. And it sounds like you do - so ask them something in return.

And read if you haven't already: http://www.launch.co/blog/good-to-great-to-excellent-a-roadm...

Lida

TBH, I see VERY few "Show HN" posts. I would like to review a startup and give constructive criticism, but HN has been flooded with op-ed blog posts with sensationalist headlines, or articles that have no relevance whatsoever to HN. Maybe the lack of "Show HN" posts is due to others feeling the way you do. But continue to post. Don't let HN become another Reddit, 4chan, Digg, pick-your-poison.

On the other hand when I criticized Chris Granger's "LightTable" I was told that I was a "hater" followed by several statements suggesting that Chris should ignore folks like myself: the "haters".

So I'm not sure, perhaps it is more about who you are than what you say. In any case, I have noted the general fall in quality of articles here, but, there's still some interesting stuff now and again... c'est la vie!

I've posted several projects to HN, including both of my guides to programming and photography...and I have been extremely disappointed...with the LACK of harsh comments, and the more-than-deserved number of upvotes. And I mean that only half facetiously, because the critical ability of HN posters, on average, is quite high, so I half-expect people to be nitpicking and ripping on me...and that's fine, since I generally don't take it personally.

Obviously my case isn't apples-to-apples, since the OP may have pitched products that were attempting to be successful in a financial sense, whereas I just like showing personal projects. But my experience has been very supportive. This is not to say that OP is wrong, but just to say that whatever corrective measurements are being decided on, that you shouldn't go too far in fixing what may only be partially or rarely broken

It's inevitable.

Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN.

On a two year or so schedule new ones come along, old ones become worse. People on here are already using those illiterate, infantile 'memes' to express themselves. The next step is HN gone wild.

The only question is, where do I go next? I'm not going to pretend it's going to have than two years to live though.

New network hasn't really cropped up yet. Google+ is still working out the kinks.

/. has gone entirely to shit, but some subreddits are still good (it feels like the average user age has been suppressed down about seven years, though).

The problem is the revenue model. You can't be exclusive when you need to cater to as many users as possible.

I have also pretty much given up on HackerNews now too. I used to love finding novel and interesting material from any subject.

Now I just see the same posts over and over again:

- "top 'n' mistakes starts-up make" - "best 'n' ways to ensure your start up will succeed" - "'n' qualities that make a good founder/entrepreneur." - "why my start-up failed: lessons learnt"

The content is rarely ground-breaking and rarely written by somebody of note.

And a more disturbing trend is as soon as somebody write/posts something interesting, there follows weeks/months of similar, non-original rehashed posts/articles.

I think point-scoring is an important factor - as soon as the posting stuff becomes a 'game' that can be 'won', somewhere the reason for it all is de-valued...

Or perhaps it's just too big now... the book "the story of eBay" gives an interesting insight to community growth...

oh, and not forgetting of course:

- "'n' things every programmer should know'" - "why every programmer should learn [C|LISP|ASSEMBLY]"

And can we just have a new section for the zillions of new "essential" JavaScript frameworks "we must learn" that get built every week.

Well, and I hate Hacker News for the whole bunch of startup hipsters that have emerged because of it.

I'm new here, so maybe I'm a bit of the "bad new crowd" OP is talking about, but seriously, this guy doesn't seem to have a leg to stand on.

His last (current?) venture 11kclub http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323459

1) asks for your PII

2) wants you to do viral MLM on it's behalf

3) has ToS http://www.11kclub.com/tos.aspx that explicitly state "you are applying to join a club you know nothing about"

4) and finally, the submitter lied about his affiliation (in the comments)

That said, maybe the behavior he's stating does go on "nowadays" (again, I'm too new to know) , but really from what I see of 11kclub, He as a person does not gain my sympathy.

From my readings around here these negative comments are most often attributed at developments that partially aim at creating controversy. If someone starts a Twitter clone country club or runs away from Diaspora to start a meme blog it seems save to assume that this is going to result in some form of dissonance. I personally find the "Ask HN" section extremely civil never really saw someone tearing down a project. Most backslashes seem to appear if a project promises more than it can deliver. The community seems fortunately resistant against too obvious forms of hype.

Thanks for sharing why you hate HN.

Is it unfortunate that you hate HN? I guess that is a question left to the reader.

What's clear from your comment is you needed to vent. (And you need HN as a way to cope with your commute/job.)

Maybe that's why there is so much harsh criticism on HN. Maybe people are venting. Maybe it has little to do with the technical and commercial merits of any given idea (e.g. a "launch") and more to do with what's going on with the commenter. Maybe they are in a stressful job, or their home life is stressful. And they need to vent.

Now, as for constructive criticism, it's a fair point. To be "constructive", all criticism cannot be solely positive nor negative.

In FDA law, there is a concept called "fair balance". In lay terms, a drug manufacturer has to disclose the bad with good. So, e.g., a TV advertisement will include little innocuous messages about side effects, and that slip of paper with all the tiny print inserted into the packaging will tell you about some very negative and scary things, if you read it. The negatives may not be front and center, but they are there. You, the marketer can say good things, but you have to say some bad things too. Fair balance.

Why not make a rule for HN: If you want to level a harsh criticism, you have to balance it with some praise.

This is a form of transparency. The reader sees both the positive and the negative. They can then choose for themselves what to focus on.

"I like 11kclub for reason A. But I dislike it for reason B."

Fair balance.

Steve, I wish you all the best for your project. Could you please tell us more about your latest project?

(A thought: if you launch a public-facing project and announce it here on Hacker News, most of the reactions you get will be like reactions from the general public. If your code base is not exposed to view of hackers, as it would be as a GitHub submission, many of us will only be able to comment on, for example, whether or not we see typos in the copy on your public-facing Web pages, and not on how cool your technical solutions are. That probably generates mostly negative--or at least, consumer-oriented--feedback, rather than hacker feedback, but maybe that is helpful too. I can say as someone who has written for a living in a journalistic organization and also has worked as an editor that every writer needs an editor, because every writer overlooks some of his or her own mistakes, if only because of being busy and tired.)

For what it's worth, I continue to find interesting (and uplifting) things to read here on HN after 1369 days here. But I don't read every thread here. I don't suppose that anyone reads HN exhaustively anymore. Maybe reading a different sample of threads here will help you get more enjoyment and encouragement out of HN again. Good luck.

I think it doesn't have as much to do with HN as it does with the startup scene itself. A few years ago before the mobile apps, there were fewer people in the startup scene, and those that were there had a more communal sense. Since we are now quite common, there is a lot more competition out there, which probably fuels some of the frustration directed at you.

personally, I wouldn't tear anyone's work down, but I can see why some people would, given how crowded it is now.

I rarely read comments here anymore, preferring to stick to reading the article linked to - for the same reason that I never venture into the comment section on the Guardian's once great Comment is Free section. The first batch of comments are always (without fail) in the same vein, and start with a variation of "Yes, but..." or "But what about..." Attack, criticise, find something to disagree with. It doesn't matter if the commenter agreed with 5 things in the article, the early commenters always go looking for that 1 thing they don't agree with.

One of the great myths is that you have to put up with negative people online, that you have to 'toughen up', because, well, just because... You don't. Seth Godin wrote a great piece years ago telling you to fire your customers if they're too troublesome, and I've used this strategy in 2 businesses since. It's liberating. Negativity, insults, poorly mannered and poorly behaved people - you really DO NOT have to put up with any of that. Kick them to the curb and move on, because you really do not need those sorts of people anywhere near you or your new business.

Unfortunately, a lot of 'those people' hang out on HN (and the Guardian).

I couldn't have said it better myself. Although I haven't been member that long, I've been lurking much longer, for a while I was afraid to really comment on any story as the attitude of some of the users on this site is to put it bluntly: elitist. It's these kinds of attitudes that causes arguments and the deterioration of a community. I rarely see people posting up new startups or web ideas they've come up with out of fear of ridicule any more.

To be honest I can come across as a cynical jerk, but unlike a lot of the people I see chastising other people in the comments, I'm at times cynical but never intentionally rude. There is a big difference between cynical and just plain rude. Pick any story on the homepage at any given time and people are nitpicking at peoples grammar and arguing something isn't right instead of contributing to the discussion.

Case in point all of this recent discussion about App.net. There appear to be two sides of the fence, one of those sides is hopeful that App.net will be successful and wishing Dalton Caldwell the best and the other side are making assumptions that it's going to fail and that people won't pay to use it, blah blah blah. This is the exact attitude the poster is talking about and I think all of the App.net submissions and comments are a great example of this ridiculous behaviour.

Etiquette aside, don't get me started on the submission quality. It feels like the homepage of HN is part interesting and beneficial submissions and the other half is comprised of articles; "Hating on X programming language", a blog post written by a Svbtle author (mostly Dustin Curtis), a Daring Fireball blog post, TechCrunch news article or submission of a Github repository for something built on-top of a programming language that I don't even know.

You have a great point. Ditch the Karma, or make it invisible, and a lot of people will stop commenting just to get votes. And only when you reach so much Karma are you allowed to start seeing the Karma of others. But experiments have been done here before, and a lot has not worked. People REALLY hate change around here ;)

On the other hand, the larger the community gets, the more real it gets. And the truth is simply that the world is snippy. They are opinionated, they don't really care, and reality pretty much sucks. Well, at least that's how I feel by the end of most days. So if you want honest opinions, you kind-of have to take the good with the bad.

Don't get me wrong, what drew me in to HN was the brilliance of the discussions too. The fact that people seemed to really care about each other. It felt like sitting in a room filled with only the smartest people, all of whom had intriguing insights into their areas of expertise. Man it was awesome. Do I want this back? YES.

The only way I can see this happening is if everyone over a certain amount of Karma, and that have been here long enough, get hand-picked and invited into an elite HN community.

Steve,

Where's the constructive criticism? It's a community, you can take your ball and go home but if you actually want better feedback start by giving some.

I'm really bummed to hear that you feel you got shot down or excessive snark about your projects. I learned something about this in my creative writing classes - it means nothing until you write it down and put it out there. It's easy to imagine how great your writing is until you actually write, and it's hard to say "at least for now, this is my best effort." If you're putting it out there, you're already doing more than most.

In spite of some snark, I still find HN to be a pretty good community. Up and down voting actually reflects this. On most sites, it is, as you pointed out, a way of keeping score (you know how it goes, if you like Mitt Romney, you vote up, if you like Obama, you vote down, regardless of the tone or content of the post). I actually feel that HN is still unusually inclined to actually use the voting to moderate rather than keep a tally relative to pretty much anything else out there.

I'd be really bummed to see this go.

I just realized that this is my fault. I'm not new to the internet by any means, but I'm (relatively new) to the geek world. Now that the jokes on xkcd and imgur actually make sense, and I can laugh at n00bs and answer a few questions on Freenode, I feel like I can identify with the hackers. In fact, I just watch the movie Hackers yesterday and it was awesome. I would have had very different sentiments a year ago, or I would have tried to fake what I feel now.

In any case, this sense of elitism I now feel entitled to, has carried over to Hacker News and I feel justified in snarking.

To the OP: Thank you for posting this. In addition to attempting to being a good human being offline, I will double my efforts to being a good human being online so that you may once again love this community.

I think there are two distinct use-cases for posting to HN, and I think the OP's pain can be partially connected to the fact that both types of posts get treated identically.

The first use-case is "Person A discovers Thing X on the Internet and wants to discuss it critically with the people on HN."

The second use-case is "Person B wants to share Thing Y that they made, in hopes that the people on HN will give positive feedback."

As a reader, you can choose to treat the two types of posts differently, but without a conscious effort, I think the default behavior is to use a consistent approach to all posts on the site. The result is that either real industry news doesn't get reviewed very critically, or personal projects get reviewed more critically than the poster would have hoped.

I don't know, I looked at your past submission for makeusdate, and it appears that you got tons of useful feedback and encouragement. Very little of the posts I saw there were negative at all. Some were blunt, but still encouraging and admonishing you not to give up.

What a stupid post. Man, are you dumb.

Just kidding. Yeah, I see what you are saying, but I guess my view is that the nature of a community is that you can't fully control it. I see some people here coming up with different ideas about how to protect HN and make it a more friendly place, but the reality is that there is no full proof way to maintain the culture of an open community. The interesting thing is that while it is very easy for a community with a positive culture to start to slowly degrade to negative over time, it is extremely difficult to bring a negative culture back to positive. Does that mean HN is doomed? Not necessarily, but I guess I don't expect things to all of a sudden change for the better overnight.

They'd want you to succeed and they'd try and help you succeed with feedback that would ultimately help you.

You're seeing what you want to see. If your idea is truly noteworthy, you will get lots of usable feedback on this site, despite all the negative (but still relevant) criticism. Two recent examples are Ouya and App.net; these ideas received tidal waves of negativity, but they were interesting ideas, and the ensuing threads were filled with useful and valid criticism (as well as supportive comments from backers). If your idea is only receiving negative comments, it's probably because it isn't compelling enough to merit the attention of thoughtful critics.

I'll add my tuppence and agree that I've noticed quite a few more "he's an idiot" comments recently. Coincidentally, I've tried to assess whether this is partly due to frustration with the quality of the original post. In some cases, I think it may be a reaction to some fairly out there opinions; in other words a kind of de facto criticism of genre rather can content.

The hammer of Thor seems to be wielded a little more. There's a lot more players now, and defenders of the castle will mow down the barbarians, to use a metaphor.

It's natural selection at work, but as any club owner can tell you, don't let the doormen / bouncers get too self important.

One of the reasons for the negative comments might be the sheer number of applications being developed and showcased.

Hence, many of the projects tend to bring in some deja-vu and the commenters are drawn to the lack of features more than usual.

FWIW, I've been feeling like the comments on HN have been more negative and combative than usual over the last month or so, too. (I've been a HN user for about 5 years, too). I've not been quite sure why - there just suddenly seems to have been a bit of a tidal wave of snark.

It may be seasonal, or something similar, and I'll admit to having anecdotal evidence only, but I have had a similar impression to the OP, albeit not quite as strongly.

I wonder if some of it is defensiveness from users scared HN will turn into Reddit? Certainly, I've seen a lot of "downvote this post, it's not something that should be on HN" comments lately.

Wow, 277 comments in here and just 10 in a front page article for a new project: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4398344

This is a good post but it also feels like you're just insulting the whole community rather than giving constructive criticism. Want some constructive criticism? Foster the community you want by being the kind of member you want to see (Gandhi said it better).

Also, your post seems like flame bait but it inspired some really interesting discussion about forum moderation. So maybe the community isn't as bad as you say.

Too bad, people like nickb are no longer around, it just takes a few of these types to make a world of difference. Oddly, it sounds as if you're describing reddit 5 years ago when I launched a startup. Good luck.

Thanks for voicing my thoughts. I agree completely. I never thought I would say this, but here goes: With the careful selection of subreddits i have at Reddit these days, my experience there is more pleasant than Hacker News. There are just so many snide remarks and so much hate in here.

It's the same problem I had with Reddit until I started being very selective with which subreddits I subscribed to. Like PG said, it is a growth problem. But I don't think a similar turnaround operation will be possible here. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

There's a lot of negative, boring people hiding behind their keyboards. Don't let them drain your enthusiasm. If they're not being constructive, their opinion isn't worth noting in the slightest. Chin up.

HNers are good people - we just need reminders regularly to do our duty to the community.

So, it seems that you are the cure to your own ailment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195

I took ten of my valuable minutes to review the next thing on Ask HN - and hopefully constructively.

I guess it is just a problem of being reminded regularly that this is a community that needs contributing to as well as reading (my default). Perhaps more of us need to actually release something ! (maybe that could be a means to get a karma multiplier)

I think you have a great point. This is a reminder that we do need to be a more proactive community as a whole.

> Hacker News now is about correcting grammar

I vehemently agree with this. Aside from a few parent comments on each thread, the comment threads are sure to have somebody being overly finicky about the minutia of another comment. Diction is important, yes, but an important tool to any conversation is understanding when NOT to correct somebody, or make them clarify their obvious statement. It's kind of like HN's much crueler version of a Reddit pun thread, with the notable exception that, as soon as I see one, I will immediately collapse the former.

I thought I'd just say I completely agree with you, though I've only been a member for about 2 years and a reader for about 3, just in that small time I've noticed a change, and I think its sad, it really is a bummer. I've noticed many people posting their start-ups and either 1) not getting any comments (what's with that?) or 2) the things you mention just hate, where's the constructive critisism this site was so great for? I can only hope my upvoting you that we can make a change here in the opposite direction.

I think people are making some interesting proposals. I have a controversial view: maybe things aren't that bad? I usually see nasty comments downvoted. We want civility but I don't think anyone wants Stackoverflow level sterility.

Also I think the community still praises and gives great self-esteem boosting comments. I can't tell you how many postings of "look at me project" that seem like 3 hour mashups for which I don't undestand the point at all, but the comments will have snark at all. Of course, this is just my anecdote.

If you are not applying for the Y-combinator or are an alumni, you will tend to have a degraded experience to those that are in the "IN" group. Sorry to see that this affects you, but I am in the same boat. I've learned to just use this site as a kind of tech bookmaking site curated by popular trends. Sometimes there are interesting or insightful comments, but the overwhelming number of comments revolve around social politics or corporate espionage like discouraging competitors in the emerging markets.

I think it's part of a larger trend in startups. When there is no startup boom, people who do startups do them b/c they love building things. When there is a boom, ambitious people do startups b/c it is part of their calculation of how to achieve power and wealth, the competition for which is a zero sum game.

The true visionaries who build amazing products and companies are not the kind of people who, in the midst of a boom, decide to do a startup instead of applying to a prestigious MBA program.

YC's new approach of choosing founders who have no idea is part of the problem. The people who can get funding just b/c of their pedigree (how they look on paper) is exactly the selection approach used by top MBA programs and investment banks. For these people, life is a reputation game which they are good at winning.

It's no surprise that YC went in this direction, b/c it clearly helps get companies funded. The founder simply becomes a risk asset, just like a racehorse, who clearly has a certain level of sophistication and metal ability, and who will follow the guidance of the YC team. This works great for attracting capital b/c the person with great paper credentials can be puffed up and made to act the role of visionary by pantomiming the style of successful entrepreneurs.

This is all in pursuit of capital, since to a large extent companies that are well capitalized and not staffed by idiots can generate a nice ROI, and the cynical investor view is that if you have n companies in a space where you expect growth, then some percentage will fail, some percentage will succeed, etc.

Ironically, though, it's never required less capital to do a tech startup, and much of the capital is being burned up on young people who put off their MBA and want to live in a major city for a few years and gamble on the boom.

This is just startups becoming mainstream, and attracting the same kind of people that have always gravitated toward iBanking and other MBA oriented fields. Sooner or later some of the startup funding will dry up due to routine, cyclical forces, and the startup scene will once again consist mostly of hackers and builders.

So I view it as both a good and a bad thing. The investor class is slowly learning who makes a good bet, aided by tons of cheap capital thanks to quantitative easing and stimulus. But for now nobody is being too picky and in the midst of tremendous uncertainty people who look good on paper are a hot commodity.

Just keep building and learning and ideally find a great team of people who love your product and what you are trying to accomplish, and you will eventually triumph.

Man, well done. I am too exhausted by my cynicism about the startup world to make such posts now. But it is very important to remember that in the current environment cynicism equals knowledge. Naivete and idealism are mostly put-on. Investors need this greed-based faux idealism to attract young talented people. I think that people bemoaning the declining "quality" of members of the HN community would be even more perturbed if HN lost any of it's potency as a platform for hyping portfolio companies owned by the investing class.

This is the inherent problem with free, open Internet. I would not change it one bit. Unfortunately, Hacker News is only one of many places like this. It's the same reason I left Stack Exchange long ago.

However, I do feel your pain. I think it is disgusting that people have plenty of time to destroy your hard work, but have not time at all to offer the tiniest bit of encouragement. I've noticed it happening more and more often as well. I'm just not sure why people cannot simply be polite to each other.

I've only been here for a couple of years and while I recognize that online communities always basically go downhill as more people are added, I suspect there is another issue at play: startup fatigue.

Everyone and his mother's brother is launching a "like X but with Y" startup now. Unless yours is something really special right out of the gate, it just gets lost in the noise and is easy for the non-trolls to ignore, resulting in a situation where the only feedback is not helpful.

Steve,

I'd hate to see you leave the community after such a thoughtful post.

I think some of the best ideas here support your plan and that this is a call to action. We as a community need to support positive comments and refrain from name calling. Acting like an adult isn't about growing a thicker skin, but embracing the lessons we learn as children.

There is a balance between condescension and constructive criticism. Lets strive for the latter.

I don't like Hacker News so much now because the hacker part seems to be slipping away and this place is becoming more of reddit news type :(

In fact, for an experiment I created an account with which I posted a few negative responses (so destructive criticism), which got upvoted.

Wow, it almost seems HN is going the Reddit way. But it's fine to do that on Reddit coz it's meant for the purpose. HN is not.

I worry about that too. I tried to look back at your older posts as I've been around a while myself. What was your old username?

For some reason, I personally feel bad about this. Being a newer member, I feel like I'm somehow contributing to Steve's hatred of hacker news. I am entrepreneurial and love seeing new projects being released, but I didn't know about HN until I moved to San Francisco a year ago.

Hopefully I help make this place better instead of worse, Sorry Steve

On my first submission to this site, I acted like an asshole in the comments section to reciprocate the attitude of the comments I got. My opinionated tone earned me more points, when I hate doing that kind of thing to begin with.

This is a cultural issue. I should not be rewarded for being a dick, nor should anyone else. Period.

Don't worry, you don't need to be married to HN. There will be something else replacing it, probably giving you exactly the kind of community you look for (because, simply, you are not the only one).

I hopped from slashdot to digg, from digg to reddit, and from reddit to HN. It's just another link in the chain.

He complains that people don't offer constructive criticism. He gives the example that people no longer say 'like this and that, try this instead' and now say 'hate hate hate'

and yet

the title of his criticism is he 'hates' hacker news.

My feedback: I like the sentiment, but try not to do the same thing your criticising in your op-ed post.

Whenever I read posts like this I wonder if I happen to be really lucky at reading comments to posts that are never negative in nature. I've never (or so seldom they don't stick out) seen any of these issues on HN - my experience is almost universally positive. I think HN is just fine.

Ok. How about this...

I promise to do my best to make my comments, submissions and votes more constructive and relevant.

As simple as that.

I am quite new here, but one thing that I have looked in the last months or so is that more and more new submitted links are mainly personal rants.

Not trying to attack sw007's post specifically, but I am talking about blog posts linked from here that seem to be added only to spike controversy.

Hey, I can't say that I feel your pain. I can't seem to get my projects on the front page even though some negative feedback would be welcomed and even helpful.

I think done amount of negativity is something that just happens on all tech forums. Programmers are an opinionated lot.

negativity is why you have awesome projects like linux, ffmpeg etc. things don't thrive because you tell them how great they are. they strive because a) someone tells them what the crap is. and b) the person is strong enough to tell himself, ok you'll see i'll build something so awesome even you will have to accept it.

This is probably an outcome of the comment engine on this site, it could use some real work. If it worked a little more like Reddit, with upvotes and downvotes, then good, useful comments would bubble to the surface and negative useless comments would get hidden.

I think HackerNews exists largely because Paul Graham saw Reddit NOT working for what he wanted--it was (and is) extremely popular, but was shifting toward a snarky, depth-avoidant population. I'm guilty there--I upvote dozens of pics in a few minutes, while skimming past the insightful articles that take too long to read and evaluate.

It's worth noting, though, that HN does have up and down votes for comments, but only users with moderately high karma can downvote.

This might not work well given relatively quick growth. A small number of people consistently downvoting bad comments may be outvoted by a huge mass of new users who from time to time upvote. Maybe everyone should be able to upvote AND downvote, but experienced users get double weight.

Personally, I think we need something different than minor adjustments to the voting weights/allocations. Slashdot-style moderation? Revamped guidelines? Hard to say what will work and what won't.

Personally, I really wished pg would bring back the vote count next to comments. It used to be a very good indicator of what kind of comments were encouraged by the community. I feel HN has been getting worse since although it was intended to make things better.

Mostly I try to stay unbiased, but like many others I have been guilty of the behavior you describe at times. It think that whenever you post a comment, there should be a bold disclaimer above to remind people to be nice, constructive criticism only, etc.

Hey Steve, don't let the detractors slow you down. As Steve Jobs aptly responded, "What have you done that is so great?"

Constructive feedback is the best way to test out hypotheses and ideas. It's unfortunate you have to weed out the noise to get to the meat.

Cheers and continue on.

I have been a huge HN fan for many years and read daily but the unnecessarily hostile atmosphere in the comments often detracts from the otherwise great content.

I guess it's a problem that gets more difficult to solve with scale but there must surely be a solution.

Really, I prefer the discourse over the circle-jerking. It's sort of why I like HackerNews because people don't simply just all agree with each other and pat each other's back. If I want that kind of stuff, I'll just head on over to Reddit.

It's cause a bunch of redditors have moved in, I hate reddit, it's pointless. ;)

HN starts with the elites. Elites make HN popular. Others join HN to be elite by proximity (or invested in). Elites leave.

This is the exact nature of an internet community that is successful. Thank god we (kind of) still have IRC.

The bigger a news site gets, the more it starts to resemble Orwell's Two Minutes of Hate. The irony today is that it's not some overbearing totalitarian power that's doing it, it's the users themselves.

I've seen the same thing happen everywhere from Usenet to Slashdot to Reddit. It's just how things go online, especially when people are allowed to be anonymous or just don't care about looking bad.

Tip: On Favilous lighten up the black just a little bit. It's unnaturally dark and is constantly drawing my attention thus preventing me from focusing on the text on the page.

Harsh criticism is often the most useful criticism.

You can do what I do: don't read the comments. Pretty simple solution and you still get to find some great articles to read.

A good many of the linked articles are full of snark and vitriol, setting a poor example for the commentariat to follow.

With billions in play in the Social Network universe, someone needs to write an opus on Mitigating Eternal September.

HN usefull http://www.phongkhamdakhoaathena.com/

Nice post Steve. Assuming anyone even gets to read this 420 posts later... [Proposed solution at the end] For years I got my daily fix of HN too. PG was a legend of the Valley for me and YC an admirable exclusive club of amazing success stories. Many we work with and many friends have had tremendous success. (Disclosure: we never applied to YC nor tried simply because we had two seasoned founders with many successes under our belts and felt respectfully it wasn't our cup of tea, but we admired and loved HN and the people at YC)

As an entrepreneur for 15+ years, I really admired the community support and its relationship to startups and hackers. Something all founders and tech leaders need. From outside of Silicon Valley it was very inspiring to watch.

When we started http://geekli.st about 1 1/2 years ago we broke into the Silicon Valley scene and hustled like nobody's business to get known, get ahead, raise funds and do all those things all entrepreneurs must do to reach their goals. One of the tools we looked towards was HN. We got some initial love in there, but once they invested (YC) in a company that was copying our every step the HN love shut down. Articles we posted/very relevant news even picked up by Huffington post, TNW and other media outlets, was repeatedly removed and shut out. At least with no transparency to voting or the 'karma factor' we had no way to know why. Along with that came the barrage of complaints from many influential developers and tech leaders we knew about the voting system, the mystical 'Karma' system and basically the fact that something once so simple and pure, full of positivity and support, became a place to lambaste, harass, condescend, denigrate and shut down intelligible and news-worthy items, startups and human beings. But like Friendster, MySpace and the ever famous forums and bulletin boards of past... things evolve from what once was innovative and positive, causing new generations of innovators to learn from the mistakes of their elders and build something better. more relevant. more useable. more friendly and more open... Thank you Paul for Hacker News and everything you and YC have always done for startups. You'll always be loved and respected by me... but for the disenchanted tech and startup link absorbers like me and so many of our close (and not so close) friends there is something new.

Welcome to Geeklist Links. Tech news, startup releases and developer links and resources, organized into your own categories, shared in tagged communities, saved, ^5'd, upvoting and down voting, with complete transparency. http://geekli.st/#link - built by developers for developers and the tech world. - Enjoy. Reuben Katz - these views I own.

i wonder if karma should be used in a more constructive way, say to make sure people earn the right to comment on the popular stories..

I guess this assumes the community as a whole still contains more positive rather than negative people, But i like to think it does still

>I joined Hacker News around 5 years ago. Your profile says account created 555 days ago.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded" -Yogi Berra

In other words it's become more left wing.

Dear Steve:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4398353

Hello.

I read your post today.

Thank you for being so honest. I agree, HN can be a lot less supportive and honest these days. When you share something you've created, the feedback can be brutal. Things have changed, you're right about that. The causes have been well-documented, whether in Paul Graham’s comment, Giles Bowkett’s rant, or Joel Spolsky’s observations on building online communities with software.

I can’t tell Hacker News what to do about its growth. I’m not an expert by any means. And I can’t really heal the hurt you must feel when you pour your heart and soul into creating something only to have people you care about say “meh,” or worse. I’ve been there, and although I put a brave face on it, I hurt when people criticize things I take personally.

It’s all very well and good to say, “Don’t take it personally.” I don’t take it personally when a client doesn’t like a feature I suggest for them. It’s a business, I’m trying things for them, it isn’t personal. But when I write essays or stories or share a little library of code, I am doing something very personal, and truth be told I crave some positive feedback, some signal that people are glad I tried even if it isn’t for them.

What I wouldn’t give for a few more “Hey, great effort, it would have been even better if you’d considered adding Foo” comments and a lot fewer “What good is it without Foo?” questions.

So here I am sharing something about me, and this is very personal. I hope I am resonating with you, because if it helps you in any way, I can live with 1,000,000 downvotes from grumpy people. And for me, that is one of the keys to being happy in a public forum. Seize on any bit of progress, no matter how small. If you like this letter, I can focus on that, I made you nod, or smile, or maybe feel a little better for a little while. That isn’t a billion dollars from a startup, but it is damn satisfying to find out that someone, somewhere is a little bit happier for a time, and to think you helped.

And maybe you can find that from the things you are trying. Is there one person out there who is a little happier, who learned a little something, who is grateful for your work? That matters, and it matters more than ten or a hundred or a thousand nay-sayers. I can tell you flat out, I am grateful you wrote your message to Hacker News. It struck something in me. It is striking something in other people. It is making people think. It is making the world a teeny bit better. That’s something positive you did, some important measure of your worth. Thank you.

Maybe Hacker News will find a way back to where it came from. I don’t know. But I can tell you, I decided a while back that I want to try to stick around even if it doesn’t. I don’t want to “bail” to the next little place the way I bailed from Reddit to HN. Time changes, and we must change with it. Unless it becomes actively poisonous, I want to try to grow and learn to be happy in spite of how it is not the way it was. There are still many wonderful things happening there, many wonderful people posting there, many excellent posts appearing there.

The trick for me at least is to learn how to filter out the crud without being upset. It is not easy, I think I have had trouble with negative feedback my whole life. But if there is one positive idea in a thread, isn’t it worth sorting through and ignoring the dreck? And this is not a passive experiment, We can contribute the good ideas, we can lead by example. I’m trying to be less argumentative. I’m trying to be more thoughtful. There’s some value in that for myself. You may already be where I’m trying to go, I don’t know. But it seems worth trying. It seems worth sticking around and making a positive contribution. Who knows, you might make one person somewhere nod their head and think and be happy for a moment in time.

That’s a good thing, and I hope that whatever you do and wherever you go, you keep making things and saying things and trying to make the world a better place.

Sincerely,

Reginald Braithwaite.

I can totally relate (though I've had far less balls than you so far). I mostly relate to the the commute but I did post a project about a year ago and though I did see sniping like you speak of the responses i got were actually pretty helpful but I do know what you mean as I've seen it like we all have on other posts.

The things I admire about you posting this most are:

1. You had the balls to not only criticize this place but actually criticize it despite the fact I'm sure you know a ton of people will say your criticism is only your experience or a common newbie mistake (I've seen that said to newbies and veterans alike) or some other sort of response full of denial and meant to shut you up.

2. You criticized despite, I'm sure, knowing many will think you had your feelings hurt due to the response on your projects and are now coming back to whine

For the record, I don't think either of those things are true of you. I totally hear you. I'd also add that this has become a place where group think is acceptable and encourage. HN is now a hive mind. On HN, if you believe... that file sharing sites really are just a place used mostly to download copyrighted media and that's wrong then you are an enemy of freedom around here. If you believe that people who are pirating (as in downloading via channel unauthorized by creator without paying) is wrong and hurts the developer you're an enemy of freedom, free software, and HN. If you use PHP you're not a real developer and you should be mocked. If you like anything about PHP you are dumb and should be mocked. Then we have the classic flame wars that anyone who knows HN would expect to never see here but they do. Often. Like Jobs v. Stallman, Windows v. Mac, Vi v. Emacs, and so on. Really?

And everyone is the smartest person here. Everyone. You could cure AIDS and some guy will come along and talk about how it should've been done faster by doing XYZ. The titles on submissions from many regulars have also gone downhill. We used to get things like "Why technique X helps Y in use case Z". Now we get a lot of arrogant "If you don't do X the way I describe in this post then you don't deserve to live". Okay, it's actually more like "If you do X then you're doing it wrong" or some such.

I wonder why. Maybe we've grown to the point where the sense of community is a little strained, people want to feel smart like all the other smart people, and so now colleagues have become competitors. When that happens what you get is jealousy and instead of helpful suggestions you get sniping because the person is thinking "shit, I have nothing a,axing to contribute so how do I save face and still look smart?". The answer is by bringing everyone else down.

Maybe we've gone from a community of mostly doers to a community of a minority of doers and a majority of spectators. It's just like sports in that case. When you're out in a social setting and a game is on everyone knows better than the coach and players how to play the game. It even becomes acceptable because by nature spectators and players both have roles to play. The players are the "anointed ones", the "professionals", who do things mere mortals cannot (or maybe even should not?) and their job is to play for the benefit (maybe a bad choice of words but along the lines of "benefit") of the spectators. The spectators then, since they have to leave the playing to the professionals, are left to either be delighted when things are going good or criticize when things go bad. The more the spectator longs to be a player but doesn't (either through a false belief that they can't or shouldn't because they weren't "chosen", or because they just don't have the balls to), the harsher their criticism becomes and the more vocal they become.

Maybe that's what has happened around here. I know I for one have been quite intimidated and jealous of others. I often feel what I can contribute cannot match what others are building so I keep it to myself. And when I see a few harsh critiques of something it becomes easy for me to pile on. I'm not above it but I am self aware enough to spot it in myself.

I speak as ive been here a while because I have (relatively speaking of course). I had a 400-something day old account hell banned a couple months ago because of what's happened to HN. I had the wrong opinion and was punished. Even before I created an account I lurked for a year and back then HN was still very intimidating but also far more welcoming and constructive. I really think anyone who is going to trot out the old "oh, this opinion comes around every now and then" or the "that's a common fallacy" argument is in denial. I'd like to see HN redeem itself or go out on top like Jordan (the first time he retired).

One last thing: for what it's worth, yeah HN has gotten a little sucky, but it's still awesome and very redeemable.

Wow, it's a good thing you're not a writer...

Criticism is one of the best ways to learn to be better at what you do. "Hate this, hate that" may be negative but it is useful feedback from actual/potential users of your site/service/app/whatever.

HN is a far better site with useful comments than it is a site with solely positive comments.

Ironically I am a writer - I've written a sitcom and had it made and have had my fair share of 'this is awful' comments - I get people won't like my stuff, I don't have a problem with that. I am making the point that the old HN crowd would give constructive feedback rather than just rip in to you...

I think the line between "ripping in" to someone and "constructive" criticism is a fine line, probably something to do with tone. Personally, I don't view (let alone comment) on product launches, I'm more of a code kind of guy, but from my position I see excellent discussion. I suspect that the negativity on product launches is because everyone can contribute - there's no skill barrier.

Why is there this myth that there is a "community" or "family" of entrepreneurs?

Startup founders are actually competitors - for funding, for sales, for attention etc etc etc

The scale that should be expected between entrepreneurs goes from "Open Hostility" on one end to "Cold War" on the other.

You should expect any "positivity" you get to be fake, stupid or both. If you receive better, you should take it as a bonus.

It's the same way Corporate HR is not the employee's friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urGVKx3H_Rk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ0BQUufUpE&feature=relat...

How long have you been using the Internet? sniping and negativity is the norm and I just ignore it. You should too.

If your app truly is good, your users/customers will be the only thing that matters.

He's saying that sniping and negativity wasn't the norm for HN, but it's become that way.

That's either rose-tinted glasses or selective recall, or both.

Probably both, I've not been around long enough to say accurately.

Its neither, feedback supplied to the "Show HN" type posts would generally be positive, or at least constructive and polite. Even if there was no feedback to offer, people would still leave a congratulatory comment about launching.

4-5 years ago it felt like the only people who understood what you went through to launch were people on this site, everyone else including family and fellow co-workers at big corp were negative about the idea of leaving a "safe job" to pursue a dream.

But now with everyone having an idea about the next big app, and blockbuster movies coming out about the geeky kid who did follow his dream, everyone else is starting to "get" us, they can relate. So the feedback you get from outside of HN has become positive, and so the feedback from HN has become more of a "reality check".

I don't see why it just can't be polite but constructive though.

sniping and negativity is the norm and I just ignore it. You should too.

HN != "The Internet"

I somewhat agree with the OP... HN has (had) almost something of a "family" or at least "tightly knit community" vibe to it. Traditionally feedback here was expected to be honest and not sugared down, but polite in tone and constructive.

No one is saying that feedback here should consist of nothing but "Wow, that's GREAT. You're definitely going to be the next Zuckerberg." And no one expects all of us to get together around the campfire, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya. But there's no reason people can't be encouraging and supportive while also being totally honest.

Example:

"Congrats on the launch! Here's hoping your project succeeds wildly. I took a look, and while I like the Froozit and Gizamble features, I do kinda think the Frizgombit could use some improvement. I also have some concerns about how you will make money from this? Is the market for a Zvezkikit for octogenarians really big enough to support this? Anyway, best of luck!"

I mean, is it that hard to show a little support, throw some encouragement to the app launcher, while also giving useful feedback? This isn't "The Shark Tank" or an interview with pg (unless pg is the one giving the feedback, in which case it kinda is) where you go in mostly expecting to be challenged and not really encouraged.

All of that said, I don't think HN has totally descended into "nothing but negativity." I still see a lot of great comments and feedback here, although I would agree that the tone may have shifted a bit over the years.

If you want hand holding and kudos? Then any public forum on the internet is the wrong place to come (go to your mommy for things like that - not the cruel world in which we live). Stop whining. Either use the criticism of your projects to improve them, moving you toward success or GTFO.

The internet is not a PC or hand-holding place. Most people are not really PC on the inside. They ace PC outwardly face to face because they fear physical confrontation or are afraid of social repercussions (in the real world)

Buck up

Cancer is cancer.

Hate this, it's pointless. :p

Brilliant. Everything about this just emphasises his point :)

> points scoring

Why else have moderation points if not for scoring? :p

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