What I've Learned from Hacker News

When I posted a comment here a year and a half ago, I felt like each vote was a real, actual smart person praising or agreeing with what I had said. Each point had a lot of meaning, and back then 5 points was considered a pretty good score. Now each point means much less for some reason. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't trust each individual person as much. For example, as I write this, the top comment is about someone using a script to submit this article. It's two sentences, and it has received eleven votes. To me, each of those individual votes mean less than they used to.

The net effect of one vote, for the whole culture of hacker news, has gone down significantly. This reduces the total perception of worth for each user, and, more importantly, for each voting action. Back in the beginning, I felt like I had some amount of power, in that if I voted something up it would literally rise in the list. In fact, I felt like I had some sort of responsibility. Now that active, obvious change in story rank rarely happens, so I feel like my vote is somewhat worthless.

I tend to mostly agree that the quality level of submissions and comments has stayed the same during the growth of this site, but the devaluation of karma has led to other cultural changes. There's something comforting about sharing ideas within a small group of people because you feel like you have real influence, and I think I'm starting to lose that feeling here. There are so many new faces that my perception of quality has gone down, even if the actual net level of quality for each item has stayed the same. Seeing many posts with 100+ karma on the front page recently has kind of solidified that feeling for me. Who are these hundreds of people?

The reason HN is so addictive is because it is filled with things we think might be useful someday. We're like pack rats at a flea market.

The question is, what utility do we get out of what we find here?

Idea: maybe there could be a second class of upvote, which could only be given, say, a week, or a month after a story or comment was submitted. The meaning of this upvote would be, "This proved to be useful to me professionally." And so, in addition to HN/best and HN/bestcomments, there could be HN/useful and HN/usefulcomments.

Anway, thanks again for the site, Paul, and please keep experimenting. Watching you experiment is at least as interesting as any particular post.

I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality.

Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their problems living up to this, it is their stated objective.

Hacker News has a different objective. It's goal is to be interesting to Hackers. I really could care less about democracy and I think others would agree. Submissions and voting are just a means to the "hacker interesting" end.

These also make for excellent reads. What was Viaweb's? :)

It was Ed Koch (and his police commissioner) who initiated the broken windows based policing. Giuliani took it to the next level and as you correctly phrased it, is the one with whom it became most associated.

Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=vHKBXA8nXvQC&pg=PA63...

So the mechanics of this system are basically that when you compete with someone that is much better than you and win your score should be adjusted upwards. Conversely, if you lose to someone worse than you, your score will be adjusted downward. Adjustments are done in batches, say after a player has finished a tournament (I use five voting events between readjustment).

My application to a user karma system would be analogous in that a "match" or "competition" would happen every time someone directly rates someone else (stories may be exempt). A high-karma user upvoting a low-karma user would increase the low-karma user's karma and decrease the high-karma user's karma. If there are two users with equal karma and one up or downvotes the other. the number of points exchanged will be minimal (the gain/loss scales with the difference in karma).

The idea is that your ideas are competing with the opinions of the high-ranked users. The assumption is that new users will have bad ideas and that high-karma users will downvote them. A downvote from a high-karma user is expected and doesn't cost the new user very much (they are expected to "lose" to them often).

I've sketched out some of the functions here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/76193

EDIT: grammar fix, typed this before coffee

Wow, it's like university. :-)

Ok, now that I've made that moronic joke, being HN I know I'll need to add some more substance to counter balance the negative effect. This, in essence is one of the reasons I love coming here - For users that care it's self policing, in other words, what Paul says regarding the broken windows theory is absolution correct.

The whole broken windows theory (and it critiques) are fascinating reads. I'd urge anyone who only knows of the summary version to dig deeper into the ideas. Certainly up most hacker's alleys.

This essay finally compelled me to register an acount, upvote some links and to make my first comment.

Purpose defeated? May be I'm starting to ruin the news site I like more.

I know many of us have probably wondered what you've been thinking about your experiment. I know I have. As usual, you've managed to write the essay before people are even asking the question.

The addictive/interesting balance is a fascinating subject. I'll be looking forward to hearing from you about that in the future.

If you have a set of blessed tags, then the submitter must carefully think which tags apply to their submission. This also forces the submitter to consider if the story fits with the content guidelines of the site.

PG, have you considered invite only schemes?

What about explicit 'people rank', where friends can rate eachother in a reputation system? That might really help with the quality of comments.

It would also help conversation is you could follow people you like. Twitter and Tumblr both do a really good job of 'pick your peers'. I often track these two links: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ivankirigin

It would be nice if there was a thread stream of selected people. It would make me engage in conversation more often. Too many comments don't have an easy response, making them closer to declarations than discussions.

Also, have you considered adding an explicit cost to votes? You could weight those above a certain karma threshold higher if each vote were $0.10.

  Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble;

HN is also my primary tech portal. While I still visit slashdot, I've found HN to be faster on stories that appear there, and I've also found more relevant items here.

For instance, there was recently a thread here regarding list copying in Python. Though I've used Python for years, I'd never known the information that was in the linked article. It's now a part of my personal Python knowledge base.

I like HN. I read it regularly, whether at work, at home on the computers, or on the go through my iPhone. It's that good. Thank you!

I wish you could still see the URL though. If an article has been deaded, there may be some comments about it, but you can't see the url, or click on it...

To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true _of_.

That is, when you see someone wrong on the internet, instead of trying to force them to agree with you, identify what they know that makes them believe their assertion.

However it’s not only the “tag line” which need to be rewritten but also the content.

Which mean one version of the article for HN users, another for Reddit and yet another for Digg.

Which can translate into three levels:

- advanced (readers able to understand abstractions),

- intermediate (readers who want to understand “how to control”)

- and beginners (readers who just want to find a solution to their problem through a simple step by step process).

This force onself to write with a specific audience in mind. And I think it’s the key point of Paul Graham article: understanding your users.

Last but not least: having the comments section on where you found the link but not on the page where is displayed the article.

I found HN comments with Stackoverflow are so far the only sites where proper discussions can really happen with very inspiring thoughts.

However those Karma thingies, I absolutely don’t care. Also the triangle button (upvote), I use it only as a bookmark button.

Also what’s really rewarding is when you check the “New” page and see few hours after it hits the home page. You feel you’re not only following.

Have a good day and thanks for your work. Thibault

best line of the essay.

This is probably sophomoric, but... I was wondering why there is no semantic engines that can identify the major themes in the comments and present them like a table of contents or color code them like checking a cached page on google? I'm imagining something like Yelp's engine that picks out the best dishes.

thanks.

I liked the two ideas Paul mentioned: length of comment is related to stupidity, and not using the same words again. Just make those fall toward the bottom of the page and we'll all be happy.

While any algorithm can be gamed, length is still pretty good. If I have to go through the extra effort of adding two paragraphs each time I write something, well... it takes time to type. So I have an incentive to think and improve my comment.

Really, I like this. It's really the same problem as Google search: out of all the junk out there, how can you tell interesting content? Because we all want to read only amazing stuff and engage in discussions with brilliant people. In practice, it doesn't work that way yet, but what if technology made it possible?

I am only commenting here because I can't find a more direct access to Mr. Graham.

Subjectively, the frontpage and discussions have grown quite bland here; without necessarily corresponding to a reduction in the quality of each article, it feels as if the range of content linked has become homogenized.

Objectively, however, it's quite clear that the range of content hasn't strayed much at all (witness archive.org). This failure to change lends a certain banality of tone to the site that is almost unbelievable.

Once you get in,addiction is non-reversible,the digging goes deeper and deeper ..into the web's bosom.It never stops. The NET is nursery rhyme's..."Come into my parlor" "Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly; ... and went into his den, For well he knew the silly fly would soon come back again: ..."

Summed up in you words,"You may be wasting your time, but your not idle." Haha Cheers!

I have never had the urge to flip that switch. The sheer quantity of the quality links are enough to keep me engaged.

Here's a relevant thread from Overcoming Bias. It is more about modeling the problem than looking for fixes, but you might find it interesting:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-tradeoff...

"forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people".

Is the implication that these "bad people" can't possibly behave any other way except badly?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

and put up barriers to visiting reddit or hacker news after 11:00 in the morning.

I'd be glad to have that problem in my new venture.

I am new to hackernews, so I can't claim any idea of how to apply these ideas to that site. However, I find the notion of a "town center" a very intriguing one for the web, especially apropos of footnote 7 of the article. Most social sites act like huge suburbs, and many of their users are invariably suburbanites trying to escape the suburbs. In this way, the problem of a lack of place gets abstracted, and suburbanite communities emerge around topics that the real people can't discuss in their physical environments for lack of a place to do so. Their place to discuss things they would explore in the real world itself becomes amorphous and isolationist. But this is too broad; enter Dunbar's number.

I don't think Dunbar was the first to suggest that communities need a finite size, but his observation that that size is proportional to the volume of a brain region is interesting in that it provides an example of a willingness to assign a metric for community size to which human beings would be subject. This raises the question I'm trying to ask and the point of this long-winded comment.

How can we create fulfilling communities on-line that will enhance the essentially human aspects of such communities? Jessealdridge suggested breaking large communities up into smaller numbers (perhaps something like www.fluther.com allows). But if any metric like Dunbar's number is to be believed, this number should be a reflection of a deeper determinant of identity in a community, which itself requires an obvious representation in the allowable forms of interaction on the site. In the high-quality sites in the physical world, human communities are delineated by spatial relationships according to the organizing principles of architecture. But such places are rare in the physical world, and are mostly confined to very old cultures or small liberal arts colleges.

Perhaps one of the reasons that such frameworks of fulfilling human interaction are so rare is that they are very difficult to understand and very expensive to make. The web can do better at creating frameworks for human interaction because it uses information explicitly, potentially clarifying the underlying principles generating the framework, and because it is much less expensive for people to come together and create something on the web than it is for them to come together and make something architectural, in the physical world.

Unfortunately, this seems to mean (as you pointed out in your article) that sites much less often impart a sense of a change in place, or of a place at all. I wonder how the problems you've outlined (trolls, stupid comments, mean people) map onto the architectural representations of these problems, and how the solutions you've come up with could map onto architectural solutions to the analogues of those problems. In short, the article makes me wonder, however tangentially, how the web could benefit from being more than a surrogate, and perhaps more of a support structure, for physical human communities.

Could hackernews benefit from having some relationship to physical places?

I would like to remind you here of the analysis made in the book "Freakonomics" regarding the "miraculous" reduction in crime at that time. Namely, lots of individuals that would have been in the social situation leading to crime were not born. The suspected cause being an abortion case won some years before in court.

If those ideas does not confront with privacy policy, they would be simple but useful tricks.