Concerning trend in commenting on news.yc submissions | Hacker News Reader

Concerning trend in commenting on news.yc submissions

19 pointsaston39 comments

Based on the few number of comments in most discussions on this site, you'd assume everyone's just reading for the links. Which is cool, I guess. Anyway, the only exception, it seems, are threads on Paul Graham essays in which everyone and their mother has something to say. We're talking something like an average of around 1 comment for most front page items vs. probably and average of 40 comments for anything PG's written.

Is everyone just sucking up/karma whoring by agreeing with PG? Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here? As I think the real value of having a community of hackers is talking, I'd really like to see more general chatter. Am I alone here?

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Is everyone just sucking up/karma whoring by agreeing with PG?

I think the volume of comments is at least partially because everyone reads them and thinks about them.

Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here?

Hardly, but given that it was his essays that brought many (most?) of us here to begin with, it's something we all have in common. So his essays generally get more attention. Furthermore, his essays tend to attract attention from all over, and visitor comments probably wind up on news.yc.

[ascend to soapbox] [begin sermon] I like to think of news.yc as a social learning machine. It would be nice to see karma computed more as a function of the contribution to the community rather than pure popularity. In terms of information content, the PG links are going to be low because almost everyone here would have read the article regardless.

Seriously, is the 100 karma points gained through linking to a pg essay worth as much as the 100 earned through 10 informative (in the classic suprising sense) links? We seem to be converging to this eigenvector [a(1) a(2) ...a(n)] where a(1) == pg_essay_link, a(2)== mattmaroon_essay_link...etc.

The reason I believe pg converted this forum to hacker news is that the learning machine was stuck on the search surface in a local minimum and he wanted it to 'learn' new things. We can't learn more if we reward behaviour that is not truly informative. He could put a damping coefficient on karma obtained from known links, but a better bet would be for the community to not reward the links as much.

I have done my share of dumb, uniformative submissions and will try to make better contributions in the future. [end sermon] [get off soapboax]

In the end, Karma ends up rewarding activity. I'm not any better or smarter than anyone else here, I just surf the internet a whole lot.

Dude, I've seen your website. You are going to change the world.

That's what we're going for. :) My partner Josh deserves more credit than me because he's the actual biological hacker but we complement each other pretty well.

Our make or break moment is in the next couple months as we launch. Here's hoping...

Hoping with you, man. Tell ingenium to keep at it.

No, you are not alone. But what do you propose? Like danielha said, some stories are more interesting to talk about than others. On the features page, I suggested separating ask news.yc posts into another area, so they don't move off the front so fast and perhaps get more discussion going as a result. However, no one has really up voted that suggestion. Another alternative is to have a different site that is more of a message board like webmasterworld, but for hackers. After all, this is Hacker News, not Hacker Discussion. This is evident in the fact that it is geared more towards new links than open discussion topics.

I disagree about not everything being interesting to talk about. If anything's worth reading, I think it's worth sharing your thoughts on. If you vote it up, you must think it resonates well. Even sharing the reason why would be interesting to others. If you don't vote it up, something must be wrong with it. Et cetera.

I think we are in agreement here. I just don't find myself upvoting that many stories, and I generally try to comment on those I do. So I was just basically saying the ones I don't think are interesting to talk about are the ones I'm not upvoting. Obviously there isn't an exact 1 to 1, but generally that is the case, at least for me.

It would be nice to have a discussion-thread-only view. There appears to be a lot of people who know a lot of things, and a lot of people learning, it'd be great to get them all communicating more.

The site has lost some of its appeal since it was opened up to topics that aren't strictly startup related.

I've noticed that accompanying the larger amount of posts, the quality has been more spread out. It's no surprise that PG related posts attract more of that quality.

> The site has lost some of its appeal since it was opened up to topics that aren't strictly startup related.

To you perhaps, but pageviews per visitor are conspicuously up since that change.

Do you think there is a relationship between the two things, or could other factors be involved (appearing on reddit, essays linking to yc.news...?).

To tell the truth, it seems that things have "got back to normal" - the meta discussions have died down, thankfully not too many political discussions have been started, and things seem to be going pretty well.

More links from outside decrease pageviews per visitor, because they bring in more visitors.

Yes, I meant to qualify that statement. An increase in page views per visitor isn't surprising. There's so much more to read.

I've had a few posts deleted which were "general chatter", but were directed more towards one person. Thats understandable however as it can distract from the topic of the post. But it makes it difficult to continue interesting topics of conversation which are starting to diverge from the post. This is where I think a simple messaging system for the site would be useful, especially given the networking incentives of beginning startup entrepreneurs..

I think there may also be a general reluctance to post things which are challenging or negative for fear of either being downvoted like crazy, or looking bad in the eyes of YC if you have plans to apply. I wouldn't go as far as calling it sucking up, but it could refrain some people from saying whats really on their mind.

The rate of submissions seems to be increasing too, which can make sifting through the new postings more difficult. It also dilutes commenting I've noticed. This could be why major posts like a new PG essay seem to gravitate more discussion. I would personally be game for the idea of limiting the number of new submissions a user can post over a given time. Maybe scale this value based on karma. This would at least make people think more carefully about what they are about to post. I understand this starts to limit the "anyone can post" nature of the site, but it could reap an overall benefit for all users by reducing information overload and concentrating discussion on fewer, good submissions.

But you bring up a good point.. I'll make a conscious effort to post more challenging, thought provoking comments. I've got karma to burn :)

"I think there may also be a general reluctance to post things which are challenging or negative for fear of either being downvoted like crazy, or looking bad in the eyes of YC if you have plans to apply."

There's a line between being challenging or negative and being hostile. I've seen pg prune hostile comments, but never challenging or negative ones (and I've made quite a few of both--I don't think I get a special pass because I have a YC funded company). And I also strongly doubt challenging pg or anyone else here with a well-thought out argument would have a negative impact on applications for funding. There are plenty of strong personalities in YC companies, many of whom are not particularly intimidated by pg--I strongly doubt the YC folks have a problem with that, at all. Not being cowed by challenges from your investors and advisers is probably even a necessity for success, and pg has mentioned it in several talks and at least one essay.[1]

Of course, that doesn't invalidate your argument. Maybe folks are hesitant to challenge folks for fear of hurting their chances with YC. It's a mistake to hesitate for that reason. But it's entirely possible that people do.

1: Search for the word "adult" in this essay: http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html

I'm not sure if I like the idea of reducing the amount of links one can post. While certainly sifting through new items becomes harder the interesting ones will gravitate towards the top. As long as submissions aren't completely off topic I'm interested in reading them.

True, but the limit need not be anything aggressive. Just simply having it and users knowing it is there could subconsciously promote more thoughtful postings. If anything, its good protection against a malicious flood attack (since users currently cant bury posts). Just an idea.

Also, some of the most interesting postings to me personally never got upvoted by others very much. Was I not watching the new queue all the time I would have missed them completely..

I don't think people are sucking up, because a lot of the threads for the most recent pg essay were disagreeing with parts of it.

I don't think people are karma whoring, because that would mean commenting on lots more stories. The average comment is more likely to be upvoted than downvoted, so a karma whore would comment as much as possible.

I don't want to see more general chatter. I just want interesting comments. I'd rather see no comments than uninteresting ones.

I think we should encourage commenting at all costs. The karma system can handle not showing you the uninteresting/bad ones.

Actually, now that I think about it, the karma system could be the reason people don't post as many comments. If you submit, you're looking at all upside. But you can hurt yourself by saying something dumb, so people opt to say nothing at all.

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

Cool link. The fact that this thread is already 20th on that list probably proves the point.

edit: it's slow enough that I don't think pg's planning for many people to be looking at it...

I see what you are saying. For example, I posted this link which I think is an awesome read for everyone on hear, and it got squashed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49579 Read it people, read it!

But I don't think there is any karma whoring going on. I think PG articles come with a pretty safe bet of being a good read. Whereas you aren't sure what you are going to get with the others. Im assuming pretty much everyone reads the PG essays, and thus there is more discussion to be had. Whereas I would like to know the proportion of people who read all the other links submitted, as opposed to just their titles.

People expect much discussion of a new pg essay, partly because its his site, partly because of trends in this site so far, and partly a stop-over from the old reddit days. A guaranteed-attention feedback loop, dragging in anyone with an inclination to chat or have a little limelight, lurkers and regulars alike.

I too would enjoy more general chatter (of the thoughtful, interesting kind).

The RSS feed for this site doesn't offer a link to comment pages; I've only commented on a few submissions that were themselves just links back into new.ycombinator.com.

There is an element of suck-upness ("I hear what you're saying but what I think Paul Graham is looking for in a submission is XXX") that is off-putting, but, I mean, it's Graham's site.

I made a modified feed that does. Subscribe to http://feeds.re.inklesspen.com/newsyc

No more than five minutes stale compared to the official feed.

The RSS feed for this site doesn't offer a link to comment pages

Yes, it does: the comment tag is defined in each item.

Great, show me a real RSS client that uses those. So far, the only one I've heard about is rss2email, which seems like utter stupidity instead of a real client.

Well, SeekSift.com does (disclaimer: this is my current project), so feel free to give it a try.

If you click "Sources" -> "Add a Source Not on this List" -> "Search for Sources" and type "Hacker", you'll see the news.yc feed.

What I think Paul Graham is looking for is for news.yc to have a life of its own apart from him.

Nothing sinister, just network effects. If twice as many people read PG's essays, that's four times as many potential conversations.

I've noticed a TON of comments anytime someone posts "Just launched my startup... Feedback please!"... Just as a counter-example.

and by startup, they mean website. Big difference, usually.

While the number of "10 ways to do x", "10 x about y" , articles have decreased, there are still a lot of links that, frankly, I could find on another site, and have little or no relevance to software/web startups or hacking.

I come here mostly for the discussions, essays, and new idea posts, not to learn what I can get on google/news

No earth shattering news here, but discussions have comments and news links don't have as much. When someone asks for help understanding something by asking a question, the community lends it expertise. If more questions were asked, more discussion would proceed.

- my 2 cents

I am, in fact, a PG fanboy. If I wasn't I wouldn't have noticed this site. That has to skew your results. It will be a while before the site attracts a population of people who don't find his topics of interest. Meanwhile, why worry? You could go back to Reddit.

Some stories are more interesting to talk about. I wouldn't much further than that.

PG is a VC. I won't consider him a technology evangilist in a broader scope. Sometimes agreeing with a VC is simply agreeing with a non-evangilist.

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