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News News: Faster, Fewer Flamewars

ycombinator.com

82 pointspg58 comments

I'm skeptical of the exponential delay -- seems like another way of saying "if you're in a drawn-out conversation with somebody, take it somewhere else because you're boring us"

Which then limits your options for participating in a controversial subject to a) doing nothing, and b) making some grand overarching statement and not caring what comes after it.

Neither of these seem to add to the site.

I understand the desire to prevent emotions from overwhelming posters, but geez, sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I've found that if both sides are honest and stick to an intelligent conversation, a lot of times you can learn a lot by the time you're about 7 levels in. Most of the time you learn that the two sides, while posturing, aren't really that far apart.

I like deep threads every now and then. Shows me how people are thinking. Shows how they react on their feet. Shows the depth of their position (or lack thereof). Teaches respect for each other and community values.

Flamewars? Not so much. But HN hasn't exactly been a nest of flame-waring, at least as far as I can see. There are heated discussions, they blow over, then life moves on.

But hey, not my call. I hope this works out the way you want, Paul! I'm always willing to see how an experiment works out. After all, I was one of the original orange members. (or was it red?) : )

What if readers could vote on the exponent? Maybe add a "flamewar" button that raises the exponent, which starts out at something innocuous like 1.1.

A button might encourage the flames and flame-type replies, though.

Another option might be to add a section (right now there is "news" and "newest") where members can move their too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting posts in order to keep them out of the main discussions.

*Disclaimer: I am certainly guilty of posting when too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting, and I kinda wish that there was an option to delete old items. I don't really care about the karma aspect, but it would be nice to be able to delete.

I suspect that it would be easier (though I don't know how practical) to simply zero the exponent for arguments that are getting upvotes. At least then it doesn't penalize the discussions generally accepted as quality.

Or, slightly more moderate: suppose the delay is depth^1.75 seconds: each upvote could be a slight reduction in the 'depth' factor: (depth-score/3)^1.75 or something like that. Could also be useful because becoming more "flamey" means you're actually increasing the depth via down votes.

The one day timer for /noobs should start ticking when they make their first submission, not when they create their account. Otherwise spammers can just wait a day before submitting anything.

On a site I ran, spammers routinely signed up then submitted spam weeks later--I'm fairly certain it was automated.

I haven't seen any cases yet of spammers letting accounts mature before using them. There would be no practical benefit. All the limits depend on karma, not account age.

Rtm just made a couple changes to Arc's internals that have made the site visibly faster.

I was just reading the wikipedia page on Arc yesterday and it talks about an unofficial fork of Arc which came about because of a perception of slow development in the official branch.

How are those two branches playing these days? Is there any cross-pollination of code?

Currently the last release of Arc is one year old. The fork (Anarki) has had more visible development, although it has slowed down after october 2008. You can see the full history here: http://github.com/nex3/arc/commits/master/ . There has been no cross pollination of code: the anarki fork fixes a few bugs that are still present in the official release of arc and it has a few interesting extra features, such as the possibility of defining your own functions to be called when a non-function object gets called. Another interesting implementaton of arc, which does include a few features from anarki, is rainbow: http://github.com/conanite/rainbow .

I'm a newcomer to HN but I was amazed to find out how long it's been around. It has the feel that many of my favorite sites had in their infancy which they inevitably loose as time goes on.

It's great to hear that the system is constantly being improved to maintain this environment, bravo.

Change is a constant on HN. Site changes, algorithms, etc. But through it all the community has remained largely tightknit and focused, which are definitely feats of their own.

There is one constant: widespread paranoia, justified or otherwise, about the quality of the site and alleged degradation. This since approximately day 1.

Because the community here is largely composed of early adopters and tech people. People who have been part of other sites who we grew attached to and watched as they degraded around us.

Is it paranoia? I don't think so. I think it's a fervent and constant vigilance against such.

But even then, it's definition has changed. The acceptable topics has broadened. We held open forums through the political season to discuss whether we wanted political news, etc.

So even then our definition of quality submissions has changed.

I'm just curious about this exponential delay :)

I've been a member since almost the very first day I think. I rarely post but occasionally comment and read a lot. This is a great site with very good content for programmers and entrepreneurs. I do hope it stays that way!

If nothing else it proves that this Quality is sustainable, even if the cost is eternal vigilance (which isn't so bad, and I imagine not outside the nature of the sort who frequent this site).

Maybe it's just me, but I thought I had been watching the site go downhill in the past month or so. I have rarely found a submission I really wanted to upmod in that time.

It's not just you, everyone thinks the site is going downhill in round-robin fashion.

That sentiment needs to be carved in marble and displayed prominently in Washington DC.

Reminds me of a joke used by a couple of musicians I respect:

"This one starts out slow, then sorta tapers off from there..."

I is, I think, due to this change constant that the site still feels new. since, in some senses it always is new becasue of the subtle changes.

there is now an exponential delay before reply links appear on deeply nested comments

I think this is a fascinating idea.

It will be interesting to see how it goes, but I see it more as a way to slow down conversations. I think perhaps we may find that it is best to exponentially delay replies in a thread from the same person. Most comment thread discussions go maybe 2 for each person before losing most value (from my observations) and so it may also find value in adding logic to slow or disable that sort of "noise" as well.

I'd prefer to be able to enter my comment as soon as I can think of it, but do not have it show for other people until the time is up.

I'm thinking this would significantly affect the effectiveness of this new feature. Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth but otherwise have about the same quantity of flame comments?

Exactly.

Let's say I'm really mad at your comment you just wrote. Really mad.

So the little "reply" button isn't showing up.

Do I a) stop being angry because a little button is disabled or b) find some other way to vent online?

I'm voting for b. And if you're going to vent anyway, I'd rather you nest it. That's what nested comments are for, anyway -- stuff that gets more and more detailed about a particular conversation.

That's why I think auto-collapsing threads with less then a certain threshold of karma after a period of time might be the way to go.

Forget auto-collapsing, I'd like to be able to collapse period.

It happens quite often that I've already read a really long thread and just want to skip over it to the new stuff, or that the topic discussed in the thread is just not that interesting to me, but the topic of the post is.

Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth

Ah, but replies to existing comments track the original comment as it moves up and down the screen. Brand-new comments sink or swim on their own merit.

I'm thinking that Original Insight A might get upmodded, but Insulting Name For The Commenter's Mother B'' will not get upmodded and will sink out of sight.

Of course, that might not actually help. It will be a fun experiment.

I think the point is that this mechanism lets users cool their heads before they type away something silly on the heat of the moment.

Having engaged in some flame wars, without wanting it to happen, it did cross my mind that they could be tracked using some sort of detection of the height of the tree and the time between the replies. Also I think that's how pg tracked them before, because he enganged almost instantly to stop one I was involved recently.

I'm officially nicknaming http://news.ycombinator.com/noobs The Land Of The [dead]

Is it possibly to give a nice brief summary of the kind of change that brought about this speed up? Because... damn the site is fast now!

I was going to ask that too: what are the "couple changes"?

Some common functions that took n arguments used to generate garbage when given 2.

Do we even have flame wars? I'm a fairly active reader and I don't really remember ever seeing one on here.

They are ignored by most of the most active users here, which keeps them small and contained, because they never gain much karma, in most cases.

Thanks for making HN faster. I visit the site repeatedly throughout the day and the slowdowns can be frustrating.

Shouldn't there be a link to the the noobs list on the lists page? There isn't (yet).

i like the idea of exponential delays for deeply nested comments. i wonder if there is a more direct way to force people to take their time in writing replies. maybe a timer on how long a reply textfield is active (i know, full of flaws, but a start, at least).

if it doesn't inhibit thoughtless replies/comments, at least it will destroy the excuses of "oh, i should have thought about my response a bit more", and "that's not what i meant, i should have clarified that point."

It also might simply cause people to work around the feature, by adding new top-level comments (that are actually replies to nested comments). I will be interested to see how well it works.

Opening "link" in another tab is a better workaround.

Hopefully the delay is enforced at the server. Have you checked to see if opening 'link' in another tab defeats the restriction?

I'm doing it right here. (I should clarify that you don't need to actually use another tab.)

Yes, it works. Click on link, open in new tab and you can reply just fine.

It looks a little strange to have no replies on the comment at the bottom of the screen (especially given the 'link' feature).

Perhaps we could keep the 'link' exception, but just incorporate its use into the flagging algorithm (e.g. people who use it a lot get treated as if every comment they made has been flagged X times).

That's an easy workaround.

Indeed.

Neat.

Right on.

As you guys have discovered, the restriction is in the code that generates the reply links, not the code that receives the replies. I'm hoping this will suffice.

Reminds me of when Reddit removed the vote count on anything less than an hour old. You could still view the vote by clicking details on the link.

May I inquire about your thought process with respect to security implications when you wrote this code?

A. "I know this is sloppy and will be found out sooner or later, but I hope people will respect the restriction anyway."

B. "I know this is sloppy, but I hope nobody will find out."

C. "This isn't really sloppy, as I know full well the security implications and don't care about them at all."

D. Didn't really think about the implications.

C is the closest, but this is not even a question of security.

true. but i would love to see the community work with this, to keep the quality up. but at the same time, i'd consider myself anti-over-moderation, and optimistic enough to wish for self-government (through social interaction). though not to appear too much the commie-pinko-leftist...

I just assumed it was a bug... You can just click on [link] and then comment still right?

Another clever idea is to add delays to troublemakers' site-browsing experience. Not my idea, I picked it up somewhere.

Not that it was added according to the post, but I am just saying that it is clever. :)

When arc3 ?

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