Monocle
blog.alexmaccaw.com
blog.alexmaccaw.com
This is a source of a lot of uncivil behavior on HN. Startup founders/tech geeks are intellectually interested in a lot of topics but unqualified to discuss them in any detail. This results in comment threads full of knee-jerk reactions and bikeshedding.
Truly healthy discussion inherently involves people expressing ideas and opinions that may be provocative. Some people very likely will be offended by these ideas. Some people will get angry. Some people won't believe what they're reading or hearing. But those are all good things. They indicate that there is a wide variety of thought going on.
Communities that are kept "civil" through the use of excessive moderation, for example, thrive only in a very superficial way. Given enough time, intellectual inbreeding happens, where the vast majority of participants adhere to a very strict dogma. Any real contemplation is quickly extinguished. The end result is a very bland type of thought, devoid of real substance. It's not truly healthy, even though it might look good on the surface.
Or maybe for some opinions you can't, if so I'd like to hear an example (intellectual curiosity, not snarkiness).
I believe I've finally come up with a solution for that, incidentally, after years of searching. It will require surprisingly little new code. I almost started implementing it during the 4th of July holiday, but I started writing a new essay instead.
What's the broad strokes idea?
I'm going to define a state for comments between living and dead called pending, and I'll give everyone over a certain threshold of karma and/or age the ability to promote comments from pending to live.
Pending comments should be promoted if they (a) make a positive contribution to the discussion, and (b) are not unnecessarily harsh or uncivil.
I may try this out on individual threads before switching the whole site over.
Presumably the sub-audience who finds such comments productive to discussion enough to upvote them will happily flip them live, too. It seems like the only reason to think otherwise is if you think that most people who have high karma are not guilty of upvoting these types of comments.
The phenomenon that bolts fatuous vitriol to the tops of threads requires no such deliberation.
I have no idea if this is going to work, but I'm psyched to see it play out.
This could be a step in the wrong direction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936055
To be clear: what he's saying in this thread seems to support the idea of a karma-limited feature for showing comments. The score (not the content) on a comment would have been negative; the comment, in context, was a superficial negative comment that commanded the top spot on a thread.
I've often wondered if this could be applied to the homepage too: rather than relegating submissions to the "/new" URL, show them to a random subset of users right on the homepage until they've hit a threshold; then show them to everyone.
I thereby feel the need to point out that using a system where the comments are promoted by being viewed inside of the thread has the potential to worsen this effect, as the pool of people available to promote comments will decrease over time, even though the potential value of the comments in question increase over time (as, again, they will be able to have been better perfected, with more research, better wording, and careful thought). I might, thereby, put more weight onto your idea for putting the comments on a page like /newest, in order to better force them to be seen after-the-fact (which, I understand, may be one of the factors you are already thinking about: I'm just attempting to show that someone else might be thinking about that sort of thing).
(This issue has an interesting effect when combined with the Eternel September + Evaporative Cooling interaction effect that this site seems to have: I have found myself "taking a pass" on the first time something is posted, instead working on a comment that I post when the same thing eventually comes up later to a sufficiently-different set of people that it can again accumulate enough votes to hit the home page. FWIW, I would then make the argument that this problem of "good content takes time, and HN is setup in such a way as to discourage things that take time" is a more fundamental cause of the "misinformation due to comment blight by people who don't really know what they are talking about" issue.)
Also, there not being a 'notify' feature more or less ensures that anything not on the front page is almost certain to die, although hnnotify.com does a good job of filling this feature in, that the service exists to me suggests that it could be useful as an actual feature for the site. And I know it's been discussed and passed on, but still.
I also worry about how the effect of weighting votes based on karma will bias conversations (though that would kind of be the point I suppose.) I guess we'll be seeing a lot more crypto stories bubbling up in the future...
I'm excited to see how this plays out. At the very least it should filter out a lot of noise.
"That idea is terrible. X is bad, Y doesn't work. We already have Z." While hostile, it's sometimes the best and most useful advice someone can receive. People who believe their idea is awesome and end up with positive reinforcement, even a simple "looks good, just work on Y a little" can become a major life changing event if that is the most hostile feedback they receive while living in a dream world.
In short, I see no reason to force sugar coating on HN. I'd rather have a 'flag' button on individual comments for getting people banned who are being insulting to a person rather than an idea. As it stands, a genuinely useful but 'harsh' comment may never get seen even when it should be.
I have never understood, and probably will never understand, why so many people on HN seem to think "critical" == "insulting" == "harsh". It's possible to criticize someone or their idea without being a dick, but too many people seem to think that "being a dick" is somehow necessary to give "critical feedback". I don't think it is.
Rational, reasonable people can disagree and debate, even disagree vehemently, without anyone needing to resort to the kind of comments that often get attacked (the ones where the criticizer is just being a dick).
I don't think anyone on HN wants to eliminate constructive feedback or even "negative" comments. The goal is to get the constructive feedback and the criticism while remaining civil. We don't need sugar-coating, we just need people to practice basic manners and remember the Golden Rule. Walk a mile in the other guy's shoes, etc. Have some compassion and empathy.
"That idea is terrible."
Taken by itself, that's a terrible comment - even if it's true! It's terrible because it lacks any explanation or exposition on why the idea is terrible and, as such, amounts to just an opinion (even if it is, coincidentally, accurate).
Why not say instead:
"I don't think this idea is going to work, because XXXX"
where XXX might be "there are already 374 competitors doing exactly the same thing", or "it takes very specific industry connections to break into that domain", or "it violates the second law of thermodynamics" or whatever?
I think that's the influence of California culture on the startup community. I'm a New Yorker, so harsh for me is telling me if my brother were still alive my app would give him cancer all over again. In California, I've been told I'm being overly critical and harsh for saying I think using node.js wouldn't work for the application and we should try nginx. Some managers I've had even thought I was mad at them because I didn't smile at them enough during the day. For better or worse, people on the west coast are more sensitive to negativity than people from the northeast. Maybe it has something to do with the winters (or lack thereof). :)
The point being, the dividing line between destructive and constructive criticism can vary greatly depending on the person and the culture they're from. I guess that's where the voting from pending to live comes into play. It'll be interesting to see where that dividing line lands for the community as a whole.
I think what you are describing is criticism, which is fine, if civil.
It's incivility that should be eschewed. I would actually be more inclined to vote civil arguments up if I knew such a system was in place.
I also think your hypothetical would-be founder is more likely to get criticism of a higher quality under the circumstances that PG is proposing.
"X is bad"... I'd imagine might give way to something more like... "X is requiring three clicks to get done, and at the end, it does Y instead. You guys should look at that funnel." Which is much more helpful.
"Y doesn't work"... I could see morphing over time to something more like "Y doesn't work on my Vaio with 8GB RAM running Firefox 23 on Windows 8." There's a bit more information there, and it's still a civil comment.
I'm interested to see how it plays out. I could see it being ESPECIALLY good for things like feedback.
e.g. your example can be shortened to "X is bad, Y doesn't work. We already have Z." And the opinion "bad" could be replaced with its factual/reasoned basis.
Of course, praise is sweet and criticism bitter. Let's not sugar-coat it - but let us not poison it either.
In my experience, people in a dream world usually are not very deterred by what other people tell them, anyway. It seems that they need to go through a series of realizations for themselves.
But I thought users with high age upvote similarly to the whole, as shown by news.ycombinator.com/classic (and presumably similar for high karma, high average, etc)... Is the reasoning that a "gatekeeper" or "mod" role will encourage a different perspective and therefore results?
I imagine that this could end up adding additional friction to discussions, as it sounds like the older/more karma'ed people will have to essentially vote-in new comments--out of sheer laziness, I think this could cause the overall comment volume to decrease.
Perhaps an automatic acceptance change just to keep things interesting?
I doubt there is. The problem is that no one judges the judges. That is, you don't lose karma points by making bad judgment calls. The same problem exists at my work. People become managers by being good engineers and by having been there a long time, but no one is judging their management skills.
If the plan is for you to personally investigate promoters' promoting habits and make the call to take away the right, then I guess that would work but I don't know how it would scale. My skepticism is based on the idea that this could be done automatically.
I hit plenty of opposition here when writing in favor of more qualified and tentative statements in precisely this context. Perhaps now your cult of personality will come around to my/our/your point of view! ;)
Sometimes this is true, but sometimes undertrained perspectives can be quite detrimental. The most clear-cut example is that of medical discussions; medical commentary or speculation from under-qualified individuals can do real harm. Many communities on the web have recognized this and have taken measures to protect users[1].
Medical advice is a pretty extreme example as far as detrimental discussions, but there are some shades of gray that I've seen show up on HN. As a biologist, the ones I've found most grating are those that reflect poor training in the the life sciences, where HNers make pseudoscientific or unscientific claims. It's easy to call these things "opinions", but they are actively harmful when most users will not be able to tell that they are incorrect.
There are certainly other cases where underinformed commenters end up doing harm, from legal speculation to "get your pitchforks" outrage attacks.
Note that I'm not arguing against free and open discussion in forums such as HN; people should be physically able to post whatever they want. My point is instead that the community should be sensitive to underqualified commentary in disciplines beyond its expertise. Less accepting, in a way.
Credentialing is but one way this has been done, but understandably not the best one here.
[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s4chc/meta_medic...
Just because we may not be "credentialed" doesn't mean our opinions are worthless or detrimental. Most of us are simply happy to contribute where we can, and we spend most of our time learning things that are beyond our comfort zone. After having been here for almost 5 years, I can suss out the wheat from the chafe, and I like hearing the variety of opinions regardless of their credentials. And most of the time I take the position of "student" trying to learn something from others. The breadth of expertise here is astounding, and I'm continually in awe of what people are doing. Could you be taking this too seriously?
Ninja edit: softened my tone about taking things seriously (one of my personal shortcomings).
The same could be said for credentialed experts, especially in the medical field. Taking steps to prevent users from freely discussing topics under the guise of protecting them can prevent unpopular but correct opinions from seeing the light of day. If somebody says something you can refute, then correct them in a civil way. That's how lots of people learn and grow - they put their theories out into the world and see how well they hold up to scrutiny. Making it "less accepting" to say something you believe is true because you're not sufficiently credentialed is actively suppressing free and open discussion.
What you might want to do is give the commenter themselves a signal, more explicit than just a bad score or being grayed out. A message could pop up by the comment saying "likely to be downvoted, you are advised to delete this" - and see if more self-policing helps.
Also, if you have some signal that occurs before votes or other comments show up (like a lot of eyeballs on a comment with no upvotes), then maybe you can use that to give users an early signal to delete their comment.
Second, much of the truly offensive stuff I've seen on HN has been phrased in "qualified" and "tentative" fashion.
Sometimes the ideas expressed here are, well, shit, and putting a gloss of civility on it doesn't change that it's a shitty idea, it just adds passive voice and some extra syllables. One is reminded of the myriad of polite and civil arguments advanced in the drawing rooms of the nicest people in favour of slavery or against voting rights.
It's easy to say any old thing off the cuff, but takes more effort to refute it. Also, truly expert people have less time, than, say, someone fresh out of college.
However, for some "inquisitive minds", discussion (flawed as it may be) yields insight and can create enough interest to further investigate a topic via "quality" sources. Of course there is erred content on HN, but it still provides an introduction for someone to determine whether or not they want to dig deeper into a subject from more credible perspectives.
I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. If you're dead set on being an ass, then you'll be one regardless, even if it takes creating a burner Twitter or GH account. Anything short of demanding proof of identity and linking your real name is useless (and now you have two problems.) All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own. A low barrier to entry with community moderation is enough to keep the value of the comments high, while keeping noise to a minimum.
A quick google turned up an article on TC about contrary evidence however. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...
Real Name policies are obviously valuable in an advertising deck... I'm skeptical on whether the benefits translate to users.
The purpose is to influence people who exist on the spectrum somewhere between angelic and dead set on being an ass.
This method is simply trying to replicate the offline version of the experience by adding a face to the name. I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, but it's probably a step in the right direction.
I said adding proof of a real identity would have some impact, but it would create more problems than it solved, thus it would not improve things.
> The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses
It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users. My argument is that if your objective is to improve the quality of the comments there are more effective ways of doing it, like effective moderation schemes.
> I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea
Because it's not effective. It raises the barrier to entry, excluding several users who would add value to discussions, without providing any meaningful level of protection. Also, neither of them, as far as I am aware, enforces a real name policy, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being "generally not anonymous."
Of course it would. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to reduce the portion of asses in a community at the cost of also reducing the number of quality users. This applies to your last paragraph as well. In this case, for a tech- or startup-leaning community, I think Twitter and GitHub accounts target a huge portion of all appropriate users, and I think it could very well be effective despite it excluding valuable users who don't have or don't wish to use accounts from either service.
As for moderation, it can obviously be an effective tool. But I don't think it's a cure-all feature or even the most fundamentally important feature of a successful community. I have probably seen more online communities negatively impacted by moderators than by users (I would say that holds for Hacker News).
Granted, the "quality" of an online community is inherently subjective, so communities I find problems with might serve a large portion of their users very well. At the end of the day, the people who dislike a community enough to leave will leave, and that improves both the community and those people's lives. That is the fundamental "self-moderation" of online communities.
Well, no, there is another possibility. Someone who doesn't already have an account on one of those other services might simply not use yours at all either.
I know plenty of intelligent, interesting, civil people in real life, and many of them contribute to one on-line forum or another. I know plenty of people who develop software, both personally and professionally. I literally can't think of anyone I know in real life who actually has an active GitHub account, though, and I only know a handful who use Twitter. Maybe it's a local thing and using these services is more common in other places.
I don't find avatars add to the conversation mostly because I don't first look to see who said something. If I read something interesting I might look to see who wrote it.
I'm not sure what the thumbnail graphics from the article are adding.
One thing I like about HN is the choice I make between reading the comments and reading the article with no framing.
As a note though, I opened the link because I thought it was related to Monocle magazine (http://monocle.com/) which also provides high quality content (albeit not community-sourced). Maybe reviewing the name is in order?
Edit: phrasing
Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. They're all roughly the same and none are that good. Upvotes suck and we need to move past them.
If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm. Anything short of that I just don't care about.
I'd like more builtin randomness for things. Display comments but display them randomly instead of by any sort of score maybe.
But then this all belies the biggest issue I have with reddit/hn/whatever. Trying to follow discussions is painful as its hard to ascertain what has been posted since you last read things and not. That alone is my biggest gripe with most of this, even newsgroup readers made things much easier to follow discussion.
But I'm curious, how would the netflix style algorithms work in practice? It would seem like it would just encourage more filterbubbleish input not? Occasionally off topic news tends to be somewhat engaging and I don't like the idea of removing serendipity amongst news/programming articles.
I may not use haskell for example often or even at all, but lots of the time I do see articles that really end up being well worth my time to read.
I recall lots of angry back and forth between folks demanding justification for downvotes received and downvoters who intended to train recommendations.
Personally, I far prefer Slashdot's model where I can build up a stable of friends and enemies and have their contributions filtered differently. I can filter out the useless cheerleaders while other people can show only them. Yay. It sounds like this thing's focus on pre-caching for performance and forcing the whole community to only say happy things will prevent them from user customized responses and views, though. So I don't expect them to break any new ground in showing more useful stuff and less chaff.
I think it's hilarious this is one of the top comments about a site which has "Criticism is kept to the constructive variety" as one of it's goals.
It concisely points out at least three very relevant ideas:
1) There's nothing particularly innovative about this proposed approach.
2) The past attempts haven't necessarily been successful, and taking the same (or a very similar) approach one more time also likely won't lead to any more success.
3) The lack of success in the past is very likely due to problems inherent to the approach itself.
For what its worth, it looks like a modern tech discussion forum built using modern tools. Nothing wrong with that, but that's how it should be branded. The feel good aspect without any real technical backend to enable it falls a bit flat.
You might consider loading your scripts after the base html is rendered so the initial page-load isn't 2-5 seconds of nothingness.
Seems like the content div is blank as a default, you might consider placing the most popular or trending article there by default as you are loading it anyway.
I would recommend loading titles and thumbnails first, rendering and having comments load in the background so the initial load time is lessened further, unless you are side-loading comments for another reason.
Also, you can only sign up with twitter/github connect?
God, it's so negative here.
I hope the following posts will detail how the community is managed - not the back- or front-end.
Edit: A link to Monocle the magazine: https://monocle.com/
2. Eternal September will eat you too.
Also, your comment is itself a bit Eternal Septemberish -- you know, the belittling, and the intentional disregarding of differences between Monocle and Reddit. Not sure if that's meant as implicit metacommentary or if you aren't actually aware that you are contributing negatively.
1. Developer Tools – http://grab.by/ohwa
The article discusses the design and performance of Monocle, which are definitely pleasant. However, the aspects of the community seem more like wishes than anything encouraged by Monocle (except for the Twitter/Github links) nor seemingly present.
Monocle is more interesting (though less ambitious) than Atwood's Discourse, but similarly misses the difference between community and charm, and performance and design.
So, back-patting and hi-fives, but no actual criticism? Because there are plenty of ideas in the tech community that deserve snark and derision.
Disagreement is absolutely the way to foster entrepreneurial spirit. What is an entrepreneur besides someone who disagrees with the way things are currently done. Besides, if good ideas are to filter to the top and learn to survive in the wild, then they need to be able to withstand people disagreeing with them and using colorful language to express that disagreement. Not every idea is good.
Friends can fight and make fun of one another. People who care about the same thing can loudly disagree. And I think communities where 100% of the people like one another are probably boring communities. And either trivially small or non-existent.
So, yeah. Monocle sounds like it could be neat, but if the idea is to shelter people from negative reactions to their ideas, it sounds like it's going to be kind of neutered and boring.
I didn't see that in the blog post.
One note -- there is an established current affairs/culture magazine/media brand called Monocle. While Monocle (the magazine) doesn't focus on tech, monocle.io's remit of "anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind" could lead to some overlap.
Dunno if there could/would be trademark conflicts. May be worth checking out if you haven't already.
My gut reaction when I first hit the site wasn't "Oh, awesome, there is a community of people here talking about stuff and submitting things", it was "Hmm, looks like a bunch of curated links or an RSS reader".
Also, if your username/profile is the same on Monocle as it is on Twitter, I'm even more likely to recognize submitters that I follow there as well.
Does anyone know of any service that offers this?
There's rarely much of a reason to overthink it - many people do, however, and even create start-up as a result!
Go with what's been tested properly and proven to work to a decent degree.
Check out http://qz.com/ for a similar interface that actually scales all the way down to mobile size.
One bug, the summaries are missing apostrophes.
$ curl -l http://monocle.io/posts/this-is-you-on-smiles(I don't know if monocle is doing that, but simply checking curl does nothing for rich client side apps).
>a discussion thread is made so that people can state whatever opinion they want to state.
Since when did stating opinion become bashing the developer/creator? If you have a problem, you should probably not get involved in the discussion in the first place.
>We all are bitching,the issue with you is you dont understand you are actually bitching.
Haha, you have absolutely no clue to what I am talking about here. That's alright.
and i suggest that you could award everyone a trophy!
-bowerbird
Also, I'm not really sure making people accountable by making them use Real Names or whatever account tied to their real name will make them be nicer. It might seem like that because on social networks, you can selectively add people to talk to that you enjoy being nice to. When it is an open forum, the discussion might still turn sour because people have contradicting viewpoints and that's okay, especially in a technical discussion. Finally, tying people to their real names by default sounds like it lends itself to all kinds of Internet Detective-y stuff which will probably lead to more Ad Hominem attacks than discussion.
Source: I post on Something Awful where we can still have useful discussion and call each other out on our bullshit. Niceness isn't as important as the free discussion of ideas.
To give this comment some context.
Dare to point out that restricting your project to Facebook logins might restrict usage and boy do some get the vapours, and a dozen hysterical "I remember back when HN wasn't so mean" blog posts start getting authored.
There is always a danger in being involved in an echo-chamber. As Groucho Marx so famously said "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". If you seek out and insulate yourself from broader criticism, the result is very unlikely to be useful.
I plan on posting a Show HN in the coming weeks, and my greatest hope is that it will be torn to pieces. I'm enough of an adult to categorize and prioritize the criticism.