Meet the People Taking over Hacker News
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
The account I'm now using, dang, was used briefly in 2010 by someone who didn't leave an email address. I feel bad for not being able to ask them if they still want it, so I'm considering this an indefinite loan. If you're the original owner, please email me and I'll give it back to you. The reason I want the name dang is that (a) it's a version of my real name and (b) it's something you say when you make a mistake.
Second, very minor, but I need to leave this discussion for a bit while I bike to a different location. After that, I'll be in the thread... but I'm not giving up my bike ride for this :)
(Edit: it turned out from old logs that someone had made a bunch of different accounts with names like "dang" all at once, so in retrospect I was reclaiming a dormant sockpuppet!)
Maybe limit the offer to return it to some time period, then keep it if you don't hear back?
I probably should have picked a different name, but I was swayed by sentimental considerations: it was my email handle at my first job, and, my code tends to be about twice as long as pg's so maybe my username should be too.
Uncloaked human moderation is also fantastic news.
Hear. Hear.
His submission list
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gruseom
is a fine example of articles that "gratify intellectual curiosity." This leadership adjustment bodes well for the future of HN as a community for thoughtful discussion.
While I agree with you it's interesting that only one submission in the last 84 days has had significant up votes. What does that say about the people on HN or the kind of stories they are looking to find here?
I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more views than the second page. People like scrolling; people click much less frequently. So upping the number of posts shown on the new page to 120 should give better content more time to be discovered.
Another idea is to tweak the new page so that the first page of /newest shows every new submission for exactly two hours. That is, page 1 would consist of submissions that are 1 minute to 2 hours old.
Also, maybe some kind of reminder to check the new page every so often would help, but that's probably a bit heavy-handed.
HN stories being anchored by a single URL kind of makes it impossible to put all the topical articles in one big story.
My guess is way way less (not that /newest gets any traffic as it is). I regularly visit /newest to contribute a bit of voting, and I don't think I've ever bothered with the second page.
I could imagine a variant of the endorsement system for submissions, where you can endorse users and have their submitted stories automatically get your vote. But that seems rather open to gaming.
It doesn't seem like many people visit the news feed at all. Personally I imagine the most important features are picking a popular article that multiple people will try to submit (each new submission upvotes the original article instead) and maybe people who have friends with HN accounts. The title probably also makes a large difference.
Some people have suggested improvements to HN's sorting algorithm which would favor more "exploration" than relying on people to go through the new section.[1]
[1] http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...
Yes, and thus the rare souls that venture there have a ridiculously disproportionate impact on what gets the front page. Almost makes you wonder if it would make sense to keep access to the 'new' page as a special privilege for experienced and trusted users. Or at least hide it behind some tiny text link so those newbies don't ruin the party!
HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7430634
DirectLink http://www.airtrafficmanagement.net/2014/03/mh370-satcoms-10...
Checking the HN comments to ensure I don't inadvertently benefit a click-baiter is very useful, too.
That said, we do have some ideas for counteracting that randomness, and it would be sweet if they work. I'd also be pleased to hear any suggestions on this. HN's (semi-)openness to interesting historical and literary material is one of my favorite things about it, and as long as I'm doing this job that won't change.
My favorite, by the way, of all the things I posted recently that didn't get any attention, is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6713259.
Off topic. So, what's the opinion on RD Laing currently in the scientific community? I remember reading "A divided self" and wondering the whole time, is the whole world mad? Or is the author mad? Or is it both?
Many HN users know Daniel as gruseom, though now he's going
to switch to the slightly more legit sounding dang.
Would love the ability to change username without having to email the mods.
I'm not sure whether arbitrary user renaming is a good feature to have. It depends on what one means by "renaming", and there are subtleties. In general, HN strives not to delete history. One option might be for people to create a new account while disabling the old one, and bring over the account age and karma but not its submission history. Our functional programming friends would perhaps approve! But I'm just thinking out loud here.
Absurd: wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate. </offtopic>
Don't know the moderator personally but I wish him all the wisdom in the world, to drive HN to new heights :-)
When there is something interesting, I've often read it elsewhere, or its an Ars re-hash of a story from yesterday. When I submit stories I find interesting and HN-worthy, I find them at 3-4 points having been submitted 12 hours ago.
My perception is that the HN frontpage is being gamed more by social marketing teams, journalists who work for re-spamming blogs and growth hackers. The types of stories are more soft news, marketing from co's etc. than much more hard-tech.
As an aside, right now the homepage is unusually good - must be because it's a weekend and the social media hackers are at home.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never reveal everything you know.One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of getting a good story onto the front page. Mediocre stories with immediate or simple appeal do seem to be doing a better job of outcompeting Rilke than they ever have in the past.
It's a good site for halfway-decent posts about Golang or CSS compilers. Thankfully, it's become less hospitable for nakedly ambitious Bitcoin cheerleading or comically inept copyright law analyses. It would be great if the site could come up with some way to let the kinds of posts 'gruseom's submission log models get some space on the front page, but it would be bad if that attempt reverted us back to the worst of the Venturebeat and Techdirt days.
I think I've gotten Dostoevsky on there once or twice, and a few others.
Completely agree. The Business Week cover story on new details from the Target data breach got 16 upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406
It was submitted with 5 other URLs and each got a point or two.
Another example, the excellent NyTimes story on the NSA breaching Chinese telco companies to hack Huawei got 10 points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963
The NYTimes version was the canonical source.
There was a great WSJ report on Google adapting to the app age which was heavily shared on Twitter, 1 point on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529
Bill Gates Rolling Stone interview, 1 point (although re-blogs of excerpts ranked):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830
BW on Satya Nadella managing the legacy of Ballmer's Microsoft board, 4 points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628
These are stories I quickly recalled from the last ~week that I enjoyed, all just happen to not register on HN.
If I go through my queue on pocket i'm certain there would be many more examples. I'd estimate less than 10% of what I now save on pocket for reading is sources from HN.
My take is that there was an influx of non-tech people wanting to find out what tech people were reading about. If you subscribe to the usual tech blogs you'll find (or would have found) that a lot of their stories are/were sources from here or are reblogs[0]. This mass of new users has now affected what is selected and how.
[0] Example, Notch tweets that they are canceling their Oculus deal. His tweet gets 8 points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714
A Next Web story which is nothing more than the tweet embedded in a page of ads gets 823 points:
One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I can write code to make sure I see them all.)
That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?
One idea is to change the rules so that users are allowed to resubmit stories that received fewer than four upvotes after 24 hours. Right now you risk getting banned for doing that.
It might be a bad idea since the resubmissions will push more legitimate stories out of the new submission queue more quickly, though.
Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page where more people will see it.
Or: show a random 30-subset of the newest 120 stories on /newest, and refresh this 30-subset per view/per time interval. Set this up to get the best of both options: at any point in time the newest 120 stories would be on /newest for someone, and there would only be 30 stories to look at for any one person. This will also give people more incentive to go check /newest once in a while, since they would, more often than now, find many more as-yet-unseen stories there each time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474094 BBC: "American Dream Breeds Shame and Blame for Job Seekers"
Submitted 4 days ago, but only had 1 point until I upvoted it just now.
Do you have some criteria by which you classify stories as mediocre other than your own personal preferences? If there was a decision procedure for this, we could just implement it and have it scrape the web for objectively great stories. Lacking that, we can build a site that aggregates the opinions of its users.
I've played with various karma systems in the past, and it's a really hard thing to get right. In particular, I believe systems need to be responsive to recent activity, while reflective of legacy (this also tends to allow newcomers to rise the karma heap fairly quickly, if deserving). Tuned sufficiently well, this needn't breed apparent favoritism (and contempt).
Who are we, as individuals, to judge the quality of content on a website devoted entirely to collective rankings?
As always, visit /new and upvote the great stuff and flag the flagable stuff.
If you notice weird vote patterns a short email with links usually gets results.
Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link.
This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.
Fascinatingly, the number of stories posted to the site has not been increasing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446750
That might be good. The number of substantive HN-appropriate stories in the world is not growing by leaps and bounds; neither, therefore, should our story stream. We want quality, not quantity.
There's a lot we can do about story quality, because the front page is so limited, there are many fewer stories than comments, and because we manage the front page for quality in ways we could never manage the threads. However, there's no way we can scan the universe of stories to find all the best ones. We rely on /newest to be our universe of stories. If /newest is broken, we'll fix it. But we're going to focus on the problem of bad comments first.
HN has been in an arms race for a long time against artificially promoted content, and we (mostly PG) have developed a lot of defenses against it over the years--a large part of why HN is still standing. I've written software to combat such gaming and I intend to write more. One thing I'm pretty sure of, though, is that the problem of bad stories is easier than the problem of bad comments, and it is the latter that poses the greater risk to HN just now.
Incidentally, this past week was a good one for the HN front page. These two threads, in particular, were IMO as good as any in recent memory:
The second part is good stories not ranking (see comment above), which doesn't have a straightforward solution, although it might sort itself out with softer, re-blog, and promoted stories being moved out of the way.
My current job doesn't have HN-style content. If it did, I'd just submit it once, and leave it alone.
They're usually a bad idea.
Better is to assume good faith and accept that mistakes happen, rather than assume mods need to be kept in check and all actions need to be scrutinised.
Although, where this would really be useful is with banning. Unfortunately, banned users aren't supposed to know they're banned and being able to actually see what straw broke the camel's back might give the game away. But it might help demonstrate to users what's expected of them.
As someone who has been on the receiving end of a shadow-ban several times over the years, you realize it right away if you actually pay attention. Your comments suddenly get no votes or responses.
This leaves no room for improvement of the moderation that does occur. This could be fixed by allowing people with 5000+ karma or so to see the mod logs.
I have a different perspective on HN than I think many other people do here; I consider myself a guest, and don't see myself as part of what makes HN HN. In the somewhat unlikely event that Daniel and Nick do something to make the site unworkable for me, I'm not going to get angry about it.
That's very interesting. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels you're quite a central part of what makes HN what it is. Without contributors - "guests" if you like - who add genuine value there is no community here beyond that you could find on any number of other tech/business news sites. A party with no guests ...
This an especially strange comment - perhaps an attempt at modesty - when one sees in your profile, this:
>"Must-read list: 'idlewords (emeritus), 'pbsd, 'apaprocki, 'patio11, 'gruseom, 'anigbrowl, 'mechanical_fish, 'carbocation, 'potatolicious, 'grellas, 'dctoedt, 'yummyfajitas, 'tzs, 'rayiner, 'DannyBee; Yeah, yeah yeah, 'pg too."
which rather suggests that for you these people make HN what it is, or at least are essential to giving it the twist of flavour you seek. You've got to realise that should everyone else be forced to make a list like this then you'd be on a large proportion of them, surely?
For me, I try to ignore the source of the comments before I consider them but I've been here long enough to have enjoyed many of your comments whether they added a sweet, or sour, flavour to a particular thread. Thank you.
This too shall pass and anger is probably not the right response to that passing, fair play.
It's a lame, lazy and flawed system of moderation which ends up with a ton of false positives.
I wouldn't be surprised if this comment gets me silent banned!
Yet you argued in another comment that this evidence should be hidden from the community. If you have faith that the evidence would show that bans are always justified, why not argue for them to be public?
That's the one I was referring to. Can you point me to the one you are referring to that says why you prefer an opaque system?
Being offended shouldn't offer anyone any special rights. If something "offends" you, ignore it and move on.
Its a good think you said "shouldn't" rather than "can't", because any number of laws forbid various kinds of offensive behavior.
> If something "offends" you, ignore it and move on.
Not everyone can "move on", which is why we have the laws we do. This is only peripherally associated with the present topic, but no one should imagine that offensive behavior is absolutely tolerated, or that people can only relocate themselves to solve the problem.
For example, sending "offensive" tweets should not be illegal IMHO.
Yes -- that's a point I made also.
Perhaps new accounts could start off dead until endorsed, and bans could be reversed. A bit like pending comments, but at an account level. It takes away "starting a new account" as a solution to being banned if both accounts have the same (100% dependent on content of posts) likelihood of coming back.
When it applies to the most egregious of problem users then it works as intended, but there have been cases where people have been, apparently, posting while banned for some slight, and providing reasonable content. That suggests to me that some banned users might be amenable to a warning or might well change their behavior if they were made aware that their actions were intolerable.
Also, it makes no sense to me to continue using up the site's resources stringing people along who, by definition, the staff doesn't want there. Although I admit I have no idea how much of a problem that is with HN itself, since it doesn't use a database.
Because you cannot stop them so at this point it is less about saving resources and more about harm reduction. It's unfortunate some people who probably would change get caught up in it but it's really a small price to pay(their not having their comments public but still being able to use the site normally) for the greater enjoyment.
The only people you're effectively hurting are the ones who think they are making useful contributions but make the unfortunate mistake of hurting the moderator's feelings.
I disagree with this assertion. Shadow-banning on HN is quite well known, and any troll worthy of the term understands the landscape of their endeavors.
>banned regularly so it effectively doubles their work
How is opening a link once a day or so in incognito mode to check for their comment effectively doubling their work?
>Quite often their willingness to invest time into trolling drops off with lack of response so often they will leave before they understand that shadow banning is a thing.
Again, I think we both have very different ideas on the transience of a trolling campaign. I assure you, once someone is determined to troll a specific community, its a much longer commitment than you are estimating.
Edit: Impressive. Down-voted for stating my disagreements with counter-points.
If the downvote was unfair, someone often comes along and fixes it; and if it was fair, then you should reflect on what you said. Either way, the impulse to complain should be held in check.
From my personal experience having dealt with trolls on other popular forums and implementing shadow bans myself previously my experience runs counter to your beliefs.
You don't have to catch every troll with shadow bans. You make the experience for the new ones unenjoyable by removing their feedback and they are more likely to move on before they become committed enough to start cycling accounts.
If someone is determined to troll a community than no form of protection other than brute force moderation will work but compared to the number of trolls out there the number that rise to that level of abuse are very small.
Silent banning is more like censorship than banning - you're silencing someone because you don't agree with them, without telling them they're being silenced.
It's also a matter of where the line is drawn. Most forums ban obvious spam - viagra, porn, etc. But HN (IMHO) bans people for being overly critical, for not agreeing with the groupthink, or perhaps not having enough tact or politeness.
Silent banning has 0 effect on spam and trolls - they'll verify their spam/troll comment has appeared, and if it hasn't, just create a new account. The people it hurts are simply people who happen to offend a moderator.
You can be pretty confident not to post spam, but how do you know if your comment may offend some moderator? - These days most things offend someone. That IMHO makes for a 'walking on eggshells' type of forum, rather than an open place to discuss.
If that's the price to be paid for transparency, I think it's worth it. The idea of a cabal of mysterious insiders ,pulling the strings while the rank-and-file plebians stay in the dark, blissfully unaware of what's really going on, - sounds more like the plot for a (bad) cyberpunk movie, than a desirable model for real life. It also strikes me as pretty close to diametrically opposed to the "hacker ethic".
My fantasy would be some way of fixing /newest as well as adding topic tags; perhaps topic tags just within /newest. I'd be happy to read everything in /newest which matches: security, crypto, hypervisor, hardware, wireless, ...; I basically find it unusable as it is now.
I don't find the level of (in)civility to be a personal deterrent, but I grew up on EFnet and alt.*, so that would be an almost 4chanian bar. I do dislike when it deters worthwhile contributions from people who are less thick skinned. I'd generally err on the side of "let people say stupid things so they can be debunked in public" vs. "censorship", but at some point lack of filtering becomes a form of censorship of its own (crapflooding, etc.)
It's really no different than physical exercise. Yes, it can be painful in the short term, but over time it allows adaptation that increases strength and robustness.
Jl is probably aware that this sensitivity can be overcome, and how to do so. Sometimes it's ok to pass over a thing in silence instead of telling a stranger to smile.
That's not how I interpreted Pacabel's response. I interpreted it more like him/her telling jl that his expectations of Daniel 'fixing' HN to ban critiques are unrealistic.
(I felt slightly bad about my response, in retrospect; I meant "YC partners seem to be subject to particularly harsh criticism, which is unfair. Perhaps if you were anonymous it would be less aggressive trolling directed at you." I'm sure jl has thought of that of course.)
On the whole, that's good. I would ask @kevin to make comment threads collapsible. Works that way on my hn android app and I love what it adds to the comment reading experience.
- Not in all cases, some times honest opinions and straight talk might come across as rude but it's not meant that way. Strict Policing should also provide a way for sincere members to Voice their concern or Appeal if they get 'removed' or 'shadow banned' which happens quite often. Let me know your thoughts please.
Yes, sometimes groveling in front of the abuser will get you a pass ("but just this once"). No, not all those abused will do it.
I can't decide if a scenario where people are banned by accident is better or worse than one with evil moderators abusing their powers.
Would it be correct to paraphrase this as "Perhaps I'd rather be the victim of evil abuse than of a human error"? I'm simply wondering if I'm misinterpreting this or if it's a difference in values.
Of course it's not my comment, so take this with a grain of salt.
One of the secondary reasons why I asked PG to out me is that it's super frustrating not to be able to defend the site and the team when people make sinister and unfair insinuations. I'll probably get it out of my system in a few days, but hoo boy has that been frustrating.
Groveling is the perception that some of the people (including me) have when deciding what to do when they get shadow-banned. So I just end up dropping the old account and any reputation it may have gained over its lifetime to start over.
I understand that it's dramatic, but from the outside it feels like a process of begging for forgiveness for committing some infraction you don't even understand. To rub salt in the wound, we aren't even given the dignity of knowing when we have uttered words that violate the secret book of acceptable comments. We just have to infer after a sudden decline in comment engagement that we have been shadow-banned. This is infuriating to say the least. For a site to have a sanctioned method of giving regular users a permanent punishment which causes them to pour effort into providing comments that land muted is repulsive to me.
I apologize for ranting, but I have yet to see a strong logically sound defense of this practice. It's one of the worst 'fuck-you' features I've seen a site implement towards its users that make critical comments. Critical discourse is what makes this site great! Unaccountable shadow-bans chill critical discourse regardless of their intent.
I beg you to reconsider the practice in its current form. As I mentioned elsewhere, someone intentionally trolling will verify that they aren't shadow-banned anyway. The people shadow-banning hurts the worst are the ones who don't expect to be shadow-banned (i.e. genuine commenters).
If it's true that what people really need is feedback about what they're doing that's inappropriate for HN, and if we'd only give it to them then they would respond by adjusting their behavior, then I have to agree with you: we should find a way to give that feedback. It would be a clear path to improving the site and correcting some of its dysfunction. I'm not sure that it is true, but I hope it is and am willing to test the idea. But we'd need a way to do it that would scale.
> People who get banned can either start again with a new account or can write a short email showing understanding of why they got banned and asking to be unbanned.
The issue people are bringing up is, what happens when the banee doesn't know why they got banned (not to mention that they got banned)?
For what it's worth, I usually point out Metafilter as a site that seem to do moderation pretty well. There are of course a number of important differences in the way the sites work, but I bet there are a great many lessons that could be shared in both directions.
Thus the importance of correct email addresses in the user's profile.
I have no idea, really, what is 'acceptable' to post here. There is no informative FAQ, there are no examples, there is no guidance coming from the owners, and so on. Every time I post I then watch my karma to see if I am being voted up or down. But I don't even know if that is measuring what I think it measures. Would I see it go down prior to a hell ban? (btw: we all call it 'hell ban' - does that not convey the frustration and dislike of this feature) I don't know. It is all just a fog of assumptions. As you post and read here you start to pick up some of the acquired wisdom.
I have mixed feelings about posting here. Fault my personality if you want, but I care somewhat if I get banned or not. Certainly, if my posting style is likely to get me banned then I don't want to waste my time posting here. So, I watch, and wonder, and fumble about.
It's not nice.
People can find out why they were banned by emailing us. That's been true for a long time. Also true is that we routinely unban them as long as they give us reason to believe that they won't keep doing whatever it was.
What I do think is that we need a better, finer-grained, more proactive feedback mechanism for informing people when their comment crosses the line. If we get that right, it should not only assuage the hurt feelings we're talking about, but improve the quality of the comment threads too.
But this is harder than it sounds. HN has some specific conditions, and we're not going to do anything that violates those. We're also not going to transplant any system that has worked well on another site—systems don't transplant. So what we are going to do first is think about this for a while.
In my view, emotion and reason need one another to function properly, especially in human situations and probably anywhere.
I don’t have any data about trolls, but perhaps if you looked at your data you might find that people rarely turn into trolls if they have at least a certain amount of karma points, or if they have been on the site for at least a certain amount of time. If you find such a pattern, you could make it so that when those users write a trollish comment and should be banned for it, they are actually informed of the ban instead of silently hellbanned. But if you ban a user whose karma or time-on-site suggests a higher chance of being a troll looking for a reaction, you can still hellban them silently.
This policy would mean that long-time users would know not to fear hellbanning after they pass the publically-stated point. It would let them interact with the site without that slight fear that their comments are going to waste, because they know the site would visibly prevent them from writing comments if they’ve been banned. But the policy would still let you use hellbanning, which is supposedly very effective, as a deterrent for trolls. I hope that there actually is a correlation between likelihood-to-be-a-troll and some combination of karma and account age that you can base this policy on.
I don't think he's referring to the tone of the email. The process of even having to ask for your account back is "grovelling".
but the guidelines say:
"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."
Should they be updated?
I hope this issue will get addressed, too.
Image is proof of lousy connection.
You must not use reddit.
(I'm allowed to say that since it's partly my fault reddit is slow)
Gmail, twitter, facebook, kongregate etc will fail miserably but the tiny table-based HN code will load 99%& of the time.
Have I been capriciously slowbanned to encourage me to lose interest and get lost, or is the process of counting up the user karma a cause of significant slowdowns? Are certain accounts more costly than others?
The "fun" of Hacker News is that you never can tell...
It is interesting that the top post in this story is someone lauding the moderation of someone whose moderation they, presumably, have no ability to view. While the assignment of hellbans and slowbans may be completely just and deserved, it might also have a profoundly corrupting influence, steering conversation exactly where it serves certain purposes best.
Have I mentioned how fantastic the current crop of YC companies are‽
It takes 2-3 seconds to load my profile page and another 2-3 if not more to load my comments page..
I've said absolutely nothing controversial or mean-spirited, aside from perhaps questioning Paul Graham's dubious "hidden until approved" moderation scheme.
Truth be told I've derived little value from the site for quite some time, so as Cartman so oft said: "Screw You Guys, I'm going home!". Or at least to Slashdot or something.
Cheers.
Their beta site was what made me stop visiting earlier this year. The fact that such an unusable design could seriously be considered in the first place was partly responsible. Their lack of action when confronted with lots of very legitimate concern regarding the beta site was also responsible.
Maybe things have changed since then. But I wouldn't know for sure, having not bothered to go back there.
> I'll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.
Yes, I'll be working on Arc again. (I've been working in Arc regularly, since HN is written in it, but I haven't been able to spend much time thinking about the core language for the last 5 years or so.)
It is one thing to provide constructive criticism. It is another to be condescending. Unfortunately, and maybe it is just human nature, but I think we see too much of the second.
I'd love to see more help in getting projects off the ground. That would be a great compliment to Y Combinator. Since many Y Combinator alum are on the site, they could use their experience to help HN contributors who aren't in the YC program.
Nice choices and it'll be cool to how it's going to move forward.
I hope that with perhaps a bit more time available, dang will be able to kill more political stories as well as 'outrage' stories about things not very directly connected to tech/startups - those articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions.
More importantly, a big thanks to everyone involved! I live pretty far from Silicon Valley or anywhere else where everyone eats sleeps and breathes tech, so it's always been nice to have this window into that world.
I doubt that we'll try to ban political stories altogether, partly because some (e.g. Snowden) do overlap with HN's core topics, but mainly because it's hard to define "political".
But "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" is, to me, a narrower and clearer criterion that is pretty easy to apply fairly. PG has spoken about it in similar terms. I think we'll probably get more active about those. But we won't do anything major very quickly.
Here's another random idea. I think it would be more difficult to code up, but there are certain comments where I think "ok, this is a wrong answer, but in good faith". Those should get "pinned" at 0 karma. Other comments should get pinned at 1 - I wouldn't want to see them cross over into negative territory, but they aren't great either. I would envision this working by clicking a 1 or a 0, and as votes go up or down for the comment, my contribution changes as a consequence. Say I click 0 when it's at 1. It goes to 0. Others pile on, and it goes to -1. At that point my downvote actually becomes an upvote to push it back towards 0.
All those dynamic calculations would probably be a PITA, so I can completely understand something like that not seeing the light of day, but I just thought it was an interesting idea in terms of being able to say "ok, this is not a good comment, but it's not a mean one or anything, so it should have a floor under it".
I have the impression that posts are more heavily downvoted now that the comment score is hidden.
It was rare to see comments become unreadable as it is now the case. I suppose that seeing the score allowed users to consider a given score as a sufficient punishment, and refrained from burying others deeper.
Maybe you could display the score when it's negative (that info is already conveyed by the shade of the text, but it is not quantitative)... or maybe cap the negative scale?
Some newbies make mistakes out of cluelessness, and by the time someone tells them to read the rules their total karma is way below zero. That's pretty harsh.
Then the problem I see is with the user interface: most people wouldn't want to use it, and it would clutter things up (a numeric input field, or a specialized "vote towards 0" button). I guess it could be a setting that individual users could enable. I'd hazard a guess it would be deemed not worth the trouble.
It's kind of sad to see him "sign of" HN and YC so quickly and without fuss. Part of me wants a grander send-off, with commemorations, "look backs", speeches etc. He certainly would deserve this, though I doubt he'd want it.
But it's not really that sad, because each act of his life's play has been greater than the last. Having been so inspired by what he's done so far, I can only imagine what comes next.
Thanks PG for Hacker News and Y-combinator .. both have changed the world for the better. Also, thanks for handing them off to such awesome hackers, who will certainly carry them on and up.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...
E.g. obviously you have some kind of operating budget to pay staff, offices, etc. Do you simply not break it down into different categories ahead of time? With an organisation the size of YC I don't understand how you can keep everything straight without something at least semi-formal.
To me, YC and HN are like the business and editorial sides of a newspaper. They're one company, but focused on different things. YC optimizes for great startups. HN optimizes for great content, that is, for curiosity. For HN to be "marketing for YC" would be like a newspaper's stories being "marketing for its advertisers". That would be a bad newspaper. Intellectual curiosity, the core value here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) would wither.
In other words, the way for HN to benefit YC is to just have the highest-quality content it can. That seems so obvious to me that I hope it is to everybody else too.
Maybe HN is just the pamphleteer equivalent - but we need to find new ways of gathering round the campfire and sharing stories - newspapers worked well for a while, what's coming next seems to have the HN shape - and still we rely on integrity in our leaders. In an age of the blockchain as the guardian of our trust, I find that interesting.
Many (most?) newspapers have some stories that are very directly marketing for their advertisers - newspaper runs a story on bra-fittings and so sells advertising space to fashion companies.
In fact isn't this how newspapers work: they sell advertising. If the stories are "poor" (which characteristic is modified according to the target audience) then the paper doesn't sell and the advertiser gets fewer impressions. The paper promotes itself, wins pageviews and sell ads on the number of pageviews it's getting. Advertisers get impressions and the system feeds-back allowing the paper to grow, charge more and continue creating "news".
Isn't that exactly marketing for the advertisers?
Indeed looking at a NYT Magazine story at random I find not only regular advertising but the author's byline is also advertising a book. That makes me wonder if they're managing to sell much of the story space too.
In part I'd assumed that HN was created in order to provide buzz/feedback for YC companies and serve the purposes of YC (eg market information)? Indeed from the user perspective there's no way to know, with secret moderation, if any particular story has been "unfairly" promoted or quashed; just as with dead-tree publications.
Just last week, Ben Richardson, Bloomberg News' editor-at-large for Asia, resigned his post over Bloomberg management's pressure on their journalists to refrain from producing articles critical of China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-news-...
(*) try banning constructive commenters on the site. you would then probably also receive complaints about banning and comment shittiness in equal measure.
Perhaps you should simply block all comments on those stories that are likely to cause some "nonconstructive" (I don't really like the term) controversy or those whose subject has already been discussed on other stories, rather than killing them (dropping them from the front page, that is).
The reason I'm offering this is because of an argument I had with dang (gruseom) about a week ago over a story that expressed a very clear political opinion (which was particularly pertinent to HN). The reason it's important for these stories to be featured on the front page is that much of what is done in Silicon Valley is extremely political – from Uber to the latest GitHub scandal. I completely understand the desire for HN to stay away from politics, but that's not the result. Seemingly shying away from politics is itself a very powerful political statement, which is often apparent to anyone reading HN when something important is going on. It either communicates that you don't understand what politics is and your role in it, reduces the role of engineers to that of mere technicians at the same time most of them claim to be the exact opposite, or sends a message of silent agreement with the status quo. In fact, this was one of the main points of that killed story.
Just as an example – unrelated to that particular argument – featuring stories about Uber's success while dropping stories expressing outrage over their practices either expresses agreement with their behavior or a lack of understanding of how political is everything they do. "Outrage" over Uber isn't any less "constructive" or political than a discussion of, say, how much money they're making and how.
HN isn't /r/programming. It is not a technical discussion site (although it is that, too), but one for all things SV or hacker-related, including the effect of technology on society and vice-versa. As such, HN can't hide from political discussions over those very issues.
But because "political" stories can and often do generate heated and sometimes bigoted debates, it might be best to conserve the site's desired collegial atmosphere by simply banning comments on certain stories. Dropping them from the front page sends a clear message that leaves a very bad taste in many of the readers. Letting them be, but prohibiting debate in the comments says: this is an important opinion that many of our readers think you should be exposed to. Read it or not as you wish, or post an opposite thoughtful opinion, but don't bicker over it.
Ultimately, though, the solutions are going to have to mostly involve the community. We'll probably be posting about this more in the coming days.
1. Click over to whatever textbox allows you to edit the site guidelines.
2. Clarify the "what's on topic" clause.
3. Add a "criticisms must be constructive", perhaps deriving it from Paul Graham's "colleagues working together to uncover the truth" wording from the Pending Comments announcement.
Start by spelling out the norms you want to see here, and we can all work to move the site in that direction without having to nail down the statutory language or figure out what 100 lines of lisp will best implement them.
Hmm, seems like I'm being all talk. I'll just put my demo online, within the next couple weeks.
Wikipedia's problem-solving mechanisms are impressive and effective for a project with a single coherent goal, but they aren't good at fostering community. In fact, they do the opposite thing: they artificially factionalize the community, which holds together despite and not because of those mechanisms.
"Don't be a dick" covers most of it. "Don't attack the person making a point. And don't be vicious when you attack their point; test it, probe it; destroy it; just don't be vicious".
Sadly having extensive documentation about what is or is not allowed leads to destructive bike shedding and comcern trolling.
Adding the small extra details of "Don't attack the person making a point" and "don't be vicious" would be improvements on the current guidelines.
Also, for example, adding "sarcasm is not helpful".
I agree with Thomas(!), clarification of the guidelines would go a long way.
There are certain topics that bring out the flamewars more than others, and those should get particular attention. Most things political, sexism, nutrition (weird but true), and so on. Most of all I think it's important to reinforce the idea that you can disagree with someone even on deeply held beliefs and still be civil about it. Moral certitude does not make it ok to be mean.
To avoid Wiki-style lawyering (as noted in other comments), I think the guidelines could really be kept incredibly small. I think pg's "colleagues working together to uncover the truth" line covers 90% of what HN discussions should be.
I'd also add "no comments that don't add information/low signal comments", to avoid "+1" style comments and humour. I'm not sure most of the community agrees with me, but I don't like such comments here. Reddit optimises for fun being on Reddit and reading comments, HN optimises for getting the most on-topic information in the least time.
It'd be great if a tiny set of guidelines were enough for HN, but that's very optimistic about people being able to pick up on implicit rules & values. A well-written set of reasonably detailed guidelines would make explicit what the majority of decent HN commenters already agree that HN should be.
(note that this is the standard pep talk that has to be delivered to moderators everywhere from time to time, and indeed that my friends periodically deliver to me when I'm worrying the same way you are :)
FWIW I was slow banned years ago and it still hasn't been removed.
It may just have been a moderator having a bad day, but the message when it's left there is clearly "You're not welcome here.". That's a message you might not want to be sending to people who are saying what you can't say.
If you fix the Font Stack in news.css so that it is
font-family: sans-serif;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
Good Luck with the new role.
Sometimes the only reasonable and legitimate response to certain ideas and claims is to dismiss them. It's much the same for negativity. Sometimes a negative response is the best one.
Highly sanitized, politically correct, feel-good discussion is pretty much pointless to engage in. The best value and insight often comes from asking the hard questions and pointing out flaws that are painful to acknowledge.
It might not feel pleasant all of the time, and it might not make people happy, but engaging in discussion in a way that some people may consider "negative" or "dismissive" often gets the best results for everyone involved.
For example-
"This is broken as it exists, for reasons A-E. However, if you did things X-Z, it would work much better and be much more interesting."
Sure, that takes more time. But honestly, if your main priority with your post is that you can write it quickly, you're probably not making a meaningful post anyway.
I wonder if an "are you sure" type button could help improve posts. Maybe it could say "Does this contribute to the conversation?", just to remind people what the point of posting really is.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1084804500...
Which was a bookmarking tool, that enabled you to create your own scoring system with multiple facets. Like the Slashdot: Insightful, Funny... You can't have too many of these as it can get unweildy (probably why Facebook settled for the Thumbs up), but it could help. Especially for a community that sees the outcome value and are prepared to learn and contribute towards community moderation.
Up and down votes are so ambiguous that I'd almost suggest they are practically pointless. The 'Mee too' and 'I don't agree' votes really need to be filtered out into something else. Perhaps into a 'Consensus' facet. Add to the mix 'Topicness' : 'On topic', 'Off topic'; 'Niceness': 'Pleasant', 'Rude' etc.
Word cap each comment too, so they remain to the point. Essays can be linked to.
Divide HN into two "sub-HNs", one for "intellectual curiosity", the other for everything else (e.g. startup news, web frameworks, A/B testing, meta-HN... even those YC startup announcements).
iPhone 4s user here. This scares me. Unlike almost every other site, Hacker News currently works great in mobile Safari.
For spam and abuse, I'd love to move the logic to a separate system where I can use resources less carefully and not worry about taking down the site.
What gets put there? Could passwords be on it even after you shut down your computer?
Edit: Or did we already get that cloud upgrade and I missed it?
Edit: oh, I'm talking about failures that were not planned
Thanks for HN, pg!
An open-house at expression.edu and one minute phone call from Pixar while I was driving to my old job changed mine(long story) ...and no, I didn't get the job. I don't even work in the computer-graphics field. I just took a wild shot in the dark, but it was the small snowball that started rolling down a very tall hill. By the time it reached the bottom, my life reached the top. Inspiration to change your life can come from anywhere; especially unexpected sources. I'd say HN is more expected than my failed phone interview.
Ignoring questions about the honesty or self-serving nature of the invisible-hand moderation, HN's rise came at the expense of a number of other sites, including reddit's /r/programming, Slashdot, dzone, etc.
The draw of HN, despite serious (and continuing) technical deficiencies, were hordes of young programmers who wanted to gain the attention and favor of Paul Graham and YCombinator.
So it's a serious question when I ask whether the technology community has been made better by Hacker News. I would quite sincerely say that no, it has been a net negative for the community, even if it serves Paul Graham and YCombinator well. The technology world is worse off for it.
The only other community I've posted to is Reddit, but... It seems like what sets HN apart is the ability to craft and hone your reputation. If you want to become known as an expert in bitcoin, all that it takes is time, intelligence, and writing good comments on HN.
You can gain a reputation on Reddit, but not as easily as here, I think. And it's usually a lot easier to get a negative reputation over there than to gain a positive one on here.
You can also write a profile for yourself, which a lot of people will read. Reddit doesn't have an equivalent of that. Even if you just provide contact info, you still gain value. For example, after I rather publicly lost a bunch of money on Mt. Gox, someone emailed me to see if I was okay. It was a really nice gesture, and in hindsight I'm not sure I'd get that kind of experience out of some other community. But I'm of course biased, since I've spent my time here and not in other communities.
Which leads to my second point of concern, which is thinking that a person's HN "reputation" means anything beyond HN. I would be very surprised if it does. Speaking of bitcoin, it seems to me that the generally accepted experts tend to be people with a deep history of working on crypto currencies, or at least a deep history with bitcoin specifically.
I've been participating, moderating, and in a few cases researching forum communities for about 15 years. It's easy to fake expertise; just make sure all your comments and posts are well-researched and fact checked before posting. That's not the same thing as being an actual expert--it's the difference between a Ph.D. in physics and an undergrad writing a research paper. No matter how accurate and readable their paper is, the undergrad is not an expert. And forums tend to disproportionately reward readability, humor, and writing style, over substance.
I'm not trying to criticize your posts or expertise specifically; I don't know either well enough to comment. I'm just sounding a general cautionary note about taking online forums too seriously. They are great for entertainment, social gratification, and light education. But they are no substitute for the work of creating real accomplishments.
Me too.
No, you don't.
On the other hand, sometimes posts are simply reactive and cannot really be improved. In that case, consider just deleting the post...in the best case, do so before receiving downvotes.
That may be true for select individuals, but I'll posit that it's no longer broadly true for the majority of the people on this site who vote.
Going by my own comments (since those are the only ones I can see the score counts for), and comments which are obviously mass-downvoted (grayed out), I see cases all the time where "serious" posts - which are well researched, features citations, links, and serious discussion - languish. Meanwhile, the occasional angry rant directed at a popular "bogeyman" (like the NSA) gets massive upvotes.
Honestly, I feel like most of the talk about "signal to noise" ratio here is just a meme itself at this point. Sure, the gratuitously silly stuff gets downvoted to oblivion,
Or: I propose the hypothessis that your calibration for how other people are perceiving things is incorrect, and that if you adjust that, then while there's still a lower percentage for whom it's true than there used to be, on average people still value signal more than you do.