Hacker News Reader

Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

It's a little ironic that HN is not particularly responsive to feature requests from the community... in contrast to how YC recommends startups be run.

There's that idea that appropriate profit motives are an important way to make things happen. Therefore, one way to make HN more responsive to requests would be to make it into a startup. Not that that should happen.

View on HN

We advocate that founders pay a lot of attention to users, not that they literally do what users ask.

What keeps users here is not features but the quality of the links and the comments. So that is what I spend the most time on. E.g. we have really good software for catching spam, and also semi-spam promoted by voting rings. There are also a number of subtle tweaks to prevent flame wars.

The last code I released (the day before yesterday) was to enable the system to ignore the flags of people who flagged too indiscriminately. Which in turn depended on code I wrote to study how big a problem bad flagging is. Like good defense, this kind of work is generally invisible. Even news.ycombinator.com/classic is something I wrote for myself to try to gauge whether quality was declining.

How big of a problem is bad flagging?

It's highly localized. There turn out to be a small number of people who generate large numbers of bad flags. (Bad = flagging something that does not end up getting killed.) Which meant the solution was to be able to turn flagging off for individual users.

It might improve flagging accuracy if you included it on users' profile pages. Give people a metric and they'll tweak it. The result might be dramatic.

That's a really good one actually.

Just being able to measure how many - and which - flags were 'good' flags and which were not would already help.

I flag 10-15 stories per day and very occasionally a comment (maybe three times in all so far or so), but I'd have to track all those stories to see if they end up getting killed or not. Most of them are easy calls, the outright spam. But there are border cases where it would be good to know exactly what the guidelines are.

Especially since 'bad flagging' seems to be a problem, if there is a lack of clarity there then by resolving that 'bad flagging' as an issue might go away.

I totally agree; it's just the incongruity.

The epic feature request thread seems vestigial: you often responded there 800-900 days ago but haven't for 428 days, I'd guess because HN has outgrown it.

Yeah, is kind of cheesy to use an ordinary comment thread. But a new, purpose-built feature request system is one of the many potential new features that, while a good idea in principle, would take significant time and yet have little effect on the quality of the site.

What about simply giving meta discussions (including features) a place of their own ?

That way if there is an interesting one (and it does happen, even if rarely) it has a spot and doesn't get killed because it takes up valuable space on the 'new' page.

I've been thinking about that for a while, if only because if there was an official place for meta-discussion, I could make people stop cluttering the real threads with it. On the other hand, maybe this feature would make the site more attractive to the kind of people who like meta-discussion, when I want it to be less attractive to them.

Well, since some of it is useful, give that it's own spot and leave the flag and kill options in place to control the meta discussion should it get out of hand.

Just like in wikipedia there is the 'talk' page, it's out of band but it is not out of control.

That seems to be a good middle ground.

It's a little ironic that HN is not particularly responsive to feature requests from the community... in contrast to how YC recommends startups be run.

No, it's not ironic. HN is not a startup. Isn't that obvious?

Make something people want is advice about how to get rich, not some moral imperative.

Edit: this whole issue isn't that puzzling either. What part of "the guy is a minimalist and has very little spare time" don't you people understand? :)

Edit 2: ooh, downvoted! Well I do concede that countering spurious claims to irony is a bit of a tic on my part, probably ever sense I saw the brilliant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg

HN would make a terrific startup challenge. It's already got a potential revenue model that would work: Charge for admission. It works for similar sites, and I think it would help a lot for this one.

Because, as I said last time, what Hacker News needs most of all is a bigger sense of entitlement among its users.

Yeah, because Hacker News readers really feel entitled. Where is this arrogance you claim to see, and how is it different from any other web site online?

It's not different in that respect from other websites. People on other sites appear to feel the same asinine sense of entitlement: that the site should be run transparently, that their feature requests should be considered carefully and implemented if possible, etc etc.

I'm not saying you're like that personally, but I think the trend is pretty hard to miss.

That's why I said "different from any other site online." I don't think we're any more entitled princesses than Redditors or Diggers, though.

I don't feel entitled to good service on HN (and thank God, because we sure don't get it), but I think it would be nice to have. If Hacker News could somehow turn itself into a competitive start-up, I'd like that, because I do think this site suffers from a lot of things.

People say exactly --- I mean EXACTLY --- the same thing about Craigslist every day, and Craig Newmark keeps saying "anything I add to the site could take away from it in some other way", and there you have it; Times New Roman, browser-default <a> listings in non-semantic, hard-to-scrape lists, etc.

I don't use Craigslist, but HN is not the same sort of site at all. There are features that would add positively to HN that wouldn't detract anything from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com