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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

This discussion about HN link quality is old and comes up frequently. I'm mostly a lurker. Thing is, I haven't read a complaint about the "low quality on HN" in quite a while.

About a year ago or two, these objections would be posted multiple times every day.

Maybe HN declined from 5 years ago, but I think it improved over the last year or so, because a lot of marketing BS isn't here anymore.

View on HN

There is a lot more aggression in the comments.

People are reluctant to flag or downvote posts that clearly violate the guidelines.

Long time reader, recently created an account...

I don't see downvote or "flag" buttons. The only button available to me is a "^", which I assume is upvote, but without a downvote or flag button it's very out of context... (edit: Yeah, the on-hover is 'upvote' but there's no downvote or flag).

Yes, you only get these options after reaching a certain karma threshold (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Click the timestamp on a post. Do you see a flag option now?

Downvoting is available at a karma threshold. I think flags for comments and submissions are always available?

Not always, or people would create accounts just to do it. The flag threshold is low, though (30).

I believe the threshold is higher than that, as I am currently situated at 45 and do not have the option.

Then you do have the option. Maybe email us (hn@ycombinator.com) if you're still not seeing it?

Clarification: I have the flag option, but not the down arrow. What is the threshold for the down arrow appear?

Sorry for the miscommunication, I had assumed that both functions were enabled at the same threshold.

If you're a long-time reader you should've known that the downvote button requires a minimum amount of karma. Or at least you'd know that it's inappropriate to derail an HN topic when there are abundant Google results on your question.

It has seen some improvement, but I guess the higher amount of submissions has diluted the occasional awesomeness that appeared from time to time. It's just a feeling (but I admit that when the complaints were at its highest it's not like HN was that bad anyway.)

Also, I'm not saying submissions are low quality, but lower quality. They are still excellent, and the articles in HM were great. They were just not as great as in the past.

Content marketing is still everywhere - AeroFS are doing it right now, and the Bitbucket story's submitter looks like he works at Atlassian and registered just to market here over and over again.

There will be many more submissions by companies today.

I don't see any problem with that. We shall downvote uninteresting submissions and upvote good ones. It is irreleveant why they were submitted.

It is important because the submission process is an important filter - someone from HN saw something and thought the rest would like it. When that is circumvented the front page becomes democratically assembled from content that is provided to us, not selected by us.

A good (content) marketer would produce content that he thinks his target audience would like.

There is no difference as to why a submitter does submit: the variable we ar talking here is the ability to estimate what is liked by the HN community.

This ability is not necessarily afflicted by the motivation behind producing and submitting content.

The original PG essays are a content marketing program for Y-combinator, for instance, but nobody in the marketed to crowd resents them. Au contraire, PG is hailed as a her (tm) and there is zero wrong with any of that, IMHO.

PG's articles are just content, they're popular here but they don't get here artificially. I'm talking about companies who are on HN just to ensure their content reaches us.

Trying to please the audience doesn't make the content suitable, they're still applying a broken and biased decision process to judge that.

You can't downvote submissions. Lurk more.

>> This discussion about HN link quality is old and comes up frequently.

While this is true, I've been reading HN for about 5 years. The first two lurking, the last three actually posting and commenting.

From what I remember, HN used to be very technical and startup oriented, which is what got me hooked. Over the past two years or so, I'm seeing a lot of articles on things which are not directly to tech or startups. I've accepted the fact I have to do a lot more filtering and searching to find articles I'm actually interested in. Not a big deal, but something I didn't have to do 2 or 3 years ago.

There's a lot of bias in how each of us remembers these things, but one thing we can say for sure is that HN has always been about a lot more than tech and startups, because that's why it was launched in the first place:

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

Try www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat

It negates the excess in bias by adjusting the ranking algorithm

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