Programming Is Like Sex

http://codesnipers.com/?q=node/440

by catalinist • 18 years ago

27 39 18 years ago

codesnipers.com

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

I’ll take your word for it.

ken• 18 years ago

It's what the internet was created for.

motoko• 18 years ago

No, it's not.

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

It gives you hand cramps

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

It's procedural knowledge

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

It’s hard to find a good partner outside the bay area

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

The results are messy

Prrometheus7• 18 years ago

You’re usually not sure which language to use

ptn• 18 years ago

you wouldn't show your mom your latest trick

ghiotion4• 18 years ago

Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.

pg2• 18 years ago

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2.

The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on it. And if they like it, they upvote it. Sounds harmless enough, right? And yet repeat and the result is a disaster.

What is the solution? The Right Thing would be to somehow scale votes by how easy/hard it is to vote on something. Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.

ghiotion4• 18 years ago

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the potential for abuse with folks misrepresenting the complexity of their article. But that wouldn't be hard to spot.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

I've been meditating about this over the last couple of days, and I'm pretty sure there are three stages in the life cycle of social news site discussion quality.

1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments)

2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions)

3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems)

Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably almost more important than the comments themselves. Good users will put up with stupid links, but they'll leave if it becomes clear that their contributions aren't being valued and they start to feel alienated from the community.

Up until recently the discussion quality on news.yc has been in stage one, but I feel like it's been drifting toward stage two over the last couple of weeks. I'm especially worried as we get closer to the deadline for YC apps, since quality always goes downhill during those periods.

pius• 18 years ago

I think there's a fundamental lack of agreement on what an upmod, uparrow, digg, or what have you actually means.

Some people upmod for relevance, others upmod for bookmarking purposes, and some upmod whenever they see something that makes them giggle.

Maybe more social news sites need to rise to the challenge of being opinionated in what the point of their upmods are.

akkartik• 18 years ago

Hmm, you could just markdead. Do y'all resist the temptation to kill stories past some number of upvotes?

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

Perhaps you could give users a limited anti-karma budget they could spend to downmod articles. Something like you may spend 1 point of anti-karma every 24 hours for each 100 karma you have earned.

For ordering purposes, a story's effective karma should be something like (total upmods / (1 + total antikarma)).

thaumaturgy• 18 years ago

I've opined a bit elsewhere on what happens to social sites as they get more and more popular.

If you want YC to be, and stay, as a particular sort of thing, then unfortunately you have to actively enforce a particular culture. Since, presumably, you don't want to have to babysit the thing yourself all the time forever, that means picking a handful of people and 'blessing' them to do it for you.

So! Here's one way that might work -- though there're gonna be some objections to it:

Pick a dozen or twenty users that you think really 'get' what you want the site to be about. Set a special flag on them in your database. When they upvote a submission, it counts for a little extra, say 1.5 points; likewise if they downvote a submission. Then, you need to make sure that as people come and go, you still have this active core group of people tuning your site for you. So, if an 'unblessed' user gets habitually upmodded in their comments, or their submissions, by members of your blessed group, over a period of time that unblessed user gets automatically blessed, and their votes count for a little extra too.

This still leaves the door open for debates and arguments, while -- I think -- helping the site to stay on-subject without your active participation all the time.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

What can I say? Sex sells... Perhaps we can disallow the use of the word "sex" in the site description? That will prevent crappy threads from shooting up the list thanks to some nitwits oogling at the word "sex"

prakash• 18 years ago

I guess a bit of benevolent dictatorship is required in keeping the signal/noise ratio high by one/small set of HN folks.

I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:

1. the raising competence of the current user base & 2. the wave of new users

I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.

dpapathanasiou• 18 years ago

Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.

Yes.

I would have certainly used it on that burger thing yesterday.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Could be worse. This link on Digg got 7070 upmods and 692 (!!!) comments:

http://digg.com/comedy/Coolness_2

...so far.

TheTarquin• 18 years ago

Not a perfect analogy though.

For example, I really do prefer to program alone . . .

Programming Is Like Sex

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