Effects of TechCrunch article (with News.YC traffic graph)

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html?24mar08

by pg • 18 years ago

50 29 18 years ago

amichail5• 18 years ago

"There has been some dilution as a result. The stories that get voted up are not quite as good, and the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite."

The problem is voting. As you might guess, I think a more meritocratic approach to social news (e.g., intelligence testing through puzzles) would give you better results when you have more users.

petercooper3• 18 years ago

I'm not so sure. That's not so much meritocratic as a test of someone's determination or the amount of time they have to waste.

True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy.

I'm also a fan of giving precedence depending on the "age" of the user. That is, how long they've been a member of the site. This means the site may not evolve as quickly, but it appears that's something people want to avoid anyway. It tends to be the new "influx" of users that comes after popularity that drags a site down, so letting older users have more say could make sense.

amichail5• 18 years ago

"I'm not so sure. That's not so much meritocratic as a test of someone's determination or the amount of time they have to waste."

That depends on the nature of the puzzle. Not many people can solve Rubik's Cube no matter how determined they may be.

"True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy."

That may not lead to a meritocracy. I think intelligence testing is more reliable.

astrec• 18 years ago

It's possible (probable, even) that every one here has read Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", but here 'tis for posterity: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

webframp• 18 years ago

sorry but intelligence testing alone isn't meritocratic. perhaps when combined with other metrics it could be a factor, but far from the only one.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

The worrying thing is that when things start to go bad they go bad fast because the system is self-reinforcing in two different ways:

1) When people see lame stories make the front page, they see that they can submit lame stories and have them make the front page.

2) When you submit a good story and it doesn't make the front page then it's kind of depressing. And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens? Sucky people.

pg• 18 years ago

There have always been lots of bad submissions. The real problem is voting, not submission. People aren't so much submitting worse stuff as upvoting worse stuff.

And the danger of that is worse than just encouraging bad submitters or discouraging good ones. It makes the site seem to be about dumber stuff. Seem because it is now about dumber stuff.

rms4• 18 years ago

Can you put up a vote weighted page on an alternate URL, if the vote weighting implementation is ready to be turned on? In the past you've said that with vote weighting on the front page looks mostly the same, I think many of us are curious if that is still true.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

So now you're finally admitting there's an effect-- any plans for fixing it?

andreyf2• 18 years ago

Did any stories about the end of the 700mhz spectrum auction make it up? It's not a good sign that something that big gets missed over by the community.

edw5192• 18 years ago

Then submit it again. Maybe the people that would have been interested in that story were too busy working to visit the "new" page during the 4 hours it was there.

iamwil• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143955

Yeah, I submitted that a couple days ago and no one voted that up.

I think that if you come to depend on hacker news for your news, then you only visit the front page, and stop visiting the new pages. And given that you can upvote on the front page, people just do it there, rather than peruse through the new articles and upvoting them. So what you end up with is that an article just needs 2 or 3 votes to make it on the front page, and then there's a positive feedback effect. This makes it more of a hit or miss sort of thing for articles. I think if you can only vote when you're on the new scenes page, it might help.

wallflower• 18 years ago

I strongly agree with #2. I usually stick to contributing comments because I don't want some of my favorite stories I've come across (which I have not yet submitted) to get buried (and unable to be submitted later because of duplicates).

edw5192• 18 years ago

"And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens?"

Entrepreneurs.

This forum is a metaphor for a startup itself. You have good days and you have other days. So what do you do? You KEEP ON SUBMITTING. You perservere.

Personally, I have reached "Hacker News Addiction, Phase II". Every time I read something somewhere else, I want to know what you guys think. So I submit it. And usually, no one comments. But I also understand that I don't really have much control over this, so I just keep submitting. And keep voting. And you should, too. Don't let the "lamemakers" take over your site. Just keep doing your thing and they'll be moving along soon enough.

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

I am one of the new users and I'd like to comment on the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite remark.

I am not entirely sure if polite meant not rude or if it meant a pat-in-the-back encouraging. However even a casual glance shows a lot of modded up comments that are of a latter kind. Especially in the Ask YC/HN articles. While reasonable encouraging is good, there's also a plenty of great job and looking good comments for pre-launch projects that are a plain junk .. with an emphasis on pre-launch. In my humble opinion these are extremely damaging comments regardless of how polite they are.

Perhaps this is a part of the site social culture. Or perhaps I'm misreading the meaning of "less polite". I just hope I'm wrong on both counts.

Now, mod me down if you agree :-p

rms4• 18 years ago

I think he meant not rude. The idea that you should only say something here that you would be willing to say to someone face to face.

webwright• 18 years ago

"the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite "

This is a hard statement for PG to verify-- right on the heels of the TC spike was all of the crap that popped up about his recent essay.

I'm going to reserve judgment for a bit.

ROFISH• 18 years ago

You guys seem to forget the fact that YC applications are due soon. Perhaps some of the new influx is users trying to cash some quick karma?

bfioca• 18 years ago

I had exactly 1 karma point when we got accepted into YC. :)

ntoshev• 18 years ago

I have noticed there are much less programming/hacking stories recently and tried to upvote the few remaining even if they are not particularly interesting to me. If this site becomes exclusively about startups, I don't think it would be interesting to me.

Also much more stories where what is said is supposed to be important mostly because of who said it. I believe popularity contests are inherently against core hacker values.

NewWorldOrder• 18 years ago

it's good to know that some of the somewhat/to outright discourteous comment threads aren't the norm...

Effects of TechCrunch article (with News.YC traffic graph)

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