Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN

http://www.georgesaines.com/

by gsaines • 15 years ago

122 140 15 years ago

pg4• 15 years ago

I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.

icey2• 15 years ago

HN used to feel like it was full of artists and now it feels like it's full of critics.

abstractbill• 15 years ago

This is very well put, and unfortunately I have to agree.

_3ex7• 15 years ago

I would say posers instead of critics (myself included)

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.

jedsmith9• 15 years ago

What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone.

Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.

SriniK• 15 years ago

It is the same reason I am commenting less and less.

techiferous• 15 years ago

This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.

gamble• 15 years ago

HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.

ihodes2• 15 years ago

Idea: track the upvotes/downvotes/flags of users and compare them to your upvotes/downvotes/flags (and maybe other respected users). If there are striking similarities, take a closer look. If things still look good (observe comments, submissions), you've identified at least a few potential moderators.

(Also, since I'm sure anyone commenting on the state of HN will have their account scrutinized, my first account is nearly 2 years old, and I've been looking at HN for around 3 years total.)

jedsmith9• 15 years ago

That your last parenthetical is necessary to have an opinion about the direction here is telling, to say the least.

pg4• 15 years ago

There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.

javert2• 15 years ago

If comments "seem worse," then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.

My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.

For example, consider the following:

Some people are saying there's a lot more negativity around here. I think that's true. Also, I've found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.

One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are "mean" differently from comments that just aren't interesting or insightful or correct.

For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes "mean," thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won't get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes "mean" is not easy, but maybe you could have a "mean" button/flag. A person clicks the "mean" flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote's power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as "mean" and greys it out or whatnot.

Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific "meanness" example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.

I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little "metrics bar" that allows users to vote on various things (like "meanness," etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn't impact the UX much for those not interested.

pg4• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments. The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that. (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)

Although maybe I shouldn't say "unfortunately," because that problem may be easy to cure. E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I'm seriously considering trying out.

irahul• 15 years ago

I remember you saying somewhere(or was it someone else) about high number of comments representative of argumentative topics whereas high-quality content having lesser comments - not much to argue about and people agreeing with article.

From that viewpoint, if the articles posted haven't changed much, not much have been lost. The perceived quality may be only representative of increase in number of users, and new users trying to earn karma or new users unfamiliar with guidelines.

So may be the high quality comments and articles are still there, but some low quality content/comment is skewing the perception.

xiaoma• 15 years ago

I've had a lot more upsetting experiences in the comment threads here in the past year and a half than I did a few years ago. I find time on the site occasionally brining out my worse side as well. A few times, it's lead me to shut down my whole browser and go out for a walk.

As far as the stories are concerned, I don't think they ever all resonated with me. To be honest, I probably got more out of Reddit in early 2006 than I ever did out of this forum. Part of that maybe been because of one time benefits of becoming an online junkie-- finding your essays, seeing some of Steve Pavlina's older pieces, learning about a wide variety of niche interests, etc...

Since getting to HN, I'd say that about 1/3 to 1/4 of the front page has been consistently interesting. Too much of the rest has been self-promotional blogging, valley gossip and current fads (diet, exercise, productivity, etc).

I still wouldn't say that I see the site in a bad light. Both the stories and the discussions are a valuable resource. I'm just diverting a bit more focus towards stack exchange sites and screencasts.

netcan• 15 years ago

A lot of the discussion whenever this comes up seems to be over discouraging bad comments.

I'm more concerned with the a decline in the quality of good comments. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems to me like the top 10% of comments I read and discussions I participate in here has declined. This is really the part that I care about most.

I care about the median or worst comment mostly because of how they affect the best ones.

cageface2• 15 years ago

My dissatisfaction stems from the shift from articles about science and tech to articles about entrepreneurship.

Edit: and rampant, childish downmodding.

roel_v7• 15 years ago

I don't understand where this impression comes from - HN used to be about entrepreneurship much more than it is now, and it's what drew many of the first waves of users. There are so many science/tech sites, but very few (just two afaik and one is almost dead...) about software/tech entrepreneurship (at least in the 'DIY' sense - where it's the technical people driving the business rather than being a resource).

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost.

I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_cul... http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144

I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.

lhnz• 15 years ago

I think an interesting experiment would be to let people pick the top-five most useful posts in this thread. Then consider that to them the rest is noise, do the top-five posts represent the top-five that you would yourself have picked?

For the record (and in no particular order):

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440812

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441254

3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440990

4. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441004

5. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2440967

vessenes4• 15 years ago

I like 1-4. I consider Jed to be trolling in this thread, so I'd skip 5. Or perhaps I just disagree strongly enough with his overall perspective that we should let things degrade that I don't think it's worth engaging.

HelloBeautiful• 15 years ago

IMHO the reason is obvious. The first few thousand users have very high IQ, so they would post interesting links and comments. After many more ppl joined the average IQ dropped sharply and so did the average quality of content.

pygy_3• 15 years ago

I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues.

I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores.

As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically.

I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive.

I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed.

I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers.

Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow.

Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads.

Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account.

The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number.

Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma.

I'd suggest two distinct scores

    log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread )
    log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission )

Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much.

Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.

nck4222• 15 years ago

The problem is that commenting in posts that are several hours old, is penalized. If you write a really interesting comment, but the post is about to drop off the main page, you're karma score will be penalized (because no one read your comment).

Absolute karma score is a measure of how many people like your comment out of how many people have read it. There's just no way to determine how many people have read it.

One solution would be to compare how much total karma the comments in the post have accumulated when you post. Then compare it to how much karma there is once reading has stopped.

duck• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if this would work well or not, but I do like the out of the box thinking with this strategy.

nikcub• 15 years ago

pg I believe that the simplest and most effective feature you could implement to resolve some of the comment issues would be to kill multi-accounting.

I have seen it too many times. I was in a discussion with a prominent user here and noticed that every one of his comments would shoot up 4-5 points within seconds of being submitted while mine would go down as many points.

In a later thread, around a month ago, I intentionally requested the page as frequently as I could to measure comment scores, and found that this users comments were spiking up to the top of the thread within a minute.

Comment counts are also self-perpetuating, which you have fixed now, but it would mean that with multi-account a simple 2-3 votes would spike a comment up with further votes from other user (eg. 'if he has had 4 votes in 8 minutes this comment must be good' - groupthink)

Multi-accounting should be easy to fix with IP tracking and some smarts (ie. I assume a multi-accounter would copy+paste the link to the comment). And although the comment counts are no longer there, the ranking and valuing each users vote as being equal is still there.

revorad• 15 years ago

Close new user registration. It might hurt YC a bit, but it's worth experimenting with.

MiguelHudnandez• 15 years ago

While reading the article, I thought of another example of the described perspective. When reading one's own code from months or years ago, it can seem disappointing.

A friend mentioned to me earlier that this is likely a result of personal growth rather than a persistent state of confusion and bad coding. At least it's a nicer way to think of it.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Ironically, the topmost article in the screenshot in his blog post[0] was lauded as "the perfect Hacker News article" in the most upvoted comment.

0: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2419347

jwuphysics• 15 years ago

I was once a huge contributor at deals.woot! After awhile, though, I started to notice the decline in the quality of posts, as more and more users filtered in. I remember being extremely annoyed by corporate accounts that spammed the "fresh" page with worthless "deals". It seemed like deals.woot! was reaching it's eternal September...

But new users might have also blamed the crappy atmosphere on me--that bitching old guy with the superiority complex is everything that's wrong with deals.woot! We need to get rid of people like him!

We know which side we're on. Deals.woot! went one way and I went the other. HN is heading in one direction... and if you don't like it, I'm sorry to say that you may not be able to change it.

Disclaimer: I just want to clarify that I am one of those stupid HN noobs.

zheng• 15 years ago

I can't help but feel like the recent flurry of "HN is declining" is saying to anyone who isn't part of the "old" crown that they are directly responsible for making HN a worse site. I know I feel like since I've created an account, its been all doom and gloom. I don't comment unless I feel that what I have to say would add something to the discussion, but regardless of karma it seems like the sentiment is that new users are dragging the site down.

I might be the only one who feels this way, but I doubt it. New users aren't all bad, and I can't imagine that the purposed decline is all our fault, either. However, the sentiment might be helping fuel the rate at which "bad" users join. Someone who has surfed for awhile and is thinking about creating an account is going to feel turned off for many of the same reasons why you don't jump on a sinking ship[0], but the trolls, etc. won't care either way. Just a thought.

[0] - I'm not implying that HN is in anyway a sinking ship, I derive a great value from it.

jedsmith9• 15 years ago

You're not the only one that feels that way. Sadly, the elitism implied by "wow, our community sucks now" is overlooked by everyone practicing it.

jdp233• 15 years ago

Indeed. Even when people bring it up :-)

greendestiny• 15 years ago

I've been around since HN went public and I don't think new users are generally the problem. I also think the quality of articles is still quite high, and quality of discussion is usually pretty good.

My personal take is that I find there tends to be a subset of users at a particular time who dominate the site. I tend to feel there is an effect where the users with the least to gain from the site are the most valuable, and those seeking to build their reputation on the site can push out the interesting discussion.

Despite my misgivings, I'm starting to think the lack of comment scores could really help in the long run. I think comment scores give the site a feeling a mutual opinion and that mutual opinion starts to cluster too much.

thornjm• 15 years ago

As someone who recently joined HN, I think it would be very reasonable for new members to have lots of restrictions.

I won't pretend to understand the situation fully but I believe there is a learning curve with any new community before new users fully understand it.

I understand there is already a number of karma milestones for features but I think this system could be taken further to be even more beneficial.

- Perhaps a new user can do nothing for the first 30 days or similar. - Followed by original comments only, no replies (except to own thread). - Once some karma is achieved, allow replies and up-voting and slowly increase their abilities. - Once they have significant karma allow them to make submissions, this may stop lots of random submissions in the hope of quick karma.

In my opinion the greatest benefit from this is not in preventing new users from participating, but in slowing them down long enough to understand and respect the current community so they may participate in a constructive and non disruptive way.

stewbrew3• 15 years ago

In the case of a social news site like hn, the external factors have changed though. People now use such web sites for marketing purposes. So, they don't post a site to hn because they think hn readers could profit from it but primarily because they expect profits from visits by hn readers. (Since hn is about startups, this probably isn't that surprising and I'm most likely not telling you anything new. :-)

I think posting an article should have some "costs" or somehow "hurt" posters. They should be rewarded for posting an article if hn readers like it.

seto28• 15 years ago

As the community increases in size, it's normal for this 'decline' to appear. I believe rather than focus on tweaking karma points or moderation is to introduce list functionality ala twitter so people can create their own HN within HN, as they see fit. As newer HNers start contributing, they can be tracked and eventually added to lists so it doesn't stagnate. Doing this will ensure old-timers will be happy while the community gets bigger and the quality 'declines' relative to x years ago.

kissickas• 15 years ago

That sounds exactly like Reddits, which in my opinion are necessary to make Reddit tolerable, so I don't think it would be a bad idea here. Maybe having a finite number could work, too, as opposed to allowing any user to create sections.

qeorge• 15 years ago

My suggestion: heavy handed moderation without apology.

For example, the joke comments with lots of votes piss me off. Were I pg, I'd just delete them outright. If anyone noticed maybe they'd take the hint.

In other words: HN needs a benevolent dictator. "Democracies" on social news sites don't work because the average person is boring.

rimantas2• 15 years ago

I don't get this frowning upon humor here on HN. It should be encouraged above all, not made into outcast.

jasonkester2• 15 years ago

It's not that we're humorless. It's just that we've witnessed what happens in communities where you jokes are encouraged in lieu of actual discussion.

Pull up a thread on programming.reddit.com or slashdot today and you'll find a 50 comment tangent devoted to silly puns. Often there will be four of those tangents to scroll past before you can find discussion about the actual article.

The quick and effective solution to this is to simply disallow silly, jokey comments. As you'll note by reading a typical thread here, it works quite well.

khafra• 15 years ago

I've never seen anyone downvoted for an otherwise substantive comment that included humor. However, if a short, pithy comment offers nothing besides humor:

1. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiousity.

2. It's probably not original and probably not even very funny.

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

Humor tends to crowd out actual discussion. Why bother typing out a 5 paragraph comment on your thoughts on the article when you can just contribute to that pun thread or just post a quick one liner? In a forum where jokes are encouraged, they tend to take over the actual discussion. Pretty much anyone can contribute to a joke thread (especially when the bar is as low as just repeating memes), but not everyone can hold an actual discussion. Thus, you wind up with a lot more joking about a topic, and very little actual discussion. It vastly decreases the signal to noise ratio. While humor is easy to find on the internet, actual discussion is much harder. I'd like to keep HN focused on discussions.

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

I am actually surprised at how much the removal of karma from comments affected my feelings about hacker news.

I like to imagine myself as pretty laid-back and uncompetitive but once comments were removed, suddenly my motivation for posting and reading just seemed to vanish.

Maybe that's a good thing. Perhaps it will produce fewer comments but ones that people are more "honestly" motivated to make.

We shall see...

anateus• 15 years ago

I think it gives the site a feel more like MetaFilter. Exactly as you say, your impetus to post is stripped of the karma motivation, and becomes more purely affected by actually wanting to make a contribution.

Kilimanjaro2• 15 years ago

Well, my tastes are not evolving or changing, I am still interested in using primes for the background, or the latest hack with css transformations, or going from 0 to 10k users in a week. They were my interests ten years ago as they are today.

What I don't like is how larry page is already blundering, or facebook being sued, or how the ipad2 is the new paperweight2 and you should wait for ipad4 with cornea display.

I second heavy handed moderation without apology, and score penalties for every fault.

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

Personally, I think the only thing hurting HN is this constant talk about the decline of HN. It's all I see in comments and now on the front page. If anything is hurting this site, it's the constant complaining. Get over it people - if you don't like it, move on or learn to deal with it - in the end you aren't going to find a community as good as this one.

spxdcz2• 15 years ago

My main problems with HN of late are twofold:

1) It seems to be becoming a blog aggregator for the X, Y and Z 'celebrities' of HN. If I wanted to read all of their blog posts, I'd subscribe to their RSS feeds. Do we really need EVERY one of their (sometimes good, sometimes mediocre) posts showing up in the top 5?

2) There seems to be fewer practical posts aimed directly at helping start-ups (which is what I loved about HN when I joined). If I look at the top 10 right now, not one of the posts gives me any practical advice on building a web business.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but unlike many here, I do feel it's about the quality of the posts, not the comments (though the two are not separate). Certainly, as the community grows, it is difficult to maintain the focused niche that HN once had.

EDIT: Just to expand on that last point. I used to feel like I was 'hanging out' with other people who were serious about building a meaningful web start-up/business. As of late, my personal perception is of an increasing number of frivolous side projects ("I built a 3D teapot in 30 seconds!") and 'cool/interesting' psycho-babble. To sum up, it's becoming less of a professional resource for me.

spxdcz2• 15 years ago

I know it's really out of the question because of the amount of additional load it would create, but in some ways I'd like to have a more personalised home page. If I could just configure it with a:

-objective-c, -java, -hotz, -raises, -acquisition, -node.js, -drm -"considered harmful" (etc)

that would probably give me a 70% better home page.

jonburs• 15 years ago

Are those the topics you're interested in or the ones that you don't want to see? I'm not sure if your example uses command-line argument syntax or search engine query syntax...

I do like the idea, btw. The difficulty most likely is accurately categorizing articles. I know /. added tagging at some point but I'm not sure if that ended up actually being useful.

gord• 15 years ago

I think github is where the action is - HN these days seems more about navel gazing, posturing, karma chasing and down-vote wank-fests... and the result is uniformity.

In contrast, the people who want to get-shit-done are changing the world on github.

I do a technicolor yawn every time I see a post that talks about M$, Oracle or Java.. as if those topics have any kind of future.

Likewise I cant comment on Node.js or Ill get down-voted cause some asshole knows only the bad parts of javascript. [ I can say this with perspective, as I was that asshole 4 years ago :]

PG, stop being so nice and enforce your single minded vision on HN before it dies.

neilk• 15 years ago

I think there's something to the premise of the article, although it's depressing.

It suggests that communities don't grow together. They just gather a new set of people in one place. Then the knowledge that's easy to disseminate, and of interest to all, is distributed pretty quickly. And thereafter there's not much to talk about. New information that's good for the forum is disseminated, but only at the rate it is acquired, which is pretty slow.

Are there other directions, other ways to grow?

- More specialized forums, different types of contributors and different topics? (The Reddit way.)

- Or, maybe the problem is that more structured data is needed to stimulate deeper information exchange. Should there be common resources, like TheFunded's database of investors, or point by point evaluations of programming frameworks? (The Wikipedia way.)

jcr• 15 years ago

Neil, the main article has a link to the "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs" article by Eliezer_Yudkowsky [1]. Considering your post, I believe you will really enjoy it.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

firebones• 15 years ago

When communities get bored, they turn on themselves (and turn meta). Some of the best flurries of interest on HN have arisen from innovation inside or surrounding the platform. It would seem that the better hack is to create more positives (and shift the community's attention to generative extensions of the platform) rather than to simply focus on mitigation and removal of negatives (such as deterring mediocre comments).

Almost all of the focus has been on filtering (true to Shirky's "publish, then filter" mantra), but perhaps equal or greater time should be spent extending the platform and enabling the community to create stronger signal. Karma is always the default attempt, but karmic schemes invariably reach a point where the negatives equal the positives. As the community shifts in personality, the currency of karma changes (500 points earned a few years ago is not the same as 500 points earned in the last few months). It's a different currency now, perhaps even a devalued currency.

An incentive for quality might be something closer to the highlighting of outstanding comments--the Best of Reddit approach--handed out not in a democratic way, but by a selected group of users who represent the kind of community we want. Karma goes private and perhaps is used only as a way of identifying future candidates for handing out highlighted contributions. This recognition is a kind of currency that could be better controlled and perhaps would be more valued.

jeswin• 15 years ago

I am working on a startup which would benefit tremendously if there is a breakthrough here. And I do spend time thinking about this quite often.

Some thoughts:

1. Karma is a good indicator in smaller forums, but it doesn't scale with increasing popularity. It becomes easier to game the system then.

2. Qualifications (doctor, engineers, lawyers) on the other hand has worked well enough in the real world.

So is it possible to replace Karma with Qualifications? But before that, how would we define each? Karma is probably what we have now and needs no further definition. Acquiring Qualification should require investment of time and skill, which should be sufficient enough to keep mediocrity out; yet not overwhelming enough to keep willing people out.

I still have no idea how to go about this, and my examples here are only my vague ideas: - What is the logical equivalent of an exam in programming? Somehow quantify their contributions with code? Open Source? Ask people to do something measurable on HN's code? - For non-programmers, there will need to be other ways of qualifying.

The words I have used here might smell bureaucracy; but can we take this idea and simplify this?

[Edit: formatting, grammar, language]

Mz2• 15 years ago

The more you try to manipulate people, the worse the culture becomes. Karma and such are technical solutions, which are tools and have their uses but the problem here is one of culture, it is a people problem. And people problems aren't readily resolved with technical solutions. One factor here is growth: It has grown too fast to absorb new members at a rate which allows for inculcation with the culture, so the culture is being damaged. Another is "popularity": Comments are "worse" because you have a higher number/percentage of people who are not as educated/savvy/cultured/whatever. Punishing people for simply not being as well-developed won't develop them -- or, more accurately, will develop them in exactly the wrong way and actively encourage that which is reviled here.

I'm getting tired of howling into the wind and beating a dead horse. My thoughts on such things are essentially ignored here while everyone who is respected (mostly technical sorts, who all want a technical solution to a people problem) rehashes how to manipulate the people with some new technical solution. I only tossed this out in hopes it helps you with whatever startup you are working on (and because it is 4:24am and I am suffering insomnia).

Peace.

roel_v7• 15 years ago

I don't think it's that people aren't interested in your ideas, it's just that they are very obvious and don't offer a solution. The only possible solutions tried so far are the technical ones, because that's the nature of the people. If you have ideas on how to solve the problems you list in another way, that would be a major breakthrough.

ignifero• 15 years ago

I won't quit until there is a better alternative. It seems that ultimately it's the popularity of any aggregator that becomes its doom. Maybe stories run too fast so it becomes pointless to comment, or it is because everyone who disagrees seems to be buried. I suppose some other hackers will come up with something better? Anyone have any suggestions?

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

I'd just like to register my vote in favor of a regime of fascist moderation.

thekevan• 15 years ago

This is the best take I have read on the "decline" of HN.

foca• 15 years ago

The guys at c2 have already figured this one out: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommunityLifeCycle

Also, if you're into how communities work and why how they succeed/fail/implode, you should definitely look at Meatball wiki: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/

BrandonM• 15 years ago

I've recently seen complaints about the lack of practical startup advice posts like there used to be. I think this submission highlights the nature of learning and how it ties into our satisfaction with Hacker News.

I think it's inevitable that we join in a flurry of excitement, learn a lot of new things, lose motivation (for whatever reason), and eventually use Hacker News as a way to pass time instead of working. What it comes down to is: How many practical posts do we need? After you've been here long enough, you know enough to fucking build something.

I definitely know enough, and I still haven't done it. I don't know why. I'm certainly not blaming Hacker News for not having good enough articles.

Just a few weeks ago I was giving my parents advice on their small business, and at some point in the conversation I realized, "Holy shit, I really have learned a lot more on Hacker News than I realized. It wasn't all just a highbrow waste of time."

I think that a lot of us internalize many of the lessons we learn here rather quickly, and it's not long before it begins to look like a repetitious echo chamber.

Eventually it's time to stop being a consumer of HN and be a producer. Write that app that you can "Show HN," write that blog post that has a new insight, be that example that defines a successful alternative lifestyle, leverage what you've learned here, and get on with life.

I think a lot of us just need to stop whining and start doing.

petar• 15 years ago

This article, one in a series of articles complaining about HN's decreasing quality, continues to reinforce two beliefs of mine:

(1) A new, better designed version of HN is needed, and (2) A design that does not "water down" from the perspective of EVERY reader MUST be based on reader's choices which will result in different users seeing different things (people don't have the same tastes, and these tastes evolve).

I have a very concrete proposal of how this should be done:

  http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1

What I don't know is this: If I were to implement the above news website, how would it take off the ground at first. Give me a convincing story and I will do it.

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

I still think HN rocks.

I do get a little annoyed at the recycling of links from recent years (e.g. SICP book/videos, Yegge post #n,) that get greeted as some amazing new discovery, but fuck it, some things are always going to be new and amazing for a new crop of people. Yeah for people finding new and amazing stuff.

Are comments getting worse? Don't know. Might be that, over time, you start to notice certain things more, no doubt through some personal bias filter (e.g. comments praising Python, Apple, or Sinatra are almost automatic up votes, while even questioning those things means almost automatic down votes) but, again, fuck it, because there are still a good number of kick-ass comments.

Really, overall, especially compared to some other communities, HN has done really well in keeping up the quality discussion. Could it be better? Probably, but not worth too worked up over. Lots better things to discuss.

Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN

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