Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787474

by euroclydon • 14 years ago

33 44 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm growing weary of reading long posts which dispense advice or tell stories and then when I go to the users profile, it's blank.

It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.

Thoughts?

pvillega• 14 years ago

+1 I believe knowing what interests a user has, or what experience, may help a lot to filter people who speak without knowing the facts (when talking about programming or startups, for example) or whose interests conflict with the subject, so the comment may be strongly biased.

Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.

philjackson• 14 years ago

What does "verified identity" actually mean? That a user has filled in their profile?

davimack• 14 years ago

What's next, then, "real names" a la Google? No, thank you.

pagekalisedown• 14 years ago

Maybe an acceptable compromise would be simply to indicate someone's age.

It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.

arethuza• 14 years ago

Age? I think one of the good things about the relative anonymity in HN is that things like age aren't usually seen as a factor in rating someone's contribution to a discussion.

[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].

Maxious• 14 years ago

Dare I say it but providing more identity hints has really improved reddit. Thanks to some css :after trickery (and now built in support for managing that), it became possible to put more identity information next to usernames called "flair". This ranges from the football team a user supports in /r/soccer, to being a Mojang employee in /r/minecraft/, to getting an AK47 flair for being a verified successful sender of candy in /r/snackexchange. And of course reddit employees, past and present get global flair avoiding awkward "do you know who I am" incidents ;)

rsanchez13• 14 years ago

But HN is not reddit!

ryandvm• 14 years ago

Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit?

Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...

p4bl02• 14 years ago

Your last remark is not incompatible with what OP asks for. Maybe HN could test that during a trial week?

astrec• 14 years ago

60 minutes doesn't seem quite long enough. I'd look at perhaps 0.5 * mean ttl on the front page.

barefoot• 14 years ago

That sounds like an interesting idea.

If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"?

Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".

route66• 14 years ago

User identification with the short comments usually found on HN might be difficult. The challenge still stands if I'm not mistaken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592

Jebus• 14 years ago

This! +1

I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.

chc3• 14 years ago

Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his life to the subject.

† The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.

waqf2• 14 years ago

"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".

officialchicken• 14 years ago

I guess independently verifying claims and facts is too hard, regardless of their origin.

Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.

hef198982• 14 years ago

Being quite new to HN, I don't think less anonymity would improve it, mittigating the "fatt finger" syndrome in mobile would help more :-)

As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all".

I think that's where the voting buttons come in.

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

What about optional links to github/linkedin/etc accounts in the profile and badges next to the comments to show what the person reveals in their profile?

I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.

davidw2• 14 years ago

Something simple like asking if the user wants to make an email address and/or web page public on their profile would be nice.

p4bl02• 14 years ago

There's already an "about" field for that, you can put whatever you want in it, and people do use it for this exact purpose.

davidw2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I do, for instance, but giving just a bit more encouragement to do so would be nice.

Tichy2• 14 years ago

Would be an easy hack to write a Greasemonkey script that displays user info next to their name. If you care, why don't you go for it?

kiiski• 14 years ago

Where do you propose to get the info from?

"...when I go to the users profile, it's blank."

Tichy2• 14 years ago

I thought you don't want to see posts from people with blank profiles. Apparently I misunderstood.

knowtheory• 14 years ago

This is an intermediate question.

What is the actual symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?

Verifiability of stories users relate?

Trollish behavior?

Something else?

Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.

kami8845• 14 years ago

i feel it's pretty easy to find out who people are

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

This is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story)

As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.

As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)

This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.

I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.

Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.

hef198982• 14 years ago

So I've been right about that whith the early votes, already doubted that.

My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.

rcamera• 14 years ago

If they left the profile empty, it was their choice. You can interpret that as if they simply don't want to be contacted. Doing what you suggested won't make HN any "better", it will only drive away the commenters that don't want to be reached out, or those who want to remain anonymous.

For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.

euroclydon3• 14 years ago

I used to think a comment should stand on its own too, but I now think that the benefit of knowing the background of the person speaking to you outweighs the downside of introducing your own personal prejudices. I mean, should HN be optimized toward mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?

rsanchez13• 14 years ago

What benefit is there to knowing the background?

rbarooah2• 14 years ago

should HN be optimized towards mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?

Unless you really think that increased prejudice on HN would enhance the experience for the 'enlightened', then this is a false dichotomy.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

I heavily self-censor whenever my True Name is known. You would only ever hear controversial ideas from the few who recklessly take permanent risks with their job (and possibly housing, dating…) prospects.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

How about a function for sending a direct message to a user through the website? It could be enabled by default, but users could disable it if they don't want to be contacted.

That way, users by default can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.

rsanchez13• 14 years ago

Does a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories?

To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.

walru• 14 years ago

I hate to be so disparaging, but this has to be one of the worst ideas I've seen thrown around here.

Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.

If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically.

I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.

Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.

Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?

euroclydon3• 14 years ago

Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type

I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.

drucken• 14 years ago

This has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true value.

There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.

I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).

HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

I'm curious why you aren't posting under your real name?

Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN?

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