Dear sw007

http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-sw007

by raganwald • 14 years ago

98 13 14 years ago

raganwald.posterous.com

alexshye• 14 years ago

"And this is not a passive experiment"

This seems to be the most important thing here. In any community, you have the chance to play an active role. If you stay and do good, you help it in your own way. If you jump ship, you leave the community with one less person that cares.

rdudekul• 14 years ago

The author asks to ignore all the negative advice and pick out the positive crumbs. Not everyone can take negative comments effectively. I for one agree with sw007 that it is demotivating to receive a bunch of negative feedback. Also genuine entrepreneurs posts seem to struggle to come up on page 1 of HN, when mostly controversial or sensational topics seem to take the prime space.

Kudos to pg for observing and listening to us. It would be awesome to have guidelines and incentive structures to keep HN as entrepreneur friendly as possible.

raganwald• 14 years ago

I don't actually advocate 100% ignoring it. I know from personal experience that negative feedback is very hard to handle. I don't believe in just "positive thinking" or "ignoring negative experiences," I believe in using specific mental habits to manage my own thoughts and emotional responses.

What has worked best for me is a methodology called "Learned Optimism:"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism

I wrote about my experience with it here:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-...

It's not the only methodology, there are other very good ones in the popular (but excellent) books "Feeling Good" and "Mind Over Mood."

jarek• 14 years ago

Entrepreneurship for the entitlement generation. Everyone gets a star.

The lack of actual entrepreneurship news on the front page is a separate issue.

3pt141592• 14 years ago

The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side of 100).

The reason that this is a problem is that the average person has more friends closer to the median IQ than they do further away. So when people share new sites with one another they are generally sharing it more often with lower IQ people than they are with higher IQ people. These people come, love the content, stay, and repeat the cycle.

Countermeasures are just fighting this effect. It happened to Reddit, Fark, etc. One countermeasure is smart-flight evidenced by people fleeing to other subreddits like "TrueReddit" or making nearly identical subreddits "CanadianPolitics" vs "Canada". Or "LibertarianDebates" vs "Libertarian". It's like "white flight" only the division isn't racial, it's cognitive.

In my opinion HN suffers far less than it reasonably should, given its popularity and influence. Probably due to good attention, moderation, and direct involvement by pg. It's likely that when I joined HN I knew far less about the world and tech; upvoting the 500 mile email posting or a basic article on split testing. But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

The only community I haven't really seen it happen to so far is Less Wrong, but over there they are absolutely fanatical about keeping out poor discussion. I don't know if that is worth the effort.

To me, the best thing to do is to just leave once it gets bad enough and a better alternative pops up. Something else will come along. Maybe a secretive invite only HN, or something that customizes which articles you see based on what you upvote. The problem with the former is that secret societies are generally self-important and word always gets out (remember fight club anyone?). The problem with the latter is that it absolutely ruins a feeling of community. So those probably won't happen, it will probably just be a new community, much like this one, but with a clean slate.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side of 100).

What is your evidence for this factual assertion? (I have done a huge amount of research on IQ testing, and I have never seen a trace of a finding like this in any of the research literature.)

But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

How would we assess the "intelligence" of an online community?

Why not rather just help everyone acculturate?

3pt141592• 14 years ago

I guess a lifetime of my friends handing me books that were written by smarter people than either of us as well as the widely popularity of a site like wikipedia.

Maybe IQ is the wrong word when it comes to subject matter excellence. Maybe it's a combination of knowledge and IQ. But I certainly do not enjoy reading the Toronto Sun.

As for assessing the intelligence of an online community, it shouldn't be too hard. It's been proven that for native English speakers vocabulary directly correlates to IQ, even when controlling for linguistic IQ. So you could put together a managed LDA generative model that trains on various documents either classified as academic research all the way down to 5th grade writing and see what the topic drift is over time. Should correlate relatively well.

minus1• 14 years ago

What is your evidence for this factual assertion? (I have done a huge amount of research on IQ testing, and I have never seen a trace of a finding like this in any of the research literature.)

Have you found evidence contrary to this? Or are you taking issue with the parent's use of the term "higher IQ" rather than "higher perceived intelligence" or something similar? I'm asking out of genuine interest because the statement seems plausible to me (a layman) based on anecdotal evidence.

athesyn• 14 years ago

It's not about IQ, it's about actually wanting to understand something intellectually, and objectively.

tkahn6• 14 years ago

So the general sense is that HN used to be great and a more open place. I agree. Here's an idea to prevent and reverse the decline of HN:

Set a large karma threshold for upvoting rights.

If you give a bunch of new users the right to upvote they'll just upvote each other based on their ideas on what makes a good community. There's no way to maintain or enforce the culture of the community when the new members can just bootstrap their own culture base with little to no input from the existing community.

If pg was inclined he could set this threshold, normalize/zero-out the karma scores for all accounts created after date X, and effectively go back in time to that date in terms of who has the power to set the tone and culture of HN.

jfaucett• 14 years ago

this was a great post. its hard to deal with negativity when you're so close to the things you share on HN. But I agree just getting one positive and constructive comment is worth filtering through a lot of negativity. Its where another guy shows you something you've never thought about and it makes the code beautiful, or a critiques that helps make your app a better experience for people who have gotten a genuine interest in it.

dumbluck• 14 years ago

Good post, Reg! I think you made Steve's day, and it is good advice for everyone on HN as well. I would be in favor of allowing people on HN to downvote overly negative comments. That would help I think. Not allowing everyone to downvote is a problem. HN karma != helpfulness.

_lj• 14 years ago

Am I missing something here? This post makes it look like the conversation is surrounding the increase in negative comments vs the decrease of positive reinforcement. I don't think that's the crux of the issue at all. I come here for an interesting conversation. Lately, I haven't been getting it. Replacing overwhelmingly negative but unconstructive comments with overwhelmingly positive but unconstructive comments isn't the way forward. That's just trading one kind of troll for another. And to clear up any misconception - I don't think anybody's explicitly saying "say nicer things, no matter what!" But I think a focus on the positivity vs the constructiveness of a comment will take people down that road anyway.

Dear sw007

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