How would you improve Hacker News?

http://branch.com/b/how-would-you-improve-hacker-news

by josh_miller • 14 years ago

24 28 14 years ago

branch.com

dotcoma2• 14 years ago

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

ColinWright4• 14 years ago

You really think it "aint broke"?

dotcoma2• 14 years ago

Pretty much, yes.

itmag2• 14 years ago

I agree with this. Hating on HN is the new meme, but it still is an excellent community IMHO.

My main gripe with HN is the influx of snarky/obstinate people. I've come to expect a certain feeling of frustration/resignation after posting a comment. "Great, soon I will have to read 3 snarky comments nitpicking over my wording and enumerating every possible objection to my argument, no matter how far-fetched."

xqyz• 14 years ago

Any reason why this discussion should not be held inside of hacker news instead of on a third party website?

ColinWright4• 14 years ago

Yes.

There are several recent items about this question here on HN, the threads are long, the same points made over and over again, very little insight, and nothing will happen.

More, threads about HN have a tendency to disappear without trace, because meta is usually frowned upon. There are a few exceptions, but if you want to go all meta, it's better to do it somewhere else and have a semblance of control.

Toshio• 14 years ago

I would disclose who is upvoting/downvoting whose comments. There are cliques on every social news site. Some of those cliques are genuine communities of technology enthusiasts, but others are like little armies of trolls which have been set up by aggresive PR firms and marketing departments of large tech companies. I have never on any social news site seen a system that gives you insight into whether upvoting/downvoting is honest-grassroots or organized by some PR firm for the benefit of some corporate entity.

ColinWright4• 14 years ago

Decide once and for all whether you think this is, or want this to be, a single community.

If not, then allow users to have different "front pages" according to their interests.

If so, then define clearly the policies and police them properly.

HN is currently sinking under a morass of links trying to reflect the ever widening spread of interests of an undifferentiated mass of users. Any given individual will find it harder and harder to find links that match their interests, and the site will become more and more bland, culminating in a race to the bottom.

Retaining the level of politeness is a noble aim, but in the end, strongly technical people will find nothing of value here and will leave.

russtrpkovski• 14 years ago

1.Making the front page should be based on a black box score comprised of upvotes and comments. This would avoid the piling on effect.

2.Throttle user's ability to submit content based on their karma score. Users should participate and add meaningful comments in order to be able to submit content. HN is more than an SEO best practice.

3. If its not your content, you don't deserve the karma. Users should be rewarded for submitting their own content (URLs would need to be added to profiles). I think HN overcompensates content submission from a karma perspective.

gte910h• 14 years ago

3 things would improve hacker news:

Better dedup

Report suspected PR (the Atlantic, for one, is hitting HN big now that reddit banned them)

Removing submission abilities from the newest of users, and of users who get flagged above a certain amount.

mquander• 14 years ago

It's almost impossible to get some self-balancing system of karma incentives to work out exactly right. But we don't need to do that. There are lots of smart, thoughtful humans here who will work for free or cheap in good faith to keep things right. Why do we refuse to enlist their service?

Basically, just straight up steal the Metafilter model of non-shitty content.

- Five bucks for an account. Maybe ten.

- Tell the mods to actually moderate discussion (instead of spending their time changing good post titles to terrible post titles.) If there aren't enough mods, then ask for more. There needs to be someone keeping discussion on-topic and civil.

- Self-links are OK only if they are really good. If someone sits around posting every post on their blog to HN (or having their buddy do it) ban them. We need less borderline-spam content on the "New" page.

- Is this supposed to be "Hacker News" or "News"? If the former, actually enforce it. Kill flamebait posts, political posts, recent dupe posts, and non-tech/startup-related posts on sight. If someone does nothing but post crappy, off-topic articles, ban them.

How do you prevent the abuse and evasion of all these vague rules? Easy. You retain good moderators with community transparency of moderator decisions to keep them honest. It works.

larrys2• 14 years ago

"Self-links are OK only if they are really good. If someone sits around posting every post on their blog to HN (or having their buddy do it) "

Along those lines I'm wondering why a few words by the OP on this subject simply asking a question and offering nothing more deserves to be on the front page.

The OP is Josh Miller (by handle) who works at branch.com where the simplistic post appears.

This essentially appears to be publicity for branch.com.

bpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

I think you're right about the publicity thing and I'm torn as to whether it's okay or not. On the one hand we're all here to support each other in building things and all that plus this really was a good way to show the HN crowd how Branch is used/useful which I know would appeal to a lot of us. There's no doubt having a guy from Branch post a Branch here is a great way to get people using it and talking about it. But then again it also feels a bit sneaky and just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If we give him the benefit of the doubt we can assume that because he's involved with Branch he uses it and also wanted to pose a question to HN so in the end his use of Branch would seem just this side of innocent. If we don't give him the benefit of the doubt then I'm not sure it was right. I do give the benefit of the doubt though, personally.

As to whether it belongs on the front page... Well technically the front page is a reflection of this community. If its on the front page then it belongs there because it was voted onto it. You don't have to look any further than the front page to tell how HN is changing for better or worse. But I do know what you mean when you say "deserves" and yeah, I'm right there with you.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

Make viewing points optional. If I want to see them, let me see them. If I don't, don't. Points viewable only by logged in users, perhaps.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

unlike most people I think that HN is pretty great. Sure the site has some problems with being overly basic and not having anything that helps foster/grow good discussion[1] but overall it's good. The problem HN has is just like every other social site: people. People change; everyone is different. HN is shaped by the people here and as they evolve so does the site. What HN needs is:

1. Proper guidelines about what is and what isn't appropriate here. Types of content, subject matters and how to approach commenting. Systems to support how much HN is growing, (eg: subreddit style system for show hn, ask hn, jobs, new content types as they arise, like recently the blog posts responding to another HN blog post)

2. Active and transparent moderation. Submissions that don't meet the guidelines should be removed, as should comments, but it should be done transparently so that the community can see what is and what isn't acceptable. If a comment doesn't provide value to a thread it should be removed and if someone is consistently posting poor quality comments or comments that don't fit with the guidelines they should be removed.

HN is becoming diluted, but with a proper structure that is well enforced the site will be able to handle it. It's hard to force a social site to remain the same forever, but it's possible and in the case of HN I think it would be the right choice.

The most important thing to remember: you can't solve people problems with programming.

[1] To address this problem I would have a reddit style notifications system and the ability to subscribe to favourite users.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

The submitted article (blog post) has an interesting factual claim with which I disagree, but that leads to a technical suggestion that I find intriguing.

"I'll start: for me, the main problem with HN is that it's extremely hard for new links to reach the front page, or even get more than one or two upvotes."

I disagree that it's extremely hard for new links to reach the front page. Most newly submitted links don't deserve to get to the front page, and too many of the links that reach the front page are still not the best links that were submitted on the same day. (For the record, each time I visit the front page, which is several times a day if I am interspersing breaks into working in my home office, as I am right now, I then go to the new page. So I am scanning the new page often to look for good new links to upvote. I upvote them if I see them. Some of them make it to the front page, but many do not. Many worse links receive no upvotes at all, not from me and not from anyone else, but some worse links, for example links with linkbait titles from low-quality sources, nonetheless make it to the front page.) Every link has some shot at making it to the front page. The front page will best reflect community consensus about what belongs on the front page if all experienced users who have reviewed the site guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(which were recently updated) take turns scanning the new page from time to time to look for the good stuff.

While I disagree with what the main problem identified above is, the suggestion in the submitted blog post about what to do about it is not half bad:

"One way to solve this might be to reward people who "discover" promising new links, i.e. give them their first couple upvotes. For example, if you're one of the first 5 people to upvote a post that eventually goes on to earn more than 20 upvotes, you get extra karma."

What this helps deal with is the first-past-the-post problem in submitting articles, which is that some people are all too aware that they get NIL karma from a submission unless they are the very first to submit that link, so they use RSS feeds and scan titles (without fully reading articles) to decide what to submit. That often results in submission of inferior articles and especially it results in submission of noncanonical URLs that mess up the operation of HN's duplicate detector software. So I would not be against implementing this idea, which would put the community on notice that everyone can take time to READ articles before deciding what to submit, and indeed everyone has something to gain from promoting a good article from the new page to the front page.

On the other hand, if I were directly answering the question "How would you improve Hacker News?" with a focus on software and interface tweaks, I would put a prominent link to the site guidelines, or perhaps even a snippet of key guidelines in every submission form and every comment form, and I would implement pg's idea and my follow-up to that

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397542

of looking at how users use their comment upvotes as a signal of which users are most determined to uphold the community guidelines here, adjusting their voting influence accordingly. In general, I think that most good stuff submitted to HN, either as article submissions or as comments posted to other people's submissions, gets too few upvotes. Look for good stuff and upvote it early and often is my approach to improving the community.

larrys2• 14 years ago

"which is that some people are all too aware that they get NIL karma from a submission unless they are the very first to submit that link"

As a side note to this if you submit a link that has already been submitted you bump up the karma on that by one point. So even if you submit a link first (by the method you describe) and it doesn't make it to the front page or get "organic" upvotes the mere fact that someone else has the same idea, but was a minute late, gives you an extra karma point.

Added: So the conclusion is that if you are trying to get karma it pays to spend time adding the obvious suspects rather than the outliers (say a story from the NYT or Techcrunch that others will do the same.)

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

"I disagree that it's extremely hard for new links to reach the front page."

I agree. It takes tuning, but 40% of my last ten submissions have made it to the front page (my record was, admittedly, fairly miserable before that).

jon6• 14 years ago

Stories should be able to be tagged using an arbitrary set of tags similar to stack overflow. Possibly only people with a certain karma should be able to tag stories. Then let people filter stories by the tags it has. This would alleviate the concern of "too many YC posts" because they can be all tagged 'YC' and I can filter those out.

ColinWright4• 14 years ago

I refer my learned colleague to the following ancient poll and discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367949

biznickman• 14 years ago

How about we improve this post by making it "Ask HN:" :) Not sure why this is linking to branch

arethuza• 14 years ago

The problem I have with HN at the moment has nothing to do with what is on the front page but everything to do with the tone of some of the comments - there has, as far as I can see, a rise in quite openly hostile and blatantly rude responses which I really don't remember seeing in the past.

NB One thing to note is that I'm not talking about sw007's experiences but comments containing lines like:

"So slow clap for writing some useless crap. Sorry for the vitriol, but this shit is just dumb."

politician• 14 years ago

OK, I'll bite: how about a system where down-votes can be optionally associated with descriptive tags like "dismissive", "mean", "irrelevant", "false", or "disagree". The tag counts are hidden from everyone except the comment's author.

jseliger• 14 years ago

I don't think there's a technical way. I think the problem is (mostly) social / cultural, and I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-ha... .

bpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

As much as we all know HN has lost enough of its luster that it's worth mentioning, I really do think at this point, unfortunately, the damage is done and there is no going back. HN is old enough an large enough now that for a while it'll still be awesome and beloved by many but soon enough it'll go one of two ways: it'll either die, become lame, and it's only inhabitants will be those it sought to keep away for so long or it'll continue to be high quality but become more like StackOverflow or certain subreddits - having great discussions and people but with everyone who knew HN it's prime knowing that it doesn't hold a candle to what it once was.

That's the thing about subcultures which I think HN most definitely is in that it is supposed to attract the most intelligent, entrepreneurial, techiest people. When it's new it's great because it makes you feel like you're part of not just a club but an elite club. Inevitably others who find out about your club want to join because they feel they deserve to be part of the elite club. Oh yes, they have all the makings of a genius and need to be part of it. This kind of self selection sucks and what's happening to HN happens to everything on the web that can be considered cool. RIP HN. We can bury its remains in the same plot as MySpace, Digg, and soon enough Facebook.

Although I would've hated it when I created my original account, I wonder if having an invite process would've helped like Dribbble and Forrst have.

j45• 14 years ago

More startup focus, less general cool hacker stuff.

I've haven't been here as long as others, but I've definitely noticed the signal to noise ratio respective to startup threads changing.

If it could be tagged and have both, it would be nice. Such features might border on the beauty and simplicity of this site, though.

gojomo• 14 years ago

My mind often wanders over a 'laundry list' of possible interface innovations to improve social news site interactions. A few of the items:

(1) 2-dimensional comment rating. The 1-dimensional upvote/downvote conflates 'advances the discussion' and 'agree': there's no simple way to register, "good comment but I disagree" (other than another written comment). This makes some simple disagreements earn downvotes, and because downvotes have a connotation of censure (and even censorship as the comment descends in visibility), increases negative/adversarial feelings. Hiding the net comment scores has helped a bit (with other costs), but adding a 2nd-dimension -- a little compass-rose -- to ratings would let up/down be "worthwhile/unworthy" while left-right could be "agree/disagree". And, the separate agree/disagree counts could be shown, the give a sense of magnitudes rather than just net differences. My theory is that by providing an outlet for non-suppressive disagreement, fewer full replies would be necessary. Everyone could 'weigh in' without so much of a corrosive sense of status-retaliation/tribalism.

(2) separate parallel stream per-item (or per-comment) for 'carping'/correction comments. Often a headline sucks. Or an article or comment has blatant logical, factual, or grammatical errors. The community can't resist racing to point these out... and to some extent that's necessary, and can result in an headline/article/comment improvement for clarity/correctness. But it's also somewhat distracting and low-value, especially if the carps persist after a correction makes them redundant, or the carps become more prominent that substantive points. So give them their own tab. By convention, corrective/meta comments should go there, and moderators (or community votes) could also move misplaced comments there. My theory is this would retain their corrective value (especially for those most interested in that sort of precision) without clogging the 'main' thread with their bulk and hypercritical mindset.

(3) community rewritten/ranked headlines. Abusive headlines often waste readers time, create unnecessary discussion tangents based on misconceptions, and bias talk in a more adversarial direction. But corrections by moderators are inconsistent (and themselves often controversial). So maybe let the community propose alternate headlines, and vote on which is best. Only the top headline, presumably improved by group action, appears on the summary list views... the alternative proposals on the detail page.

(4) subheads (aka 'dek' or blurb/tease). Allow a second-line in submissions for display in list/summary views, as is common in many journalistic presentations. More context can help save time/attention. Because writing these can be as challenging (and subject to the same abuses as headlines), if the headlines can be community-corrected per the above, the subheads should as well.

(5) event/topic clustering (a la Techmeme). Interleaving 10 stories about some attention-grabbing new release or controversy with 20 stories about other things heightens a false sense of novelty/urgency but doesn't lead to more coherent evaluation/discussion. All the stores about "Company X releases Y" (and similar) could be grouped as a contiguous block. The block might rise/fall on total votes to all stories; the relative prominence of the stories within the block could be based on their individual votes. They'd have one comment thread, avoiding redundant comments (and comments like, "as I mentioned in the other thread"). The groupings could be moderator-controlled, algorithmically-controlled, or even community-influenced.

(6) ignore 'sunk time' in ratings decay. Consider story A, submitted at an inopportune time, say time 0. It starts with one vote. Over the next 6 hours, 4 more votes/resubmissions trickle in. It never hits the front-page and quickly leaves the 'new. Now, at hour 6, elsewhere on the net, story A gets more attention. It's wrapped/aggregated as story B, which is also submitted. In the next 15 minutes, say that A gets another 25 upvotes, while B gets 20 upvotes. I have the strong impression that B will shoot up to the front page -- 20 votes in 15 minutes! - while A will still languish in obscurity -- merely 30 votes over 6 hours. And yet, for the overlapping, recent 15 minute period, story A got more votes. I suggest it ought not be penalized for the prior hours it spent in the doldrums, before it really 'broke' more widely. The right decay function (looking back from now rather than forward from submission time) could make this work. My theory is that removing this extreme recency bias would mean some slow-building stories, from more foundational sources, would get better treatment than well-timed later sensationalizing/oversimplifying rewrites.

itmag2• 14 years ago

Have a private message system which mods can use to send warnings and such to obnoxious users.

How would you improve Hacker News?

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