Identity as Collateral: Preserving Hacker News

http://e1ven.com/2009/04/06/identity-as-collateral/

by e1ven • 17 years ago

35 49 17 years ago

pg• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure the solution isn't to identify users. That would be too intrusive. I'm still betting on keeping crap off the frontpage.

The definition of crap may have to get broader. We may have to kill stories related to politics even when they're intellectually interesting. We'll see.

e1ven13• 17 years ago

Encouraging (or requiring) users to link their accounts with a physical identity is certainly a more drastic action than Reddit.com or Digg.com could take, and it very well might be overly broad, but I strongly suspect that limiting the front-page stories won't be enough.

As you commented in "What I've Learned from Hacker News", it's not so much the stories, but the comments, which see the greatest tarnish as new users enter any community without necessarily understanding the culture.

I love Hacker News, and I suspect I'll remain a member as long as you will permit me, but it disappoints me when I see comments along the line of "So what?"..

What's more subtle is the increase in sarcasm- It's not that any particular comment is terribly hurtful, but it indicates a culture of people who are showing off, or attacking one another, rather than working together.

I'm ashamed to admit that at the worst of times, it reminds me more of 4chan than a college coffee shop.

Of course, such feelings are mostly isolated, at least for now, but I'm more worried about preserving the commenting culture than the submitted stories.

tdoggette• 17 years ago

I am a relatively recent arrival in that I've got nothing to do with the "seed" group: someone mentioned this site and Paul Graham at a DC OLPC meetup last year, and I checked it out.

I would not object at all to linking what I say here to my real name. Indeed, my name is Thomas Doggette. My username is my first initial and last name. I don't use my real identity on sites where I argue with others about sex and religion and politics (in rather mixed company), nor where I play games, but something like HN provides a benefit to me (reputation among potential future colleagues and employers) in exchange for being upfront about who I am.

JunkDNA2• 17 years ago

What about granting voting and posting rights to only those people who have been invited to join? Give the members who have the highest karma a set number of invitations and they invite people they trust. To prevent people from gaming the system you could even display the user who "vouched" for a troll to join. This is essnetially the strategy private clubs and organizations have used to preserve their identifies for years. I'm not suggesting we turn HN into a social network or anything, but I do think we can use the notion of personal relationships to act as an anchor. It's less egalitarian (and I would probably not have enough karma to qualify) but it would certainly be effective at preventing the community from being overtaken.

vorador• 17 years ago

What about a "three strikes" for bad comments ?

aak• 17 years ago

"The solution isn't to identify users. That would be too intrusive." - Tara Ploughman

The irony is delicious :)

lacker• 17 years ago

Not really ironic... both his statements and actions are against identifying people.

- Ron Tackle

snprbob86• 17 years ago

It would be interesting to allow people to link their accounts to Facebook or LinkedIn simply to see if there is any correlation between comment scores and willingness to give up anonymity. If non-anonymous posters routinely score better by a significant margin, maybe you could give a bonus starting point to their comments. Slashdot does something like this with their Karma Bonus system: http://www.slashcode.com/articles/03/01/18/0015227.shtml

Alex3917• 17 years ago

"The definition of crap may have to get broader. We may have to kill stories related to politics even when they're intellectually interesting."

That would only make sense if there were too many intellectually interesting articles about politics. There aren't. The vast majority of articles on politics say nothing new at all.

A quick and dirty solution would be just to delete any articles if someone can find a link to an earlier article saying essentially the same thing. This would get rid of more than just the junk stories on politics, it would get rid of all the rehashes of the ethics of nootropic drugs, or the link between race and IQ, or whatever. We have all these topics on this site where people find it necessary to upvote thinly rewritten versions of the same dumb ideas every few months; that's what needs to be banned, posts with nothing novel except the URL.

jibiki• 17 years ago

One of the things I've noticed is that HN voters typically vote up screeds rather than evidence. For instance, there have actually been several articles about the results of real life bailouts, both successful and otherwise; these almost never seem to get as many upvotes as the "Francisco's money speech" type submissions.

But now that you mention this, maybe the problem is that it's easier to recognize articles with identical data than articles with identical ideas. So people say "oh, I've already seen an article about bailout X", but not "oh, this is just another flavor of libertarian blathering."

skolor• 17 years ago

A while ago an article was posted on Kuro5hin about this: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000. It may have been posted here.

One thing I found interesting, and what may be very effective, is something like robot9k. The gist of it is that no comment that has previously been posted can be posted again. I've spent some time in the #XKCD-Signal IRC channel (Where Robot9000 came from), and it forces rather lengthy and interesting discussion. While it would have to have some modifications to work in a commenting situation rather than a IRC situation, I think it largely helps with the amount of trash posts.

Note that while it removes all the "First post" and "Wow. That sucks" posts, it does nothing about post attitude. It doesn't fight against trolling, but at least it has to be original trolling, and you will thus have to have some sort of moderation to beat that.

e1ven13• 17 years ago

Thanks for the link, Skolor, it's very interesting, and I hadn't read it before.

I used to be a regular reader of Kuro5hin, but I've fallen away as I've had less time to read general interest articles of late.

The article seems to focus on several suggestions all of which presupposing the idea that user accounts can't be the same as the list of members, so you see an increase in trolling. I suppose I'm not sure I agree.

I'd be interested to find out if people would be as willing to troll, or even just be vindictive, if the had more at stake than simply a disposable username. There would always be some, I suppose, but my hypothesis is that it would greatly diminish.

10ren5• 17 years ago

Robot9000 might lead to "intellectually stimulating" trolling, but I agree it doesn't do much about post attitude.

A deep strength of hacker news is that when someone goes to the trouble of responding to a troll in a factual rather than inflammatory way, it is supported with upvotes. Responding like this can be difficult, but it's very effective - and good for the soul.

A weakness of HN is that intelligent, articulate writing is sometimes used with harsh attitude and connotations. That is, it's just as nasty as elsewhere online, just elegantly phrased. This is accepted, because HN favours intelligence over attitude (could just be my perception).

Eliezer posted an article on denotations vs. connotations recently, which gave me a new perspective on this old idea: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/

patio11• 17 years ago

The most important thing for keeping HN useful is not making sure that the front page is a pristine pond of Erlang essays, Rails optimization tips, and innovative ways to monetize iPod apps. (Though I prefer a frontpage which is, oh, about 80%+ that kind of stuff relative to generic intellectual curiosity articles.)

The most important thing is that the comments are kept useful by constant vigilance on the part of the community. Did anyone see the reddit t-shirt thread yesterday? That sort of thing needs to remain unthinkable here. Not just the sophomoric sexualization and laughter-excuses-any-misconduct, but the parts of Internet culture which aren't relevant to programming/business/etc. (I like lolcats, anime, and politics myself -- just not here.)

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

<soap box>Lots of things are intellectually stimulating if the commenters treat each other with respect and courtesy.

If the commenters aren't civil, almost no topic is going to work. You can have lots of flame wars and trash talk about OOP vs FP -- heck, we've done it many times. Same goes for relational databases verus column-oriented databases, or Erlang innards vs. the JVM.

It's not the topics, it's the behavior of the commenters that make or break a site.

As a hacker and somebody who is interested in just about anything, I'd like broader topics and stricter commenting behavior, although I understand you can get to the same point with a limited topic list -- it's just real boring. Bascially what you're saying is "let's limit discussion to things that are so technical as to not emotionally involve but just a very small subset of the readers" That's great, but success in this case means the site is bland and stale.

At some point, I think about 1.5 years ago, we had a discussion on here about the reason for other topics. Fact is, after so many startup articles, they all start to look alike. I don't know about other readers, but I'd like a reason to come back every day. The "nuances of database scaling" is wonderful, overdone, and we all wish we could have those problems. 3-D printing? Economics of drug legalization (not the policy)? Working a startup in a down economy? Effects of the Innovator's Dilemma on military power? Comparison of various country's economies and the impact on trade? These are all startup topics: they're exploring problems and issues where startups can get involved.</soap box>

EDIT: I'll add another statement: the best startups are those that emotionally-involved founders come at a unique and interestesting problem from radically different worldviews using technology to make people's lives easier. That means that discussing unique and interesting problems that emotionally charge and divide us is the best way to form groups to begin to solve those problems.

frossie2• 17 years ago

I am one of those recent arrivals. I do work in software, but in a semi-academic environment and don't have the slightest interest in owning or working for a start-up. I came here for the signal to noise, so I guess I am exactly the newcomer that vexes the author (though not having commented until today, I can safely say I have not stoked any flamewars).

For the record I don't have a problem with user identity - after all I post under my real first name which is unusual enough to google me very quickly. I certainly do object to the suggestion of user identity being enforced through membership of a social network. Much as I love Hacker News, I don't love it enough to jettison my misgivings on social networking.

It would be a real shame to kill interesting stories because of the comments they would attract. Perhaps allow those stories to be posted, but lock them down for comments?

e1ven13• 17 years ago

Glad to have you, Frossie!

I'm sorry if I gave the wrong impression- I'm glad to see the site expand, and I think it's great that you're coming ;)

I just want to preserve exactly that signal to noise ratio that makes the site attractive to both of us - The comments in particular suffer when people don't try to maintain a good front.

You're absolutely right that Social Networking may not be the best way to do that- My contention is that digital identities are inexpensive; They don't require substantial investment to maintain, so it's easy to turn abusive.

For example, say for whatever reason, I chose to be acerbic and taunting to people on the forum, rather than engaging the larger community.

It would be trivial for me to create a new username, do things which are destructive to the idea of a community of interest.. It's not just outright trolling, but I might reply to comments sarcastically, and attack people when they "Ask HN" on something I think is somewhat obvious.

The harm to myself would be minuscule- In this example, I've substantially diminish the enjoyment of other people, and might even do so for months or years under the same username.. But when I'm ready to move on with my life, I discard the username I created for HN, and no one is the wiser.

I haven't left any trace that people might find when googling my name. Essentially, I've made myself dispensable.

If I were applying for the YC program, I'd not want to do that, for fear that PG et all would reject my application, but if I'm visiting, and this account is in no way linked to me, what incentive do I have, other than common decency?

Sadly, I think that common decency does not get us very far.

You might want to take a look at the article I linked at the bottom of my post, on creating online communities.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters

I think that it does a very decent job at giving a general overview, but it doesn't yet account for way inexpensive digital identities allow people to behave in an uncivil manner.

Again, welcome to the site, and I hope I haven't scared you away ;)

Xichekolas2• 17 years ago

"what incentive do I have, other than common decency?"

It's a shame that 'common decency' has to be enforced in some way.

I post under a screen name (obviously), and while my real name is in my profile now, even before it was I never felt the urge to push someone else's buttons just for the fun of it. I realize I'm being a bit optimistic when I say this, but I think people rise to the standard to which they are held.

We have a bit of a reputation here at HN for being stodgy and humorless. While I don't think that is true, I'm fine with that reputation if it means newcomers think twice before posting their witty one liners and meme-of-the-week. Eventually the culture initiates the newcomers and they don't have to think twice... they will know what the community values and what it does not, and they will contribute accordingly.

In short, I don't think we need any technical solution to solve what someone's innate desire to be valuable will accomplish for us. What we do need is for existing members to set the tone, and so far they have done so admirably.

frossie2• 17 years ago

Thanks e1ven - don't worry I don't scare that easily :-)

I don't know whether this helps at all, but I "read" HN for months through the RSS feed - so in a way I was not on HN at all, if HN is defined by reading the commentary and/or upvoting. But it was enough to give the vibe of the site, by the nature of the stories posted. Eventually I read something where I thought something like "Does whoever submitted this actually believe this ?!" and came back here to see the comments. I was pleasantly surprised by the S/N, so either it was not the kind of thread that was worrying you or you guys must have been intellectual saints before all the plebs showed up :-)

The point is that whether you realise this or not there are already two tiers of access to HN (full site and read-only). So you could chose to enforce some kind of social pressure on commentators (either through real identity or as another person has said through an invite system - I have seen the latter work well in other contexts) while still not turning HN into a private Y-combinator club.

It comes down to as to whether you folks feel that the essence of HN lies in the story selection or the commentary. Obviously I don't have an opinion on that.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

The trade-off of losing some percentage of registered users and keeping quality high might well be worth it. If the site's user base is growing by an order of magnitude every year, it probably wouldn't hurt to lose users.

At least, it's worth it if the alternative is becoming the next reddit.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

It would certainly be an interesting experiment for some social sites to make. I wonder what a non-anonymous 4chan or reddit would look like?

mahmud• 17 years ago

It would be like real-life; anonymity is the third pillar necessary for The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

HN is the first "community" I have ever given my real name to.

e1ven13• 17 years ago

Absolutely- One of the things I enjoy about the HN community is that is is, most of the time, much more like spending time at a school lounge, than it is like an internet forum.

Being more like real-life isn't such a bad thing ;)

quizbiz• 17 years ago

How would you enforce non-anonymity?

erlanger• 17 years ago

Well, that's one way to keep people away.

bbuffone2• 17 years ago

I like the identifying people idea but don't think it will have the preservation affect. If the preservation of the "Hacker News" is the goal then moving to "class" system would be more efficient then identifying people.

As hacker news grows, there would come a time when a new news.news.ycombinator.com would be created taking with it a certain group of people that would form a more tight knit community similar to the way it was in the beginning. The stories and comments would flow up to news.ycombinator.com but not the other way.

Then repeated...

e1ven13• 17 years ago

I think that's been the approach that Reddit.com has taken with subreddits- Note their refrain that "Subreddits aren't tags". I believe they're attempting to manually and intentionally fracture their community to such that each subreddit might stay small enough to be manageable.

I think it's worked, to a degree, but it's somewhat at odds with the purpose- If X people want to be members of a community, I'd prefer to find a way to work together and ensure we all behave ourselves, rather splitting into small groups.

I'm honest curious- Would you agree that under ideal conditions, if everyone behaved, it would be better to be a larger group such that you could share disucssions, or would it be better to remain small, so that you know all the posters?

If you did want to remain small, how do you ensure the communities are of sufficient size to be viable even with people leaving?

Personally, I'd rather find ways of encouraging people to be on good behavior all of the time- That's something I liked about the applicants knowing their posts might be used as part of their YC application, and something that might work well if they posted under their real name.

10ren5• 17 years ago

Colin, I appreciate your signing your name, but the guidelines suggest using your profile for this (presumably because sigs take up comment space):

  Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed
  with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click
  on it to see your profile.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bbuffone2• 17 years ago

"Would you agree that under ideal conditions, if everyone behaved, it would be better to be a larger group such that you could share disucssions, or would it be better to remain small, so that you know all the posters?"

I am not sure if everyone behaved it would be better;

Comments would be better - there are two types of disruptive comments; people that are just being jackasses in comments, if they are over-the-top and constant, I say smoke them out of their cubes or basements and boot them off the site. Make it possible to just kill a comment chain. The others are either new or stupid and not much you can do to these people except mentor them and give positive re-enforcement.

Stories are the biggest issue because they are the basis for what I think is the most important part of hacker news and that's the comments. One reason I really like hacker news is the "Ask HN" feature. This allows me to skip the story and read the concept, question... and dive directly into the discussion.

People are not malicious in their story submission - It's not like there are links to child porn or nazi sites. So people aren't knowingly misbehaving. The problem is that there are lots of things that a lot of people won't find interesting.

I know personally I won't be offended or concerned because you or everyone thought my submission wasn't interesting. The reason being is that I most likely didn't write it, if I did then pride-of-ownership would come into play would I would be disappointed.

---

The topic of online community preservation has many parallels with "real-world" communities and even biological diversity, which means it will need to be solved by someone more advanced than me. If we could come to a conclusion on this for hacker news and apply it to the real-world we might get a noble prize.

10ren5• 17 years ago

BTW because redditors can belong to many subreddits, you get the benefits of both small and large groups.

I agree that the small communities have worked. FWIW, I've had more pleasant conversations in the quiet backwaters of reddit than here.

It seems to be a very hard problem - I'm just thankful that something has been found to help.

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

Interesting idea, but I have neither a face book id nor a Linked In id. I wouldn't want to create either just to participate in HN. Perhaps I could link to my webpage and/or blog, but I use distinctive "tones" for each, so I'll have to think about how that works.

e1ven13• 17 years ago

It's not so much the specifics of linking real world accounts to HN accounts, but increasing the investment cost of accounts, such that people want to be on their best behavior.

Even charging money for an account wouldn't do that, because it's easy enough to write off the account, and get a new one later.

But for example, look at my user account, e1ven. If you Google it, you'll see work I've done with Zimbra, Freenet, SQ7, and a dozen other projects.. The username certainly has a great deal of weight on it's own, without needing to link it to my resume.

How else do you think people could be encouraged to have "weighty" reputations, so they don't want to give them up?

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

"But for example, look at my user account, e1ven. If you Google it, you'll see work I've done with Zimbra, Freenet, SQ7, and a dozen other projects."

yes and if you google my username you won't find any connection to the "real me". Yet I (like to think I) am a responsible and constructive member of this forum.

"How else do you think people could be encouraged to have "weighty" reputations, so they don't want to give them up?"

I don't know. I don't even know if it is the right question to be asked.

anamax• 17 years ago

> It's not so much the specifics of linking real world accounts to HN accounts, but increasing the investment cost of accounts, such that people want to be on their best behavior.

Another approach is to remove identity from posts. The underlying idea is not unlike the idea behind the ITS "crash" command.

It may also be useful assigning downvotes to users not posts, to keep users unaware of totals, and possibly the votes on their articles.

horatio2• 17 years ago

I have to chime in just to say that there are people here who for various reasons (e.g. bootstrapping/moonlighting) would not publicly disclose who they are. I know those people would be thousands upon thousands of karma points less helpful to other hackers if they were forced to identify themselves publicly simply to provide their insight.

Look around your LinkedIn and Facebook communities. How many of those groups are thriving in the way Hacker News is with useful, helpful information? How many of you read them every single day and contribute to them in the way you do here?

I, for one, would rather pay large monthly fees before making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors, etc, what I contribute here on HN.

(This isn't my primary account, so consider this post even more "anonymous" than usual.)

e1ven13• 17 years ago

That's a very fair criticism, Horatio. Perhaps it may be best to encourage people to post under their names, but not enforce it in any technological way.

Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!

People are unlikely to engage in disruptive behavior if they're "being judged" on what they say- Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.

horatio2• 17 years ago

> Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!

Which is exactly the problem-- it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are good things and bad with attaching real world identities and that was not considered in your post. It's not a panacea and has real and (to me, at least) severe consequences.

I happen to work a great deal with gaming communities which are notoriously trollish and awful. In my experience, physical identity would help with those problems, but it's overkill. It's like the "nuclear" option, in a sense.

What we've found works best is the general act of tying the identity to something the individual does not want to lose casually. The real enemy of the net is casual trolling out of boredom or random flashes of meanness. The highest return on investment is found by eliminating that one aspect-- it doesn't require the "nuclear" option of turning us all into our public personas.

For example, we've found that physical/real-world identity is not nearly as important as the combination of:

* Tying access to something people don't want to lose, such as months of their time/effort, their reputation to people they respect, or to their wallets. Note that reputation can be based on limited identity revealing to key people, or even simply reputation amongst people they associate with under a particular identity (even if they whole group is using non-real identities-- for example, a gaming clan).

* Broken window theory (i.e. http://ta.gd/broken )-- hiding/fixing trolling as quickly as possible. This is one of the best methods we've found to keep incidents down and people behaving. If they don't see it as commonplace (as trolling is on Reddit/Digg) then they aren't going to dive in as readily.

* Having strong, respected moderators/spokespeople encouraging respect and frowning sternly (and directly) upon negative behavior. This ties into both of the above points.

My company is actually investigating using some of these techniques in a service to reduce griefing in games, but requiring physical identities in that case is a deal-breaker.

> Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.

This is only true if you believe that people want to increase their reputation solely tied to their real world identity. This is a motivator for you, but it is not for me and others-- otherwise people would already be using their own names 100% of the time on things they are proud of.

Anyway, I agree with your desire to keep HN strong. I actually think HN has been doing great for the while I've been here. It has its ups and downs, but I think we have other options to improve that don't include tying Facebook Connect into every aspect of the online world.

nkurz• 17 years ago

I was wondering if requiring the creation of a "root level" URL on some domain might be a good substitute for real identity. Perhaps something like http://domain.com/hn.html, on any domain one has control over. A parallel would be Google's verification for its domain applications. Each domain would need to be unique per user.

Many (most?) people here already have a domain that they control, and this seems like a reasonable hurdle for anyone posting to Hacker News to accomplish. Unlike credit card validation or the like, it's equally accessible for users from any country. And one doesn't even have to buy the domain, just come up with some way to make a file accessible on the root of some site.

It's also a nod to history of the internet. Long ago, essentially in the predawn of time, Usenet started being filled with spam and low quality posts. The alt.hackers newsgroup came up an interesting solution: self-moderation. Users were required to figure out how to add an "Approved" header to their own posts. Thus perhaps the file could just read "Approved". :)

Identity as Collateral: Preserving Hacker News

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