News News: Faster, Fewer Flamewars

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#29apr09

by pg • 17 years ago

82 58 17 years ago

I'm a newcomer to HN but I was amazed to find out how long it's been around. It has the feel that many of my favorite sites had in their infancy which they inevitably loose as time goes on.

It's great to hear that the system is constantly being improved to maintain this environment, bravo.

trickjarrett3• 17 years ago

Change is a constant on HN. Site changes, algorithms, etc. But through it all the community has remained largely tightknit and focused, which are definitely feats of their own.

Hexstream4• 17 years ago

There is one constant: widespread paranoia, justified or otherwise, about the quality of the site and alleged degradation. This since approximately day 1.

TrevorJ3• 17 years ago

I is, I think, due to this change constant that the site still feels new. since, in some senses it always is new becasue of the subtle changes.

mechanical_fish2• 17 years ago

there is now an exponential delay before reply links appear on deeply nested comments

I think this is a fascinating idea.

trickjarrett3• 17 years ago

It will be interesting to see how it goes, but I see it more as a way to slow down conversations. I think perhaps we may find that it is best to exponentially delay replies in a thread from the same person. Most comment thread discussions go maybe 2 for each person before losing most value (from my observations) and so it may also find value in adding logic to slow or disable that sort of "noise" as well.

eru• 17 years ago

I'd prefer to be able to enter my comment as soon as I can think of it, but do not have it show for other people until the time is up.

Hexstream4• 17 years ago

I'm thinking this would significantly affect the effectiveness of this new feature. Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth but otherwise have about the same quantity of flame comments?

lhorie• 17 years ago

I think the point is that this mechanism lets users cool their heads before they type away something silly on the heat of the moment.

volida• 17 years ago

Having engaged in some flame wars, without wanting it to happen, it did cross my mind that they could be tracked using some sort of detection of the height of the tree and the time between the replies. Also I think that's how pg tracked them before, because he enganged almost instantly to stop one I was involved recently.

bisceglie2• 17 years ago

i like the idea of exponential delays for deeply nested comments. i wonder if there is a more direct way to force people to take their time in writing replies. maybe a timer on how long a reply textfield is active (i know, full of flaws, but a start, at least).

if it doesn't inhibit thoughtless replies/comments, at least it will destroy the excuses of "oh, i should have thought about my response a bit more", and "that's not what i meant, i should have clarified that point."

amalcon• 17 years ago

It also might simply cause people to work around the feature, by adding new top-level comments (that are actually replies to nested comments). I will be interested to see how well it works.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

Opening "link" in another tab is a better workaround.

bisceglie2• 17 years ago

true. but i would love to see the community work with this, to keep the quality up. but at the same time, i'd consider myself anti-over-moderation, and optimistic enough to wish for self-government (through social interaction). though not to appear too much the commie-pinko-leftist...

noss• 17 years ago

Another clever idea is to add delays to troublemakers' site-browsing experience. Not my idea, I picked it up somewhere.

Not that it was added according to the post, but I am just saying that it is clever. :)

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

I'm skeptical of the exponential delay -- seems like another way of saying "if you're in a drawn-out conversation with somebody, take it somewhere else because you're boring us"

Which then limits your options for participating in a controversial subject to a) doing nothing, and b) making some grand overarching statement and not caring what comes after it.

Neither of these seem to add to the site.

I understand the desire to prevent emotions from overwhelming posters, but geez, sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I've found that if both sides are honest and stick to an intelligent conversation, a lot of times you can learn a lot by the time you're about 7 levels in. Most of the time you learn that the two sides, while posturing, aren't really that far apart.

I like deep threads every now and then. Shows me how people are thinking. Shows how they react on their feet. Shows the depth of their position (or lack thereof). Teaches respect for each other and community values.

Flamewars? Not so much. But HN hasn't exactly been a nest of flame-waring, at least as far as I can see. There are heated discussions, they blow over, then life moves on.

But hey, not my call. I hope this works out the way you want, Paul! I'm always willing to see how an experiment works out. After all, I was one of the original orange members. (or was it red?) : )

stcredzero2• 17 years ago

What if readers could vote on the exponent? Maybe add a "flamewar" button that raises the exponent, which starts out at something innocuous like 1.1.

indiejade• 17 years ago

A button might encourage the flames and flame-type replies, though.

Another option might be to add a section (right now there is "news" and "newest") where members can move their too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting posts in order to keep them out of the main discussions.

*Disclaimer: I am certainly guilty of posting when too tired/drunk/grumpy to be posting, and I kinda wish that there was an option to delete old items. I don't really care about the karma aspect, but it would be nice to be able to delete.

bmelton• 17 years ago

I suspect that it would be easier (though I don't know how practical) to simply zero the exponent for arguments that are getting upvotes. At least then it doesn't penalize the discussions generally accepted as quality.

dschobel• 17 years ago

Rtm just made a couple changes to Arc's internals that have made the site visibly faster.

I was just reading the wikipedia page on Arc yesterday and it talks about an unofficial fork of Arc which came about because of a perception of slow development in the official branch.

How are those two branches playing these days? Is there any cross-pollination of code?

stefano• 17 years ago

Currently the last release of Arc is one year old. The fork (Anarki) has had more visible development, although it has slowed down after october 2008. You can see the full history here: http://github.com/nex3/arc/commits/master/ . There has been no cross pollination of code: the anarki fork fixes a few bugs that are still present in the official release of arc and it has a few interesting extra features, such as the possibility of defining your own functions to be called when a non-function object gets called. Another interesting implementaton of arc, which does include a few features from anarki, is rainbow: http://github.com/conanite/rainbow .

axod• 17 years ago

I just assumed it was a bug... You can just click on [link] and then comment still right?

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

I'm officially nicknaming http://news.ycombinator.com/noobs The Land Of The [dead]

dfranke• 17 years ago

The one day timer for /noobs should start ticking when they make their first submission, not when they create their account. Otherwise spammers can just wait a day before submitting anything.

ericb• 17 years ago

On a site I ran, spammers routinely signed up then submitted spam weeks later--I'm fairly certain it was automated.

pg4• 17 years ago

I haven't seen any cases yet of spammers letting accounts mature before using them. There would be no practical benefit. All the limits depend on karma, not account age.

vaksel• 17 years ago

Do we even have flame wars? I'm a fairly active reader and I don't really remember ever seeing one on here.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

They are ignored by most of the most active users here, which keeps them small and contained, because they never gain much karma, in most cases.

ggchappell• 17 years ago

Shouldn't there be a link to the the noobs list on the lists page? There isn't (yet).

benreesman2• 17 years ago

Is it possibly to give a nice brief summary of the kind of change that brought about this speed up? Because... damn the site is fast now!

gruseom• 17 years ago

I was going to ask that too: what are the "couple changes"?

pg4• 17 years ago

Some common functions that took n arguments used to generate garbage when given 2.

pmarin• 17 years ago

When arc3 ?

ilamont• 17 years ago

Thanks for making HN faster. I visit the site repeatedly throughout the day and the slowdowns can be frustrating.

News News: Faster, Fewer Flamewars

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