Comment by pg
12 years ago
I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll continue to.
You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads.
There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.
Could not agree more. I lurked on HN for ~2 years before creating an account, also a 4-digit refugee from /. For the last 3 months I've been quietly mourning and seeking out a replacement for HN. It could be I'm no longer a target demographic and it's simply time for me to go (I'm a reserved cofounder of a profitable startup who has an angel investor and in my 20s).
In addition to the politics, I've noticed what feels like a bifurcation in age or maturity with stories and commenters. My working narrative is that much of the negativity is immaturity from HN's endless september of college and high school students, although I know that's likely incomplete as many simple narratives are. Also, something about reading a blog post with a "Discuss on HN" link at the bottom irks me to the point I feel like the content isn't so much about improving understanding as it is to generate clicks and drive traffic. I am not a fan of personal brands or personalities in any industry, though it feels like many come here to create one.
The issues I see are related to people and their behavior in the community and not the HN site or features. I believe the best way to nudge the community back to neutral is with more people correcting or excluding the negative behavior.
> Also, something about reading a blog post with a "Discuss on HN" link at the bottom irks me to the point I feel like the content isn't so much about improving understanding as it is to generate clicks and drive traffic.
Offtopic, but I've considered adding such a link to my own blog before--not to "generate clicks and drive traffic", but--since I don't have inline comments--simply to give people something to click through if they want to comment on a post of mine without breaking flow. If you know where "the" discussion for your post will be happening, why not just link to it?
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It would be good to see some data. For instance, how is the trend of average upvotes per user per month looks like? It is however clear that HN is attracting lot of marketers and activists. While I don't know all the efforts going in to fend this off, the ones I know such as banning specific URLs, dead stories etc look unorganic/bruteforce as opposed to clean algorithmic solutions. One clean solution would be to simply enable downvote button and increase the expressiveness of the community. I however has no idea why HN does not have downvote button.
I disagree with 'tptacek on the number of actual users plaguing Hacker News like this, but I think it's fairly undeniable the phenomenon is there and it's strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_i_see_it
You don't need data. I know, that's an unpopular phrase to say on a forum like Hacker News - but seriously, if you were alive at the keyboard on HN during the NSA debacle, you shouldn't need to ask for data. Whether there were 100 or 10 people poisoning the discussion with political strife, they were certainly the most vocal and noticeable. Their comments were easily upvoted because they were full of pathos and emphatic calls to action. As I wrote in my reply to pg here, I don't think it's enough to do what's being done now with stories - there should be a user filtering system. Restricting posts somehow could be good, but I also understand that we don't want to turn the forum into some sort of elaborate rule system.
I also believe the problem is intimately related to karma farming, and also intimately related to overpopulation. Hacker News is a fond ideal, but I don't believe it scales. Not without changes at least. I know that might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's true.
Agreed. I came here to be learn about technology and to be inpsired to one day make the leap from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur. I don't come here to read about politics.
What happened to my spelling there? Jeez.
The decline is because there are more people on the site, not because of politics per se. The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.
> The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.
Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria?
The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too.
Is that a function of IQ?
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All signs indicate that pg wants his own personal r/politics.
With respect, pg, three things:
1. Why is it not a cause to worry if Hacker News declines at all? It doesn't matter if it happens by default when it does happen. It might not be reversible.
2. Corollary to that, I believe it has happened. During the NSA scandal, I tried to do what I could to dispel what could best be described as hysteria. I don't believe the majority of people on Hacker News can be described by hysteria, but a hugely vocal minority can be, and they direct the movements of the front page.
3. I am not pessimistic about Hacker News, I don't like to believe the forum is succumbing to the inexorable march of time, or some such. And I'm not going to soapbox comparisons to reddit. However, I don't think optimism is enough. You don't seem to be particularly concerned about this, but I see sentiments of concern at least daily in some form or another.
I understand I'm not a powerhouse of karma and influence here on Hacker News, but I've tried twice to raise proposals for some sort of change to the political atmosphere of the forum. It hasn't worked. What else do you have but optimism, to put it bluntly?
EDIT: When I joined Hacker News in 2011, I wasn't as savvy to the mechanics of the forum as I am now. I thought that the front page being dominated by political fads every few months or so was just regular. But in being here to the present, I've seen that it has only gotten worse from 2011 to 2013, and in reading archives/the comments of senior members, I can see how this pattern developed. That's why I've tried before to submit a proposal to the changes thread.
I submit that it doesn't matter if politics can be intellectually gratifying or even relevant, as per the guidelines. It's categorically unrelated to startups or technology, save for being indirectly so in occasional cases when those two topics scale. Whatever benefit comes with political discourse is eliminated by the sheer level of scathing derision that comes from combatting sides debating the topic.
I've read through (some of) your essays on HN design and think that, ultimately, you will have to introduce a little more complexity to handle posts that relate to identity cleanly.
The best option that I can see is to allow users to mark a post as 'off-topic' in addition to 'flag'. Subtract the off-topic count in some fashion and generate second set of rankings. Then allow users to chose between the normal front-page and the filtered front-page.
It would not split the community into have/have-nots and it would enable a little self-selected filtering. It feels like a general enough case that it would have merit across a wide range of posts.
It would also provide a lot more information upon which to make judgment calls.
Fascinating site you've got going. This is the only place where I can actually stand to read the comments.
I'm not so sure Hacker News succeeding is the top thing in the world of important priorities to me.
And while overly emotional topics are certainly bad currency in a large group -- no doubt about that -- I find it weird that we think we can talk about helping people suffering from starvation, slavery, lack of electricity, and all kinds of other problems and not be able to discuss the impact of the technology we create in the privacy and anonymity realms. I'd go so far as to say it's purposefully myoptic. Seems like all sorts of things are fair game -- as long as it doesn't show us the results of our own work too closely. We'll talk about any problems but the ones we helped create.
I wish HN the best of luck, and I certainly don't want flame wars or policy advocacy here. But hell, we're not morons. Or robots. If you want all that gossipy SV crap on the front page, you're going to have to take some other stuff you don't like as much. People vote based on emotional impact of stories. I can't see how you "fix" HN by continuous tweaking, making the system non-intuitive and frustrating.
Perhaps the best thing to do is go back to just tech and business. But even then, I find it impossible to believe that we can continue to live in some kind of artificial bubble where uncomfortable topics from the outside world never appear. If that's the plan, good luck with that.
Do you monetize HN, or the data generated? That's something I always wanted to know.
Not counting talent acquisition and buying/investing into startups
No.