I want to be perfectly clear: I'm a relative newcomer here. If you want to stop reading on account of that, go ahead. I won't accuse HN of being reddit or digg. But I do want to give my perspective as someone on the fence about staying "active."
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.
I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]), or the ones that disagree substantively.
But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out. Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to oblivion (though not soon enough).
One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:
The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.
Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.[4]
I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or unique. I can't say my perspective is unique here, but I do think it's an unsolved problem.
PG actually submitted an Ask HN several months ago regarding what you mention[5]. I'm curious if anything came of that. I don't know how to make it work. In real life, when people I have discussions with consistently detract from the value, they get left out to some extent, or if I'm in a group where fluffy comments are prioritized, I leave, and eat lunch with other people. I have no idea how to make this work on the internet. This would be sad, because I don't know anywhere else on the internet that has this level of discussion.
This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written.
I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).
It's definitely business - back around the time Gawker got banned from YC for being trashy, there was some amount of opinion that TechCrunch stories should get the boot too - but it was never going to happen because of the exposure TechCrunch gives YC startups.
PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.
The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.
The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.
How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.
What about, instead of comment scores, if the comment is among a top percentage of comments in the thread, the user's name is a different color, like orange? Kind of like how a new user's name is green.
I've found similar thing. What surprised and frustrated me sometime is my "shallow" one liner got a lot more upvotes than my longer, more thoughtful comments. It seems people have extreme short attention span and won't bother to read the longer ones.
This is simply because long comments very rarely provide more value than short ones. In fact, I would wager that shortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.
Example: The parent post could be ~ 5 lines and contain the same point. I really like the way 4chan handles this sort of thing: The so called "green text". On 4chan it is unspoken rule that nobody cares about you. In order to make your text interesting enough to be read, you have to make it as short as possible while still carrying your point across.
The inherent problem with this is that certain posts simply cannot be made shorter without omitting useful information. When users are expected to write short comments, you'll quickly find that one-liner jokes and the like are the most upvoted, not the ones with actual content.
While 4chan may be a fun way to pass time, it's hardly the place I go when I want to read/join intelligent discussions or learn new things.
The degeneration of HN is likely due to the influx of new users from 4chan and Reddit, where comments are very short and often appeal to the lowest common denominator.
[S]hortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.
This is often true, but I think the value of brevity comes mostly from the context, a threaded comment page. In that context, users expect a discussion, not a monologue. They're not just looking to passively absorb information by reading, they're looking to sharpen their own understanding by actively articulating a response. That's harder to do when you're trying to respond to a comment that makes multiple points. Better to break a long-form comment into several more tightly focused short comments so that people can more quickly pick out the topics they want to respond to.
Personally, I try not to spend too much time on HN (sometimes I enable noprocrast), so I need to quickly decide whether it's more worthwhile to read a single ten-paragraph comment instead of ten shorter ones presenting different points of view.
Usually, if the first paragraph is not absorbing enough and there is a risk that the rest is going to be rambling, I simply stop reading without any regrets. For me it's not an attention span issue, it's a limited time issue.
I've noticed this too. Unfortunately, my two most upvoted comments recently have been of the "throwaway" variety. Not mean, not trollish, but a couple of easy-to-agree with quickies that I banged off on the bus ride to work. One[1], perhaps legitimately upvoted so that the response would be more visible, was a simple statement that the submission was a couple years old and it would be interesting to see some newer data. The other[2] was a cheap, throwaway anti-SOPA line.
The danger here is that the easy-to-upvote throwaway comments become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it or not, karma is social validation. A long, thought-out reply that gets no upvotes is somewhat depressing; it makes you think that, even at your most thoughtful, your thoughts are unappreciated. Contrast that with a cheap and easy line that gets 40 points, and the social feedback is clear: your considered opinion isn't valued, but your cheap lines are.
It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its lack of scalability. What works for a small, mostly homogenous community breaks when that community becomes larger and more diverse. We can deny it all we like, but I'm sure most people feel pretty good when they log on and see their karma significantly higher than it was the last time they checked. It's an ego boost, and few people are immune to enjoying that. When playing to the lowest common denominator gives you that fix of social validation, and a more thoughtful comment doesn't, it's pretty strong positive reinforcement for the less-desirable behaviour.
I'm not sure how to combat this in a scalable manner. It's difficult to think of examples of community-moderated forums maintaining quality in the face of rapid expansion. My previous suggestions of weighting the votes of those who consistently upvote quality comments higher than those of people who upvote fluff has met with little traction, and I can see some pretty big potential weaknesses there, myself.
In reviewing this comment, however, I have had a thought of something that seems ridiculously trivial, but might just work: pg has stated before his belief that comment length is a relatively good indicator of quality. I notice, however, that the comment box is relatively tiny. It makes a long, thought-out post appear, prima facie, no more substantive than a 3-liner. I would be interested to see what the result of making the comment box significantly larger would be. Would people, upon seeing that much empty space surrounding a throwaway comment, be likely to reconsider posting it? Are there easy cues like this that can be used to hack the behaviour of commenters? I'd be interested in seeing the results of running an A/B test on a seemingly simple change like this: Make half the users' comment boxes two or three times as long. Leave it that way for a few months, then take a random sample of the resulting comments and see if there's a difference in quality. I wouldn't be surprised if there was.
I don't know that this social problem has a technical solution, but you're right that the "points" system encourages shallow comments. Unfortunately some people will always see a number as a score, and start gaming the system to increase it.
The problem with many submissions recently has been they are taken directly from reddit, and have content that sits well with reddit but not HN. The "Programming prodigy passes away at 16" story is a good example: it's tragic news, but the fact that someone has died is not necessarily a good HN submission. Although much of the discussion about Erlang and Haskell went right over my head, I think this site did better when those stories were oft-submitted, if only because it tends to push away the people who would prefer fluffy "human interest" stories. I personally have no intention of creating a startup but find pointers to useful technical ideas and tools here - more of those, please
So I think we need to concentrate on the submissions, removing stories of marginal interest to hackers, and being diligent in upvoting good stories and comments, and downvoting crufty comments.
Yeah, submissions may be where the solution lies. I'm not sure if it's just me but has anyone else noticed that the New page gets completely saturated with spam? I have show dead turned on and I used to see a handful of dead stories. These days it's not uncommon for me to see 5 live stories with the rest having been killed. A month or so ago there was a discussion about HN's rank on Google. I'd be happy to see it close to the bottom of the first page if at all.
"It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed
for its lack of scalability."
The motivation to be part of an online community should be the enjoyment
at the discussions and not the number of points.
I hate the points, and I hate it, that I look after them. I think that
just the presence of a karma system has a bad effect on the quality
of the comments. You're getting what you ask for.
It's symptomatic how often I read 'Please don't downvote me' or
'I hate to say this, but' in the last time.
I've noticed this with my comments too. My hypothesis is that if a person wants to optimise comments for upvotes, they need to be quick one liners because the discussion and therefore the eyeballs move on very quickly. If you write a high quality comment it takes time but less people read it because the top of the bell curve of the huge wave of eyeballs following the stream of the discussion has passed it by.
Humans are social, we have a need for acknowledgment from our peers so we can measure or opinions against others and to help develop our thinking on a particular point. As you suggest above, karma points are a crude replacement for the nods of agreement that you would get in a face to face conversation that signify that you or I are saying something interesting. It's a not a nice feeling to think you are saying something interesting only to find you are talking to yourself. Therefore, there is a strong incentive towards pithy one line comments that get seen quickly and appeal to the masses.
The trouble with karma points is there is no differentiation between the nods you get in drunken agreement from your friends when you say something funny in a bar and the nods you get from your colleagues when you say something insightful. We would value these differently in a face to face situation. On the internet it's just a competition for generic human recongition points where the short fast comments that 'press peoples buttons' are at an advantage.
The trouble with pithy one line comments that press peoples buttons is that they are hard to get right, not many people can strike the right balance. What's meant to be a pithy one liner actually just ends up saying nothing, something offensive, illogical or merely just voicing tribal agreement with Apple or Google or whatever.
Maybe it would be better to be able to see other peoples upvotes but not out own? What about a mandatory 1 hour before a comment appears, perhaps just display a '...' to signify that someone is preparing an answer? I don't know what the answer is, but I also miss the more challenging technical articles.
That's s disappointing. I usually spend less time on one liners than anything and thought everyone else did the same. I had no idea that one-liners got so much attention. But for all the people who express sentiments like yours and all the people who read it and all the people priding themselves on being the smartest people in the room, somehow stupidity still slips by under our noses. How? And, just as a hypothetical, you can find a comment much like yours then look back through that person's history and see they're a chronic fluff contributor. How is it that we know not to do something, speak out against it, and then do it anyway?
Also, I don't like your proposed solution. It assumes the worst in people. I tend to believe that if you cater to the lowest common denominator then that's what you get but when you assume the best in people they'll try to live up to that expectation. Of course people will be people and it's inevitable they we disappoint from time to time but... Well, but nothing. That's how it goes I guess.
Did you mean you spend less time on reading one liners? Yes me too, but there are lots of one liners now and not so many well written comments.
Regarding your second point. At the scale of HN now, I think we have to consider people not as individuals but as a swarm of actors; perhaps analogous to particles in a CFD analysis. Then ask the question 'what design changes need to be made to change the direction of these actors'. I don't personally assume the worst in people but I don't think people are naturally moral actors. They won't 'do the right thing' without any incentives. People are driven by the positive and negative consequences of their actions which they measure from the reactions of their peers. In the case of HN our peers are the crowd sourced 'off the cuff' opinions of a random sample of a few hundred thousand random people. Some people are horrified by the idea that morals don't exist and it is a bit of a scary concept being surrounded by potential monsters, but really I think it's just nature and lots of natural things are scary but can be mitigated by design.
A great community is built by a focus on positive actions, on growing in a positive direction. To that end - let me take a stab at the definition of a 'value-added comment'.
I would define a value-added comment as lucidly conveyed viewpoint based on a simple set of logically-consistent principles ... that flies in the face of commonly-held understandings of the subject matter at hand. It's not enough to offer an opinion, or an adversarial opinion - it must be clearly stated and supported, so that the emotional weight of its disagreement prompts a healthy discussion where some measure of truth is found, where some insight is gained where there was none before.
This rests on the premises of intellectual honesty, trust, and emotional maturity within all involved, but I nevertheless think that kind of discourse is what would grow HN, and what we ought to focus on. Calling out non-value-added comments does nothing to create a culture of value-added comments.
I think this is why Slashdot added the "Funny" upvote option. It doesn't add any karma points to the poster, but the voter still feels like they recognized or validated a clever comment.
I was baffled that the below got 25 upvotes where it's pretty clear (barring vote ring or anything insidious) almost nobody bothered to look at the Course links on the university page (1 times out, 1 404's, 1 has only German language content, but looks interesting
This is a good point - one aspect of some political topics is the urge to upvote stuff you feel Very Strongly about. "Yeah! Go! You tell 'em!". That does not lead to good discussions though, and thus I feel those topics are best avoided here.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.
I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]), or the ones that disagree substantively.
But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out. Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to oblivion (though not soon enough).
One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:
The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.
Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.[4]
I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or unique. I can't say my perspective is unique here, but I do think it's an unsolved problem.
PG actually submitted an Ask HN several months ago regarding what you mention[5]. I'm curious if anything came of that. I don't know how to make it work. In real life, when people I have discussions with consistently detract from the value, they get left out to some extent, or if I'm in a group where fluffy comments are prioritized, I leave, and eat lunch with other people. I have no idea how to make this work on the internet. This would be sad, because I don't know anywhere else on the internet that has this level of discussion.
[1] http://beagle.ci.uchicago.edu/ [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466925 [2] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=joakal [4] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html [5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696