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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2.

The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on it. And if they like it, they upvote it. Sounds harmless enough, right? And yet repeat and the result is a disaster.

What is the solution? The Right Thing would be to somehow scale votes by how easy/hard it is to vote on something. Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.

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I've been meditating about this over the last couple of days, and I'm pretty sure there are three stages in the life cycle of social news site discussion quality.

1. "You're wrong because" (intelligent arguments)

2. "You're wrong" (no reason given, baseless opinions)

3. "You're a fag" (ad hominems)

Of course there will always be some of each in any given stage, so the way the community reacts to comments is probably almost more important than the comments themselves. Good users will put up with stupid links, but they'll leave if it becomes clear that their contributions aren't being valued and they start to feel alienated from the community.

Up until recently the discussion quality on news.yc has been in stage one, but I feel like it's been drifting toward stage two over the last couple of weeks. I'm especially worried as we get closer to the deadline for YC apps, since quality always goes downhill during those periods.

Yeah you're a fag so what do you know.

(Sarcasm people! Sarcasm! Humor is tough to do in written form)

I would add that there is a step 0 which is "you may be right, although I do not understand how..." which is how, if you think about it, you talk to people you deeply respect. I guess that's the extra-credit level for the internet, because it's rarely seen.

Well, these types of threads always exist, but the real problem is that the ycnews community or the technology behind ycnews has failed to hammer it down. I'm all for democracy when the majority brings meaningful and intelligent articles to read, but in this situation I don't mind giving up equality for quality.

Any article title with "sex" in it should be harder to get to the first page, also any article title with curse words. Both are instant indicators of low quality.

Curse words aren't necessarily an indicator of low quality. Plenty of cogent arguments (and plenty of great literature) have been written that included cursing.

"Plenty of great literature" Agreed

"Plenty of great arguments" Disagree. AFAIC, credibility is lost as soon as you resort to this. Many don't think like I do, but many do. Is cursing really worth losing those of us who do?

I've opined a bit elsewhere on what happens to social sites as they get more and more popular.

If you want YC to be, and stay, as a particular sort of thing, then unfortunately you have to actively enforce a particular culture. Since, presumably, you don't want to have to babysit the thing yourself all the time forever, that means picking a handful of people and 'blessing' them to do it for you.

So! Here's one way that might work -- though there're gonna be some objections to it:

Pick a dozen or twenty users that you think really 'get' what you want the site to be about. Set a special flag on them in your database. When they upvote a submission, it counts for a little extra, say 1.5 points; likewise if they downvote a submission. Then, you need to make sure that as people come and go, you still have this active core group of people tuning your site for you. So, if an 'unblessed' user gets habitually upmodded in their comments, or their submissions, by members of your blessed group, over a period of time that unblessed user gets automatically blessed, and their votes count for a little extra too.

This still leaves the door open for debates and arguments, while -- I think -- helping the site to stay on-subject without your active participation all the time.

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the potential for abuse with folks misrepresenting the complexity of their article. But that wouldn't be hard to spot.

Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting.

Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

Maybe restrict users below a certain karma to X number of upvotes per day? That way, you need to consider carefully which stories you upvote. Comment upvotes could stay infinite.

Maybe have the HN software go pull the page that is submitted, and assign it a weight based on number of tokens on the page. Obviously you'd remove stop words and HTML tags.

This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian filtering for post importance.

This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN, so maybe you could experiment with it here.

Yes, both of those seem excellent. Could we give it a try and see how it turns out? You could define the acceleration of a downvote as (exp (- (* numdownvotes 0.5))) or some such, to discourage cabal behavior.

An ideal solution, although I'm not saying it's easy to get it right, would be to measure the weight of the story based on what portion of clicks are long term clicks, i.e., clicks after which people spend considerable amount of time (presumably reading the article) before coming back to perusing other stories on news.yc.

What if you did a word count of the linked article, and used that for the weight? It might be good to strip out links from the count, but other than that it seems a pretty sold way of judging complexity.

What if the downvote only appears if the story is above, say, 7 karma? This would limit how long a lightweight story could be high on the frontpage.

Karma is variable, no? As the site gets more traffic, karma points will start to go up over the board. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak. 7 may be a good threshold now, but will it be in 6 months?

Probably not, but it's the kind of thing that could be manually or algorithmically adjusted.

How about, simply, "only the top five stories can be downvoted?"

I think there's a fundamental lack of agreement on what an upmod, uparrow, digg, or what have you actually means.

Some people upmod for relevance, others upmod for bookmarking purposes, and some upmod whenever they see something that makes them giggle.

Maybe more social news sites need to rise to the challenge of being opinionated in what the point of their upmods are.

Perhaps you could give users a limited anti-karma budget they could spend to downmod articles. Something like you may spend 1 point of anti-karma every 24 hours for each 100 karma you have earned.

For ordering purposes, a story's effective karma should be something like (total upmods / (1 + total antikarma)).

What can I say? Sex sells... Perhaps we can disallow the use of the word "sex" in the site description? That will prevent crappy threads from shooting up the list thanks to some nitwits oogling at the word "sex"

I guess a bit of benevolent dictatorship is required in keeping the signal/noise ratio high by one/small set of HN folks.

I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:

1. the raising competence of the current user base & 2. the wave of new users

I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.

Hmm, you could just markdead. Do y'all resist the temptation to kill stories past some number of upvotes?

Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.

Yes.

I would have certainly used it on that burger thing yesterday.

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