Although everybody is automatically assuming only bad-mannered ilk will come from TC, has anyone thought 'hey maybe there will be MORE insightful discussions.'
Other than that, why not just led the editors do what they do best and not worry about it?
Because we have almost no editors, we police ourselves and if the community grows too rapidly it can lose focus, if tomorrow we'll be featured on Oprah this site will lose everything I love about it.
A better intro for the beginners would be nice have. How is the whole thing moderated ? What are the points assigned to the post ? What is karma ? Etc. I clicked around the site, but aside from the Guidelines page, I didn't manage to find any sort of FAQ or similar.
Fantastic and concise. Out of curiosity, is there a link to that anywhere on the News.YC website? Perhaps I'm blind, but I don't see one anywhere. I looked for a page like that when I joined and, after not finding one, just jumped into the fray.
It's a great resource for newbies like myself. Perhaps it deserves more prominent billing?
It's in the footer on the list pages under "guidelines". footers don't appear for comment pages, for some reason. It's even more important that they're there in comment pages, I imagine.
Not every site. The Ars Technica forums have maintained a surprisingly high level of quality discussion over the years. Ars uses human moderators who read every post and enforce the rules.
There's also Metafilter. Or more spcifically, ask Metafilter which maintains one of the highest quality, large communities I've managed to find online.
Maybe there should be some kind of validation before you can start posting and taking part in the discussions.
A smart way of doing this would be to let potential new users write a bit about themselves, and let existing users vote on whether or not they should be allowed to post based on their introduction of themselves.
Another way would be to let new users have a quota of comments that could be raised if the initial comments were voted up.
Slashdot implemented something in something similar long time ago (I guess they still do it) and I don't know why nobody ripped that off. To start moderating your account need pass a certain threshold of "oldness".
I think the moderation is even more important because when people start modding down valid coments or modding up stupidity that's what make me want to leave. That's when I got annoyed with Digg +-2 years ago and Reddit +-1 year ago.
I've been wondering that too. Slashdot has gone through all of the problems that face digg, reddit, etc. And they have found some pretty good solutions through trial and error. They are even well documented here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
Generally I am amazed that moderation systems are not better than they are, especially since the stakes seem to be so high in this niche right now.
Actually, instead of that, why not just assess their voting habits and allow posting at a certain threshold? Those users that continually upvote stories and comments that are considered "low quality" are held, be they new/old whatever. Get too low, and you can't vote either.
The only issue is you need to be very specific in how you choose to asses what is "high" vs. what is "low" quality. Too rigid and you basically encourage group-think, too lax; anarchy.
(Note: I would keep "karma" in place since it would help to distract from the "real" karma system.)
Perhaps I haven't had sufficient experience with Digg, Techcrunch, etc., but it seems a touch elitist to me to denigrate someone based solely on the sites which they choose to frequent.
Example: I browse youtube. A lot. I sometimes comment on videos. Now, read the comments on any substantially popular youtube video. A lot of noise, yes? So does that automatically make me an idiot or a bigot or illiterate? No, not necessarily. A similar argument can be made for TechCrunch, Digg, or any other website. The problem is the site, not the users.
In a sense, this is a fallacy of division: Digg is a noisy site with little, if any meaningful discourse. Therefore none of its users are capable of meaningful discourse.
@TheTarqin: The problem with these sites is, that they all "were" great places to go. But as soon as the userbase grew, they went downhill...
It's not so much about being elitist, than being afraid of things, we have experienced already at other places.
I suppose I can understand that, but I wonder if a better response might be of the "welcome, new users: here's how this site is different then you're used to" variety.
I understand that News.YC is pretty awesome. It's a fairly small, high-signal community, and I greatly appreciate that. I just don't understand this Digg-o-phobia. Perhaps it's just that I haven't witnessed the transformation you mentioned in other sites. Hacker News is really the first such website that has grabbed my interest.
Anyway, here's hoping it stays as interesting, vibrant, and high S/N ration as is now.
If there is an influx, the lack of fluff will scare them away for quite a while.
It was over about a 12 month period of time that reddit went from being occasionally political to being totally dominated by Ron Paul/Obama fanatics. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.
I concur. I'm a top-10 reddit poster and Hacker News is my first site of the day now. Keep up the good work and don't be afraid to ban the idiots. Now if only somebody would set up a "Political News" site using the same code base...
"He" would be Michael Arrington, the person who put it on the front page of TC. If he's an actual community member here, then he should have realized that was a stupid thing to do, for the sake of the news and comment quality on Hacker News, and not to have done it.
Do you think Arrington values the community here more than the community reading TC, his own community? Adding value for his readers should be his first priority.
First off, he's referring them to a site that competes with his own, which very well may cause some users to switch over. That isn't too far of a stretch for my imagination, seeing as N.YC has much higher comment quality and community cohesion.
Second, if the TC users came here and destroyed the signal to noise ratio we currently enjoy, he would have done them a disservice by recommending a web site that was so quickly destroyed after they all discovered it. Of course, few of them would likely realize that they, themselves, were the cause of the downturn.
Clearly neither of those seem like they're going to happen, based on the referral numbers that Paul posted so far, but it was a more feasible option when I made my earlier post.
Of course, that's only up to the point that the "smarter people" stop tolerating the dilution and leave, thus leaving the TC members in the exact same position as before.
you guys, relax. pg has been thinking long and hard about the newbie influx problem for many months now. he saw what happened to reddit, and he's applying his usual sensible approach to preventing that from happening here.
It's not a matter of different standards, it's a matter of: if you can't lead active yc users, why would you be able to lead an influx of new reddit (or techcrunch or whatever) users?
rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a way that alienates rms.
in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me.
I don't think he'd enjoy that email, so I haven't sent it. He chose not to contact me about this, presumably for a reason.
This, on the other hand, is a public thread where it's relevant to the topic in the parent comments. I haven't asked pg to read this thread, so it's not my problem if he chooses to.
PG: "Eventually the other users will get tired of you filling up the comment threads with your private beefs, and you'll stop."
Your reply: "in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me."
I think you should read more carefully, if that's not a notification of doing something wrong or asking you to change behavior I don't know what is.
Pretty ironic for you to say it's bad leadership for him not to do what he in fact just did...
I'm not ready to pull a chicken little. I came over here from reddit after seeing pg's post on trolls on the reddit front page. Some of the earliest comments and/or posts I saw were of the "oh man, we're screwed now" type. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I have a hard time believing the reddit crowd did HN a disservice. HN is just too darn... smart for the majority of people. On the rare occasion when some stupid POS makes it to the front page, the comment section more than makes up for it.
The community is too good to suffer fools gladly. And fools get bored easily.
So the obvious question is... how many sock puppet accounts does Arrington already have here? He admitted to 5 at digg, I think. Sometimes I come here first thing in the morning and it's 75% techcrunch.
> Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting.
ahem i think you mean Heisenberg's blog - Shcrodinger's blog would be all blogs at the same time until you actually tried to read it - then the blog wave function (a blavtion if you will) would collapse thus revealing the true observed blog. which will almost certainly be a LOL cat. it may be alive or dead - it's mileage has varied.
HN is one of the very best sites on the web. In fact, it's probably one of the best sites the web has ever had, at least for the tech/startup group. I have confidence that the right people will find it and the others will be bored and go away. It's actually kind of boring for flame wars. But great for news and ideas.
Hacker News is one of my favorite sites - i love it for the quality of the content. Hope it doesn't go down because of the attention that it's getting now.
On one hand, I'm glad that arrington validated something I've believed for a long time: news.yc is the best social news/network/app for people who are into startups.
On the other hand, I do not want to see this place get overrun by ron paul supporters and facebook fanboys. Where will all the cool people post news to then? Maybe swen.yc?
You know, it really turns people off when you go around spamming your links all over the place (I've seem them both here and on reddit). You may have a great site, but perhaps you should let your technology speak for itself.
If it is truly great, people will come through word of mouth.
hey man TC isn't that bad. You have to muddle through a lot of comments from what seem to be the same trolls, but once in a while you find a gem of a comment.
too bad there isn't a browser that can filter out comments from select people ... TC would then be much more insightful
I find it amusing people are 'upset' that HN got techcrunch'd with the story being posted on TechCrunch. You should be ecstatic the TechCrunch editor frequents this site so often as you would most likely sell your first born to get featured on TechCrunch.
