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532 points by pg on Jan 31, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 137 comments
There's been a big spike in new users the last couple days. Unfortunately it's been visible not only in the traffic stats but in the character of the comment threads.

New users: we'd appreciate it if you'd please read the site guidelines before commenting. Most importantly, the principle that you shouldn't say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to someone's face.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News is an experiment. We're trying to see whether by asking people to be civil we can avoid the kind of nastiness that anonymity breeds by default. The experiment has worked so far. And while the new users may not realize it, this is why they're here. People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.

The principle that you shouldn't say things you wouldn't say to someone's face means you can't express yourself the way you might be used to doing on Reddit or Slashdot. This, for example, would not stand out on either of those sites,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459250

but it's not cool here.




I've also noticed comments modded down to <1 for no good reason. I like the idea that here, generally downmods to <1 are reserved for abusive or off topic comments, rather than just something you disagree with.

To the new users: If you disagree with a comment, please reply to it, stating why. Don't just blindly downmod it.

Just my 2c


On the flip side, I don't understand why someone should get 40 karma points for a two word witty comment, no matter how funny it was. Why isn't karma per comment limited to -1 to 10? Seems like it would limit karma bashing and karma mega-boosting.


If you limit the karma to 10 then a particularly good comment will eventually sink below comments that are upmodded later because of the way the ordering algorithm works. Similarly, a particularly bad comment will stay visible.

I don't see anything wrong with karma mega-boosting. At the end of the day it is just a number on your profile.


And much more likely any good comments that are not put in the first hour will never get the points that they deserve. Someone says something witty and gets 192 points. Two days later someone writes something very informative, but there are very few viewers after that so they get only 5 points. It would be foolish to think that an algorithm could compensate. Slashdot has this very problem years ago and solved it in a very good way. This reddit system of many points only works for when there is very small users, but does not scale.


- When people with long enough attention spans are invested in the conversation they will read through many of the comments. In many cases if you come into a conversation late you will be posting a reply because it is less likely you are coming in with a new angle. If you are posting a reply it is more likely others will see your comment because it will be visible on their threads page.

-I think the example you gave is a very rare case (I hope.) Unfortunately part of commenting right now is timing, which I do not have a problem with. If you post something informative two days into the conversation it will not have the same exposure, although depending on the conversation it will not appear far below the fold.

-I do see your point and I think it would be great if good comments that come late have more visibility. None or all of the following might help:

1) Delete comments and their replies once they reach a certain negative threshold (-5 for example.) Of course this gives downmodding a whole new meaning but maybe that is a good thing. This would make the comments section more readable and keep the conversation more civil and/or focused.

2) Highlight comments that were posted in the past 8 hours and have reached some karma threshold in yellow. This is a sort of "recent hot shots" feature. This way when an HN reader scans the page they can see what new comments are receiving upvotes more easily.

3) Give recent votes more weight then past votes. This means that a karma point awarded now means more than a karma point awarded an hour ago. Maybe the algorithm HN uses already does this- I am not sure.

I don't think pushing newer comments with fewer points up is a good idea because that changes the power up upvoting too drastically. Perhaps some anchor tags at the top of the comments section leading to the hottest new comments?

p.s. nice blog


So I started writing a reply that got longer and longer and I am going to turn it into a blog entry. Would you be willing to review it before I publish it?


Enjoy:

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/02/comments-rating-s...


I think he meant only credit the user with 10 karma points. The comment can still be boosted based on the number of up-mods it receives.


Wouldn't we then be saying that no comment is worth more than 10 points under any circumstances? I am not sure that is the proper behavior either. In this scenario a well thought out 3 paragraph critique would be limited to the same number of points as a two word quip.


Well the obvious next step is a logarithmic scale for comment values.


I'd prefer weighting the karma by comment length until it reaches at least three lines, combined with a markov chain that recognizes vocabulary like that in the linked article and common among insightful posts.


If you go this way you challenge people to beat it. Keep It Simple is the best.

This being said, the "unique post" robot proved to be a success in several implementations.


Possibly. But right now many two word quips get more points than longer, well though out, responses. If karma really has no value (over the few point levels currently defined) I guess it doesn't matter. But I always assumed that in the future karma points would be used for additional features.

Perhaps the upper limit shouldn't be 10, but the total number of words in the post. So a two word quip, only gets you two points. ;)


I have a related suggestion: show someone's median karma per comment and karma per post in his/her profile. This would shed light on someone's real contribution level: e.g. someone puts up a TC article and gets 128 pts in one day vs. someone makes 64 moderately insightful, 2 pt comments.

StackOverflow awards medals to bring out distinctions. I don't think we have to go that far, but it's a similar idea.


I think it's entirely valid to not add karma to a comment you agree because it's reached the karma you feel it deserves.

Similarly as people have pointed out you don't need pile on the down-modding simply because you don't agree with something.

I would almost say that unless something is actually disinformation, spam or trolling you shouldn't down-mod it, even if you disagree. Upvote the comments you agree with or write a persuasive argument instead.

One thing that I like about Stackoverflow.com is the ability to see how much people down/up mod.


Like say, Slashdot?


I have noticed a piling on of downmods in the past couple of weeks. TooMuchNick seems to have lost 30+ points for a couple of comments. They didn't add much to the conversation but they weren't so offensive that he deserved that. He got the point. Probably -1 would have accomplished it. HN is the most civil site that I have seen. All it takes is a gentle tap to remind a commenter the s/he didn't contribute to the discussion.


Sure, but he's from Valleywag (he launched the site and eventually got fired for being too gossipy even for Gawker and Valleywag), and he's starting a site to encourage people to keep a visual online diary of their sex lives. He'd have to post thousands of fantastic comments here in order to compensate for the damage to civility he's done in his life so far.

(I know this is kind of harsh, but if you think I wouldn't say it in person, you probably haven't met me.)


As far as I know, new users can't downmod.


True, but I think it's a lot easier to get to the karma level where you can downmod now. Unless the limits have been raised.


Perhaps that's the solution then: raise the limits for downmodding. Everyone on the leaderboard is now above 2000. Given the long-tail nature of such distributions, that means there's probably 1-2 thousand active users above 500 - more than enough to downmod spam/trolls.

I'd set the flag/downmod limit to 500.


I'd personally like to say "Please keep HN civil, free from trolling, and intellectual." This site has been a great resource - and that's at least partially because the tone of the vast majority of the community here is pretty serious.

I have an account on reddit as well, and my tone over there is different than my tone here. On reddit I make a decent amount of off-the-cuff remarks, occasionally troll a bit, participate in pun threads, and also have a decent amount of intelligent debate and discussion. Here I keep my mouth (fingers?) shut (stoppped?) unless I have something to say, because that's the vibe here.

Here, I'm more likely to vote people up who have a differing opinion on an issue, or even if they have an opinion that offends me, if they are able of stating and defending their position logically. On reddit, I'd probably just skim over their post.

Etc.

The tone of this site has gotten a little lighter since the first time I was here, and it seems to have gotten a lot more of a focus on the business side of things, which is fine - but if people aren't careful, the site will devolve into yet another pick-your-favorite-site-here.

So yeah. Please keep HN grown-up. It's nice to see mostly responsible discussion happening on a site like this, and I hope it continues to happen.


And by "grown-up," we mean "like grown-ups who aren't from TechCrunch."


I'm not familiar with this whole TechCrunch debacle, other than reading about that guy being spit on.

By "grown-up", I mean "thinking before posting, and posting in a way that indicates that one has a generally 'mature' mental-model". This isn't something that can be measured objectively, more of an attribute that emerges from the sum of a users postings - and posters on HN have generally passed the "act-like-an-adult" test so far.


You really should re-read the top level of this post. It's directed squarely at you.


I just learned the very hard way to never ever comment on HN after drinking.


Seems like HN should ask a GMail Goggles-like "Are you drunk?" question before you are allowed to post comments!


That principle doesn't work online. In general you can say stuff to people in person that's insulting and abusive, and then just give a wry smile and everybody laughs. You can't do that online. The guideline has it exactly wrong.

The problem is that what you say online about someone is frozen forever, and takes on more significance than either the sender or the receiver actually meant. In person, I call you an asshole, you're impressed that I said it to your face, we both laugh and move on. On the web I call you an asshole, you call me an asshole, it escalates, shows up in google searches for both our names, people who aren't quite up to speed on things (recruiters) take it more seriously than it should be... bad stuff happens.


Some percentage of the nasty things people say on web forums are said half-jokingly and offend because half-jokingness is hard to convey in text, but I think the majority are genuinely nasty.


Have you considered asking new users to enter their first and second names, and creating an available username from that?

This is often credited for Facebook having more 'real' content than MySpace and Friendster.


Enforcing specific types of usernames is rather lame. People would just enter fake names. Facebook depends on your real identity so people who have met you can locate you.


Some people may enter fake names, but asking for their first and last names at least sets expectations.

As you've touched on, allowing people to find you on hacker news would also be a benefit.


Usernames consisting of people's first and last names feels corporate. It would be a bummer not to have any mechanical_fishes.


One thing that might help just a bit is to more prominently encourage people to add some contact information in their profiles. It is, unfortunately, fairly rare.


Thanks mate!


I didn't realize until this moment that there was a mechanical_fish and a robotrout... am I missing out on a joke or something?

Next I'll see a reply from cyberguppy.


What about FirstnameLastinitial? E.g., I'd be Mikem, rather than nailer.


My guess is you're not the only MikeM, which leads to yahoo-esque usernames (I'd likely be TimS223 or something), and by that point you may as well allow real nicknames.


I really appreciate the distinction you drew here. I'm definitely an asshole a lot, but I'm fairly certain that at my core I'm a reasonable and accommodating person. That's something that can come across in person, but on the internet I have to take particular care to make sure I'm not stepping out of line.

Not that I always do, but I should :).


It works in as much as we have the chance to reply and amend our comments if they are taken differently than intended. The same problems exist for phone calls and email as well but it doesn't stop people from figuring out ways to communicate wry or witty comments, it just changes the conventions that are used.


I'd also prefer to see less "linkbait" on the front page; i.e. stories with titles that are, at best, only tangentially related and are instead overdramatized just to get clicks.


It would be healthy for submitters to look at headlines before they copy them directly, realizing that what makes sense for a blogger (aware of Digg) seeking some well-deserved attention for a post might not make sense in an extremely specialized forum like Hacker News.

What I mean is, a blogger is completely justified in naming a post "Why James Bond would never drink a Coke" (like I did for an environmentalist blog) if that blogger believed their purpose would be best served by alerting Digg users to the perfidies of the Coca-Cola company. But if a Hacker News reader appreciated the post's message -- that Coca-Cola is exploiting water rights laws in third-world countries to produce its products cheaply at the expense of the residents and their clean water supplies -- they would do well to use a different headline that what the desperate blogger, often paid by the pageview, had written with a view to Digg.

That said, bloggers will more and more overhype their posts in the way that media have since their beginning, and those of us on small thinky web sites will have to get used to downvoting and moving on.


Except we can't downvote can we? at least not stories? (or is there a karma level for that?) (I am sure I am missing something obvious).


Nobody can downvote stories, but if they're violating the rules, high-karma users can flag them for deletion.


I would be cool with allowing high karma users the ability to down vote stories (people on the top 100 list for example).


I used to really want downvoting. Flagging really works much better. The stories that I would have ended up downvoting either don't belong here and get [dead]-ed, or they spawn a lot of fascinating conversation.

Fortunately, people haven't been doing a lot of gaming of the system yet. The biggest problem with upvoting only is that controversial posts garner the most votes (a thousand people love a subject and ten thousand people HATE it, so it gets a thousand upvotes and a TON of comments, even if most people disagree with the premise).


I agree, downvotes are dangerous. I know Reddit had (has? I don't know I left when I found HN) a problem where all new articles were getting downmodded by people who wanted their own links on the front page.

I repeatedly think that I would like downvotes, but I quite quickly remember that I absolutely hate downvotes. I don't completely agree with being able to downmod comments, however I think the side effects are dampened that you have to have good karma before you can downvote, which prevents trolls from abusing the system.


Curiously PG posting this gets 50 karma and counting, someone else posted a similar thing earlier in the week and got flagged dead.

I don't want to see this topic regularly but maybe the guidelines could be made more prominent for new users?


Good idea. I should add some kind of welcome page.


How about "Don't say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face" next to the submit button for the comment box? It could be a link to the full guidelines page maybe.

Even for older users it could be good to have a little reminder to not be an arsehole (I could certainly use that sort of reminder on occasion).


Didn't someone write some kind of code to detect when a given text might be a flame? Not sure what it was based on. It'd be cool if the site said "your message looks kind of flame-y. Are you sure you want to post it?"


There is some available real estate in the navigation header. Maybe a "posting guidelines" link up there is warranted?

If it clutters the interface, it could go away once you get 100 karma or so.


I like tying it to karma rather than user date length. That way, long-time users that haven't done anything will still see the guidelines, as a sort of hint.


Why would long-time users that "haven't done anything" need the hint?


One may still benefit greatly from the experience of posting and commenting rather than observing. I was reading hn a while before I got an account, and never really thought about karma, submission titling or type, or comment voting.

I have often wondered why the posting, submission, and voting guidelines haven't been more prominent. I appreciate Paul's active role in this community--I think it account's for much of the civility to have benevolent moderators--but definitely making the principles easier to access would be helpful, too.


Incidentally, having the page detailing the post-formatting capabilities on the Reply page would be handy, so people are aware of italics,

  code indentation
and so on.


Yes, please. It took me a while to figure out how to indent code.

FYI, text surrounded by asterisks (*) will be intended. Begin a new line with two spaces, and you have code indentation.


An alternative to placing site guidelines on a welcome page or in the navigation header (where I believe they would eventually be glossed over) would be to link to the guidelines from within inappropriate comments. If a comment gets downmodded below a certain level, it could either be appended with a link to the site guidelines or altogether replaced by a link to the guidelines. This would probably be a better hint to the commenter that something he/she said may have violated the guidelines. This may also have the side effect of keeping people from abusing the downmod option.

This could be one approach to dealing with the "broken windows" issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373356


I guess a link saying Rules in the top Orange Bar would be nice. I think that's the most visible part of the HN site.


Displaying the policy before a low karma user can reply would be nice.

If you find yourself in that section of code, the little "help" link that shows after the edit box when "edit"ing could also be displayed when you are starting a reply.


I just added one (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). For the first day, new users get a link to it in the top bar and just above the "submit" button on the comment form.


Duplicate submission. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219081

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133453


Um... Did you look at who made this submission? :)


Oddly enough, a thread like this was front-paged just a few days ago, but was killed by the editors.


I didn't see the earlier thread, but perhaps the difference is in how things were worded? I quite often see pairs of comments posted at the same time and making exactly the same points, yet where one post gets voted up and the other doesn't, simply because one comment is better written than the other.

I imagine that this is even more important than usual in this case, since when the message is "please be good" there's really nothing except how well the message is worded.


It wouldn't matter. I think some dupes are required.

When you say "take care" to somebody it's not like you think they won't take care of themselves. But if you stop saying it altogether, I bet it will harm the basis of civility.

I vaguely recall an experiment done on a classroom where everybody was required to say hi every morning. Soon after the entire class had a great spirit. I don't recall when, where, or who; if somebody does, please say.


"pg"? Am I missing something?


pg == Paul Graham

http://ycombinator.com/people.html


the guy running the site.


I think this may have been meant as an "ironic" joke. Then again, that kind of humor is also one of the common things on other sites that I'm thankful to not see rewarded here.


I think that is pretty funny - in fact when I read digg (usually on the phone, sitting on the toilet) for a laugh I always check the comments first, but I NEVER participate (its pure theatre). Has its place, as does HN I think. Is HN the only civil place online ? ;)


Why should it matter who made the submission?


What has caused the spike in new users?


I don't know (the web server doesn't keep track of referring urls), but it started on thursday.


the web server doesn't keep track of referring urls

that makes the bloodsucking capitalist in me cringe. ;)


Because Michael Arrington mentioned YC News in Techcrunch???

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/04/2009-products-i-cant-li...


Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Not only mentioned, but likened to Digg. People may have been expecting that what passes on Digg would pass here.


The post was on January 4th though. I wonder whether it's a chaotic system effect.


I think it may be related to acangiano's "Let's all grow up" post. He mentioned Hacker News and it seemed to be a popular submission, particularly on reddit.

A few curious trolls probably wandered over and created new accounts. Of course, that's not Antonio's fault. I liked his post. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455474

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7tbpl/lets_all_...


well if its just a few.. that is ok ;)


I'm not so sure about that. A single troll can do a lot of damage. A single person can acquire scripting software ( like the Arrington username ), abuse the page formatting on every page, and destroy the balance of conversation by pissing people off.

It takes the ethos of the entire community to keep this all in check. Some trolls might assimilate, but a determined person would be hard to deal with.


yes, one troll can do a lot of damage. but trolls around here never get the chance, because their accounts are killed swiftly. the editors on this site are much more aggressive about curbing bad behavior than anywhere else i've ever seen.


Layoffs?


That's actually why I started posting here.


Leo Laporte also mentioned this site on TWiT I believe. I was already a member, but perhaps this drove some people this way.


http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte/status/1164672251


Don't these guys know how to keep a good secret?


'tis the message of the medium, nothing on the internet is secret to anyone on the internet.


As a reddit convert myself, I'm terrified to post here. I hear that Paul Graham himself sometimes singles out dumb commenters and publicly ridicules them. ;-) Best to keep a low profile.


I just read through your comments, and I think you should comment more often.

Besides, I'm sure Paul Graham wouldn't single out someone that has been trained in classical piano and seems to like Bach...


Ha! That happened to me early on once. It's okay, it doesn't ruin your HN citizen status as long as you don't keep saying silly things. (I was involved in a massive flamewar and utterly deserved repudiation.)


Unless you have a not-so-secret smirking attitude toward Paul Graham, having publicly ridiculed him in an earlier stage of your career and now being lucky enough to have no need for his money.


I can remember when -23 points would be reserved for something like a string of racial epithets, not merely a lame but inoffensive attempt at humor.


It's okay, a little smack on the hand is just what I needed. I have no idea what's brought so many new users (I just came to find talent and advice for my startup), but as long as it's a temporary influx, the new users will settle down as they usually do. A short period of bad behavior from inexperienced users is just a growing pain for any healthy organization, and since the community (and Paul) have dealt with it so well, I have little fear that growth will turn Hacker News into Digg. For instance, I know now not to cheekily mock Paul in his own thread, and probably not to write a single thing after several black-and-tans.

That said, members who wish to preserve a community's original quality should be proactive. They may have to replace the functions of some other original members who have left. We call this "culture."


Well just to chime in as someone that has been here for quite a long time, a 'slap on the hands' (as far as I have witnessed) tends to be dropping a comment to -1 or so.

Piling on someone like that should be genuinely rare, and only because they are spamming links to goatse or streaming curse words at someone.

Hopefully this little portion of our 'culture' doesn't change, as it seems like a civil way to deal with this sort of thing.


As more people use the site the Karma swings are going to increase. He got a + 24 on the same thread so IMO it balances out.


Yes, but it once was the case that noise comments were given a single downvote and left alone by everyone else.

Negative numbers here are like a slap in the face, and when overused they will be even more corrosive to the community than a flood of juvenile comments would be.

More to the point, those scores are not supposed to be used to represent entertainment value, because people are not participating here for pure mindless entertainment.


I tend to down vote things that are at +50 karma and up vote stuff that get's really low unless they are extremely good or bad. However, think of it like a threading problem. If 30 people that think like I do see the comment at 10 and all up vote it it's going to hit 40 without updating it's value to those people.


Then maybe enough others like you will take notice a little later on and correct it. Just don't worry about how everyone else votes--they're not the ones you get to decide on.


more users -> more mods, whichever way


I honestly hope that HN news does not degenerate into another reddit or digg-like news sites where comments and content are full of dramatized and useless material.

So far, I've found the users of this site intellectual, technical and insightful in their comments and as a result, its been a joy to participate in this community and I hope the crowd which this site attract remain the same - smart and technical people.


Just like when reddit started out. So what does HN do differently that will stop it?


I find that the site has definitely spread apart in it's values. And the real problem is as "undesireables" flood in, the people who are truer to the original culture get disgusted and back away.

As a personal (though perhaps not universal) example, see here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458256 , a +23 comment decrying the multi-page split of the article. See here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398185 , my own comment railing against them wasting my time\effort like that.... modded down to -6.

I don't want to be a whiny nuisance about it, but when that happened it really alienated me from the community and quite frankly I don't think I've contributed much anything of value since. I felt betrayed when I chose to stand against that kind of crap and I was stabbed in the back. Add in the fact that the "rules" are not being applied equally as the culture splits, and it just feels random and unfair.

To conclude my soapbox, I could be doing approx. 50 trillion things on the internet right now, so stop trying to waste my time\effort with 11 three sentence pages, snarky\"witty" comments; and God save the YCNews


I think it just comes down to wording. The post that ends with "FAIL" got downvoted.

That seems pretty harsh to me, but I think people are just hypervigilant against any hint of encroaching diggishness.


Edward Tufte has a good thread of collected moderation advice and policies from over the years here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Here is the short essay he provides to anyone who cares to comment, at the top of the comment form:

-----------------------

This board is only about evidence presentations and analytical design. For all business matters (book orders, courses, shipping, prices, delivery dates), please go to the Graphics Press contact information on our home page

On the Ask ET forum, we seek to publish questions and contributions that advance the analytical content of the thread, provide a good example, or raise an interesting question. Contributions should be relevant to the chosen thread. Please no marketing pitches, gratuitous links, or incivilities. There are about 6,000 contributions in the 500 threads now published on this board; they provide good examples of what has been accepted for publication.

Some new contributions go to a non-public queue, which is frequently reviewed by a member of the editorial board in order to decide whether the material should be posted. About 30% of submitted contributions are posted; after publication, about half survive the occasional reviews of published items. The editors are unable to reconsider their decisions or to answer any queries about editorial decisions (some of which may well be mistaken). Publication policies are described in detail at Moderating internet forums [Ed. the link I mention above]

If your contribution is published, your email address will be masked on the board, and your identifying IP number will not be published.

-----------------------


Feature request/experiment: Put a small second column on the right side with the 'new page' on the main page.

I suggested this to reddit a long time ago when they first started to really get lame, but it never caught on.


While this is up on the front page, I'd like to say that I love HN and the people on it.

There's lots of things I like about HN, like that links can't be down voted and that downvoting comments is an exclusive right to people with good karma.

However, the main thing I like about HN is that I see lots of civil discussion and people giving useful comments and suggestions. When I have seen disagreements (I believe I've been in a few myself) I notice that people tend to do what they do in real life and simply 'walk away'. When I read something that really irks me I usually just close HN and will come back later or whenever when I've forgotten about it.


maybe make this post a sticky, so that everyone will see it right away. Can be temporary one...i.e. first 90 days you see this thread at the top of the list, then it goes away?


A suggestion:

Any chance that news stories could be throttled or more heavily edited/moderated just after a spike in new users? Just a thought, it could help to filter out those who are interested versus those just looking for another forum to do their usual thing on.


The problem is more in the comments. The character of the submissions hasn't changed much.

The best way to deal with nasty comments by new users may be just to ask them to stop. Several times lately I've noticed established users doing that, e.g.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457319


Well things seem to be going well. Dodged a bullet this time !

I am very interested to see how things maintained - increasing popularity is inevitable...


Apparently, they already are: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435705


Is it possible to change your username somehow? I'd switch over to using first name/last initial or first initial/last name if it is. I like being held personally accountable for what I write here, and the real life conversation standard.


i'd say putting your real name and contact information in your profile suffices.


I showed up here because a real-life acquaintance wrote a nice post about HN on his blog, here: http://www.robsayers.com/programming/HackerNews.html I had visited in the past when it was purely Startup news, but I hadn't created an account.

As I'm more of a tinkerer and explorer than entrepreneur, the bent is more toward my liking, since the revision. I really like the attitude--or rather lack thereof--and look forward to becoming a part of the community.


> People like it here because one can have a civil conversation.

It's true, I don't know how I stumbled across this site but one thing I noticed is the 'high quality' comments compared to other social news websites.

I'd say to the regulars be patient with us, the new folks in town, since we may be a bit jaded by some of the other places we visit and, yes, the anonymous nature of the Internet does bring out the worst in people, including me.

One thing I've learned when commenting is "less is more" (although you'd never know by this three paragraph 'comment').


Well I post here once in a blue moon when I see something of interest, and I also comment. My long term goal is to break 100 points on my next submission.

It's a sad thing that it's been years now and we still have to have guidelines that essentially say what everyone was told by their mother when they were a child. I think this will improve some day when either 1. we ban dogs from the net or 2. we start shooting the bad ones :)

As an aside, PG, congrats! I saw recently that you were promoted up a level. It's a wonderful thing, non?


Just a thought, but if you got modded down badly, being banned from HN for a few days, with a big banner that tells you why "sorry: your last comment was modded -5, we'll let you back in tomorrow", that might take care of the teaching once and for all.


For some time I read hacker news nearly daily (one of the rare places) and mostly because of the comments. Some members here have good points, ideas and are right at the mark. Even with this valuable board discussion if many of these non sense comments increase it will turn away good members. With the anonymity of the internet there will be always some characters that need moderation and so far ycombinator did a good job. Keep it up.


From all the downmodding of the linked comment, I gather a lot of people are going to disagree, but I actually think the comment may have been the most helpful one in the thread.

Its message was:

    Prioritize, focus on things that are relevant to 
    your success, not on things that only matter after
    you've succeeded, i.e. see the bigger picture.
Perhaps the delivery could have been better.


The method a person uses to convey that idea is important. The way it was said, there was likely too much work to be done extracting that simple idea compared to the ideas worth to the parent poster. I think everyone's opinion is that the way we communicate our ideas on this board is also important.


From my experience posting, I'm learning more about what's acceptable, and sometimes I even delete a post that's dragging down my karma.

But more interesting - With the experience of posting here, I should be able to write a press release for my startup that appeals to hackers.


> We're trying to see whether by asking people to be civil we can avoid the kind of nastiness that anonymity breeds by default.

Plus liberal use of disabling people's accounts without notifying them let alone asking them to change something.


I think it basically boils down to:

Hacker News logins are a privilege, not a right.

Coming from a background of things like talkers where you needed to be explicitly invited by another user before you could get in, I don't really have a problem with that.


i've seen pg make polite suggestions to commenters who are out of line. they almost always completely ignore him.

given that he's got other things to do besides just moderate this site, i don't blame him at all for killing the accounts of unruly posters. at that point, the onus is on them to do something to get back in his good graces, or just go somewhere else.


I agree wholeheartedly. It takes effort on the part of all of us to maintain a useful and constructive environment here at HN, and I have GREATLY appreciated the thoughtful, insightful and provocative discourse here.


The group is indeed its own worst enemy

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624


What about putting a cap on the number of users that can register per day? This keeps the community growing but in a controlled fashion.


Where did the new spike come from?


is there an IRC channel for HN?


try #startups at freenode


Or http://chatterous.com/hnyc


hacker news is not digg. end of sentence.


hossam


design flaw.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

hate to carp on it, nobody likes hearing I told you so, but a design flaw is a design flaw.


Slashdot used to be (reasonably) well-informed discussion. Digg at the beginning too. And reddit as well. rec.sports.baseball.bos-redsox, too.

All successful forums grow big and become worthless. The Y C kids need to learn this.

Never gonna' give you up Never gonna' let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.


That's not a reason to give up. Maybe this time it will work. As pg says, this is an experiment.

The problem of retaining the character of a site while not just letting it stagnate (as happens when you start doing things like cutting of new memberships or restricting new user posting) is a very hard, and as yet unsolved I believe, problem. But solving hard problems is what it's all about, right? :p




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