> "quality content with a focus on... anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind"
This is a source of a lot of uncivil behavior on HN. Startup founders/tech geeks are intellectually interested in a lot of topics but unqualified to discuss them in any detail. This results in comment threads full of knee-jerk reactions and bikeshedding.
It's fine for people who aren't officially credentialled experts in something to talk about it. The best insights often come from outsiders. The problem comes when people express their ideas intemperately, either by making extreme statements that should be more qualified and tentative, or by being uncivil to one another.
I believe I've finally come up with a solution for that, incidentally, after years of searching. It will require surprisingly little new code. I almost started implementing it during the 4th of July holiday, but I started writing a new essay instead.
> It's fine for people who aren't officially credentialled experts in something to talk about it.
Sometimes this is true, but sometimes undertrained perspectives can be quite detrimental. The most clear-cut example is that of medical discussions; medical commentary or speculation from under-qualified individuals can do real harm. Many communities on the web have recognized this and have taken measures to protect users[1].
Medical advice is a pretty extreme example as far as detrimental discussions, but there are some shades of gray that I've seen show up on HN. As a biologist, the ones I've found most grating are those that reflect poor training in the the life sciences, where HNers make pseudoscientific or unscientific claims. It's easy to call these things "opinions", but they are actively harmful when most users will not be able to tell that they are incorrect.
There are certainly other cases where underinformed commenters end up doing harm, from legal speculation to "get your pitchforks" outrage attacks.
Note that I'm not arguing against free and open discussion in forums such as HN; people should be physically able to post whatever they want. My point is instead that the community should be sensitive to underqualified commentary in disciplines beyond its expertise. Less accepting, in a way.
Credentialing is but one way this has been done, but understandably not the best one here.
I hear where you're coming from, but I disagree with regards to the HN community specifically. I hope most members here understand that there's a huge gray area between our "extpertise-es." Personally, I have degrees in biology and env. science but I've been a software dev for 15 years. I'm not really sure where I fit in. Does that mean I can't have an opinion on environmental science topics because I'm "not in practice?" I can't speak for the medical advice topics (because I'm largely ignorant), but I always take the opinions on this site with a grain of salt.
Just because we may not be "credentialed" doesn't mean our opinions are worthless or detrimental. Most of us are simply happy to contribute where we can, and we spend most of our time learning things that are beyond our comfort zone. After having been here for almost 5 years, I can suss out the wheat from the chafe, and I like hearing the variety of opinions regardless of their credentials. And most of the time I take the position of "student" trying to learn something from others. The breadth of expertise here is astounding, and I'm continually in awe of what people are doing. Could you be taking this too seriously?
Ninja edit: softened my tone about taking things seriously (one of my personal shortcomings).
> The most clear-cut example is that of medical discussions; medical commentary or speculation from under-qualified individuals can do real harm.
The same could be said for credentialed experts, especially in the medical field. Taking steps to prevent users from freely discussing topics under the guise of protecting them can prevent unpopular but correct opinions from seeing the light of day. If somebody says something you can refute, then correct them in a civil way. That's how lots of people learn and grow - they put their theories out into the world and see how well they hold up to scrutiny. Making it "less accepting" to say something you believe is true because you're not sufficiently credentialed is actively suppressing free and open discussion.
A lot of popular opinions are also terribly wrong. I'm referring to the fact that popular opinion should not prevent people from reading an alternate viewpoint to begin with. If all we're allowed to read and discuss are popular opinions, there's a lot of potentially valuable information we're missing. People here can read, discuss facts, debunk falsehoods and make up their own minds.
Yeah, I realized as soon as I posted that that I'd have to explain.
I'm going to define a state for comments between living and dead called pending, and I'll give everyone over a certain threshold of karma and/or age the ability to promote comments from pending to live.
Pending comments should be promoted if they (a) make a positive contribution to the discussion, and (b) are not unnecessarily harsh or uncivil.
I may try this out on individual threads before switching the whole site over.
While the idea sounds good, care should be taken that it doesn't mean HN turns into an echo chamber. Sometimes having your idea shot down is the best thing that can happen. Doing a "Show HN" and getting only positive feedback can convince someone to quit their job and work on this new idea full time to disastrous consequences if the idea wasn't that great.
"That idea is terrible. X is bad, Y doesn't work. We already have Z." While hostile, it's sometimes the best and most useful advice someone can receive. People who believe their idea is awesome and end up with positive reinforcement, even a simple "looks good, just work on Y a little" can become a major life changing event if that is the most hostile feedback they receive while living in a dream world.
In short, I see no reason to force sugar coating on HN. I'd rather have a 'flag' button on individual comments for getting people banned who are being insulting to a person rather than an idea. As it stands, a genuinely useful but 'harsh' comment may never get seen even when it should be.
In short, I see no reason to force sugar coating on HN. I'd rather have a 'flag' button on individual comments for getting people banned who are being insulting to a person rather than an idea. As it stands, a genuinely useful but 'harsh' comment may never get seen even when it should be.
I have never understood, and probably will never understand, why so many people on HN seem to think "critical" == "insulting" == "harsh". It's possible to criticize someone or their idea without being a dick, but too many people seem to think that "being a dick" is somehow necessary to give "critical feedback". I don't think it is.
Rational, reasonable people can disagree and debate, even disagree vehemently, without anyone needing to resort to the kind of comments that often get attacked (the ones where the criticizer is just being a dick).
I don't think anyone on HN wants to eliminate constructive feedback or even "negative" comments. The goal is to get the constructive feedback and the criticism while remaining civil. We don't need sugar-coating, we just need people to practice basic manners and remember the Golden Rule. Walk a mile in the other guy's shoes, etc. Have some compassion and empathy.
"That idea is terrible."
Taken by itself, that's a terrible comment - even if it's true! It's terrible because it lacks any explanation or exposition on why the idea is terrible and, as such, amounts to just an opinion (even if it is, coincidentally, accurate).
Why not say instead:
"I don't think this idea is going to work, because XXXX"
where XXX might be "there are already 374 competitors doing exactly the same thing", or "it takes very specific industry connections to break into that domain", or "it violates the second law of thermodynamics" or whatever?
> I have never understood, and probably will never understand, why so many people on HN seem to think "critical" == "insulting" == "harsh".
I think that's the influence of California culture on the startup community. I'm a New Yorker, so harsh for me is telling me if my brother were still alive my app would give him cancer all over again. In California, I've been told I'm being overly critical and harsh for saying I think using node.js wouldn't work for the application and we should try nginx. Some managers I've had even thought I was mad at them because I didn't smile at them enough during the day. For better or worse, people on the west coast are more sensitive to negativity than people from the northeast. Maybe it has something to do with the winters (or lack thereof). :)
The point being, the dividing line between destructive and constructive criticism can vary greatly depending on the person and the culture they're from. I guess that's where the voting from pending to live comes into play. It'll be interesting to see where that dividing line lands for the community as a whole.
I have to agree with PG here. I guess I just see criticism and incivility as two different things.
I think what you are describing is criticism, which is fine, if civil.
It's incivility that should be eschewed. I would actually be more inclined to vote civil arguments up if I knew such a system was in place.
I also think your hypothetical would-be founder is more likely to get criticism of a higher quality under the circumstances that PG is proposing.
"X is bad"... I'd imagine might give way to something more like... "X is requiring three clicks to get done, and at the end, it does Y instead. You guys should look at that funnel." Which is much more helpful.
"Y doesn't work"... I could see morphing over time to something more like "Y doesn't work on my Vaio with 8GB RAM running Firefox 23 on Windows 8." There's a bit more information there, and it's still a civil comment.
I'm interested to see how it plays out. I could see it being ESPECIALLY good for things like feedback.
It's possible to be critical without being harsh or uncivil.
e.g. your example can be shortened to "X is bad, Y doesn't work. We already have Z." And the opinion "bad" could be replaced with its factual/reasoned basis.
Of course, praise is sweet and criticism bitter. Let's not sugar-coat it - but let us not poison it either.
On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg might've been told "we already have tonnes of social networks; MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, etc."
In my experience, people in a dream world usually are not very deterred by what other people tell them, anyway. It seems that they need to go through a series of realizations for themselves.
Can you explain the reasons why you see this as being an effective way to filter out overly-pedantic or critical comments? These comments seem to be the focus on HN not just because they are common, but also because they get upvoted to the top of the discussion, perpetuating the theme.
Presumably the sub-audience who finds such comments productive to discussion enough to upvote them will happily flip them live, too. It seems like the only reason to think otherwise is if you think that most people who have high karma are not guilty of upvoting these types of comments.
Because there's a karma threshold attached to promotion, a user who has some demonstrated engagement with the site will have to make a deliberate decision to grant a forum to limbo comments. That person will have to believe the comment makes a positive contribution and maintains civility.
The phenomenon that bolts fatuous vitriol to the tops of threads requires no such deliberation.
I have no idea if this is going to work, but I'm psyched to see it play out.
In another thread not long ago PG stated that this was exactly the case on a few comments he found vitriolic. If he measured the votes of only high-karma users, the comments would have been negative. You can search through his history to find his report on the subject (it was around three weeks ago, IIRC).
To be clear: what he's saying in this thread seems to support the idea of a karma-limited feature for showing comments. The score (not the content) on a comment would have been negative; the comment, in context, was a superficial negative comment that commanded the top spot on a thread.
At the very least, the intuition seems to me that if you have a high enough karma score, you've learned by example what is an acceptable and unacceptable comment and know how to compose comments that are acceptable, and should be able to tell the difference. Beyond that, if you set the knob high enough, you're going to capture people who have been around for a while and have been able to witness the rise of the pendants and armchair-experts compared to yesteryear so won't dismiss these things as "normal."
If this is the case, a good optimisation might be to weight the value of a vote according to the karma of the person casting that vote. This seems like a simple idea to me, and I don't know if it's used elsewhere, so please forgive me if I'm being a bit naive here!
Have you changed your stance on "down voting when you disagree with a comment" (you have previously stated that it was OK)? I personally think it would encourage civil behavior if it was frowned upon. I often see comments that I disagree with but that are interesting nonetheless and I'm happy to up vote them for the sake of fighting our tendency towards groupthink.
I might be misunderstanding the way you described this, but wouldn't this increase the noise for people with higher karma since they'll see all of these pending comments? Or is this going to be an option similar to being able to see dead comments?
There are several possible solutions there, and it may take some experimenting to figure out which is best. I may not display pending comments in the threads where they live, but only on a page like /newest. Or I might give the people who see pending comments a way to say they've seen them and don't want to promote them, upon which they won't see them again. And of course after some time and/or number of views, pending comments will die if not promoted, and then no one will see them except with showdead turned on.
Hacker News already has a flaw that conversations tend to be too short-lived to put any real thought into a comment. To describe what I mean by this: in order to do some real research, or to perfect the wording of a comment, might require a couple hours of time: right now, unless you are willing to spend all of that time frantically and immediately when a thread is posted, by the time you have managed to contribute something of real meaning the activity on the thread has died down because everyone has "already read it" (and won't return) and it may, in fact, have already dropped off the home page (and so will get no new traffic).
I thereby feel the need to point out that using a system where the comments are promoted by being viewed inside of the thread has the potential to worsen this effect, as the pool of people available to promote comments will decrease over time, even though the potential value of the comments in question increase over time (as, again, they will be able to have been better perfected, with more research, better wording, and careful thought). I might, thereby, put more weight onto your idea for putting the comments on a page like /newest, in order to better force them to be seen after-the-fact (which, I understand, may be one of the factors you are already thinking about: I'm just attempting to show that someone else might be thinking about that sort of thing).
(This issue has an interesting effect when combined with the Eternel September + Evaporative Cooling interaction effect that this site seems to have: I have found myself "taking a pass" on the first time something is posted, instead working on a comment that I post when the same thing eventually comes up later to a sufficiently-different set of people that it can again accumulate enough votes to hit the home page. FWIW, I would then make the argument that this problem of "good content takes time, and HN is setup in such a way as to discourage things that take time" is a more fundamental cause of the "misinformation due to comment blight by people who don't really know what they are talking about" issue.)
There seem to be a number of features in hacker news which presume longer threads tend more towards noise than signal. The threaded format as implemented, for one, makes it difficult to follow conversations in long threads, particularly in replies to the root post if you're linking from the latest comments page. The further into the nesting you get, the more crunched the text becomes. And, apparently, posts take longer to show up.
Also, there not being a 'notify' feature more or less ensures that anything not on the front page is almost certain to die, although hnnotify.com does a good job of filling this feature in, that the service exists to me suggests that it could be useful as an actual feature for the site. And I know it's been discussed and passed on, but still.
I also worry about how the effect of weighting votes based on karma will bias conversations (though that would kind of be the point I suppose.) I guess we'll be seeing a lot more crypto stories bubbling up in the future...
This is so true. Karma and other scoring metrics just magnifies the problem as the number of people and therefore also the potential karma points decrease the later the comment is posted. It's not an easy problem to solve because people naturally gravitate towards the newest items.
as i was not quite able to articulate below, it feels to me that forum comments, email and todo-lists lie on the same protocol manifold but not quite at the optimal point. (RE: your yesterday's comments... i use browser tabs as a to-do lists.) The obvious axes are synchronicity (temperature) and information (related to entropy) but probably this is still not the best frame to think about this problem.
You could try probabilistically showing pending comments to users who moderate. Then those comments will only be shown to a random sampling of others until they have been promoted. I've always wanted to build an algorithm like that!
I've often wondered if this could be applied to the homepage too: rather than relegating submissions to the "/new" URL, show them to a random subset of users right on the homepage until they've hit a threshold; then show them to everyone.
I think the web is moving in this direction in general. A small group of peers to provide feedback/proofread drafts before publishing was the start. This may be a bit out there, but I for one would enjoy fanning out my tweets to 1% of followers and immediately ramp up to the rest if it surpasses a threshold of engagement or views. That way I only publish interesting content.
So, will this be for all comments, or will having a certain number of comments approved cause yours to automatically be in, or what?
I imagine that this could end up adding additional friction to discussions, as it sounds like the older/more karma'ed people will have to essentially vote-in new comments--out of sheer laziness, I think this could cause the overall comment volume to decrease.
Perhaps an automatic acceptance change just to keep things interesting?
Awesome - I was hoping it would be something like this. I've found that new comments on new links tend to be lower quality and from newer accounts. When a thread is started with these kinds of low quality comments it can be hard to recover from, if older accounts or high karma accounts can prevent this from happening naturally that would be great.
But I thought users with high age upvote similarly to the whole, as shown by news.ycombinator.com/classic (and presumably similar for high karma, high average, etc)... Is the reasoning that a "gatekeeper" or "mod" role will encourage a different perspective and therefore results?
Interesting. Are you suggesting that some/all comments would enter in a pending state until they are promoted? What sort of rules are you thinking for which comments go straight to live vs. start as pending? Or would it be user based... as a probationary step before getting hellbanned?
Another idea: have 2 scores. One score controls life/death and the other score controls karma. The life/death score is based on the votes of users who meet certain criteria. This way, its essentially a vote of the the class instead of a singular person.
I'd be interested to know how you'll decide which threads to pilot this feature on. If it isn't random, I think it may give us more insight into what topics/biases you feel draw out this kind of behaviour.
possibly oblique but not tangent: how is the email-as-todolist thing going? streak seems to be the closest to that but comments-with-state sounds closer... and how does this fit into your periodic table?
This assumes there's a correlation between karma/age and the tendency to promote fairly (i.e. due to civility and positive contribution, rather than promoting what one agrees with).
I doubt there is. The problem is that no one judges the judges. That is, you don't lose karma points by making bad judgment calls. The same problem exists at my work. People become managers by being good engineers and by having been there a long time, but no one is judging their management skills.
How do you recognize that, though? Your heuristic can't be "promotes comments with many downvotes" because the problem at hand is bad comments with many upvotes. If your heuristic is "promotes comments that others don't promote", how do you know you're not punishing someone for a minority viewpoint?
If the plan is for you to personally investigate promoters' promoting habits and make the call to take away the right, then I guess that would work but I don't know how it would scale. My skepticism is based on the idea that this could be done automatically.
First, you are responding to a point the original poster didn't make. He didn't claim that he wanted to shut discussion down to "officially credentialed experts". He claimed that people involved were "unqualified to discuss them in any detail" ie. a polite (perhaps qualified and tentative) way of saying "they don't know what they are talking about and are just making stuff up".
Second, much of the truly offensive stuff I've seen on HN has been phrased in "qualified" and "tentative" fashion.
Sometimes the ideas expressed here are, well, shit, and putting a gloss of civility on it doesn't change that it's a shitty idea, it just adds passive voice and some extra syllables. One is reminded of the myriad of polite and civil arguments advanced in the drawing rooms of the nicest people in favour of slavery or against voting rights.
One thing that comes to mind is that the costs for informed comments with supporting arguments are often higher - much higher - than the costs for uninformed rants.
It's easy to say any old thing off the cuff, but takes more effort to refute it. Also, truly expert people have less time, than, say, someone fresh out of college.
I find that my comment scores are higher and my comments more civil if I delete some of the comments I make. These days, I tend to write it, read it, then half the time delete it.
What you might want to do is give the commenter themselves a signal, more explicit than just a bad score or being grayed out. A message could pop up by the comment saying "likely to be downvoted, you are advised to delete this" - and see if more self-policing helps.
Also, if you have some signal that occurs before votes or other comments show up (like a lot of eyeballs on a comment with no upvotes), then maybe you can use that to give users an early signal to delete their comment.
The problem comes when people express their ideas intemperately, either by making extreme statements that should be more qualified and tentative, or by being uncivil to one another.
I hit plenty of opposition here when writing in favor of more qualified and tentative statements in precisely this context. Perhaps now your cult of personality will come around to my/our/your point of view! ;)
I've personally resisted the urge to participate in that as I believe it's counter to the "hackers only" philosophy of HN but, as someone with a B.S. in Biology and an MPH in Health Policy, pretty much -ANY TIME- medicine, health, biology, etc. come up in HN it's a barrage of ignorance, errors, and the sort of intense nonsense bullshit that I would expect of corners of the internet populated by people far dumber than HN's crowd.
There was a time when HN was populated by founders/tech geeks, and didn't have the problems that you're describing. That suggests to me that the presence of founders/tech geeks is not the proximate cause.
Sometimes the truth is unpopular and seen to be uncivil when bluntly stated. Should we all rub blue mud into our belly-buttons and sing praise of everyone's opinions?
The discussion there may be "civil", but it's not healthy.
Truly healthy discussion inherently involves people expressing ideas and opinions that may be provocative. Some people very likely will be offended by these ideas. Some people will get angry. Some people won't believe what they're reading or hearing. But those are all good things. They indicate that there is a wide variety of thought going on.
Communities that are kept "civil" through the use of excessive moderation, for example, thrive only in a very superficial way. Given enough time, intellectual inbreeding happens, where the vast majority of participants adhere to a very strict dogma. Any real contemplation is quickly extinguished. The end result is a very bland type of thought, devoid of real substance. It's not truly healthy, even though it might look good on the surface.
Very lucid and interesting post. However, if you look at other communities like Slashdot, a level of civility is enforced by the community, without necessarily stifling unpopular or dissenting viewpoints (at least once upon a time). It becomes a matter of filtering out inflammatory posts ("trolls"), and that will ultimately depend on the tastes and preferences of the community at large.
Don't get me wrong, the contributors to those subreddits are amazing, but what makes those subreddits work the way they do is the strict moderation. Unsupported posts, memes, etc. are immediately k.o.s. and I believe that's what keeps the quality contributors from leaving.
The most exposed among the high-quality "ask" subreddits may be /r/askscience. There you will typically find that whole swathes of subthreads have been deleted by the moderators. There are lots of civil, high-quality contributors, to be sure; but it's the moderators that ensure that it stays civil and focused.
You can state an unpopular truth without being an asshole about it. "Javascript has some problems with larger codebases" is civil and has just as much information as "JS falls apart when you try to make more than some web 2.0 to-do list" (Don't think this opinion is very unpopular though)
Or maybe for some opinions you can't, if so I'd like to hear an example (intellectual curiosity, not snarkiness).
I see your perspective regarding quality content in the sense that inquisitive founders/geeks may not be "qualified" to weigh in with your standard of "quality".
However, for some "inquisitive minds", discussion (flawed as it may be) yields insight and can create enough interest to further investigate a topic via "quality" sources. Of course there is erred content on HN, but it still provides an introduction for someone to determine whether or not they want to dig deeper into a subject from more credible perspectives.
> Social accountability is provided by linking your Twitter or GitHub accounts
I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. If you're dead set on being an ass, then you'll be one regardless, even if it takes creating a burner Twitter or GH account. Anything short of demanding proof of identity and linking your real name is useless (and now you have two problems.) All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own. A low barrier to entry with community moderation is enough to keep the value of the comments high, while keeping noise to a minimum.
Is the offline version of this strategy efficient? By that I mean if we're standing in a room together are you less likely to be an asshole to me than when you're behind a keyboard?
This method is simply trying to replicate the offline version of the experience by adding a face to the name. I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, but it's probably a step in the right direction.
The offline version of this is requiring everyone to wear a "Hello my name is __________" sticker but not actually checking that they put their real name on it.
I don't understand your reasoning. People who are genuinely dead set on being an ass will be an ass, period. Like you said, adding friction can improve things (you mentioned requiring proof of identity) even if the friction can still be subverted (IDs can be faked). The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses, so I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea.
> Like you said, adding friction can improve things (you mentioned requiring proof of identity)
I said adding proof of a real identity would have some impact, but it would create more problems than it solved, thus it would not improve things.
> The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses
It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users. My argument is that if your objective is to improve the quality of the comments there are more effective ways of doing it, like effective moderation schemes.
> I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea
Because it's not effective. It raises the barrier to entry, excluding several users who would add value to discussions, without providing any meaningful level of protection. Also, neither of them, as far as I am aware, enforces a real name policy, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being "generally not anonymous."
> It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users.
Of course it would. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to reduce the portion of asses in a community at the cost of also reducing the number of quality users. This applies to your last paragraph as well. In this case, for a tech- or startup-leaning community, I think Twitter and GitHub accounts target a huge portion of all appropriate users, and I think it could very well be effective despite it excluding valuable users who don't have or don't wish to use accounts from either service.
As for moderation, it can obviously be an effective tool. But I don't think it's a cure-all feature or even the most fundamentally important feature of a successful community. I have probably seen more online communities negatively impacted by moderators than by users (I would say that holds for Hacker News).
Granted, the "quality" of an online community is inherently subjective, so communities I find problems with might serve a large portion of their users very well. At the end of the day, the people who dislike a community enough to leave will leave, and that improves both the community and those people's lives. That is the fundamental "self-moderation" of online communities.
I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. [...] All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own.
Well, no, there is another possibility. Someone who doesn't already have an account on one of those other services might simply not use yours at all either.
I know plenty of intelligent, interesting, civil people in real life, and many of them contribute to one on-line forum or another. I know plenty of people who develop software, both personally and professionally. I literally can't think of anyone I know in real life who actually has an active GitHub account, though, and I only know a handful who use Twitter. Maybe it's a local thing and using these services is more common in other places.
There is actually evidence as far as I remember which indicates that people using for Facebook commenting system behaves nicer because others can identify them.
At my default browser size I can see 8 items on Monocle at a glance and 21 on Hacker News. I'd suggest, at least, reducing the size of the information about the submitter, number of points, etc. When scanning HN I very rarely look at those.
I don't find avatars add to the conversation mostly because I don't first look to see who said something. If I read something interesting I might look to see who wrote it.
I'm not sure what the thumbnail graphics from the article are adding.
One thing I like about HN is the choice I make between reading the comments and reading the article with no framing.
Excessive attention to identity can really destroy a discussion site. There are communities where I know everyone, but knowing the topic being discussed I already know what each and every person is going to say. Zero information content there.
That's an interesting thing, though--it makes me less likely to post from HN on a mobile device, and thus I'm more likely to be thinking in a useful manner and making thoughtful criticisms.
The application looks good with interesting articles at the time of writing.
As a note though, I opened the link because I thought it was related to Monocle magazine (http://monocle.com/) which also provides high quality content (albeit not community-sourced). Maybe reviewing the name is in order?
As a reader of Monocle, I thought the same. Being that they both play in the publishing content world, I'd think Monocle the magazine would come down on the OP legally. Aside from all that, I'm eager to check it out.
High five to my fellow Monocle readers (subscribers?) ;-) Just as a FWIW, I'd totally love a Hacker News-style site for Monocle-esque topics (i.e. the blend of culture, design, business)..
"an experiment in creating a friendly and intelligent community around sharing quality content"
Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. They're all roughly the same and none are that good. Upvotes suck and we need to move past them.
If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm. Anything short of that I just don't care about.
Perhaps they simply want to create a community that discourages "Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content," and encourages If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm.
I agree upvotes suck, but I think part of the problem is both displaying the score, and allowing downvotes to influence things.
I'd like more builtin randomness for things. Display comments but display them randomly instead of by any sort of score maybe.
But then this all belies the biggest issue I have with reddit/hn/whatever. Trying to follow discussions is painful as its hard to ascertain what has been posted since you last read things and not. That alone is my biggest gripe with most of this, even newsgroup readers made things much easier to follow discussion.
But I'm curious, how would the netflix style algorithms work in practice? It would seem like it would just encourage more filterbubbleish input not? Occasionally off topic news tends to be somewhat engaging and I don't like the idea of removing serendipity amongst news/programming articles.
I may not use haskell for example often or even at all, but lots of the time I do see articles that really end up being well worth my time to read.
I see that comment as being constructive criticism, without a doubt.
It concisely points out at least three very relevant ideas:
1) There's nothing particularly innovative about this proposed approach.
2) The past attempts haven't necessarily been successful, and taking the same (or a very similar) approach one more time also likely won't lead to any more success.
3) The lack of success in the past is very likely due to problems inherent to the approach itself.
That's somewhat close to what http://getprismatic.com is doing. It works fairly well, but I wish I could explicitly tell it what I want to read rather than it just assuming what I want from things I and others tweet about.
Agreed. They didn't really point out anything new or different that they will be doing. That's one of the hardest problems in development. though. It's easy to just reimplement things and mash them up, it's tough to write new stuff. Developers can waste years just rewriting Hacker News with Git logins and stronger moderation (moderation is already pretty harsh here, by the way, with far more people than spammers being ghosted) like they are doing.
Personally, I far prefer Slashdot's model where I can build up a stable of friends and enemies and have their contributions filtered differently. I can filter out the useless cheerleaders while other people can show only them. Yay. It sounds like this thing's focus on pre-caching for performance and forcing the whole community to only say happy things will prevent them from user customized responses and views, though. So I don't expect them to break any new ground in showing more useful stuff and less chaff.
I'm surprised that more sites haven't gone down the road advogato[1] went. I guess it could result in an echo chamber and their seed accounts might not be the right thing, but it seems like a different approach.
One of reddit's key features in the early days was a "recommended" page that was supposedly trained by your up/down votes. It never seemed to work all that well and was abandoned after a year or so.
I always though this was a horrible idea for a system where users are simultaneously consumers expressing their preferences and curators/creators being rated through the same metric.
I recall lots of angry back and forth between folks demanding justification for downvotes received and downvoters who intended to train recommendations.
I will admit to using the "I'm training the recommended filter" excuse to justify downvotes long after the recommended page went away. Once the admins caved and added /r/politics, I gave it up.
I don't understand how using your Twitter handle will elevate the level of discourse. Twitter itself is full of trolls. Also, you can create anonymous Twitter accounts that don't use your real name, so accountability goes out the window too.
For what its worth, it looks like a modern tech discussion forum built using modern tools. Nothing wrong with that, but that's how it should be branded. The feel good aspect without any real technical backend to enable it falls a bit flat.
Looks like the emberjs tutorial got seeded with some articles and comments.
You might consider loading your scripts after the base html is rendered so the initial page-load isn't 2-5 seconds of nothingness.
Seems like the content div is blank as a default, you might consider placing the most popular or trending article there by default as you are loading it anyway.
I would recommend loading titles and thumbnails first, rendering and having comments load in the background so the initial load time is lessened further, unless you are side-loading comments for another reason.
Also, you can only sign up with twitter/github connect?
Am I the only one who don't like this new trend when every second website now is designed with the low contrast and native OS antialiasing disabled? I'm 24 and I just can't read the summaries on this site. Just compare the two versions on this screenshot [1]: default on the top, and native antialiasing on the bottom with the slightly darker text (#67707c)
Does it strike anyone else as unfortunate that every new social news site has to be its own completely closed ecosystem? What happened to the age of the protocol?
Seconded. Especially because the "quality content with a focus on technology, startups and frankly anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind" is pretty close to what that Monocle is doing :)
There is more to this than just Reddit. For one thing, there's a different approach to identity, and for another there's summaries and whatnot that get automatically pulled. And, for all we know, other additions that he hasn't shared yet. Plus, reinventing Reddit is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, the site you are using right now.
Also, your comment is itself a bit Eternal Septemberish -- you know, the belittling, and the intentional disregarding of differences between Monocle and Reddit. Not sure if that's meant as implicit metacommentary or if you aren't actually aware that you are contributing negatively.
With the way that infinite scroll currently works, I could effectively DDOS, or at least slow down the instance of Monocle I am interfacing with by just scrolling down, and once I got the first story just scroll up and down endlessly. I'm looking at Chrome Developer Tools' Network tab right now[1] and it seems you're sending a bunch of "ignore" fields in a POST request, and from that I gather that the farther down I go, the larger the POSTs get. So, at the very bottom, I'm sending a ton of huge POST requests. Point-being, this is probably not a good thing.
I hope this comment is seen as observational rather than the sort of blind criticism that Monocle dreams to avoid.
The article discusses the design and performance of Monocle, which are definitely pleasant.
However, the aspects of the community seem more like wishes than anything encouraged by Monocle (except for the Twitter/Github links) nor seemingly present.
Monocle is more interesting (though less ambitious) than Atwood's Discourse, but similarly misses the difference between community and charm, and performance and design.
"There can be too much negativity in the tech community. It seems the average response to someone out on a limb, showcasing their latest idea or startup, is one of snark and derision. That is no way to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. Monocle is an attempt to remedy that."
So, back-patting and hi-fives, but no actual criticism? Because there are plenty of ideas in the tech community that deserve snark and derision.
Disagreement is absolutely the way to foster entrepreneurial spirit. What is an entrepreneur besides someone who disagrees with the way things are currently done. Besides, if good ideas are to filter to the top and learn to survive in the wild, then they need to be able to withstand people disagreeing with them and using colorful language to express that disagreement. Not every idea is good.
Friends can fight and make fun of one another. People who care about the same thing can loudly disagree. And I think communities where 100% of the people like one another are probably boring communities. And either trivially small or non-existent.
So, yeah. Monocle sounds like it could be neat, but if the idea is to shelter people from negative reactions to their ideas, it sounds like it's going to be kind of neutered and boring.
One note -- there is an established current affairs/culture magazine/media brand called Monocle. While Monocle (the magazine) doesn't focus on tech, monocle.io's remit of "anything that appeals to the inquisitive mind" could lead to some overlap.
Dunno if there could/would be trademark conflicts. May be worth checking out if you haven't already.
I would consider adding who submitted the article to the list view. It sounds small, but on HackerNews I recognize names of people who have submitted past articles I enjoyed quite often and tend to always click on those. If you're trying to build a community I think this is pretty important.
My gut reaction when I first hit the site wasn't "Oh, awesome, there is a community of people here talking about stuff and submitting things", it was "Hmm, looks like a bunch of curated links or an RSS reader".
Also, if your username/profile is the same on Monocle as it is on Twitter, I'm even more likely to recognize submitters that I follow there as well.
My friends and I have wanted a personal version of something like this for a while. We have several Facebook groups where we share links/ideas and comment on them but would like to move away from Facebook.
I just tried out Potluck and it feels like the whole goal of it is to suck in your graph. It has zero content or usability until you do that. I suspect that even after you add your graph, if none of your friends are using it, it will continue to have zero content. Seems kind of the opposite of what Monocle is trying to do.
This is super slick, once loaded.
I haven't tried commenting or posting, but as a reader, I'm pleased.
My only criticism atm would be seeing a completely blank page with NoScript on.
Nice minimal design. I like the ability to read a summary before deciding to click through. I was confused at first when the main content frame was empty (like another commenter pointed out - maybe put something there on page load).
Yes, we should ban all negativity. Looking for problems, vulnerabilities and holes, whether in arguments, suggestions or code is very bad and should be stopped immediately.
I was thinking of working on something similar and was debating an iFrame. I was worried it would mess up people's readability plugins (especially important for mobile devices). Also not sure what the ethics of iFraming other people's work is.
Alex did his part by creating something interesting. Just look at the comments on this thread. This, right here is the problem. Everyone keeps complaining about stuff that they haven't done or not capable of doing. If you have a suggestion, just try to communicate with him or the other developers working on it. Any developer would like creative/helpful input. Stop bitching and support people who create stuff.
You are the one bitching about the comments here. a discussion thread is made so that people can state whatever opinion they want to state. Dont like it ? dont answer. We all are bitching,the issue with you is you dont understand you are actually bitching.
Dude, relax. I am talking about the discussion, not the actual product itself.
>a discussion thread is made so that people can state whatever opinion they want to state.
Since when did stating opinion become bashing the developer/creator? If you have a problem, you should probably not get involved in the discussion in the first place.
>We all are bitching,the issue with you is you dont understand you are actually bitching.
Haha, you have absolutely no clue to what I am talking about here. That's alright.
Interesting idea, but I wonder if "niceness" is really that important when sharing ideas that may or may not be controversial. Being professional and constructive might be a good goal, but these don't necessarily entail "niceness." That is, you can still be professional and constructive while being a giant asshole.
Also, I'm not really sure making people accountable by making them use Real Names or whatever account tied to their real name will make them be nicer. It might seem like that because on social networks, you can selectively add people to talk to that you enjoy being nice to. When it is an open forum, the discussion might still turn sour because people have contradicting viewpoints and that's okay, especially in a technical discussion. Finally, tying people to their real names by default sounds like it lends itself to all kinds of Internet Detective-y stuff which will probably lead to more Ad Hominem attacks than discussion.
Source: I post on Something Awful where we can still have useful discussion and call each other out on our bullshit. Niceness isn't as important as the free discussion of ideas.
To me, Reddit has done a great job of letting me think of it as the kind of place that suits my style of discussion. I hear stories about the atrocity exhibition in this-or-that group of subreddits but never encounter it personally.
It seems that many unfortunately take "constructive criticism" to be only delusion-inducing back patting: People get their panties in the bunch around here when people have anything but unadulterated praise for various Show HN projects.
Dare to point out that restricting your project to Facebook logins might restrict usage and boy do some get the vapours, and a dozen hysterical "I remember back when HN wasn't so mean" blog posts start getting authored.
There is always a danger in being involved in an echo-chamber. As Groucho Marx so famously said "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". If you seek out and insulate yourself from broader criticism, the result is very unlikely to be useful.
I plan on posting a Show HN in the coming weeks, and my greatest hope is that it will be torn to pieces. I'm enough of an adult to categorize and prioritize the criticism.
This is a source of a lot of uncivil behavior on HN. Startup founders/tech geeks are intellectually interested in a lot of topics but unqualified to discuss them in any detail. This results in comment threads full of knee-jerk reactions and bikeshedding.