Is there a plan? What's stopping 100,000 Digg users hearing about HN on TV and showing up with posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats?
Clearly there's the code behind the site, the karma system and minimum thresholds for downvoting and so on. I've also seen people linking to the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) occasionally, to try shame people into behaving themselves.
I've got to be honest though, I can't see anything that's fundamentally different about HN that means it will avoid the fate of those other sites. You let me register, what's to stop others? Do you have to "Accept" the guidelines when signing up? I can't remember, even if you do though, let's be honest, nobody's going to read that.
I don't know, do you think HN is structure well enough to prevent it happening? Is there a special plan? Or do people just expect to have to move on when things go down hill?
HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.
Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.
I'm not sure it's necessarily the quality of the users. Call me an optimist, but I think most people in general are decent and most people that bother to come here are pretty smart.
I think the problem with size is the same reason everyone else is a crappy driver but you. In a normal day of driving, you are surrounded by mostly good drivers, but a couple of them are bound to make really stupid mistakes (just by random chance). Since this is your only experience with them, you label them a "bad driver" and it overshadows all the good driving around you. If you only drive on lightly traveled roads, you are less likely to see a stupid mistake, but get on a major interstate highway in a major city and there are enough people that something is bound to happen.
Likewise with large social news sites. Every user is a 'good user' 99% of the time, but has that random moment when they do something trollish or get carried away with an argument and say something mean. (I know it has happened to me before.) When a site gets large, the probability of this happening on any given thread rises accordingly, and since everyone focuses on these instances, it seems like every thread is full of trolls and angry people.
I think anonymity also plays into it. Large communities are by default anonymous, and small ones are not. People in small towns don't cut each other off or tailgate each other, because you are likely to know the person in the other car, or at the very least be headed to the same place. (I know, I'm from a small town.) In a major city, you are never going to see that other car again, so no one cares if they act like an asshole.
Also, some kinds of filtering (and related things, like informal community norms) don't scale, so if the community hasn't grown too much, the problem might tend to be easier. Hacker-oriented mailing lists with 100 posters don't seem to be too hard to moderate, but I'm not eager to try 10,000 posters.
Growth is a big part of the problem. It's much the same for movies. You can either appeal to a more discriminating audience, which is inherently smaller, or go lowest common denominator. Actually, the pattern is to start out appealing to the discriminating crowd to get a "cool" cachet, then expand and go mass-market.
Another big problem is the monkey-see-monkey-do nature of Homo Sapiens. Over time, you will see more noise in the form of attempts at imitating signal instead of true signal.
What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned.
That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit.
Also, it might be desirable to extra strict during certain times when people are likely to go berzerk and act really stupid (the SA moderators call this the "banhammer" and make a sticky thread notifying users when it is in effect -- what would normally be a warning becomes a ban).
I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?
i wonder if simply restarting the entire software would help a bit. in other words, deleting the entire database and starting from scratch every n years. meaning the front page would be blank, people would have to 'register' again with their karma at 1
if it takes making a new community, a restart might be a good approximation, among having other effects (eg the effect on karma whores)
At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.
Death. Taxes. Gentrification.
#1 and #2 cause strong negative backlash. As you would learn from marketing theory, a user that you have personally screwed with will likely cause 20x more damage to your brand than your best users improve it. #3 Locks out a lot of useful expertise. For sure, HN could use a lot more knowledge about programming. So far, this site has attracted lots of people who want to learn but much less so people who already know a lot and have wide experience. We still very much need to be inviting to the latter.
Another point that very knowledgeable people are very opinionated, stubborn, and generally assholes. Linus Torvalds is the stereotypical example. This is not to excusing the behavior, but the correlation exists and we will all have to try not to get so offended and ban people like immature children.
If you try to hold onto the past forever instead of trying to improve then you will fail.
I hope this was useful.
I'd say that a jackass active on the site is more damaging than one banned. If you ban someone, you have only upset one user. If you allow a spammer/troll/flamer/etc to continue unchallenged, you have upset all of them.
The thing with online communities is, this is Web 2.0, your users are your product. The better the users, the better the product. If you have a good community, smart, helpful people will be attracted and will thus improve the community. If you have a bad one, they will be warded off. Scum breeds scum.
Think broken window theory.
The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of Digg and Reddit refugees.
BTW, welcome to hacker news...
"1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.
2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.
3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.
4. Votes on comments affect karma.
5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking."
We go from social news site to social news site, dragging down article quality with our penchant for less-than-total fact saturation and off-topic posts.
The only responsible thing is to get your hacker news here, and your funny pictures elsewhere. Refrain from contributing posts or articles and let the people that make this site great continue to make it great.
Wait, crap. Except for this post and that post.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines:
Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video, picture...
The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is "Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate.
Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking site at the moment.
Simple collective voting and new/hot/controversial are very unsophisticated measures of how much any particular user will like something.
For an example of how powerful collaborative filtering is, check out movielens.org
The key is to take each user's votes and use them to figure out based on other peoples' votes what stories and comments to display. Then the community doesn't really "grow". Sure you may get some niche communities that grow, such as people who all tend to upvote cat pictures, but the "thinking person" doesn't have to worry, b/c as long as there is a weak (or negative) correlation between cat pictures and your upvotes, the system will never recommend any to you.
Imagine rather than one massive community, an infinite number of beautifully overlapping ones. I think the ideal system would consider votes for stories and comments, and show each person mostly content that had a high probability of being enjoyed.
The "new" tab might show things with less of a strict filter to prevent false negatives.
The research group that built Movielens has some papers on the web and the math isn't that tough. With a properly design collaborative filtering system there simply will not be the digg/reddit degradation where the site gets so big and noisy and low quality. Sure there may be stories that are hugely popular, but as long as the algorithm gets enough quality input (votes) on a variety of things, no user would get too many duds.
Ironically Reddit's redesign only increases noise by tending people away from the subreddit niche communities that had existed -- I would more likely click on a weak title if in a quality subreddit than if it's the #4 item on the screen.
At the rate it's going, news.yc will surely become the next reddit, and eventually the next Digg. As others have pointed out, we'll all have probably moved on by then to the next site (or hopefully one that implements CF!).
It seems odd to me that nobody has implemented a site like this with CF... As with most of my posts, if anyone wants to collaborate to do an experimental site like this just let me know. There are some cool ruby libraries out there and of course gsl.
On Digg and Reddit, there is no "focus". Digg started out as a tech news site and degraded slowly until they opened up the doors to include all news, which brought what you have refered to as posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats.
On reddit, the day I stopped reading was the day I saw a post on the front page encouraging folks to not post political stories on the politics sub-site because they don't get enough attention that way. That would imply that both sites have a problem with "activists".
To me, that sufficiently explains why the front page of HN "works". What I can't figure out is why the comments on this site tend to be so civil. The HN community seems to lack the hostility that plagues virtually every other site of its kind. Is it fewer angry people? Older, or more mature audience? Maybe it's migrants from the three sites you mention who were fed up with the poor behavior exhibited there?
Hopefully, the choice of content will keep people interested in that kind of content, and remove those that don't. They already got reddit/digg/foobar for their stories.
Comments would take more time to moderate, if we think of users up/downvoting as a differential equation that slowly is moving towards the "intelligence of the masses". So in time, the level of comments will degrade. The way of keeping that from happening is, of course, to mercilessly kill bad comments and keep them out with overpowering ;)
That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.
the community here likes how things are and has a vested interest in keeping HN like it is. so thats what they do, try and push out the bad where they can and promote the good.
