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0 pointsalexashka5y ago0 comments

Yes, poll people who invest in YC start-ups if they'd be willing to invest in start-ups that improve upon HackerNews forums.

That should generate a few million.

Then hire somebody with a proven track record to oversee proposals for additions to existing HackerNews.

In other words, get money, then crowdsource ideas, then pay people to implement ideas with most votes, then provide beta tests, then provide HackerNews add-ons for a small fee that would cover the expenses. Run it as a non-profit.

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Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?

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I'll throw in two more ideas - make any action taken by a moderator public, with blanked out content that is flagrantly illegal (links to child pornography)

Make it possible to dispute any moderator action for a fee, in other words move from a dictatorship to a democracy.

HackerNews need not be a dictatorship where what moderators think is good, is what's going to be enforced upon the rest.

There can be thousands of HackerNews that are filtered, sorted and moderated differently, based on people's preferences. This would be trivially made possible by asking people who'd be interested in such a service, to pay a small monthly fee.

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Trivial change - please make it possible to block specific users based on name/how long they've been registered on site for X-number of days. For example if I see someone routinely making comments I am not interested in, who does it benefit for me to continue reading their input? It only causes tension, it's like having to live with people you are fundamentally opposed to with no recourse other than leaving (no longer reading the comments section)

I predict this feature alone would decrease tensions among regular readers significantly, making your job easier.

0 comments

dang5y ago

That's not a concrete suggestion, but rather a meta-strategy for getting those. Alas, I think it would run up against hard economics super quickly. Forums like HN aren't big businesses, and efforts to make them into big businesses exert pressures under which they turn into something else. This is probably the most important thing for understanding HN, actually: it ended up in a sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it without needing to pressure it. Previous thoughts about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re "please make it possible to block specific users" - this has been on the list for a long time but I have a feeling that it may go against the community in the long run. The more I get to know HN, the more I realize how important the non-siloed property is—i.e. everyone's in one big room together and can't self-select to get away from each other [1]. Of course, that makes HN a place where we all run up against things that are not only unpleasant, but actually shocking [2]. But I think that learning collectively to deal with that—learning to tolerate what that does to our nervous systems—is core work we have to do together, to keep this place vital.

Each internet community begins with different initial conditions, and if it goes on for long enough, those initial conditions get a chance to unfold into something unique. Trying to change the initial conditions after the fact feels to me like a bad idea. It's better to find ways to live with them, and maybe to steer their consequences, like sweepers in curling.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

InitialLastName5y ago

Relatedly (since we've got you here), rather than blocking bad users it would be nice to be able to tag specific users in a way that shows up on the comment feed. For example, there are a few users whose comments consistently impress me with their depth, and whose commentary in a thread often flags a deeper conversation on a topic.

It might just be because I have a terrible memory for usernames, but it would be nice to be able to immediately see "Founder/CEO of Initech" or "Expert Bananacurist" next to the name.

dang5y ago

Do you mean a private list of your own tags that the UI would then display to you? Interesting idea.

4 more replies

Tossrock5y ago

Since you're soliciting them, here's a few concrete suggestions:

- Avatars. A consistent, recognizable image can go a long way from transforming a faceless internet post into something closer to a person you recognize and would hesitate to harm. With enough time and exposure, usernames can work for this (everyone recognizes when tptacek, or moxie, or you post), but avatars supercharge it. People hate changes to the site UX, so maybe put it behind a profile option that's defaulted to 'off' - then, only people who care about seeing them do. Of course, this would increase the moderation burden - people using offensive avatars, etc, but I think it could help.

- Heads on pikes. A weekly/monthly/ongoing/whatever roundup of notable bad actions which people have been moderated for. This should be limited to interesting and informative cases - not spam, piracy, CSAM, etc, but legitimate humans engaging in bad-faith actions, flame wars, etc. Having negative examples to avoid can help a community understand what is and isn't appropriate in a more concrete way than a dry set of rules. And seeing people be punished for violating those rules in a public way can have a deterrent effect. Making these public works better than just downvotes, because downvotes ultimately end up hiding content.

- Exemplars on pedestals. The obvious counterpart to negative examples is positive examples. In a way, the upvote system already does something like this, but it's not the same as officially-sanctioned recognition from the staff. A very simple approach might be to give you / other staff members (maybe even high karma users/yc founders) a button on each comment that highlights it as a positive example worth emulating - maybe changing the text color in css of the username/time stamp to show that it's been recognized.

dang5y ago

I don't think we'd go for #1 because it's core to HN that it's a text-only site. And #2 is too shaming. We've found over the years that underpunishing people (relative to what they expect) is more effective. There's a nice user report about that somewhere in the current thread. (edit: actually several now, which is pretty cool)

#3 I think is a good suggestion though. We should have some means whereby users can exalt something good, not just flag something bad. The challenge is to make it different enough from the upvoting system so it didn't just turn into a variation of the same mechanism.

3 more replies

mdpm5y ago

Agreed on not creating silos.

Adding User 'flair' is perhaps a viable option, where users can simply tag other users with a short description. That enables both properties - avoiding discourse you find troubling, and allowing users to highlight those that they find enlightening.

Freedom of speech works well when paired with freedom to listen. Removing content (even if only from a user's view) only deepens the filter bubbles we're being shaped by.

rectang5y ago

> Agreed on not creating silos.

There's one big silo, with the people who have stayed within it, and the people who have left outside it.

There aren't very many women here, which I assume is because of how the HN conversations about issues important to women tend to play out. This isn't an HN-specific problem, it's industry-wide. But I didn't go into software until my 30s, so the gender skew of the industry feels alien and alienating to me.

I would ditch HN if I discovered another tech community which was more inviting to women. I don't care if I start to miss out on the HN-resident perspectives on gender which shock me, because there are other perspectives which are more important to me which I'm already missing out on.

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0 pointsalexashka5y ago0 comments

Yes, poll people who invest in YC start-ups if they'd be willing to invest in start-ups that improve upon HackerNews forums.

That should generate a few million.

Then hire somebody with a proven track record to oversee proposals for additions to existing HackerNews.

---

Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?

---

I'll throw in two more ideas - make any action taken by a moderator public, with blanked out content that is flagrantly illegal (links to child pornography)

Make it possible to dispute any moderator action for a fee, in other words move from a dictatorship to a democracy.

HackerNews need not be a dictatorship where what moderators think is good, is what's going to be enforced upon the rest.

---

I predict this feature alone would decrease tensions among regular readers significantly, making your job easier.

0 comments

dang5y ago

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

InitialLastName5y ago

It might just be because I have a terrible memory for usernames, but it would be nice to be able to immediately see "Founder/CEO of Initech" or "Expert Bananacurist" next to the name.

dang5y ago

Do you mean a private list of your own tags that the UI would then display to you? Interesting idea.

4 more replies

Tossrock5y ago

Since you're soliciting them, here's a few concrete suggestions:

dang5y ago

3 more replies

mdpm5y ago

Agreed on not creating silos.

Freedom of speech works well when paired with freedom to listen. Removing content (even if only from a user's view) only deepens the filter bubbles we're being shaped by.

rectang5y ago

> Agreed on not creating silos.

There's one big silo, with the people who have stayed within it, and the people who have left outside it.

3 more replies

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