Solving The Hacker News Problem

<p><pre><code> Quality of HN Comments Over Time | . . | . . q| . . . . u| . . . . . . a| . . . . . l| . . . . . i| . . . . . t| . . . you are here --&#62;. . y| (that's all) |________________________________________________________ N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F '09 '10 '11 </code></pre> (It must be that time of year again...)<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871</a>

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way.<p>Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.

Ah yes, the cycle of website life.<p>* Hot new community forms at Site X.<p>* Site X residents refer to themselves as the New Wave of whatever. Much better than older Site W because of features/members/dynamic/demographics 1, 2 and 3!<p>* Site X's reputation spreads to former hot new sites T, U, V and W. Site X begins to attract more and more new users.<p>* Site X denizens begin linking articles at T, U, V, W and vice versa.<p>* Site X begins to exhaust natural topics of conversation. Denizens of more than 3 months standing become sick of 100th "What does Site X think about AlphaGamma?" post and begin to slap down newbies.<p>* Someone reminisces out loud about the Golden Days of Site X.<p>* Discussions on Site X become more and more about Site X. Extremely intelligent individuals begin to earnestly argue that their proposed feature will save Site X from itself.<p>* Someone proposes or launches Site Y. A how new community begins to form there ...<p>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.

For what it's worth: I feel safe saying that <i>most</i> high-karma users of HN have a variety of severe concerns with it. My experience asking this question over email has generally been one of getting gigantic essay-length responses.<p>In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. HN is succumbing to the problem pg tried to address: dilution. Thing is, reddit already came out with an excellent solution with their subreddit system. This simply wouldn't be an issue if there were different sections for tech, hacking, programming, startups, science, finance, and general interest. Keep all of the deeply technical stuff in one place, the cruft in another. Let's face it, the people who are complaining about lack fo deep tech are also likely to read and enjoy one of Spolsky's blog posts. There's no need to ban the latter to protect the former, just keep them in separate sections.<p>Now, HN isn't trying to grow, so there's no need to have user-created subreddits (sections, I suppose). Just make 8 or so that people care about, and add another if there's sufficient demand.<p>I really shouldn't be crediting reddit with this, as the solution existed long before them. All HN needs to do is follow the forum model and have different sections. It's too big to only have the front page.

As a longtime MeFite and a longtime member of this community, I believe that most of the issues could be dealt with by having obvious and active moderation.<p>As MetaFilter, not only do we know who the mods are, we know which mods are on call at what times. (And there's 24/7 coverage.) HN relies very heavily on a flagging system, but it's just not as responsive to stuff that is broken as is a human who's responsible for what's on the front page and what's in the comments. Having a handful of humans who are responsible for curating the front page (and possibly also pinning really good stories from new onto the front page) would solve most of these problems. Is this less democratic? Sure it is. Would the unfairness be worth it? In my opinion, yes.<p>This problem just isn't solvable with code; it takes benevolent dictators.

I'm probably one of those darned newbies who isn't a real hacker and is screwing the place up. (Sorry.) So I wasn't around in 2008 (or whenever the Glory Days were). I don't feel like this article or other discussions about the issue have really given me a good idea of what HN supposedly once was that it isn't anymore. I wish I could get such info. I think that kind of information would hold out some hope of figuring out a real solution -- a means to raise the bar or deepen the discussion or whatever it is that people are wanting.<p>I know there are other large forums on the internet but this is the largest one I have personally participated in. I think such large forums are breaking new ground, socially, in ways that do not compare to sites like Facebook. Where else can I actually speak with my 80K closest friends? If I am in a room of 500 at work (and not on the stage, because I am not one of the big wigs), only a handful of people around me can hear anything I say. We all can listen to the presentation, but we cannot converse. Here, any and all of us can converse. It is unlike anything you can do "IRL". I suspect that is part of the issue: No one really has a model for how you manage that kind of social interaction. And the models we do have break in that setting.<p>Just thinking out loud.

Forking of sites has the same problems as forking open-source projects. It exacerbates conflict, forces people to choose sides, and ultimately both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost.<p>Instead, the best solution is to evolve Hacker News as a product.<p>My personal opinion is that we should put Hacker news in the hands of the YCombinator alumni. Founders and first employees (CEO, CTO, lead designer, first engineer hire and first design hire) of YC startups would probably make the best moderators and admins.<p>In fact, I would say that it's probably time that PG spin off YC as a full-time startup, assigning control of the design and codebase to one talented UI designer, one talented developer and one talented product manager.<p>For the site to keep growing in a way that maintains quality, it needs more functionality that it has. The two features that lack the most are filtering and combinatorial game mechanics.<p>Filtering is necessary so it is easy for the the hardcore tech articles to be easily found by high-karma members, so they can vote those articles up. If it's not findable, it's not voteable. Filtering is also necessary for people to extract the most value out of hacker news. Most users don't want 100 front-page articles everyday. They probably want 10-20 of the highest value articles. Less is more.<p>Combinatorial game mechanics like those on StackOverflow would help as well. Upvoting/downvoting is limited in that it will always fall victim to the masses. Giving special voting/tagging/burying rights to distinguished members (very high-karma users and YC founders and employees) would go a long way to helping eliminate the crap.<p>I think I speak for most members here, when I say that I don't want Hacker News to be a democracy. I want it to be a technocracy. I want the smart and accomplished people to control what is good and should be visible to all. I've got only 260 karma points, and personally I don't think that should be enough karma points to allow me to upvote a submission. 500+ karma points should be the threshold to be able to vote an article to the frontpage.

Another reason HN may be boring: we've beaten a lot of the common topics to death. It only takes a handful of articles about "how to pitch a VC" to soak up most of the relevant advice on the subject. While posts often present a unique combination of previously mentioned ideas, it's becoming increasingly rare to actually find something new if you are a regular here.

As a low-karma, long-time lurker, I'm not sure I've ever really seen the kind of submissions he is looking for. Can someone provide examples of submitted content that would meet his criteria of deeply technical discussion worthy news?

How to solve the signal/noise problem? Amplify the signal.<p>Call it undemocratic, but insight and perspicacity is not uniformly distributed so it's absurd that pg/$whoever_you_respect's upvote on an article counts as much as anyone else.<p>As a simple experiment, it would be interesting to see a view of the frontpage based only on the upvotes of people who are above a certain avg-comment karma threshold (since the site is predicated on karma as a quality indicator) and the idea that people who write insightful comments won't upvote crap stories.

Gated communities are effective means of preserving the identity of communities, they all employ some bar of entry whether racial, religious, ageist, or economical.There are many social maladies that are also unique to the gated community, the insularity often breeds all sorts of creepiness. Preservation all to often morphs to Stagnation.<p>Artists are often the shock troops of a neighborhood gentrification, after the studio loft, comes the artisan coffee, some renegade youths, a young lawyer or two, and before you know it, the neighborhood just ain't what it used to be.<p>I would Posit that a website calling itself "Hacker News" immediately opened itself to all kinds of interpretations. The term "Hacker" seems to be as hotly debated as "Artist" and justifiably so.<p>The Hackers, introduced others who identify with the Label, and still others who probably do not, but nevertheless find it of value to their venture.<p>When the neighborhood changes, you are free, within your means, to move to another place. Sometimes you yourself change and require a change of scenery.<p>When a startup grows to a full company, many times you lose something while gaining another, and vice versa. Many in this forum have made those choices on their own, so it should be familiar ground.<p>It is almost heretical to mention it here, but perhaps there is no algorithmic solution (if there is a problem) to the complexity of human relation, expression, and motivation.<p>More people, more heat, Entropy.

Come now, I can't be the only one that finds the Hacker News quality "good to great"?<p>If Hacker News is about hackers in a startup sense, it's <i>good</i> that the front page has everything from: Movies being in decline - Ruby concurrency explained - A torrent meta search engine - Windows 7 SP1 launch - iPad2 being unveiled.<p>There are far more elements to hacking than programming, just as there are far more elements to startups than programming. And I dig that Hacker News is so varied.<p>I think there is a <i>vocal minority</i> of people that get irritated by bicycle shed debates (+1 from me to allow collapsing comment threads on my machine) or people wanting to only read about programming or hacking - the latter of which is laughable because I am pretty sure you'd be sick of Hacker News if it was 100% a specific topic (I have some scars in the field of sorting content users will enjoy...)<p>Guess what: there are millions of non technical silent people on the internet, and a <i>huge</i> amount of those people visit Hacker News <i>every day</i> - and love this destination. The amount of random non computer scientists I meet in Cambridge that love Hacker News is staggering.

It's definitely not what Alex is semi-proposing but I've been running RubyFlow - <a href="http://rubyflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rubyflow.com/</a> - for a few years now and it totally stole the MetaFilter model, just for Ruby-only stuff. No "votes" and points scoring - just interesting posts from people in the Ruby community coupled with me editing posts for format and deleting anything that's blatantly spam or offtopic. Seems to work though I have been <i>tempted</i> to go in the voting/Reddit/HN direction with it.. maybe I shouldn't!

<i>Simplest solution</i><p>Limit the number of links submitted per account per day to 1.<p><i>Why</i><p>Prevents spammers and karmafarmers from submitting the entire TechCrunch\Wired back-catalog at a rate of 25+ a day.<p><i>Further Analysis</i><p>Increasing the scarcity of a resource (link submission ability) will increase the value of items it is traded for (links).<p>HN already gets the independent code submissions people want. They just die an early death on the new page due to overcrowding by webzines\newspapers with builtin linkbait titles. This reduces the rate of dropoff for independent news.

If the crowd has cycled so much, I wonder if maybe this isn't the best solution for the desired outcome.<p>Granted, I haven't been visiting tech-specific boards for more than a few years, but I'd generally agree that the more technical articles are what I'm interested in.<p>I think I'd be interested in a board that was geared toward programmers/hackers, but didn't use a typical karma/point system. I'd like to see one that perhaps utilized karma, but under a collaborative filtering system. So, in a simple for-instance, if a small subgroup of people tend to upvote articles that I do, those articles would be given more weight, and similarly those who downvote articles I upvote would be, from my perspective, given less downvote weight, while at the same time there might be a different subgroup that was weighted to value their downvote more. Perhaps give people the ability to tweak the tolerances of their collaboration. Give them the ability to say "if this guy has X karma and ignores someone's articles and votes, then I want to ignore them too"<p>Of course, this might be 1. a completely naive idea, 2. an idea that's already been tried and failed 3. an idea that's already being used 4. something to time-consuming for people with real work to do or 5. an idea that's unworkable and that I'm only having because I just started reading books on, and experimenting with, machine-learning ;)<p>Though even if it existed, I probably wouldn't use it. I already waste half my day reading the few articles that interest me on hacker-news, heh<p>it sucks that when you design any system or any set of rules, and humans are going to interact with it, you have to think "how are these shady bastards going to subvert my beautiful creation?"

I think that if you stay at any online community long enough, you begin to perceive a drop in quality - even if that drop does not exist.<p>IMHO opinion, there is plenty of signal in the stream. What has happened is that the interests of the community have diverged. I'd be far more interested in ways to focus on things that I was interested in, within the stream, than narrowing the flow of information.<p>On my wishlist is a way to pipe the HN stream through a Bayesian filter based on articles I've enjoyed, and make an RSS feed of articles I'd be interested in.

Where is the data that shows HN has degraded? We aren't seeing kitten pictures. A scan of the front page shows the mix of articles being programming, startups, tech.<p>I'm not sure what Alex wants? More discussion around PG's hackers and painters?

I've come to realize in my short time here, that dissenting opinions are dangerous. I've learned to respect the karma gods and pander or, post my opinion and delete it before taking too hard a karma hit.<p>Its sad to see that an informed, but non-conforming opinion is taken as fact and karma-nuked.

It's simple really. Digg was good, then it got popular, Reddit was good, then it got popular. I've increasingly visited HN more than Reddit to get my old Reddit fix, as I assume others have, and so popularity has increased and now the quality is degrading as people want their karma fix or 2 cents.<p>There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll.<p>The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments.<p>Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...

The Illustrated Guide to Flame Warriors is a handy reference: <a href="http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm</a>

In theory, centrally planned things make a lot of sense.<p>In practice, democracy usually comes to a better solution, even if it is not perfect.<p>HN is driven by votes, the community is getting what the majority wants right now. The only way to really improve HN is to change or limit the community. You can tweak the rules only to limit certain actions to high-kharma users, but if there is pent up demand for some kind of story it will make its way to the front page.

IMO, a tag system like StackOverflow or Quora seems a good way to go.

I'm fairly new, but I think HN is great. The level of discussion is way, way higher than other similar communities I've seen, and I think the general focus on tech issues with splashes of other topics is perfect. Seems like a successful self-regulating community if I've ever seen one. People just like to complain.

It seems there's always been reluctance to add features, for the sake of simplicity. Personal messages, for example, would have been useful in many, many instances, but instead we find ourselves checking out the plain-text profile and finding alternate methods of communication.<p>This limitation has also sprouted ancillary sites attached to the HN Tree of Life, such as searchyc.com, hackermonthly.com, and hnrecap.com as mentioned in the post.<p>In a similar vein, carving out a sub-HN seems to be: a) downloading the source code, b) bringing it online at another domain and c) announcing via "Tell HN".<p>All in all, unless someone with &#62;10^5 karma decides to take the time and add some community features to HN (for various values of "community" and "features"), we're all going to continue and see more noise and many different signals.<p>As an aside, I wholeheartedly appreciate the name, "Bloomfilter."

Everyone here has seen this same lifecycle play out at just about every online community there ever was. Doesn't matter whether it was open or closed. It's a fact of life.<p>The solutions offered are top-down culture modification and just plain don't work. Adapt, and wait for the next HN to come along. You can't stop the train.

Almost all sites that have comments and user moderation concentrate on the comments and up voting / down voting them. Normally, when dealing with people, I don't remember the individual quote that made me think they were brilliant / a troll, I wrap that up into my sense of them. If I'm flipping channels and see someone who has struck me as a brilliant commentator, I stop based on the visual cue of their face. Names are kind of hard (is this the guy who called me a $%$% or was he the one who really knows python?).<p>I guess I wonder if the same thing keeps happening on "comment moderation" sites, isn't it time to look at the ways your view could be based on your (not the group's) opinion of your fellow commentors? I don't have a technical suggestion, but I will probably think a lot on it.

Perhaps pg is too busy these days to really tend to HN? God knows I would be if I were carrying his load.

In response to some of the points being raised in the thread, and to provide some sorely needed data, here are some snapshots of the HN "newest" page taken since Feb 2009:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254397" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2254397</a>

<i>"... I think HN does a crappy job with general tech news and a so-so job with content that’s specifically relevant to startup founders and employees. These days, HN does a downright terrible job with deeply technical topics; that’s the area I hear the most complaining about on Twitter and in private. Since deep tech is HN’s weakest point, let’s go after it. ..."</i><p>The weakness of the argument is that the engineer/developer/programmer view is a subset of the interests hackers, founders and entrepreneurs. I draw a clear distinction between tech guns for hire who only want depth as opposed to those who want to solve technical problems and maybe innovate which requires both depth &#38; breadth.

It's important to separate concerns, and I think there are three main things people are complaining about:<p>1) quality of submissions 2) quality of comments 3) quality of community<p>It's the second and third that I think have declined. It's not because the people are any less smart, it's that there are just too many of them. It becomes difficult to keep a mental model of everyone in your head, so you start seeing everything as disembodied text, rather than human beings speaking to one another, with a history of shared experiences.<p>IMO, this is a solvable problem. You can use avatars and display our locations next to our comments, or even just make our names a little bigger. Anything to humanize the conversations.

Every single community driven website on earth have being thru this kind of cycle the only way to stop this is to start a new one that will end getting into this cycle again. It's a matter of the amount of people using it, on the beginning only very early adopters and people passionated about that specific topic (here tech startups)are in, as years go by more people that have more interests start to join and post things they think is good, and then the topic changes to a more general subject.<p>I like this community and I think the quality will always fluctuate but the most of it will always be very good content for people in a hurry.<p>Thanks for all of you who help this place being nice.

Well, obviously posts/discussions like this can actually be contributing to the "problem" as some see it, but I'll make one point I don't see made here.<p>For me personally, I've learned a lot and grown a lot over the course of the 4 years I've been lurking and occasionally contributing here. So for me, a smaller percentage of the stories/articles/posts/discussions appear as insightful as they once did. I don't mean to knock HN in any way, in fact my point is that that fact is not a "problem" to me. New users are joining everyday and everybody who makes the effort to learn and contribute gets something out of HN.<p>It's what brings me back 17 times a day.

HN would be better if it were invite-only like Dribbble. I'm not a member of Dribbble, but it's a good example of why restricting community growth is beneficial.<p>We're too late for that here. I don't think PG has enough bandwidth or interest to truly solve the problem. New users will continue to join, adding noise to the signal, unless HN changes course. It's going to become more generic and more biased the longer the site stays open.<p>I hesitate to suggest more moderation as some posters suggest. I'm already uncomfortable with the murmurs of unfair moderation in the system here.

One solution can be to give read-only access to new users and charge a very low one time fees for upvoting, submitting and commenting. Only people who are serious about contributing will pay for it.

Honestly I'd love to pay for a Hackernews account if it meant weeding out some rather distasteful people. Not saying that is the be all/end all solution to the problem though.

There is no hacker news problem if you realize that all sites up to this point in internet history are either heavily curated for quality and limited in scope or self-moderated with a one-dimensional, imperfect karma game, and thus chaotic and ephemeral.<p>Such is the nature of suchness until someone figures out a better game that more properly engages human nature.<p>Crying over the demise of HN is like crying over a naive hill-climbing algorithm when it gets stuck.

Very well written article. I think he has some good points. I'd really like to see a 'deeply technical' alternative to HN and hope he'll find the good guys !

Could this phenomenon be in any way attributable to nostalgia? Personally, I find any online community loses attractiveness after a certain period of time.

One thing worth noting is that reversion to the mean doesn't have to be a bad thing. For example todays mean level of education compared to the mean level of education a few hundred years ago is very different. A good question to ask might be, would submitting this increase the mean level of discourse on Hacker News? It is the same sort of thing as what is in the guidelines, but reworded for greater relevance.

Put some teeth into karma. Make more karma mean bigger upvotes and downvotes, say 1 extra point for every 500 points of karma. It doesn't have to be linked to when a person joined. It's elitist like a journal or university, but at least anyone can read HN, and good posters will rise. Problem solved?<p>EDIT: Oh yeah. 1 week comment lockout for negative karma, with a grace period for newbies to learn how to comment.

I just want to speak up as a relative newcomer that feels I've learned enough about this place to speak my mind without being afraid of retribution and can do so with a basic understanding of what works/doesn't work here.<p>I really like it here, and it's my 1st stop after Gmail every day, and often more than once per day. Nothing is perfect, but as far as I'm concerned, this is as good as it gets.

This has probably been said before (and/or above), but perhaps each article should be tagged and users should subscribe to only those tags of interest to them. In addition, a social component to HN would be useful -- for instance, allow me to recommend a story for someone or for stories of interest to my friends to be ranked above the norm. Our friends make great filters!

I agree with Alex, I think the success of HN has led to an overflow of people dissatisfied with HN who have made HN a success in the first place (and some with YC itself.) I posted two ideas that could be of interest to such people here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253752" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2253752</a>

Why can't HN force categories on every posts? Have the community create and curate the categories, and select their own categories on HN to read. Just a blanket vote up/down button hardly measures how valuable anything is for any particular group if that group is not constant.

This was discussed before: <a href="http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934367" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934367</a><p>I had a comment which I guess I should link to rather than repost: <a href="http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1934605</a>

I would very much like to have <a href="http://startups.ycombinator.com/startups/" rel="nofollow">http://startups.ycombinator.com/startups/</a> and have a more narrow focus on startup related news and entrepreneurship.<p>The constant stream of front-paged political arguments and noticeable increase in mean-spirited commentary in the threads has caused me to spend most of my time on HN logged out. It used to be that I'd read the comments before I'd even read the story to see if the story was worth reading. I wonder if it's possible that pg doesn't notice the degradation in comment quality as much because the trolls have been here baiting him since the very early days.<p>I don't think HN is irrevocably broken; I'm glad that pg is helming the ship and I think he's doing an admirable job of it so far (I think the ranking algorithm in use for the front-page stories is one of the best anywhere). But HN used to be great, and now it's merely good.<p>I think that a lot of people who have been here for a long time have thought about what's changed here, and how it could be fixed. I know I've littered more than a few mailboxes with lengthy emails about what I think is wrong, and what I think the solution is. Reading this thread kind of tells the story - a point has come where the community is large enough to have factions that value different things. "Anything that good hackers might find interesting" works when you have a small group of people engaged in conversation. It's less useful when you have mobs of people who have come with different ideas of what they want to get out of this site.<p>In the early days, HN felt like it was a problem solving tool; a way to find out what cool things people were working on, and occasionally to ask for advice. The community was humble, competent, and full of people who actually made things. Those people are still here, but there's a self-aggrandizing element here as well. The group of people who seem to think that someone else's success somehow reflects poorly on themselves, the bloviators and blowhards who believe that a volume of arguments somehow makes up for the measurable factuality of arguments. I don't really know what the solution is to this. I thought if there was a way to ignore people it might make a difference, but after some experimentation I think that that's a dead end - there is too much chance of missing something truly interesting from doing that.<p>All this being said, HN has had an immeasurable positive impact on my life - The people that I've met through HN (both in person and virtually) are some of the smartest, most amazing people I've known. I'll get to use the things I've learned from HN (and more importantly from the people in it) for the rest of my life. I can't think of another site on the net that has come even close to making such a huge impact.<p>I can't imagine missing out on all of this if HN had been invite-only when it launched. I didn't know anyone when I first came here. I didn't even know who Paul Graham was.<p>Instead of complaining about it, I think those of us that have been here for awhile owe it to pg to actively try to improve the community. It's become too large for him to handle on his own. Yes, there are moderators, but they're an invisible hand that only act as a corrective force.<p>We're a creative lot. I'm sure we can figure out some way to improve this community from the inside.

Or may be after a while our <i>perception</i> about something changes disproportionate to the actual change?<p>That's basically boredom--and it can happen even if you consume something <i>good</i> for a long time. That "good thing" doesn't change so much as your perception of it.

Maybe experienced HN (read as a mix of high karma + there since the beginning), could have a bigger impact on which articles are chosen. I honestly don't mind a "dictatorship" selection where chosen members could remove useless post / select useful one.

Hi, I'm taking on this challenge. Al3x, can you send me an email at jkwon.work@gmail.com?<p>Also, I'm taking suggestions for seed users. There will also be a HN Karma cutoff where everyone above a threshold can join. You can nominate HN users or yourself here.

Wait... he complains on his post about not submitting his blog posts to the community.. which then gets submitted to the community and upvoted (albeit probably not by him). Does that sum it up?

Political stories simply need to be killed with prejudice.

Part of the problem is the basic UI look, hence I am working on a new UI for it: <a href="http://peri.me/2B1A/" rel="nofollow">http://peri.me/2B1A/</a>

what about tagging? automatic or crowd-powered. Seems a great way to sort through the noise. tags could be "technical", "startup", "YC" etc.

Another HN challenge... as discussions get longer (like this page), it gets more chaotic and more difficult to follow.

Remove points from users (keep on submissions/replies for positioning).<p>Problem solved by changing motivations/behaviors.

Pretty soon you guys will be telling the kids to turn down that damn music and stay off your lawn :)

I now check 'new' articles more often. There are a lot of gems in there that are not voted up.

Does anyone here think crowd-sourcing due-dilligence on startups would be a good idea?

Sounds like (s)he wants a Less Wrong for startups.

My suggestions for tweaks to improve the site:<p>1. hard ban on purely political news ("Egyptian leader stepped down! OMG!")<p>2. hard ban on gender-specific things ("i'm female, went to bar during hacker conference, got groped, OMG!" -- yes it was hacker conference, but gosh subtract the 'during hacker conference' and you have real life, it's independent of tech, not specific to it or due to it, just a life thing with guys and gals)<p>3. particularly if hard bans (enforced by a set of trusted admins) on the above topics are not added, then allow submitters and admins to add/edit content tags for each post; then allow logged-in users to submit content filters so that when they see, eg., the front page, it can suppress all posts with certain tags (eg., pure-politics, gender, sports, religion, etc.)<p>4. optional for-small-periodic-fee premium accounts, which allow those users to exercise extra features like smarter content tagging/filtering, sorting, user following, user submission/comment filtering (so you can blacklist blowhards and pedants from what you see, even if they are not banned from the site overall)... I'd personally love to blacklist anybody that ever does a comment reply to me that is (a) rude, or (b) idiotic, or (c) overly pedantic (some is fine, we're nerds, goes with territory, and some precision is valuable, sometimes). Blacklists could be flat files, one user per line. We could share them among each other privately. I've bookmarked a few "a<i></i>hole-or-idiot" users but I'd love it if I could have them automatically stripped from anything I see on HN in the future. Actually, I'd love to have this feature on all social/forum/news sites I visit.<p>5. fix the "type comment, hit submit, get error page saying something doesn't exist, so you have to go back, copy your text, hit Refresh, paste the text back in, hit Submit again" bug/feature. that drives me nuts. feels like impl side-effect rather than intentional UX<p>6. don't have the up/down arrows so close together when viewed on iPhone<p>7. don't allow just anyone to downvote any comment. or at least, they can't downvote it beyond 1 point, below which is penalty land. right now, any dumbass can downvote a comment of mine from 1 to 0, which then reduces my overall lifelong site karma by 1. Just because they disagreed with me. Or they're an asshole. Or they accidentally hit the downvote button (see 6). Instead, have a minimum karma requirement to issue downvotes, and/or only admins.<p>HN is great, despite it's imperfections. But I'd gladly pay up for premium features. HN Gold? HNGold.com (YC-W11)?<p>EDIT: added a few items

The basic complaint is that social sites grow into mobs. The solution is rather obviously: halt growth. You have to limit the number of active users to some vaguely Dunbar-ish number or you inevitably wind up with a lowest common denominator mob.<p>Metafilter did this, right? For a couple years they said "No new accounts."<p>I think scaling a social site to a very large number of members without deteriorating badly is impossible. It's a matter of human nature and mobs.

The solution, ultimately, is for the site to wither and die, and be replaced by something else that will have the same fate. This is what happens to all things, and to all human social groupings in particular, from ancient Rome on down to your nuclear family.<p>If you're tired of it, start something else. Or hang out and jump ship when the next great thing comes along. Trying to preserve the golden age is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

Case in point - this article.

If sites want to claim some sort of community and continuity, they're going to have to place newbies into virtual reeducation camps. Want to see the newest links? You have to read through 10 comments from an '07 post first. Posted a link to an internet meme? Back to the virtual reeducation camp with you.

Reeks of elitism.

This.