Another Way to View the "Decline" of HN

I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.

My main problems with HN of late are twofold:<p>1) It seems to be becoming a blog aggregator for the X, Y and Z 'celebrities' of HN. If I wanted to read all of their blog posts, I'd subscribe to their RSS feeds. Do we really need EVERY one of their (sometimes good, sometimes mediocre) posts showing up in the top 5?<p>2) There seems to be fewer practical posts aimed directly at helping start-ups (which is what I loved about HN when I joined). If I look at the top 10 right now, not one of the posts gives me any practical advice on building a web business.<p>I'm not sure what the answer is, but unlike many here, I do feel it's about the quality of the posts, not the comments (though the two are not separate). Certainly, as the community grows, it is difficult to maintain the focused niche that HN once had.<p>EDIT: Just to expand on that last point. I used to feel like I was 'hanging out' with other people who were serious about building a meaningful web start-up/business. As of late, my personal perception is of an increasing number of frivolous side projects ("I built a 3D teapot in 30 seconds!") and 'cool/interesting' psycho-babble. To sum up, it's becoming less of a professional resource for me.

I can't help but feel like the recent flurry of "HN is declining" is saying to anyone who isn't part of the "old" crown that they are directly responsible for making HN a worse site. I know I feel like since I've created an account, its been all doom and gloom. I don't comment unless I feel that what I have to say would add something to the discussion, but regardless of karma it seems like the sentiment is that new users are dragging the site down.<p>I might be the only one who feels this way, but I doubt it. New users aren't all bad, and I can't imagine that the purposed decline is all our fault, either. However, the sentiment might be helping fuel the rate at which "bad" users join. Someone who has surfed for awhile and is thinking about creating an account is going to feel turned off for many of the same reasons why you don't jump on a sinking ship[0], but the trolls, etc. won't care either way. Just a thought.<p>[0] - I'm not implying that HN is in anyway a sinking ship, I derive a great value from it.

My suggestion: heavy handed moderation without apology.<p>For example, the joke comments with lots of votes piss me off. Were I pg, I'd just delete them outright. If anyone noticed maybe they'd take the hint.<p>In other words: HN needs a benevolent dictator. "Democracies" on social news sites don't work because the average person is boring.

As someone who recently joined HN, I think it would be very reasonable for new members to have lots of restrictions.<p>I won't pretend to understand the situation fully but I believe there is a learning curve with any new community before new users fully understand it.<p>I understand there is already a number of karma milestones for features but I think this system could be taken further to be even more beneficial.<p>- Perhaps a new user can do nothing for the first 30 days or similar. - Followed by original comments only, no replies (except to own thread). - Once some karma is achieved, allow replies and up-voting and slowly increase their abilities. - Once they have significant karma allow them to make submissions, this may stop lots of random submissions in the hope of quick karma.<p>In my opinion the greatest benefit from this is not in preventing new users from participating, but in slowing them down long enough to understand and respect the current community so they may participate in a constructive and non disruptive way.

I am actually surprised at how much the removal of karma from comments affected my feelings about hacker news.<p>I like to imagine myself as pretty laid-back and uncompetitive but once comments were removed, suddenly my motivation for posting and reading just seemed to vanish.<p>Maybe that's a good thing. Perhaps it will produce fewer comments but ones that people are more "honestly" motivated to make.<p>We shall see...

Well, my tastes are not evolving or changing, I am still interested in using primes for the background, or the latest hack with css transformations, or going from 0 to 10k users in a week. They were my interests ten years ago as they are today.<p>What I don't like is how larry page is already blundering, or facebook being sued, or how the ipad2 is the new paperweight2 and you should wait for ipad4 with cornea display.<p>I second heavy handed moderation without apology, and score penalties for every fault.

I was once a huge contributor at deals.woot! After awhile, though, I started to notice the decline in the quality of posts, as more and more users filtered in. I remember being extremely annoyed by corporate accounts that spammed the "fresh" page with worthless "deals". It seemed like deals.woot! was reaching it's eternal September...<p>But new users might have also blamed the crappy atmosphere on me--that bitching old guy with the superiority complex is everything that's wrong with deals.woot! We need to get rid of people like him!<p>We know which side we're on. Deals.woot! went one way and I went the other. HN is heading in one direction... and if you don't like it, I'm sorry to say that you may not be able to change it.<p>Disclaimer: I just want to clarify that I am one of those stupid HN noobs.

I am working on a startup which would benefit tremendously if there is a breakthrough here. And I do spend time thinking about this quite often.<p>Some thoughts:<p>1. Karma is a good indicator in smaller forums, but it doesn't scale with increasing popularity. It becomes easier to game the system then.<p>2. Qualifications (doctor, engineers, lawyers) on the other hand has worked well enough in the real world.<p>So is it possible to replace Karma with Qualifications? But before that, how would we define each? Karma is probably what we have now and needs no further definition. Acquiring Qualification should require investment of time and skill, which should be sufficient enough to keep mediocrity out; yet not overwhelming enough to keep willing people out.<p>I still have no idea how to go about this, and my examples here are only my vague ideas: - What is the logical equivalent of an exam in programming? Somehow quantify their contributions with code? Open Source? Ask people to do something measurable on HN's code? - For non-programmers, there will need to be other ways of qualifying.<p>The words I have used here might smell bureaucracy; but can we take this idea and simplify this?<p>[Edit: formatting, grammar, language]

I think github is where the action is - HN these days seems more about navel gazing, posturing, karma chasing and down-vote wank-fests... and the result is uniformity.<p>In contrast, the people who want to get-shit-done are changing the world on github.<p>I do a technicolor yawn every time I see a post that talks about M$, Oracle or Java.. as if those topics have any kind of future.<p>Likewise I cant comment on Node.js or Ill get down-voted cause some asshole knows only the bad parts of javascript. [ I can say this with perspective, as I was that asshole 4 years ago :]<p>PG, stop being so nice and enforce your single minded vision on HN before it dies.

I think there's something to the premise of the article, although it's depressing.<p>It suggests that communities don't grow together. They just gather a new set of people in one place. Then the knowledge that's easy to disseminate, and of interest to all, is distributed pretty quickly. And thereafter there's not much to talk about. New information that's good for the forum is disseminated, but only at the rate it is acquired, which is pretty slow.<p>Are there other directions, other ways to grow?<p>- More specialized forums, different types of contributors and different topics? (The Reddit way.)<p>- Or, maybe the problem is that more structured data is needed to stimulate deeper information exchange. Should there be common resources, like TheFunded's database of investors, or point by point evaluations of programming frameworks? (The Wikipedia way.)

While reading the article, I thought of another example of the described perspective. When reading one's own code from months or years ago, it can seem disappointing.<p>A friend mentioned to me earlier that this is likely a result of personal growth rather than a persistent state of confusion and bad coding. At least it's a nicer way to think of it.

When communities get bored, they turn on themselves (and turn meta). Some of the best flurries of interest on HN have arisen from innovation inside or surrounding the platform. It would seem that the better hack is to create more positives (and shift the community's attention to generative extensions of the platform) rather than to simply focus on mitigation and removal of negatives (such as deterring mediocre comments).<p>Almost all of the focus has been on filtering (true to Shirky's "publish, then filter" mantra), but perhaps equal or greater time should be spent extending the platform and enabling the community to create stronger signal. Karma is always the default attempt, but karmic schemes invariably reach a point where the negatives equal the positives. As the community shifts in personality, the currency of karma changes (500 points earned a few years ago is not the same as 500 points earned in the last few months). It's a different currency now, perhaps even a devalued currency.<p>An incentive for quality might be something closer to the highlighting of outstanding comments--the Best of Reddit approach--handed out not in a democratic way, but by a selected group of users who represent the kind of community we want. Karma goes private and perhaps is used only as a way of identifying future candidates for handing out highlighted contributions. This recognition is a kind of currency that could be better controlled and perhaps would be more valued.

In the case of a social news site like hn, the external factors have changed though. People now use such web sites for marketing purposes. So, they don't post a site to hn because they think hn readers could profit from it but primarily because they expect profits from visits by hn readers. (Since hn is about startups, this probably isn't that surprising and I'm most likely not telling you anything new. :-)<p>I think posting an article should have some "costs" or somehow "hurt" posters. They should be rewarded for posting an article if hn readers like it.

I've recently seen complaints about the lack of practical startup advice posts like there used to be. I think this submission highlights the nature of learning and how it ties into our satisfaction with Hacker News.<p>I think it's inevitable that we join in a flurry of excitement, learn a lot of new things, lose motivation (for whatever reason), and eventually use Hacker News as a way to pass time instead of working. What it comes down to is: How many practical posts do we need? After you've been here long enough, you know enough to <i>fucking build something.</i><p>I definitely know enough, and I still haven't done it. I don't know why. I'm certainly not blaming Hacker News for not having good enough articles.<p>Just a few weeks ago I was giving my parents advice on their small business, and at some point in the conversation I realized, "Holy shit, I really have learned a lot more on Hacker News than I realized. It wasn't all just a highbrow waste of time."<p>I think that a lot of us internalize many of the lessons we learn here rather quickly, and it's not long before it begins to look like a repetitious echo chamber.<p>Eventually it's time to stop being a consumer of HN and be a producer. Write that app that you can "Show HN," write that blog post that has a new insight, be that example that defines a successful alternative lifestyle, leverage what you've learned here, and get on with life.<p>I think a lot of us just need to stop <i>whining</i> and start <i>doing</i>.

As the community increases in size, it's normal for this 'decline' to appear. I believe rather than focus on tweaking karma points or moderation is to introduce list functionality ala twitter so people can create their own HN within HN, as they see fit. As newer HNers start contributing, they can be tracked and eventually added to lists so it doesn't stagnate. Doing this will ensure old-timers will be happy while the community gets bigger and the quality 'declines' relative to x years ago.

The guys at c2 have already figured this one out: <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommunityLifeCycle" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommunityLifeCycle</a><p>Also, if you're into how communities work and why how they succeed/fail/implode, you should definitely look at Meatball wiki: <a href="http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/" rel="nofollow">http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/</a>

Personally, I think the only thing hurting HN is this constant talk about the decline of HN. It's all I see in comments and now on the front page. If anything is hurting this site, it's the constant complaining. Get over it people - if you don't like it, move on or learn to deal with it - in the end you aren't going to find a community as good as this one.

I still think HN rocks.<p>I do get a little annoyed at the recycling of links from recent years (e.g. SICP book/videos, Yegge post #n,) that get greeted as some amazing new discovery, but fuck it, some things are always going to be new and amazing for a new crop of people. Yeah for people finding new and amazing stuff.<p>Are comments getting worse? Don't know. Might be that, over time, you start to notice certain things more, no doubt through some personal bias filter (e.g. comments praising Python, Apple, or Sinatra are almost automatic up votes, while even questioning those things means almost automatic down votes) but, again, fuck it, because there are still a good number of kick-ass comments.<p>Really, overall, especially compared to some other communities, HN has done really well in keeping up the quality discussion. Could it be better? Probably, but not worth <i>too</i> worked up over. Lots better things to discuss.

This article, one in a series of articles complaining about HN's decreasing quality, continues to reinforce two beliefs of mine:<p>(1) A new, better designed version of HN is needed, and (2) A design that does not "water down" from the perspective of EVERY reader MUST be based on reader's choices which will result in different users seeing different things (people don't have the same tastes, and these tastes evolve).<p>I have a very concrete proposal of how this should be done:<p><pre><code> http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1 </code></pre> What I don't know is this: If I were to implement the above news website, how would it take off the ground at first. Give me a convincing story and I will do it.

Ironically, the topmost article in the screenshot in his blog post[0] was lauded as "the perfect Hacker News article" in the most upvoted comment.<p>0: <a href="http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2419347" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2419347</a>

I'd just like to register my vote in favor of a regime of fascist moderation.

This is the best take I have read on the "decline" of HN.

I won't quit until there is a better alternative. It seems that ultimately it's the popularity of any aggregator that becomes its doom. Maybe stories run too fast so it becomes pointless to comment, or it is because everyone who disagrees seems to be buried. I suppose some other hackers will come up with something better? Anyone have any suggestions?