Ask HN: How is it that HN is a success?

[bm98]

Dang's comment on HN's self-regulation [1] got me thinking: It's amazing to me that HN actually works. That, the the most part, the best submissions and the best comments do tend to float to the top. I wouldn't expect individuals acting in their own self-interest to bother to spend the time to upvote and downvote and flag things, especially when the feedback from such actions is so minimal. But they do, clearly!

Are there any papers that have studied this phenomenon?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12205581

[JaumeGreen]

It works because of the people in here that write exceptional comments and act as a regulator.

I've noticed a certain reddification of comments: memes, funny answers, and uninformative drivel. These answers are usually downvoten, rightfully so in my oppinion.

If a huge influx of new users comes too fast and they don't get used of the culture here they could upvote those kinds of comments, and change the culture to a different one, one where memes go to the top instead of interesting comments.

I'm not against when it happens in the right places, I do browse reddit, but I come here for the expertise of the participants in the discussions. Surely some of them may express better what I've said, or even disagree with some or all of it, but I'll grow wiser thanks to that.

[GFischer]

Adding to your point of "huge influx of new users", that's called the "Eternal September" effect, after a time where Usenet was flooded with AOL users and they destroyed that culture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Interestingly enough, some time ago HN did a study of what new users upvoted compared to old-timers, and the deviation wasn't significant.

You can compare the current front page to the "old-timers" front page by visiting HN Classic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Edit: pg's post where he mentions the lack of a difference

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

[hexane360]

I love/hate to watch the same thing happen (on a small scale) to subs on reddit. Some communities can grow and grow while maintaining a culture, but most have some drift, or even a complete change in the userbase.

[sotojuan]

/r/minimalism is a good example of this. Not to sound pretentious, but I was one of the first hundred or so subscribers to it. It's been bad for a few years now but in general it was killed by a massive influx of users who all had their own definition of minimalism, and they came before the sub had enough time to have its own culture/definition.

[Jtsummers]

I suspect it helps that people can't downvote until they have 501 karma. That means they must've participated for at least a decent amount of time in the community before getting any real power (upvoting is useful, but downvoting is regulation). By the time someone gets to that level, they know what's encouraged and discouraged by both the moderators and the community.

Another thought: Unlike Reddit or most standard forums, we don't have subfora. We have one forum, one set of front page news, one set of comments per article (with good efforts to minimize duplication of posts, even topics). I think this helps to force people to play nice with each other. I can't go into hn/politics and troll, then go back to hn/programming and be civil. The whole community sees (or can see) my posts. Uncivil behavior in one thread will color the way people view me elsewhere. Forcing me to more seriously consider my behavior (I've deleted many posts, the two-minute delay I have on mine has saved me a few times from posting-in-anger).

[totony]

The minimum karma to downvote also accentuate the echo chamber

EDIT: I guess echo chambers actually help popularity

[snowwrestler]

I don't think that the best submissions and comments float to the top. Some real dogs get voted to the front page because (for example) the byline is Sam Altman, or it's some trending political topic, or it confirms some widely-held opinion.

And comments that violate the prevailing opinion here often get voted into negative numbers, even if informative and well-written. Just try to argue that piracy is having a negative effect on music, movies, etc. and see what happens.

I would recommend that everyone browse /newest here on a regular basis. I often find great stuff there that never makes it to the front page.

[cs702]

The specific set of rules and mechanics that currently regulate HN are not the key to its success. The main reason HN works, in my view, is because Y Combinator TRULY CARES about having the most relevant and interesting submissions and comments float to the top.

HN's rules and mechanics (e.g., requiring a minimum karma to downvote) are a CONSEQUENCE of these priorities. These rules and mechanics have evolved in lots of ways from day one, and will likely continue to evolve, forever, as HN moderators do their best to prevent them from being gamed.

Unlike many other discussion-oriented websites with user-generated content, HN's main priority has NEVER been to reach a greater audience or to grow web traffic at the expense of quality. The main priority has always been high-quality content. As far as I can tell, HN moderators would eagerly accept a narrower audience in exchange for better content any day.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

N moderators would eagerly accept a narrower audience in exchange for better content

So would many of the readers & commenters. I almost never downvote because I disagree with something, but I will almost always downvote someone who's being rude, or otherwise uncivil or even sometimes, just making unfunny "jokes."

I like the community and the intent behind it. That's worth working to protect.

[gxs]

Great response and agree wholeheartedly.

Amazing the results you can get when you optimize for something other than revenue/number of users/page views/reach/etc.

[cs702]

Yes, exactly: HN is optimizing for something other than the usual, easily measurable metrics of "success." Well put.

[Yhippa]

It's the quality of the users that makes this work. If people care and downvote things that aren't germane to the discussion at hand that helps a lot with pruning. Otherwise low-quality content hangs around.

Also I see some very high quality and insightful comments on this site that I don't see elsewhere. I think twice about posting things that don't add to the discussion.

The only other place I saw high quality discussion like this was Slashdot with their excellent moderation system. Unfortunately the people who hung around there in the mid 2000's turned me off. Generally open source zealots hung out there and you didn't see many dissenting opinions.

Dissenting opinions are my favorite thing that help me deal with my personal biases and HN encourages it.

I think the minute average users like me stop caring about the site then the quality will go down.

[superuser2]

HN is unabashedly homogeneous. It's a community by and for science-educated upper-income white male software engineers who (claim to) value thinking like scientists and being articulate, and share a strikingly uniform set of opinions about the industry and politics.

The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out of the community is so narrow that, assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.

There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).

[AndreyErmakov]

>> HN is unabashedly homogeneous.

I think you've summed the nature of HN pretty well. I wish I knew that before I joined (recently), but unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way.

>> The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out of the community is so narrow...

That is exactly the conclusion which I arrived at after about three weeks of active participation. At that point I lost any interest in continuing trying to become a part of the community.

In my opinion, the HN community is not very healthy and has become incestuous in its nature. People basically choose to exchange with the like-minded only, share the same opinions, upvote the things that match their view of the world and downvote deviant opinions.

This all is aggravated by the fact that the HN user base is mostly North American and visitors from other world regions are somewhat of a minority in here (my observation). That's why a lot of ideas and opinions that I see around here are just "alien" to me, although I've never had a problem finding a common language with Europeans, for instance.

In its current form, I can often look at any new question that comes in here, and if I have seen its equivalent on HN before, I already know what will be the most upvoted comment and what kinds of downvoted comments I will find at the bottom of the page. The mechanics of HN is such that it works as a giant "echo chamber" and users are "taught" which kind of opinions they're supposed to like, support and help to spread and what will happen to them if they defy the state (downvoting sanctions).

I'm sure many like this way of things, but the way I view it you can't have healthy offsprings (which are ideas and opinions) if your community embraces incestuous relationships as its core defining value. Without diversity, there is no evolution.

On a related note, I used to be one of the early users of StackOverflow/StackExchange sites. In its first couple of years they had a liberal content policy and this invited a healthy, diverse and vibrant community that produced many profound and wise ideas. When they went down the deletionism route and started discouraging deviant opinions, the most interesting people started to quit and in about a year or two the sites degraded to such an extent that made it pointless to return in the search of quality content.

HN is not there yet, as I still see some high quality answers now and then. Usually they're neither upvoted not downvoted, they just stick somewhere in the middle-bottom area and I have to dig for them. Sadly this requires much time which I'd rather spend on more important things.

I also very much dislike that anti Russia/China/Turkey/Islam rhetoric that comes every now and then. It's not that bad as on Reddit where you can just say some not very intelligent bad thing about those countries and get yourself a few hundred upvotes and a dozen gifted "reddit golds". That's just the new bottom that Reddit recently hit. I sadly see HN moving in the same direction.

>> assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.

>> There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).

Apparently I'm with that group as I no longer have any wish to hang around HN. At that point I'd be ashamed to admit I've tried to be a HN member, as it would be an embarrassment to admit to having an active SO/SE account these days. To me, that was a mistake in judgement. I'd like to delete my account and make the divorce official, but apparently HN does not allow that and does not buy into the "Right to be forgotten" idea. I have no doubt that most of the HN users share that same official opinion being the "example citizens" that they are.

[minimaxir]

See the 1% rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Very, very few people on HN vote relative to the population as a whole.

[k__]

> the best submissions and the best comments do tend to float to the top

I guess this is a "filter-bubble" problem. The HN crowd is (probably?) rather homogenous, so the stuff that gets to the top is stuff the people here like and think is good. This doesn't mean that anything getting to the top here is good in a general sense.

There are enough people out there who despise HN for being a bunch of privileged white guys, who only talk about stuff that privileged white guys like.

I'm one of these privileged white guys and I like what's going on here, so I'm probably not in the position to judge HN objectively, haha.

[Freak_NL]

I don't quite get why you jump from homogeneous to 'privileged white guys'. That seems to force racial and gender issues into a discussion where there are none.

The community here seems to consist mostly of software engineers and people in related fields of work, and in that sense we might be a homogeneous bunch, but that makes sense for the topics discussed here.

[superuser2]

>That seems to force racial and gender issues into a discussion where there are none.

The sentiment expressed in your comment, the belief that racial and gender issues are unimportant or nonexistent, is exactly one of the shared values that defines the HN in-group.

[Freak_NL]

> the belief that racial and gender issues are unimportant or nonexistent

That is absolutely not what I wrote, nor what I belief. You are shoehorning me into a position, and I resent that.

I do belief that racial and gender issues are not relevant when discussing the pros and cons of cryptocurrency or the benefits of two-factor authentication. That to me goes beyond a shared value, it ought to be common sense.

HN communicates via text — no avatars, no non-sense. All that matters is whether or not you can formulate a post in English that adds to the topic. Aside from English proficiency, that is about as inclusive as you can get. There could be a dog behind the keyboard on the other side for all I care — as long as he/she is civil and provides some interesting insight into the topic at hand.

Having an interest in software and its related topics is not the exclusive domain of the 'privileged white male', regardless of the demographic slant towards men in the software industry (of any colour really, depends a lot on the country posters hail from and the local demographic make up of the population).

[k__]

I don't jump to anything, that's just what I hear from people who don't like HN.

[cauterized]

It's also self-selecting. People who aren't aligned with this particular filter bubble don't stick around long. I say that as someone who has temporarily rage-quit HN a couple times over frustration with what came across as closed-mindedness on the part of the majority of commenters on certain topics.

Unfortunately for my blood pressure, it's still the best source for a few types of tech and startup topics. And at least it's not as bad as the filter bubble on slashdot.

[wvenable]

Joel Spolsky wrote an article about this over a decade ago and no doubt influenced the design of Stackoverflow:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...

It articulates that the existence or lack of features can adjust how an online community functions.

[jackskell]

The quality of the discourse here is why I lurk.

Thankfully, HN isn't well known and polluted. It is a refreshing place for civil discourse on the Internet, and I have not found very many other places like it.

If there's a donate button here, I'm missing it.

[mbrock]

I think it's partly because there's still a rather strong ideal of what good HN content should be like, backed by active participation by reasonable moderators who enforce the guidelines when they're blatantly violated.

There's also a text by pg where he explains some of the design (or "anti-design") choices that shape the community in a desired way.

[lumberjack]

Peer pressure. If you come upon a nice behaving community you feel like you should behave accordingly.

[DrNuke]

It depends on your definition of success but yes, respect for YC's reputation and a genuine interest in learning the SV way of doing business gently regulate the behaviour of this world wide community.

[pasbesoin]

"opt in"

People choose to be here, and to make it what it is.

Administration restricts itself to what is necessary.

[red_blobs]

Whether people like it (or would like to believe it), it works because it doesn't allow the tyranny of the masses. It doesn't give everyone a voice, which means better comments and content for all.