[pg]

This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be.

Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.

[chaostheory]

The link itself maybe an embarrassment, but the discussions surrounding it on YC are somewhat less emotional and pretty interesting; and they do touch upon the reasons why it happens (particularly the thread started by mixmax)

[pg]

I noticed that too. It's like stone soup. Still, chicken soup would be better.

[derefr]

You could take out the stones after the soup gets going--edit the post to be a self-reference link, rather than an outbound one. That would make it clear that the post is not valued, but the discussion is.

[dkokelley]

I wonder about the behavior of HN users. Do they vote up an article for the article, or for the discussion taking place?

Sure the (original) article does not deserve to make it to the top of HN, so why is it up there? Is it being up-voted because of the content of the article, or the content of the discussion, or because commenters have posted in a popular article and want their comment seen/possibly up-modded?

The last case is obviously the least desirable, but what about the other two? What should the community be voting on?

[carpal]

I never expected it to get this high. The post was a rant and, as most rants do, turned out to be a bad idea.

I've temporarily replaced the rant with my more complete and restrained thoughts on the subject.

[r7000]

For a quick switch your replacement text seems much better thought out!

[immad]

The current link asks me to download a binary file when I click it in FF 2.0. Whats up with that?

[carpal]

It had to do with the weird way I switched out the post. It should be fixed now.

[pchristensen]

Ah, that explains it. I read the article and wondered what everyone was so worked up about. The new version that I read actually is very complimentary on the importance of hackers.

[fortes]

Perhaps new accounts shouldn't be able to vote stories up (only comment, and vote on comments). Through usage, the account would then earn the right to vote -- the hope being that they would have enough time to learn the culture.

[lacker]

Vote weighting is possible, but maybe it's too extreme yet blunt for the problem at hand. Vote weighting would affect all articles, but really there's a specific problem of popular-but-trashy articles that you want to target.

For example, you could add a penalty for negative-rated comments. A trashy article is more likely to cause the sort of argument that gets comments downrated.

Or you could try to classify the comment contents and organization to get a sense of how "argumentative" vs "quality" they are. Bayesian if you want. You could use article contents, too, if you had a scraper.

Either way the ranking algorithm will have to get more complicated as time goes on. Logically you should have more information with more users, so the quality of articles should actually get better. The problem with vote weighting is that by downweighting votes you are discarding this extra information rather than using it more cleverly.

[t0pj]

Perhaps keeping tabs on how karma is used.

Are the recently arrived users simply voting up articles yet not adding any comments of their own to explain why they've voted up?

How about this?

If a person votes up an article (which costs a point), a contributing comment by the same person can start out at 2 points instead of 1. You're basically paying back the point taken to vote up an article. This would give more incentive for users to voice their opinion instead of simply voting up (without commenting) as well as now giving others a chance to agree/disagree. If their comments don't really add any value, they'll receive bad karma as normal.

You can also show a flag next to the user id to show whether they voted for this article or not.

[joseakle]

This sounds similar to the rules Yahoo Answers has.

What about users who vote up a story so that it is stored in their history? I do it often, i like a story but don't think i have much to add to the conversation, but still want to keep it.

[t0pj]

Adding a link to your list of favorites should be functionally separated from the public voting system.

There should also be some way to eliminate the votes of individuals whom you have personally black-listed .

Thus, you could toggle between the public view of the main news page with all votes counted versus the personalized view which takes your preferences into account.

Or you could allow votes from only those you have personally white-listed.

[dood]

I think the best solution to maintaining the quality of a rapidly growing community/vote driven site is restricting the flow of new users by providing disincentives. Metafilter (for example) has a $5 sign up fee.

Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.

Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.

[eusman]

so, most of the new users voted up for this story, and the older users contributed the comments in the story...this is interesting about the "quality" of the users, so maybe the weighting that will affect story order, should take in mind user contribution(karma) in comments...

So, maybe comments's karma should be kept as a different record. And there should be comments weighting too, because we wouldn't want new users to game the system with each other and thus game again the weighting system for the story order.

"Quality" could be expressed as "experience" because obviously people adapted in the climate of YC.news who behave the expected way, as you say you expect to happen and thus the problem correct it self. But expecting the situation to correct it self may not be the right way.

Expected way though shouldn't be mean is the correct way, because the community would remain closed instead of being open.

So, because of the problems that arise with a weighting system making it probably not democratic, the most correct way for weighting would be to happen in manual down voting, which should appear only for "experienced users".

Weighting should happen there, so for example if you have 1 experienced user up voting and another one down voting, their vote is eliminated, which positive/negative difference could be used in two ways:

1. added in the current points of the story

2. or a non-linear scale be used that would determine the quality of the story.

what do you think?

[henning]

You made me feel bad for LOLing at the article. :(

Regardless of his feelings on solutions and causes, it's not like an Internet rant is going to change post-industrial work relations in developed countries. Certainly the people at fault will never read it.

[gaika]

Yeah, simple trust metric would be very nice here. Give more weight to people who vote like you and everything will be ranked as if you did it.

[wumi]

with the considerable amount of traffic that HN can drive to a link/ blog (and such a specific audience) any thought that the "recently arrived users" may be gaming HN?

[pg]

There has been an increase in spam lately, but there was no sign of that here. I wish...

[icky]

> I wish...

The elided part is probably the most interesting. Don't let CagedLionGate turn you into a self-censor, pg.

[rokhayakebe]

you should check this out http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=carpal. clearly carpal has some issues other than business guys. imo he needs attention sooo bad that 80% of his posts are somehow about someone attacking a product or a group of people. carpal get a life man and please if you cannot add to our intelligence do not take away from our precious and scarce time. and yes i am a business guy with 0 programming skills and i would never want to work with you even if that meant my startup would never come to life and you were paying me to work on it.