[BrandonM]

Indeed, we’ve come full (half?) circle. IIRC, it was renamed to Hacker News in part to discourage meta-discussion on intellectually stimulating posts, questioning why the front page had so many posts that weren’t about startups. Now we are instead discussing startup post fatigue.

[dang]

You can see the reasoning here (Aug 2007): https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. Basically, pg got bored reading about nothing but startups.

[ximeng]

Interesting the idea that the original plan was that your votes count for more if you vote for the right kind of stories. Would seem to create an echo chamber effect where what’s already popular stays popular and new stuff doesn’t.

[dang]

It's impossible to say without trying it, and we never did. (Edit: actually I remember a conversation with pg where he said he did experiment with it, but dropped it. I don't remember why though. Maybe I'll ask.)

You could make the opposite argument: the "right kind of stories" includes being unpredictable (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so up-weighting votes from users who are good at picking those would lead to a less predictable, more interesting front page. Conversely, the median vote tends to be for the same few hot topics, leading to a more samey (as well as more sensational) front page.

My bet is that it wouldn't change much either way, because the problems with voting seem to flow from the voting mechanism itself, not from which users are doing it. Internet upvoting is the ultimate reflexive reaction, which excludes reflection, and reflection—the slower cognitive process which considers something before reacting to it and is thus able to see something new—is the quality that picks up on uncorrelated bits and makes for good taste. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

If that's true, then instead of trying to squeeze more signal out of upvotes we should add a new mechanism that encourages reflection over reflexivity. Flagging is closer to that than voting is, so something like an up-flag might be worth trying: i.e. "this deserves extra attention because of how good it is".

[ximeng]

Thanks for the thoughtful response dang. Perhaps a blend is useful - it's good to have quick takes on articles, but the current voting structure incentivises quick takes over thoughtful responses.

In many cases, writing a quick comment to get position in the discussion and then editing or self-replying might be the only way to get engagement from other thoughtful commenters. And a response that takes more than a few hours (or in some cases, minutes) to compose is likely to have very little engagement at all.

There is a comment feed, but it's heavily biased towards more recent comments and doesn't have enough context to be useful in many cases. Perhaps the "exalt / flare" system that you suggest could help to flag up more interesting comments in a slower stream.

At the moment, unless you check your own comments or look out for your karma and investigate any changes, you're likely to miss out even on replies to your own comments, let alone interesting comments on older articles.

[kick]

I'm up-flagging the up-flag idea.

[dang]

It's fun to think of what a good name for it might be. The word "exalt" occurred to me at one point.

[kick]

The thing that immediately came to mind for me was 'flare', partially for the obvious "Oh wow it basically perfectly fits with the intention of it!" but also for alliterative reasons: flag / favorite / flare

[pvg]

Flagging is closer to that than voting is

Maybe I'm a terrible person but the experiment this suggests to me is a ranking where only flagging is allowed. A brutal agoge which only the best stories survive.