I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.
this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex
I've actually been considering this over the last week. I've been a user since the beginning, but I find that I am maybe clicking on one or two links from the first two pages. Seems the value of the content is feeling very bland these days. Which is surprising seeing as we are in such an amazing time technologically. Where has the quality interesting content gone?
Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.
HNs isn’t Twitter, and one of its strengths is being intellectually open and discursive.
What you see as ‘the obviously true thing everyone should accept, positively affirm, and shun dissenters of’ may not be that. At the very least, none of us should expect HNs to be tailored to our particular set of ideological values, no matter how deeply held - imo.
I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring.
One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.
You've really hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. HN has become awfully boring, but much more so in the last year or two. I used to keep up with tech here and I've learned a lot about architecture from links and articles posted here, but the conversation seems to have become narrower.
Feed filtering is the must have feature for our times. All this subscribing and no built-in fine grain negative control is absurd. Right now the number of sites I block per page on HN hovers around 15% to 30%. The front page is always much lower (3%-8%) which tells me the mods actions align with mine about what shouldn't be on the HN front page.
I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.
I'd like a better "hide" mechanism - swipe. I'd like to swipe away comments and submissions that I am done with but have them revive if enough points or comments come in after. Eventually the front page would only show new posts or those jumping in popularity (or be empty as I dismissed everything); no infinite scroll.
I would like to see more of the "invisible web" showing up on the front page. As primarily tech people we should be more familiar with the older and wiser corners of the web and not just a slew of attention grabbing headlines.
I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there.
As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat.
Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.
The community in Ask HN is far too pessimistic and sociopathic. I think there's a lot of very ambitious and intelligent people here who have become cynical and narrow focused.
There are certain topics that have to be avoided. Ironically the attitude is very anti-startup and against newer, unproven technology.
I'd actually love to see a community where we could discuss startups and new tech. Subbreddits tend to swing too young - opinions are strong but unfounded, and there's a strong bias against the tried and true. Something like Indie Hackers attract the idealists who have big dreams but do not act on them.
I would stop using HN if it turned into Reddit - from a comments perspective. I already see it happening on some threads so it's probably a matter of time.
Everything I like, and hate, about this place comes down to the community. Features don't mean much either way.
That said, I'd like to be able to change my username and be able to archive or delete my content at will. Even a pseudonymous identity and history on any platform can be a liability these days.
I don’t think you’ll move anyone away with a simple feature such as profile pics or whatever.
There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.
Tough to beat, so long as you stay out of the comments section for anything non-related to tech, it's the best source for almost everything to bootstrappers, solo founders, etc.
The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting.
People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons.
I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point.
I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting.
Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom.
But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.
>The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me.
Absolutely. I agree with everything else you bring up as well.
I would love to see down-voting vanish completely and the flagged/dead threshold increased dramatically. It is too easy to drown out otherwise thoughtful, quality contributions to discussion. Instead we see two to three word witty quips float by unscathed. It is the antithesis of the type of discussion described in the guidelines and runs counter to the curation of substantive, meaningful discourse.
I think downvote could be more valuable if it required a comment explaining why it as downvoted. I sometimes find I read comments that have been downvoted, and I'm wondering why, potentially the downvoter had a good reason I wasn't understanding.
I agree, and I think I have a potential solution, although it would require additional moderation efforts.
Every downvote must must be accompanied by a comment. That comment is bound to the downvote, and whether that downvote is counted is contingent on the quality of the accompanying comment.
The accompanying comment must give supporting reasons for the downvote. If the comment is something along the lines of: "I disagree", "NO U R DUMB", "asdfasfdasfd", or is blank, then that comment's downvote can be flagged for review, and ultimately discounted.
A good accompanying downvote-comment should do something like: (1) point out logical errors or fallacies in the parent comment (2) point out logical or methodical errors in the parent comment's sources. [1]
I'm sure we'll get some mental gymnasts who try to twist things, but with this system, the added friction with downvoting should reduce the number of "I disagree" downvotes by a meaningful amount.
[1] edit: even this can be a problem though, because these kinds of logical or methodical refutations can be insightful to some people, which they won't see if the downvoted comments fade into the abyss
I disagree to an extent. There's a Facebook bot that reposts things from HN to FB and you can see the significant drop in quality. When people can't downvote, they yell at each other. There's a similar effect on HN main page where you can't downvote submissions, only flag. So disagreements with the submission float to the top of the comment list, whereas the people who agree give it a silent upvote. One of mine in the past got about 70 upvotes and 20 disagreeing comments, but few people write comments in agreement because a comment like "Well said!" adds nothing to the conversation.
However, the fact that this comment was downvoted into negative numbers without any criticism is quite disappointing. It's a good demonstration of where the system doesn't work.
Yeah, the downvote I got for this comment kind of proves my point. Which is why I rarely post or comment.
This is not stopping me from using HN as such but there are plenty of posts I'd otherwise comment on. But what is the point if they just vanish? If the goal is to only be seeing the approved groupthink, what is the point?
A possible solution is to force people to comment if they want to downvote.
I think I'll resurrect my old reader tool and ditch the HN web site as such. This little experience has reawakened an old gripe.
I agree that the downvote option is problematic - it carries different meanings with subtle differences:
- A way to signal disagreement with a comment.
- A means to flag a comment as clearly misleading or incorrect.
- A way of signalling a 'low value' comment (obviously subjective).
- A way for the downvoter to simply express his or her displeasure at what has been posted regardless how reasonable the comment is. (This probably happens more often than people care to admit it. It's subtly different than just disagreement.)
One might argue all the above examples are types of 'disagreement'.
An idea: clicking downvote adds the following line to the end of a comment:
1 reader disagrees or 3 readers disagree
It doesn't capture the other examples, but maybe it will deter the other uses.
On the other hand, this might be a terrible idea. It's a difficult problem to solve!
Pease consider a page listing beta features in progress and maybe even a form to sign up for beta testing. People seem to be under the impression (I used to be) that this forum is frozen in amber.
Devlogs would be nice too, since just about everyone interested in Arc development is already here, but that might be asking too much.
The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.
There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality
I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.