[pajju]

Good that someone raised this topic.

1. Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted.

2. There are pre-formed HN groups who game the system often.

My Feedback

1. Some special users can be given special Front-Page-Post Button permission.

Say, 3 Top Users have voted this Post for FP(Front Page)

2. Frontpage should not be the highlighting part of HN. At least it looks like that as of now.

The other good parts of HN: new|Ask|Show be shown side by side or given equal weightage.

3. Giving Better experience is the challenge.

The Front page feed can be a variable of Votes, Interest based.

There is lot of scope for improvements.

4. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in different colors.

[petercooper]

Many good articles & posts don't get upvoted.

As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)

As a long timer HNer, I think the main problem is there's little reason or motivation to monitor /newest so it's mostly visited by people being asked to vote up other people's posts. It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.

[grey-area]

It'd be very cool if on the bottom of the homepage, you got a few items from /newest you were invited to vote on without actually going there.

Nice idea. This is HN's biggest problem I think - there is no real incentive to visit /newest and the vast majority of good stories slide off it without getting more than a few votes. Adding some new stories to the bottom of home would be an excellent way to get votes.

The other problem of course is that what is popular is not always what is good.

[smoyer]

A minor point but I'd rather see the newest stories at the top ... and I'd even say you could reserve the top 5 (or so) positions for new stories. That way, every story starts on the front page but has to work to stay there. Once you throw out the stories marked dead, I suspect each of the new stories would get a few minutes even during the busiest periods (gut feeling ... no data analysis).

[onion2k]

As someone involved in news delivery, I find this to be an opportunity. I frequently dig up stuff with only 1 or 2 votes here that I can share on and look like I found it - ha! :)

I really thought you'd have automated 99% of the information gathering for your newsletters based on something like that. :)

[petercooper]

Not quite automated but there is certainly a process! :) Even just doing searches for common terms on here can dig up some gold.

[kyrra]

Another good part of HN is active[0] which is not linked on the top bar. It shows the most active topics by comment count. Useful for finding topics with lots of discussion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/active

[krapp]

I've felt for a while that HN would be much improved if vote count and karma were invisible. If you give users a stat, you're encouraging them to gamify and optimize for it. Personally, I would rather there was no karma at all, but that's not going to happen. It serves its purpose by affecting the sort order of the thread - it doesn't need to be visible to do its job.

The value of gaming the frontpage could be reduced by having random items from below the fold bubble up from time to time, and perhaps by also having popular items bubble down. Not only would this encourage worthy but not necessarily popular stories to be read, it would (more importantly to me) encourage users to notice that there is more than one page and those thirty slots to read. I believe lobste.rs does this.

It also occurs to me that some people find stories through /comments, and this page can also have an overcrowding problem when multiple comments for the same story take up most of the page. More stories would be discoverable there if comments were grouped by story instead of individually.

I think /active should replace or sit alongside /new. It would provide a nice contrast between the stories getting upvotes and stories getting comments.

[Loughla]

I believe that the incentive to optimize votes/Karma has very little to do with the actual Karma count. I believe it is mostly about driving a narrative or page-views for income.

Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.

[krapp]

Nevertheless, having actual numbers there provides (by design) a form of operant conditioning, intended to encourage posters to want their numbers to go up, not down, and to associate a posters' credibility with their karma score. It might be a minor issue overall (as the effect of karma would be the same either way) but not having the numbers there at least makes the forum less obviously gamified.

As an obvious example, tptacek is sitting on 200k+ karma right now. What purpose does that number serve to anyone? How does it make the site better? I don't think it does at all.

[Loughla]

So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?

I would argue that the content of submissions stands on its own compared to the total; I've not once checked a user's overall karma before voting.

And it's still not on point. The point is that for the people we really need to worry about, it's not about karma at all. Get rid of karma, I agree with you. It serves no real purpose.

But, the problem of gaming the system will still exist - it's all about money. I can drive views to my site or product without karma.

[krapp]

>So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?

Not necessarily, but I would argue that the karma score is there to suggest that his comments should be treated more seriously in general, since karma is meant to be a signifier of 'quality.' It's an easy (and deceptive) metric to determine who in any argument should be listened to and who shouldn't. Although his having that much karma might mean his upvotes and downvotes count more which to me would be a bigger problem for the fairness of the forum in general.

I would be happy if Hacker News got rid of karma entirely, but that seems unlikely. The next best thing at least would be to just not have the numbers there at all.

[tptacek]

My comments are absolutely voted up way more because of status. Some of it is unavoidable: there are people who follow my comments, just like I follow 'patio11 and 'rayiner, and so my comments get statistically more positive exposure.

I think the post/propter is swapped here, though. I doubt I'm voted up because of the silly number. I think the number is silly because of the reasons I'm voted up.

I agree: I'd like HN to get rid of karma. We got past the point where karma stopped being funny and became embarrassing for me several years ago.

[marrs]

I think you're absolutely on the money and I think your suggestions would really help.

I'd like to add something: replace the down-vote button with a "report spam" link.

The one thing that makes me rage on HN is seeing people getting down-voted for having a disagreeable opinion. It's supposed to be to suppress trolling or spam, but people just can't help but use it to oppress others' opinion. Just on principle, it makes me angry, but for practical reasons it's irritating as well because it becomes harder to read often more interesting comments.

[aout]

Well, if you hide Karma but still use it in the ordering of the thread then Karma could be derivated. In a day you could extract the data from the posts and build a kind of karma-book with top users etc etc...

[krapp]

Roughly, perhaps - you could obviously tell that one thread is more popular than another because it's on top, and maybe in some cases determine that one poster has more karma relative to another based on the way a thread reacts when it's known that they downvoted (since I believe but may be wrong that downvotes from higher karma posters are weighted more._ But factors other than just karma determine the sort order of the threads, and where stories wind up on the front page. How much can you really determine on a site with as much direct moderation as here?

[malka]

reddit like : apply a random modifier. It would probably leak data, though.

[S4M]

> 4. Users Gaming the system, be strictly banned for X Days and shown in different colors.

I don't think users gaming the system can be spotted so easily. Let's take an example: let's say both of us like Astronomy and post sometimes articles about spatial exploration. It is only natural that we would end up upvoting each others' submission, especially if we both like to check the new submissions and tend to read HN approximately at the same time. Users like I described could easily be mistaken by a voting ring detector.

By giving harsh penalties like you suggest to users who are gaming the system, you take a big risk to alienate people who simply have shared interests. I think the ranking algorithm of HN takes voting ring into account, so if you and I are part of a voting ring, our upvotes will impact less the standing of a page - I think I read about that somewhere but can't find the exact source.

[velox_io]

I think the ratio of page views vs likes would quite a telling indicator. This should mean less click bait (a great title with mediocre content), which seems to be plaguing the web these days, even HN!

Having articles appear on the front page briefly, to seed views and see if they stick could be helpful to give then a chance. A report button would quickly stem any spam.

[pajju]

Additional feedback:

5. Use of better colors: For following keywords or topics & colors for users by active | top | influencers etc.

6. Verified accounts.

7. Use of on Demand Badges like: Trustworthy User Badge, Looking for(Badge), Looking for co-founder, Hiring, Remote jobs etc.

All these can be grouped under a Paid plan? I would definitely pay for value & additionals, even a good mobile app experience is missing.

8. There is lack of networking and peer discovery in HN.

They should add community managers & make this evolve. Take it to the next level.

9. Follow options: Follow this discussion, Alert-me's, Follow Posts by keywords.

10. Finally, there is lot of scope to Improve.

HN team & YC should Rise up to the expectations and deliver richer experiences. What are they doing?

11. Add a separate Top Link: Voice-UP your concern.

This is for: Alerting, finding loopholes in the system(gaming the system etc), User Site feedback, new interface ideas.

Creating a vibrant HN ecosystem is the way looking forward. Lets do it.

[Gustomaximus]

With 5. I'd be inclined not to colour influencers or other user accounts. I'd be concerned it would exacerbate hivemind as 'these are the opinions I should upvote and follow'. I like in HN that I typically read a comment before I note someones username on this vs reddit type interface where the username is highlighted.

[cantankerous]

Agree with you. HN has been (seems to be) moving away from indicators that can influence upvoting (for example, folks upvoting a comment already substantially upvoted because its upvoted while downvoting dissenting views). Coloring influencers could assign undue heft to persons of a particular color over others and influence conversations in ways orthogonal to the dialogue.

Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.

[pajju]

overall reputation he/she has earned in the HN ecosystem.

A light (grey shade)color underline can shown up as his overall reputation, function of his contributions, activity in HN etc.

[Tiksi]

Reputation is a great judge of quality and for certain things, and absolutely awful for others. For things that take a great deal of base knowledge to properly evaluate, like cryptography, quantum physics, etc. relying on reputation is generally the best bet unless you've studied the topic for years. There is simply no way to objectively and properly evaluate them for a significant majority of people. On the other hand, on topics that are inherently subjective, or topics that most people understand and end up having conflicting, subjective viewpoints, reputation is an awful way to evaluate the quality of content.

Most of the time on HN, reputation only contributes to the problem. Comments and posts should be evaluated based on their content, not on the person posting them. Reputation only fans the flames of "groupthink", "the hive mind", or whatever you want to call the inevitable tribalism that exists in every sufficiently large community. Reputation has a way of turning subjective opinions into de facto truths, even on things that are unrelated to the source of the reputation, and how could you possibly have an dissenting opinion on the truth ? Giving a popular, well known, "reputable" name priority has a chilling effect on discussion, since going against them is a surefire way to catch some heat from the rest of the community. If reputation and the popularity of a name didn't affect people's views, celebrity endorsements wouldn't be a thing.

The best system I know of is the one 4chan has. Everyone is anonymous, previous comments have no influence on current ones, and the only thing there is to evaluate is the content of your post. Since posts are ranked by time, not by score, every post has an equal opportunity, and it's incredibly difficult to cheat. Obviously that system also has problems, and a lack of threading is annoying at best, but at least it doesn't suffer from stifling discussion and punishing anyone who dissents.

The ideal system would be one where users have a per-topic reputation score, and the poster's handle isn't shown. This way eg. an expert on crytography doesn't have any sway in a discussion about marketing. The fact that someone is revered for their knowledge of networking says about the validity of their thoughts on economical issues, and should have no weight in those discussions. However I imagine this would be incredibly difficult to actually implement in a reasonable way, and could probably still be gamed, though it would be better than what we currently have.

Side Note: I didn't (and can't) downvote you, and I'm not sure why people feel your comment doesn't deserve to be seen.

[galfarragem]

I don't agree with you but I upvoted your comment (that was already being downvoted) - it adds value to the discussion.

The simplicity of HN is something innegociable IMHO. As I understand you are proposing to evolve HN into a mix of Reddit-social network for hackers/entrepreneurs.

[pajju]

Thanks.

It was an open opinion & you understood it well. Others simply downvoted it.

I don't feel anything for downvotes, but opinionated things gets often misunderstood and the whole discussion stops there.

The Idea that someone brings a new conscious(new topic) open for discussion is also gone down by downvoting. The essence of further discussion is thus diluted, because of first few downvotes or no enough upvotes.

This is still a persistent problem in HN, if there is a downvote, there can be fair explanation too(as you did) or don't push it so down, so others might re-consider this topic to be validated.

Nice, these kind of open discussions is the way looking forward.

[lettergram]

They could interlace new, Ask, and Show articles with the top page at random. This would definitely increase overall votes on new stuff, while at the same time reducing the power of voting circles.