IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the requisite boulder of salt...
1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.
2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common "always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested, being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.
I think the only (scalable) way to ensure that is to only bring "good" people into HN. After all, if you want a scalable solution, the community has to be self-moderating to some degree. And if you can't trust "the masses" on the site, then you can't trust the moderation. The only solution that makes sense is to only bring good people into the community.
HN does this in a few ways:
1. Most people finding HN find it through pg's articles and through Y Combinator, which already means they're probably alright.
2. HN's loop works well. We only discuss interesting things, downvote comments don't say anything intelligent, even if they're funny jokes, etc. Therefore, people who aren't interested in intelligent conversations find somewhere else to go. Keeping HN alive and kicking.
People come here for the submissions (on-topic, non-fluff, genuine upvotes) and discussion (civil, educational, interesting). To create a superior HN you would have to improve on those features first or it's a non-starter.
It's unlikely you could improve on those though. HN has network effects (i.e. HN is popular because HN is popular). Unless PG drops the ball with HN, by letting it get overrun with poor content for example, there's just not much room for a competitor, and that doesn't seem likely.
I think these are great ideas. If followed, it's likely that we would all start seeing something closer to the HN we want to be a part of. I must say however that I don't expect this post to cause the change. Not because it's a bad post or has bad ideas within it but because it is just a post and will fall to the bottom soon and many people will miss it.
I think there are more fundamental problems with the site and the way it works.
I replied to this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488561 yesterday explaining what I think the issues are. Because I think it applies here as well, I'll re-post it below.
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I'm not sure how submissions like this are still showing up so commonly or how they arrive at the top of the list. If ever there was a community of people capable of solving the problem of "improving HN", this is the one. I supply a problem statement and solution below.
Problem: HN has problems which seem not to get fixed despite recommendations made to the maintainer(s?). Why? I suspect it's because maintaining HN is one of the lowest priority jobs to the maintainer of HN. The guy is busy! Fixing problems or implementing possible features quickly would have very low ROI to such a person. This isn't to say that he(they?) doesn't care - just doesn't have time because his other responsibilities are actual responsibilities, not a hobby. This is the equivalent of hiring an independently wealthy person to work for your company. The person may really like working for you, but you can't rely on them. They have little incentive to stick around if they get even slightly bored.
Solution: Make a new one. Someone make something better. You know where your primary audience lives (here) so you know where to find users. Monetize it in some way so that I know you'll keep working on it. Make it your full time gig. With the number of users you could get, you wouldn't have to ask for much. A donation model would probably pay you a pretty good salary. Be nice to the community and make reasonable attempts to fix the issues they bring up. They'll probably even help you fix them if you need them to.
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As you can see, I think the problems are more low-level. For example, I don't have a lot of karma. I don't submit things but I do comment occasionally. I've never been in an uncivil argument on here and I feel I carry myself in a way that benefits the community. But because of how the HN application works, I can't down vote. I'm not saying that the ability to down vote would fix the issues, but it's one small part of it. Reddit gives everyone the ability to down vote and most comments/submissions which are considered inappropriate (mind you Reddit necessarily has a higher tolerance do to variety of content) get down voted out of site so that the majority of users never perceive it as even being a problem. This is all because Reddit arms it's users with the tools to make Reddit what they want it to be.
I could gain the ability to down vote on HN by getting more karma but I have no idea what amount I'm trying to get and I would likely find myself posting things just to get there which would also bring the overall quality of HN down.
Reddit also allows the posting of rules in a prominent location where everyone could see them. That's what this post needs. You've created good guidelines. Throughout the day, they will get better as people pick them apart and add their opinions. By the end of the day, these rules would probably be suitable for posting prominently in the side bar of all pages within the HN app. But they won't be. They'll fall to the bottom and be forgotten. It's unfortunate.
We could ask the maintainer to post it prominently on the side of the pages, but it's very unlikely to happen as it would take some UI tweaks, etc.. The point is, we need an application that lives and breathes. One which changes when it needs to. If for no other reason than to test theories about what may help. We need a HN that is the full-time job of someone, not a side project.
I love HN's community but don't like a lot of it's policies/design choices. Before anyone says "but maybe that's what made it a good community in the first place", you probably aren't wrong. But I keep thinking there must be a more optimal way to do it.
I would propose that first and foremost, the best application would be to improve the quality of HN. It would be interesting to see changes over time from various angles. For example, the churn rate of users, the repetition of posts, the number of commercially-biased posts (I.e. advertisements), etc. I am relatively new to the forum, so I’m sure that veteran users would have even better suggestions.
Realistically unless you have someone who is willing to spend 1,000+ hours per year making qualitative judgments about the quality of every active contributor, and who is then willing to go around being kind of an asshole, the community is eventually going to fall apart. And right now that's not going to happen, because there's no profit motive.
You could do something where you collect everyone's email address, and then give anyone willing to spend the time to be HN's curator the ability to send out 3 emails a year to the entire list that they could sell advertising against and promote their own projects. But short of that, I don't see anyone stepping up to put in the time and emotional labor required. The only other solution is to implement a paywall, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Definitely, I agree, and I'll be working on building a great community. But surely there are features that even the most passionate of HN users have wanted that would enhance and leverage the relationships within this community.
I didn't feel like I knew what the answer was, so I was very curious to see what it would be.
I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.
You would need a lot more hands-on moderation than other communities, since it would be harder to build a self-governing community like HN that largely knows who to mod up and who to mod down.
unlike most people I think that HN is pretty great. Sure the site has some problems with being overly basic and not having anything that helps foster/grow good discussion[1] but overall it's good. The problem HN has is just like every other social site: people. People change; everyone is different. HN is shaped by the people here and as they evolve so does the site. What HN needs is:
1. Proper guidelines about what is and what isn't appropriate here. Types of content, subject matters and how to approach commenting. Systems to support how much HN is growing, (eg: subreddit style system for show hn, ask hn, jobs, new content types as they arise, like recently the blog posts responding to another HN blog post)
2. Active and transparent moderation. Submissions that don't meet the guidelines should be removed, as should comments, but it should be done transparently so that the community can see what is and what isn't acceptable. If a comment doesn't provide value to a thread it should be removed and if someone is consistently posting poor quality comments or comments that don't fit with the guidelines they should be removed.
HN is becoming diluted, but with a proper structure that is well enforced the site will be able to handle it. It's hard to force a social site to remain the same forever, but it's possible and in the case of HN I think it would be the right choice.
The most important thing to remember: you can't solve people problems with programming.
[1] To address this problem I would have a reddit style notifications system and the ability to subscribe to favourite users.
I'm glad to hear that an experienced editor sees HN that way, and also that you see evidence of a repeatable approach. Those are good signs.
As I'm sure you know, it's a more complex problem than just being willing or unwilling to put up with bad behavior. There are costs to addressing it—quite a few, it turns out, no matter what approach one takes.
Our plan is to move HN toward more community self-regulation. Each step we've taken that way—e.g. when we added vouching for dead comments—has worked well. I doubt the community can become completely autonomous (though a mod can dream), but we're pretty sure it can go further in that direction, especially if we do a good job of specifying what kind of site HN is, and isn't, supposed to be.
The no-one-noticing-good-submissions is seemingly a huge problem here and I think working on fixing that will make HN much better. I emailed PG a few months ago with some ideas I had about how to quantitatively measure submission and discussion quality, but he did not respond. I'll forgive him though, he's been making babies and startups :)
If pg really wants to preserve the feel of HN, he needs to develop a system that analyzes the behavior of users to determine their acceptance level of other users. This will create a network effect, where the most influential users will drive the site.
He then needs to seed the system with 5-10 users who he considers paragons of HN (I can think of five off the top of my head, but his are almost certainly different), and tweak as necessary.
Hmm, well to make a community-driven website, but actually only with the content that the moderators deem worthy, is a good way to piss off users and to not make it change the world. It makes HN mediocre.
The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments.
To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche.
The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like $2, would be fine.
Of course, this will never happen. This isn't really something I want to happen, but, to me, it seems to be the only way of limiting the user base in an effective manner.
Sounds good in theory, the best communities are almost always those that are strictly moderated or have their rules heavily enforced.
It will probably make HN worse though. HN already suffers from being too much of a "rich, startup boys club". This will only get worse as those that have been around longer and made comments that "fit" within that viewpoint get karma and get to decide what comments are shown.
1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.
2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common "always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested, being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.
My .02 worth for you :-)
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