I imagine that too many new users on one day is a troublesome idea regardless of what site they’re from or why they arrive here.
It’s as simple as noting that new users are new and still learning from everyone else around them. When everybody is new, it’s hard to get a feel for the current culture and style.
I imagine that it would probably work on a permanent basis to gate new accounts to a certain fixed value per day or proportion of new to old accounts, e.g. .1% per day or whatever.
Personally, I came here from Reddit 1,791 days ago, so I will be the first to say that I hope we don’t have an “anti-Redditor refugee” policy, whether express or implied. Far better to demonstrate through action and voting what we value as a culture and welcome as many people to the site as we can handle without diluting our ability to teach by example.
As someone who recently joined HN, I think it would be very reasonable for new members to have lots of restrictions.
I won't pretend to understand the situation fully but I believe there is a learning curve with any new community before new users fully understand it.
I understand there is already a number of karma milestones for features but I think this system could be taken further to be even more beneficial.
- Perhaps a new user can do nothing for the first 30 days or similar.
- Followed by original comments only, no replies (except to own thread).
- Once some karma is achieved, allow replies and up-voting and slowly increase their abilities.
- Once they have significant karma allow them to make submissions, this may stop lots of random submissions in the hope of quick karma.
In my opinion the greatest benefit from this is not in preventing new users from participating, but in slowing them down long enough to understand and respect the current community so they may participate in a constructive and non disruptive way.
With all due respect, you sound very condescending. To use an analogy, think of a first generation immigrant who says that now the country is too crowded, we shouldn't let immigrants in anymore.
Why are you convinced that you are better than newer users, to the point that all new users should be forbidden? It sounds a little harsh. You could impose some new thresholds so that people's votes and comments only start mattering once they have some amount of reputation. That should help get rid of the obvious trolls.
And maybe more radically, block all new users from upvoting.
Say HN gets an influx of new users who typically upvote inflammatory or LOL-evoking one-liners. If they all upvote each other, they all get karma, and the community starts to shift towards that behavior (because that's what earns you karma, and karma is supposed to be indicative of your contribution to the community).
I know I lurked here for about 6-8 months before creating an account and that time period allowed me to appreciate HN's community and what was and was not acceptable. Of course new members could still post comments and submit articles -- they just wouldn't have the ability to decide the community ethos.
20 karma is, I think, an arbitrary amount, but the actual amount should be structured around 'how long it should take someone to get used to the rules around here'.
Frankly, my biggest complaint of late is that too many people are posting too much nonsense, and while I'm sure we've all been guilty of it at some point or another, my concern is that as the nonsense gets more acceptable, we go the way of the dogs.
Also, yes, there is an incentive to discourage growth. In years past, HN was self-selecting to the degree that only people who fit with the community would bother to stay. The old guard was ruthless with the downvotes, and exercised a mutual desire to keep the garden clean. Now, so many people join each day that it simply isn't possible for the 'core group' to exercise this control.
Many would consider this growth a positive, but in an environment where the ultimate goal is to preserve its values, its quality and its intellectualism, then 'for the masses' isn't something that should fall within its description, or in the actions of its members.
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.
Have you considered a limit on user interactions per day? 10 posts/comments a day and 10 upvotes a day?
It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).
I think I only made one comment on my first day. Perhaps this should be something that appears for an account's first X comments, where X is a sane limit. Perhaps a karma-limited reminder would be more effective for those who tend toward lurker. Then again, perhaps for the lurker class, that's ultimately unnecessary
One possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members.
To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into the hands of the older users. However, HN has a different philosophy and it might make sense here.
To say it one more time, reddit doesn't do this and never did.
I disagree. This would simply skew the entire site towards content that nets high karma, and high karma users. I have seen no evidence that high karma users post content any better than a new user, and often times, they are worse - manipulative or egotistical.
It seems a lot of over-posting comes from the famous "karma: 1, created: 30 seconds ago" accounts, so it may make sense to impose limits based on time as a user. (Karma may not work as well, as I could imagine a spammer creating 100 accounts and using them all to upvote one another's submissions.)
I think a 'barrier to entry' sounds a very good plan. I guess you could somehow filter the 'new' page for submissions by people > 25 karma and see if it cuts the spam.
Why not apply some commonsense to onboarding? Accounts on HN start their lives shadowbanned, once you've gained some karma you can downvote comments and some point after that the ability to vouch for dead posts. I don't have any data on to what degree it works, but it would make the lives of those seeking instant "gratification" somewhat harder. Alternatively you could apply rate limits. Maybe new users could create a small number of posts on their first day and it gradually increases over time before the training wheels are kicked off entirely. Obviously neither option eliminates the need for moderators, but in theory you should be able to get by with less of them.
actually, it shouldn't be a per day quota because heavy users will be disadvantaged. The idea is to have a steady rate of voting for as long as a user is on the site.
The problem with this is new users. When you join the site, you have 0 karma, and so would go negative if you posted a comment (assuming, of course, that you can go negative. I'd rather not experiment with that).
Of course, pg could make new users come in with 10 or so karma, just to get them started.
Now that I think a bit more about it, this could be a really good idea. It would limit new user's ability to comment and influence things until they have gained community approval of their comments and thoughts. And if they don't get that approval... too bad. If they aren't adding anything worthy of some upvotes, they are adding noise, which detracts from the experience of everyone else.
only comment without links up to 10 karma,
submit at 20 karma,
comment with links at 50 karma, etc.
sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
Initially one proves themselves in discussion, then they can bring new ideas to the table. By setting the limits at relatively low levels it doesn't discourage new participants.
As a relatively new member of the community, I believe that this is important because you don't want the community to become static any more than you want to get overrun a la digg, reddit, etc.
A few days registration won't work, though, because the bad guys will just start setting up accounts, keeping them dormant for the waiting period, and then do their dastardly deeds. Besides, karma is a better measure than seniority.
It’s as simple as noting that new users are new and still learning from everyone else around them. When everybody is new, it’s hard to get a feel for the current culture and style.
I imagine that it would probably work on a permanent basis to gate new accounts to a certain fixed value per day or proportion of new to old accounts, e.g. .1% per day or whatever.
Personally, I came here from Reddit 1,791 days ago, so I will be the first to say that I hope we don’t have an “anti-Redditor refugee” policy, whether express or implied. Far better to demonstrate through action and voting what we value as a culture and welcome as many people to the site as we can handle without diluting our ability to teach by example.
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