Чему я научился у Hacker News

I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not sure why it has. Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected.

I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile. [4]

Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. [5] So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower. [6]

I notice most of the techniques I've described are conservative: they're aimed at preserving the character of the site rather than enhancing it. I don't think that's a bias of mine. It's due to the shape of the problem. Hacker News had the good fortune to start out good, so in this case it's literally a matter of preservation. But I think this principle would also apply to sites with different origins.

The good things in a community site come from people more than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that technology comes into play. Technology certainly can enhance discussion. Nested comments do, for example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls.

So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there.

The downside of tuning a site to attract certain people is that, to those people, it can be too attractive. I'm all too aware how addictive Hacker News can be. For me, as for many users, it's a kind of virtual town square. When I want to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. [7] But an online square is more dangerous than a physical one. If I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. I have to walk a mile to get there, and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. But visiting an online forum takes just a click, and feels superficially very much like working. You may be wasting your time, but you're not idle. Someone is wrong on the Internet, and you're fixing the problem.

Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN.

I feel like the addictiveness of games and social applications is still a mostly unsolved problem. The situation now is like it was with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, and we haven't yet evolved ways to protect ourselves from them. We will eventually, and that's one of the problems I hope to focus on next.

[1] I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and average (with the high score thrown out) seemed the more accurate predictor of high quality. Median may be the more accurate predictor of low quality though.

[2] Another thing I learned from this experiment is that if you're going to distinguish between people, you better be sure you do it right. This is one problem where rapid prototyping doesn't work.

Indeed, that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of people. The reason not to do it is not that everyone's the same, but that it's bad to do wrong and hard to do right.

[3] When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. Sites that habitually linkjack get banned.

[4] Digg is notorious for its lack of transparency. The root of the problem is not that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but that they use the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage. Instead of bubbling up from the bottom as they get more votes, as on Reddit, stories start at the top and get pushed down by new arrivals.

The reason for the difference is that Digg is derived from Slashdot, while Reddit is derived from Delicious/popular. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of editors, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with voting instead of bookmarking. (You can still see fossils of their origins in their graphic design.)

Digg's algorithm is very vulnerable to gaming, because any story that makes it onto the frontpage is the new top story. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures. A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.

[5] The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these, and when I read comments on really bad sites I can hear them in their voices.

[6] I suspect most of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments have yet to be discovered. Xkcd implemented a particularly clever one in its IRC channel: don't allow the same thing twice. Once someone has said "fail," no one can ever say it again. This would penalize short comments especially, because they have less room to avoid collisions in.

Another promising idea is the stupid filter, which is just like a probabilistic spam filter, but trained on corpora of stupid and non-stupid comments instead.

You may not have to kill bad comments to solve the problem. Comments at the bottom of a long thread are rarely seen, so it may be enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the comment sorting algorithm.

[7] What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that there's no center to walk to.