"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

The guidelines grant too much leeway here and make it difficult to educate new members about what's appropriate. Off topic should just read: "NO politics, sports, crime or general news stories." Full stop, no excuses.

Likewise, the on topic section provides too much cover for people to submit just about anything (hard to get more broad than "anything that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity."). I'd rather see tight, specific rules and let the community decide when it's appropriate to bend them.

I've seen these things discussed, and pg has given his opinion on some of them in comment threads, but we should decide and put the answer in the site guidelines.

I've had a few discussions with people on HN that have bordered on political (mostly around Wikileaks and Terrorism) and I think these discussions have left me more rational, as any good discussion should.

Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment, which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

that political posts and commments have no place on HN.

That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to listen to community consensus here.

I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

and

"Undergraduation"

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

and

"Is It Worth Being Wise?"

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing business who wants to hire competent workers.

What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?

Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.

IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete political threads. Then the definition of politics will be subjective. That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme. What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective action if the experiment starts going wrong.

In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.

as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how XXXX works and how it can be improved

I like other political discussions (of XXXX) here- when the above is adhered to- because I seem to find the facts more quickly here than on any other site. The diverse points of view and contexts of experiences of the people here nearly always makes me realize something I hadn't previously considered. But I think the broader consensus is that too many people won't feel bound to adhere to the facts, and the conversation will tend to devolve as patio11 suggests.

Promote civil discourse and find a solution to all the pedantry. There's lots of threads now where people are arguing for a long time essentially over semantics. It's really bone-headed and doesn't reflect well on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555595

It's my understanding that HN's algorithm rewards articles that have lot of comments and discussion. I've observed that I typically enjoy articles that feature a high upvote to comment ratio, while I'm unlikely to enjoy articles with more comments than upvotes. I would be interested in seeing what the front page would look like if articles were penalized for having more comments than upvotes. Maybe this is just a personal quirk, I don't know.

I'd also like to see the community flag more comments than just those that are spam. Personally, I flag any very mean comments/ad hominems. I've been on the receiving end of such often enough that I know that those kind of comments can easily ruin somebody's day. I think, as a community, we should actively discourage comments that are mean. All criticism ought to be constructive, otherwise what value does it add to the discussion?

At day's end, though, the most effective way to influence the community is going to be leading by example. Long-time members of the community need to show newer members what is appropriate. pg needs to show the community "this is good" and "this is bad" and he has to participate. The entire tone of a community is decided by its most senior and most active members. The majority of a community will follow the lead set by those few.

I agree about "Be the change you want to see".

My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice, network technology, programming tips, hacker culture, VC firm news, economics, politics, military tech.... whatever the topics are that people are actually posting and upvoting.

Classifying a topic could be done by a voting algorithm, weighted by karma... the poster thinks the topic is economics, then it gets marked as economics. If enough commenters feel that it falls under politics instead, then their clicks on that topic classification (submitted as part of the comment form) will reclassify it as such. Those users who want to see only certain topics can filter as desired.

The spirit of respectful and collegial debate that pervades the site is a huge draw and could just as easily be applied to the "off-topic" as the "on-topic"... and there is a synergy in having both available. It keeps things fresh and interesting and there is intellectual stimulation available here that you can't get anywhere else, regardless of topic.

I guess I am saying that the pool can be bigger and still be clean, and it can have a shallow and a deep end, fast and slow lanes, and serve a wide range of swimmers... but still be known for its overall high quality.

On the other hand, I think it would be useful to have strict limits on how far the culture stretches. We should try to preserve the geeky, business-y, thoughtful culture, rather than going the route of reddit where everyone's allowed to do what they want.

This site is already radically different from other online communities, why not go full-bore and just make it based purely on a the-cream-rises-to-the-top model?

I would imagine the flag feature is enough to get rid of the spam or junk topics. If someone really likes a topic or wants to see it stay on the front page, they can burn up karma with upvote boosts (to a limit).

It seems the focus here is already on the community finding and upvoting topics of intellectual value and fostering stimulating discussion. Why not just bring that to a laser-like focus and drop all efforts at "punishing" or otherwise disciplining members of the community.

There's a big difference in motivation between thinking "what can I add to the discussion that will be appreciated and upvoted" versus "gee I sure hope I don't get penalized for saying this"... and that thought loop feeds back into the culture of the site. Right now I would (subjectively) say that 85-90% of the effort people put into the site is positive, while maybe 10-15% of it is negative (downvoting, indulging in a bit of flaming, etc.). If the architecture of the site was further refined to reduce channels for negative action, it would seem that positive effort component could get upped to 90-95% and make this place even more of a standout than it already is. HN could be one big proof-of-concept that a large, diverse, open community on the web can still be a highly evolved and civil community.

Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure, wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually doesn't result in some pissing contest. I am content with having people who don't like me/my opinions vent their spleen by viciously giving an entire downvote to my comment and then moving on. I'm very cool with that. It beats the hell out of anything else I've known so far.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116043 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3125017

I have a serious medical condition that is supposed to be killing me, and I do still have bad days at times, but I'm getting well when doctor's (and everyone else) says that can't be done (getting well is why I have slimmed down so much). To me, that is an ordinary fact and I talk about it casually at times online, the way I would to the two sons who live with me and know all the details. For other people, that's a headfuck and most folks divide up between being highly impressed or spitting in my face and accusing me of both making up crap and being a danger to others to talk about it (which makes me want to go "Okay, which is it? You can't have it both ways.").

In short, I guess I'm the anti-group-think wherever I go. AKA lightening rod for controversy.

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 :-)

That's nice, but the problem is that those people then don't know just how bad the stuff they're ignoring has got.

Maybe they'll start to notice some churn in users; they'll notice that a favourite commenter is no longer around, or that there are many newer members who are creating odd posts. And then BAMN - HN is suddenly worthless.

Does this comment contribute something to the general discussion rather than just trying to prove that someone else is wrong? If so, [add comment]

then it might stop me from making some of my more bone-headed and offensively off-topic comments.

Imagining HN as a large round table discussion full of very smart strangers that I was lucky enough to join in with seems to help. Only say something that adds to the discussion, moves it along, or points out a seemingly missed but valid and contrary point of view, and don't be so rude as to mention that guy's stutter, the foreign guy's poor pronunciation, or be a boring pedant. If it gets boring, go to the next round table.

I'm a little concerned by the "citation please" two-word comment below someones long contribution for some reason. Not everything needs to be peer-reviewed here, there's plenty of room for well-formed opinions based on one experts own experience. I guess the problem is when they are crowded out by the poorly-formed opinions or dogma. A balance, like most things, I guess.

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way. Perhaps a trick could be borrowed from the StackExchange sites and a down-voter would pay for the privilege with karma points?

Quite a few users agree with this general opinion, with differing values assigned to "didn't further the conversation in any way." One problem is that many users who are not furthering the conversation don't seem to notice that about themselves, and then demand an individual explanation for each and every downvote, which seems too much to ask for in response to comments that are, in pg's words, "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

While many users share the opinion that downvotes should mean something mostly about contribution to the community rather than disagreement with the point of view expressed, the opinion that downvoting is okay when used for expressing disagreement with the content of a comment has also been expressed by many users over the years, including by pg, the site founder.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If someone who disagrees with me on factual or policy matters has made a thoughtful comment that introduces me or other HN participants to new information, I am happy to upvote it. But if a comment indeed doesn't contribute to the discussion, because it merely expresses one user's opinion with no verifiable information, it's within the current site guidelines simply to downvote the comment, so that the person who posted it is made aware that he or she should try harder to make a substantive, evidenced comment next time.

There's no value in identifying and shaming people who are overenthusiastic about products. Just correct any hyperbole - and don't crow about the fact that it's hyperbole! - and move on.

That's the most topical one, but "idiot", accusations of poor reading comprehension, and mocking interrogatives are all things I'd encourage downvoting as well.

Seconded. I also believe, more generally, that the growing tendency to express negativity towards people (instead of ideas) is just as much of a problem as frequent offtopic threads. Luckily, this is somewhat easy to fix, because it may be easier to remind participants to keep a respectful tone than to define what actually constitutes a hacker-relevant topic.

MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.

I continue to be surprised that we have to re-learn all these things the hard way on the web.

I still think you should be able to see your own karma of course (click on your username), but that it should require two seconds of effort.

I propose thread subscription. If I want to watch a thread for new comments it would be convenient to get a digit on my nav bar regarding how many threads I am watching that have new comments.

I believe this would keep threads more active. Perhaps it would encourage quality posts, rather than quantity ( people might submit often in attempts to get on the front page ( even if for an hour ) ).

For instance, this is a great topic and I would like to subscribe to this thread-

Might i suggest a crazy idea though: For every submission, ask 2 random members (who have a minimum but not high karma) to review it before it gets posted. If they disagree, ask a third. It's something i am testing out on my site, but i don't have sufficient user base.

I try hard not to respond to any political posts. Now I can downvote I might consider downvoting those.

I avoid anything that mentions Apple, or MS, or often Linux, especially if they're in the same thread. These threads could be great, but often they're content free bickering. I upvote good information. I will consider downvoting flaming.

I haven't submitted many articles. I notice some people submit very many articles - 10 per day. I don't know if there's some way to nudge people into only subbing good articles. Maybe once they've got over twenty submissions they need an average score of X (for the subs) before they can sub any more??

I'd also welcome more power given to people with high karma scores (and maybe high average scores (although I realise there are some problems with average karma)) to have super downvotes, or downvotes for submissions, or some such.

Essentially, the way things are set up, every thread becomes ossified after while. It becomes this stagnant, rigid, structure that doesn't change much when new comments are added.

This is the opposite of what you want, if you want a vibrant, active discussion on an interesting topic that lasts for longer than a few hours.

Effectively, HN needs some of the features that forums and bulletin boards have had for ages. There is a reason forums work so well for discussions.

Also the minimalist computer science inspired upvote/downvote sorting system is a bit of a mismatch to human communication. Someone has to try a more complicated paradigm. I think tags on posts and comments would work better. Have a menu/autocomplete thing for common tags like [agree, troll, disagree, interesting, this, politics, hostile] and weigh submissions and comments through them. Should also be able to combine multiple tags and have a rating option for each tag. Label severity of disagreement, politics or suspected trolling.

This way when you need to tune the knobs you have more data to work with than just upvote/downvote, total karma and average karma. I don't expect pg to do these kinds of experiments though, he has minimalist tastes and limited time.

Also many times when communities fall apart, we have limited data to work with to see where things started to go wrong. Was it too many n00bs that chased experts away? Was it hostility? Did too many new people start voting on new submissions? I've seen some attempts at analysis of HN but don't remember them making clear conclusions.

I sometimes make a comment that I don't feel is controversial/wrong at all, only to see it downvoted. Not only is it discouraging (and a great way to ruin my day), but it's also low in signal--I don't know whether someone just had a bad day and wanted to spread their hate, or whether I misperceived the controversy of my comments. I always want to ask the downvoters to let me know what I said wrong--I just hate the anonymous drive-by shooting, if that analogy makes sense.

[downvote] [comment about reason] [what? you missed the point] [no, you said this] [no, read it again] [you can't write] [you can't read] [your an idiot?] [you're a bigger idiot]

Some method of de-duping might be useful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972222

When you see that someone already pointed out misbehavior (but no more than say 5 such opinions), add your own concurring opinion rather than upvoting - the offender needs to see the public opinion and they no longer see the vote count.

Also when I see a comment that does not add to discussion I downvote it.

Also, your point about upvoting certain comments will probably be moot if users can't see the result of their action. Without having seen the numbers I'll make a bold statement and say that overall voting per user has gone down significantly.

Many new users might not even know that the arrows are for voting since it isn't explained anywhere.

Pros:

* Saves the reader's time. This is incredibly important. I've been here pretty much since the beginning, mostly as a lurker. I've noticed that I used to look forward to the stories with the most comments, because the best comments in those threads were generally very good and generally easy to identify. Now I avoid stories that have received a lot of comments. I just don't have the time to read every comment, and the current ranking system seems too inexact.

* Simple, structural, code-based adjustment. Hacker News has a simple interface, simple rules, and a public code base. Bringing in a dedicated moderator might make some of us happier, but it would also be a tacit admission of defeat. I get the sense that PG would like to exhaust all simple, code-based solutions before getting to that point.

Cons:

* Unintended consequences: chasing after karma. IIRC, this is PG's primary concern about comment scores.

Solutions?

* Maybe it makes more sense to hide karma for individual users than to hide scores on comments. There would still be thresholds of positive karma that would enable users to have certain privileges, but users wouldn't have access to that information. Admittedly, I haven't given this much consideration, so I haven't thought through the consequences.

* Maybe there is another way to make comments easier to scan. This could be done visually, perhaps using color or s simple icon. It might also make sense to offer another sub-HN, kind of like /classic. Personally, I don't rely on HN for news; for me, the value is in the comments. So maybe a /comments sub-HN could feature submissions that generate the best discussions. Defining best might take some doing (highest value average score? highest value single comment?) and would probably require a check or two to prevent users from gaming the system. But for those of us who think HN's value is most closely associated with the value of its comments, it would be great to have an interface that offered a more efficient way to find the most interesting comments.

It may be however, that there are people who have found ways to chase the karma they want by means that are detrimental to the community. For example, users might post almost duplicate links with more enticing titles, or they might (don't know whether this happens) up vote their own stories using fake accounts.

If there are such users, rather than abolishing karma, I think we should try and fix the rules.

If people are gaining karma, but harming the community, what are they doing, and how can we prevent them from doing that?

That's just part of having a bigger community. It always becomes more general over time as it grows.

You can't usually get around this as it's a natural part of the lifecycle of a forum/group/site.

Site fail when they refuse to recognize this and start mucking around trying to revive the past glory.

Just makes our experience bad.

Hacker News is a startup community which, and more recently users seem to be forgetting this. .

Which is why, I believe that along with the ban on "fluff" as highlighted in PG's Essay there should also be the same ban on Political Submissions. There are several reasons for this but just going into one of the reasons as to why there should be a ban on these type of submissions is because, if you go to any political thread you will see that they all eventually turn into flame wars and because there has been an uprise in the political submissions around HN recently and as a result of these flame wars, they have been spreading out into other areas of the site which have been reducing the comment quality.

Likewise, I think people should stop saying "This." - I'm not going to fully go into this as it has previously been covered - http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3153377 but its really of annoying when people just comment for the sake of commenting. I think that, if you are going to comment, then you should be commenting because you want to add your 2 cents and not because, you're commenting to say that you agree with someones comment yet don't add any other value because, this is what the "up vote" button is for. Maybe, some text could be added above the Add Comment button which says "Does Your Comment Add Value? If So:"

I might not have enough karma to do this, or it might be not available to users but like the down vote (which I do have access to) I think there should be an option to flag comments which are deemed unnecessary by users (this could be implemented via a certain amount of karma) to remove some of the unnecessary comments in particular the "This." comments and the ones involving flame wars between users.

Likewise, I also think there should be an "infraction" system used on Forums. I think there is already a system like this in place, as I know if you get a certain amount of downvotes then, the post will get deleted etc but, on Forums the users are clear of their infraction points and it encourages "good behaviour" on the site after they rack up infaction points - making them be more considerate etc. The infraction system could work in the sense that - if you submit something that is "fluff/banned on HN" then you would get +2 infaction points likewise, a bad comment would get +1 infraction points.

Infraction Points would last 30-45 days and if you get 10 infraction points simultaneously then depending upon your karma you would receive a punishment such as:

Under 200 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban

Under 500 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour Change

Under 750 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour Change + Loss Of Downvote.

ETC

Users would be allowed to earn the ability to have the header colour change and downvote button back via the Karma System.

Likewise, repeat offenders of Infractions would get more severe punishments. Such as having a script which shows for certain users, where the site keeps messing around whenever they try to do an action for a duration of time they are on the website.

Whilst, there are other smaller aspects which could be improved around the site, I think if these were tackled then Hacker News would have its strong community over the long haul and we won't see, flame wars/poor comments off users as often.