[HN Gopher] Hacker News (HN) - Part 1: analysis
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Hacker News (HN) - Part 1: analysis
Author : sebg
Score : 78 points
Date : 2024-04-08 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.osm-ai.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.osm-ai.net)
| mtmail wrote:
| > Even more interestingly, there was negative karma. I don't even
| know how this came to be.
|
| Brand new account commenting with very low value but not worth
| flagging. For example "I read the article yesterday" or "Why is
| this article even on HN?". I've seen a couple that had negative
| karma on the first days. Often though it's simply spam and the
| account soon gets shadow-banned though I don't understand the
| process that does that. Example user:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gabriella4151
| redbell wrote:
| Well explained, Gracias!
| omoikane wrote:
| Once new users gain the ability to downvote stuff, actively
| engaging in discussions increases the risk of losing karma, and
| lose the one ability that is not available to new users. So if
| users perceive the main value of Hacker News as a moderated news
| feed, it seems the best strategy is to earn their 501 points
| somehow and lurk after that. Maybe that's why user activity falls
| off after a few years.
| screenoridesaga wrote:
| There's also active downvote bots that search for phrases like
| GOP and flag them immediately... watch.
| imadj wrote:
| I didn't realize that the active user tenure is this low (one
| year) since I frequently come across veteran users.
|
| On a similar note, sometimes i wonder where the high profile
| users who leave the platform move into (if anything), there
| doesn't seem to be a lot of options. Do they switch to alt
| accounts? turn into lurkers? maybe go off the grid?
| fritzo wrote:
| The average user in the dataset will have lower tenure than the
| average user you encounter, because long-tenure users will have
| more encounters.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I wonder if people rotate their accounts alot here at the one
| year mark. Which I should be doing...
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| if nothing else because they dont allow you to delete your
| account
| bredren wrote:
| You may want to use anti-stylometry tools in addition to
| account switching.
|
| There's already been evidence that analysis to identify and
| attribute authorship across accounts can work surprisingly
| well.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| the agents enjoy my unique typos though!
| username923409 wrote:
| i mostly lurk HN, and don't post unless i feel like my
| contribution is useful in some way.
|
| from my perspective, it's relieving to see that the number of
| users has remained mostly constant in recent years. of course
| it's selfish to think in this way, but almost no "social media"
| or UGC-based platform that i've used has actually become better
| or more useful to me as it became (much) larger.
|
| this kind of fast growth in users (beyond some size) often leads
| to a shift in the culture that made preexisting users participate
| in the first place, leading to a loss in overall quality of the
| platform as a whole. if the growth is gradual enough, then new
| users eventually figure out how to fit into the culture or leave.
|
| i guess i've said nothing that isn't obvious to people who have
| used a computer before, basically "yay no eternal september for
| HN yet", but i digress.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Interesting point.
|
| I was watching _The Synanon Fix_ on HBO, this weekend, and
| towards the end of the first episode, we see the original
| addicts, being replaced by the more lucrative "lifestylers,"
| and I suspect that the next episodes will be downhill, from
| here.
|
| The app I just wrote and released, is picking up steam, but
| slowly. That's deliberate. We're not doing _any_ promotion, and
| it 's giving us a chance to make course corrections. By the
| time people start piling in (and they will, but it will never
| be more than a rounding error to many social media apps), I
| think it will be in extremely good shape.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I've significantly reduced my commenting recently because I
| realized that I've been using the internet to hone my
| discussion/argumentation skills since I got on the web in 1996
|
| At this point there's too much noise on the internet for good
| long term, long form discussion like we had on irc and forums and
| frankly I'm not sure where that lives today.
|
| HN seems to be the last place that had good regular conversation
| mostly cause of dang
| weinzierl wrote:
| You've put into words exactly what I feel.
|
| _" [..] frankly I'm not sure where that lives today"_
|
| I wish I knew.
|
| Being a digital native (albeit an old one) and never having
| been very social in real life I notice that this trend drives
| me increasingly into real world interactions. I always found
| trade fairs, conferences, meet-ups and especially networking
| events a bit ridiculous and yet I attended more of them after
| the pandemic than in the decades before and very strangely I
| enjoyed it.
|
| _" HN seems to be the last place that had good regular
| conversation mostly cause of dang"_
|
| Amen to that!
| pickingdinner wrote:
| These platforms are not designed for intellectual discourse,
| even when they're advertised to be, and even when they try to
| be.
|
| You can't just be right. You also need to be careful. Some
| would say mindful, but that's not it. You need to be careful
| not to trigger anyone or trip any ideological wires. Not fun
| and for what, so you don't bother anymore.
|
| And this is not to discredit the moderators or anything else
| here or on any other moderation dependent platform. Without
| them the average quality of comments would be worse, but there
| also is no denying that their primary role is censorship.
| pickingdinner wrote:
| Downvoted without a counter argument. Which just proves my
| point. There is nothing more unintellectual than a plain
| downvote. I even had some guardrails in that comment too. But
| I am sure the downvote was warranted to the person who did
| it.
|
| But also upvotes are similar. No one necessarily "likes" the
| truth. Nothing about correctness really warrants whatever an
| upvote means to that person. A "correct" vote maybe, but
| those are unavailable on these platforms. Not designed for
| intellectual discourse.
|
| Just to be fair, Twitter is worse. How can you have
| intellectual discourse with character limits and contextless-
| ness as a feature? You get something, and something valuable
| to many, surely, but it isn't intellectual discourse.
|
| Youtube comments are another great case study. Reddit also.
| acover wrote:
| > In Comments
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-
| examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| The guidelines want you to be kind, which is orthogonal to
| right.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| screenoridesaga wrote:
| Really I feel like HN is the worst for discussion. Look at all
| these long empty comments. There's nothing of substance here.
| Lerc wrote:
| My main issue with HN comments is that the threading display
| tends to cause focus on a very small number of high ranking
| comments along with their threads. This leads to potentially
| insightful comments on the original article being largely
| unread.
|
| It's a problem where the solution is not obvious. There is
| perhaps an an opportunity to cycle through a series of
| candidate solutions.
|
| I imagine something like placing a single comment at the top of
| comments selected from some formula of view-count and score, so
| that comments at least get some views to get the chance of
| being upvoted to the point of being seen by the wider
| community.
| tcmb wrote:
| If what they call 'consistency' is just the total number of
| stories posted, it's not really surprising to see a strong
| correlation with total karma points, is it? The more stories
| posted, the more karma gathered. Anything else would be a real
| head scratcher.
|
| You could say, there might be people who keep posting stories
| even though the don't get upvoted, but that would be kind of
| irrational. If the community doesn't seem to be interested in
| what they post, they will stop doing so sooner or later.
| w-m wrote:
| Another curious data point: id =40000000 is up in a few hours. I
| thought it would be fun to try to make a submission pointing to
| that id, while trying to get that id right when it's up. But it's
| too late to start hacking on a script; I'm rather going to bed
| now. (Anybody else trying, please don't kill the server or make
| dang mad).
|
| Edit: oh I missed a 9 in looking at an earlier link, it'll be a
| little more than a day from now, unless sama announces a new
| product, triggering a comment storm.
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| > This finding suggests that the key to a high score isn't
| necessarily landing viral hits, but rather consistently sharing
| stories.
|
| This is interesting. I find it's very difficult to predict which
| links do and don't perform on Hacker News, resulting in quite a
| diverse (to me at least) series of stories. Thanks for the
| analysis.
| laurex wrote:
| > for those treating HN as a competitive platform where karma
| points serve as the score
|
| I have to imagine that people for whom there's a primary
| motivation to be a "winner" in points must quickly lose interest?
| But maybe I'm just naive to how motivating status could be...
| screenoridesaga wrote:
| You are doing that right now though because you want attention,
| don't you see how ironic your comment is? You're the noise.
| jll29 wrote:
| The author "found out" that sama = Sam Altman nad pg = Paul
| Graham, by his surprise.
|
| It is well known that Hacker News owner company, Y Combinator had
| Altman as his CEO before he joined OpenAI.
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