People have been saying that for most of News.YC's life. Certainly for longer than you've been a user. And your proposed solution is also one that's been discussed since before you joined. So ironically this submission appears to be an instance of the type it seeks to prevent.

Incidentally, your second option is impossible. There's no downvote on submissions. The way to push a story down is to upvote other stories. Or if it's really lame to flag it for deletion.

Average income here has to be pretty solid.

The rich ones are too smart to buy just any random stuff you put in front of them and the poor ones are too busy trying to get rich to pay attention.

Advertising isn't just targeted at dumb people.

And it's kind of a moot point because this site doesn't carry ads. And if it did, would be less attractive to many of us.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33086

The flagging system is almost there from that point of view, but it's still pretty hit and miss... I think if the flagging system was tweaked to give more weight to the flaggings of people on the leader board, the system would work extremely well.

Of course, this may be by choice - after all pg may not want to create an oligarchic moderator class on news.yc... up to him.

I'd see an oligarchy as more of a site like Reddit or News.YC, but rather than every person having a vote, a set group of people are able to. Like if only the leaderboard could perform certain tasks.

The problem to circumvent then would be if the leaderboard became overtly political, but I think that a) that isn't going to happen on a site like this, and b) it should be easy to make the system balanced if we have Dictator Paul Graham around to make sure that the people in such a system don't turn into absolute jackasses.

The problem lies when normal people stop thinking that they can submit and get content to the top, the submissions tend to become rote, and you lose community interest.

(As an aside some of the power users on Digg started taking bribes and were banned en-masse IIRC, but I don't see that happening here.)

It won't happen, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.

If I remember correctly, you're expected to lurk or use the newbie boards (http://www.dumbrella.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=cb8a89...) for at least 6 months before posting on the party board.

Even then, if other members don't like what you post, you get harassed pretty quickly and often an admin will delete your thread, or lock it with an (often insulting) explanation of why it was locked. If someone continues to submit posts that members just don't like, that person will get banned pretty quickly. There's a certain culture there, and everyone, admins especially, will berate people who don't fit in.

That would work here, but it certainly works for them.

Also, on HN there's a distinct "we" feeling - my (limited) experience is that admin-dominated forums are more focused on class (ie. looking up, even sucking up, to mods).

I thought that's already the case, though. Can't you not vote stories up until you have a certain karma level?

That's true, and they were saying it before I joined... but is it true? I know that in the last month quality has certainly dropped a notch, particularly in comments. Certain stories are just awful (the guy that wrote the blog post mocking the job applicant who asked about salary, and the follow-up posts, come to mind). It's still an incredibly high level of signal to noise, better than any other site I know of beyond perhaps MetaFilter, but that doesn't mean it isn't slowly getting worse.

Out of curiosity, do stories flagged by multiple users get auto-deleted? One story I flagged was deleted the moment I hit "flag." Does that work like Digg's "bury" button, or was that just coincidence?

I've been wondering that too.

I don't think invite-only is a good thing. It probably would have prevented me from ever being here.

Writing thoughtful comments (even if they are disagreements) to get the desired karma for submissions is as good as a pseudo-invite.

The one tricky part would be whether to allow 'Ask HN' posts or not from new accounts that haven't reached the specific karma level yet. I think they should be allowed, as sometimes one needs to create a temp account, to get some useful feedback/suggestions for some situations where one cannot disclose the identity very obviously.

I know you don't really care, but, there you go.

Group think at it's worst.

I like to think there is a place like this for those who need somewhere to think out loud. Where participation is devoid of clique's, popularity is not a requirement and intelligence is the true barrier to invitation.

Metafilter and Something Awful - IMHO two of the most successful general communities online - use another mechanism to weed out unwanted people: paid membership. Not only does this keep people out, but it has the psychological effect that members make an greater effort to live up to respective community's guidelines and ethos.

Now, I would gladly pay a one-time fee of around 10-15 USD to be a HN member, but I suspect that this solution wouldn't be accepted by many people. That leaves us with invitations. Knowing that I'm in some way responsible for the people that I invite to the community and that their actions reflects back at me, I will exercise more caution when handing out invitations.

Regards,

WarTheatre

Well technically YC is invite-only already. You need to apply and go through an interview process.

I'm being slightly facetious, but there is a broader point in that - Part of the reason for HN was to build a community and to let YC get a feel for the people it takes into the programme.

Making HN invite-only would create a limited gene pool of startup talent - And whilst it's just my own conjecture, I suspect it would stagnate (not in terms of the individuals, but in the diversity of the ideas/topics/beliefs).

Part of the excitement of the startup area is getting something from left-field - someone in their garage building something nobody expected. Invite-only seems to go against that ethos.

Communities like this have two big problems to solve when they grow up:

1. "The crowd" comes in, and dwarfes by sheer numbers the original community, pretty much diluting the original values to a fraction.

2. Same community, same members, same ideas - after a while you get stuck in a loop, and it's hard to bring truly original content.

Unfortunately these two problems don't solve each other, but rather make things worse. The crowd will assimilate only the most superficial and more repetitive values, while the true target for original content is lost pretty fast.

What I'm saying is things are pretty much doomed, and I'm not talking only about HN. Believe it or not, there was a time when digg was better then HN is now.

As for solutions, I have none. But do like the idea of invitation only... maybe with a twist. You still need to be able to get new members directly, not through aquintances. So how about having "full members" and "regular members". Regulars can't post stories, and their comments are somewhat at a disadvantage (graphically or by initial points. I's suggest both). Their comments have "invite" buttons visible to the full members, possibly with a window showing comment history in between. Full members have a number of invites logarithmically proportional to their karma.

To the HN today it's both too late and impractical to apply this, but a clone could be worth it. Maybe starting with the users with the most karma as of one year ago.

I think that as far as the system goes, HN works better than both Digg and Reddit. Digg was killed by its emphasis on the "Digg" button, by its claim to be a bookmarking site early on, and by its poor comment system. (That, and the formula for displaying all posts that reached a certain level of popularity and only those posts.) Reddit's system was far more flexible, but its community got far too one-sided, to a pretty awful degree. Hacker News discourages that stuff in part by forcing karma gaps before you have access to features.

I think that if anything, the karma requirements should be increased again. Require higher karma for downvoting comments and upvoting submissions, require some karma for submitting stories. That way, the people who have the most control over the system are the longer-time users, who have contributed more and who have much less of an impulsive reaction towards things. That's the most important thing to keep in mind: impulse kills civilized community.

I think HN can be saved, but only time can tell. I think that it will have to be tweaked to balance things out.

But honestly, it has stayed about the same. Sure, once in a while some trollish post gets to the front page, but the mods tackle it or people flag it or upvote other things within a day. The signal to noise ratio is just really high, and unless that's going down drastically, I don't see a problem.

Come back the day HN becomes Digg, because I don't think it'll happen...for a long long time at any rate.

Growth is good. It's only bad if you have people who fundamentally misunderstand this site, and by far I think most of the people who join News.YC understand what it is about. I mean, if they didn't understand, why would they even join or hear about it to begin with?

Opening it to the public allows more diversity in content/discussions. Honestly, I think Hacker News is doing great, the quality is terrific...at least compared to other sites that I visit often (digg/reddit).

I like the general concept for it's egalitarian giving of power.

New users still get that happy feeling from their comments getting 'up voted' (on slashdot comments are rated not voted for, but I see no reason why different schemes couldn't work in this context). On a site that's just starting out the win-the-lottery constraints are pretty lax, or at least everyone who follows the rules get karma points to hand out. Or maybe simply registering gives one karma points. I think it's important to encourage users to partake in many roles--low barrier to entry for good intentions; stay inclusive while still providing meaningful content.

Their system could be used for submissions, too, not just comments.

An alternative to restricting the user-base--which I think will just reduce the variety of submission perspectives and depth, and only prevent off-topic-ness so much as the community is homogenous--is to

A. Make the "topic-ness" very clear. This might include reminder text or tutorials or mission statements, and it include the comments and voting mechanisms we already employ to pass-on the culture.

B. Use natural language processing and automation (at least for flagging) to reduce off-topic submissions.

I think the best way to keep the quality of YC news high is for committed people (like pg) to do what they can and slowly deploy heuristics when possible.

Google shows about 160,000 pages indexed for YC, I'm sure some of those are leading to new users.

Turning HN into an invite-only site will radically change its nature and reduce the quality of posts and variety of opinions found here.

Apart from indulging in some serious groupthink, you'll keep out new or existing hackers that haven't found this site yet.

The site keeps growing and so the nature of the site changes. Instead of using draconian measures in a doomed attempt to recapture the 'good old days', make changes to the community system (karma points, modding, etc).

But if we ever notice quality falling dramatically, it may be time to move to such a model.

Works for Kotaku.

However, it'd require that we properly characterize what is and isn't wanted from users. Trolling's obvious, but there isn't much of that here.

I'd prefer the ability to downvote crappy articles in place of an invitation-only registration system.

Example: every time an Apple story is posted, somebody complains not about the post but about their hatred for Apple. If those people could downvote Apple stories, I think some of them would. And if we have more anti-Apple people than pro-Apple people here, then suddenly the Apple folk have their voice muted. That's not an optimal solution.

that way the biggest contributors of thoughtful comments are the ones doing the policing. hell you could just make it the leaderboard.

What about graduated voting? You need a higher level of karma to vote on stories when the reach a certain number of votes.