have been updated pretty recently, as I see one significant change in the guideline text that responds to controversies that came up over the last two months. The Hacker News welcome message
gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
several HN participants proposed further revision of the guidelines, and also proposed making the guidelines more visible during the article submission and comment submission process. For example, have the "add comment" form field prominently display a link to the guidelines, perhaps with a snippet of text referring to the guidelines most related to comments, and similarly have the submit form
prominently display a link to the site guidelines and a brief description of what kind of submissions are most desired.
Weighted voting fixes based on user behavior signals do seem like a good idea (that is what pg is thinking about), and we might as well discuss how to make those fixes mathematically correct. The technical tweaks can best be reinforced by ongoing efforts at user education, including possible revision of the guidelines, and, in the opinion of several HN users, simply making the guidelines more visible to everyone who submits an article or posts a comment.
Edit to reply to first comment kindly made to my comment:
What kind of comment is most often upvoted, and by whom, is an empirical question. I don't have access to the data to resolve the question of what kind of comment is most readily upvoted. The bestcomments page here on HN
shows a current snapshot of what the current community, based on current communication of the guidelines and current technical features of the HN software, has upvoted the most in the most recent several days.
The problem with votes being weighted upon previous upvotes of content submitted by that user is as follows: The chance of upvoting a post is related to its length and complexity. One-off puns or silly remarks are much more readily upvoted than long, insightful but demanding comments on complex matters.
Well the difficulty is really that we don't know that any more (since we can't see comment vote counts). I'd say it's not inverse to your suggestions - some 'higher' HN posters do seem to get away with 'comedy' comments, but many newer members who don't get the 'HN tone' get downvoted into oblivion.
I think since we can't see the vote numbers people are less likely to upvote longer comments now - but I don't imagine them losing out to jokes.
I'd still think that over all, good comments are going to attract more votes that joke comments, and with less risk of being downvoted for 'making this like reddit'.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
have been updated pretty recently, as I see one significant change in the guideline text that responds to controversies that came up over the last two months. The Hacker News welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Hacker News FAQ
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
In recent discussion,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397542
several HN participants proposed further revision of the guidelines, and also proposed making the guidelines more visible during the article submission and comment submission process. For example, have the "add comment" form field prominently display a link to the guidelines, perhaps with a snippet of text referring to the guidelines most related to comments, and similarly have the submit form
http://news.ycombinator.com/submit
prominently display a link to the site guidelines and a brief description of what kind of submissions are most desired.
Weighted voting fixes based on user behavior signals do seem like a good idea (that is what pg is thinking about), and we might as well discuss how to make those fixes mathematically correct. The technical tweaks can best be reinforced by ongoing efforts at user education, including possible revision of the guidelines, and, in the opinion of several HN users, simply making the guidelines more visible to everyone who submits an article or posts a comment.
Edit to reply to first comment kindly made to my comment:
What kind of comment is most often upvoted, and by whom, is an empirical question. I don't have access to the data to resolve the question of what kind of comment is most readily upvoted. The bestcomments page here on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
shows a current snapshot of what the current community, based on current communication of the guidelines and current technical features of the HN software, has upvoted the most in the most recent several days.