Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN?
45 comments
I'm curious why you aren't posting under your real name?
+1 I believe knowing what interests a user has, or what experience, may help a lot to filter people who speak without knowing the facts (when talking about programming or startups, for example) or whose interests conflict with the subject, so the comment may be strongly biased.
Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.
Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.
What does "verified identity" actually mean? That a user has filled in their profile?
What's next, then, "real names" a la Google? No, thank you.
Maybe an acceptable compromise would be simply to indicate someone's age.
It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.
It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.
Age? I think one of the good things about the relative anonymity in HN is that things like age aren't usually seen as a factor in rating someone's contribution to a discussion.
[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].
[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].
Dare I say it but providing more identity hints has really improved reddit. Thanks to some css :after trickery (and now built in support for managing that), it became possible to put more identity information next to usernames called "flair". This ranges from the football team a user supports in /r/soccer, to being a Mojang employee in /r/minecraft/, to getting an AK47 flair for being a verified successful sender of candy in /r/snackexchange. And of course reddit employees, past and present get global flair avoiding awkward "do you know who I am" incidents ;)
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But HN is not reddit!
Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit?
Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...
Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...
Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his life to the subject.
† The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.
† The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference.
"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".
If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions must be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the comment matters. If the only thing that matters is what you say and not the actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED
What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs identities).
Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.
Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.
There is no intrinsic merit to the statements "God created the world" and "Animals evolved from simpler lifeforms and ultimately from non-living compounds" — their merit is entirely extrinsic, deriving from research done by scientists. It's ignoring these extrinsic factors and "letting the statements stand on their own merits" that leads to creationism being taught in school — that literally is the way the school board members usually put it. That's what I'm getting at: The more context you get for a claim, the better. In technical matters, the identity of the person telling you something is very important, because the value of an expert's opinion is extrinsic to the actual words that comprise the opinion.
That sounds like an interesting idea.
If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"?
Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".
If implemented, it would also be possible to use patterns of voting to estimate (to some degree) how likely a user is to up/down-vote based on the author alone. Maybe dye a user's name purple for "groupie"?
Of course, stylometric analysis would still give away many of the users here well before the sixty minutes is up. A real solution (to burn through all usability in the name of meritocracy) would be text rewriting ala "A Scanner Darkly".
User identification with the short comments usually found on HN might be difficult. The challenge still stands if I'm not mistaken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592
Your last remark is not incompatible with what OP asks for. Maybe HN could test that during a trial week?
60 minutes doesn't seem quite long enough. I'd look at perhaps 0.5 * mean ttl on the front page.
This! +1
I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.
I love reading HN because arguments and reason are all that matters. Spiced with some trolling here and there to make it fun. Trolls' messages end up gray anyway.
I guess independently verifying claims and facts is too hard, regardless of their origin.
Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.
Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.
Being quite new to HN, I don't think less anonymity would improve it, mittigating the "fatt finger" syndrome in mobile would help more :-)
As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all".
I think that's where the voting buttons come in.
As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all".
I think that's where the voting buttons come in.
What about optional links to github/linkedin/etc accounts in the profile and badges next to the comments to show what the person reveals in their profile?
I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.
I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.
Something simple like asking if the user wants to make an email address and/or web page public on their profile would be nice.
Would be an easy hack to write a Greasemonkey script that displays user info next to their name. If you care, why don't you go for it?
This is an intermediate question.
What is the actual symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?
Verifiability of stories users relate?
Trollish behavior?
Something else?
Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.
What is the actual symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?
Verifiability of stories users relate?
Trollish behavior?
Something else?
Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.
i feel it's pretty easy to find out who people are
This is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story)
As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.
As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)
This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.
I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.
Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.
As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.
As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)
This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.
I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.
Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.
So I've been right about that whith the early votes, already doubted that.
My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.
My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.
If they left the profile empty, it was their choice. You can interpret that as if they simply don't want to be contacted. Doing what you suggested won't make HN any "better", it will only drive away the commenters that don't want to be reached out, or those who want to remain anonymous.
For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.
For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.
I used to think a comment should stand on its own too, but I now think that the benefit of knowing the background of the person speaking to you outweighs the downside of introducing your own personal prejudices. I mean, should HN be optimized toward mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?
should HN be optimized towards mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?
Unless you really think that increased prejudice on HN would enhance the experience for the 'enlightened', then this is a false dichotomy.
Unless you really think that increased prejudice on HN would enhance the experience for the 'enlightened', then this is a false dichotomy.
I heavily self-censor whenever my True Name is known. You would only ever hear controversial ideas from the few who recklessly take permanent risks with their job (and possibly housing, dating…) prospects.
What benefit is there to knowing the background?
How is having less information helpful, in this case?
You've already acknowledged that the intent is to reduce prejudice and priming and to allow comments to be judged on their merits.
How about a function for sending a direct message to a user through the website? It could be enabled by default, but users could disable it if they don't want to be contacted.
That way, users by default can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.
That way, users by default can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.
Does a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories?
To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.
To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.
I hate to be so disparaging, but this has to be one of the worst ideas I've seen thrown around here.
Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.
If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically.
I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.
Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.
Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?
Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.
If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically.
I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.
Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.
Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?
Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type
I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.
I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.
This has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true value.
There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.
I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).
HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.
There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.
I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).
HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.
It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.
Thoughts?