One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end. Given some of his previous work in bayesian spam filtering techniques, I am inclined to believe (hopefully not in vain) that the HN algorithm will continue to be adjusted over time to weight down the useless stuff and add buoyancy to the interesting stuff. Because it is still very hard for a program to gauge the nature of comments, the best approach is likely to assume that comments and active discussions == good, while lack of comments == bad.
So, I might have too much faith in "the system" (which is a rarity for me), but for now I am trusting that this issue is being managed transparently, and we can all do our part by acting intelligently. I'll also add for good measure, that there are times I have to remind myself to take my own advice ;)
One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end.
Yes, I agree that this is the secret advantage [1] of the site: It's being gardened, using hoes and rakes built out of Lisp.
[1] Well, okay, technically it's a secret only in the Purloined Letter sense.
Comments
Thanks for clarifying your argument/points.
One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end. Given some of his previous work in bayesian spam filtering techniques, I am inclined to believe (hopefully not in vain) that the HN algorithm will continue to be adjusted over time to weight down the useless stuff and add buoyancy to the interesting stuff. Because it is still very hard for a program to gauge the nature of comments, the best approach is likely to assume that comments and active discussions == good, while lack of comments == bad.
So, I might have too much faith in "the system" (which is a rarity for me), but for now I am trusting that this issue is being managed transparently, and we can all do our part by acting intelligently. I'll also add for good measure, that there are times I have to remind myself to take my own advice ;)
One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end.
Yes, I agree that this is the secret advantage [1] of the site: It's being gardened, using hoes and rakes built out of Lisp.
[1] Well, okay, technically it's a secret only in the Purloined Letter sense.