Advice YC: How to recover

by eusman on 3/31/2008, 10:14 PM with 5 comments

This is my final submittion before my exit from YC.News.

I am really irritated by the quality of the community that I am leaving it.

The quality since the last month has dropped significantly.

The attitude is bad and it's obvious in a selection of comments.

A minority seems to act against the spirit of the community and to me that I've been visiting YC.news since last year, I never expected to see it going the downhill.

Bad articles are submitted.

Gone are the times that level of quality was similar to the article of Paul Busheit's attribution about ideas.

Hope you recover from this downhill. But I am done now.

Thank you for the contstructive converstation the past few months.

Bye

P.S

If you want my ideas how to save this community:

1. add levels of penalty to those that abuse down voting in comments

2. beyond a number of down votes that exceed a preset limit, pause the down voting until the comment gets at least 1 upvote (and reset to a new limit the down vote, premasurable to a fraction) or 1 reply that will receive at least 1 upvote. This can protect the people comments from people that attack others by down voting.

3. add extra protection layer, people with karma less than the user who commented are not allowed to down vote the comments.

4. and most importantly a system that tracks downvoting perfomance. if a comment is down voted and afterwards upvoted, affect the perfomance of the user down voting and therefore how they are allowed to downvote.

  • by technoguyrob on 3/31/2008, 10:31 PM

    5. Don't make posts like this. Instead of publicly announcing your dreary departure, limit your criticism to the constructive aspect; if you wish, mention in passing that the quality is causing you to leave, but don't make that your centerpiece: focus on your advice and beckoning for open discussion.

    <small>(P.S. His name is Paul Buchheit.)</small>

  • by webwright on 3/31/2008, 10:53 PM

    Is downvoting comments really a problem? I haven't noticed that. Maybe your comments suck? :-)

  • by eb on 3/31/2008, 10:52 PM

    I don't think the quality has declined much at all. Good articles make it to the top and the commenting is fine.

    Your comments were downmodded because they were petty and you have a bad attitude. When you post:

    "whatever downvote me, i am probably done also with hacker news too... no comparison to what it was 1 year ago...or at least few months ago"

    what do you think is going to happen?

  • by bmaier on 3/31/2008, 10:43 PM

    Oh god, here goes the procession of posts like this, everybody off the cliff before its too late.

    Wanna make the quality of the community better? Submit better things, be more selective about your upmods, make better comments but dont flood it with dramatic I'm leaving posts.

    By doing so you're contributing to the the very problem that caused you to leave...