Month: October 2011

Lessons learned from a social news website

Back in February 2009, Paul Graham shared the lessons he’d learned from a side project of his – social news website Hacker News.  I’ve read it back then, of course, but once again someone pointed out to me the value of that article and I went back.  It is a must read for any web developer or even anyone who  participates in online discussions, social networks, or just maintains a blog.  Here is my favorite section that explains bad comments.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn’t be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they’re being mean than stupid people are to know they’re being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it’s simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it’s hard to write a short comment that’s distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. [5] So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don’t all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower.

Doctor ibn Engineer

I had an interesting idea today, which somehow transformed into a rather lengthy thought train, which, in turn, pushed me to browse quite a bit of Wikipedia, and, finally, to write this blog post.   It’s just one of those things that I spent some time thinking about which has no practical purpose rather then annoy and entertain readers of this blog and confusing Google into bringing in more people, searching for rather random things.

I started off with names and naming conventions.  People names, to be more precise, and how different cultures approached the naming.  Remember, those Arabic names that trace the ancestry of a person using the “ibn” word,  which means the “son of”.  Abdul ibn Hasan ibn Abdurahman ibn Foo ibn Blah ibn .. it can go for ever.  No, remember those surnames based on the profession of a person, used by many cultures.  Baker, Fisher, Hunter, Miller, Parker, and so on.

Wouldn’t it be fun to see these two paradigms mixed up.  We’d still use “ibn” to indicate the “son of” part.  But instead of meaningless father’s name we’d use father’s profession.  In conjunction with the regular first name and last name that could give some really awesome names.  For example, my son could have been Maxim ibn Programmer ibn Engineer ibn Projectionist Mamchenkov.  How cool is that? For a change, most people’s full names would be interesting.  The downside?  Those families with the same profession running through generation would be really boring.  But they would still have something to feel proud about.  John ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor Healer.  I’d be more than willing to trust my health into his capable hands!

What would your name be like?

Bike sharing in Nicosia

Cyprus Mail reports that bicycle sharing schema was launched in Nicosia, Cyprus:

PEOPLE in Nicosia are now able to roam the city on bicycles at 27 docking stations spread across seven municipalities as part of the much anticipated bike sharing scheme.

The scheme was unveiled yesterday at a special ceremoney in Aglandjia attended by various officials, including Communications Minister Efthymios Flourentzos, and the participating mayors.

The new system is open now but not all of the 27 stations are operational yet. It will be another ten days before the system is fully up and running on November 7.

The scheme involves 315 bikes which people can borrow from any designated station and return to any other station of their choosing. A network of bike lanes, some of which are expected to be completed by the end of the year and others by 2012, connect the city’s universities and hopefully “rejuvenate our bodies” in the word of Aglandjia mayor Andreas Petrou.

I think these are great news.  Of course, at first people will look funny at this.  But slowly slowly the culture will change and more and more people will use bicycles to move around.  We’ve seen this happening before and we’ll see it happening again.

Back a few years ago, when roadworks began to construct a walk path and bicycle lane along the seaside road, I’ve heard many people joking about Cypriots being the laziest nation in the world, the nation that never walks or cycles.  Those who were not joking, often presented a number of other reasons of why that was a useless development.  One of the most frequently used reasons was, for example, weather.  People were saying that it was too hot in Cyprus to walk or cycle.

And what are we seeing now?  Lots of people walk and cycle, people of all kinds – young and old, Cypriots, locals of other nations, and tourists.  It’s true that on a hot day there are fewer people out, but overall, I think it is obvious that the walk path and bicycle lane are useful.

There is also a generic European trend towards healthier lifestyle and smaller environmental footprint.  We shouldn’t forget that too.  In the last few years, most European countries banned smoking in public places, increased the prices of nicotine and alcohol, promoted healthy way of life, including sports and other activities, better eating, and quitting bad habits.   As a result, many European nations look better.  Fewer people smoke.  And bicycles are a widely used mean of transportation.

Cyprus, even though often far behind other European countries, still moves in the same direction.  We’ve already seen a smoking ban. We are seeing a reincarnation of the public transportation system.  And, I think, adding bicycle sharing schemes and constructing more bicycle lanes are a good way to go.