Yes, yes, HN is going to the dogs, it's not as good as it used to be, it's all because of the new users, and so on and so on. It's been like that since I joined two and a half years ago.
Last year, upon Iteration 27 of this same subject, I threw something like this together in jest:
Quality of HN Comments Over Time
| . .
| . .
q| . . . .
u| . . . . . .
a| . . . . .
l| . . . . .
i| . . . . .
t| . . . you are here -->. .
y| (that's all)
|________________________________________________________
M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A
'09 '10
I must have been on to something because so many didn't realize it was a joke. What fun that was. All I have to do is shift the x axis every n months: some things never change.
I think that reminding people to read the guidelines does not necessarily mean that HN is becoming bad.
I incur sometimes in posts that do not follow the guidelines and get a lot of downvotes. Half the time they are from new users that maybe do not even know about those guidelines, so maybe they do not even understand why they are getting downvoted. Of course they can learn it the hard way, but reading the guidelines is a lot faster and wastes less of everybody's time.
In the same way there are some posts that are not appropriate to this community. In the last days I did not find many interesting posts in the first page, but that's just my opinion and the community as a whole decides what goes up or not. Nonetheless some days ago I even found a link to thisisphotobomb.com (a websites of the cheesburger network, like the lolcats) and this is clearly against the guidelines. Again, there are the voting system and the flagging system, but it wastes less of everybody's time just to know the guidelines and it's better not to pollute the new posts section.
In each of these cases I think "you should read the guidelines", but don't write it because it's against them. But the fact that lately I've been thinking it more often, means that a kind reminder is not totally out of place.
Does this all mean that HN is becoming bad? I don't think so. It just means that we have guidelines we care about because they made HN a place we all like.
Indeed, though the worst trend I see is emotional comments getting voted up more. Maybe I'm seeing the past more warmly than it was, but it seems like clear, logical, consistent, coherent comments got voted up and emotional based comments stayed around 1 or got voted down. It seems like a lot of emotional reactions are getting voted up even when they're not coherent, consistent, and logical - which seems a bad trend.
1) It's been a while, so worth the reminder; and
2) It's actually a submission from someone whose been here a while. The last several were from people with < 200 day memberships.
So: worth a little bit of +1 action, but I certainly hope it doesn't 'stay at the top for a while' as someone else said. Hoarding one of the 'above the fold' slots would be a bummer.
I think the reality is more that it goes in cycles, and it does seem to be at one of its low points currently. A reminder of the guidelines seems in order.
I find myself writing comments fairly often, but end up pausing before I hit the reply button to re-read what I'm replying to and to think if my comment is actually contributing to the discussion. A good percentage of the time, I just end up closing the window.
I may have good intentions to begin with, but if what I say reads as being one of the three points you wrote, there's no point in having other people argue against my invalid or ignorant claim. It just leads to semantical flame wars.
One of the biggest reasons I can think of for the eventual decline of HN are the result of these words;
>>>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<<<
The problem over here is that people's version of what gratifies their intellectual curiosity varies. What I find interesting is deeply subjective and I need to acknowledge that to contribute anything, anywhere. The same thing goes for HN in general.
HN is starting to attract people outside of its core audience and in doing so it inevitably leads to the point where people come in whose mean of what's interesting is different from the mean of what's interesting for the core audience.
It isn't their fault, but this process feeds into itself. So, if I see a post here on HN on death. I have this tendency to post up stuff related to death. Regardless of the fact whether or not they adhere to the spirit of the guidelines. People see that and they are more inclined to upvote it, since there is already content like that on the front page. So, it accelerates.
You might have noticed that the front page of HN always follows a pattern there are a series of similar posts which come up and stay there over the course of time. This is a good thing and a bad thing as well. The trick is in stopping it at the right time. That's where the community and the moderators come in, but if the majority of the community don't know any better than that. This means that the community can't self adjust. The moderators then have to play a stricter role, which is inherently negative in the longer run.
At the same time, if you define those words too strictly then HN won't be HN, anymore. This is the underlying paradox that needs to be solved to avoid that decline.
As long as someone has opened up a guideline discussion....
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Agreed in full.
However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2 of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.
So assume it's that your comment fell into the "noise" category and work harder on producing "signal" next time. We don't need to have a discussion every time someone felt that some post did not contribute sufficiently to the discussion.
I think if a post goes -1, anyone else downmodding should have to reply to be allowed to downmod them again. I am all for the karma system, but I have had situations where people misinterpret what I am saying and after requesting a "why," I find out changing one word makes people understand to the point of me not being negative.
(And burying a dissenting opinion for no reason should need a defense.)
Hacker News is starting to feel like programming.reddit.com a year ago. Now, Reddit is getting more and more like Digg a year before that. Digg certainly looks like Youtube comments one year before. Now, Youtube, that surely is now just like Myspace some time before. And Myspace now is somewhere close to what the AOL forums used to be. But AOL - don't look at the AOL forums! they now look as bad as Usenet did when everyone joined there, before they were Google groups, before they were called DejaVu, when all the newbies had just spoiled all the good old newsgroups.
We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there, and we could build a cozy place with no trolls and newbies, and share really interesting stuff and discuss it intelligently.
But I'm sure the dumbfucks will follow us around, from here to the end of time.
I still have about 3 weeks left before I can make that complaint.
Luckily though, HN seems to be holding steady, and it has a long way to go before it becomes Reddit. HN is like having a conversation in your living room at a cocktail party with a lot of smart people in attendance. Reddit is like having a conversation at a sports bar with a bunch of random drunk assholes.
As someone who was previously a reddit guy (although I found out about HN via irc), I'll do my best to make sure that I don't contribute to the change. I came to HN because I liked the culture and the discussion here; changing that culture and discussion would defeat the purpose of coming here. Thanks to all you HN oldtimers (in internet-years) for creating and contributing to what HN is today (and hopefully will be for years to come).
thanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc.
one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.
My main annoyance with HN posts lately is the use of profanity in post titles and occasional posts that are, in general, NSFW. For those of you in startup land this probably isn't an issue, but on behalf of those of us who are still "workin' for the man" please take a moment before hitting the submit button to imagine that you still have a boss and consider whether your imaginary boss who just walked into your office and saw this post title on your screen would be A) pleased that you are taking a moment to keep up with industry trends while you're waiting for your code to compile or B) wondering why you would waste your time reading such trash. If it's the latter, consider whether this is because the topic of your post is really inappropriate for a professional forum (if so, please don't bother posting it) or if it is an appropriate topic but you're using profanity as a crutch because you're too damn lazy to write an articulate, descriptive title (if so, stop being lazy and rewrite your title).
So sometimes HN can feel like a pretty rough place and a reminder is in good order. To HN's credit, though, these comments tend to be few and tend to be downvoted. You can also find comments like this floating around:
Everyone seems to be focusing on the voting of comments, but I think the tips on what to submit (and vote up) are the most violated, as seen by the now almost daily post about men vs women.
I must have noticed this too, because I switched my hackernews bookmark to go directly to the newest submissions a few days ago, since I didn't like what was on top.
Reading and upvoting from newest is the most effective way to change what is on the frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
Lamenting the bad is less effective than embracing the good. As in life.
My take is that hackers are sometimes gasp interested in discussing political issues. Thus, the best approach is not to have people constantly chastising topics/comments as off topic, but to keep the quality of each comment high enough that an intellectually curious person would enjoy reading it, even if it's about something not typically associated with hacking.
hey, I have a question that is related to the hacker news guidelines. So, I'm considering taking my blog static. You know, it goes with the whole early 90s feel of my website. Also, I'm lazy and maintaining a good comment system is work.
So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.)
Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.
I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.
I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.
Don't automatically submit each article to HN. Have your hypothetical reader click a "comment" link which, if the article is not submitted, prompts them to submit it (and then leave their comment), or if it has been submitted, goes directly to the existing discussion.
I try to be a good new person who follows the rules. :)
The rating system is probably the only one I've seen work this well. When I see myself getting downvoted, it tells me pretty clearly that I need to go and reconsider what I posted.
The apparent degradation in quality is probably because the average quality of discussion on the internet has declined as more people entered the melee. It'll probably go back up as new combatants start to get better at expressing their ideas. That, or it'll become so hopelessly unproductive that everyone will collectively decide the internet was a bad idea.
I just can't believe the volume of new posts. I posted a link to my own python blog 23 hours ago and since then there have been 470 other postings. Perhaps an idea is that people should only post their own work or even it HN was limited to programming related posts only. I come here for insights into different languages and the programming profession. I'm not that interested in the politics of another country or parenting tips for New Yorkers.
It is August. A lot of people are on vacation - including writers of blogs and articles. Get used to it. We have X numbers of stories on the front page, we won't always have X amount of interesting stories. Some days we will have 0. The world doesn't fit into nice even patterns.
The only trend I've seen lately that's bugged me is people creating "throwaway" accounts with names intended to be a joke specific to the comment they've posted.
This is a nice public service announcement. It does make me think that these guidelines should be linked to more prominently somewhere, maybe on submit page?
[+] [-] swombat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Last year, upon Iteration 27 of this same subject, I threw something like this together in jest:
I must have been on to something because so many didn't realize it was a joke. What fun that was. All I have to do is shift the x axis every n months: some things never change.Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604
[+] [-] DeusExMachina|15 years ago|reply
I incur sometimes in posts that do not follow the guidelines and get a lot of downvotes. Half the time they are from new users that maybe do not even know about those guidelines, so maybe they do not even understand why they are getting downvoted. Of course they can learn it the hard way, but reading the guidelines is a lot faster and wastes less of everybody's time.
In the same way there are some posts that are not appropriate to this community. In the last days I did not find many interesting posts in the first page, but that's just my opinion and the community as a whole decides what goes up or not. Nonetheless some days ago I even found a link to thisisphotobomb.com (a websites of the cheesburger network, like the lolcats) and this is clearly against the guidelines. Again, there are the voting system and the flagging system, but it wastes less of everybody's time just to know the guidelines and it's better not to pollute the new posts section.
In each of these cases I think "you should read the guidelines", but don't write it because it's against them. But the fact that lately I've been thinking it more often, means that a kind reminder is not totally out of place.
Does this all mean that HN is becoming bad? I don't think so. It just means that we have guidelines we care about because they made HN a place we all like.
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boredguy8|15 years ago|reply
1) It's been a while, so worth the reminder; and 2) It's actually a submission from someone whose been here a while. The last several were from people with < 200 day memberships.
So: worth a little bit of +1 action, but I certainly hope it doesn't 'stay at the top for a while' as someone else said. Hoarding one of the 'above the fold' slots would be a bummer.
[+] [-] DavidSJ|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lingrush|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobo-tuerto|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sasare|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] revorad|15 years ago|reply
I try not to comment if the comment is merely:
1. clever and amusing 2. expressing anger/disagreement 3. disproving a wrong but unimportant claim made by another commenter.
Besides these, submitting, upvoting, downvoting, not voting and flagging are enough to make HN more interesting for myself.
[+] [-] uxp|15 years ago|reply
I may have good intentions to begin with, but if what I say reads as being one of the three points you wrote, there's no point in having other people argue against my invalid or ignorant claim. It just leads to semantical flame wars.
[+] [-] kevinskii|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todayiamme|15 years ago|reply
>>>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.<<<
The problem over here is that people's version of what gratifies their intellectual curiosity varies. What I find interesting is deeply subjective and I need to acknowledge that to contribute anything, anywhere. The same thing goes for HN in general.
HN is starting to attract people outside of its core audience and in doing so it inevitably leads to the point where people come in whose mean of what's interesting is different from the mean of what's interesting for the core audience.
It isn't their fault, but this process feeds into itself. So, if I see a post here on HN on death. I have this tendency to post up stuff related to death. Regardless of the fact whether or not they adhere to the spirit of the guidelines. People see that and they are more inclined to upvote it, since there is already content like that on the front page. So, it accelerates.
You might have noticed that the front page of HN always follows a pattern there are a series of similar posts which come up and stay there over the course of time. This is a good thing and a bad thing as well. The trick is in stopping it at the right time. That's where the community and the moderators come in, but if the majority of the community don't know any better than that. This means that the community can't self adjust. The moderators then have to play a stricter role, which is inherently negative in the longer run.
At the same time, if you define those words too strictly then HN won't be HN, anymore. This is the underlying paradox that needs to be solved to avoid that decline.
[+] [-] bpyne|15 years ago|reply
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Agreed in full.
However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2 of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.
[+] [-] swolchok|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invisible|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vivtek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jng|15 years ago|reply
We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there, and we could build a cozy place with no trolls and newbies, and share really interesting stuff and discuss it intelligently.
But I'm sure the dumbfucks will follow us around, from here to the end of time.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|15 years ago|reply
Luckily though, HN seems to be holding steady, and it has a long way to go before it becomes Reddit. HN is like having a conversation in your living room at a cocktail party with a lot of smart people in attendance. Reddit is like having a conversation at a sports bar with a bunch of random drunk assholes.
[+] [-] jjcm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sukotto|15 years ago|reply
Then again, I'm pretty happy with the overall quality of the site and comments so I guess it doesn't really matter :)
[+] [-] lingrush|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terinjokes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljf|15 years ago|reply
one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.
[+] [-] spooneybarger|15 years ago|reply
I don't. I think it is sometimes a symptom of a different problem. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847
[+] [-] duke_sam|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahblahblah|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techiferous|15 years ago|reply
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
And some recent examples of comments here on HN:
"All you have is a pink blouse and a pathological case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644724
"I'm sorry, but even on HN I feel it is appropriate to reply to this jackass with only two characters: FU" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644606
So sometimes HN can feel like a pretty rough place and a reminder is in good order. To HN's credit, though, these comments tend to be few and tend to be downvoted. You can also find comments like this floating around:
"Email me, and we'll figure out a good time for you to come buy and visit; I'll buy you coffee." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641763
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10ren|15 years ago|reply
Lamenting the bad is less effective than embracing the good. As in life.
[+] [-] grandalf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|15 years ago|reply
So, I was thinking, I'd submit every blog post here, and basically say "go to [link to hn story] to comment" (I could also do a ssi include of the hn story comments, but I would be less in the clear from a copyright perspective there, and it'd open me to worrying about things like cross site scripting, which is one of the things I wanted to avoid by going static anyhow, and users would still need to click the link to comment.)
Anyhow, a friend of mine who isn't a hn user thought that spamming up hn with every blog post I wrote would be, well, spammish. My thought is that hn seems to be mostly okay with that sort of thing.
I'd like to get some feedback from others on this idea.
[+] [-] mquander|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decklin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|15 years ago|reply
The rating system is probably the only one I've seen work this well. When I see myself getting downvoted, it tells me pretty clearly that I need to go and reconsider what I posted.
The apparent degradation in quality is probably because the average quality of discussion on the internet has declined as more people entered the melee. It'll probably go back up as new combatants start to get better at expressing their ideas. That, or it'll become so hopelessly unproductive that everyone will collectively decide the internet was a bad idea.
[+] [-] dkennedy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krschultz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotharbot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabrielroth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JshWright|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbywilson0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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