The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community.
I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch.
For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.
Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers?
"Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only <person, writing on topic> pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"; 8pm: "Show me puns, please". "Show me anything the author thinks is good, if their self-evaluation rating on the topic meets the following criteria." "Don't show me anything dang rates as not meeting criteria X".
Even USENET 30 years ago had people sharing kill files (don't show me comments whose headers match [patterns]). They weren't sufficient to check eternal September, but we can do better now. It seems like there's a rich design space available here that we've not been exploring. What am I missing?
I think it is expectations failure "the more the merrier" is not the case. Having tight 10 person group is so much better than having 100 people group.
You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.
> this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community.
It seems to be many people could agree on this. When a community grows, most of the time old members would start to struggle about the problem.
I wonder, could there be a design where it is a typical community, then when enough old or hardcore members realized this and believe this is no good it would trigger a threshold, they can vote to fork or diverge to a new community? This is a repeatable process, and then there would be multiple communities with different vibes where everyone can enjoy.
All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out.
People come to these places for various reasons:
- To debate
- To learn
- To engage intellectually with other people
- To be heard/validated
- To gain social standing
The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore.
As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).
This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is
reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity.
You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.
I've said this before but, given time, the HN comment sections always sort themselves nicely.
I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.
>> As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds
I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what
These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck.
The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.
Also even though forums are anonymous if you spend enough time somewhere and the community is small you end up getting to know the people and that has a value in itself - I miss that about early Internet forums - unfortunately this doesn't scale at all.
I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming.
One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"
My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.
To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say.
And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.
To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog.
That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results.
What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.
DuckDuckGo has the !hn bang for searching in the algolia page, so just stick it to the end of your query instead of site:news.ycombinator.com and you are good to go!
This place is one of the most urbane communities in which I’ve participated. It can still get bit “catty,” but nothing that even comes close to what I’ve experienced (and contributed to -mea culpa) in the past.
Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter.
In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.”
I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive.
I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past.
I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.
> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS.
This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well.
What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?
I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.
Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally trending up, which I take to mean I’m generally adding more than I’m detracting. If it was generally trending down, I might consider if I’m coming across wrong / being misunderstood , or maybe something is wrong with the people here!
Also if you want more karma, just repost old posts that got a lot of votes, like the OP did :D. Likely to at least some votes esp if still relevant.
These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy (https://hackerdaily.io). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits:
1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute.
2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not.
It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself.
It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome!
Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.
I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with everything. But it gets harder and harder to keep the political op-eds at bay, or as the author of this blog mentions, the fruitless arguments that don't go anywhere.
I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.
For the subreddits I track with RSS I've yet to encounter anything political or someone not arguing constructively. Is this something with the platform or each forum? I often don't mince words either.
After a while in a community one tends to have "seen it all", so it'll be longer between nuggets produced.
I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist.
In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints.
What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:"
"Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics"
While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often.
To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.
I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising.
> I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots.
I think it works like this:
blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for.
Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted.
Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol).
I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.
> This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.
I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning.
Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff:
Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions.
TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..
> To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.
I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective.
To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" to mean "mapping from words/sentences to a concrete meaning" and "arguing semantics" to mean "Arguing what mapping is correct or agreeing on a shared mapping".
To give a concrete example of an argument (from the article):
> Abortion is the canonical example of this type of argument: once you have decided what “life” is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one.
Deciding what "life" is by my definitions a purely semantic argument. As you try to define "life", you will want to keep almost universally agreed upon statements such as "Human life has inherent value" coherent. Some of the simplest definitions will raise issues if you start considering future and past humans. There are some interesting questions that you can try to answer by defining "life" and following the logical consequences. However, if you are only interested in abortion, most of the subtly of a definition of "life" is not relevant.
So if you are interested in only the first question you ask, arguing semantics can be a deep rabbit hole, but if you are willing to entertain new questions as you primary question, it can be interesting as its own study.
I think it's pretty clear that increasing scale is the driver for the degradation of thoughtful connections between users.
The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context?
In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users.
I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example).
Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.
On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we must cherish it for what it offers.
I'd be interested to know how often Paul Graham reads HN these days, compared to the past. Last post was 6 months ago. Prior to that, only responses to his announcement of Bel. Other than Bel, no submissions since 2014.
I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children?
I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.
I think one of the problems may be that many people on HN have moved from the lower and middle class to the upper class and so their attitude of fighting for innovation has morphed into an attitude of defending the status quo and suppressing innovation while shunning the contrarian 'hacker' ideals which they used to harbor.
Unfortunately, for those of us who fell through the cracks of the system and are left behind (and who are still fighting for innovation), we are finding that more and more HN community members who used to fight alongside us are now turning against us.
The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur.
Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude.
The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.
I grew up middle class, still am (although middle class has almost vanished), and hope to remain middle class. Infact, my moral compass says striving to be rich is bad.
I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful.
The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.
To some degree, Reddit has addressed the problem of a large online community by subdividing itself and allowing each division to moderate itself (to some degree). However, what might be more interesting is an automated subdivision of users. For example, even if HN has hundreds of thousands of users, philosophic-types would only see links and comments from other philosophic-types. Trolls would get lumped with trolls. With a significant percentage of outside-your-demographic to keep things lively as well as gather further data about what kind of community a user truly enjoys engaging with. Especially important is identifying constructive conflict — the type of person you enjoy disagreeing with (if not in the moment, at least afterward).
So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.
Google is already showing different results per country and region creating bubbles of thought. News networks filter out information they think most people aren't interested in or (even worse) things they don't want people to know. Youtube messed up somewhere and after only a few clicks you're back in the "popular" video hell.
You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?
What about HN experimenting with tabs in the comments so if you want to have a more philosophical discussion click on the ‘Philosophy’ tab or if not maybe the ‘Technical’ discussion is more your speed. I could even see supporting an ‘Offtopic’ tab as a place where you can share ideas inspired by the post that are not exactly relevant but could spark inspiration in others.
It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?
I remember in Usenet there was often a competition how much you expand a thread sideways. This might the optimal format. A discussion board with only one thread branching infinite. You could then search for significant node points, which have created more discussion and node points. Now to avoid endless wallowing in same shit year after year, I suggest automatic AI system, which does not cancel anything, but moves an arcticle to the node it mostly belongs. And as high as possible regardless of creation time.
There is a life to a forum... for badly run forums it's measured in years, for the best of the best a couple of decades.
There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth.
Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all.
The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so.
I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent.
What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.
The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.
the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.
OP complains about being drawn to post comments to harvest karma. IIRC, 10 years ago, the comment karma was displayed next to the comment itself.
This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes).
I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.
HN collects links from sites I couldn't hope to think about. nor could I hope to know they existed (a good example is the site about the searchlights the other day), and also sites that I don't follow because in general I'm not interested in the topic except for the odd article that ends up in first page here. So to me, HN actually has a huge value as a news site.
As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.
Personally, I've just come to terms HN is good for tech news. There's always some good people calling out any bullcrap in the comment sections which is wonderful, but when it comes to sharing opinions, it just feels like a karma battle. A similar reason why I ditched Reddit years ago.
I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling
[+] [-] ChefboyOG|5 years ago|reply
I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch.
For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.
[+] [-] mncharity|5 years ago|reply
"Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only <person, writing on topic> pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"; 8pm: "Show me puns, please". "Show me anything the author thinks is good, if their self-evaluation rating on the topic meets the following criteria." "Don't show me anything dang rates as not meeting criteria X".
Even USENET 30 years ago had people sharing kill files (don't show me comments whose headers match [patterns]). They weren't sufficient to check eternal September, but we can do better now. It seems like there's a rich design space available here that we've not been exploring. What am I missing?
[+] [-] ozim|5 years ago|reply
You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.
[+] [-] namelosw|5 years ago|reply
It seems to be many people could agree on this. When a community grows, most of the time old members would start to struggle about the problem.
I wonder, could there be a design where it is a typical community, then when enough old or hardcore members realized this and believe this is no good it would trigger a threshold, they can vote to fork or diverge to a new community? This is a repeatable process, and then there would be multiple communities with different vibes where everyone can enjoy.
[+] [-] kstenerud|5 years ago|reply
People come to these places for various reasons:
- To debate
- To learn
- To engage intellectually with other people
- To be heard/validated
- To gain social standing
The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore.
As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity.
You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.
[+] [-] teekert|5 years ago|reply
I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what
These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck.
The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.
[+] [-] reader_mode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Splizard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryf|5 years ago|reply
I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming.
One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"
My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.
[+] [-] names_are_hard|5 years ago|reply
And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.
[+] [-] narag|5 years ago|reply
That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results.
What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.
[+] [-] augusto-moura|5 years ago|reply
DuckDuckGo has the !hn bang for searching in the algolia page, so just stick it to the end of your query instead of site:news.ycombinator.com and you are good to go!
[+] [-] henrik_w|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melicerte|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter.
In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.”
I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive.
I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past.
I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.
[+] [-] partingshots|5 years ago|reply
This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well.
What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?
[+] [-] peejfancher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xivzgrev|5 years ago|reply
I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.
Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally trending up, which I take to mean I’m generally adding more than I’m detracting. If it was generally trending down, I might consider if I’m coming across wrong / being misunderstood , or maybe something is wrong with the people here!
Also if you want more karma, just repost old posts that got a lot of votes, like the OP did :D. Likely to at least some votes esp if still relevant.
[+] [-] RubenvanE|5 years ago|reply
1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute.
2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not.
It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself.
It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome!
Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.
[+] [-] dwrodri|5 years ago|reply
I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.
[+] [-] LeCow|5 years ago|reply
On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.
[+] [-] _y5hn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fantod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meerita|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints.
What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:"
"Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics"
While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often.
To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.
I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising.
..no conclusion.
[+] [-] Chris2048|5 years ago|reply
I think it works like this:
blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted.
Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol).
I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.
> This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.
I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning.
Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff:
TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..[+] [-] thethirdone|5 years ago|reply
I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective.
To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" to mean "mapping from words/sentences to a concrete meaning" and "arguing semantics" to mean "Arguing what mapping is correct or agreeing on a shared mapping".
To give a concrete example of an argument (from the article):
> Abortion is the canonical example of this type of argument: once you have decided what “life” is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one.
Deciding what "life" is by my definitions a purely semantic argument. As you try to define "life", you will want to keep almost universally agreed upon statements such as "Human life has inherent value" coherent. Some of the simplest definitions will raise issues if you start considering future and past humans. There are some interesting questions that you can try to answer by defining "life" and following the logical consequences. However, if you are only interested in abortion, most of the subtly of a definition of "life" is not relevant.
So if you are interested in only the first question you ask, arguing semantics can be a deep rabbit hole, but if you are willing to entertain new questions as you primary question, it can be interesting as its own study.
[+] [-] benjaminjosephw|5 years ago|reply
The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context?
In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users.
I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example).
Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.
[+] [-] elorant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rntksi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|5 years ago|reply
I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children?
I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cryptica|5 years ago|reply
The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur. Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude.
The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.
[+] [-] mola|5 years ago|reply
I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful.
The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.
[+] [-] wildermuthn|5 years ago|reply
So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?
[+] [-] mentos|5 years ago|reply
It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?
[+] [-] timonoko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|5 years ago|reply
There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth.
Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all.
The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so.
I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent.
What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.
[+] [-] bot41|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] httpsterio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mturmon|5 years ago|reply
This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes).
I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.
[+] [-] luord|5 years ago|reply
As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.
[+] [-] AnonsLadder|5 years ago|reply
I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling
[+] [-] friendlybus|5 years ago|reply