Most popular links in Hacker News comments, 2006–2015 | Hacker News Reader

Most popular links in Hacker News comments, 2006–2015

github.com

I have seen xkcd #927 used to dismiss discussions of standards on HN so many times that it is the only xkcd comic I can recognize by number.

Same with 538 for me, though it's more often a mention of the "$5 wrench" than a link.

Yep, going into the list it was the first xkcd link I saw and I immediately knew what it was before even seeing the number.

I don't recognise it by number, but I knew exactly which one it would be.

The thing I find slightly annoying about those that use xkcd #927 as a response is that it ignores how new standards can push things forward, it's mostly/always used in a dismissive way. Also, if the new standard is enough of an improvement on the old standards, it can largely cause development using the old standards to stop, causing a consolidation in the market rather than splintering the market further.

Hopefully one day more people will realise xkcd #927 isn't that insightful, it's just a simplification of the issue to make it a better joke.

I've started downvoting comments that are XKCD links and nothing more to encourage context-giving and discourage needless repetition.

Yeah the way i see it, the reason we get so many "standards" is because commercial interests always want to build silos.

A "standard" is, imo, worthless if you have to supplicant yourself to corporation A, B or C to implement it.

Sadly the consumer world is more and more willing to do just that.

Observe how while IBMs attempt at siloing the PC with MCA went nowhere, "we" were all too willing to embrace Apple's proprietary "standard" regarding device docking.

Funny, I would have thought that the wrench comic would have been more popular. But maybe it has become more popular in the recent few years thanks to the advance of cryptography.

Thanks for this. I just discovered http://hckrnews.com for the first time through your list of links. I think I'll be using it to browse the site from now on!

Just reread the 2003 Paul Graham post about PR firms, which is of course a great insight (hence all the reposts), but I had to chuckle at the last part where he goes on about how, unlike print journalists, bloggers are far too principled to be fed stories by PR firms.

It is strongly worth nothing that there has been a shift in comment sentiment/quality over the years. In early HN, comments were more hostile and would definitely be killed by the modern mod team. (it's where the HN stereotypes originated)

See my old list of the Top Comments for each month of HN since 2006 and note the difference between the old comments and recent comments: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZwonVX_KlDYhuhPnAAnV...

At the least, there is no situation nowadays on HN where commenting with http://xkcd.com/386/ would be considered appropriate.

This might be the only online forum I've ever seen get less hostile over time.

For some odd reason if anyone is missing the hostility, there's always IRC, one of the best places to learn but also one of the best places to get flamed.

I'm not sure how to get started with IRC. Could you recommend any general channels?

Sort by the largest and start from the bottom

General-purpose channels on IRC seem to fall into two categories: on the one hand, small and populated by mutual acquaintances who view un-vouched-for outsiders with suspicion; on the other, gigantic, purposeless, and either dead idle or too busy to keep up with. Starting from scratch, you're better off looking for channels relevant to your specific interests, and branching out from there.

It seems to me that current HN is understood as a juxtaposition to Reddit, both in post quality and commenting civility. At least, that's what I try to support with my commenting and voting.

The way I see it. It's not that the HN crowd don't appreciate humour and memes, it's that they don't want HN to descend into a forum where every second comment is a reflexive wise-crack and/or meme-vehicle. So that type of behaviour is actively policed against and newcomers think HNers are a dour bunch of so-and-so's. Not so!

If I want to chuckle for a while I'll head over to Reddit.

If I want to see what can happen to a forum when the intelligentsia leave I'll head over to /. for a while.

To remind myself of how bad things can get if we allow the lunatics take over the asylum I'll read the comments in YouTube while I watch a video.

Though not a news site, comparable sites to HN in terms of comment quality are TheRegister and ArsTechnica though you'll rarely get the level of detail in comments that one does on HN - the reason being (to go back to the point I made at the start of this comment) is that one does not fear that one's voice will be drowned out by dross.

The main improvement HN has over Ars for me is simply threaded replies. It's been relatively old fashioned for a long time now, but it makes a huge difference for having actual conversations.

Although I must say, the technical content on Ars has slipped a bit in the last few years. The science content is still OK though. Hopefully that's not just a reflection of my relative ignorance.

/. may be the closer comparison.

And I think the death kneel to /. was their JS heavy D2 commenting system.

As for Reddit, i think the issue there is "community of communities". With each of them having their own rules of what is acceptable or not.

In general the tech community has gotten a lot softer (online and IRL) over time as the field has become more professional and mainstream. In my experience the stereotypical tech jerk with open contempt for everyone - see for example Nick Burns 'your company's computer guy' from late 90s SNL - has been replaced by a friendlier, more diplomatic (but perhaps just as cocky) sort.

My experience when I first joined HN (2009) was truly terrible, it left a sour taste in my mouth for a couple of years. If HN were still like that I definitely wouldn't be here. And if my coworkers all behaved like that, I'd probably be in a different field entirely.

This comment is super weird to me. I've been here since the beginning and I think comments have gotten more hostile since then.

Also, I'm not aware of an at-large "HN stereotype". No one outside of HN that I interact with discusses HN, and if there's ever discussion of this stereotype here, I've missed it.

In the beginning comments were mostly civil because every commenter knew each other, and today there's no point being hostile because there are too many people to make any sort of permanent impact anyway. There were a couple years in the middle that were a little chaotic, some of which I definitely contributed to, but things seem to have mostly settled down.

I've also been here since the beginning and thought that comments have been getting meaner...but when I actually look back at old threads, I'm reminded that that's not, in general, true, and we were just as bad back then.

The obvious conclusion to me is that my standards have changed. I'm older, hopefully wiser, and less inclined to put up with bullshit. So Hacker News has improved over the years, but my expectations have gone up faster than the rate of improvement, and so it seems like the quality of discourse has gone down.

Reminds me of a comment I left on Reddit in 2012, which was basically that while it wasn't as engaging for me, it's worth remembering that there are still millions of new people who are just finding the site for the first time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/rbqwc/by_request_i_di...

I've been here and on Reddit (I remember that exact post of yours on Reddit) for years and I've had the same realization after going over old threads. I think that while the quality and meanness haven't changed much here on HN, there has been a marked shift away from "hard tech" content. For example, the article posted the other day about suicide in Greenland wouldn't have been posted here years ago. It was an interesting read and a thought provoking discussion but it doesn't fall in the realm of hacker news.

But it does.

>For example, the article posted the other day about suicide in Greenland wouldn't have been posted here years ago.

Really? Top articles from 2 random months in 2010:

http://www.economist.com/node/16636027?story_id=16636027

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisis...

http://archive.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/18692/he-took-polaroid-every-...

http://ruhlman.com/2010/09/so-you-wanna-be-a-chef%E2%80%94-b...

> It was an interesting read and a thought provoking discussion but it doesn't fall in the realm of hacker news.

You're a hacker, and you found it "interesting" and the discussion was "thought provoking", so by the guidelines (which have been in place for very many years) it is solidly on topic for HN.

Here's a thread from pg from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128439 "Ad exec driven to suicide (partly) by trolls (nytimes.com)"

Part of the reason you're seeing more discussion of suicide and mental health is because we're seeing less stigma and less taboo around these subjects.

The content has become much more 'mainstream'. I think this is partly because over the last 10 years they're a been a popular culture fetishization of startups and entrepreneurship, and ycombinator in general has become much more widely known. I keep coming back but less so than in the past. I think the site has shifted a little away from my central interests.

We (or at least I) miss your long insightful rants :-)

:-) I've shortened my average comment significantly over the years, mostly because of time and attention constraints. I suspect that the comment ranking algorithm actually penalizes posts > ~5 paragraphs in length now; that'd explain why eg. edw519's posts rarely rank highly now.

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/692478097837391872

While the rating for an entirely identical comment seems about as scientific a test as one could hope for, perhaps at least some of the fall-off in points is a penalty for literally copying old comments?

(Also, any one comment could fall through the cracks; the best comments can sometimes, by pure chance, fail to catch initial attention and fall out of view, without it necessarily reflecting anything but who was awake and browsing then—there's definitely a "rich get richer" effect in any system that promotes highly ranked content. For example, it would be interesting to know what times of day these two comments were posted.)

Well, I've also noticed the effect where when I write a short (2-3 paragraph) comment, it's instantly ranked at the top of the comments for the article with 1 point, while when I write a long (8-10 paragraph) comment, it's instantly ranked at the bottom of the comments for the article with 1 point.

That's interesting, although, if it is more than just chance, it seems like it would say more about pg's attitudes towards desireable comments than about those of the broader community.

The comments were not identical. He starts the repost with:

"Aaah, feels like a good time for me to recycle an oldie but goodie from #245 here: ...."

If I was listening to the radio and I heard Milli Vanilli say something about dusting off a blast from the past my reaction would probably be to change the channel, not turn up the volume.

> If I was listening to the radio and I heard Milli Vanilli say something about dusting off a blast from the past my reaction would probably be to change the channel, not turn up the volume.

Indeed, what I take you to be saying is was what I meant; not necessarily that HN now has less taste for long-form comments, but rather that people are less likely to read, and therefore to upvote, a comment that is prefaced with a statement that it is a duplicate.

(I agree that what you have highlighted is an important sense in which the comments are not identical.)

Got it. The whole complaint was intellectually bankrupt. Even if the comments were identical I don't understand why they would be expected to score the same way.

> I've been here since the beginning and I think comments have gotten more hostile since then.

I've been reading HN since around 2010 and to me it seems that there is now less hostility about technical topics but more hostility against anyone who isn't 100% politically correct. I also think that the quality of comments has decreased dramatically since.

> No one outside of HN that I interact with discusses HN, and if there's ever discussion of this stereotype here, I've missed it.

Many IRC communities I'm part of know HN and sometimes discuss it and the stereotype in those seems to be that HN users are overly sensitive, hypocritical, greedy and toxic. Many of them are also former HN users who now hate the site.

Naive (and synonyms) is the one I hear the most, and i tend to agree with it.

I think its more hostile than when I started. I'm pretty sure some of the comments about other people's religion wouldn't have stood in 2009[1].

The biggest difference to me is a tactical change of not refuting the other side or even acknowledging their argument, but just bury people you disagree with and take their voice.

1) yeah, I'm still a bit peeved https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071013

Religious flamewars are not allowed here and we point that out whenever we see them. If something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574861 comes up again, it would be good email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't see everything, so we rely on users to keep us informed.

It wasn't a "Religious flamewars", it was a drive-by of FUD that has been repeated in political threads. I wasn't arguing for superiority of something, I was just pointing out the historical truth and beliefs of a church. Frankly, getting downvoted for quoting the founder/prophet of the church for the origin of the name was a pretty low point on HN for me.

The HN stereotype or how I see HN referred to from the outside is that we're a bit of a Silicon Valley, startup, hipster clique.

(Not necessarily agreeing with that.)

> It is strongly worth nothing that there has been a shift in comment sentiment/quality over the years.

At least, the feeling that HN changes in one way or the other and some sentiment about these changes is almost as old as HN.

Have HN comments gone downhill?

Well dang, who can resist weighing in on that one? :)

The problem is that a crowd of 100K is just a different animal than a crowd of 5 or 10k. I noticed sometime in the first few years that I couldn't say much of anything without somebody misunderstanding me -- or getting offended. So then I spent a lot of wasted time either 1) writing comments the size of the Titanic, or 2) responding 43 levels down to help define what the definition of "is" is.

One of the things I used to like about the old HN was that it was startup focused, but open-minded. We'd post all kinds of stuff, but at the end of the day the conversation all came back to "And what could we do right now to help fix that?"

Now the conversations just spin off along traditional lines, the same as you'd see anywhere else on the net. (Admittedly, the mods make it much nicer than most places)

This relates directly to the "Friends" story now on the front page. I'd rather belong to a smaller, more focused group, one that shared my interests (but not my opinions, problem-solving methods, or worldviews) I find this is both better for me and for the discussion as a whole.

So a bunch of Graham, a bunch of XKCD (top one being the one on standards), and a bit of joel.

Is there any hope of separating Ycombinator and Hacker news?

They are already quite separated. It would be good if they were separated even further from my point of view (because the value of HN for me outweighs the value of YC tremendously), but since HN does not have a monetization strategy it currently needs support in the form of employees generously paid for by YC.

You'd need to at least begin to solve that problem before you can ask for more separation than there already is. And from a community perspective I think Daniel and others are doing a pretty good job at keeping an even keel when it comes to not giving YC preferential treatment. The only bit left is the job postings, which is probably a fair way to pay back for what YC does for HN.

Most of these look like things I'd expect.

However, number 13 is an obvious spam link if you look at the mentions.

I wonder how HN protects against this type of spam and how this particular spam got through. The most recent mention was 4 years ago, so it would appear this particular issue is fixed in the current software.

My http://ihackernews.com made the list. I've had zero time over the last 5 years to maintain it. Some nice person did convert it to js, based on the now available hacker news API. Now that this site renders better on mobile there's really no need for ihackernews. Reach out to me if you'd like to do something with it.

#13 is a spam bot, looks like the site got shut down or something

It's interesting to compare HN's usage frequency of particular xkcd comics compared to elsewhere on the internet (https://xkcdref.info/statistics/)

Something I've noticed of late is that there are things one can criticise on HN and receive reasoned rebuttal, and other things where any criticism will receive a flurry of downvotes but little discussion.

If anyone is curious, Link #5 (broken) is now hosted here: http://ejucovy.github.io/readability/

I'm sure the first 2 are simply people trying to remember/understand what formatting is supported. I wish it was a bit more prominent.

fullmalls.com at #13 and etradinglife.com at #15? Maybe you should filter for dead or flagged comments?

Ironically your comment ended up dead, perhaps for mentioning those domains.

Got one upvote though (maybe yours).

Probably, I vouched it and upvoted, given that it actually was relevant. Guess those domains were bad enough to trigger the spam filter.

https://circleci.com is 37 on the list. 37! Ahead of I think any other SaaS company.

Either my unintentional content marketing campaign has paid off, or something is weird with how they count this.

There's a lot of noise above you, too. E.g. YouTube gets all of its videos conflated, ycombinator links should arguably be ignored; really, you're about 30th :-)

I'm kinda surprised that https://xkcd.com/1172/ didn't make the list..

Rank 50 is missing. I wonder what it was!

I just tried the query myself. The result set contains this URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headli..., which does not work when entered in the browser. It appears that OP merged this URL with the working URL, that occurs on rank 49. Also notice, that a URL variant pointing to this page occurs on rank 89 again.

I was hoping the cdc.gov links would make it given the number of discussions of mortality in the USA.

Why is Google.com mentioned twice?

Google appears twice. 92 and 82. Makes me wonder how good this list really is.

That is due to some Google links having www and some links not (I double-checked by running the query).

It is a easy-to-miss fidelity issue that does not warrant passive-aggression.

OMG, talk about being overly sensitive as a community :)

If you skim the comments here you'll see that there are also other problems with this list and there's no aggression in pointing out that those issues lower the level of trust one has for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com