Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Slashdotter for 12 years and in the last year or two my visits have fallen to once or twice a week. The issue isn't what this guy raises though.. it's just that they're so far behind on everything. Hacker News and Reddit have basically supplanted Slashdot for covering the same stuff with similar audiences but a lot quicker. Slashdot is frequently days or weeks behind on its beat.

That said, its discussion and moderation system is still one of the best out there.

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Me too, I read /. religiously from about `97 onwards. Once I found HN I pretty much stopped visiting it, though. The SNR is just so much higher here. One thing I do sometimes miss about Slashdot is its slightly more technical focus. I am completely uninterested in all the startup stuff, and find myself wading through more of it here. (Maybe I'm just in the wrong place, but I stick around because the quality of discussion on the things I do care about is high.)

Slashdot was great back in the first few months and years. Like many other aggregation sites, it degraded in forum quality as the user base grew exponentially. See Usenet's Eternal September. The Well has intelligent discussions, but it can be dry and academic, not to mention it is subscription based. Digg and reddit are just overrun with lunatics and youtube-esque banter.

On HN, I can read a few interesting articles and comments and feel satisfied. I am learning a lot. I hope I can contribute in the future.

Agreed. PG's encouragement of civil tone and discouragement of Slashdot's oh so tired in-jokes ("In Soviet Russia" et al) brought me here long ago.

It's funny, I've actually sort of quit visiting HN daily and gone back to /., because the comment quality seems to be decreasing. Yes, Slashdot is still full of morons, but the moderation system just... copes with garbage better, and I have no expectations of politeness.

Remember when every week there was a thread bemoaning the slow demise of Hacker News? Now that it's actually happening, no one cares.

That said, its discussion and moderation system is still one of the best out there.

The system was a decade ahead of its time, but imo the owners broke it by continually fiddling with the rules in an attempt to keep people from turning karma and fans into a way to keep score.

I totally agree with you peter. Although, I feel it supplements Hacker news quite well. At least every post there tends to be interesting..

Reddit on the other hand I feel degenerated into Reddit-Chan (well,actually worse) after Digg added their diggbar. Reddit USED to be about honest debate. These days though, your karma revolves around how mainstream you are. Posting pedobears and other overused jokes gets you guaranteed karma.. It shouldn't. And thats why I joined Hacker news. Its good technical news, and every comment (besides mine I suppose), is generally worth reading.

I joined Reddit programming after I joined Hacker News. I keep hearing these bad things about Reddit but actually I find links and discussions interesting there. Sometimes more interesting than here because people are more relaxed. Yes, there are those obvious jokes and even purposely made accounts to post specific kind of useless comments but I just sniff and keep scanning the rest of them. In reddit it feels more like discussing with colleagues than with professors. I'm not saying HN is worse, on the contrary - both are important. Often I would read both - HN's and reddit's opinions on the same article.

For those of us without ADD, the editorial control over story selection is actually rather nice. (The user commentary, however...)

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