Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

I'm pleased to see that I am officially allowed to complain that HNN is getting to be just like Reddit.

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.

It'd be an interesting day when forum degeneration can be solved via circular migration around ring of sites vs. Linear migration like today.

"everybody barrel shift!"

That's the current approach to antibiotic drug resistance, actually. Antibiotic resistant drugs are supposedly treated with antibiotics that are too old for those drugs to retain a resistance to.

Let's hope pathogens don't figure out how to do heap allocation. That would be a lot of trouble. After all it wouldn't take too much extra storage for them to collect 'data' on enough antibiotics that we'd lose the race.

"We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there"

... except for spammers.

Youtube is improving.

They have votes now. I've seen a few insightful comments there (it depends on what kind of video you're looking at, of course - you being the crucial word here.)

A million monkeys banging on typewriters occasionally produce insightful comments by sheer random chance.

They still produce more insightful comments than Youtube commenters.

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.

I think if we can get it to the point where it's like going out for beers with a bunch of smart people at a reasonably nice bar that will be perfect.

Yeah, but that's going to attract "hangers-on", isn't it? I think that's why that sort of community can either be stable or open but not both.

You should check out some of the smaller subreddit communities. For example, r/coding is extremely nerdy and has virtually 0 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).

Don't worry. The point is there's no change.

I wish I had signed up when I started reading and not when I decided to stop lurking.

Then again, I'm pretty happy with the overall quality of the site and comments so I guess it doesn't really matter :)

I was hoping not to find anybody from reddit here. It figures it's probably their second greatest place of cyber-congregation.

I came over to the comments just to see who would make this remark. ;)

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