Why I stopped reading HN
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Very interesting insight. If you're not doing things that are transformative -- that change your habits and the way you have of looking at the world, you're wasting your time. And I don't mean that in a philosophical or political sense. It applies to everything -- coding, marketing, time management. If you spend 3 hours on HN today and leave with basically the same opinions, habits, and immediately useful pieces of knowledge that you started with? Not good for you.
HN has always discouraged deeply nested discussions, seeing them as just so much noise. I've always thought that was whacked. Yes, many times you are in a flame war and nothing is accomplished, but the entire point of interacting with other people is to learn. So you'd think that a long conversation about, I dunno, pointer arithmetic, would have a transformative effect on both the participants and the community. I think the issue here is whether you view users as intelligent folks who are trying to understand each other, or cranks and trolls who solely exist to get some emotional thrill from flaming (yes, Gresham's Law comes into play here, but everything is a trade-off)
As it is, what's happened is this kind of lightweight, superficial herd mentality, with folks striking out fairly deep responses and then nothing ever gets settled. Lots of generalizations and high-level talk, nothing past an initial exchange or three. I've even questioned some longtime members about various topics and was told "I'm not posting to discuss, I'm posting to cut you off" more or less.
Once I realized that HN was idle geek chitchat and not the watercooler for entrepreneurs I wanted it to be, it changed my opinion of the place. I still like it, no place like it, but it also has this terrible time-wasting underbelly that we rarely talk about enough.
I find the short/shallow discussions on HN very good for this. They give you just a couple of shots to either pose an insightful question or provide an insightful response, which encourages high signal content and enforces a "get to the point" mentality. From discussions elsewhere, I've found the majority of learning comes within those first few serious posts; by the time a single person has posted 5-6 times it's often either repetitive or off-topic. In my experience, it's extremely rare for people to still be providing new insight after 5+ rounds of back and forth.
That said, in those rare circumstances, I would like to continue discussions further than HN allows (that's one reason I list my e-mail address in my profile.) I've found that what kills deep discussion on HN is not the lack of deep nesting, but the fast news cycle and lack of a "refresh" mechanic to bring threads with new posts back to the top. If someone responds to a discussion I started 2 days ago, I may never see their response.
I don't know if this problem is really solvable without the reddit style sub-reddits, with as big a community as we have here different things will interest different people and each one of these things is taking front page space away from other things quicker.
As written, this is a dangerously solipsistic statement. Transforming your mind, body, knowledge, opinions and philosophy is indeed helpful, but it is much less than half the problem: Unless you are content to live and die as a hermit, you must also seek to transform the world, even if it's just the world in your immediate vicinity.
Learning is valuable, but teaching is just as valuable, if not more so.
Teaching is hard, though. You have to do it in tiny pieces, applied one drop at a time over weeks, months, and years. One of the hardest things to learn is not to lecture. You think -- especially if you have spent years in school -- that you can just tie someone down and tell them the truth over and over until they get it, but it doesn't work that way in real life. Rather, it is both ineffective and rude to grab a piece of someone's attention and then attempt to deliver a big lecture. In face-to-face interaction, people deploy social signals to discourage this; on the web we must take more obvious measures, such as designing venues like HN where lecturing feels awkward and is therefore discouraged.
But if you want to read incredibly long-form back-and-forth discussions that go on for pages the rest of the Internet is right there, one click away.
Dangerously self-referential statement. As written, of course.
I'm actually an antisolipsist, so it was written using the second-person pronoun and is correct as such. (and not solipsistic by any means)
And no, I have no idea if I am pulling your leg or not since I'm still working out all the implications of antisolipsism.
I rarely, if ever, see it discussed how a particular argument could be settled. Instead, they all branch out into n-ary tree style growths - one core question becomes a couple of supporting points, becomes a mass of key points each with a different importance weighting for each participant, some pick-n-mix arguing for the easier nodes which may or may not include some artillery citations being lobbed around, followed by a hunkering down into fixed positions as the argubattle dies out, tenuous support structures collapsing under the confusion.
What sort of shape do you imagine a transformative discussion on pointer arithmetic might take? What transformation might it result in, and in whom? Is the point for one person to learn what another knows, or for both to explore the topic to generate completely new information, or both? How would you declare, in advance, end conditions (would you?)?
A serial discussion doesn't seem a great vehicle for arguing or discussing - the more deeply nested it is, the more specific and time consuming each point is, the harder it is to see the wood for the trees.
Instead of arguing whether forestry companies should pay more tax due to environmental damage, you end up arguing whether it's right that in Minnesota, under regulation Foo.Bar paragraph baz, any company which owns more than 140 hectares of land more than 80% of which is forest, and employing more than 10 people, and which falls under the definition of a Forestry company as specified by Jones vs. Calson 1884, must submit their year end accounts under Revised Minn. Accounting Regulations instead of New Minn. Accounting Regulations. Then each of those points opens for arguing. It's very fractal - every point of contention is potentially a whole full-sized argument.
In short, as a discussion on the internet lengthens, the available conclusions approach 'it depends [on the specific situation]', although Godwin's Law intervenes to prevent this state being reached. Human Nature abhors naked indecision.
Clay Shirky has a copy of a speech explaining the mechanics of this phenomena, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ~ http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
I also find over-the-top viewpoints are more likely to yield belief system update than the regular old bland viewpoints like liberals versus conservatives. I learn much more from statists versus anarchists or copyright abolitionists versus IP defenders who are actually worth their salt.
are you sure?
1) He couldn't stop himself from posting. He had to comment on things even when he had nothing to add. He even admits to commenting solely to gain karma.
2) He couldn't stop himself from reading the things he found pointless. All the flame wars, the arguments, etc.
Just learn to skip all that. Learn to only post when you have something to add. Only read an article when you actually care about the article. Only read the comments when you care both about the article and what others have to say about it.
Learn some self-control.
That, or tell me what the new best tech-news site is. I get a lot more information about new techniques, languages, etc etc here at HN than anywhere else at the moment.
Then I discard it and feel very proud for saving everyone's time.
I know for one that I also pay more attention to use of words and grammar on here that I probably would other places because that is what the standard is, that is what we all like to read and comments not at that standard usually end up down the bottom heavily down voted.
You don't see a lot of well written and constructive comments down voted even if they are arguing a alternate and contentious viewpoint.
So I click 'back' on my browser and it goes away.
Since I learned to do that, my time on sites like HN has been much more rewarding.
Precisely what that addiction is to is perhaps what's hardest to answer. Is it attention? Validation? Some more abstract notion of amassment and score? I've noticed myself looking up into the corner upon return to the site, and have even consciously avoided that gaze pattern at times.
It may even come down to such fundamental questions as the existence of altruism. Just as one can ask "are you doing this for someone else, or just because doing things for others makes you feel good?" one can ask at "are you contributing thoughtfully because you want to participate in the community, or because you want to see your karma go up?" If you want to see your karma increase, is it because you want to participate, or the converse? Can the two be functionally separated?
I'm going to try to avoid that this time :)
The majority of time when I post it isn't to make a point, but to get clarification or ask a question, and sometimes I forget to look for the answers, or the answer comes after my 'threads' page has gone through a few pages, making it harder to find, etc.
Downvotes are ideally for low-value content. If your viewpoint is contrary to popular opinion, the onus is on you to explain your reasoning persuasively enough to not come off as a simple contrarian.
Downvotes are not a reward for thinking independently. They are a penalty for sloppy thinking or overly presumptious output. They are also the only way I can think of for fighting populist, short-circuit comments that troll for upvotes - by encouraging actual argumentation.
It's quite possible for the majority of people to vote based on agreement, and yet have the overall score of the comment be determined by those who vote by quality. Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out. The remaining comment score is made up of those who voted because it was a well-reasoned argument.
Reddit has the "Controversial" tab for this, though HN unfortunately doesn't make a distinction between a comment with 50 upvotes and 40 downvotes vs. one with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
It's possible for this to happen, but I don't think there are that many hot-button issues where the two sides are exactly balanced. More commonly there will be at least a slight skew in one direction or another, which gets magnified in absolute score the more people there are who vote based on agreement. For example, if there's a 60/40 opinion skew among people who vote based on agreement on a particular topic, and 20 people vote that way, you already have an 8-point rating gap between the popular and unpopular comments (+12/-8 versus +8/-12). On really high-traffic topics, where 100 people might up/downvote based on agreement, you only need a tiny skew from 50/50 for the votes to pile up in one direction or another.
I think in practice that often swamps the quality-based voting, especially on high-traffic articles: you sometimes see extremely short and not particularly insightful comments that express a popular sentiment up at +40 or more.
Certainly, some people stop, think, disagree, and downvote. I believe that this is the case when the original comment is sloppy, and generally warrants a reply. In some cases, especially various kinds of politics, the replies are omitted presumably because of fatigue. Such people have already replied to the argument enough times in their life to not want to do it again. That could be interpreted as a failure of domain research on the part of the original commenter, but I don't like to blame people for not being "well-read".
up-promote vs. down-demote: affecting order-of-presentation and karma
left-agree vs. right-disagress: a mini-poll per comment, with no censorious effect on presentation or numerical-reputational effect on karma
Is there somewhere to read up on all the rules of HN? I figured out a few things on my own (like that you have to have 200 rep to downvote), but once in a while I come across something I don't understand (like, it seems that you can't downvote immediate children of your comments?).
This kind of thing also tends to change. I think I got my downvoting privileges at 50 or so. Like words after a long night of drinking, voting has flowed a lot mre frequently of late. Pg usually modifies the caps to compensate, but they aren't usually announced. I noticed, for example, that /leaders is no longer in the top bar. I think that was a while ago, but just an example of how the site changes.
Here is pg's announcement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173801
In the same discussion, in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174132, pg moved the leader link to the Lists page and had the Ask HN on top bar.
I make plenty of comments on controversial topics, often in opposition to mainstream opinion. I get lots of critical responses, but I only rarely see downvotes, and have only one comment that I know of that's below 1 (deservedly so; it was snarky and non-contributory). I'm neither timid nor controversy-avoiding; I just present my controversial ideas in a way that's engaging and enlightening.
Something that could reduce the game-like unpredictable reward aspect of karma scanning might be to delay updating it, perhaps only once a day. But then you might fall back to checking 'threads'.
Perhaps only hide karma score from your own comments made more recently than a day?
An experiment would be to remove it, and only display it on your username page (as your average karma is now.)
Hey pg, next time you're making changes to make HN a little less addictive, how about a "hidekarma" option, which would stop my karma appearing in the top right hand corner of every page?
It creates an incentive to game the mechanic, makes it easier to game the mechanic with vote rings and bots and whatnot, causes people to comment and submit for the wrong reasons (build their karma rather than listen, learn, and contribute), and displaces the more natural, organic reputation from Web 0.99beta (Usenet, BBS, mailing lists, etc) where you actually had learn netiquette and figure out for yourself who knew what they were talking about and who didn't
Perhaps it's useful to some social networks, but I think HN is much more capable of getting along just fine without it.
The less I have to bear the burden and sink the energy cost of filtration the more I can put into comprehension, enjoyment, and growth.
He wanted to spend his time reading and discussing articles on hn. His problem was that he was finding it increasingly unrewarding. So he quit.
Your last point regarding the best tech-news site is irrelevant. He is replacing hn with "arguing with people in person or via e-mail, reading disagreeable books, and the like."
bonus: you have a massively increased influence on what gets to the front page - so, to an extent, you create the HN you want.
I find much more useful content on reddit these days. HN tends to be full of opinion pieces with very little technical content. These sometimes start interesting discussions but I don't feel that I actually learn anything useful either from the original article or the comments.
All you have to do is say something you believe will fit in with the groupthink of the community.
The first step to salvation is the realization that karma="how much time you waste commenting" rather than how much your comments are valued.
I'd like to see a community where there is a limited supply of karma. Or your karma is shown as a percentage of total karma. I think that would produce much better dynamics.
Perfect advice. That pretty much applies to the entire Internet, not just HN.
I still sometimes get drawn in, but not as easily as I was before I'd developed any resistance. As recently as a few years ago, I could still be fooled by deliberate trolls. Now I'm mostly only fooled by de facto ones.
As pg writes he learned not to be part of such arguments. Although, an important lesson, I'm sure that's pg actually wanted to learn something more pertinent to the argument (that's why he joined in the argument in the first place).
When we don't get to learn what we were seeking to learn, we feel disappointed.
I prefer, "Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." I'm still learning that one, though.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584474
About 5 levels down you'll see a 20-point comment that's unnecessarily nasty. I think that's exactly what the author is referring to, and I agree - I don't like it.
Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?
I am not sympathetic to the notion that this is an unreasonable nasty comment, given some of the arguments I've found myself embroiled in on HN recently.
I'm not arguing with Drew, though. He's an interesting guy, and he doesn't like commenting here anymore, and that's a shame --- though, again, talking about colonialism on HN is not a good way to moderate your blood pressure.
"From the article you seem to be replying to"
"Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion,"
The person he's attacking made a simple statement (perhaps factually incorrect), and the guy jumped all over him. Its not a particularly egregious case, and certainly not uncommon, but I surmise that it exemplifies the authors complaint.
However, this is an issue we can all try to address. Next time we see a comment that says "hackers rule", we can avoid being trigger happy about upvoting it but rather evaluate it in terms of its merits. As a corollary, I make it a focus of mine to upvote good comments that I disagree with, a particularly hard thing to do.
This is one thing I absolutely can't stand in reddit and now I see that it is also very common here in HN.
People seem to up-vote users with "high score/past reputation/YC funded member" on virtually any comment they leave, even if their comment contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion or just re-enforces whatever the hive mind believes in.
Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion.
This is really sad.
I think overall karma points should not be made public. Each comment should be judged by its own merit not by the "karma points" they have in the leader-board.
It's not as widespread as on reddit where there is widespread reputation-sniping going on, and many HN users tend to pick up on unfair downvotes and vote the comment up to counter it. It'll still deter some people, I guess.
I don't see a way to check, but I'd guess that my upvote to downvote ratio is about 3:1. I try to vote up anything that would want to see more of on the site, whether I agree or disagree with the content. I try to mercilessly vote down snappy one liners, purposeless profanity, and dumb jokes. If anything, I'd say I vote primarily on form --- I'll support just about any content if it's well written and well intentioned.
That's been a problem with HN for as long as it exists.
Seriously, that's what I wrote it for.
The link offers very little help in doing these tasks. It's almost pure content, with little about how to integrate it into your life and actually use it. I think it therefore is failing to give much advice about a part where the many of relevant people get stuck or fail.
There also seems to be some significant proportion of people who think taking issues like this seriously is not fun -- it's "overly serious" -- and they want their internet discussions to be light-hearted and enjoyable. They are alienated to learning things. So they won't care what you're saying; they think it's only for people with a different personality type who like that kind of thing. I don't even know what to do about these people because giving an explanation of why they are making a mistake would offend them -- if they aren't going to take discussion too seriously, they certainly don't want it to turn into a self-help seminar that asks them personally to improve.
So, point is, while it's a decent article, if it's supposed to be for fixing a discussion atmosphere involving thousands of people, I don't think it will solve that problem.
1. Logout of HN and have a friend of yours change your password and not tell you what it is. This keeps you from getting into the commenting/commenting-for-karma cycle. And you won't want to create a new account because karma addicts can't stand the idea of starting back at zero.
2. Find a community that better suits your argumentative needs. I would probably suggest looking a quora.com -- but, if you're addicted to arguments for the sake of arguments, then that's probably not a good idea either.
3. Take up photography. Seriously. It will center you and give you a vice to replace the void created by quitting this site (whether the ban is short-term imposed or long-term imposed).
Sometimes you just have to accept things for what they are and let them be. HN is the Parisian salon or bohemian coffee house of its age. And they also suffered from the pretentious, inane or despotic and inciteful, as well as the insightful and delightful.
This should be the reason he has comments closed. Walk your talk.
Tell me again why I should care about this article?
EDIT: FWIW I did enjoy reading parts of the article. I thought the writer has some thought-provoking things to say. I like his ideas about what make a bad argument, and I like his ideas about the importance of interacting with people who don't think like you. I just have a problem taking people who say one thing and do another seriously.
I also begin a lot of comments that I don't publish (please give the karma to swah below for saying it first :), as writing is a skill you have to work at. I don't consider myself a lurker, as my low karma might indicate given I've been here 1306 days, but mostly I scan and occasionally read in depth and try to jump in when I can add value or correct obvious mistakes. In terms of interests it's surprising how diverse this community is. Even with lots of programmers one wouldn't expect to find so many familiar with category theory.
I've seen HN change, often not for the better, and I'm reminded of Shirky's essay on a group being it's own worst enemy, but I've watched this puppy grow for a long time so I'm staying. Besides, I haven't owned a TV in 20 years now and I miss the Saturday morning cartoons. HN fills that gap.
One site that I like to look at from time to time is http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?s=7f68f69e2b74a...
From what I can tell, most people that post there do so in a manner that represents intelligence and proper manners. Plus they all agree with each other too. There are some new people that join up because they have a question but from what I have seen, there is a finite community. This also leads to a tremendous stagnation on the forums. When everyone agrees, and everyone is polite, discussions resolve themselves very quickly and there is nothing left to talk about. Granted they are only concerned with one particular philosophy and it's impacts, I think it shows what can happen.
http://www.reddit.com/r/startups
This is where the superiority of a site designed to offer something for everyone without foisting a mould on everyone becomes obvious. Reddit allows the targeted streaming of topic consistent information. Hacker News attempts to be an aggregate approximation of multiple streams that interest hacker mindsets. Alternatively, Facebook is good if you're looking for organized boredom in a curated garden that will spill your information like a dribble cup.
I avoid articles from techcrunch, nytimes, and basically any majorish news source (they usually can't keep my attention for some reason, even if it is interesting). What I do like are the new startup posts (sometimes they are interesting just to see what people are doing), the underlying tech posts or how someone solved an interesting problem (be it programming or something else) and anything else that sticks out I'll click on. After I click on them I skim them and see if it keeps my interest and then I read whatever is left, some days I don't read any articles and some days I read quite a few.
Also comments help the filter and if I'm grabbed by a title I might check the comments to see whether or not I am going to read an article.
I see where the author is coming from but think it's a good thing for his development as a person, he should carry on and move to his next thing, because he should push forward in whatever direction he feels fit. Anhyoo, I never stopped reading, because for every shameless plug, there's a 6502 implemented in Javscript here. You just don't get that ratio on reddit. Good night, and $deity bless.
From what I have seen,those with karma of 1000+,have been active on HN for more than a year.
I am curious to know the number of people with karma 1000+ - (or any breakdown of people/karma ranges).
It would be helpful to have : a)A graph of number of stories submitted vs Karma level. b)A graph of number of downvotes vs Karma levels
This might give a better picture of the dynamics of HN. While that would not be directly indicative of the quality of discussions, it would atleast show: a) Rate of infusion of number of people into higher karma levels b) A closed, and strongly opinionated group of higher karma levels
..which should be healthy for HN, as such.
Way off topic, but: I think the article was too long. This is a trick I learned a long time ago: usually when I write an email or a blog post I let it sit for a while, then try to shorten it. Other people's time is as precious as our own so the effort in shrinking material down for quick digestion is worthwhile.
Him: "Baby, I love you but you're so self-destructive" HN: "No, don't go - I promise we'll change and be better for you"
I don't buy it. Why make a stink about it? Why not just leave quietly?
Just related: http://xkcd.com/603/
Few communities are begun by the average, they're begun by the inspired, impassioned, or invested. The founders are focused. Motivated, they cross a barrier of inaction, pouring in resources and effort, establishing a meeting place for clear like minds.
Latecomers are on the whole less missioned. The barrier to joining is less than the barrier to beginning. Growth and time inexorably pull participatory discussion away from the founding focus toward the bell curve's center.
Did you know Wikipedia doesn't function as a democracy? I believe the stats are something like top 20 % influence 80% of articles. If HN were to be proper democracy, I think it's decline would be hastened a.k.a -"Every community deteriorates over time"
Aging in online communities happens way faster than real life-but it 's psychology is basically the same -"What does this Twenty-something CEO know to tell us 15 year industry veterans something of value?"
And we do check the karma of other users even though we have to click through to a profile. All the time. At least I do. It helps to frame a user's comments for instance.
Ultimately I think karma is a big deal. And it comes off as a little disingenuous when someone with a ton of it belittles its importance.
I've already learned that going "with the crowd" can get you more than trying to argument against the popular belief. Going against guarantees to give you some minus values even if you follow all the rules and contribute to the discussion (that is you're not going off-topic). I guess we can generalize things and say that the life is the same, you just can't argue that the condoms are good among the Catholics. So I have personally already also learned that how I'd be able to get more karma: say positive things about Python in post about Python, about Erlang in post about Erlang, about Lisp in posts about Lisp, etc. As Scott Adams would say "we're just meat robots."
As long as people react so, the people are not only train not to troll, but also not to discuss against, just to "join our righteous crusades and fight the infidels."
Sure you can preach to the choir on issues but if you do truly believe in an opposite viewpoint and make a well construed argument on it, good enough for the other side to at least see where you are coming from, that will earn a lot of respect.
That's funny; I read Hacker News when I just want to blow off some time. If I'm being careful with my time, I'll spend it hacking.
I felt that my comment (the one I linked to) was on topic and fulfilled what the TC had asked for, yet downvotes and no explanation.
So I felt hurt, and here I am bringing it up. "It," the downvoted comment, basically being the reason I don't post here much anymore.
I don't mind my downvotes in this submission, since unclear comments aren't good comments. So I should have written a better comment.
I do respect this community a lot, I'm just not very "active" anymore.
The worst feature of this and many other communities is the transparent effort of many in the discussions to make compliments at the nebulous 'community.' Some cool people make an effort to engage in some threads (especially about them or their fraudulent board members). However, most of the time, hairs are split in abundance.
I think another issue is the idea of having a range-rating system versus a 1 point up & 1 point down system.
Another idea is to be able to turn off seeing the point system altogether until you are done reading what you want to read. Perhaps this can be accomplished somehow with the firebug firefox add-on. I like the idea of being able to customize & edit the entire Web as an add-on feature (not permanent/censorship) :)
Move along. Nothing to see here.