HN on second day from launch
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I think it has to do with the influx of new programmers and the growth of programming as an industry. Programming is becoming easier and more mainstream so the natural result is the ratio of excellent people to disappointing people changing for the worse. computer forums no longer intrisincly filter out stupid people.
Googling “reddit alternative,” HN is on of the first results.
I find lobste.rs to still be good. It probably has to do with the fact that you need an invite to post there.
I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good intellectual watering hole on the internet as far as I know, and I have looked. If HN were to continue getting worse or if it shut down, it would be a huge loss for me.
I’ve considered starting a new website, filling it with a hand-curated pool of users gathered from around the internet, and then launching an invite system. Lobsters isn’t good enough because it focuses too narrowly on web development and also people are really afraid to comment there because they might mar their image or get their invite revoked, I think. I believe there is a very large amount of arbitrage when it comes to online communities.
There is so much arbitrage! A new Wikipedia that’s actually good at teaching rather than just being a reference book for experts. Social sites that differentiate between curation, storing and fluid, in-flux communication and exchange. And most of all, using new techniques for raising the quality of content and comments. The space of incentive schemes is virtually boundless and there are def some veins of gold out there.
Alright, y'all are getting virtual hugs. I agree completely as well.
I also agree that the changing trends are a biproduct of the increasing levels of access to software development as a profession. However, I do not think that computer forums should filter out "stupid people". I had the pleasure of hearing Code.org President Alice Steinglass talk about how her professor in undergrad told her to stop studying CS after she asked what a debugger was. If we begin arbitrarily filtering out "stupid people", we are no better than that professor.
> The most precipitous drop in my opinion was right after all the buzz about Facebook becoming less popular, musk joining mastodon and everyone in the comments brainstorming about alternative social media schemes.
I think it happened earlier than that. Around 2015-ish to be exact. That's when I personally noticed an uptick in "pat yourself on the back" posts instead of actual good signal.
> I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good intellectual watering hole on the internet
I was a bit fearful as well. But after reading your full comment, I don't really fear that much now. My idea:
Let HN die.
More decentralized sites (like the one you proposed with hand curated content) will crop up. I'm personally investigating the Linus Tech Tips forum as an HN alternative since it seems to have the maker and hacker vibes that I used to see here (and on Reddit and JCXP before I found HN).
In short, yeah HN is dying. But I'm not really going to mourn its loss since it will free up room for better websites to come along. After all, that spirit of adventure and "what will we think of next" is what pushed me to become an engineer in the first place.
As for me, I'll probably leave here forever in a week or two if things don't improve.
What if gasp mailing lists made a come back? The longer I exist, the longer I realize I don't want the next iteration of Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or whatever comes after and uses IPFS and Filecoin for the foundation. I just want high signal and civil discussion in my inbox with a firm but benevolent dictator moderating. So, HN, but through my email client.
Of course, ironically my most upvoted comments are all about news or long format writing on non-tech related topics. But I really don't have time for that and I keep getting lured in ;-)
I had a boss who would regularly say "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers".
There's an ample amount of hacking (orig. meaning) related content out there, right now. For example, 35c3 was a little less than a month ago and I still watch a talk roughly daily. Centralized way points which attract the normal, average people will evolve eventually in the wrong way and it is RIP TAZ.
And all those who always claim X gets too political: it always was political, everything is. The word you perhaps sought is political polarized (ie. help! my important political view is or has become a minority in this subculture). Looking back at the phreaking culture and telephone history (to give an older example) , politics were involved with Ma Bell right from the get go. After all, they were installed as a monopoly and kept that way _by_ the government.
It's been in decline almost since it's creation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723734 [2010]
and still going strong.
Perhaps it's the complaining about "decline" that keeps it great
Your account's a bit older than mine, but I don't see HN as "great" anymore, not for a long time. Just "pretty sorta good", with spurts of greatness here and there. https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ was put up 3 years ago, it's still true that you can cherry pick great comments since then that probably couldn't have been made anywhere else but it seems the frequency has declined. On the other hand ignoring the threads that attract hundreds of comments can help, but now you're in a sub community that can be punctured by the larger community at any time (this is different from a community existing on a separate site). I only looked at this thread today (I thought it'd be one of those to reach >100) since I was searching to see if anyone has posted an invitation to contact for a lobsters invite recently, it's time to spend a bit of time looking for somewhere else.
This is the real problem with HN and with pretty much all other more serious social sites. And the best example of it is you, posting this slightly controversial reply, using a brand new account. Yes, you might actually be a lurker that just created the account to post this, while reading the website for many years, but while I can't prove that's not the case, you can't either prove that is the case.
I wonder what will happen to HN if the karma system gets removed.
I believe the reason for this is that everything is political these days. Until Obama, tech companies were not politically relevant (Microsoft and Google as exceptions). Now, social media giants are in worldwide fights including summoning tech execs before parliaments over being abused for propaganda, and even the netiquettes are political now given that a huge number of those who violate them are right-wingers who then in turn whine about "free speech" and "censorship".
Also, the new generation of HN-relevant startups (think Uber, AirBnB, Lyft as the worst offenders) made a point of intentionally breaking laws to make a business at the cost of society. Of coure, politicians now take a close look at how companies backed by seemingly infinite cash reserves negatively affect their communities, and affected people also make their voice heard.
Finally, companies these days are more or less forced by social media pressure to take a stand on highly contested political topics. The most recent examples of this are (internationally) the Gillette ads and (nationally/Germany) a couple adbusters that put up fake Coca-Cola banners warning of our right-wing AfD, with Coca-Cola's communication director tweeting "Not every fake has to be wrong". Mostly those putting up the pressure are on the left-liberal spectrum and the haters right-wingers. In addition the role of systemic racism, sexism and transphobia in the tech and media world, as well as (finally) people speaking up e.g. about sexual assault, got dragged onto the spotlight by #metoo and other viral campaigns.
And of course these debates now also happen on HN - with the difference here that many people are socially liberal, but follow ultra-capitalist economic viewpoints. This makes, in my opinion, political HN debates largely centered around the (negative) effects of SV-style capitalism while there are not many socially conservative or, worse, alt-right trolls on HN.
edit: another thing is, much of the tech scene didn't care much about politics or how their work would be used either. Only now, with employees taking responsibility for what their code does and who uses it and what ethical concerns they have with company policy, massive debates emerge. This includes stuff like Google employees protesting against working for the military, helping censorship in China or how employers react to sexual assault allegations. These debates naturally also leak over to HN, seeing how many employees for FAANG are on this platform.
http://hckrnews.com/ is much better.
There's a page out there somewhere, where someone curates a list of all the alternative HN portals.
I’m not a big fan that many front page links are to big news outlets nowadays. It’s not hard to find NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc news and I’m not generally seeking out that type of content here. But I see a lot of it on HN now. And geez so many paywall links.
I liked it much more when it was more independent content. More focused on learning and building. It felt like the whole start up thing was new and everyone was helping each other learn.
Regardless of time, the comments keep me coming back. It feels more like the “old” internet when it had a net positive vibe.
Sometimes it seems to get stuck on a certain date for a week.
Especially the point that they tried to build a community where people would actually get to know each other. That didn't scale too well...
Here’s what Twitter looked like then: https://web.archive.org/web/20070225121301/http://twitter.co...
Second post is the co-founder of Octopart. Not surprising, since they were funded by YC, but I'm glad things turned out well for Andres.
> ... I'm a shell of the personality I used to be. Basically, I had been languishing in school and had gotten comfortable with mediocrity.
I know this feeling.