Hacker News Reader

> Lobsters isn’t good enough because [...] people are really afraid to comment there because they might mar their image or get their invite revoked.

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 don't think there's any benefit to have all a users comments public facing. Sure have age+points to vet flame accounts, but why should I be able to see everything you've ever written in one click? It is intrusive and also devoid of the contexts of the discussions.

>HNs decline

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

HN may be in decline... but it's still got a VERY LONG way to go until it is as toxic as every other user-based forum on the internet. I know I was semi-late to the party, but I'm still enjoying hanging out here.

Personally I peg the real start of the decline with pg's thread here in April of 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

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.

Indeed, avoiding fast-rising threads or items high on the front page is necessary to find gold but there are still awesome threads. For example this one - the article itself is so-so but lots of knowledgeable people wrote good comments that are helpful if your startup is in B2B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19007221

> Hacker news has declined in quality.

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.

> 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).

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.

I would rather be able to visit some central resource rather than mix email and discussion forums. Mixing those things together just feels wrong. Mailing lists tend to be extremely visually jarring. But there’s no difference between a mailing list and any other form of community. The packaging doesn’t matter. So I’m confused why you seem to think the packaging will help in some way. What matters is the moderation, the incentive scheme for users and other stuff like that. Also, traditional mailing lists lack a mechanism for maintaining solvency. The ultimate failure of all that has come before is the fact that it completely depends on altruism. Forums Create amazing value in the lives of people who use them and they will be good when they begin to sustain themselves based on that value.

People often say that about mailing lists, but I often wonder if they have used any really good mailing list software. I mean, it's been years, but back in the day we used to write software for dealing with mailing lists and usenet posts and the degree of control you had was so much better than forum software. With forums, you get what your host wants you to see. With mailing lists/usenet you get a feed of data that you can do with as you want. Most modern email clients do a really bad job of dealing with mailing lists. I remember using NN and Gnus for reading mailing lists and maybe my memory has gone foggy, but it was a much better experience than any forum I've ever been on. You've got the ability to search, filter and sort by a variety of criteria. You've got the ability to elect not to read posts by certain people (nor replies to those people). You've got better navigation between threads. You've got the ability to read everything offline. You've got the ability to write code yourself based on the data rather than having to deal with APIs for forums (if you are even lucky enough to be dealing with a forum where your host thinks its OK for you to have APIs at all). You don't have to worry about ads showing up. You don't have to worry about corporate interests deciding what's important for you to see. So many advantages and only a few disadvantages.

Wow, you’ve totally changed my mind. Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. Someone really should make a new mailing list community.

I would love a truly hacker mentality oriented mailing list focusing on doing stuff rather than what's cool/not cool. I don't want to complain about HN, it is what it is and a lot of people like it the way it is. But I'd really like a place where the vast majority of links point to blogs of people doing things in tech, or giving me ideas about what I can do in tech, rather than links to news agencies or news papers or long format writing on non-tech related topics. If it was a mailing list it would be incredible. I'd love to go back to being able to plonk people into kill files and filter/sort topics however I want.

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 ;-)

Peter Cooper could, and should, make that mailing list.

https://cooperpress.com

> how her professor in undergrad told her to stop studying CS after she asked what a debugger was

I had a boss who would regularly say "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers".

Communities are like ecosystems; they evolve. They are dead when they stop evolving. It might be dead for you if you dislike the way a community is evolving but that is your subjective perception which is _objectively_ inaccurate.

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.

user: oskkejdjdkjd created: 9 days ago

I don’t understand your point. Your account is less than a year old. But anyway I jump from account to account mainly because of the abuse of flagging by politically oriented users. If you must know, I first got here in 2012.