Little Known Hacker News (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Little Known Hacker News (2008)

techcrunch.com

54 pointssolipsist36 comments

As I was not there when all this happened, I decided to investigate and find out more about what it was like back then. I was surprised to find that the group of people who truly affected HN the most after this article was the old-timers and not the new "digg-like users"[1]. Users reacted as if this was the end of HN and immediately grouped all new users into one that many despised. If you want, you can look for yourself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133440

The new users probably did not create as much trouble as people had thought they would. Rather, the older users created the high tensions between the two groups. This all led to excessive discussions that has been prolonged for years. Unfortunately, this article has inspired many people to continue doing so (my bad!). All of this small-talk is what's really been hurting HN.

For those that want to compare HN before and after TechCrunch's article, here is what the homepage looked like:

Before: http://web.archive.org/web/20080308054301/http://news.ycombi...

After: http://web.archive.org/web/20080312014516/http://news.ycombi...

A lot of people here on HN (pg included) agree that the site quality has gone down a little over the past few years. As this is probably the result of the number of users and we know that TechCrunch has contributed to that number, we can safely say that the two are somewhat correlated. However, the heated discussions and behavior that has come as a result are probably more worrisome than the new users themselves. Just something to think about.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133446

I'm not sure the trouble is that new users would create "trouble" as originally foreseen, but that new users represent a wider area of the population. For a site which aims to a high standard of discussion, regression to the mean is just as dangerous as "trolling."

... and a thousand geeks cry "Noooo!" in unison.

Why do so many people think that HN will be ruined if a few more people join? I've been reading HN a lot longer than my account's age implies and I don't think the quality has changed.

The only real problem if you ask me, is that with more people submitting stories, things will not stay long on the /newest page.

In my opinion it's better to have 100 stories with 20 comments each, rather than 10 stories with 200 comments and the usual huge thread under the top comment.

Historically it's happened on a couple of community driven sites, Digg being the best example. People submit stories, people vote stories, it's a very gameable system and it's ruined other communities. I loved Digg the first 6-12 months after it launched. The quality of the stories and community plummeted pretty quickly though.

I've been reading HN for just over a year now and I think the qualities always been top notch, which is why I'm still around; but's only natural to fear HN succumbing to the same fate that other sites in a similar domain have.

HN is not completely defenseless against the barbarian hordes that have been attacking geekdom since that September so many years ago. For one, it's not pretty. Barbarian hordes like flashy things and may get distracted by something else and just go away. It also has no password recovery mechanism, so, when they forget their passwords, they are locked out until they can create another user and that buys us some time before they can downvote. Unless they authenticate with another auth source, but you can't always win.

HN is no more or less pretty than Reddit, and the general feeling around here is that Reddit's Eternal September happened sometime in the last year or two.

HN won't last forever. Reddit was great when it started, then they achieved the growth they were looking for and it got diluted a bit. PG started what would become HN, and the early adopters migrated. As reddit becomes less useful for tech and programming news, or as a way to find cool new sites, more people will migrate over here. Then some people will get pissed at the requisite drop in quality, and will start a new place.

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

> All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

Well, Peter, HN can't stay a kid forever.

You are all acting as if the fate of news.yc is in your hands. It isn't!

If anyone here proves that he is not a good actor, he will be ruthlessly pruned from the site. This happens to dozens of people every week. This is all handled behind the scenes by pg and the editors.

That's the real reason this site has lasted as long as it has: pg and co are willing to be extremely ruthless about weeding out bad actors. That's the big difference. Other sites were more interested in growth, so they weren't as free to get rid of badly-behaved members.

This idea that news.yc is doomed to follow in the path of all other discussion sites that came before it: no, it is not. Not so long as pg is willing to keep pruning bad actors.

The flaw in your expectation is your assumption that communities decline due to bad actors. I think you're wrong. The decline comes from two other effects: regression to the mean, and decreasing overlap in shared interests and goals.

People who followed PG's essays from the early days were pretty plugged in to tech startup culture, and the early community was focused around that. They were people who had a startup, or were contemplating doing one. Generally, they were smart, ambitious and technically astute.

Over time, those traits regress to the mean, as people come upon the site based on more and more random hearsay, wade in and contribute. If they are marginally less smart or astute, they still aren't bad actors; but the group's average declines, and asymptotically approaches the population mean.

And this more diverse population isn't as homogeneous. That affects the kinds of stories and comments that get voted up. It's only natural that stories and comments which appeal to the lowest common denominator will attract the most votes; it's that in the past, the lowest common denominator had a higher value, owing to the homogeneity.

I'm sure someone has codified a law that basically says "thing is cool when I discover it, but it is uncool when the next 1000 newbies behind me discover it".

A really good example of this is this blog post: http://scobleizer.com/2010/12/22/an-industry-challenge-build...

translation: it was cool when I started going, but now that all you "little people" are coming, it sucks.

I am not sure if the moderation/flagging system can cope with a 10-fold increase in the number of noise posts.

I think I've noticed three things. It's hard to say for sure, but I think these three are true -

1. Raw nastyness has gone up. Profanity, insults, and sarcasm in disagreement. HN was super civil 2-3 years ago. Now it's still far more civil than anywhere else, but gently declining.

2. Stupid arguments that agreed with the dominant view of a thread used to be left alone or even get downvoted. Now I see sometimes where a reasoned critique is at 1 point, but a response going, "How could you even think that? Everyone knows that isn't true" - proof by assertion type stuff - get voted up.

3. Also, very lately there's been a marked increase in the class warfare/social justice/inequality vibe filtering in. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your views, but it was less like that a few years ago.

Also more people seem to vote based on whether they agree with something rather than whether it adds to the conversation.

Voting based on agreement has been going on since at least 1078 days ago (which is before when I registered as a user, after about a year of lurking beforehand).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I've observed this too.

But I'm not sure it is related to this '08 article (I joined about half a year after it "aired" BTW, so have no data point on how HN was before that).

I think a lot of the stuff you highlight has happened in the last year - and accelerated in the last 6 months. Views are appearing to be less informed and commenting lot less jovial.

We do seem to be getting more content on politics and religion now too (more than there used to be).

(r.e. civility; I totally agree - I distinctly remember getting into a disagreement in my first month here and it was about the most polite argument I ever had :D Pretty sure we both converted each other in the end!)

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's important to keep memory biases in mind. In particular, our penchant for rosy retrospection[1] seems pretty relevant. I'm just saying that this post has a very "kids these days" feel to it. :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

I believe there is actually a definite cultural fault line between the older, core HN community and many of the more recent arrivals. The old HN I believe was pretty tightly clustered around ycombinator's social graph. I think if you played "six degrees of PG" with commentators, the average score has probably risen from 2 to 4, at least. I believe that PG's essays articulate much of the ethos at the core of the HN community.

My perception is that a fair number of "join us now and share the software, you'll be free" type hackers are not really enthusiastic about the whole startup culture of angel investors and "profitable exits". There has often been an anti-establishment character to hacker culture, and sometimes it takes on an anti-capitalist tone. I see a lot of people mention Reddit and Digg as cautionary examples, but isn't Slashdot really the first and foremost case study?

For the first year or so I read HN, I didn't make an account because I didn't think I had anything to contribute that would help startup entrepreneurs make money. As the perspectives expressed on the site began to become more diverse, I started to feel like I might have something to contribute. I suppose that makes me part of the problem, at least in terms of diluting the solution's purity. I certainly try to avoid precipitating conflict, but I also see a certain amount of conflict as inevitable unless HN does something like split into a separate ycombinator related startup focused board and a general programming/technology area.

3. Also, very lately there's been a marked increase in the class warfare/social justice/inequality vibe filtering in.

Which, if you ask me, is a subclass of a larger problem: people with agendas. The bonnet-dwelling bee is, as always, the most destructive parasite of all.

In the good ol' days, discussions about politics were strictly banned, and this ban was pretty heavily enforced. Comments of the form "!HN" would be modded up. But then folks got bored with the meta-discussion about whether or not a given story was HN-worthy, so pg added a line to the guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

which seems to have killed off the meta-discussion but also resulted in a bunch of rather political stories and discussions showing up.

As a community grows in size it becomes more diverse. As it becomes more diverse it becomes a better representative of society in general. As a result websites that target a niche audience tend to shift to websites that target popular culture as they grow. HN is technology and startup oriented and is populated by many professionals in those fields. A popular HN will be populated by people who want broader topics and who are not experts in any of them. And less disciplined individuals tend to abuse the moderation system until it becomes nothing more than the voting system of a popularity contest. Reddit, for example, was a great place for discussing interesting topics a few years ago. Today it is a website for memes. And the technology topics are moderated not according to how interesting the submissions might be but according to how cool and popular they are. The eternal September is not a new phenomenon. And this isn't limited to websites. It happens to TV stations too. SciFi has wrestling, History has ancient aliens, and MTV stopped playing music videos a long time ago.

An important question for a retrospective posts is why has HN not degraded as quickly over time as other sites?

I think the key game mechanic increasing the longevity of Hacker News is the minimum karma threshold necessary to downvote comments. In effect, it requires new users to undergo a period of socialization to community norms. During this period they train in recognizing what the schema for comments containing negative informational value looks like. First out of fear, then out of mandate as an acquired power.

If you ever want to keep a community alive, implement similar withheld powers of negative punishment and adjust the level of input work required to earn them.

Ironically, solipsist, the user who posted this, has an account less than a month old with 2120 karma. Based on my casual observation of the new stories page over the last month this user submits a lot of stuff. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. But submitting a lot of stories is a good way to get lots of karma quickly, since stories are voted up more highly and it takes almost no time to do.

I agree that the downvote karma threshold has been instrumental in maintaining the quality of discussion here on HN, but it seems like it's too easy to get around by submitting lots of stories. And that drastically reduces the socialization period.

You're definitely right, solipsist has submitted 26 articles so far today!

The obvious solution is to limit the number of articles you can submit a day to, say, 1. Increase the scarcity of the resource to increase value of what it's used for and limit the power of karma farmers and spammers.

Another option is to have story submissions not count towards karma. Presumably one should submit a story because they think the community will benefit and they want to share it. If you give people cookies every time they submit something, you'll end up with people who only want the cookies.

See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2066572

Seems as if it isn't that hard to bypass the "trial" period of HN. In addition to minimum karma requirement, applying 3 months of newbie time would probably be somewhat helpful as well. If the user has earned his badge of negative voting after the end of the rookie period, his understanding on the site has matured to point where he knows where the site is at, and he would be more than willing to keep it that way.

Was this the time that everyone posted Erlang stuff to make the site look more boring? I never learned so much about an obscure programming language in a single weekend.

This article back in 2008 is how I found HN in the first place :)

Same here. And this is my second account, my first was banned. :/

Ahh I remember people discussing on whether or not that post will degrade the quality of discussion.. :)

Also, feeling a bit nostalgic seeing nickb post in that screenshot..

Funny, that was the post that originally brought me to HN and I've been here ever since. :)

I think Gruber must have linked to the TC post or something, because I don't read TC myself.

One thing that's interesting to me: check out those point totals: 26 points, 30 points, 35 points. Compare that to the homepage right now: 23, 181, 74, etc.

Possibly a consequence of there being more people. I don't generally think to myself "this needs exactly 5 karma points", I think "I'm going to upvote this."

A more accurate comparison would be the percentage of people that read the article that upvoted it, and even that wouldn't be a perfect comparison.

I'm sure it's a consequence of having more people. That's what's interesting: it's a visible indicator of the increased population around here.

That happened to reddit too, three years ago I had a story sitting on the frontpage in the number one spot for more than a day.

It got me more than 200 karma. Today most of those who post have ten times that number.

I think Hacker News is a gem then as it is now. Simple idea, great topics, and a wonderful community. Just works very nicely.

I must say. The design has improved significantly.

As long as immaturity and disrespect are weeded out, I think we'll be fine. Just remember the "flag" option to report such comments.

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