Techmeme vs Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Techmeme vs Hacker News

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125 pointsguptaneil47 comments

>And not one story about Apple or Facebook in the top 20 right now.

It isn't always that way. Some days we have three stories on the front page about Facebook (the day before yesterday) and I don't think a single day goes by where some Apple story doesn't creep its way in. There's an Apple-related story on the front page right now and two on the second page. It's gotten better over the last year though. It used to be that 3-4 (or more) articles about Apple and Facebook were on the front page at any given time.

Is that necessarily a bad thing though? To be fair, Apple, Facebook, and Google have had by far the largest impact on consumer technology in the last decade. Obviously, they're newsworthy and interesting.

To me, a good measure for whether an article should be on HN or not is whether people can learn something useful from either the article or the discussion surrounding the article. I think we can all learn from their strategies and actions, and the conversations surrounding articles about Facebook or Google are usually filled with insightful comments (maybe not so much with Apple articles).

Apple, Facebook, and Google are discussed everywhere, all the time, on all tech news venues ad nauseum. That is why I personally don't care for their appearances on HN. You are right though, often the commentary is outstanding compared to what you would find elsewhere.

Worthwhile and insightful stories are good. Stories that trigger worthwhile and insightful dialogue are good.

What's not so good is yet another link of Gruber dutifully cheerleading whatever Apple does, followed by comments about how all Gruber does these days is dutifully cheerlead whatever Apple does.

Which is why he said "right now" - I can't tell if your post is serious or a joke reference to HN pedantry! ;)

Hmm, I dunno.

Apples to oranges for me. I look at HN as a place where techies discuss topics that interest them, vs Techmeme which lists tech stories in the media, sans discussion.

Excellent comment: apples being techmeme right now and oranges being the natural hn color

Speaking of pedantry, here's my obligatory response where I say Apples and Oranges can in fact be compared http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-...

This. HN often has discussions about an article here because of the community and the calibre (as opposed to HN members on the site itself), while Techmeme relies on the inherent "conversational" properties of blogs themselves.

False dichotomy. They're both aggregators per se, but one top-down curates breaking news (and reactions to it, which is why a story may take up so much space), the other uses voting to optimize news of any age to the interest level of a community.

I don't disagree with Fred's conclusion - that Techmeme is hard to take sometimes - but that seems more a reflection of the quasi-autistic and frequently hysterical focus of the tech media these days.

Two very different entities. Techmeme is about the news and that's it. Hacker News is about the community and how we as developers and designers think about the news. Hacker News is more about the community. Like today a random post about Windows 1.0 to 7's journey led to donations for the guy behind Trumpet Winsock. Very few communities have such a strong positive energy in them like HN. I have learnt so many cool things here and I am just 20 days old on HN.

I never heard of Techmeme to be honest, but I rely a lot HN for everything related to geek and technology. So I believe HN is doing a damn good job. Congrats to everyone of you.

Like many HN posts, I found the comments even more insightful than the article:

"TM: What has happened. HN: What will happen." - William Mougayar

"Hacker news is great...Huge time-sink liability though." - Liad

"I find the comments more interesting sometimes than the actual article that is being linked to" - Rick

"Techmeme is a popularity contest, HackerNews is curation. Curation in my experience wins easily." - Larry M.

"I have really fallen in love with HackerNews lately, finding its eclectic mix of articles fascinating. I have been participating a lot there because it doesn't just pull in the same old standard fair I find everywhere else. I also often find, multiple perspectives, whether in stories or in the comments." - Elia Freedman

"...the commenters on HN leave a lot to be desired. With a room full of geeks, you pretty much get what you'd expect -- some insights, but a lot of pedantry." - davidu

"Hacker News is so great I only let myself go there once a day. And I might have to cut back on that too..." - Nate Kidwell

"Hacker News looks like a place where you can soak your brain for hours, if you have the time." - James Harradence

From Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic: "All of our stories that do well on Hacker News share one thing: they are written. By written, I mean that someone took the time and effort to examine individual sentences, to think about word choices, to create transitions between grafs, to describe things precisely. You know, writing! But a lot of what gets posted in the tech blogosphere doesn't fit this definition of writing. It's more in the tradition of the wire services, where speed rules over creativity. That the Hacker News community both recognizes and rewards pieces that are written makes me love it."

Adrienne Jeffries and Alexis Madrigal also have some really interesting things to say. Fred's blog often has excellent comment threads and this is a fine one.

Yeah, I'd like we could do something about that pedantry.

"... doesn't the fact that Techmeme drives traffic cause the echo chamber - and how do you change that? ..."

Spin in any article is like spraying "Cheez Whiz®" on a plate load of "Water Crackers" then claiming the discovery of the "new" Brie. [0][1] To the cheese connoisseur, you know something is wrong straight away. Instead of the soft white gooey cheese melting out the sides of the light chewy rind, we get an orange blob expertly sprayed on a cracker.

The echo chamber effect is dampened by the HN readers who are connoisseur's of hacker related information. [2] Spin is detected at both submission and reader level. A pre-spun article might escape submission, but the average HN taste is attuned to poor substitutes.

[0] Cheez Whiz® ~ http://www.kraftbrands.com/CheezWhiz/

[1] Carr's Crackers ~ http://www.carrscrackers.com/history.shtml

[2] Submarine ~ http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Has anybody looked at the correlations between the stories on TechMeme and HN? My guess is that because of HN's broader scope more of the TechMeme links wind up on HN than the other way around. But it would be interesting to see data related to that ... and also see whether one routinely proceeds the other.

I don't know about that but Techmeme clearly takes HN into account. I've noticed many times where an article makes it to Techmeme without any other blogs linking to it. Every time that's happened I've found the article on the top of the HN page.

interesting data point, thanks!

I'd sat Hacker News competes more with Quora than Techmene - especiually the ASK HN section.

That's interesting. I was thinking last night whether it would benefit HN to be structured more like Quora. Naturally in some discussions I would love to see it, however in others perhaps not. HN places focus on good comments more than anything, while Quora on good answers with a bit less emphasis on commenting. A blend somehow I believe to be the future.

TechMeme's got huge gender biases, and this helps contribute to the echo chamber effect that Fred's talking about. In September 2010 I wrote about a case where even though 65% of the articles on a subject were written by women, TechMeme's version had on 16.5% by women. http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1618#comment-88992

Jon, this seems like a silly fight to pick.

Techmeme simply surfaces the hottest content from tech blogs that's getting linked/tweeted right now. It is descriptive, not editorial. If you notice that only 16% of women are being shown covering a story, then your takeaway should be "gosh, only 16% of women wrote interesting posts that are getting linked to on the web" rather than "gosh, techmeme is descriminating against women."

Techmeme just calls it like it sees it. It's awesome in that way.

Techmeme's definition of "interesting" is "selected by an algorithm that starts with hubs that Gabe says are interesting". If 65% of the stories are written by women, and only 16% of Techmeme's stories are, then Gabe's algorithm finds women a lot less interesting than men.

If you agree, then yeah, Techmeme's awesome.

If you don't agree, then you need to be conscious that Techmeme's presenting you a skewed view of the world. Unless you're actively working to balance it with sources skewed in the other direction then it's going to mean that your overall information sources aren't giving you an accurate picture of reality.

If you looked at the top 5 Google results across all key words and men wrote more of the posts than women, would you accuse Google of bias? Or would you consider that maybe its evidence there are more men writing on the web than women. I don't see a difference here. Gabe's said that his system adds new sources programmatically as they get linked to. Why on earth would he block out female voices?

It depends on how much more. Women write roughly as much as men in the blogosphere, so if the overall results were (say) 75% male it would indicate a bias. The times I've looked at Techmeme and memeorandum they're usually 80-90% male.

I don't know why Gabe blocks out female voices but from the Atlantic article linked to in my thread he doesn't seem to read any women regularly so my guess is that he either (a) doesn't know he's doing it or (b) doesn't care.

Argh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's 16.5% rate compared to any other sites?

If that's all explained in your article, then I'll just read it later :)

Copy pasted for convenience. Will delete later if it's distracting.

_____

The coverage of the Arrington kerfuffle provides some great examples of a form of structural bias against women that most people overlook. At this point about 65% of the posts I’ve linked to above are by women (31/47, I think). Here’s TechMeme’s summary of the debate:

five guys and Shira

16.6% women.

In a comment on Gender, race, age and power in online discussions, chapter n back in 2008, I talked about representation issues on Techmeme:

    the majority of these blogs are generally what Susan C. Herring et. al. refer to in Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs as “filter blogs”, commenting on external events, as opposed to “personal journals” or “knowledge blogs”; TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth.

It’s nice to have such a clear example!

At the risk of being pedantic,there are a couple of important lessons here:

- The “neutral” algorithms of sites like Techmeme, memeorandum, and mediagazer are in practice heavily biased against women, and so present yet another challenge for women in general — and women in technology, politics, and media in particular

- If you’re getting a large chunk of your news via Techmeme, you’re getting a very male view of reality

Thanks to jokermatt999 for the cut-and-paste.

Yes, later in that thread there's data from Google and Bing -- both in the 45-50% range.

EDIT: Also, here's the link to the Susan Herring et. al. paper I mentioned "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html

Wait, 65% of the stories you linked to were written by women, while only 45%-50% of stories at large were written by women? Have you tried to examine the roots of your gender bias?

You've misunderstood.

There were 47 stories. 31 (65%) were by women.

TechMeme highlighted 6. 1 was by women, 16%.

Google's front page had 4/9 women. (44%) Bing's front page had 5/10. (50%)

If I'm reading joker's summary of your argument correctly, you're saying that techmeme disproportionately covers blogs about tech news instead of blogs people write about their own lives or about generalized, uncontroversial knowledge; which makes it biased against women?

The biasing in this case seems almost an epiphenomenon; TC tries to focus on certain views of certain subjects and succeeds; whether those views are disproportionately written by men has little to do with anything.

You are not reading it correctly. I'm saying that there were 47 stories on this topic, of which 31 were by women. Techmeme featured 6 stories on this topic, of which only 1 was by women. Whether or not a view was written by a man strongly is strongly correlated with whether or not Techmeme features it.

I didn't see you addressing the actual point I raised, which was that Techmeme looks for certain topics, covered from a certain stance. Just like Encyclopaedia Britannica demands articles inhabiting the Classic Stance[1], Techmeme demands its own stance.

But saying this is a gender problem is like saying that because doctors are more likely male than nurses are, and get paid more than nurses, we should have fewer doctors and more nurses.

[1] http://classicprose.com/csx.html

The data shows that Techmeme's choices of topics and perspectives result in an overwhelming majority of stories by guys even in situations when more women than men are writing about it. Why don't you see that as a gender bias?

I don't know the data on Britannica authors. If there are more guys then women, then there's gender bias, and Classic Stance may or may not be a contributor. But in any case, I don't see what that has to do with Techmeme situation. Ditto with whether or not there's gender bias in the medical profession.

I understood it exactly as khafra did. I suppose we are confused about this line (which khafra was referring to):

TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth.

This quote makes it sound like women and children write more personal and knowledge stuff, which TechMeme naturally overlooks. Further, it straight up says that this tendency is "unsurprising".

So we are wondering what this has to do with gender bias or why it's surprising that a technology would miss things that it is designed to miss.

But you said he was not reading the summary correctly, so obviously something is not clear here.

Sorry, I still don't understand. When you say there were 47 stories, where did you get that list and how do you know it's comprehensive?

I got the list by watching twitter, following links, googling, binging. It probably isn't comprehensive but is a superset of the other lists.

That's interesting, but did you know that Gabe Riveria, founder of Techmeme, is dating Alexia Tsotsis, a prominent writer from TechCrunch?

Just a thought.

reality has a huge well-known gender bias. HN is a subset of reality.

I don't visit TM, mainly because I follow a large swathe of tech publications on Twitter, and that's how I get my breaking tech stories - so have no real need for aggregation on stories I've already read.

Whereas I've found HN to be much more useful for the smaller, less known publications, personal blogs and company articles which I wouldn't pick up on with my traditional web browsing method.

I've never actually been to techmeme, so I went there. That's one ugly website.

This should be taken as constructive criticism: if the first thing that pops into a new user's head is "wow, that's ugly", it's probably time for a redesign.

I didn't notice a lack of diversity in Techmeme. I consider the site to be very useful, and while they push the big companies stories above the fold, there are still a lot of interesting links to other news or opinions.

Yes, but they often cover minutia to death. I unsubscribed when I got 4 stories about rumors of a white iPhone in my feed reader.

The greatest difference b/w HN and Techmeme? It is the great quality of conversation between all you intelligent people out here.

What does Techmeme have? Just some Tweets?

Flagged linkbait.

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