Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This release was discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969.

For discussion purposes, moving from Beta to RC doesn't make a new topic, i.e. the discussion tends to be substantially the same.

Edit: Even when a project goes from one version to another, there's rarely anything new in the thread about the new version, because the comments are nearly always about the project in general [1]. For example, in the present case, you'll find a few comments about XQuartz being removed (something which sounds like a major new development), but the vast majority are just about Inkscape in general. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need to limit the number of times it happens, or HN's front page would mostly be discussing the same projects over and over. Obviously there are exceptions in unusual cases, but when it's the same project, with the same version, going through two different statuses (like Beta to RC or actual release), you will be hard pressed to find the slightest difference in the threads.

That makes this post a duplicate by HN's rule (see [2]). I won't bury this one, but when this comes up again in a few weeks, let's not have a third thread.

Nothing against this project, of course. It's just that front page space is the scarcest resource HN has [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You linked discussion of `v1.0-beta1`, but actual discussion is about `v1.0-rc1`.

That's the point. For the purposes of HN threads, there's no difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22445850

Sigh! This kinda micromanaging herds doesn't work, you are wasting your time :(

I wish you were right, because it would be a lot less work. But herd dynamics alone don't produce anything like HN's front page. HN is actively curated and always has been. The site is a set of feedback loops between the elements of its system: community, software, and moderation.

If upvotes alone were deciding everything, the front page would consist of the few hottest topics repeated over and over, plus the indignation and sensation du jour. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The reason why unregulated hivemind behavior composes to a dumb and unstable outcome is not that the people contributing are dumb. It's that they're only using a small part of their attention. If everyone here would deeply reflect before upvoting, flagging, posting, etc., about whether that action making the site more interesting in the long run, we'd get different results. But people don't put that level of attention into what they're doing here, nor should they—it's a lot of work, and everyone has more important things to worry about. What that means, though, is that the hivemind is mostly acting reflexively rather than reflectively (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is bad for a site like this.

The solution is to have a small number of users (i.e. the mods) specialize in worrying about that, i.e. putting full attention into the site as a whole, and reflecting on it and regulating it (or helping it self-regulate) at that level. Then you get complex feedback loops between the big system (the community: large population, sporadic attention) and the little system (the moderators: tiny population, focused attention), which makes the site more unpredictable and interesting. Edit: software is also a critical part of this.

To have paid staff manually micro-regulating like this isn't what I call a solution. You're simply prodding the herd with a stick, and your message is virtually drowning amongst the other ones.

You cannot be imperative, top-down to a community and expect that to work.

"For discussion purposes, moving from Beta to RC doesn't make a new topic" <-- kinda trying to convince

"For the purposes of HN threads, there's no difference" <-- almost resorting to authority

That tone and kind of discourse is ... unfortunate.

It's similar to the Wikipedia principle, don't say something is amazing, explain WHY it's amazing. Then you will perhaps convince 10s or 100s of people that will not enforce your rules but perhaps convince other members of the same. I just hope your rule is right :)

In other words, a community cannot be sustained by being regulated by privileged people, poking them here and there. A community needs to regulate itself and their individuals need to grow themselves.

By the way, such a (humble) message would be worthy of being colored in a distinct way to give it more priority.

But given the abysmal lack of development (and also the current state of features, ew) on the HN site, I doubt that such a feature would ever emerge. In fact, the only thing that makes HN worth visiting is its users. The website itself is horrific.

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