Hacker News Reader

Folks are replying to you saying that HN has the same problems. I don’t entirely disagree with them, but I do think that Reddit is much worse.

It may be the more conscious moderation style on HN, but it’s much more likely you’re going to get interesting content and thoughtful discussions here than on most subreddits, particularly those that show up on r/all or r/popular.

HN definitely has issues with performative intellectualism and people being unnecessarily argumentative, but I don’t think equating it with reddit is accurate.

Comparing Hacker News with mainstream and general discussion subreddits is misleading, as is comparing it to Reddit as a whole. Obviously Reddit is going to come up worse in every conceivable metric (although, also, better) simply because of scale.

A more accurate comparison would be between HN and niche subreddit of roughly equal size and traffic. Not that I am or am willing to put in the work to make such a comparison, but I suspect the quality differential then would be smaller than a lot of people assume.

HN is more of an echo chamber than reddit because the moderation can be effectively done by just dan and there's no subreddit niches on HN to allow diversity of opinions.

HN usually allows controversial comments to stand as long as they don't generate poor discussion. Sticking to the facts, presenting evidence and avoiding broad generalization helps. People often talk about controversial topics without being censored.

Many Reddit moderators straight up ban people who post stuff they don't agree with.

If you had said something like that about u/gallowboob on a top subreddit on Reddit, your comment would have been deleted within minutes.

The fact that your comment here isn’t deleted is a testament to how wrong your comment is.

Sample size 1, great argument buddy. Go look at all the comments that get flagged every day, not for being inflammatory, but just for being unpopular. And unlike reddit you can't even read them on HN after they die. They're so afraid of dissenting narrative enough downvotes means deletion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alden_penny

Set "show dead" == "yes".

(For other users: your own account page.)

In theory, yes.

In practice, who the editor is and how they execute the task matters tremendously.

There's a frequent mantra by a certain segment of the population, tending to "but who should judge?", or the more pointed "what gives you the right to judge?"

My answer to the first is "someone who's quite good at it, and takes the responsibility seriously".

To the second: "who are you to say I cannot?" We are all judgement-making machines, so long as we have a functioning intellect. We're trying to fit our heads around an external reality, and, generally, make better rather than worse choices.

I'm a fan of systems with checks and balances, with principle, and with transparency. HN scores well on some points, less so on. others (notably transparency). A problem with transparency reports is that excessive detail is tedious and cantip off malevolent actors, insufficient can hide many sins.

Would you care to support your accusation with evidence?

How could the HN mod roles/power/relationship improve in your opinion?

2 HN mods control 100% of fourums!

(And, generally, do an excellent job in my view. Not perfect, but it's a difficult, unending, and greatly-underthanked task.)

In your view, should there be more or how could the HN mod system improve?

Not OP, but it would be nice in my opinion if we knew a title was edited (either by mods or OP). It's weird to me when a post has been up for hours and the title gets edited. Can totally change the context of the comments.

Agreed. This wouldn't be difficult to implement would it?

Nearly every bullet point you mentioned can be sensibly argued regarding Hacker News. Particularly the fourth, sixth, and overwhelmingly the last. I have also seen a regular username here containing “penis” in an intentional fashion and a number of people with clear mental and psychological issues, as well. Perhaps the problem isn’t the specific forum.

These issues apply to any internet forum once sufficiently popular. Digg and Slashdot had the same issues, and were slowly strangled by them. The plebs dragged the average down to... well... the average, and then people moved on. Right now YC seems to be the "hip new place to be", but you mark my words, it's going to go down the same path.

HN has existed since October 6, 2006. It's maintained quality at a higher level, for a longer time, than Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Digg, Reddit, and numerous other fora.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

That's good to know, and gives me hope, but this trend is generally a function of popularity, not time. Once a decent fraction of the population is on a platform, inevitably it is dragged towards the lowest common denominator.

Just recently someone on YC asked about "mind bending books" and the #1 response was Permutation City by Greg Egan.

I've read this book, and it was an amazing, nearly life altering experience for me. But lets just say... his style of science fiction is not for everyone, and it's certainly not mainstream. Even in my relatively techy circle of friends, nobody has read any books by Greg Egan. Not one. This indicates to me that the current YC crowd is an extremely narrowly filtered subset of the general population.

Recently I've been reading his Orthogonal series about a Universe that has Riemannian spacetime geometry instead of our Lortentzian spacetime. See: https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html

Can you imagine going to Facebook, Reddit, or even Slashdot and having such books be even in the top 100? The common people upvote Tolkein, Pratchett, and J K Rowling.

Notably, even in the early days, Slashdot had... crazies. Conspiracy nuts, creationists, UFO true believers, and the like. I've noticed that YC is one of the few forums where the one or two Creationists present are mercilessly voted down and their arguments are rejected out of hand. Such trolls get no traction here. But recently... there has been an increase in such talk. It's still small, but I've noticed the trend.

HN takes a number ofvfairly deliberate steps at maintaining its limited appeal, including a decidedly and intentionally lacklustre appearance, limited features, near total lack of gamification (leader list excepted, and I've thought that maybe should be tossed), and the gently but firm hand of moderation nudging content and discussion.

Look at the "new" queue to see what fails to make the cut, much of it auto-killed.

"The fact that Reddit is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times."

Perhaps back when Reddit used to be a niche site, it was "mainly populated with technologically proficient people", but now it's the seventh most-popular site in the US. The days of "fellow Redditors" meaning anything concrete are long gone.

You can see it's evolution over time from a site where programming topics were very popular (as a proportion) to where general-purpose memes are dominant. (https://media.wired.com/photos/593278f0a31264584499534b/mast...)

>Seems to be bipolar with pro China / anti China every day of the week.

I see anti-china all the time, but rarely see pro-china. This in on /r/all, by the way, so it's not because of any filter bubble on my part.

Funny to read that on HN.

I nearly spit my coffee out while reading it. And it's already on /r/LOLHackerNews

To add to your list:

* using engagement as a ranking metric. This ensures the content is addictive, even if it's low quality

* the reactionary fabricated content they keep because it went viral

* important news won't surface until hours after an even happens unless an admin stickies it because they removed their traditional ranking algorithm

* the shift away from subreddits being communities and towards social media style entities

I wish reddit's alternatives gained some traction. Voat had some promise but got taken over by racist bots. saidit might have some potential.

> Reddit nice guys who have account names like "Iliketitties" or something really depraved.

Missed opportunity to refer people to the canonical subreddit /r/rimjobsteve.

A few other characters I'd add (that appear both here and on Reddit):

* "The Pedantic Nitpicker". He will respond to your long, 50 sentence comment and say something like: "That one sentence said 'all' and should say 'some' because here is a counterexample. Therefore, YOUR ENTIRE POST IS WRONG."

* "The Sealioning Scientist". No matter what you say, she will ask for linked academic sources, and goad you into arguing, all while acting sincere and curious. If you fail to cite them, then obviously you are writing fiction, and she wins.

* "The Silent Downvoter". Skims through posts, looking for ones that violate some established groupthink or simply go against the current subreddit's zeitgeist, downvotes and sneaks off into the dark. Nobody knows their username because they never comment or explain their downvote.

"The Silent Downvoter". Skims through posts, looking for ones that violate some established groupthink or simply go against the current subreddit's zeitgeist, downvotes and sneaks off into the dark. Nobody knows their username because they never comment or explain their downvote.

I think we all wish that we could see the reasons people had for downvoting, but I've accepted that it's just like real life: people will disagree or dislike you and judge you, and you might end up none the wiser, and that's just how it goes.

I think this combination of phenomena, getting downvoted for going against groupthink as opposed to not contributing to the conversation, commenters trying to call out their downvoters, commenters accusing their downvoters of being sheep, is more illustrative of a different general issue: people have a tendency to perceive negative social signals as attacks. We all understand defensiveness as a phenomenon, but humans in general are also much better at spotting defensiveness in others than in themselves, so the calmness disappears when it's you being downvoted.

Downvoting as a mechanism seems to do an approximate job of social regulation at best, and I think that's specifically because the wisdom of the crowd is only good for some things and specifically not good for handling nuance or dissent.

"No matter what you say, she will ask for linked academic sources, and goad you into arguing"

My favorite are the people who demand sources for every assertion of yours, while making numerous factual assertions of their own without providing sources.

Bonus points for disregarding sources once provided, e.g."everyone knows Snopes and Politifact are fake and just anyone can write on Wikipedia".

> It's sunny outside

citation needed

Location unclear, please specify (all I can see is overcast, I mean seriously) :)

'The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect'

This one is interesting to me. I could certainly be accused of being this guy, you could probably make an argument that I'm being this guy right now.

We're all here and participating for different purposes, and one of my purposes is to sharpen my writing skills and my rhetoric. Arguing with strangers on the internet is the most effective way of doing this that I've found, that doesn't affect my personal/professional life.

Another thing you mentioned - people with immense issues. We've all got plenty of issues, and one of the best things about commenting anonymously on the internet is that there is no punishment for revealing them.

I think that there are positive perspectives you could take on some of these bullet points

> We're all here and participating for different purposes, and one of my purposes is to sharpen my writing skills and my rhetoric. Arguing with strangers on the internet is the most effective way of doing this that I've found, that doesn't affect my personal/professional life.

> I think that there are positive perspectives you could take on some of these bullet points

Arguing with someone on the Internet is positive only if the other party also wishes to argue.

Kind of like going out to the street and physically fighting with a random person. It'll definitely sharpen your fighting skills, but it's not a positive if the random stranger doesn't want to fight.

There are many differences between arguing and fighting. One that comes to mind is arguments ability to be productive.

I feel you've made an argument towards me with your comment, and it was welcome because you posed it rationally and without making it personal. It's impossible to pose a fight with a stranger rationally and impersonally, so I'm not sure that that analogy is a good fit.

> There are many differences between arguing and fighting. One that comes to mind is arguments ability to be productive.

I think the distinction is that while it is productive for you, it may be the opposite for your interlocutor. People have conversations for different reasons, and the reasons you have are a strict subset of those. And in real life - outside of academia and some of the tech world - their reasons rarely align with yours.

(Lesson learned the hard way).

In HN you can simply not reply when you don't want to argue.

> In HN you can simply not reply when you don't want to argue.

If you're addressing the physical fighting analogy, yes - it is an imperfect one. It is also not the main thrust of my argument.

If you're referring to the wider point, I don't see the relevance. It's not a given that the purpose of commenting on HN is for sharpening writing skills and rhetoric. It no doubt is the purpose of some on HN, but not everyone.

To take the statement to a pointless extreme, you can also choose not to reply to someone who is openly insulting you on HN. That doesn't make it OK to do so.

I don't think arguing with strangers on the internet presents a valuable feedback loop for learnings in real-life discussions. It's just a very different world with different repercussions.

It's a very different medium which is why is presents a valuable feedback loop. It presents a rare opportunity to build the skill of making a strong argument, without putting your reputation at stake.

In my work I'm able to make a convincing argument as to why a given architecture is the right way to do it, why a given tool isn't worth using, etc. This allows me to participate in high-level design discussions and be a major contributor to them, even though I have relatively little experience. I attribute that almost entirely to my experience as an internet commenter, as odd as that sounds.

I coached high school debate teams, neither that nor arguing shit over the internet are the real world because you aren't actually risking anything and they are, as we are exploring in this very post and thread, predictable.

If it was the same as the real world it wouldn't make for very good practice, now would it?

When I played sports, we spent a fraction of our practices trying to mimic the real world scenario (scrimmaging). And even in a scrimmage, it's risk free, there are no stakes.

The lack of risk is exactly what makes it great practice.

I can't agree with the idea that physical repetition is a suitable analog for any social interaction. For example, a hetero male can't get better at attracting women without being in the actual, concrete situation as it unfolds, which is exactly what is happening in coached dating situations as well.

Edit: I would go a step further and wager our brains aren't calibrated for arguing random other human beings in person we don't share assumptions, behaviors, and/or appearances with; I mean people have a hard enough time communicating with the people they've chosen to commit the rest of their life too, it's hard to conceive of being able to master a marriage without being in the marriage.

The problems with Hacker news I'd like to add

* HN Companies and sock puppets pushing agendas

* Hacker news counter culture movements and backlashes. Seems to be bipolar with pro Rust / anti Rust every day of the week.

* Hacker news nice guys who have account names like "mothsonasloth" or something really depraved. Along with all the other hypocrites

* Hacker news Admins and big personalities driving content trends on the site e.g. (/u/patio11)

* Recycling of posts / knowledge, since there are always new people joining. You get things like "TIL that microservices are awesome" trending once every month. Which is frustrating for veteran users

* Hacker news arm chair generals/economists/politicians. The points system rewards trendy content and doesn't necessarily mean quality. Unlike points in Stackoverflow, there is some degree of confidence in the users competency.

* The fact that Hacker news is mainly populated with technologically proficient people, who probably have some sort of issue, whether it be mental, psychological. Sure we all suffer from our demons but the amount of stuff I read on there makes me cringe at times.

* The "Hacker news Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect

perfect example of __The "Hacker news Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect__

Can we please train gpt2 with this model and get HN gpt2 going?

You just described the real world

> * The "Reddit Contrarian", waiting to snipe your post with their immense intellect

I began thinking twice before commenting on anything, and then eventually stopped. Even in the most benign subs, you can quickly escalate to Hitler if you deviate from the hive-mind.