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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

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adenozine

This article is what yall want on the front page?

The author submitted and probably vote-manipulated to get it there.

It's a content-less article, it has nothing to do with hacker values or software or entrepreneurship.

Please vote responsibly, everyone!

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Regardless of how one feels about the article, the thread is surprisingly not bad, and it's an intellectually interesting topic that doesn't get discussed here much. That makes for a great submission! Your notion of what belongs here is narrower than what the site guidelines call for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This one doesn't hit that standard because it falls into one highly predictable sequence (promoting a blog) but it's unexpected enough along other axes to be a fine one-off.

Interestingness declines exponentially, though, so I wouldn't say we want follow-up posts of this nature for a while (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Much better to find something else that's equally unexpected and completely unrelated.

Well, observing the decrease in quality and increase in frustration on HN over the years, I'd double down on my opinion any day.

The more junk on HN that has nothing to do with code, the more people complain, the worse the quality is, etc. Year after year, it's held true.

I don't hesitate to posit either that moderation decisions have severely decreased the quality of the HN experience. A a cyber-hammer as the arbiter of discussions which they possess nothing worth contributing to, saying "these loosely worded guidelines are what is right" despite dozens, probably hundreds of conversations that moderation members have had with contributing individuals about what kind of posts belong on the front page.

Anyhow thanks for the links, they were "enlightening"

Sorry, I don't think I'm parsing this completely, but if you fish around in the archives using HN Search it's not hard to see that complaints like this go back to the beginning of the site. Actually it's kind of fun:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20is%20this%22%20%22hac...

As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse. HN has been "turning into Reddit" since before it was HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721), getting "taken over by politics" for almost that long (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869), and so on.

If you don't mind me asking dang, what sort of technical work do you do?

If you'd prefer a private conversation, I'd be open to that; I'm curious to know if you write code on any kind of regular basis professionally.

As I see it, your response further cements my point, that there's a huge chunk of people unhappy with content here, and a moderation instrument that is acutely aware of it and firmly poised to change it, and yet refuses to.

You might say something about diversity of content, I just don't think that's what HN is best to pursue. I'm here to read news that appeals to me. I write code, I read code, I want to read news about that. Enlightenment is not it.

Thanks for the response.

The flaw in your argument is that you assume that it would be possible to make everybody happy. That's extremely not possible, and often trying to appease one subset ends up pissing off a much larger subset.

These complaints are not coming from a "huge chunk of people", and the fact that they've been more or less stable since the community started is at least evidence that there isn't a massive decline, which is what the complaints always posit.

I'm happy to answer your question about technical work but why does that matter in this context? (I'll tell you why I ask: you've already made more than one comment about the moderators here which express that you've got a problem with us for some reason, so this feels like a gotcha question, and it feels lousy to be cross-examined.)

Well, you didn't answer it.

Curiosity, more than anything. You're an enigmatic figure. Little is known about you, though you act as gatekeeper over a large number of conversations, I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything in this context.

I could gather thousands of voices that want to read news leaning to the hacker side of the content spectrum. All these voices with commits and code reviews to show for themselves, and then there's you. There's almost nothing about you on Google, and there are MANY examples of your supposed entitlement to act as executor over conversations here.

I'm not meaning to accuse. I know what it costs and what it demands from a person to even attempt to moderate a community of this size and as diverse as this one. I do appreciate the role you possess, I just can't really appreciate your opinion, given so much evidence that the quality has decreased.

You probably used reddit early on, surely you wouldn't say the quality has skyrocketed since then? It's terrible. That's really all I'm saying. HN totally IS getting worse, and posts like these are directly attributable, given a long enough time frame.

Statements like "I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything" come across as more aggressive than curious. FWIW I've been a professional programmer for many years and write code every day, though not as much as I'd like to.

Well, your attributing my opinion to "flawed arguments" seems to be tit for tat.

I call it a wash ;)

Thanks for sharing. I assumed you didn't code, and just existed perhaps attached cybernetically to the news.yc HTTP pipeline. Nice to know there's at least some depth to ya.

Ok, peace :)

Welcome to Hacker News.

It’s okay for an author to post things they’ve written. Do you have any evidence of vote manipulation?

The guidelines of this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) contain

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

The same goes for comments about voting on posts. It’s boring.

Also please take a look at the very first section of the guidelines for a statement on what’s on-topic here.

It's a lot more entertaining than another presentation of the javascript framework in fashion this hour...

JavaScript frameworks haven’t significantly changed market share for like three or four years, it’s React with niches of Vue and Angular exactly like it was in ~2017. Even the build systems haven’t changed.

“Minimalist” CSS frameworks eschewing JS though, whew.

I think I was the first to upvote it this morning when I was browsing the new section. Pretty sure it just had 1 point. It just struck a chord with me because my brain goes through the same thought process when I consider practicing mindfulness to ease my seemingly ever-increasing anxiety and though maybe some people here would have some ideas that oppose it so I could get past my own lazy "why bother" conclusion.

The submitters older posts don't have more than 1 or 2 points, I don't think they're manipulating. Maybe my highish karma gave it a bit of a boost?

One question alone may lead to a meaningful conversation. Search for enlightenment goes hand in hand with the search for the truth, at least to me. But yes, the article isn't that well-thought out, but if it triggers interesting conversation, it's all good for me.

Philosophy is closely entangled with information technology.

Would you care to elaborate? I don't mean to be pigheaded, I'm not understanding the connection between philosophy and the science of information.

Philosophy is, literally, the love of knowledge. It covers a lot of ground, but much of that is directly or indirectly relevant to computing and information systems:

Epistemology, the nature of truth, value, aesthetics, ontology, logic, proof, categories, symbolic logic, quantity, ethics and morality....

https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/what.shtml

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-fuzzy/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-provability/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/

https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/rapaport_phics.pdf

Just for starters, logic is a branch of philosophy.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Computational_logic

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