Why I stopped reading HN (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

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254 pointsobilgic289 comments

The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community.

I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch.

For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.

I think it is expectations failure "the more the merrier" is not the case. Having tight 10 person group is so much better than having 100 people group.

You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.

The Evaporative Cooling Effect hits hard.

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

... and, more generally, "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big" (L. Kohr).

The link referenced there is 404. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

The IA has an archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20160923123125/http://blog.bumbl...

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers?

"Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only <person, writing on topic> pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"; 8pm: "Show me puns, please". "Show me anything the author thinks is good, if their self-evaluation rating on the topic meets the following criteria." "Don't show me anything dang rates as not meeting criteria X".

Even USENET 30 years ago had people sharing kill files (don't show me comments whose headers match [patterns]). They weren't sufficient to check eternal September, but we can do better now. It seems like there's a rich design space available here that we've not been exploring. What am I missing?

Perhaps something like the Nest thermostat approach might be best: have something that learns your preferences based on time, day of the week, and other factors. Maybe it attempts to see what kind of mood you're in?

No, please, no. It will end up like youtube: spend one evening watching chess videos, and suddenly all your recommendations are chess videos. And afterwards on a meta level there is anxiety with everything you click on and how it might influence your filters.

Adding a feature to a system, like learning, may require additional user control to preserve empowerment. What if you had transparency and control over the interest vectors/graphs used, and management of the training set? A system can learn from reader actions, both about reader preferences, and about the content. Whether that's used for empowerment, or dystopia... hopefully we don't find that design choice is so forced, that the only way to avoid the latter is to neglect the former.

But I only want to read comments I agree with. :-)

> afterwards on a meta level there is anxiety with everything you click on and how it might influence your filters

Yes I have so much hesitation where I am curious about someone’s fringe viewpoint but DO NOT want to be swamped with more of the same

Or a personal assistant? As there's potential for rich interactive refinement, as well as learned inference.

As with Nest, there's an architectural privacy challenge. You'd like your pa to have insights like "oh, your interests on topic X align closely with other-person, so let's see, maybe you'd like thing too?". Ideally using local or trusted computes. But you don't in general want other-person's pa to know all your things. So perhaps an ecology of trusted visibility? Your pa can run parts of itself on a bonded site, with greater visibility than it would have locally, but with restrictions on what it can report back? But that's hairy and hard. So...?

I wonder how the defaults would be chosen on such a platform - especially for visitors that have no profile.

Perhaps default to status quo? So a manual moderator filter, and vote ordering?

Then there's a customization problem. "Following this blog post, I installed the hn-isnt-reddit style, added the extended-debate-is-wonderful plugin policy, and configured them to ... ".

I would like to see a tagging system that could be used for filtering or just viewed on the comment itself. I almost always view every discussion board I'm on as wide open as possible in order to see taboo-breaking or uncomfortable opinions and to get an idea of where the population of readers is leaning on a topic and tags by other users would also be useful. It's more information about why people like or dislike things, which I find almost as interesting as the comments themselves.

Hmm, neat, so sort of optimizing for people/community watching? Allow users a richer expression, not to provide the system with more insight to improve recomendations, but to provide other users with more insight into users, individually and collectively. And since the system is learning about both content and users, it too might contribute insights, modulo privacy, somehow. Intriguing.

If some of the tags were common, then they could be used by the user to filter content. Things like "impolite", "not-pc" (or whatever the pc version of that would read), "combative", "inflammatory", "informative", "insightful", etc. They would also give me an idea of what kinds of things trigger others. I'm in my mid-50s, and I still have a hard time not accidentally using a phrase that others might consider rude because I've been using it all my life and don't really think about what it actually might mean.

I don't know if it would be helpful by giving people more information, or detrimental by giving people more information on why their comment was downvoted.

Slashdot does this to some extent. Moderators are invited to choose from a small subset of tags. The most used tag by the moderators is listed next to the comment's karma. Your idea would be a generalization of what Slashdot does, and it certainly has merit.

I am not sure your idea works for my goals.

My goal of reading others is to discuss with my "antiself" to quote CS Lewis and the linked OP.

I would fall into an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing what I already think. That is not good for me.

Alternatively if externally I continue to grow and change, depending on the rate of change, the pattern would provide more and more mismatching results.

In essence we are back to the same problem. I do not know think this can be automated in a simplistic way.

"Only show me quality comments with which I'm likely to disagree"? Just enable the bubble-buster policy plugin and check the antiself option?

As one grows, one's taste in say book selections changes, so why not in filter patterns and associated readings?

I want an environment that mirrors the serendipitous nature of real physical life conversation.

What you're proposing seems very similar to blocking people who you feel shouldn't be allowed to contribute.

"...forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society ..."

I'm obviously exaggerating my point, but this snippet of a definition feels appropriate.

> this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community.

It seems to be many people could agree on this. When a community grows, most of the time old members would start to struggle about the problem.

I wonder, could there be a design where it is a typical community, then when enough old or hardcore members realized this and believe this is no good it would trigger a threshold, they can vote to fork or diverge to a new community? This is a repeatable process, and then there would be multiple communities with different vibes where everyone can enjoy.

All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out.

People come to these places for various reasons:

- To debate

- To learn

- To engage intellectually with other people

- To be heard/validated

- To gain social standing

The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore.

As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).

What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?

The ability to keep track of more than 100 social connections in our head would probably solve the lions share of problems, as that's normally how we keep things civil. So far our only method of dealing with more than that many people has been bureaucracy and rule sets. Bureaucracy crushes and alienates, and rules are cheated.

I usually take a REST-like approach when dealing with people on the internet. With most people I just don't keep track of who they are beyond the end of the conversation because it's a waste of time. If we get to discuss again, I will judge that new discussion on its own merit.

Interestingly, this way of thinking has lead me to stop reading user names a lot of the time.

I believe we would need more empathy, realising that our own voice is not more important that others, trying to understand their position instead of trying to debunk it at all costs, basically less trying to "win the discussion" every time. At least for me this is something that I find lacking nowadays in internet discussions.

> What does fully evolving to big crowds look like?

birds, fishes, insects

basically some kind of hive mind

> the initial population has been crowded out

I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming.

One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"

My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.

I'm not sure what your point was? It sounds like you want to see links to stuff like

"Show HN: Here's my first program"

    10 PRINT "My Name"
    20 GOTO 10

I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. A "Show HN" that's some new programmer implementing their first version of X even though X has been around for years isn't "news" unless they have some novel approach.

I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy.

Interesting. I never though the "News" part meant much at all. A substantial portion of the links that get highly upvoted here, and attract active discussion, are actually quite old.

To my mind, the main "thing" is that submissions be interesting (for some definition of "interesting"), not that they be "news".

I guess it just goes to show how different people can look at the exact same thing and interpret it differently.

Hackernews was never about hackers, it was about startup tech founder types (that maybe or maybe not considered themselves as hackers).

A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs.

Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...

What constitutes a hack has changed.

Once upon a time it was clever things you could do with hardware. Like how Carmack figured out how to do smooth side-scrolling on EGA hardware, leading to Commander Keen.

These days, it seems a hack is often duct-taping together a bunch of third-party stuff, often for visual effect. E.g. connecting a database of some kind to a map, or a funky visualization. With a broader audience online, something that relates to a wider audience gets more traction.

I think there is overlap between both of these kinds of hack and startups, but the overlap is bigger with the latter kind. Building a business using as many shortcuts as you can, leveraging what other people built, is much more efficient than doing almost everything yourself, which is what was required in the early days. The early days was about exploiting hardware; these days, it's about exploiting existing software and data.

Detailed posts about languages and libraries isn't really hack territory IMO, unless they're exploits of some kind.

Depends on the timezone, I guess?

When I browse, it's a mix between the two groups and a third group that upvotes and engages with the post you said "hackers in the archetypical sense" would.

(The timezone thing is starting to become my stock reply; when I browse the semi-regular threads of how HN is going downhill or no longer populated by hackers, half of the claims disagree with my daily experience on this site. Can't explain it in any other way.)

>Depends on the timezone, I guess?

Of course you would say that, given your username!

A fair point!

this place was originally called StartupNews after all...

Building your own version of something that already exists can be a really cool hack.

> One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"

So? With the number of people who have access to development tools it's hard to build something that doesn't already exist. I think it's a shame that when someone shares something the first reaction is to shoot them down by saying it already exists, but it's helpful to give the OP and others an idea of what's already out there

Also even though forums are anonymous if you spend enough time somewhere and the community is small you end up getting to know the people and that has a value in itself - I miss that about early Internet forums - unfortunately this doesn't scale at all.

> initial population has been crowded out.

This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity.

You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.

This is something that's bothered me for a while, but I'm beginning to make peace with it. Everything is ephemeral, nothing good lasts, and if you want to find the good stuff you have to keep searching. It's the cycle of life for anything of value - first it's niche, then it goes mainstream, then it turns to crap. True for online communities, products (digital and physical), and probably much more.

Ok, there's one thing that seems to last: the linux desktop never takes off. Some people bemoan this, I like it. It means that the Linux I love won't go away...not just yet, anyway. Every year that linux fails to popularize on the desktop is another year I don't have to go looking for a new niche tool that will do what I want instead of what its creators want.

edit: typos

I've said this before but, given time, the HN comment sections always sort themselves nicely.

I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.

Either HN has some incredibly smart sorting algorithm, or the level of discussion here is amazing for the number of users.

On sites like Reddit the first 2 or 3 top level comments are puns, sarcastic one liners or a variation on the current meme.

Or it might be a matter of etiquette: the same user on HN upvotes the smart comment and then goes on Reddit and upvotes the dismissive and overused quip.

It's the etiquette. The community standards are by no means perfect, or always adhered to, but in general, if you want to dismiss something or post a joke, you have to put some work into it.

> level of discussion here is amazing

The demographics is different. Reddit audience is 50% random teenagers and 90% teens + college students -- browsing on an app looking for quickly-consumed content. HN is probably majority people slacking off at work and hence more "mature"...

(It doesn't hurt that dang will just delete the content-free pun/meme comments when people get tempted to up-vote them.)

>> As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds

I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what

These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck.

The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.

Think there's a missing chunk from this comment :-)

You mean my garbled sentences, or something else?

"It is in YNH's view what"...

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say.

And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog.

That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results.

What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.

Do you have some examples of quality technical comments (conforming to the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) being downvoted to hell? (Not disputing you at all, just curious for some concrete examples.)

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS887US887&hl=en...

So I guess the answer is no, given that the first two comments are not technical comments, and while they were perhaps pithy or correct in their observations, they were not quality comments either.

Of I course I myself feel that I have been unfairly downvoted in the past, but I do have a more strict rule for when I would downvote someone than most people seem to have. On the other hand all my upvotes have been 100% totally deserved, I'm just lucky that way.

I have a lot of examples, so why not show concrete examples? Because then those comments become the discussion and I don't want to go into a discussion that I've already said it's polarized, shaped as a popularity contest and thus rigged.

Maybe it's OK downvoting comments because they're factually wrong. But this has become downvoting comments because the downvoter has a different opinion. As soon as there is a very popular opinion, you can't even state facts that contradict that opinion without being downvoted.

I'm not here to promote some agenda. If I find uneasy to express an opinion, I just shut up, I don't lose anything personally.

Edit: if you really want, you can pass a comment through the barrier, with a lot of pre-emptive disclaimers and anticipating objections, seven paragraphs of socratic explanations and trying to sound so erudite as to seed a doubt to the knee-jerk downvoter. Too much work for simple stuff.

> Not just discussions about politics,

I still find HN to be one of the most politics-free places on the Internet, which is nice. Granted, I avoid almost everything that talks about US computer programmers vs the rest of the world computer programmers, discussions which tend to have not that nice xenophobic nuance to them, but the rest of the discussions are pretty civil.

Also (and of course), I also avoid almost everything related to Apple-Google-Tesla, the conflict of interests in here are too big (lots of Apple/Google employees, lots of owners of Tesla shares), so I realise that nothing productive can come out of those conversations. Surprisingly, I find that Microsoft employees are a lot more open to criticism, and I say that as a person who used to dislike MS massively (I still hold them partly responsible for the failure of OLPC)

I'd really be interested in hearing which TECHNICAL forums are more political?

I personally don't regard this as a technical forum, more like a general-discussion forum of things that are of interest to (mostly) technical people.

Slashdot. I dare you to wade into a political discussion there. It’s all name calling and vitriol. So toxic.

I find HN to be a very specific political demographic of great interest, so when I read it, it's with the specific intent of exposing myself to the point of view of this very specific political demographic.

That's not the same thing as a specific POV or catechism: the demographic actively seeks novel answers and ideas in certain ways so long as larger assumptions remain unchallenged, and even then the right framing can work wonders. It's the demographic that remains consistent, even predictable. The position of this demographic isn't always a given.

If you replace “political” with “intellectual” or “social” or “philosophical” I’d agree with you. If you start challenging larger assumptions, you might get a few new insights, but the danger is ending up in the swamp of post-modernism that would make Napoleon’s march to Moscow look like a productive use of time and resources in comparison.

I was surprised that trump being hospitalized for covid hadn't been posted and submitted a link, but it was flagged.

Puzzled I checkd the FAQ, which led me to the guidelines and there I found the magic:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

So politics is mercifully off-topic by design.

check them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>So politics is mercifully off-topic by design.

And yet, in spite of Hacker News' disdain for both politics and repetition, any story about Julian Assange, including daily posts about his hearing, will remain untouched[0].

What's really off topic isn't politics, but politics HN doesn't agree with.

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

If it’s novel enough, or it won’t attract enough down or up votes regardless, then I don’t really see the issue with this.

Nobody cares enough about Assange, but a Trump post would be a bloodbath.

It's just odd and a bit frustrating that there never seems to be enough people to flag certain politically-charged subjects, whereas there is always someone at the ready to flag others, regardless of the relative merit of the discussions being had.

It would be interesting to see links to the highly meritorious politically-charged discussions that were flagged.

Adding the purely subjective qualifier "highly meritorious" makes it seem as if you intend to make me waste my time searching for links only to categorically dismiss them all out of hand. That's a common form of trolling that should be beneath you. Most stories or comment threads here wouldn't meet the bar for "highly meritorious" so there's no reason political stories should as well. Anyway, you should know of some examples since you unflagged them. You mention sometimes doing so here[0].

I found a couple of examples, as well as comments by others who've noticed the same issue. I'm not trawling through the archives to try to make an exhaustive list, though.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24296079

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24504297

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24667006

[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610890

[4]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147116

[5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291582

[6]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23677740

Ok, I've gone through that list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24504297 was not a good discussion (many of the comments in it were flagkilled, so anyone who wants to see how bad it was would need to turn 'showdead' on in their profile). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24667006 was ok, but small; had the post stayed on the front page it would almost certainly have turned into a flamewar. We turned off the flags on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23677740, so that's an example of a discussion not being suppressed. Your other links just point to meta threads.

These links seem to me to point to a system that is working reasonably well, the main problem with which is that people say a lot of untrue things about it. That's inevitable—people say a lot of untrue things in general. I don't think it's possible to do better than 'reasonably well', for many reasons, including: there's too much randomness, we don't see everything, and a lot of these situations are lose-lose.

If you're suggesting that we should just have political free-for-alls on HN, that is quite impossible—HN would not survive it. If you're not suggesting that, it's unclear to me what your complaint is. Too much Assange? Everyone thinks that HN has too much of $something.

How we moderate politics on HN is well-established, and clearly explained at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone have a better idea, I'd love to hear it, but please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why it won't work.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. I think it's the "hacker" half of the "hacker-politics" that makes it on topic here. The story is developing over time; sure some non-newsworthy Assange articles get posted here sometimes but in general I don't think it's incongruous with HN.

>I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc.

And every possible iteration of that has been hashed and rehashed to death at this point - Assange is a hero and should be pardoned, Assange is a traitor and should be punished, Assange is guilty of sexual assault, Assange was framed, Assange is being tortured, the entire trial is a farce, Assange is a Russian stooge, Assange is a CIA stooge, Assange is a hologram meant to distract you from Epstein, insert rant about the American military industrial complex and war crimes here.

Is there so much new and interesting intellectual content to be gleaned from Assange's hearing that we need to milk it every single day?

The grandparent to my post was talking about politics, not repetition. I shouldn't have strayed and conceded that it's repetitive because this is my point: hacker-politics is on topic here.

"hacker politics" is in the eye of the beholder. There's no clear delineation between "politics" and "hacker politics" in an age when Facebook can be used to organize a genocide.

One could say that many Trump stories are "hacker politics" because of Trump's unprecedented use of social media, and the effect that social media as a whole has had on the American political landscape since his election, leading to the "fake news" phenomenon and controversies about the influence of social media platforms and their ability to manipulate public perception. The investigations into Trump's relationship with Russia, Wikileaks and the DNC leaks certainly touch on "hacker" themes and Assange specifically. And a strong case could be made that stories about gender and racial disparity in tech and programming count as "hacker politics."

Yet again, many such stories are more likely to be flagged than anything to do with Assange exclusively. "hacker politics" is not the standard actually being applied here, rather it's aggregate political bias. Do you think a story about, say, an Antifa or BLM hacking group would stand on technical merit alone?

Stories about "Trump's unprecedented use of social media" could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make "Trump stories" in general on-topic.

Stories about "the effect that social media as a whole has had on the American political landscape" could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make US politics in general on-topic.

Stories about "the influence of social media platforms and their ability to manipulate public perception" could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories about "fake news" in general on-topic.

Stories about the Wikileaks organisation could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories derived from the contents of particular leaks on-topic.

Stories about the DNC data leak could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories derived from the contents of the DNC data leak on-topic.

Stories about gender and racial disparity in tech and programming could be on-topic. That doesn't necessarily make stories about gender and racial disparity in general on-topic.

Stories about an Antifa or BLM hacking group could be on-topic. That doesn't neccessarily make stories about Antifa or BLM in general on-topic.

Personally, I don't find this distinction particularly hard. As for "bias", I've seen sentiments on this site that could broadly be categorised as Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, etc. Of course, there is a heavy political bias, but I'd say it's generally just "US-centric" (which is to be expected, as this is a US site); e.g. as a UK citizen I find some of the comments very bizarre (usually anything involving guns, healthcare, abortion, etc.). It can still be interesting, and if not I can just collapse the thread or close the page.

Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064097, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211437, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362035. People accuse us just as often (more often, rather) of suppressing Assange stories.

You're overgeneralizing based on the special case of the extradition trial. Arguably that was over-covered here, but it was hardly because of the sinister situation you're imagining. We just weren't following it very closely.

The principles of how we moderate political topics on HN are well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The principles of how people arrive at inaccurate generalizations about it are also well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If there's any aspect of this problem that hasn't been thoroughly discussed and answered at those links, I'd like to know what it is.

Gray area boundary. There is enough overlap with technology related news in that story that while it is political, it's also tech. HN errs on the side of inclusivity here.

Odds of any given submission or story landing is highly variable and arbitrary.

I land a fair bit of content on the front page, but also submit a lot. Many of my successful items are surprises, much of what I'd like to see take hold doesn't. I'll submit certain ‘beats‘ of interest regularly (different items), hopefully without becoming too polemical. I also scan 'new' upvoting items of interest frequently. I'll nominate items from others for the 2nd chance queue (email the mods).

The Assange story is complex, has always been inherently political, and those politics have dhifted, as has awareness of interactions and consequences. Assange was always controversial. Many who'd once admired his work, and who can point to specific good acts and valuable releases, are also now skeptical of his intentions and connections. Myself among them.

But items concerning him and his case(s) can still be submitted.

> highly variable and arbitrary

I think it might be that a few upvotes around submission time might be the deciding factor.

It would be interesting if there was an algorithm that would statistically separate upvotes from "number of eyeballs on the site" somehow.

maybe something like:

- 100 people saw this subject - maybe toward top of page = more likely count as "see" - of that x% upvoted it - make it more visible

maybe I should have said "TV politics"? I think assange/snowden/etc kinds of stories are more computer politics.

Ditto for looking at older posts/discussions. I usually use https://hn.algolia.com/ when searching Hacker News though.

Great to have you on board, commenting here and there :)

Tip:

DuckDuckGo has the !hn bang for searching in the algolia page, so just stick it to the end of your query instead of site:news.ycombinator.com and you are good to go!

I noticed the algolia search is not very good and doesn’t go back as far. I think it limits results to 6 years or so.

Weird, because the front page with the most popular of all time show posts from 9+ years ago, but if you search something popular like "microsoft" and sort by date it only goes back a few months. I think it truncates by a 1000 results or so

This place is one of the most urbane communities in which I’ve participated. It can still get bit “catty,” but nothing that even comes close to what I’ve experienced (and contributed to -mea culpa) in the past.

Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter.

In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.”

I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive.

I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past.

I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.

> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS.

This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well.

What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

This is why I think the future is actually in smaller action-based forums. Like, if you want to achieve something, you would join a group based on that goal, and it would not be structured around posts/news, it would instead be structured in a way that would break down the goal into finer and finer chunks, that people could collaborate on and actually submit/assign/judge tasks to perform.

All this karma circlejerking is getting boring. Nothing gets done.

Totally agree. We could even give it a name, like Usenet or sth?

> sth

What is sth?

something[0]

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth

The same author has a post from 2013 (3 years after "Why I stopped reading HN") addressing what is lost when programmers chase internet points.

https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-...

It resonates with me because I often find myself scrolling HN when I was meaning to be working on a project, both at work and at home.

I don't know if this[0] will help with your scrolling but it helps with mine. I made it so I could more quickly scan new stories today not mixed amongst popular stories from past days. It also groups common themes (e.g. covid, etc) so I can scan/skip them as a group, leaving the unclassified/interesting stories at the top. Any/all feedback welcome.

[0] https://hackerer.news/

Interesting because in the original post, he declares his resolve to quit HN and declares that he's not visited it in one whole month. "Yeah, right", I thought, and indeed in the intervening 3 years, he came back.

I'd wager most of us have needed a break at some point. I myself have gone through at least 4 accounts since 2006. I periodically "delete" them by setting minaway to 999999999. The act of starting over with a new account with zero fake internet points does help keep their value in perspective, though.

I gave you an upvote.

I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally trending up, which I take to mean I’m generally adding more than I’m detracting. If it was generally trending down, I might consider if I’m coming across wrong / being misunderstood , or maybe something is wrong with the people here!

Also if you want more karma, just repost old posts that got a lot of votes, like the OP did :D. Likely to at least some votes esp if still relevant.

> I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Interesting perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain karma from comments is writing a "The article gets it completely wrong. Here's why..." type comment[1]. HN highly rewards this kind of comment. Discussion after discussion is riddled with them. It might help to exemplify taking risks in the space of possible comments. There are a number of interesting axes in this space.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JadeColoredGlass...

HN should highly reward this kind of comment, because it aids the reader in determining what to spend their limited time in reading. If it is done well. Editor, not censor. Not “I don’t like this political view”, but “The assertions aren’t supported by facts” or “These facts should also be considered”. Anyone who spent any time judging Baldrige Quality Award submissions would know the drill.

Early on, karma meant you had an interesting comment. If the comment made you comment, it was pretty automatically worthy of an upvote, even if you disagreed.

Later, it turned into more of an agree-disagree vote.

I receive this post's stimulus, condense my individual thoughts into a new stimulus, and output it as a post for future readers. Sometimes I receive stimuli from those readers (votes, responses) and the cycle feeds back on itself, usually attenuating until the conversation fades out but occasionally amplifying in intensity until the conversation fails spectacularly (ban, rage-quit, Godwin's law, etc). We're the neurons in this society's brain.

On karma points (roughly how aligned is the individual's signaling with the group's signaling), it's useful to the individual for calibrating their (outputted) opinions to better align with the group's. That was a critical piece of surviving as a social creatures.

Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

Probably.

I wonder if karma was hidden from us if it would do something to curb this compulsiveness. Seeing instant feedback, a number going up or down is very stimulating compared to nothing, or even a very broad "over 0/under 0" status as a middle ground.

Fun History Fact: HN used to show the karma of every single comment to every single user! This was changed for exactly this reason.

You can still get the "over/under 0" because posts under zero get progressively grayed out the farther under zero they go.

I've had -3 karma for about 6 years now. Kind of proud of it. My only comment was trying to be helpful with a link but it got downvoted a bit.

oh— what to do— what to do....

That has happened to me.

As someone who recently hunted for karma, it's pretty easy. First you have to decide if you want to slowly amass karma by comments, or try to get lucky by submitting links. Submitting links is easier if you have a source to draw upon. There is a newest links page on a certain crustacean-named website which is a good source for this. If you've been reading HN, then you should have a good idea which articles will appeal to this audience and curating these links (mostly based on the headline) is a 5-10 minute exercise. Think of it as link arbitrage.

Posting comments might be easier if you don't have a source for new links. Again, if you have a pulse on HN, it's not too hard. You don't even have to lie, just slant your take to appeal to the audience. HN loves clever hacks, cynicism, free speech, definite statements. Often times it's better to be a little bit wrong because your comment will attract a lot of rebuttals trying to correct you.

These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy (https://hackerdaily.io). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits:

1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute.

2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not.

It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself.

It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome!

Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.

Nice layout and idea. What do you mean "all posts per day"? Seems it shows a selection?

It takes all posts that were posted on a certain day (based on your local timezone) and shows these posts ordered by their score. To keep it clean only posts with a score of 50 or higher are shown. (I might change this number though, if people would like to see less popular posts)

E.g. the main page is always 'yesterday', so for me it shows the posts that were posted between 00:00 and 23:59 on Wednesday, but if its already Friday where you are it will show the top posts of Thursday.

The second point is great one. Occasionally I have to stop reading HN and leave the tab open for a day because I want to read the conversation in full instead of rereading again later trying to figure out which comments are new.

I had the exact same problem. There are a lot of interesting discussions, but its way easier to distinguish the interesting from the useless discussions when they're done instead of ongoing. I find that I read more carefully and focused when the discussion are already crystallized, instead of just browsing the latest discussions for some dopamine.

Gotta say Hackerdaily is impressive. Where you pre-load the article for some sites, is that RSS you're using or something else?

Also any chance you'd share the source for this?

Thank you! I mainly build it to learn GraphQL and Postgres for myself. But if people are interested, I could share the source in the future.

I'd like to express interest. I really like your take on how to group the information available and think that you design is very pleasant.

There is even a movement that thinks building a HN reader is "A spiritual successor to TodoMVC".[1] I don't know if that is of any interest to you but I thought leave that here.

[1] https://hnpwa.com/

I will start looking into how to make the code open source before launching the project officially!

Unfortunately I won't be able to submit the project to https://hnpwa.com since they only allow (more or less) direct copies of HackerNews to their directory. [1]

[1] https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas

I like the idea, but I'm wondering about the legality of copying the contents of news.ycombinator. Do you have any thoughts on this?

HackerNews has an open API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API). It doesn't say anything specific about the legality and there have been many HackerNews clones in the past. So as far as I know it should not be a problem, but if anyone can correct me I would love to hear so!

Needs dark theme.

Done. :)

It doesn't work for me, it shows an empty feed for all days.

It looks great. I can't seem to minimize the comments and seeing an exception in console. I am on chrome desktop.

That's weird! I've used it mainly on Chrome so far and I've not yet encountered this problem. Does it keep happening or was it once?

I keep getting this on most news items for example on https://hackerdaily.io/24741077/comments i get this error

  DOMException: Failed to execute 'appendChild' on 'Node': This node type does not support this method.
    at Object.appendChild (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:41326)
    at m (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54249)
    at v (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:53880)
    at _ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:54335)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57721)
    at P (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:57656)
    at f.__patch__ (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:58133)
    at f.t._update (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:35072)
    at f.r (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:65536)
    at _n.get (https://hackerdaily.io/_nuxt/commons/app.977ae7a.js:1:27248)

Folding works in this one though https://hackerdaily.io/24740266/comments

Thank you for that tool. I'd suggest on a post to add a link to the original page on ycombinator.com, in case one wants to read it there.

In the same style, I like to use the "top 10/20" on https://hckrnews.com/

Thank you, I'll probably post it on the main page when It's a bit more finished.

Minor thing: the number are right-aligned but the element doesn't have minimum size, so they still have a cascading layout instead of a straight alignment.

Yes, need to fix this. Thank you!

Great job! It really fits the way I consume HN which is just once per day usually.

I like the outline.com article style, and also discovered outline.com in the process.

I am not a huge fan of the layout for the comments, it feels a bit too big for me and a bit hard to follow along, as it switches between authors and so on, but that might just be a personal preference.

You should probably consider making it open-source as it is definitely the type of project I would like to contribute to!

Thank you for building this!

I use this one... https://hckrnews.com/

> It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles,

I don't see that. When click on the articles, it is just going to the articles. Otherwise ,it is really nice and I do like the idea of it not becoming an addictive slot machine.

It depends on the webpage, if the webpage is not an article it just redirects to the webpage. If there is a book icon before the the title the webpage has been converted to an article.

I just want to say that you NAILED a UX issue I see with Hackernews comments, at least for me - when I am reading through the comments on a HN post, I often find myself several layers deep into a conversation that I realize I am not interested in any more. Either some facet of the topic, or maybe a side conversation (like the one we having now about HackerDaily). I want to "jump out" of this conversation and back to the "main topic", but I have to scroll up until I get to root of this topic and click the collapse sign (-) next to the parent to easily get to the next conversation tree. However, I may be pages and pages down from where this conversation started and have to page up and up and up. Alternatively, I can page down and down and down to try to find where this topic ends. Neither works very well.

But what you do is provide a line of minus signs (-) at the top left that grows and shrinks with the tree and at any time I can click one of these to collapse a parent post! This is great! Being a UX aficionado I am tickled that you have not only seen the same pain, but found an elegant solution for it. Well done!

Isn't that the same thing that the [-] sign doesn in HN? Works the same way for me.

But scroll down. As you scroll down, the line of minus signs grows. When you are 6 comments deep into a conversation (where each comment is a reply to the last. The comments are all indented to the right), there is a line of 6 minus signs at the top left (------).

If you click on the second minus sign on the left, it collapses the conversation up to that parent without having to scroll up to that level.

I see! I can see the - signs but clicking them does nothing...

Yeah, I had this problem too on one page. I clicked on another article and it worked. Looks like it is a little buggy (founder take note!)

Yes, I am aware of the issue (see my recent comment on one of the parent comments).

I am afraid that it is an issue with the way some browsers render the CSS sticky position. If you have any CSS knowledge, I would greatly appreciate your input!

For my information, which browser do you use?

I tried both Google Chrome and Firefox (also, Brave)

Thank you, this truly warms my heart!

I have poured too many hours of my life into this little detail. It still doesn't work great though:

1. It is hard to click on on mobile devices

2. It sometimes renders behind the comment or is not clickable (not always, just sometimes). I am afraid this has something to do with the way browsers render the CSS sticky position, so I might not be able to fix this. I am not very experienced in CSS though, so if you've any advice on how to fix this I would truly appreciate it!

Because of the above two issues I might need to go back to just a fixed minus button. :(

My current thought about how to fix this is to have a link called 'parent' or 'up' next to each comment timestamp. Clicking on it would scroll you one level up. Disadvantage: you'd have to click it once for each level you want to go up. Advantage: it's simpler than any alternative I know of.

What percentage of this problem would that fix?

This is an interesting idea! The problem is that you regularly get 8+ levels deep, so that's a lot of clicks. Maybe two buttons (for parent and for top-level parent) might do the trick?

That's a good suggestion—thanks. Maybe 'parent' and 'top', or 'up' and 'top'.

I've wanted something like this for a long time, and had resigned myself to using the algolia search, sorting by votes, and looking at the previous week. This is awesome. Thank you for making this!!!

fyi, your site raises security flags on firefox (81.0.1) and chrome (85.0.4183.121) for me.

"Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized."

I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with everything. But it gets harder and harder to keep the political op-eds at bay, or as the author of this blog mentions, the fruitless arguments that don't go anywhere.

I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.

Ditto.

On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.

I guess everybody has different experiences, but by and large, the subreddits I frequent are reasonable enough

Passively getting news that starts to include more political op-eds is a very different issue than actively participating in a toxic community though.

Not saying either of you are wrong. Just saying they are different issues.

Twitter has to be the worst major platform. It is a rollercoaster of misery, disgust, and annoyance.

And there isn’t even a proverbial nugget in the turd to make it worth it.

I got rid of twitter for exactly the reasons you mentioned and the for what it did to my inner well-being. There are some accounts that I've enjoyed following and even after leaving the platform I still use the RSS feed of nitter.net for these to browse these posts. No doubt that if I'd sign up again even with an intention not to post myself and only to lurk, I'd get sucked into toxic discussions within less than a week. nitter gives me the distance I need to consume the content (on my terms) without risking addiction or potentially contributing to the toxicity myself.

I prefer Twitter to Facebook. I still think there are threads on Twitter (daily!) where things can be learned in real time for later follow up/reflection. It isn’t a good medium for arguing though. This experience may be a reflection of my particular old school circle (I joined in 2006)

Facebook unfortunately doesn’t have vibe where people You trust can jump in and provide an insightful thread. It’s just stacked piles of trolling and baiting. Its only saving grace is keeping in touch with family and friends who don’t use any other platforms.

In my case, Facebook is for things like checking what my old aunt back in Italy is up to. Granted it’s not what I would describe as “insightful content” but at the same time, I’m never going to be upset for something my old aunt said. Twitter and Reddit on the other hand were having a really negative influence on my well-being. I’m sure you can use them in a “sanitised” way and avoid the trolling and hate, but it’s hard and requires a lot of self discipline. I’m not sure why I don’t get the “bad part” of Facebook, I’m starting to think that it’s cultural - Facebook is the only social network that I use, that still “thinks I’m Italian” and pushes me localised Italian content. On Twitter and Reddit on the other hand I exclusively follow content in English and/or related to Australia, the country where I now live.

I'm surprised people expected differently from a platform where every conversation is a shouting match by design.

But there is, as long as you stay within people with 5k to 50k followers, particularly in niche fields, and use mute words often.

Nah, there's a lot of nuggets there. Keep away from the political trash and follow people who post interesting things that you like. For example, I like old video games, so I follow people who talk about old video games.

This guy posts cool, obscure Mario trivia: https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog

A wiki about cut content in old games retweets cool new finds: https://twitter.com/CuttingRoomWiki

This non-profit posts articles about classic gaming: https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg

Oh and the Homestar Runner guys started making content again, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StrongBadActual

There's lots of nuggets. It's not even hard to find them among all the shit. If you're following someone whose content you don't like, just stop following them. One big tip I wish was more obvious is that you can turn off retweets from specific people you follow. So if someone posts cool content themselves, but also retweets a bunch of political trash, you can get the former without any of the latter.

Those are cool, but the problem is that Twitter shows you a load of turds for any nuggets. I just want it to click your link and read a thread, instead they minimize a thread and show me politics and celebrities below, and trending stuff on the right (desktop).

On the old reddit at least (stopped using after the new launch), if I went to /r/technology I’d only see /r/technology and that was pure nuggets. You could also unsub any default subreddits

The Twitter web client is trash, definitely agree with you there. I use a 3rd party mobile client (Twidere on Android). There are some clever uBlock rules you can use to make the web client a bit less shit (e.g. hide the "What's Happening" box), but it's hard to keep up with.

I read Twitter for one thing: comments during a major disaster, but only for the first 24 hours or so of the event. It’s easy to filter the OMG posts and you get immediate relevant information.

There are two/three groups of users on twitter:

- the "celebs" (anyone which is moderately famous)

- the "old school" (which usually forms tight groups and doesn't get as much hate mail)

- the newcomers (anyone that joined, let's say < 5yr ago). Those are mostly wallowing in a pit of sadness

I'm relatively new to HN but a reddit "senior", and one of the things I really appreciate about this place is the relative lack of toxicity. To me, it seems people really come here for civil discussion and default to asking questions instead of flaming. Well, that and more people source their claims.

From a 30 year view of communities, including Fido, Usenet, Reddit and many others, I’d attribute that to @dang’s and @pg’s benevolent dictatorship.

Many communities start out nice and well meaning, but at some point devolve into a Wild West. HN did not, and I think that’s thanks to dang’s moderation (and pg’s at an earlier time)

Also, “small” things like dropping the vote counts, and having canonical rules for titles (which are, as pg noted, a “commons” but treated in other platforms as a land grab) reduces competition and bragging rights. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of what keeps the people looking for conversation here, and those looking mostly for signaling and gratification out.

As the great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said: “God is in the details.”

Mies’ work wasn’t without flaws or detractors, but then compare one of his subtle, perfected masterworks to the infinite cheap and nasty boxes that leveraged only the sketch outline of his style.

Now translate that into any field, absolutely including online community building. There’s no question where HN stands.

Have been reading reddit since 5 or so years now, but pretty much only the frontpage. I like reddit but it has gotten so political and toxic. Many posts boil down to "haha look how stupid this person is". I sometimes skim the controversial comments to see what the hive mind disapproves of. Recently, on the mega threat of Trump being covid positive, the controversial comments were along the lines of "I don't like Trump but I hope he gets better, nobody deserves covid". So not wishing someone death is bad? Overall reddit is pretty toxic.

I think you absolutely must avoid the front page. Reddit seems to have a relatively young audience, and the front page just gets the guff that the average teenager likes (at best, puppies; at worst, self-righteous posturing and feeble jokes). If you look into the subforums, they can be very different. Something serious like r/statistics has little in common with a hilarious shitshow like r/wallstreetbets.

TBH that’s good moderation (And scalable algorithms to delegate such privilege) at work. there are plenty of flames and toxicity here, they’re just suppressed.

Also the really controversial topics tend to get flagged.

Moderation is relatively easy with a community like HN.

Facebook and Twitter desperately need moderation - but they're built completely differently and much larger. Moderation there will immediately be compared to censorship, which Twitter and FB are afraid of because it threatens their money.

We're so afraid of one good idea being hidden by moderation that we allow thousands of bad ideas - which eventually create a hive-mind and drive out the good ideas anyway.

TBH on Hacker News it's also a problem. If you have a point of view that is consistent with the majority of users (or with the users who write lots of comments), then everything is fine. But if your point of view differs, then you're often downvoted into oblivion. This is often not a good place for discussing things.

Karma points are both a blessing and a curse. They are good as a form of gate-keeping but bad because I too have found myself deciding not to post a comment in case it got down-voted to oblivion. In fact I debated whether or not to post this comment for those same reasons.

I try to take down voted comments on the chin (and one of mine at -4 was absolutely warranted) but at other times it can be dis-heartening to see a comment being down-voted for no apparent reason.

I guess the answer is to not be too vain / overlly bothered about my Karma points but just as a highly upvoted comment feed the reward centres so do down votes in a whole different way.

Oh, and responsible and thoughtful use of down-voting rights please.

I hate it when I get downvoted to for asking a question, usually when someone posts a vague or unsubstantiated comment.

It's one thing to downvote an opinion, but downvoting anyone who questions an opinion, or clarification?!

I kind of think about it like the karma attained buys you the ability to occasionally say something that wrests the narrative back from the crowdmind a bit .. at least until it disappears due to the downvote pileon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's Hoping ;->

Reddit have different moderation policies for the different sub-reddits.

For example r/AskHistorians have amazing quality content due to very strict moderation.

Are there any other examples folks know about? This is the only subreddit I see suggested as being well moderated when this comes up, unfortunately I'm not into the subject

Twitter is driven by engagement, which in turn is driven by controversy.

I'm using the web and it's crazy how much memory consumes this website. After a couple of clicks the browser starts to suffer.

You're answering to a comment about a people/platform problem at Reddit with a technical issue at Reddit. While both are maybe true, one is easy to fix (with the right organization) while the other there is no solution in sight, that works at global scale. Most communities keep their feeling by remaining smaller (like HN) and strict moderation, both of which goes against what Reddit is aiming for.

https://old.reddit.com/

For the subreddits I track with RSS I've yet to encounter anything political or someone not arguing constructively. Is this something with the platform or each forum? I often don't mince words either. After a while in a community one tends to have "seen it all", so it'll be longer between nuggets produced.

How many users subscribe to those subreddits you've mentioned? I have made a similar the observation, I have a few subreddits that are very niche with only a few subscribers -- discussions are very much on point and civil. Usually, the quality and decency of discourse on a subreddit seems to be inversely related to the number of people engaging in it.

Good point. Larger averages and higher numbers will increase noise to signal by sheer mathematical outcomes. I'm on nothing extraordinary, so between 100k - 3M users per forum on reddit. They are heavily moderated, so anything less than on point, is for good and for worse removed / moved to other subreddits.

I do suspect many might be subscribing to forums that invite a bit wider discussions, and that this brings out more commenters but also less technically viable comments. I mainly use reddit / HN for RSS filtering, so is more interested in the news, but always check comments for interesting counterpoints and tips.

Why don't you just exclusively subscribe to the subreddits that interest you?

I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist.

In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints.

What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:"

"Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics"

While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often.

To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising.

..no conclusion.

> I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots.

I think it works like this:

blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted.

Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol).

I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.

> This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning.

Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff:

  Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions.

TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..

> I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.

This is why I'll never understand people who are crazy about <insert political candidate here>. No matter who they are, they will do something you disagree with. It's much easier to recognize what they did is wrong if you were never part of their group to start. Instead, I see people twisting themselves in knots to defend positions they would normally denounce.

And not just too single out politics, but I see the same thing with companies (like Apple). I also don't want to sound holier than thou either, since I've recognized it in myself before. This joining a tribe is part of the human condition, so it's something I have to actively fight against.

> Instead, I see people twisting themselves in knots to defend positions they would normally denounce.

This is actually a rational behaviour (in an f-ed up system/incentive).

Any admittance of failure will be used against your candidate, and the opposition will defend their candidate just as strongly. Consider how when celebs get involved in scandals their PR isn't always to admit fault.

Its the same thing of "repeat a lie enough.."; even if the defence itself is not accepted, it can still soften the blow of the scandal by resisting the death-blow of unanimous condemnation. Humans are sometimes herd creatures, visible support is a universal defence in itself, even if only to threaten/dissuade attackers.

In other words, this is how political theatre works.

You’re just rebranding a weakness as a strength.

vague concepts of "weak" and "strong" are closer to the semantics-free/nuance-free iconography of branding than my thoughts about political theatre. One sentence dismissals of a paragraph of text add little value to this thread, it would have been better to represent your disapproval with a downvote.

> To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective.

To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" to mean "mapping from words/sentences to a concrete meaning" and "arguing semantics" to mean "Arguing what mapping is correct or agreeing on a shared mapping".

To give a concrete example of an argument (from the article):

> Abortion is the canonical example of this type of argument: once you have decided what “life” is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one.

Deciding what "life" is by my definitions a purely semantic argument. As you try to define "life", you will want to keep almost universally agreed upon statements such as "Human life has inherent value" coherent. Some of the simplest definitions will raise issues if you start considering future and past humans. There are some interesting questions that you can try to answer by defining "life" and following the logical consequences. However, if you are only interested in abortion, most of the subtly of a definition of "life" is not relevant.

So if you are interested in only the first question you ask, arguing semantics can be a deep rabbit hole, but if you are willing to entertain new questions as you primary question, it can be interesting as its own study.

I agree. That's likely why philosophy is often so semantics heavy. Your example is apt.

OTOH, I do think that there are different levels of "bogged down in semantics."

Semantics can sometimes interesting in their own right. That's rarely a help though. The semantics are generally not interesting as used to try and win a debate.

Getting back to the original point, I think the semantic arguments are usually the shallower ones. That's not bad in itself, but being a bog, moving past semantics is a rarity once in. That tends to get annoying and boring faster than rehashing a repetitive but substantive discussion.

Say we're discussing the existence of god. "What if I consider god to be the universe itself?" might be interesting on first pass, but it's kind of boring by the third time. Environmental sustainability. It might be interesting to reflect on the etymology or politics of the term "sustainable" in the context it's used today. It rarely gets us to a more nuanced view though. Usually, it just keeps the debate in shallow water. what does the word "really" mean. What words should we use.

As I said, I think it's important to keep in mind that there is no escape. Professional philosophers get stuck in semantics regularly. OTOH, a forum is probably somewhat susceptible to shallowness (semantics are just one type) regardless. After all, it's a casual medium.

I think it's pretty clear that increasing scale is the driver for the degradation of thoughtful connections between users.

The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context?

In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users.

I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example).

Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.

On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we must cherish it for what it offers.

Absolutely, diversity is incredibly important when we're talking about different kinds of "intellectually curious" people. When diversity means letting in the trolls, the marketers and those less inclined to input constructively, that's when conversations start to degrade and loose value. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to encourage first type of diversity without becoming vulnerable to the second.

That's why we have voting. You start trolling, you're getting the boot.

You need a precise conception of trolling. going against the norm (or groupthink) and questioning them can also be seen as trolling.

Only if you're a low-effort and obvious troll, which unfortunately there seem to be plenty of.

However, smart trolls (of which HN also has plenty) learn to adapt to the local culture. HN will often permit trolling as long as it's civil, and the mods won't ban an account that posts frequent troll comments if it also sometimes posts high quality comments.

What we really need is some kind of consistent and homogenous diversity.

The author is actually still reading HN: https://sealedabstract.com/posts/metapolitics/

I'd be interested to know how often Paul Graham reads HN these days, compared to the past. Last post was 6 months ago. Prior to that, only responses to his announcement of Bel. Other than Bel, no submissions since 2014.

I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children?

I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.

I think one of the problems may be that many people on HN have moved from the lower and middle class to the upper class and so their attitude of fighting for innovation has morphed into an attitude of defending the status quo and suppressing innovation while shunning the contrarian 'hacker' ideals which they used to harbor. Unfortunately, for those of us who fell through the cracks of the system and are left behind (and who are still fighting for innovation), we are finding that more and more HN community members who used to fight alongside us are now turning against us.

The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur. Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude.

The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.

I grew up middle class, still am (although middle class has almost vanished), and hope to remain middle class. Infact, my moral compass says striving to be rich is bad.

I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful.

The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.

Agreed. And while my moral compass does allow for a very small subset of ways to be rich that I don't consider bad, as I grew up, I've learned this about innovation in tech: 90% of time it's just marketing bullshit, plain and simple.

I've grown a cynical perception of the startup scene not because I hate innovation, or want to preserve status quo - it's because I love innovation, but all I keep seeing is startups arbitraging whatever random potential gradient they can find on the market. For every true innovation like people shipping medical supplies via UAVs in developing countries, there's many more startups that just try to suck on the sweet flow of adtech money, or to make cash arbitraging laws and social trust.

The way I feel about both entrepreneurship and corporations these days: we've refined the ways of making money down to science, but in the process, we've got self-referential. We've lost sight of the big picture: that all that activity is meant to do something useful in the real world. And what's less hackery than self-serving innovation, where the actual thing being done is the free variable, and the only goal is to redirect the flow of dollars?

To some degree, Reddit has addressed the problem of a large online community by subdividing itself and allowing each division to moderate itself (to some degree). However, what might be more interesting is an automated subdivision of users. For example, even if HN has hundreds of thousands of users, philosophic-types would only see links and comments from other philosophic-types. Trolls would get lumped with trolls. With a significant percentage of outside-your-demographic to keep things lively as well as gather further data about what kind of community a user truly enjoys engaging with. Especially important is identifying constructive conflict — the type of person you enjoy disagreeing with (if not in the moment, at least afterward).

So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.

What about HN experimenting with tabs in the comments so if you want to have a more philosophical discussion click on the ‘Philosophy’ tab or if not maybe the ‘Technical’ discussion is more your speed. I could even see supporting an ‘Offtopic’ tab as a place where you can share ideas inspired by the post that are not exactly relevant but could spark inspiration in others.

It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?

Google is already showing different results per country and region creating bubbles of thought. News networks filter out information they think most people aren't interested in or (even worse) things they don't want people to know. Youtube messed up somewhere and after only a few clicks you're back in the "popular" video hell.

You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?

I remember in Usenet there was often a competition how much you expand a thread sideways. This might the optimal format. A discussion board with only one thread branching infinite. You could then search for significant node points, which have created more discussion and node points. Now to avoid endless wallowing in same shit year after year, I suggest automatic AI system, which does not cancel anything, but moves an arcticle to the node it mostly belongs. And as high as possible regardless of creation time.

There is a life to a forum... for badly run forums it's measured in years, for the best of the best a couple of decades.

There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth.

Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all.

The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so.

I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent.

What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.

The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.

the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

But did it actually work better? I am inclined to think not as lots of people moved from ./ to HN.

I think a lot has to do with culture itself and not the moderation system. Slashdot was always a bit unruly.

I think it did. I'm an old-skool Slashdot person who just moved over to HN a year or two ago, and there are lots of things I really miss about the Slashdot moderation system.

One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems.

That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts.

As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.

Slashdot is insufferable trash today. If you read the comments, every article gets sniped by Nazi swastika ASCII art, which they still haven't bothered to ban. (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...)

How hard is it to ban the same post being made repeatedly, over and over?

Slashdot stopped trying.

I feel slashdot stopped trying ages ago when the editor had to fight to not put ads (or excessive ads) on the site. They were bought up and its been on autopilot for years.

> (You would have thought the teenagers doing this in the 90's would have grown up by now...)

They grew up. They kept their opinions and attitudes, as people do. You can grow out of graffiti, but you will still like the style. Getting older does not magically make you stop liking nazi if you liked them as teenager.

Instead, you seek to pass your values to teenagers that follow you.

From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.

I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).

Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed.

All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read.

Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".

"Disagree" describes a wide range of things though. It can be "you claim facts that are demonstrably false", "you claim facts that I cannot demonstrate are false, but I have strong doubts and you do not provide sources", "you cite correct facts but your interpretation of them is demonstrably wrong", "you cite correct facts but I interpret them differently", etc. And those are just factual disagreements, without getting into "you're making a strawman argument", etc. Thinks probably shouldn't be this fine-grained, but I hope you get the idea that there is reasonable room for more helpful feedback than "I disagree".

I left slashdot when the openly sexist comments became too frequent (they used to be less frequent). It was years ago, I dont know whether it was temporary or long term trend.

Same with 9gag btw. It was funny, then funny with occasional eye roll and then "I dont have to look at this". I dont know whether it changed back or not.

I still look at the Slashdot front page, but don’t look at the comments anymore.

I think the majority of the enjoyable community moved on a long time ago.

For example, if you just mention you’re a happy Microsoft user, you’re accused (often in a racist way) of being a schill and the cause of everything wrong in the world.

I read Slashdot nearly every day for quite a few years, stepping away at some point in the 2000s.

That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice.

Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funny, Insightful, or Informative?

In practicality, it's not that useful, or at least it wasn't put to any practical use by Slashdot when I stopped reading it back in the 2000's. At a moment's glance, it's pretty trivial to see why people might've upvoted a particular post - it's clearly meant to be funny, or it has a lot of informative links, etc. So the metadata of "why" was just redundant.

On the other hand, I suppose the metadata could have been put to some practical use after all. For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" [1] and "Insightful" [2] replies on Slashdot and to focus on the most "Informative" [3] ones. I don't remember the interface allowing you to do that. Perhaps they added it later, or perhaps it's something you might explore in your own system.

------

[1] I mean, one can only read so many "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE!" jokes before one wants to jump off of a bridge.

[2] In my experience, 99% of the "Insightful" comments were just those that forcefully/eloquently regurgitated FOSS talking points that resonated well with established Slashdot groupthink. "Insightful" upvotes tended to mean "I agree with the author of this comment" and not "wow, actual new insights are presented here." Perhaps this might have been avoided if there was a separate "I agree with this" upvote method, distinct from "Insightful."

[3] It was easy to farm for karma this way; if you stumbled upon a recent Slashdot article without many replies, you could throw a few easily-Googled relevant links into a reply and be assured of getting a bunch of "Informative" votes. Nonetheless, while imperfect, the replies deemed "Informative" had a decent signal-to-noise ratio relative to the rest of the replies.

>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot

The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001.

Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see.

Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then.

While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.

I thought metamoderation was a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure if it had practical benefits.

It's certainly very interesting to talk about, at least for me!

Starting with the results and working backwards, I didn't find the results of moderation+metamoderation on Slashdot to be superior to subsequent sites like Reddit and HN that skipped the metamoderation portion.

Why? I think metamoderation on Slashdot was ultimately redundant. The metamoderators were also the moderators. So your moderation was being moderated by the moderators that moderated the posts. The metamoderation was not really of a higher quality than the moderation, so it didn't really add much.

Metamoderation was good at flagging grossly incompetent moderation, such as somebody seeing an ASCII swastika and upvoting it. However, as long as the community as whole is relatively healthy, that sort of poor moderation would be rendered moot anyway; such a post on Reddit would receive perhaps 98% downvotes and 2% upvotes, it's not clear to me that preventing that tiny 2% minority from voting in the future would be demonstrably better than simply drowning them out which is what happens by default anyway.

Metamoderation could perhaps be useful if the metamoderators were guaranteed to be trusted, high-quality users.

Slashdot tried to do something like that; IIRC you got the opportunity to meta-mod after you were up-modded yourself, so theoretically "better" posters were doing the meta-modding, but in practice I think this just added an extra layer of echoes to the echo chamber.

I agree this is an interesting topic.

You're right that the pool of moderators + meta-moderators was the same, but I think there's value in a kind of "peer review" for voting. On Reddit almost everyone (who expresses an opinion) complains that people use downvotes to disagree but I suspect that even the people complaining about it do the same thing from time to time (even if they rationalise it). Sometimes it's helpful for someone not involved in the argument to judge what you've done, even if that person is quite like you. It's pretty easy to imagine excluding anyone who replied to that same thread from meta moderating (or maybe doing something more sophisticated than that). It's not really about the trolls upvoting ASCII swastikas but the people regularly downvoting otherwise OK posts because they dislike someone's argument or their name or what they said in a completely different conversation. Or maybe it's about people upvoting low effort content (but for that to work, you would have different people metamoderating like you say).

It's hard to judge based on outcomes but I always felt Slashdot made you think about voting in a slightly different way. The system as it was there wouldn't work with Reddit for a variety of reasons but it's still useful to think about.

former link site "sensibleerection.com" had similar, where votes for category, and votes for value where separate.

As such you could get +20 flamebait, for a popular or welcome flamebait post,

or -10 funny, and so on - the tags where not inherently good or bad.

It is also the worst. And don't get me started on "you are posting to fast" crap, wheny you cannot comment on something, because you recently commented on totally different post.

Here's the front page from 10 years ago if people want to compare: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-07

OP complains about being drawn to post comments to harvest karma. IIRC, 10 years ago, the comment karma was displayed next to the comment itself.

This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes).

I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.

Another technical fix might be separating Submission karma from Comment karma. I'm guessing that good Comment karma is associated with civility and adherence to community norms. That assumption could be validated by someone with access to the underlying data.

I agree that continuous oversight by quality moderators like dang are probably more important than technical tweaks.

HN collects links from sites I couldn't hope to think about. nor could I hope to know they existed (a good example is the site about the searchlights the other day), and also sites that I don't follow because in general I'm not interested in the topic except for the odd article that ends up in first page here. So to me, HN actually has a huge value as a news site.

As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.

Personally, I've just come to terms HN is good for tech news. There's always some good people calling out any bullcrap in the comment sections which is wonderful, but when it comes to sharing opinions, it just feels like a karma battle. A similar reason why I ditched Reddit years ago.

I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling

I agree with the spectator sport aspect. There seems to be a bunch of comments which exist to further the endless tennis match.

So someone stopped visiting HN ten years ago. Is this really worth a post on HN and more than a hundred comments? Personally, I can't understand the statements of the person concerned; what bothers me more are those posts that don't contribute anything relevant to technological development. Basically, I find HN very helpful and both a good source of information and inspiration. The discussions are also generally quite good. And we should be able to trust adults to have a little bit of a culture of debate.

It's interesting for me, because I didn't realize at the time that the things that bother me now were present then. The author seems to be more sensitive than me like ten years more.

No doubt that some people consider it interesting. I personally would have appreciated a brief specific list of recommendations of the author of the post on what to improve. Maybe you can give such a list.

But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. There are platforms like reddit where you can debate about any topic out there, but HN should be more focussed.

Maybe you can give such a list.

I can't. There isn't always an answer. The author does provide a good list of what's wrong.

But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker.

Online forums working is a very serious hackers' matter. What you're saying is just about that! There has been a lot of discussion about HN's algorithms to vote and select articles for front-page, moderation, etc.

HN isn't obviously more focused than Reddit unless you're browsing the front page; for example, the Rust subreddit.

It's interesting reading this because I've recently been trying to wean myself off Reddit for the similar reasons, and one of the communities I have used to replace it has been HN -- because (in my experience) HN generally tends to avoid the issues in the way discussions play out characterised by this article.

It's worth remembering that a forum completely devoid of 'bad arguments' is realistically never going to happen. I guess (as the author notes) it's a matter of 'personal thresholds'.

This place definitely does not deserve any of my impulsive cynicism. I want to be able to read your discussions without my poor input, I've changed my pw on older accounts to gibberish just so I block myself from commenting.

HN has given me tons of hope for online communities, but every now and then, I run into what Yahoo article discussions looked like post 9/11(lots of whistling to the same tune, started by IC speakers). Don't go there, and you will not hear from me. These are my terms.

Forums like this, reddit, etc. become worse over time partly because people demand (superficially) high-quality comments. People who's time is valuable are less likely to comment.

When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that.

That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave.

Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem.

The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.

Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have a sensible debate about abortion (and let's definitely not have one here!), but it's not plausible to characterize the disagreement between pro- and anti-abortion folks as a mere disagreement over the meanings of words. In the case of disagreements that are truly merely semantic, it's possible for each side to either (i) come to an agreement on terminology or (ii) agree that they disagree only about terminology.

Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.

Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting a lot of weight on a distinction which became discredited in 1951).

What happened in 1951?

I mean, I think there _is_ some semantic debate, in that there are always semantic debates about what is life and what isn't on the edges (see the endless rather tedious argument about whether viruses, or, more esoterically, mitochondria, are life whenever anyone brings it up), but it's largely irrelevant to the actual question.

I actually agree, and have thought so for a long time, that the discussion about abortion is very much about the meaning of the term life.

One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about.

So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".

You're then talking about 'meaning' in a deeper sense than just the arbitrary definitions of words, so it's no longer a purely semantic dispute. (Note that the author characterizes semantic disputes as disputes over arbitrary definitions.)

I reread the relevant parts of the text again, and I don't find anything that supports that the author meant anything else with "semantics" than I do. Semantics is about "meaning", not only on a superficial level.

"Semantic arguments are particularly insidious. Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary (unless the actual argument is about language). The worst thing you can do is to have an argument in which you talk past each other because you each have a different idea about what the words mean."

It doesn't make sense to dismiss an argument as merely semantic if you are talking about something more than just arbitrary definitions. In many cases, pro- and anti-abortion people have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins. This isn't merely a disagreement about how to define a particular word. You can, if you want to, characterize it as a dispute about what it 'means' for something to be alive, but that's a much deeper issue than a mere semantic quibble. (The debate can't, for example, be resolved by introducing two new terms alive* and alive†, with both sides of the debate agreeing that a foetus is alive* but not alive†.)

But the author's point was that arguments shouldn't be dismissed as merely semantics, but that semantic questions are important and has to be resolved for it to be meaningful discussion.

Yes, the different sides have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins, but that is because they mean different things when they say that something is alive.

So this discussion is becomming a bit too meta, but now we are discussing meaning of the term semantics. Considering that the author himself took up the discussion about abortion as an example of something that is "purely a semantic one", I'm convinced that he meant the same thing as I do when he used the term semantic.

The article says the following. "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."

So the author does seem to be saying that the whole abortion debate is purely a debate over arbitrary definitions, not merely that it's important to clear up semantic issues before getting into the meat of the debate.

If the issue were purely semantic, it would be possible to resolve the debate simply by introducing unambigious terminology agreed on by both sides (e.g. using 'alive*' and 'alive†' rather than 'alive'). If this doesn't satisfy both sides, then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself. Informally we can say that they disagree over what it means to be alive. But philosophically it's important to be clear that this isn't just a semantic issue about the meaning of a particular word.

Another way to bring this out is to think cross-linguistically. Do we really have to have the abortion debate over again for every one of the world's ~6500 languages and their corresponding words for 'life'? I think not, because at heart the debate isn't a debate over word meaning.

> "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."

Which is quite much exactly what I said.

That a definition is arbitrary doesn't mean that it is unimportant. If I use one arbitrary definition, and you another one, we won't have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes this can be resolved, when the definitions themselves aren't the central issue and we can agree about at least some provisional defintions. Sometimes the definition itself is the central issue, and can't be resolved. Like when we disagree about the meaning of the term life. In this case, any provisional definitions won't help.

> then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself

Those two things are the the same. What is the meaning of a word other than the "nature or essense" of the thing it references?

>Those two things are the the same. What is the meaning of a word other than the "nature or essense" of the thing it references?

This is actually a vexed question in linguistics and the philosophy of language. I don’t want to get into it here, but the answer to your question is not in any way uncontroversial or obvious.

For me the idea that the root of the abortion debate is a disagreement over an arbitrary definition doesn’t compute, for the reasons I already gave. (Why not just introduce new words with commonly agreed definitions and be done with it?) But that discussion seems to be going round and round in circles.

Because introducing new words with commonly agreed definitions won't help. It would go like this:

life_prolife = life begins at the conception.

life_prochoice = life begins at week 20 of the pregnancy (as an overly simplified example for the sake of argument).

Pro life: it is wrong to kill anything that has life_prolife.

Pro choice: no, it is only wrong to kill anything that has life_prochoice. It is, at least under some circumstances, ok to kill something that has life_prolife but not life_prochoice.

So of course we haven't resolved anything (which I think is your point). Rather, we have moved the discussion to which definition is the one that is relevant to use when we discuss the sanctity of life. And that is a discussion about semantics.

> We all agree that we don't go around and kill people

Well, except for the police.

(Flippant comment, but the number of people who think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances but also that the police should never face any consequences for killing someone, no matter how gratuitously, is astonishing)

I tried to keep the argument short, so I did simplify a bit, but in practice there are certainly many exceptions which I won't bring up here to not start a completely other discussion.

I have to disagree with the commentary a little bit HN is still one of the only places where the insights are consistently thoughtful.

There are a lot of smart people on FT it's paywalled and quite expensive (ie professionals only) and even it can be a little reddity at times.

Don't fully discount some forums on Reddit as there are some smart people there, and there's something to be said for 'raw' authenticity, sometimes a poorly articulated point can be enlightening, but you have to wade through a lot.

I don't actually agree fully with the moderating approach but you have to give them credit here.

As far as 'cutting edge programming' well - is there such a thing? We can only argue so much about concepts that have been addressed before. One might say 'AI' or at least Deep Learning is the domain of 'cutting edge programming' wherein there's enough new fodder.

And there's been a Cambrian Explosion of startups so pure novelty is going to be hard to find.

A simple rule: "Would you miss it if it were gone?" I think so, which is something to say in 2020.

He's right. I'm done here. Good bye.

HN is a great place to study bad logic - people are smart enough to avoid the common fallacies, so you get some interesting bad forms.

That said, where can you have an conversation, without requiring qualification to entry, about complex topics without bad arguments getting in the way of progress?

Ok, you've got my attention. Where can you have a conversation that requires qualification and is about similar topics?

I'd assume academic institutions, forums, etc, plus those associated w/ industry (e.g. acm etc). Also, places where conversations are jargon-heavy such that it would be hard to participate as an outsider.

The bigger and the more successful a forum/group/channel gets the more it attracts traffic. With more traffic comes more low-value traffic. Whether that is less than or more than or quite exactly proportional I don't want to speculate about.

If a forum gets too big, those who value lower volume higher quality traffic will leave. It often doesn't raise the level of the community remaining.

Most clearly we have seen that with Stack Overflow. Where Stack Overflow is still useful as a "static" resource for questions/answers who have not changed for some time.

Real question here is whether HN a community or a glorified news feed? I think it's the latter and there's nothing wrong with that, I actually don't want a forum community, just a place where I can read the _news_ and some related comments. I don't think the design of this website is intended for extensive discussions people try to have here.

My actual problem with HN is clear astroturfing. The forums is clearly being gamed the same way reddit is, if not more and it's awfully offputting and honestly - scary.

Can you give me some examples of "clear astroturfing"? I see what I presume to be astroturfing occasionally, but only on hot-button political issues that I've come to believe we usually shouldn't discuss on HN anyway.

I bet he's back here right now, reading this thread.

Like all discussions - HN degrades when the number of people involved increases - I rarely look at an items comments if there are more than a hundred or so because I know that the amount of uninteresting (to me) 'chaff' to wheat will be high (there are exceptions obviously).

I treat HN as a source of quality links to articles and sites elsewhere that I skim through a few times a day. The discussions are secondary.

This applies surprisingly well to Twitter and most of online communities I met. The logner and less elitist they are the more the conversation quality deteriorates, it is after all a sign of popularization or vulgarization, which ironically both words used to mean the same but nowadays the last one is definetely pejorative.

I find it mostly fine as long as you avoid political threads or threads with "Rust" in the title that have many comments. I outright just hide the former now. Moderation does good at removing outright trolls, but there is a particular, very sneaky class of trolls that do very here.

I think the Ask HN section has some great ideas and advice.

I have discovered a ton of interesting books and other resources from that section alone.

If you simply avoid the politics and news and stick with sections like Ask HN, I think you gain much upside and little downside.

I'm actually also scouting for a reddit and HN alternative. It seems like Reddit users are just spilling over to HN and that shows in the quality of many "discussions".

I think NRKbeta's method of requiring a quiz before one can comment [0] should be tested on bigger platforms. NRKbeta seems to have a good experience with it. Furthermore, it'd be nice to be able to subscribe to moderators or groups thereof. I think Aether[1] uses that method of moderation.

[0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

[1]: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/

That is from 2010.

Does anybody have the facts handy? How many posts per day now and then? Velocity of the front page? Comments per article?

HN has an API, so it's probably not difficult to get some data. But I have a day job and several hobbies already...

One thing from diving into the code of early release of HN (it was running on racket) seems there are quite bit gatekeeper, and the people who has the power to downvote. That seems like an issue of top of the head.

I wonder if anybody has tried to train an AI on comments to weed out all the rubbish and troll replies.

Wow that’s a totally unexpected and novel idea! /s

I am quite at the opposite of the article author. I see HN as a news aggregator, especially through the excellent hckrnews.com. I do post a few comments, read answers, seldom answer back. I certainly receive enlightening answers and upvote them. I often receive downvotes, and generally ignore the noise. I do not thing it is possible to have a real followed argument on HN and possibly on any open forum on the web.

Gimme one reason to stay here... And I'll turn my back around

This is the same "Everything was better in the old days" stuff... I just can lol about it.

seems like a post like this pops up every few months

I'm not sure of the every few months, but this article was discussed 10 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275

Wow, that was a blast from the past. 122 comments in 2010, seems that the one thing HN has always liked is meta-commentary about HN :)

TLDR people get on internet forums to debate topics, and leave because topics aren't debated, they're screamed about from opposing sides, and nobody is willing to say "I might be wrong, change my mind"

This looks like a problem because of faceless conversations happening over the internet. But I agree how it can be unproductive. In fact, I spent about 3 hours writing this comment. But can't technology today save us from this pit?

Why not make it fun!!!

First ingredient is a never-ending argument which the author has exhaustively talked about.

Second ingredient is a common availability of the debaters or the various debater camps.

Third ingredient is to make the "debate" for public to access live/offline.

Fourth ingredient is, we need a neutral person who can moderate and more importantly co-ordinate this. Why not ask HN-ers; its just another Ask HN post away? Is it against community guidelines? And if this person is a little elder that the debators, the much better.

The fifth and final ingredient, is a self-pledge. Towards 3 things - tolerance, civility, and, anti-social-dilemma. Think all dimensions of tolerance. Time. The relative age of the OP. What if the OP is a student or a novice? Can he/she speak English properly? Can you tolerate the way he/she speaks? Can you tolerate the speed of his/her broadband connection? Know a bit of the person's background. Can you all agree on a lingua franca? Can you not stoke any innate blood curdling racism? But once the match has begun it is going to be a "social dilemma", after-match. What if I took the wrong side of an argument and now my job prospects have all gone bad...?! It is something to expect. Which is why civility is important. At the end of the debate all parties, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or, time zones, must dissolve peacefully...

I certainly don't want a 3rd world war born out of this... :)

So I am literally suggesting a death match of sorts between the debaters. I am suggesting a healthy way towards unraveling your internet-anonymity. But its important to be civil. Its important to forgo the comfort of the relative pseudo-anonymity we all seem to enjoy while arguing. And the prize is a healthy argument. Sadly we all go home and eat our own cakes. If you want solace, then, take pride in the fact that this is the normal discourse of a civilization, and, you participated in it. We will have lots to love, and, hate. But that is life.

Today, we have the means to make this happen...Google Meet, Hangouts, Zoom, etc.

If this goes as dreamed, perhaps we might see sponsors from some media outlets...that is a plate with a dash of humanity in it. It is something we all might have to live with.

So in essence, yes, the practicality of "this" can be debated. At length if need be. But I think I have covered the healthy and right way to behave on the internet - anonymously or otherwise - especially when having an argument, or, not when having an argument.

Peace out folks!! _\m/

TL;DR Things were so much better in my days.

I'll add another one that has transpired: the technical and expert knowledge has gone elsewhere. The board is nowadays predominantly populated by emotional outbursts from people who have next to no idea what they are talking about regarding the subject matter.

The threads on COVID where everyone is a statistics trained doctor is a good showcase of what the board has turned into.

I don't even want to bother discussing tech stuff here anymore. People can make fun of Reddit all they want, but while they have a larger population of people who are there to shitpost, they also have a larger population of people who know what they are talking about.

As one person said, HN is "no longer really populated by hackers". It's an embarrassment.

Others have mentioned that the downvoting brigade is in full swing, and that there seems to be a lot of shitflinging in general.

As for moderation, DanG does a great job of staying out of it but I do wish he would toss his weight around a bit more.

Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.

> ...to drive people to paywalls.

You are making assumptions about motivations. Dang’s post Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic [1] explains the rationale that many here adhere to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Here's another explanation: not all bad stories are upvoted, just those that work well to spin up a good discussion.

I know I upvote in this pattern. I read HN for comments first, stories second. The linked story is immaterial, as long as there's something interesting in it that can be discussed on a better level. Take "pop science" articles - the comment thread under those tends to contain links to original research, corrections to the article, opinions of actual scientists in the field, and much better explanations of the described phenomena (as well as the standard set of complaints about paywalls and "journalism these days"; I myself am sometimes guilty of the latter).

Would an arXiv paper be preferable to a "pop science" article? Perhaps. And we get our fair share of papers submitted here too. But I have a feeling that the "articles for the masses" are statistically more likely to create an insightful comment thread, and end up being upvoted more.

Also worth noting is that moderators often update the submission link, when better sources on the same topic are surfaced.

After this I already zoned out:

"Every community deteriorates over time. Every community gets new members who don’t understand the rules (or the rules just change), and things just deteriorate."

People change, communities change, they grow apart. To call it deterioration is blatant narcissism and failure to look at the situation objectively without judgement.

I don't know, rest of the post goes on to describe comments like the one you make here.

People in this thread have forgotten - or were not here when it happened, but there was an exodus of worthwhile, contributive people from 2010-2012 or so.

The fellow who kept bringing up how "everything is fine" with his ASCII chart of cyclical HN population graph trying to justify the onboarding of stupidity to this site hasn't showed up for quite a number of years.

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