Show HN: Hystoria – a Reddit-like site where all posts must be 5+ years old | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hystoria – a Reddit-like site where all posts must be 5+ years old

hystoria.100millionbooks.org

375 pointsmoksha25697 comments

I created Hystoria as an experiment to see if blocking out current events can lead to more thoughtful discourse.

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Hystoria is a simple, reddit-like site (built with a simplified version of Lemmy [0]) where only items older than 5 years can be posted.

I've been obsessed with media dynamics for years now, always wondering what variables can be adjusted within the current environment to result in better media production and consumption.

This is my approach for Hystoria. Time creates context: so even a vapid political article from years ago can present worthy insights since we know a lot more about the topic, context, and outcomes. Lindy effect: chances are that an older item worth discussing now is even more important now. And philosophically: we know exponentially more about the past than the present, and history rhymes, so we should talk more about the past.

More details on my approach are in the launch post [1].

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[0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

[1] https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/introducing-hystoria/

Blocking your own proxy?

404 Kod: Message, IP. 172.18.0.3, 180 per 60 seconds

Ugh it was just working, looking into it.

To add, I believe that's caused by rate limiting in Nginx.

Thanks, looks like it was at 1 per second...I just boosted it a bit.

EDIT: boosted again...gosh, HN front page is no joke :D

EDIT 2: I ran into multiple rate limits, some of which were harder to discover/configure than others. Site should be back again. Sorry.

Seems like the host is down altogether for me.

For me too.

Why have rate limiting at all? Just disable it

Maybe they don't have an unlimited budget for bandwidth charges? I'd strongly recommend they go behind a (free or cheap) caching CDN first before removing limits.

Host pings, but port 80 is dead.

Also, the rate limiting is probably meant to be based upon the client's IP, not the proxy IP. Usually, the proxy adds the client IPs to the request headers and you can use those in Nginx rules.

Ay I thought this was based off of lemmy. It's cool to see it be used to create interesting sites like this.

I've deployed a number of web services and I have to say...Lemmy was incredibly streamlined and easy to deploy. Deployment is entirely automated with docker and an ansible script, and updating requires just 1 command.

Really looking forward to them completing the ActivityPub integration.

Does lemmy still do the thing where they censor certain words and don't include a way to configure the censorship to try and discourage certain groups from using it?

Looks like it:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/server/lemmy_u...

That's the most offensive Regex I've ever seen.

I would seriously question why you would want to attract anybody that used any of the regex statements words, but is as easy as changing it in the code.

Really? You can't go 10 minutes in many LGBT spaces without hearing someone using the f-slur in an affectionate way. Also banned is "b!tch", which is not really considered that offensive in most of the US between female friends, as well as "pu!sy", which is maybe vulgar but not an offensive term at all (I notice "dick" didn't make cut). Maybe for a site like Hacker News those terms aren't usually appropriate, but I see Lemmy \more as a replacement for Reddit and I'd hoped it would be inclusive to everyone, not just to those in their bubble.

I don't know how their system works, if using these words just means the comment won't be shared or if it flags it for a moderator's attention, but I don't think so. Here's a direct quote from a developer:

> I'll have to think about this. Hard-coding it means I don't have to do a database migration every time someone comes up with a new slur. And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

In my view this goes against the core point of the fediverse. The whole reason I like the fediverse is because it democratizes control by giving it to the users instead of a small-group of potentially self-interested owners.

(After googling I found out "n!ps" can be used as a racial slur but I associate it with a funny slang for "nipples". I wondered how the AI conference dealt with this but apparently they changed their name a couple years back to avoid connotations with the slur so maybe it's more widespread/well known than I thought.)

(edit: censored slurs. asterisk didn't work because it triggered the markdown so I used !)

I wasn't aware of this element of Lemmy...thanks for bringing it up. Philosophically speaking, I detest the idea of software limiting a user's speech in such a way...maybe such a filter would be needed, or maybe not, but I would prefer to see the need demonstrated over time through practice instead of bluntly imposed by software by default.

Reminds me of how Mastodon doesn't allow quote-toots...but quote-tweets can be highly effective when used correctly. Should be up to instance owners to regulate such behavior.

Next challenge: Write a regexp to check whether the post was written by an African-American or not, so you know whether to censor the n-word.

Not possible! Regular expressions aren't context-sensitive.

You should just detect bit color?

You should fire this behind CloudFlare or a general cache provider immediately. Get the settings for Nginx figured out later, you don’t want to miss your moment on the front page..

Yeah I was scrambling for a few minutes there but finally uncovered some not-so-well-documented rate limits set by default in the Lemmy config. I suspect requests will die down pretty quickly after this submission peaks.

I love the concept, but I don't know if 5 years is even enough time for people to have gotten over current events. If you made it 20+ years, I suspect that would work better.

In any case, good luck, and I hope I'm wrong. :-)

I think having it at a filter would be nice. Maybe 5, 10, 20 years.

20 years! Frankly hadn't thought of going back even further. But I guess if Lindy holds true, the farther you go back, the better it should get. In such a case having options to filter would be helpful, as other commenter suggested.

Heh! The site could have “vintages”.

With a twenty year rule we could be arguing about hanging chads right this moment!

This is what makes askhistorians nice. There 20 year real I think. I look forward to checking this out.

Link to the rule, for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules?utm_source...

I agree, this is a very interesting topic.

Interesting - reminds me of the "Delayed Gratification" magazine I just started subscribing to; it's a less ambitious timeframe, but by being deliberately 1-2 quarters behind, it does avoid a lot of churn and puts in a lot of perspective.

(FWIW: I find I enjoy the magazine, but I find it also spends a bulk of it in discussing interesting but marginal items from 6 months ago, whereas I would've expected a benefit-of-retrospective discussion of key items from the past)

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

If you don't mind, is it nicely laid out, typeset, nice paper, presented nicely on arrival etc.? i.e. is it a good gift, or is it 'just' a good magazine?

I've thought about 'Lapham's Quarterly' before, it's just international shipping enough to put me off.

Lapham's Quarterly is great stuff. They had a 50% sale a couple of months ago and I bought...a lot of their back issues.

Lapham’s Quarterly is truly a gem. I am a longtime subscriber and have the whole catalog, which I consider to be one of my prized collections.

The design is great.

Paper is good; thick and matte. Presentation is great, TONS of infographics, interesting design. It's a visual delight.

(Whether it's a good gift, hugely depends on the recipient; it's not quite in the "Coffee table artsy book" range :)

I love this idea!

Fantastic idea, I've had several concepts like this in mind.

This reminds me of my approach to reading the news around election day. Every day's news was just waybackHN's random day function:

http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=random-day

I think it's a brilliant idea. It will result in timelessness being emphasized. Politics rage and "the Twitter mob" is not timeless for the most part, but the key learnings and historical insights are timeless. How do you ensure that a post is actually old? Can't post age be spoofed by the client or the server that is serving the post?

Currently I'm relying on the poster (a) identifying the year of publication in the title and (b) trusting that the year claimed in the title is accurate.

So it's not automated. I'm not sure if automating such a thing is doable in a reliable way, but I'm happy to be corrected.

This reminds me of an idea I’ve had for a restaurant, but know I will never actually build myself. Standard “Sports Bar” setup with TVs everywhere, but all of the TVs are playing the live broadcast from exactly 8 years ago. (I picked 8 years so that the news would match up with the US Political cycle, the Olympics, and most of the time the leap year cycle.) I always thought that it would be fun to watch the breathless reporting of long past news in real-time at a place like that.

It would be neat to do this with news footage from other countries. Like a British pub in Austin TX playing BBC footage from 8 years ago (or whatever the appropriate cycle length would be.)

FYI, there is a subreddit for 10 years old news. It doesn't receive much traffic https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgo/

click

"Leslie Nielsen, star of 'Airplane!' and 'Naked Gun,' dead at 84 [10YA | Nov 29]"

Oh :(

I didn't realise.

/r/Stuck10YearsBehind is more popular

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stuck10YearsBehind/

On a similar vein: https://teddit.net/r/eddit10yearsago/

Reminds me of The Hacker Classics. http://jsomers.net/hn/

It includes every HN post with a date like "(1999)" in its title that has earned more than 40 votes. Some good gems in there.

Is there a way to sort this by votes? I must be missing it.

I wish I could see - I love this idea. Although sometimes I look at newspapers from a long time ago to see what was being talked about. A lot of times it's the little things that are the most interesting. Those things that we thought were huge but ended up being flops or "I wonder what happened to those guys..."

I think sometimes seeing how much of a kerfuffle we made out of past current events can help you realize that time does go on, and things and people were that crazy back then too.

Sorry, it's back up now. I ran into multiple rate limits, some of which were hard to determine/uncover/configure.

I've long thought that a Hacker Canon adjunct to HN — including only posts that have stood the test of time — would be an interesting thing to have.

Oh man I love this. I have long had a sort of back-shelf idea to create a "Month Old News" site where you can read headlines from a month ago with more context and thoughtful analysis.

Delayed Gratification is this, but quarterly. https://www.slow-journalism.com/

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573

(not affiliated, and not a subscriber)

Ok it's actually back up now. I ran into a rate limit, and then another rate limit, and then another...but things should be good now. Sorry.

What a cool idea! Now, how about somethimg where only content can be shared if it's only 500+ years old?

Idea: create another Lemmy instance focused on 500+ year old content and federate it with mine! Then you'd get the best of both worlds ;)

Not exactly what you're looking for but maybe a subreddit is the answer?

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/

I'm not really sure what problem this is supposed to solve. Hysteria is not a new phenomenon (Satanic Panic, witch trials). Disagreements and politics are not new; what if someone posts about the start of the Iraq War? Ignoring the present doesn't do anyone any good.

Of course hysteria is not a new phenomenon, but hysteria perpetuated by instant-gratification digital social networks absolutely is a new phenomenon.

Recognizing the dubious assumptions upon which the Iraq war started should provide perspective to people debating the merits of modern wars and their motivations.

This project is not meant to encourage people to ignore the present...it's meant to provide additional perspective for understanding the present from the past.

A very interesting idea.

I had my own idea:

xornews - news about politics that are only in one camp, or the other, but never in both. For example liberal/conservative. That's the main split in my country.

But I realized it can't work without a bunch of moderators fascinated by political science.

Politics are binary.

The politicalcompassmeme subreddit is an interesting example of co existence. I think the flairs / labels of users is key.

I was absolutely astonished by the civility and depth of understanding people showed for each others' positions when I visited that sub. I think in order to have a successful post you can't just dump on "the opponent", you have to make something everyone from any place on the compass will laugh at, even if it's a bit of a dig. That really incentivizes empathy since you can't laugh _with_ people you disagree with if you don't really understand where they're coming from.

r/pcm uses irony to defend racism and anti-semitism... it's a garbage subreddit

I made a tinder-style clone a couple of years ago where you would swipe a headline left or right depending on the political direction you thought it leaned.

When you got one wrong, it was a signal that you should read the story (i.e., that the story was not run-of-the-mill left/right propaganda).

I thought it was a fun idea with real benefits, but it never really caught on.

Love the idea here. Would love to see how perishable items like current affairs do when posted anachronistically.

Have 404 error om the site now

I looked for RSS but I didn't find it. Doesn't it provide any feed?

rss-proxy [0] can help out with a feed [1]. Maybe this helps.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

[1] https://rssproxy.migor.org/api/feed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhystor...

Lemmy also has RSS baked in, so for this instance, you could use the following:

https://hystoria.100millionbooks.org/feeds/all.xml

There are a couple more endpoints (one for communities and another for users) but I'm not sure they're relevant since I've closed off the community feature on this instance.

More details:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/348

Really cool idea ! I Land on a 404 for now unfortunately

Did you have to wait 5 years to launch this?

Nope, and yet it's being publicized on platforms that prioritize the present :)

But that's the world we live in. No single platform can (or should) dominate the media landscape. Everyone has to play in harmony with everyone else.

There's no silver bullet winner-take-all outcome for this thing we call the media.

How do you determine the date of a webpage?

The user determines it, and they're trusted to provide the correct year upon submission. Then I double-check most posts.

Not sure how long this manual honors-system style thing will work, but I'm not sure of a reliable way to automate this.

I like the idea but why 5 years? Just to damper current events and lead to thoughtful discourse I'd think 5 days

True if looking at individual news stories. However, when looking at significant developments, 5 days is not enough to create proper context. I'm thinking about things like wars, public policy, scientific breakthroughs, major business moves, etc.

Lovely idea, lovely site.

this could just be a subreddit, no?

It could be, but then reddit would own it, and the fediverse would lose out. And users would have to deal with their awful new interface and privacy shenanigans.

Honestly, how does this site differ from a subreddit? How does Reddit "own" a list of links that a user has shared?

What in this site's privacy policy (which is safe to assume is a one-man band with no legal council) make it more transparent or free of shenanigans when I'm just sharing a link?

Reddit owns reddit.com so they can do whatever they want with it. And indeed, over time, they've added ads and analytics and generally made it more commercial and less user-friendly. This is a subjective opinion as someone who's used reddit off and on for the past 10 years.

My site is owned by me. I expect to be the primary contributor to it after the initial hype dies down, and I would prefer to spend my time contributing to a site that I control.

Privacy policy is at https://100millionbooks.org/privacy/. You can judge it for yourself. I run my own mailing list server and analytics server. There are no trackers on the site. Since launch 3 years ago, there have never been any trackers or ads on any 100 Million Books apps or extensions (not even affiliate links). That's a pretty good track record, and you can bet Hystoria will benefit from all of it.

Reddit “owns” a subreddit if people go to Reddit to access it, people go to Reddit to add to it and it cannot be found anywhere other than Reddit. And then Reddit controls it.

The general case is the “network effect”. The Fediverse is partly designed to combat it.

So could HN

Given the quality of mods on reddit, I reckon it's better this way :)

Why would the mods on reddit be any different that the moderators on hystoria? The owner of the sub gets to pick the moderators, so moksha256 would get to pick moderators on either platform.

Maybe you mean reddit admins, who are employed by reddit to oversea the site? What issue would they be causing?

A post from 2015 about how the Earth is flat is just as disingenuous as a post from 2020 about how the Earth is flat. I'm not sure how this is supposed to lead to automatically thoughtful discourse.

That's a good example of a post that probably wouldn't do well on such a site...you're right, time doesn't add much context to that topic.

Presumably, not by cutting down on old cruft but by cutting down on new cruft. I would think that requiring the post to stand some kind of "test of time" would cut down on quick-trending but shallow content in a lot of cases.

These particular constraints may not be ideal, but AskHistorians has a similar restriction called the 20 years rule where discussion of events from the past two decades is verboten. It doesn't automatically make conversation thoughtful, but it's an easily enforced rule that largely precludes modern politics without sacrificing too many topics of interest.

There's still going to be controversy. For example, Turks not admitting Armenian genocide (~100 y.o.). Also, the winner writes history. I guess within those 20 years, the losers get mostly assimilated.

There are still things people care about outside that window, but it has the effect of giving people time to sort out evidence and write things that can be cited. You'll find that there are many posts taking apart those issues.

It does at least mean that you're limited to discussing flat earth posts that were able to stay online and findable for at least 5 years, which is a subset of all flat earth posts. So that's good!

Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap". With the benefit of time it's easier to filter out the crap. New crap is shiny, old crap is stinky.

Sturgeon was talking about pop culture. There was a lot of crappy music composed contemporaneously with Bach, but the crap has been forgotten and only the good stuff survived.

Can't thoughtful discourse begin on a topic that is wrong, discussing why it is wrong? For example, I'd love to see a critique of what is wrong with:

http://alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm

...which makes the claim that you don't need to correct for relativistic effects for GPS to work correctly. I don't see an immediate, obvious flaw in his thinking, so I think it would be great to have as a conversation starter with someone more knowledgeable.

In fact, thinking about it more, doesn't stack overflow essentially depend on people being wrong and needing correction?

The author isn't actually familiar with how GPS works. First, there's no timestamp transmitted by the satellite (aside from the nav message, which isn't used for this). The satellite time is estimated as an offset from receiver time. Secondly, relativity is compensated for by fixing the satellite clocks so you don't get that location drift. Thirdly, if you had a perfect clock and used a naive algorithm, yes you'd have problems with changing elevation or gravity. Fortunately, GPS accounts for both receiver clock offsets (whatever their cause), and drift in offsets over time. The receiver is also constantly adjusting its clock based on the satellite signal so that error never accumulates beyond acceptable limits.

Here's the secret, thoughtful discourse is hard work and will never be "automatic" :)

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