Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaspax | Hacker News Reader

Okay, I get the idea here, but... my account is younger than that and I'm sort of miffed by the notion that my votes shouldn't count at all. Furthermore, having the cutoff date be in the past means that I could never earn that right regardless of how much I participated after that.

I would be much more well-disposed to a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts, while still allowing people to eventually count as old-timers.

View on HN

What I want is a news aggregator like HN but where I can control (possibly have it learnt) how to rank based on network effects. Preferably in an interpretable fashion if any machine learning gets involved. Heck, I would even be happy for it to be partially probabilistic to get me to “read across the aile” at times.

I've thought about that, however I worry about it turning into what Facebook does and put you in an echo chamber (with the occasional "across the isle" item thrown in to "make you angry"). But I still like the idea, just not sure what the best implementation would be.

Some ideas I've had include having multiple up/down vote buttons for different criteria -- one that says if you agree or not with the content, and another one that says if it is a well reasoned and interesting post. That way I can pull up things that people in my cohort think is a good post but also disagree with content wise. But this requires that people are reliable able to judge something fairly that goes against their view.

Then I'd like to see "bubbles" that show which cohort(s) I belong to and which other ones are out there so I can choose which to read at any one time.

"Aisle," both of you, like in the senate chambers.

Slashdot moderation has this, with separate voting for insightful, interesting, funny, etc, and the corresponding toggles on the view side if you want to prioritize or exclude particular categories.

It already is an echo chamber. Except that you have zero control over the content you see, so you're stuck in someone else's echo chamber. It can be really fucking frustrating, which is why I closed my main account after 8 years.

you're still here tho, so why close the account?

I don't really want to be here. This account will be gone too as soon as I close my browser. I won't make another one unless something very urgent comes up.

I always thought HN (or reddit, youtube, etc), with a Bayesian filter would be interesting.

I'm sure there's a good amount of obscure content that doesn't get appreciated because it never reaches the people that would enjoy it.

That's certainly the case but how would a Bayesian filter help?

So tiktok but for news?

Smart personalised and decentralised search with comment aggregation and sharing.

It shows you what you're interested in, not what adtech, or social media barons, or VCs, think you should be reading for your own good. Or for "engagement."

Something something echo chamber? Probably. But it's not as if we don't have those already.

You can already do that. Just click hide on posts you don’t want to see.

The issue with having a model that does it for you is that your going to immediately start fighting against it and its decisions.

Hate to be the stereotypical pedantic HN commenter, but fwiw this normally works, I believe there's an exception with Ask HN posts where clicking "hide" will not fully hide it, at least last time I tried.

Wait, have I been on HN since 2011 without realising this? There is nothing in the FAQ at least [1].

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

I have always avoid pushing “hide” since I assumed a new submission would pop up at the bottom and I never wanted to go beyond the top 30 as I feared I would stay on the site for a bit too long.

Thing about things that happened before you is you can never be a person who experienced them.

That said, could be implemented as a rolling decade. The term is “classic”. For cars that takes 25 years. Ten for tech seems fine.

That would be accounts from 2011 and before.

Still curious, what had happened to HN on Feb 13th, 2008?

I just scrolled to its frontpage[0] and the top story was “Immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry”[1].

Any other explanations why `https://news.ycombinator.com/classic` turned back to this date?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-02-13

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115094

On google and wikipedia, HN's launch date is listed as "February 19, 2007". I presume this is to screen for that first ~year of accounts.

Funny, since I remember lurking for years before making mine!

I upvoted this comment, but it doesn't count.

Your vote counts in the "primary" ;). You are part of selecting stories for the main page. Overwhelmingly, "classic" voters will vote for things that are already visible on the regular main page.

It probably started as a fun gimmick rather than an actual feature people are supposed to use?

Why do you care about a random view on a website?

Your vote counts on the main homepage.

> a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts

Are you sure you know what the motiviation for accounts older than 2008 is (are you sure it's reducing young/drive-by accounts?)

Have you thought about what that motivation might be?

I assume that it's to filter for people who have been around a long time. If there's some other specific motive, I'd love to hear what it is.

It was an experimental feature slapped together by pg in 2009, and has been largely forgotten about ever since. The motive then was to see if there was any difference if you filtered out newer users. There wasn't then, just as there isn't now.

Its continued existence is just a historical artefact.

As far as I can see it's not linked from anywhere in the UI, and is only occasionally referenced in comments.

Nothing to be miffed about!

That's the what, not the why

Also, nothing has been removed, only added. You can see more of the data which was hidden before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com