Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibraheemdev | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the comments here are incorrectly assuming that this is a new page. The classic page was first announced by pg in 2009 [0]. He created it because:

> I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

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Ahh that makes more sense. It felt like a bit of an odd cutoff point haha

I feel that this experiment can prove nothing about the quality. It does show that votes from initial users have roughly same distribution as votes from later users, but only because the initial exposure to the front page highly correlates to subsequent votes. So it rather proves that both group of users have the same usage pattern: mainly watching the (non-classic) front page. It would have been more interesting to see the front page that only consists of submissions from initial users.

I think a lot of the comments think this is the algorithm that HN uses for its primary page. It's not obvious the link goes to "/classic"

How is this helpful? If the HN veterans did not like the 2020 content of HN they would simply not use it.

The results are just showing the particular interests of that group of people who still enjoy the site after 12 years.

It's interesting for historical purposes to see if the tastes of the "old timers" are different from the tastes of the "newcomers."

It would be hard to measure this directly simply by comparing the front page from 2008 to today, because different articles will have been posted on different days, so a direct comparison is imposssible.

By simply seeing what old-timers vote on vs what everybody votes on, you can make a better apples-to-apples comparison. Not a perfect one, of course, because many old-timers may have quit long ago if HN had changed too drastically, and similarly their own ideas of what HN should be may have changed.

i think his hypothesis which isnt tested by the classic page, is that if 90% of the old timers left hn, the 10% who remain could be those who vote similarly to the newcomers, making both pages appear similar, even though a significant group of old timers may have voted differently.

Which is quite helpful. It’s my default bookmark as I prefer the mix.

// This account is 2010; I had been in the earlier cohort under different account. A decade later I still find the early but still active cohort votes a mix of links I prefer.

Also, how much of the ranking is just determined by factors other than user-votes?

I made a similar piece of software to Hacker News about a year ago and I found what was probably an earlier copy of the source code for hacker news somewhere.

I seem to remember that the score that items are sorted by was a weighted sum of the inverse of the age and the votes. I don't remember if the votes themselves were assigned different values based on some context.

Perhaps ask pg? Who knows, he might tell us :-)

(I'm not a Lisp'er, and I've never been particularly fond of Lisp, but I have to admit I enjoyed reading the Hacker News source. It had a lovely minimalism to it)

To give an example, I'd rather not have votes count from people who are upset about this one particular method of ranking. I might start using this view more!

I have a 2008 account. I do think HN was a bit better earlier on, but I still enjoy using it.

However, HN is also effectively a monopoly. There's really nowhere else to go to find the same type of discussions.

Not http://lobste.rs/ ? I've seen people suggest that from time to time.

Here is its climate models in Fortran discussion: https://lobste.rs/s/zlwgmm/why_are_climate_models_written

Lobste.rs is restricted to computer related content.

On Hacker News you will find anthropology, politics, philosophy, startup advice.

It's possible that someone who thinks that Hacker News was "a bit better earlier on" favours that, especially as (as pointed out elsewhere in this very discussion) those are noticeably lacking from the page at hand. So let's see what the answer to my question is.

Lobste.rs is a "need to know someone" service, so it has limited membership.

Dicussion on Hacker News is not qualitatively better than on any number of well moderated technical subreddits or niche trade forums, and most of the articles posted here are cross-posted from Reddit and other sites. The only real differentiating factor is that Hacker News aggressively downvotes humor and polices for tone.

Every now and then threads pop up asking about alternative HN-like forums, here are some:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023209

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16342192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402797

I strongly disagree. No subreddit has dang (and the even less appreciated sctb) as a moderator.

Sadly we don’t have sctb anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21930336

> If the HN veterans did not like the 2020 content of HN they would simply not use it.

I’m not sure how accurate that is. For example, I strongly dislike new Reddit, but I feel forced to go there as the niche communities are still far more populated than their respective forums scattered across the internet.

I’m not sure HN has quite the same holding force, but I’ve yet to see anything that feeds my curiosity in the same way.

If by "new Reddit" you mean the UI, you can use old.reddit.com or go into your account settings and enable the legacy UI, if you're logged in.

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