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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> (I found it while looking for information about dbus)

The first place I search for tech related commentary is on https://hn.aloglia.com/ to see what articles were shared and who commented what on a particular topic on news.yc. It has served me well.

Many "experts" have taken to twitter instead of commenting here (kind of self-censored themselves from entering the discussions here) which is a shame, as twitter is an endless pit that is nigh on impossible to filter for quality opinion.

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You typo'd Algolia.

https://hn.algolia.com/

I use them too, they are great for search. One thing I miss from Reddit though is the ability to sort comments. Yesterday during the Okta incident, I was trying to find new comments on that thread to get the latest news as I trust info here more than elsewhere.

i used to believe Algolia was actually called Agolia

Same here - could it be the Mandela Effect in action?

I do the same.

The diff between HN & Twitter is voting mechanism at HN.

Voting mechanism when all is said and done, has kept things sane and of high quality (though there is a echo chamber kind of vibe going, to the detriment of diversity of thoughts).

There certainly is an echo chamber, but I'd argue it's way less detrimental than the shit chamber that search engines became...

At least for searching tech related comments, site:news.ycombinator.com is a mandatory filter for me on any search engine nowadays.

Search engines are more manipulative than that, for a start, large players (govts & global businesses) can game search engines which probably explains your comment describing search engines. You cant run that many sock puppets on hacker news without drawing attention unless you just do a MITM to create a fake hacker news. In that instance the original hackernews wouldnt miss you and the people doing the MITM would be able to psychologically manipulate you all they like, all it needs is someone not too hot on computer security and include an OS and device which isnt that secure over and above what a court order couldnt solicit, like root certs.

I've found the opposite to be true with echo chambers. Twitter you normally just get the person's followers echoing around

On HN, I never got the vibe of sects as anyone can be challenged and there is one singular front page instead of a custom algo home page that gives almost echo chamber by default with twitter.

Because of the quality/voting, I never regret reading HN. I often regret knowing twitter exists after reading. Even if there is good content there, it is not enjoyable to follow a multiple tweet single thought or sorting through replies. It is just plain frustrating to me.

> I never got the vibe of sects as anyone can be challenged

However, I have definitely noticed that, over time, a certain set of views that were common before, have been marginalized or disappeared altogether. Particularly the libertarian/right-wing of the US political spectrum, which used to be very popular around here, is now substantially under-represented or even completely absent. I say that as someone who hated that perspective - I found certain comments maddening - but in a way it was interesting to hear views that are very far from my background.

Part of it is probably that even tangentially-political content is stomped on extremely quickly by dang. Part of it is that the growth in the number of commenters clearly changed the social and geographical composition of commenters (there are lots of internationals like me now, whereas it used to be mostly US west-coasters). Part of it is probably that certain positions "lost" the public debate. In the end, it's how it is.

I think large part of that is user names here are very small and anonymous. As opposed to twitter and the old style phpBB forums where everybody has a much more prominent and recognizable avatar. There, you (subconsciously) judge by the person, before reading the content.

Here, I hardly ever even read who I am replying to.

Don't forget dang.

Reddit has a voting mechanism as well, but I'll argue that the "echo chamber" and closed-mindnessness of the users is a lot stronger there especially in the larger communities. Also the people here are typically more respectful to one another compared to Reddit and Twitter. Both of these factors affect how people vote on Reddit compared to HN.

I agree, and would like to highlight two differences in social network structure that help lead to HN being a more civil place than Reddit beyond just the qualities of the user-ships:

*1. Restricted comment downvoting*

A user must achieve a not-insignificant amount of karma before they can access the downvote-comment feature.

*2. Lack of emphasis on notifications, especially regarding comment replies*

This is huge! It must certainly decrease engagement in the short run to continue with the status quo, compared to Reddit notifying the user of every reply via every protocol available to them. You have to seek out a reply to your comment, which requires you to write something worth responding to. It reduces Poe’s law significantly. I would actively oppose notifications being integrated into news.ycombinator.com - the apps and readers can do as they please. Wonderful balance, thank Guthix.

I'd add also a few points

* Unappealing UI makes the site look boring. Furthermore, users have to be comfortable with the fact that there's no "easy" content, I.e., memes and one liners.

* Comment score is mostly irrelevant, so users don't try optimizing their score. This leads to better discussion.

* Only one board. Things stay on topic, as users from that toxic subboard don't leak elsewhere. So "bad" types of users don't have a place to hang out here, unlike Facebook or Reddit.

I'm much happier commenting here than on Reddit. It's demoralizing to put effort into a comment and then be buried under one liners and memes.

Same here, but I prefer DDG [1] or Google [2]. Algolia often proves to be a much dumber algorithm to match my search intent.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com

Many of my searches on Google nowadays are followed with either "hacker news" or "reddit" keyword.

typo in your link https://hn.algolia.com/

I also use https://hckrnews.com/ instead of the classic front page. It’s very useful.

Agreed; this is also what I do.

For me, checking the top 10 HN stories on hckrnews with a 5 minute timer set is productive/useful, since I value being informed about major tech topics.

When I scroll endlessly for an hour+ on the front page, I'm usually avoiding something, which I'm learning is bad for my overall mental health.

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