Why is Hacker News so successful while Slashdot has become a relic of internet history?
To add in response to the post, there is clearly a sweet spot of how many users a site has. At the beginning, fewer genuinely interested people can work, and it can get better as the number grows and more people contribute. At some point, you have too many people, and the combination of eternal September effect plus not being able to please everyone plus trolls and people looking to get upset about something means the quality goes down (that's where a lot of reddit is I guess). Then when numbers go down again, a lot of the quality users leave and you're left with the trolls etc. so that even if active users is higher than at the beginning, the quality is gone. That's where slashdot is.
I'm sure the time period matters, rather whether it's still owned and stewarded by YCombinator, with someone like Dang actively moderating it.
The heydey of Slashdot was when it was itself in its 'startup phase' with Rob Malda leading the charge from the front, and back then it was great. Complex and sophisticated technical discussion, as well as other topics. Arguably way less politics than HN, though maybe more open source-oriented politics. Not many ads. Useful-ish summaries.
Frankly the question why HN is more "successful" than Slashdot rankles somewhat because I feel like it's maybe not really more successful, depending on what you define the goals of such a site to be. To me it's just different. For example, Slashdot threads did a great job of mixing discussion and entertainment. They made me laugh, they made me cry, they taught me a hell of a lot about UNIX and programming and often they did all these things simultaneously. Some people don't like entertaining comments but Slashcode gave people great UI controls so you could hide them if you didn't like them. In practice, I found they made discussions way more enjoyable to read. In contrast, HN basically just bans entertaining comments. It's a crude approach.
Slashdot also pioneered a lot of ideas and tech that made very big discussions work. Back then sites got "slashdotted" because Slashdot scaled far better than many of the sites being discussed. Contrast this with HN, which can't really handle threads of more than 500 posts before the UI breaks and around 2000 posts, the site itself starts to break.
Finally, frankly, Slashdot moderation was way less frustrating than HN's can be. HN claims to a high minded search for intellectual curiousity, or some such. DanG makes it work, more or less. But absolutely nothing is formalized in any way. How would you replace Dan? The principles which are claimed to be enforced are sufficiently vague and inconsistent there's no way you could ever scale the model up. Slashdot, for all its faults, provided a crisp and actually formalized moderation system that tried to reflect the priorities of the user base rather than Malda himself.
The current site is a shadow of its former self due to neglect and being out-competed by other sites that were able to keep on the VC train longer, but the core ideas of the site worked. Honestly I miss it sometimes.
> Why is Hacker News so successful while Slashdot has become a relic of internet history?
Dang, ruthless moderation and community effects.
People underestimate the degree to which peer comments encourage and discourage behaviors in the rest of the participating population. Civility and on-topic-ness are central values of hacker news. The top 5% most active users religiously follow this, and this establishes a clear personality for the platform. This implicitly discourages new users from contributing in a way that strays from those values.
There are 2 possible events where this system goes haywire. Slow takeover and viral events. Slow deterioration happens through complacency. Viral events are when there is an overnight migration of new users to your platform, replacing your culture wholesale. Dang's remarkably consistent culture reminders curb the slow deterioration. For the 2nd point, HN has likely never had a major viral event, but culture war threads are often locked quickly and deprioritized.
HN is the way it is cause of painstaking effort to keep it the way it is. Don't take it for granted. I try my best to be an honest participant. It is one of the few places that still remind of the old internet. I'm willing to be a obedient child if that means it can stay that way.
Not sure what signals you'd need to realize your formerly excellent site is a giant moldering dumpster and you should just throw archives from the first 15 years somewhere and call it a day— but I'm pretty confident they were just ignoring those signals like 10 years ago.
Like with all things in life, HN could be better, more accepting to different thinking people.
There have been times when seeing what gets up voted and what gets down voted really made me think twice about what people that are running this website are actually thinking.
Also also, not sure if this is specific only to me or if it happens to others who's first language isn't English but quite often when I ask a question users assume the worst and think that in just trolling and down vote, making the website less useful...
But! Compared to pretty much any other content aggregator, HN is, content wise much better, even if the comments experience can get worse then Reddit.
I have no idea what you're talking about here, apparently more than just newbies not being able to downvote - could you give an example or two? Maybe it's just a sinister way of describing being downvoted but not being able to downvote others.
> There have been times when seeing what gets up voted and what gets down voted really made me think twice about what people that are running this website are actually thinking.
Uh, it's not the "people running the website" who do the voting, not sure what you mean. If you really are curious about what the people running HN are thinking, email dang at hn@ycombinator.com and just ask. It's not a hidden, mysterious, shadowy entity. Or, reading his comments on here for an hour or two should answer most questions.
p.s. It seems likely you meant way but typed eay or esy and it was auto-corrected to easy?
Unfortunately, it's hard/impossible to talk about this properly, because of that sentence starting "Which does mean that if you're thinking an easy of expressing". I can't work out what grammatical sentence they could've been going for, what they meant exactly, it's such a mangled mess. I try to repair it but can't.
I'm actually curious if you're trying to illustrate the following part of their comment with your replies?
> Also also, not sure if this is specific only to me or if it happens to others who's first language isn't English but quite often when I ask a question users assume the worst and think that in just trolling and down vote, making the website less useful...
"Which does mean that if you're thinking an easy of expressing your thought doesn't align well enough with those above you, your experience of HN will be crippled."
Well, I think that would just be guesswork, so maybe don't worry about it.
I tried, but can't believe that you're "actually curious if you're trying to illustrate the following part of their comment", i.e. that I'm deliberately trolling. You are just 'cleverly' being mean, while accusing me of the same. Don't play such games on HN, thanks. I'm not interested in playing, and utterly regret taking part in this thread.
Here is the "understandable English" you requested, which is how I interpreted the OP's message without picking apart their every word (I hope they will correct me if I'm wrong):
If you are attempting to express your thought and the way you word it does not align well enough with those who have more karma (and thereby things like flagging/vouching power), your experience of HN will be crippled.
I'm not sure I agree with this entirely, though I can definitely see their point.
I was trying to say that how people think, how good they are at putting those thoughts into words and how they put it into words is different from person to person.
Quite often when I try to give an example of something I pick as obvious of an example as possible.
Example of how people have different definitions for the same words: Word: evil.
Hitler probably wouldn't describe himself as evil, but a vast majority of people would use the word evil to describe Hitler.
That would mean that Hitler's definition of evil would have to exclude the things that he did.
When I gave that example in a different community the moderator deleted my message saying that supporting and glorifying Hitler is not allowed there.
While I do have faith that here on HN people would actually read what I wrote and understand that I did no such thing. Such misinterpretation of comments still happens even here, which ends in a negative outcome.
"Why am I not more successful?"
"How do I make money fast?"
"Tell me your ideas?" (so I can be successful and make money fast)
There is nothing else other than relevant content and the density of information per page is very high. Hence no distractions.
Slashdot was a little bit messy,and less obsessed with facts and technical accuracy, and with being civil and polite, but it was also, well, more human I think. And being a bit messy is ok, as long as most people recognize it (including the people messing about ) and mark things as such for those who don't (the funny, flamebait, etc tags).
Which is a shame, because smart folks are often some of the funniest.
2. No commercial algorithm boosting a topic over other. Plain upvoting. This helps a lot. It becomes matter of the community's collective choice.
3. Unlike reddit for e.g. the mob down voting is reduced to an extent because the hard limit is -3. (Fun fact: I had reddit account a while ago where a popular sub's mod got personal and his cronies downvoted me everywhere. I was shadowbanned on several of the subs. My max karma drops was ~300-400 points in a single day. It was due to a thread which wasn't even fluff or lame/ funny/ sarcastic, but because I had questioned the moderation morals. The post was sick and hurtful & the crowd gets murderous. If slashdot is snarky, reddit is outright toxic.)
4. No amount of praise is enough when I mention @dang. The guy ruthlessly keeps everyone in line. Hats off to him. HN is much better because of his untiring efforts to curate.
Examples - Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit. Hi5 -> Facebook -> Tiktok.
There'll eventually be "new HN".
The above is in addition to all of the meta problems the site has had with change of ownership, management, catering the advertisers, etc.
Of course now the users are completely different from the time it started, and the level of discussions there is much shallower than what it was let's say, 15 yrs. ago.
Different motivations give different options and lead to different outcomes. Personally I find HN a worse community because the motives are hidden/glossed over.
To me HN is an order of magnitude better than Slashdot but of course your mileage obviously varies.
HN has also learned from Usenet's, Slashdot's and Reddit's issues, e.g. how to avoid the eternal September effect.
HN is a lot more niche in different kind of matters, like finding obscure problems with a compiler, how a company is using some technology and why, or simply articles about work/life balance and what to do and what not to do to achieve a fulfilling life.
The comment scoring put the final nails in. It took a while to die after that but the screaming and thumping were pretty good indicators of where it was headed.
I remember reading it as a teenager for news, but felt completely disconnected from the community and never even created an account. Jokes about Micro$oft from the 90s. My subjective impression was that the average age of users was about 40.
Similar fate awaits HN eventually. I don't see alpha gen coming here, the culture is going to feel too old - like mingling with their parents
The key for me is are folks willing to have a conversation and does the site support that.
The ideological people (apple is evil, masks don't work (now turned into they do work), the lab leak theory is misinformation (now somewhere in between?), a fair bit of anti-racism stuff) can really drown out the conversation. When a site gets more popular that seems to happen?
Someone is definitely keeping some of the politics out of here which is a relief.
The chain is for practical purposes:
Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg > Reddit -> HN
(Yes, I know that HN predates reddit. Talking about the where programmers hang out, though.)
Whenever you create an unpopular post your karma goes down. I have no adblocked the karma display because I will not be judged for my posts. Should I get shadow banned I'll create a new account.
Why HN? Being an old Isonews member I like the orange. And even if the quality has degraded there are still some interesting posts here. I'm also not a "slashdot" I'm a "hacker", well I don't call myself hacker but commonly hacker is synonymous for creator, developer, entrepreneur. Slashdot never mattered in my world. The internet is a tool, a means to and end, not the center of my life. I don't even remember when I first stumbled upon HN. Was it on Google+? I miss Google+ and the spirit and people it had. I felt right at home. Unlike Facebook where is never really fit in. A platform for consumers and their producers but more consumers who have no clue about the creative spirit. How I despise Facebook. Then Google+ became more like it instead of continuing with doing its own thing. The final UI changes made it as terrible as Facebook. The post was the main attraction and comments and discussions were no longer wanted. And when it died there was Reddit which was and still is the worst Troll-infested... platform of stupid. And there was HN, which I always viewed as being too much ivory tower/first world problems, but compared it has the most interesting topics. Twitter then is a platform for the permanently "how dare you" crowd. Someone always has something to bitch about. And while many seem to like it, I never could, smartphone stupidity.
And HN then, old school, low effort design. Not the best input methods. But interesting enough and more positive than reading mainstream news, which in the last 2 years and nowadays especially is unbearable. That's also why I strongly react when I see a propaganda post for either side of the war, which doesn't really concern me. Idc about it. It's all lies anyway. What's the relevance for a IT tech news site? None. Ok if it gets IT techy but a ship sinking? idgaf. If you ask me, the Ukraine is being used so the "west" can sell weapons. 1000 million € loan and more from Germany alone... anyhow not on topic.
HN without karma would be an improvement. I will not change my ways or truth just because someone with a larger pot thinks they have more power or the right to judge.
Why is there no Google+ replacement? A social network for devs, artists, businessmen, but not big businesses, where you can stay up to date on the latest in tech and directly talk to people without having to "friend" them and where you're not judged and censored via "karma". Not owned by big tech. Where the focus in on discussion and meeting people and not POST BIG comment small but all equal.