Hacker News is a masterpiece
thesumup.substack.com
thesumup.substack.com
For example I’m a long term Cryptocurrency user/investor/advocate and Hacker News is one of the few places I read negative discussions on Cryptocurrency that are well reasoned and anchored in reality.
Most discussion I see on other sites is either negative out of bitterness (and it shows) or positive for no reason other than misplaced hope.
There are other topics too I find insightful and the comments section often valuable even though it’s a topic that makes me feel not so good. For example topics regarding getting old, ageism, what we spend out time on in life.
Often confronting but helpful to see and read, sometimes causing me to change trajectory.
Again I rarely find a similar level of confrontation on websites to my wants and desires outside Hacker News.
I have a healthy group of friends that will confront me with similar levels of unease, never letting me get to comfortable.
Just wish more websites offered a similar experience.
Twitter and Reddit I find are time sinks with little return other than a place to burn time.
It feels more like an adult conversation where people can agree to disagree and carry on with their lives.
The high standard of moderation also helps.
To be clear: I frequently find myself undoing my downvote actions after a moment of reflection, in cases where I realize I've done an impulsive downvote because I didn't "like" the comment. I'm not perfect (first to admit: far from it), but I do try to be a good member of and positive force in our community.
Really appreciate you folks, most of the time this is a really cool place to spend time. Also, @dang deserves a lot of credit for keeping things headed in the right direction.
Someone will be along shortly with link to Paul Graham writing that a downvote button can be used for disagreement. I disagree, so I don't have that one in my bookmarks, sorry.
The other day I posted a differing opinion from the norm on Reddit and was downvoted out of the room. It was a well thought totally reasonable opinion.
What does it mean for these wildly popular platforms if we are unable to have adult conversations?
The "you're posting too fast" thing when you get mobbed is another terrible feature.
If you see an account whose posts are nearly all [dead] - which means either they're banned or running afoul of our software somehow - and you don't think they deserve that fate, you can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look. I've actually been working on a ban review system that will allow us to catch cases where accounts have been making good posts and don't need to be banned anymore. Though in the Dostoevskian underworld of internet dynamics, I have seen several cases of banned accounts which, as soon as they noticed they weren't banned, immediately begin violating the site rules in the most garish way until we ban them...apparently indicating that they prefer that state.
Please make sure you're up on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, though, because if an account has been breaking the site guidelines, you can spare yourself the trouble of emailing—we're just going to point that out as the reason why the account needs to remain banned.
Beside promoting quality reasoning and references to interesting sources, I have an egotistic motive: bring more attention to the civilized discussion and thus get fresh opinions and references to help me make my own opinion.
There are just too many news stories that show how media sites and social media are being manipulated to push the agenda favorable to those who control them.
Watching a video on a repair on YouTube? Before commencing check the comments and see if there’s anyone pointing something out. Often there is and you can find tips or pitfalls to avoid.
The value of HN-style moderation becomes clear when reading years old threads - most everything is on point and relevant even decades later.
IMHO the best part of HN is anything that benefits from a perspective on software history because somebody will jump in with “Yeah I was there at Sun in 1986…” and tell the story.
The closer it gets to everyday politics or JavaScript framework du jour, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.
All threads, where reading the comments usually gives you very little information besides how toxic a decent chunk of the userbase can be.
I see people making objectively wrong comments here on HN all the time in my own niches. So, I'm sure when I'm reading something outside my niche here that I'm reading BS - but it doesn't read like BS.
The only thing outside my niche that I know I can trust here is tech stuff, and that's why I started coming here many years ago. But I've also seen HN's quality go down over the past few years, slowly becoming Reddit-like, unfortunately. I think dang's emphasis on discourse style will ultimately keep HN's quality satisfactory, though, no matter how many Redditors migrate here.
HN will probably remain the best forum for discussions on a wide variety of subjects for the near future.
I feel like I get good arguments from both sides here, then it's up to me to decide. The pros and cons arguments are usually better here than any other site open to the public
In general, people here seem good at using articles submitted as a prompt for discussions. I think this works wonderfully for tech as lots of people have interesting adjacent knowledge and it helps put things into context. The thing with this though is that reading the article properly isn't always necessary to join the conversation. For politics, I find that people tend to fixate on certain points while ignoring the rest of an article's argument.
home page, cmd+click article, cmd+click comments, repeat.
Because the comments are often as insightful if not more insightful as the article linked.
I still miss the count of upvotes since they removed that though, it helped sift through the comments quicker. :)
The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.
Compared to its reach, that’s surprisingly cheap.
And “hacker news” isn’t even the domain!
The only way to make money without digging the site's grave is to give a boost to posts advertising something. It has to be done infrequently and in a very subtle way so the users don't notice, and they will have a hard time finding advertisers without people finding out that they do it.
So yeah, I don't think its really worth it.
> (1) HN's only value to YC is the community; (2) the community only comes here to the extent that it finds HN interesting; (3) therefore, to optimize HN's value, we have to optimize it for being interesting. Moderating for parochial interest (e.g. suppressing things that some $ingroup doesn't like—VCs or whoever else) would make HN less interesting, so we don't. We also don't do it because (a) it would be wrong and (b) it would feel bad, but those concerns don't belong in a cynical argument. YC's business interests, however, do belong in such an argument, and it's very much in YC's business interest to keep this community as happy as possible. That's a sort of miracle if you think about it—a freak of economic nature—so we should all enjoy it for as long as possible.
(It's been almost a decade since Graham was involved with HN.)
The market HN is selling itself to is misanthropic nerds who want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg. The community's loathing of ads and images and the whole anti-modernist zeitgeist pays for itself in hacker "street cred" when someone's crazy idea makes a return on YC's investment.
Unfortunately it is consistently getting worse. 10 years ago a message would only be mass-downvoted for tone, but never for specific opinion expressed or defended. So HN would be a place for interesting discussions without flamewars.
Not anymore. Now I seldom bother posting opinions on touchy topics that are against the "SF bay mainstream" view -- no point of wasting time it the post gets hidden in minutes. On other topics it is still a good discussion place where one doesn't have to fear expressing a minority opinion. My 2c.
Now minority opinions, even rationally expressed are just downvoted, which discourages writing them at all.
I think HN is slowly losing ability to have a discussion with people who hold different views. Now it is "my votes are stronger than your votes". Which is sad. Mt 2c.
For sure things have evolved, but this site and community is still working afaict. I suppose it depends on what minority opinions you’re referring to.
I will admit I would sometimes feel compelled to downvote minority opinions instead of refuting them. On some subjects (eg abortion), I have seen the same opinions and arguments made for decades. I'm tired of seeing the same poorly thought out arguments again and again and again and again.
However I try to hold back and just ignore those comments these days. (Not always successfully..)
0: I use HN exclusively on mobile and the downvote button is too easy to press accidentally, so the privilege is actually a curse.
And, while your observation probably does correspond with the political direction that such action leans, I've seen tons of cases of what I think are "jump the gun" downvotes from both directions.
All you have to do is look at how many Trump flags you still see compared to Biden flags.
Also, believe or not, the far left dislikes Biden.
My knee-jerk reaction is "this is a good thing", but this is wrong.
The left's lack of party loyalty costs us elections. The farther left hates the "Vote blue no matter who" mantra, which allowed Trump to win 2016. The right votes red no matter what because they think every democrat is a socialist.
yours: "they aren't criticised more, this is bias of observation on your part"
other comment: "that's b/c they are more tribal!"
Observation bias exists, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moderation bias, one way or another. However, I think the distinction of "conservative" is maybe a red-herring - it invites tribalism.
As an example, I think people refusing to wear mandated COVID masks are provocative/incorrect. I also believe the authorities (gov and media/corps) are incorrect, and actively biasing scientific discourse.
So, is my opinion conservative, or not?
You stated there was, and implied there is no such bias on HN? I'm not so sure.
My question was to imply - there may be talking points, or "biases" considered conservative/liberal, but this is an ambiguous thing. Often, full perspectives are a mixture of both, but people might still be censored on the "perception" of their tribe, or on individual points. As such, the perceived tribes are not a useful distinction to make.
It's interesting b/c someone who appears anti-conservative also agrees, implicitly, that conservatives are represented as more tribal on HN. But that person shouldn't be affected by pro-conservative observation bias (unless they are pro-conservative despite thinking of them as tribal).
Such content does not have to rise to the top of the page -- posts bubble down quickly in the absence of upvotes. But if, when it does (because enough people were interested in reading and commenting on it), it gets killed by flagging instead of a debate on merits we nudge HN in the direction of becoming yet another echo chamber. And a path toward becoming another echo chamber on the internet leads to a quicker irrelevance than most contributors realize. My 2c.
On the other hand (or in the same vein?), nowadays it seems like people pick-and-choose their "facts" far more liberally than ever. So many choose to believe something and it becomes their truth, through ever increasing echo chambers and whathaveyou. Or maybe they're just more vocal about it, I don't know. It's just a trend I've noticed.
A comment which says “the earth is round” does not and should not need to justify that position. Most of the community already thinks the earth is round, so commenters don't need to spend time explaining why.
By contrast, a comment which claims “the earth is flat” had better damn well include why the earth is flat, and that argument had better be pretty convincing! Who knows, perhaps the flat-earthers were right all along and one of them will open my eyes some day—but the onus is on them.
To take a more realistic example, I’ll sometimes see HN comments which are (in my estimation) based on the premise that government is inherently evil. Perhaps this is just an accepted truism in conservative circles, but it's not in mine, nor is it something I believe. So if I see a comment which assumes "all governments are bad" as a starting point, I will likely downvote it!
(Please, let's not turn this thread into a discussion on the merits of government, I just needed a real-world example.)
My goal is to downvote stupid arguments and upvote constructive ones, regardless of whether I agree—but due to the above, the two end up being correlated in practice.
For example, someone might say "Video games are a waste of time!", and people will try to defend them, citing examples of games that require a lot of thought, or tell an amazing story, etc., but they respond with things that just feel like non-sequitors, and it's only after a dozen comments or so that we REALLY find out that the original commenter feels that all forms of entertainment are a waste of time, and that everybody should spend all their waking hours either being productive or learning something.
As a result, I now spend much more time delivering upvotes to downvoted comments. It’s a pain in the ass, because I have to log in to do it, and I’d much rather remain logged-out because it hides all the crap that dang has to deal with.
One of the reasons HN has a really good signal/noise ratio is that its simple design and lack of 'flashiness' does not attract the usual Internet crowd. Only people who really care about technology and the details of how it all works stick around here for very long. Those who want cat videos and meme discussions quickly move on.
Some older forums feel similar but they’ve often fallen to spammers who automate attacks against phpbb
I would assume it would correlate higher with having few choices, or stubbornly refusing to move..
When internet websites started getting "smart" and feeding "my interests", I stopped using internet websites. Hacker News and Wikipedia are... the _only_ sites I use with regularity.
Though if there was something like a Reddit of music where I could drop in on discussions around a general genre (or tag collection, to use the Pandora model?), that'd be pretty cool and would probably beat Spotify's algorithm for diversity (though yes, there are subreddits already for plenty of genres - maybe I should see how worthwhile they are).
Now I'm actually getting used to reading these text-only pages.
And there are even settings to limit your time on the website and avoid unproductive rabbit holes.
« Simplicity makes me happy. » Alicia Keys
(For a lack of a better quote without being cheesy)
But I guess it's a matter of who the audience is. If you want to appeal to the masses, some of these "features" probably do help.
I have a suspicion many of the people who really enjoy HN, problably dislike much video and audio content; at least consuming less of it proportional to the general population. I read faster than anyone talks and tfind text more efficient; I expect others share that. And also that there are other reasons people prefer text.
That and the community ofc
That said, I agree whole-heartedly. HN is the start and end to most of my days as well.
People here are less mentally mainstreamed, homogenized and lobotomized.
And since this page doesn't have to fulfil any user interaction metrics it can simply stay the way it is (almost perfect) without having to support new media, getting redesigned and filled full of tracking JS, A/B testing JS and other trash.
Less homogenized? It's hard for me to believe you mean that, but I'll suggest instead that it's homogenized more closely around your interests, so that you don't notice the homogeneity.
Less lobotomized? So long as you skip threads about crypto, Tesla, SpaceX... just anything even tangentially related to Musk, then sure, less lobotomized.
Thank you HN!
Browsing HN feels like what browsing Reddit felt like back in 2012. There are a lot of great viewpoints on here from all sorts of people (though it is a bit of a monoculture being that most of us are in the tech industry). Meanwhile, outside of some niche subreddits, an increasing number of submissions onto Reddit make you wonder "is this real?", and top-voted comments are often called out for misinformation by much less popular replies.
A lot of this, I think, comes back to motivations. Hacker News doesn't need to chase growth above everything. It's run by a super successful VC as a kind-of side project that also doubles as a funnel for applicants into YC. From what I understand, Reddit makes almost all their money from ads, so they absolutely need to grow the site and increase per-user engagement, which makes them take several pages from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram's playbook, and none of those pages have "quality text content" as a leading KPI.
The only special thing about HN is its association with YC. That’s it.
But people have this inherent need to worship just about anything, so we get self congratulatory articles like this one.
Maybe the fact that this article does well here will make a few of you see through the bull crap? Probably not, but a girl can dream…
a) Reddit is a gigantic mixed bag of quality, and thinking Reddit is “all bad” is admitting to not understanding how to use it, and
b) being unable to understand that the category isn’t actually “forums” is sad. You can get this level of quality (which is to say, not the real draw of HN in the first place) by directly visiting the sites posted here.
b) Hacker News and subreddits are variants of forum though? I understand your idea of being able to get this yourself on the linked pages, but I have to say I really enjoy the preselection hacker news users do for me.
In short, Reddit serves a purpose that Google used to serve.
That's true actually. I usually use google + reddit to find "real people (TM)" testimonials for medical treatments that can't be found otherwise.
b) The link aggregation and the conversations are two distinct features, and only some tiny percentage of good content actually makes its way here, and even when it does, HN is extremely temporal, so if you "miss" it, you're SOL.
But I really, truly, emphatically, want to make something clear: HN users are not in any way immune to any of the things you seem to take issue with over on Reddit. Your problem isn't with HN or Reddit, your problem is with people, as what you've listed is true and inherent in any collection of humans interacting with one another (specific ideology notwithstanding).
In the case of Reddit, it was purposefully trashed by its new owners who decided that anything less than a east-coast-lib groupthink would prevent growth, or something - or maybe they are just incompetent. Feels a similar story with Stack-Overflow.
Dang worship is just one example of how HN is no better than any other social media, and the fact that he still has a job is an indication it may be meaningfully worse.
How are you so certain you've the correct position on anything, if you can't consider other points of view? How can you understand others actions if you will not listen to their attempts to explain their motivations?
He doesn't do any of that, he just states some basic, "Stop doing <value judgement about user's behavior>." No discussion, no insight gathering, nothing.
He's a garbage moderator. You can literally observe it in his comment history [0]. His most recent comment (at time of writing)[1] exemplifies this perfectly:
> You don't have to agree with anyone's views but this style of argument is deathly to the curious conversation we want here.
No, it is not. This is simply wrong, and "this style" is dismissive and rude. But that's not up for debate, as dang has decreed it so. The only reason he writes anything at all here is to explain why the person is, to him, wrong. Zero attempt whatsoever to understand an alternative perspective.
Awful, terrible moderation skills.
And nobody said anything about debating anyone, I'm wholly uninterested in dang's perspective at this point, he's made his lack of ability in this area perfectly clear.
It's also perfectly clear how little is in his toolbox to enforce his decisions however, so I suppose it's mostly a wash.
Also I think it's the literal definition of hubris to disagree with, "what may be tendentious to you is not to someone else" but I'm guessing you don't really care about hypocritical shit like that.
I feel no such compunction, so: This guy seems to be hiding behind a new handle; for what reason(s), we can speculate.
If it's the case that you don't have to share the same politics, then please explain why:
> if you're wholly uninterested in Dan's perspective on things, this place is probably not a great hang for you
How is removing "tendentious meta-debates" aka "controversial topics not directly related to the main thread" compatible with "On-topic: Anything .. interesting ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" or even "seasoned talking points aren't on topic here"?
(though it does match "Avoid unrelated controversies".. Guess those are never interesting to good hackers?)
> If you want to debate the moderators
I think the issue is they don't want to debate the mods. Or specifically, for the mods to debate them. I feel there's a difference moderating the meta-aspects of a debate (style, relevance etc), and participating in a debate.
If by project you mean whatever dang says it is, then sure it's what dang says it is. If you mean a community forum, no, dang just had an opinion. The fact that you agree with that opinion and so don't care to be convinced otherwise don't change that it's just an opinion.
> Dan has explained over and over again, in great detail
There may have been an explanation, but no discussion - but would you just argue that this wouldn't be interesting or productive? You're satisfied so why would you care about inconsistent modding?
Very often it's "stop breaking the guideline", or "stop participating in flamewars" - so not much to go on. Often the next comment is "which guideline did I break" or "What do you mean by flamewar/why is this a flamewar?" - which goes unanswered.
Other times, users will participate in blatant trolling, or obvious (non subjective) rule breaking and get far more detail/response.
It feels like dang/mods aren't exactly sure of what the moderation rules should be, so simply don't answer difficult questions..
That said, what is the benchmark for moderation? Reddit? The internet standard is so low, HN is great in comparison.
But "the fact that he still has a job" is too far - HN should rethink it's moderation for the greater good, but HN will hardly die otherwise.