Ask HN: Why Hacker News?
Out of all the forums, subreddits and communities you could partake in what makes HackerNews your goto?
Humor is a little suppressed here, but after going to Reddit, I think that's a good thing. Otherwise, attempts at humor becomes disruptive to the conversation.
I found that no downvotes meant that people who disagreed ended up talking to each other the most (since you can't downvote, if you disagree you need to argue), leading them to become rivals and then friends. Actual synthesis of viewpoints happened.
Perhaps HN is too big for that effect and it would turn into chaos, but I'd be curious to see it tried.
Something like Lesswrong’s dual voting system of up/downvotes + agree/disagree may also help, but I’ve never engaged with discussions on Lesswrong to tell if this works on larger communities such as this one.
Comments get loaded with unpopular opinions, which is often things like the ineffectiveness of masks in stopping pandemics, or people who post evidence on how dangerous vaccines are. When someone dies, someone will post all kinds of slander about them. Because there are only upvotes and no downvotes, these float to the top, and the comments are usually counted as engagement, further boosting the comment.
A lot of the most commented on submissions were actually flagged/killed on HN.
It's certainly possible it would turn out the same way though.
1) Reduce issue-related downvoting by only allowing some random subset of the current active users to downvote, a different set per post. Don't let the user know their vote won't work in advance, but tell them after.
2) Reduce vote sockpuppeting by recording which pairs of voters downvoted a post, then disallow that pair from downvoting a post again. This includes votes that failed due to 1).
It results in a community which can be somewhat slack when it comes to the rules, makes everything more conversational which is important for having quality discussion on anything.
The Signal to Noise Ratio isn’t that great. Depending on topics and your level of understanding on the subject. It could be 90-95% noise. But if you compare to other internet forum, which could easily be 99% or 99.9999999999999% noise. Measuring signals only HN is many orders of magnitude better.
And then, possibly the most important part, the quality of signal. You have SVPs, CTO of not small startups, but large established companies, many veterans over 60s talking about the good old days from Mainframe, IBM, Microsoft era. Engineers from TSMC, ASML, Intel and Samsung Foundry. People working for NASA, Government officials, Lawyers, Scientist from ITER, Experts working on State of the Art Compiler techniques. Engineers from WebKit, Safari, Edge, Chrome, People who worked on the original USB-C ( Hint not Apple ), and the list goes on and on. ( I am not going to name them )
It’s unfortunate a lot of them no longer do HN.
1. Without HN, I would not have known about Nand2Tetris, OCaml, Non-Linear Dynamics, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, or Aaron Schwartz. In a way, HN has changed my life. I came to know and love functional programming, I came to know about great resources on Computation, Programming, advanced Math and so many more things. Culture outside of HN is much duller, and no offense, are for people with much lesser intelligence. Especially for someone like me who weren’t born in Stanford or UCLA-B uni campus. I am sure that there are places with better culture exist- that are better fit for the intellectual minds. But, HN is a paradise to me. It honestly changed my life. I come here regularly for the educational resources recommended in comments and posted here as stories.
2. It is a good news source, and that news that are super interesting for hackers are encouraged to post here- is super nice.
3. It has less political noise and the discussions are nuanced. I can find, albeit in minority, sane right wing voices here. Where all other major outlets are overrun by the super-woke ideology, and even sane RW voices are deplatformed and banned from forums, it is refreshing to see some opposing voices in here. (I am a common-sense abiding humanist, and definitely more left than right, I still see reasons in many RW arguments and agree to some of their policies.) It's very nice that, in HN, RW voices are not supressed.
Bonus: Watch new JS frameworks every week.
For serious: Know how many people agree/disagree with you. (I recommend HN to change upvote/downvote into agree/disagree).
I've also learned that there's an attitude type here that I struggle to appreciate. There's a negativity that makes this place almost unbearable.
I'm terrified of my first "Show HN".
And the lack of clout, images, gaming too.
* Low-effort comments generally don't get upvoted.
The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.
The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.
It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.
Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.