It was already getting choppy with the election and cryptocurrency generating huge emotional hellthreads. Then came Musk and Mastodon. Now it's Reddit. HN is just turning into another hub of tech outrage. This site is giving me pain to read now.
Want to see a contrast? Look at the comments on this Reddit drama and compare it against the original Digg redesign drama on HN a decade ago. There's a sharp difference in comment quality.
Further reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, rest-in-peace, was a and highly inflential in his contribution to RSS, Creative Commons, Open Access academic publishing and pushing for an open internet generally. Maybe some see it as a stretch to point to the impact of Aarons work in todays Reddit but the history is there. His story is part of Reddit's story and YC/HN's story.
Reddit is a product of YC and HN has always followed Reddit closely.
Generally available API access has been a defining feature of many HN startups so far. This shift alone, towards a world where big tech are locking out API access and squeezing indie devs, is also of great interest to many who rely on API's for work and play.
It's a perfect storm and we're all watching closely.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPN2vmZl4kA [2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit [3] https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3709702/watch-this-reddi...
Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many. Except the frontpage is filled with multiple Reddit stories with repetition of the same comments.
> Generally available API access has been a defining feature of many HN startups so far. This shift alone, towards a world where big tech are locking out API access and squeezing indie devs, is also of great interest to many who rely on API's for work and play.
> It's a perfect storm and we're all watching closely.
Sure there's nothing wrong with following closely. As you say, this is a big moment in economic models of tech. But the quality of this commentary is just bad. I feel like I'm watching my grandmother watch a soap opera on TV after a long day. Maybe this is just me, but judging by the voting happening on my comment, it's not.
That is true, but emotional/historical connections changes how people feel about things, even though it might not be "how it ought to be". Reddit is closer to YC and therefore closer to HN, no matter how independent HN should be from YC.
HN and Reddit are deeply intertwined at multiple levels. There's a cultural connection ("this site is turning into reddit" is a decade+-old meme that just can't die). There's a historical legacy one - HN came about because pg wanted to recreate the kind of culture Reddit had in its first two years, while the latter kept evolving past niche startup/tech content. There's a technological one - Reddit started as a Lisp success story (written/prototyped in Common Lisp, subsequently rewritten in Python), HN is written in pg's own Lisp dialect, Arc.
For better or worse, Reddit is part of HN's DNA. It's not just accidental phenotype similarity (both being link aggregation/commentary boards with up/down-voting karma mechanism) - HN is Reddit's younger sibling.
> Except the frontpage is filled with multiple Reddit stories with repetition of the same comments.
This is temporary. Reddit is going through a critical moment right now, but the amount of Reddit stories should start to decay in the next couple days or weeks (unless Reddit manages to turn it into a perpetual high-intensity crisis).
Part of that HN is not known for the perpetual "drama" generation the reddit community is known for.
I say that as someone who left HN for reddit. And someone who mostly tries not to comment here, lest that makes HN more like reddit. HN should stay different.
To the extent people think or even say this explicitly, this is literally defining HN in terms of Reddit. The sign on the vector may be negative, but it still connects the two.
If stuff like GPT is going to be useful as a Q&A engine on Google/Bing it needs plenty of data feeds that are coming in quickly and fed into training. People claim some old scaped DBs of Reddit comments are enough because some OSS model trained on it but I’m skeptical that’s a serious option for Microsoft and the like.
Otherwise the HN/YC<>Reddit is pretty much just an old founding story, not one relevant to today or the culture of HN.
Also:
>Want to see a contrast?
The new Digg (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773
What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?
You're right, but the reason I didn't include it is that the coverage around AI isn't all emotional. There's a lot of hype behind it yes, but at it's core it's based on new products that people are excited about. But maybe I should have. A lot of them devolve into the same type of hellthread.
> What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?
Discussion about CSS and web design features, discussions about web accessibility, and how there were just very few flippant comments. These big Reddit threads have a lot of pithy "f** Reddit" comments and lots and lots of silly (angry) jokes that make me feel like I'm on Reddit and not on HN.
On the other hand, lots of discussions are also happening around design and accessibility. Reddit's official app has bad design, including many dark patterns and terrible accessibility and performance. This has been discussion alongside the policy changes from day one.
Wow, a comment about Digg in 2012 applies _perfectly_ to new Reddit, except I get 2 big pictures instead of 6.
1. Before Reddit and Digg, there was Fark. Then a user-hostile redesign killed it (fark.com)
2. Why Perl?
3. Video to Video with Stable Diffusion (Step-by-Step) – Stable Diffusion Art
4. The Surprising Power of Documentation
5. Intel is all-in on backside power delivery (ieee.org)
6. Temperature-dependent RNA editing in octopus recodes the neural proteome
7. MIDI 2.0 driver support coming with Linux 6.5
Doesn’t look like he engages much https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
Maybe dang could arrange something or it could happen organically. But that particular event was in response to an acute flood of traffic. Not some long term reduction in comment quality and Reddit-tier rage/politics.
You can’t fight floods with a small temporary dam. Nor can you moderate your way out of it entirely as every major subreddit has shown (hyper modding usually does the opposite by sanctioning a certain ‘acceptable’ set of low quality posting and fuelling meta drama).
Randomness inevitably includes sequences that seem non-random—sometimes longer than one would think possible from a random process.
If you have any ideas about how to further dampen hellthreads, I'm all ears. We can't just suppress them because that would produce an even more hellthreadish backlash.
I've been reading Hacker news since 2008, but as things stand now, I'm afraid I won't be reading it for much longer. Why? Because for the last (at least) few years, more and more often I catch myself asking: why is "Hacker news" even called "Hacker news" anymore?
Maybe this question will sound strange to some people here, but once upon a time in the past Hacker news used to have a lot of posts that were actually interesting to hackers. Today on HN mostly topics about entrepreneurship, economy, about unscrupulous rich people who make money from the corpses of others, and for whom the audience applauds in unison here, etc., prevail. We can say that the topics about everything that real hackers have never been interested in and which is the antithesis of hackers prevail here.
Guys, I guess we know what hackers are, what kind of people they are and what actually drives them? I say this because what we read here on HN has nothing to do with it. Why did this shift in interest occur? And, wouldn't it be great if the owners of this site would admit it, be honest and rename the site to, for example, "How to become the new Elon Musk"? I think that would be quite appropriate, because this place has nothing to do with hackers anymore, so it would be fair to admit that!
Put another way, there's a tradeoff between false positives, (hustle bro Musk story, say) and false negatives (a story that would generate good discussion not making the front page - yesterday there was one about the air India flight landing in Russia that had a bunch of political comments but also lots of interesting talk about other times planes landed on the wrong runway, taking off with one engine, etc.)
Since the cost of false negative is much higher than false positives, better to skew that way.