Is HN negative by design? (2011)
mikealrogers.com
mikealrogers.com
It's too clubby, it's taken the general disgust that people feel toward the banality of messageboards that deteriorate into meme-ification or juvenile flamewars... and turned that into a kind of snobby elitism that is just as off-putting.
Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous. Only an antisocial or asocial nerd would come up with such a rule and think it was a great idea, and I say that as an antisocial nerd myself.
The system of ranking people by points, insisting that every single post be some giant revelation of wisdom that advances the fortunes of the tech industry and mankind immeasurably, etc. has only exacerbated people's tendency to self-aggrandize, kiss ass, over-analyze minutiae, and constantly try to one-up each other... all cloaked in a brightly colored cheerful passive-aggressive candy coating, of course.
I still cruise the site from time to time because it does have great links (one of the few things left going for it) but there is no way in hell I would consider myself part of the community or welcome. I certainly wouldn't and don't come here any more to ask questions or try to learn anything by exposing any gaps in my knowledge to general ridicule and sneering.
My two cents.
Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.
As far as I can see, if you have a point or articulation in your "thank you" comment, it's not really frowned upon. But if all you can contribute to the conversation are those two words, isn't that what upvoting is for? I really like that HN threads are much easier/faster to navigate (compared to reddit for example) merely because of the lower number of comments, which stems from the pressure to provide more substance behind them.
I spend over an hour a day on this site, yet have so few comments or submissions; because it costs so much time and effort to put anything in front of a pedantic, productivity/efficiency obsessed audience ready to shred anything to bits and pieces that is less than a throughly fact-checked, carefully constructed argument. I think that's what makes HN worth reading.
For example, I'm about to post about a project I've been working on for a while. I'm sure it'll feel good to hear if people have good things to say about it but the most valuable feedback I'll receive will be from the people who overanalyze things and are highly critical.
The first year or so was a private club. I knew many of the posters, and would have great arguments, some won, some lost but it didn't really matter because everyone shared a passion for knowledge, and would rather be proven wrong than not learn something new. The discussion was great.
The second year I started losing track of the usernames and thus it became less of a club of peers, and more of a regular forum, albeit a very high quality one.
The third year the site had attracted so many users that the original patos of intelligent discussion based on merit started to fade. Based on mere numbers this had to be so; for any given subject there are only a limited number of people that adhere to the standards to which we had becomme accustomed, and new users mistook nitpicking for good discussion.
The fourth year I've more or less stopped posting and discussing here, primarily because it's become a game of winning, and not a game of learning. Nitpicking is a great way of winning, but terrible if you want to have an interesting discussion. Negativity is highly correlated with nitpicking in this respect :-)
I remember the first year here i had a long discussion with MattMaroon about a linked story where a consultant had saved a company 100 million dollars by changing a few bits and pieces around in the check-out process. He was concinced the company was Amazon, I was convinced it wasn't. The discussion dragged on, and we each tried to throw statistics, numbers and good guesses on the table, until at the end Matt found a link directly confirming that it was indeed amazon. He was right, and we were both happy because now we knew. I don't see many of those discussions anymore. Unfortunately.
The comp.* hierarchy and probably most of the rest of Usenet in 1992 had the ethic that you should not waste a whole message on just a thank-you (thank-yous sent by email were fine, and in 1992, almost every Usenet From field contained a valid email address) or on any other purely social nicety unless perhaps the social nicety's purpose was to conclude or cap off a long series of back-and-forth messages.
Usenet was probably where a good 40 to 50% of thoughtful public discussion happened on the 1992 internet (the other places where much public discussion happened being mailing lists and IRC).
Look at some of the threads where people have posted "Woe is me, I need a job and my wife is sick and my dog is dying and my car just fell over" and look at the generous offers of help and posts of support those get. Look at the "Hey, I'm coming to SV and want to visit some people, who wants to get together?" posts and notice how many people chime in to say "Hey, come see us." Look at the threads about depression and related topics, and notice the people saying things like "If you need somebody to talk to, call me anytime."
I think HN actually has (mostly) a very positive vibe, and I'm glad that jokes and Internet memes and (most) "me too" posts are downvoted. There's a place for that stuff... that place just happens to not be HN.
Now I'm not saying HN is perfect, and I won't even argue that the level of discourse hasn't suffered a bit the last few years. But, by and large, this is one of the most civil and productive forums I'm part of, or ever have been part of.
Eh, I wouldn't think about the karma thing to much. I have 3001 karma as of this posting, and I still find myself surprised at which of my comments are upvoted, downvoted and/or ignored. I just say what I'm honestly feeling, submit stuff I find interesting, and figure the rest will sort itself out.
On top of that, HN seems like a get-shit-done site. If you aren't contributing, get out of the way. If you don't have something nice - no scratch that - *useful to say, then don't say anything at all. And this is not to be mistaken with, no laughing allowed, no fun, and no hearts. It is more of an efficiency thing.
For me, I'm not here or on any other message board to "get shit done"... if I am getting shit done then I'm not surfing the Internet, by definition. I come to sites like this to learn stuff, find cool links, run across things I had never heard of or thought of before, and hopefully have interesting conversations. I really detest the constant pressure of having to self-censor and edit what I say with a view to making sure it's "useful"... whatever the definition of useful is.
It's funny that after a long hiatus I do a drive by here and this thread is on the front page.
Also the point thing sucks, frankly. Whether you want to or not, you start keeping track of your points, wondering what you could do to get more, feeling jealous of others who have way more than you, etc. Human nature I suppose. It also sucks to call it some bullshit euphemistic name like "karma", which obscures what it really is, which is a social ranking system.
I would say that 4chan and YouTube comments are at one extreme, and Hacker News sits squarely at the opposite extreme. Neither appeal.
Hmm, I never had that impression.
It's the No Me Too Posts Policy taken to the extreme and it alienates people from one another
That's what keeps this from degrading like Reddit.
Personally, I feel connected to others on HN (and not alienated) via the serious intellectual discussion I find on here. That is the fabric of this community.
Is this new?
Or the guy was confusing HN with Google+
Whereas, social network communities like Twitter and Facebook are self-selecting along any number of criteria--political, personal, ideological, local, employer, etc. As a result, I bet most people don't see as much diversity of opinion through their personal social networks as they do in single-issue dedicated online communities like HN.
So, I'm not surprised that this author found a more positive response from Twitter, than he did from Hacker News. The people following him on Twitter are already people who have affirmatively chosen to hear what he has to say. The people here have not, so they are more likely to argue, point out flaws, etc.
That can come across as negativity, sure--but is it? Is disagreement or challenge such a bad thing?
Personally speaking, I think that one result of highly personalized social media networks is that it leads to segregation from opposing opinions or very different points of view. The result is, seemingly, less tolerance for those opinions or points of view.
Although my interest in open source was very high when one of the early planets, Debian Planet, started, I never found Debian Planet or any other open-source planet worthwhile.
>Apache's policy to this day is that any member of the community can syndicate the entire contents of their blog or a specific tagged feed of their blog to the planet. It's the individuals decision how much of themselves they want to share. Mozilla had a nearly identical debate and came to the exact same conclusion
This policy has been tried many times, but has never resulted in a blog, feed or form of public online discourse I want to follow.