Comment by kb101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kb101 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the poster 100%. Originally I was very enthusiastic about the site, and happy I had found it, but ultimately I realized that every time I visited or attempted to add my input to a thread, I came away feeling depressed and/or angry.

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.

I've had an account here for more than four years, so I'd like to think I have a somewhat informed perspective on how the community has fared thus far.

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.

I fully understand the sentiment behind this comment since it resonates with how I feel about HN for the most part. However, there's undeniable value in this particular style of a community:

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.

>Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

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).

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