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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

It needs a relatively small community with a strong moderator who will warn people once. Not much of they around as it’s a painful job. I would like just an old fashioned, strict (no endless bickering over politics and wars, just hard tech and show offs what you have been hacking this weekend) forum with most people from r/programminglanguages and some of Hn. That’s enough to keep me entertained anyway.

I very much dislike the discord move; no archive.org / publicly available history. So much interesting and valuable stuff is discussed and a year later they close the channel/topic/even server and gone it is. Worthless.

View on HN

LTT forums I think is quite a good.

https://linustechtips.com/

What part of this is different from HN as it is?

I don't think of HN as a place to initiate a discussion or ask a question. I've contributed two items which never got any visibility or responses. But, I'm fine with contributing to a thread that makes it to the first few pages if I think I have something to say.

HN isn't a good place for discussion in my opinion due to the (explicitly allowed) practice of downvoting comments you don't agree with.

If you'll be penalized for saying something people disagree with, you won't say it, or you'll say it and I'll be downvoted until it's hidden. This leads to HN threads usually being dominated with a few majority opinions and any real discussion being killed-off or buried.

This is basically the same as Reddit. If you want real discussion you often need to sort by controversial.

I'm still coming up to speed on downvoting. The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post.

At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.

> The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post.

I believe you get access to downvotes after 500 karma, and only for up to a day after the comment was made

One quirk about HN is that if you complain about the downvotes, you'll get even more. The community does seem to treat karma as the truly imaginary internet points they are.

Descendance into the underworld occurs when the goal becomes to embrace the highest negative score as it will put the comment at the bottom extreme of the thread and neither get lost in the middle nor marked at the top of the groupthink. If down votes were to serve the purpose of hiding less useful comments, then it would be more appropriate to style the comments with colors associated with a light/dark theme and not mess with chronological order, but that would likely set off the anti-gay crowd. As an aside, the temperature is more constant further from searing gazes. Just don't get flagged as that calls the terminator hounds.

Complaining about voting is explicitly against the community guidelines

IMO, HN they should introduce tags and include them to range the visibility. This way we could have more visibility for specific areas.

HN is good, but a little too much politics topics for my taste, but yes, not for nothing I am here. I was talking about my ideal (utopia) forum which will never happen. Now I am still on reddit for 3 subs and HN and lobsters.

Are you ok to share those 3 subs on reddit?

Sure

- r/programminglanguages - r/lisp - r/functionalprogramming

The issue with lobsters is the difficulty of joining it, which I suppose is a feature.

HN has its positives, but there’s a good reason it’s derisively known as “the angry orange website” in many tech circles.

What do you think the anonymity makes the locals' angrier? While anonymity can encourage people to provide honest feedback, I also had an experience where I received negative feedback for nothing:)

Not many hackers left round these parts. The Eternal September hit hard.

Well, for one thing, HN discussions don't just disappear after a while.

Too many HN comments nowadays are a) dumb jokes b) disinformation that it would take too much effort to correct kindly. In the old days those comments were corrected harshly and that kept the community quality high (both because it kept the discussion more accurate at first order, and because it drove away users who couldn't take their lumps). Nowadays they are not corrected at all.

This is the problem with voting based social media. A demographic can be entirely supplanted by another really quickly. All you need is for the new demographic to upvote themselves, and the pre-existing demographic to not downvote the other demographic. Pre-existing users will start leaving when they see the content they originally came there for being outcompeted by the content the new demographic has introduced, causing a domino effect.

I've seen this happen with multiple subreddits. HN is also at risk for this, but it's a niche corner of the internet, so it would surprise me if there are ever enough non-assimilated individuals coming in at once to truly endanger the community.

I would start by not allowing voting on main topics; only allow on comments. And rank topics based on comment votes. Bad comments are going to be downvotes or, if bad quality, will just be removed.

Tildes may be an interesting testing ground as a forum without downvote. It has Labels instead for marking less constructive comments, like Joke, Noise, Malice, etc.

Tildes does not rank based on voting, and instead displays votes as a separate signal. IMO it's a great piece of UX. It gives the author the pleasure of imaginary internet points but doesn't allow highly online mobs to sway the ordering of discussion.

There's a part we can all play here and that is to downvote no-effort/low-value comments. I do that and occasionally explicitly respond to people asking them to refer to the HN guidelines and not turn HN into Slashdot. Jokes (with no other content), sarcasm and the like should all get downvoted. Thoughtful/high-effort comments should be upvoted.

Yes, there are more reddit like comments now. Moderating is a really hard job when sites are very active.

I don't think it's an activity level issue. When dang took over he made an explicit shift to prioritizing kindness, with predictable results.

dang has a different style than pg did but I really don't think that's the issue. The site is big now and has absorbed a lot of people fleeing Reddit and Twitter and they've brought that culture with them. dang's moderation has continuously been evenhanded and well applied. The site has changed despite his efforts, IMO.

I hope this doesn't sound like 'sucking up' because it's certainly not intended to be that, but I have been continually impressed at how good a moderator dang is. And more than moderation, he also 'curates' the site well, often adding links to when the subject or even the same article has been discussed before, etc.

But moderation of a popular forum is a Sisyphean task, and worse, it seems that gravity increases over time in this form of the task, making rolling the ball up the hill increasingly hard and not just endless. That sounds bleak but I think the solution is that eventually all forums must be abandoned, however good they once were, and new places found. I expect this to happen with HN eventually too, even though it's had a pretty good run so far.

I don't think one can easily compare HN to other forums, so saying the results are predictable is a bit harsh.

I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.

I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.

It is annoying that people spread misinformation, but a quick scan of a user's comment history often gives a good indication of their credibility.

> I don't think one can easily compare HN to other forums, so saying the results are predictable is a bit harsh.

Well, I predicted them at the time (and IIRC commented as much), and that's been borne out.

> I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.

You can definitely go too far. Kind is better than harsh all else being equal, and you should never reward cruelty for its own sake.

> I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.

For me HN inherited an amazing community that has since gradually declined, and almost all visible moderator interventions have had a negative impact. I certainly think e.g. nudging out Chris Stucchio did more harm than good.

Add the third type please:

finding any reasons to contradict to parent commentor and win the arguments at any costs.

Nice observation. I also noticed that the quality went downhill when HN applied strict moderation.

Sure this place looks friendlier now, but it feels empty as most competent people had already left.

Not sure if it will ever be possible to moderate content as it was in the past. Time to generate content has become way faster and cheaper.

HN isn't pretty much guaranteed to be dead in a year or two and it can also be archived easily.

HN is a laughing joke now, compare to the old days. For every popular thread there are at least 50% of comments are outright wrong, or unimportant bike-shedding.

To the point some people created a satire website called n-gate some years before just to laugh at HN. And for sure for every top place popular HN thread right now there will be a lot of people posting the link just to laugh at the comments.

Even n-gate apparently found it too hard or painful to keep up with everything on HN.

http://n-gate.com/hackernews/

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