We need more sites like hackernews.
X /twitter used to be that , but it's now overwhelmed with bots and SEO.
The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.
"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.
There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."
The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)
Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.
And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.
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It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.
If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.
You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.
I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
HN has 39 million comments after 17 years.
HN is small.
You only see who you follow, and there's no like/karma/upvotes algorithm.
Everything is sorted chronologically, and if anyone tries to "game" that by posting too much, they'd get unfollowed and/or banned.
Mastodon is a nurtured cultivated twitter.
Personally I follow the CSS/JS/TS community (for work), the gamedev community (for fun), and the space community (for passion)
Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least.
Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
There's probably not more than 50k meaningfully unique sites with some notable amount of actual desirable information, after excluding all the SEO'ed sites, blogs repeating each other, etc... at least for the English web.
Manual curation is entirely possible since probably there aren't even 50 such sites being created per day on average. This is including every single forum still open to public viewing. There really aren't that many left (<10k).
Especially worth mentioning in this connection is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39424688, as of this writing #1 on HN. I mention it here because what it says about moderation, and about centralized platforms being both the highest-value and most poorly managed targets, applies here also.
Why would you expect otherwise, that intelligent people will suddenly lose their ability to perceive what's higher quality content?
The issue is that those are now impossible to find.
A huge proportion have simply stopped updating, gone offline or moved to a paywall on substack/medium/etc...
The 50k number is all inclusive and probably even still an overestimate.
And I never mentioned whether something 'qualify as information worth retaining the ability to retrieve'... are you confused about what the comment chain is about?
I'm okay with that. Honestly sounds a lot better than the current state of affairs. The only problem now is getting invited.
This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.
But I don't think it's bad. Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal. There are a lot of people out there, with their own opinions, ideas and understanding (or lack of) of the world. Internet just converges towards the average human being. If we want a better internet, hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser, rather than blame the SEO and bots...
Sounds quite ideal to me.
> hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser
I'd rather hope for a future made by us and for us instead.
"Average" people just don't care about this stuff like we do. They don't care. I tried to get them to care, they refuse to care about all this stuff that we care about. That's fine, people like what they like and that's that but why should we care about their concerns then? We should not. And I do not.
Truth is I couldn't care less about such an "average" human being. Why is everything always about the "average" person? Why must all technology serve this mythical average human? Where is the technology that serves me? My programmer's computer system and network?
Isn't that why we all come to Hacker News?
People chase these "averages" because there's money in it. The money mostly comes from advertising consumer products to them. That's why advertising destroys everything.
Put it all in perspective
LLMs are only a deathblow, albeit a massive one, to a trend that's been 10 years in the making.
I feel it's time for another small internet for us, with blackjack and dancers. But this time let's agree not to make it friendly and accessible for everyone, alright?
and Slurm, please.
..anyway that's how I ended up with a Great Dane."
HN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience.
- no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger
- no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring
- limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word
- no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans
It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?
I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.
E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.
At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.
Peace and quiet.
In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up.
I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.
most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that:
1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!)
2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger.
3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.
The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not.
https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...
Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
HN is heavily moderated (censored) and people love to complain when that happens on sites like twitter.
I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there.
And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.
On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources.
That most people do is itself revealing.