Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonger_ | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I like how HN focuses on content and discussions rather than individual users. If I wanted to follow experts, I'd probably curate a selection on a social network like Mastodon, or kludge together some RSS feeds.

Also, I feel like this tool selects for active commenters, not for knowledgeable experts. Not to mention throwaway accounts.

Still a cool project.

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Personally I don't read user names. Easiest way to focus on the comments. Of course, the lack of avatars and signatures and stuff like that helps a lot.

I have absolutely no idea who I've had an argument with on HN ever. I'm sure I've had a few.

It's interesting to keep track of some known people. Sometimes you get to see (for example) a thread with cperciva, tptacek and animats - and I think it makes it more fun to read when you know...

But but ... they're known to you because you read the user names ...

I’ll often looks at the username if I find a comment either particularly insightful, or particularly stupid. It tends to be the same small collection of users, so I guess I’m agreeing/disagreeing with people quite consistently.

There is one person here that is like my Polish doppelganger. I'll go to post in a thread and I'll find they already posted the gist of what I was going to say.

There's also https://hnrss.github.io where you can "subscribe" to a user's comments.

If I see a thread with too many comments from high volume posters, I assume it's low signal. Most of them are very good at commenting in a style that is convincing sounding and popular here, but when they stray into topics that I know well, I often find them to be confident, plausible, and wrong. (And also upvoted above people with correct information who don't have the same name recognition.)

>I often find them to be confident, plausible, and wrong. (And also upvoted above people with correct information who don't have the same name recognition.)

This is basically 99% of hacker news comments in a nutshell.

You pass the confidence, plausibility, and accuracy challenge with flying colours!

I'm sure that happens with me (I've noted for awhile that banal comments I write here get upvoted, presumably from a combination name recognition and people who engage with HN by following specific people --- which is how I do it too). What I'll say is if you see this happening with me, call me out on it! Refer back to this comment, if you like, when you do.

Apart from sheer volume (I have been a message board nerd since FIDONet when I was a teenager, it's second nature for me) I attribute what success I've had here to engaging principally on security topics, which is where I've spent my whole career. But I also just like to shoot the shit about stuff! I'm wrong all the time! (Including about security stuff).

One username that always stands out is “1970-01-01”. Every time I do a double-take, thinking a timestamp has gone wrong.

the same, I get weirded out sometimes when I read a remark from someone who evidently has decided to keep track of who I am on the site. Seems like a lot of wasted mental effort for little reward.

A couple of weeks ago someone made a whole anonymous Mastodon account just to ask me a vague question about a comment I made here on HN like six years ago. It kinda creeped me out.

A fan? A stalker? Just a rando with too much time on their hands?

I do look at the commenter's name (same as for an article's author) as I know quite a few commenters personally (some are former colleagues) so our replies sometimes refer specifically to something the other person knows or did.

Obviously this applies to a negligible percentage of total commenters, but as I only comment on certain topics I’m more likely to encounter friends with the same interests/experiences.

I concur on the sentiment - I think it’s great we don’t have avatars etc here as it makes it more content focused -

But at the same time I think the OP has made an awesome project! Well done

The negative space should be the most interesting, since absence trends are the hardest to recognize. What are Hacker News’s quantifiable blind spots? Answers on a postcard.

I've been interested in a map of what gets flagged for a while.

Not the negative space, but a list of untolerated content.

But curating such a list of experts to follow takes quite some effort. It would be great to have a tool that helps with that.

And sure, ideally you wouldn't need such a list of trusted experts but just focus on content. There even was a time when this worked - you could just type "what is the best database to use" into a search engine, and get a helpful result. Not anymore. On HN it may still be better than elsewhere, but ultimately it's a similar issue.

Thanks! Those are fair points. We're thinking we could uplevel the social layer so you can connect with people of similar interests for deeper connections. In this way we compute not just your contributions but how they relate to others.

With such efforts I think it is time for people start deleting their accounts, not because they want/need to hide anything, but some people may want to stay semi-anonymous by using aliases and data mining everything and correlating it with other sources (e.g. LinkedIn) may help identify them and cause trouble (e.g. someone wrote something about their workplace without naming it, but hey, it is "John Doe that works in MegaCorp".

> it is time for people start deleting their accounts

HN does not let you do that though. At least last time I asked about it, they sent me a response saying that they’d notify me when it became possible to delete an account. And they provided some reasons for why they don’t delete comments and accounts.

It would destroy older comment threads. There are quite some gold nuggets to be found there.

Sure, but what is more important? Some random comment threads, or honoring the wishes of the people who have been contributing comments to the site?

For me I would prioritize the wishes of the contributors.

Well, how about the contributers honoring the wishes of the owners of the plattform?

Also my wish as a contributer is that the threads stay like this. So I can come back later and reread them. I often gained value in reading a linked old thread.

My advice for people not wishing for that, would be simply to stop commenting instead of demanding the site should change.

Could there be a middle ground to remove the account ID as a correlation between posts? The posts could remain as a graph of replies without retaining who posted which.

I know this means someone could still use stylometry to try to reaggregate the posts, but that's less reliable than HN actually telling us that the same authenticated user made all these posts over a decade.

I could very much live with that solution.

I thought it goes without saying, that when you post something sensitive, that you don't want to connect openly to your account - you use a throwaway account. HN made it easy to do that.

"Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone."

-Twilight Zone Episode: Time Enough at Last-

The social web died, all you're doing it making pitchfork and torch 2.0 for mobs.

If you want to add value and not bloody public spectacle rank comments instead of users.

I have a bunch of low quality posts here when idiots piss me off, but also share world first research and breakthroughs I've been involved with the rare time the counter party is worth talking to.

> rank comments instead of users

> I have a bunch of low quality posts here when idiots piss me off

It’s ironic because in the second of the parts I quoted you on here you are basically yourself generalizing the users instead of the comments.

Is it really “idiots” that piss you off (the users)? Or is it the specific things they said in isolated cases (the comments) that piss you off? Wasn’t your point exactly that this kind of distinction is important?

And the OP here seems to willfully ignore the main point his parent was making. He said that not having this focus on a "social layer" made HN better. But then OP says:

    We're thinking we could uplevel the social layer

head => palm

It’s great that you finished it but I wish you had taken a little more care to protect users here. Some people I respect a lot are a little more vulnerable because of this

How?

This seems like a slippery slope towards bog-standard social media.

Currently, HN is the only place on the internet I am willing to interact with others _because_ it lacks the "social layer" you are recommending.

The focus on user comments that are thoughtful, relevant, and respectful _is_ the social connection I value.

I agree. It's also quite humbling which I think is a good thing.

I think that especially in CS, since applications of which touch on nearly every possible field of knowledge, computer scientists often run into trouble of assuming they know more than we do.

CS people are prone to the engineering trap of "I've learned one slightly complex thing so obviously I'm capable of knowing every complex thing". It tends to forget how important sheer quantity of practice is in every field that expects a higher than high school level of education.

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