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Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

The HN you are yearning for disappeared about 8-10 years ago when it was largely taken over by normies and people way outside the hard-core-tech fold. It's not very different from Reddit front-page now if the topic is even remotely political.

For purely technical topics you expect good quality discussion, but those threads barely get comments in the two digits.

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I’m sure complaining about HN is as old as HN.

Specifically comparing HN to reddit is old as well. It's mentioned in the guidelines to not say HN is turning into reddit. The examples of this shared in the guidelines go back to 2007

If you think HN users are normies, I think you might be in a bubble. Normies ain’t this literate.

Yes sometimes the loudest voice definitely rises to the top and it’s annoying, but I also think it’s a condition that too many new members don’t know how to use the upvote button.

I also think it’s a symptom that HN does not allow enough people to use the down vote button. you could be a commenting member for years and not be able to downvote or you could be somebody who posts a few click bate links you copied from another aggregator and all of a sudden you have the ability to downvote. It’s pretty dumb.

From my observation it is hard to get to 501 karma points by the karma gained from submissions than through comments. So for comments every 1 upvote equals 1 karma. But for submissions, god only know what is the conversion rate /s. I think there are many factor. But I think this mechanism is to limit people creating accounts and mass down voting anything they don't like. So it is trying to solve another problem. However upvote power should be limited for new accounts (I don't know if this already the case)

I might be biased in my perspective because I tend to focus on links that make it to the front page. It's true that many links end up languishing in obscurity.

I just think the level of effort involved is different. For instance, the person who posted the link to the study we're now discussing earned 199 points with far less effort than you put into replying to my comment. Many of the links posted are copied from Reddit, Twitter, Slashdot, etc.

I am sure what he actually got is much less than that number. If you got 200 up votes to a comment then that's 200 karma, but with submissions it is different, maybe dang can shed some light on that. Also what gets traction depends on a lot of things that you will find that most people will have the vast majority of their submissions have little to zero activity. So it is not that easy, some will manage to do it but the purpose is to limit that to something manageable. Then I think dang is managing both up voting ans down voting rings. With up voting being harder (everyone can do that)

Yeah, normies suck. I totally only want to hear from people obsessed with the latest computer Science minutia!

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