Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

HN may have less features, but do we even need them? I do not think it makes it worse because of that. You could call it minimalistic, which puts it into a more positive light. :)

Edit: or as someone else who has phrased it better: "less is more".

View on HN

I liked the "friends" and "foes" system that Slashdot had, though I would say generally the "foes" here just get banned which is convenient.

I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?

In practice, the Slashdot moderation system was ridiculously easy to game. You could adjust your viewpoints to subtly praise Linux and denigrate Windows and be assured of a higher rating.

I think the problem with Slashdot was that "Funny" was higher rated than "Interesting" or "Insightful", and it made the site a clown circus.

I'm not against memes and jokes, I like them. But I also like some actual intelligent discussion in between.

And that's why right now I visit Hacker News and it's been many years since I used Slashdot.

Because people agreed with you? Why is that a problem?

Because that leads to groupthink, which stifles critical thinking and leads to poor decision-making. Ideally we'd have honest debate instead of ignoring warning signs, dismissing alternative viewpoints, and failing to thoroughly evaluate risks. This leads to overconfidence which can cause blind spots leading to catastrophic failures. We can't adapt to new information or actually learn from our mistakes if our shared groupthink says oh that was bound to happen. We'd stop innovating entirely.

In terms of Slashdot groupthink, no one uses (used) Windows and Microsoft was about to fall, but when looking outside of that at computer sales vs counted Linux installs, the picture was and is still very different. The reverse happened on the server, but Nadella was able to see outside the groupthink bringing Azure to the success it enjoys today.

What a pile of meaningless buzzwords.

Slashdot's moderation system didn't lead people to think "no one used windows", the userbase just didn't like microsoft.

Beyond that, having to re-debate every single idea every single time it's brought up is inefficient to the point of uselessness. We, as individuals, don't have time to verify every single theory from first principles, so we rely on tools like "moderation" as a heuristic to make progress.

Eh, I think he brings up a pretty good point but I wouldn't say HN is any better. People here think that MacOS has high usage numbers and iPhones are the most used phone, when that's not the case. There are also a few very, very misguided ideas about software development that definitely are over-represented on HN in large part due to the (apparently, according to polls) very inexperienced nature of most HN visitors and the things they tend to work on (low-skill/low-knowledge, "high-in-their-mind"-velocity work).

HN has some very clear bubbles that probably wouldn't happen without a popularity system tied to its comments and submissions; maybe the janitorial duty of removing spam and so on is enough for a page like this. I'm not sure I see the merits of upvotes and downvotes at this point.

> What a pile of meaningless buzzwords.

I completely disagree. That was a very coherent and well articulated comment. Having a useful vocabulary is not the equivalent of using a bunch of buzzwords.

Downvoting and upvoting even if not visible can also lead to groupthink moreso on sites like Reddit than here. Points acquired here eventually let you downvote. But, really no reason to upvote or downvote comments as no one can see the points of a particular comment on this site. I am aware that after so many downvotes that the comment starts to gray out into oblivion eventually but even that promotes groupthink. Factual counterpoints, especially in political threads, are hard to discuss

> But, really no reason to upvote or downvote comments as no one can see the points of a particular comment on this site.

Voting effects the presentation order of comments, which is especially significant when there are many responses sharing an immediate parent.

That's probably a bigger impact from voting than making points publicly viewable would be

Yes, I think it is definitely a balancing act, because the rising of certain comments can certainly contribute to groupthink. However, I also think that impact of having the best comments rise to the top is very useful. The system doesn't work super great in an early and active thread, but it works very well once the thread ages a little bit

I think that supports my point. If there were no points then it would just be responses in order of posting. Points offer bias.

Yes, the point of moderation, community or otherwise, is to be a mechanism for promoting group norms.

That reinforces my point that sites like this lead to groupthink and coalescence around acceptable thought

Well, it reinforces the hypothetical argument that sites like this have a mechanisms whic promotes settling into some kind of self-reinforcing content patterns. You’d have to actually show what the common patterns were for each site (and particularly whether they were share substance of argument or shared style, or both) to make the “groupthink” argument.

(I think the best argument against the groupthing argument here is how inconsistent the positions are that are claimed to be the “groupthink” position by those claiming that.)

> (I think the best argument against the groupthing argument here is how inconsistent the positions are that are claimed to be the “groupthink” position by those claiming that

Aren’t you countering yourself by not providing the research requested above though?

I mean without objective evidence it’s all just a subjective opinion on either side

Where’d this approach to “groupthink” come from? Did you formulate this all on your own?

ETA: obligatory: /s

I'm a little too young to remember Slashdot. It would be interesting to see an informal ethnography of those older discussion sites/Usenet/etc. from people who remember that stuff. Online communities deserve more study.

I always thought that moderation is a little high handed. Instead, individuals should choose what they see or don't see via a local filter that they've trained over time. I used to filter spam out of my email inbox that way, it worked pretty good.

You talk about it as if doesn't exist anymore. If you're not aware, it still exists.

In some sense it doesn't exist anymore. At the very least, the withered corpse is a far cry from what it once was.

Score 5 funnies absolutely ruined /dots discussions

Slashdot allowed you to configure scoring, so you could assign 0 or even negative points to 'funny'.

I think that the classical phrasing is "less is more".

At least, that's how my bash pager has it in the manpage.

You are right!

I'd like some markdown support:

  * Triple ticks for code ```

  * Bullet lists

Two spaces to mono space is somewhat offensive

The single most annoying thing is the inability to somehow use a single line break to start a new line. It makes it very tedious to copy/paste things (that are not code) when quoting them.

Textile is the syntax of a Jedi Developer.

Not as clumsy or random as a Markdown; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

The "tech progressive" mindset cannot comprehend the idea that something cannot be improved or shouldn't be "enhanced". It is too close to the abyss.

Also, don't want to overlook the fact that people have to justify their jobs. If you are employed as a designer, and you were to tell your employer that The app is in good shape and doesn't need any design work, you are putting yourself out of a job. Now scale that up to an entire team of designers, or even a department with a chief designer, and you have a bunch of people. Primary incentive is to continually change things. I don't think it's a coincidence that bigger apps from companies that are big enough to hire Full-Time designers are constantly churning their UI.

I don't mean this against designer specifically. I've seen plenty of software engineers that do the same thing. Hell, I've caught myself doing the same thing. It's just part of being human, but recognizing our human nature and not doing dumb things because of it is an ideal to shoot for in my opinion.

Hmm, I have an idea for HN on the next April 1st.

Dark mode. Sure, Dark Reader exists but many mobile browsers don't support it.

Annoyingly enough it's been talked about for years but it never gets implemented, despite only three colors really needing a swap: background to dark sepia or just dark gray, and text to white and off-white.

You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS. You need to store the setting. You need to consider people without accounts. You need to put a bit on thought into the color scheme, as this website is after all known for its color. In the end, many people will complain, regardless of how well you do.

I can virtually guarantee that the amount of people getting annoyed at being flashbanged by HN is larger than the amount of people that would complain about a dark mode.

For users without an account you just stick to prefers-color-scheme. For users with an account you add a setting 'disable dark mode'

Dark Reader has autodetection so those users won't be a problem either.

And if you really wanna keep to the identity of the site, the top bar doesn't even really need a color swap.

It really is less of a conundrum than you think.

> You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS.

The Browser also has controls. Good Browsers let you set your browser-wide choice differently from your OS-wide choice. Great Browsers let you pick per-site overrides directly, as a standard user setting in a consistent location in browser controls. I realize a lot of UX designers have come to much prefer the "add more controls" approach over the "teach a person to fish" / understand how your OS and browser controls work as the user of the site approach. I realize why a lot of UX designers will always prefer that approach, because teaching people is hard and it is easier to cut complaints off at the pass than answer complaints with "use your browser's settings".

But seriously, it should be fine to release a dark mode in 2025 that only responds to `prefers-color-scheme: dark` and leaves it to users to understand their OS and Browser tools. It irks me a lot more when sites like Wikipedia and Bing and Google ignore `prefers-color-scheme: dark` by default and makes you dig for some dumb website-specific control (that's in a different place on every website) just to set it to whatever they call "System default" that means "trust the Browser's prefers-color-scheme, I know what I'm doing". UX designers have taken something that should be natural and automatic and made it more complex and more confusing just because a small handful of users complain that they don't understand their OS and Browser Settings tools.

If only colour swap is required, can you use a Greasemonkey script?

And how would you propose running Greasemonkey on a mobile browser?

> Dark mode.

The idea of "Dark mode" as a "feature" annoys me more than it probably should. Because it highlights how proper separation of content and presentation has been ruined by the so-called modern web, by modern web devs that don't get it.

The website is supposed to provide content, not presentation. Presentation is a user-agent feature. If you want to read a site with bright yellow font on a purple background, that should be your decision and yours alone. Configure your user agent with that color scheme and done.

By hardcoding presentation into the content, the "modern" (regressed) web removes functionality from the user. So now the user is relegated to begging the developers to implement particular color schemes like "dark mode", which doesn't make any sense.

The web was like that for about the first 10 minutes. In 1996, the "modern" web accepted that web pages were almost always going to incorporate appearance and made it sane by standardising CSS.

I want a pickup truck that is designed like HN. The slate may be the answer

A minimalist pickup truck could be a bicycle. Depends on whether you really need a truck at all.

or perhaps, from a space and utility perpective, a cargo trike? I don't think a bike could handle a desk, even a foldable/collapsed one from ikea, whereas a cargo trike probably could.

And then you're like the meme that popped up recently somewhere on Twitter about some guy using his cargo bike to move bricks. Only took him 12 hours and 4 trips to do something anyone sane would do in 1 hour and 1 trip

This seems like a relatively bad approach in general. An even more minimalist bicycle can just be your legs, depends on whether you really need a bicycle at all. A more minimalist pair of shoes would be sandals, or even more minimalist is just going barefoot and building callouses on your soles. You also don't really need to look stylish, so a more minimalist set of clothing can just be a sheet that you wrap around yourself. I don't find this to be a useful line of thinking.

If walking gets you to where you want to go, then what's the issue?

I mean you could technically balance a sheet of plywood on your back on a bicycle, but it seems like it would become impractical at any speed above 30mph just due to aerodynamic...uh...lift.

Last time I did this I rested the sheet good on one pedal and rode side-saddle. It worked all right. YMMV--helps to be going downhill...

Dark Mode. And Follow User would be two feature I have been using for years with other tools.

Follow user is antithetical to the idea of HN -- content should be upvoted because of what it says, not who said it.

But I agree dark mode would be nice.

I believe HN's HTML structure is simple enough to overwrite with custom CSS on the browser end.

Sure, but I use at least five different browsers for HN, some on my phone. That’s a huge pain.

Being able to check a profile box would be a lot easier.

Genuinely curious, why do you use so many different browsers for HN?

Fair question. I use HN Replies, which emails me when people reply to me. On my computer, if I click the link in the email, it opens in Chrome. But on my computer my normal browser for HN is Safari. I use separate browsers for different things on my computer, so Safari is for HN and reddit, Chrome is for Google apps, like gmail etc., and Firefox for everything else. So sometimes I also get into HN via Firefox if I'm there an happen to type the URL or get a link.

Then on the phone, Safari is again the default browser, but if I click a link from the gmail app it opens in mobile Chrome.

So to use a plugin to change anything, I'd have to have the plugin on all five browsers.

Comments by people with more points to their name are (or at least used to be) promoted higher, which naturally leads to more upvotes.

So there's still an element of who says it that matters

Comments have never been ranked differently on HN based on karma.

https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...

These go in your ublock origin "my filters" section. Enables Dark Mode through CSS, and another filter restricts the width of comments.

A 'Block User' feature would be nice. We don't have that feature do we? HN is full of trolls who fly just below the radar of what level of rudeness it takes to get kicked off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com