Ask HN: Does HN move too fast? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does HN move too fast?

14 pointsdsr_5 comments

It seems to me that the vast majority of comments on any given HN article come within the first 24 hours after it is posted. Once it's dropped off the first page of /news, the discussion goes away.

While this is probably fine for the vast majority of articles, I think it encourages a fire-and-forget mentality among commenters that is antithetical to the spirit of hacking. There is value both in contributing to deeper conversations, and in reading them.

Does anyone else feel this way? Perhaps I'm just nostalgic for Usenet.

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I suspect that moving fast keeps flame wars and inside jokes to a minimum. It also encourages people to express their ideas clearly.

Needs slightly more checking against near-duplicates submissions. Sometimes i get a deja vu feeling (maybe it's just a glitch in the matrix).

Though, some important issues that stays current deserves several updated submissions. Those near-dups are good.

It's the difference between a news site and a discussion forum.

There's also a very anti-user design to the submissions that I think discourages even reading the comments once there's a lot of them.

Maybe, but the community has adapted to the speed of churn.

It seems like okay stories leave the front page after about half a day, while good or great stories might live for ~36 hours.

There are certainly times I think it does; but unfortunately, I think this is how this best has been designed. There's no designed way to watch threads that you find interesting and so if it's not on the home page, or not in the front page of your own private comments section, at least in my experience, you're not liable to see it. Often, I'll use my own karma as an indicator of whether or not I've received a comment to my work; and, if I haven't received a karma change in a long enough time, I'll go check my comments to see if they've been responded to. Usually they haven't.

All of that said to say yes, I think it does move too fast, especially for verbose, spirited discussion.

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