Hacker News – The Good Parts | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News – The Good Parts

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171 pointssmartmic224 comments

HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable. And I know that sometimes that falls into some personalized negativity but it’s useful most of the time.

The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.

Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.

Blogging?

It is also another good option but I find HN better in the sense that there are usually more chances of somebody responding to your comment/ ask post in HN in a similar minded way as compared to blogging if you are like me who has interests in lots of things.

Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.

It also forces you to make sure you write so that you are understood. This gets rid of a lot of writers block because you are determined to make sure you are understood, almost like a mission. Otherwise, this place doesn’t work. It would be a giant LinkedIn showboat-off.

It is always surprising how people misinterpret things you wrote. Lots of time people reply to an emotion, “not” jokes don’t work well in writing. If you write first sentence to negate it in the paragraph breaks really fast.

I write a blog sometimes - iambateman.com/articles - and it’s great. But for daily writing I find it challenging to keep it up.

It’s useful for someone to be wrong on the Internet.

I’ve learned a lot from watching constructive disagreements between other people. Regardless of whether they’re “right” or not, healthy disagreements sharpen our perspectives.

Cue joke about the way to get an answer on the internet is to post a wrong answer.

Tactical wrongness is an underrated parenting technique too.

> HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable.

Only true if your general argument is still in line with the HN zeitgeist. You are allowed to disagree so long as you dont disagree on core topics. HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion. While people here don't karma farm (or karma guard) as aggressively it takes almost nothing to end up shadowbanned/instant-flagged/etc for having a disagreeable standpoint.

In other words, as long as you aren't right of center you can disagree all you want. Even a trivially libertarian viewpoint is met with significant ire.

Voting systems in general are a massive problem in social media. They don't stop the truly bad actors but they drive away the exact thing that prevents you from being caught in an echo chamber (of which HN is an example of).

> HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion.

The alternative is to be like 4chan, though. I'll begrudgingly admit that there are pros, but the cons definitely outweigh them.

> The alternative is to be like 4chan, though

4chan's problem isn't the lack of a voting system, the problem comes from the complete anonymity of its users, the lack of friction to post, and the near complete lack of moderation standards.

The very best online online communities I've ever been a part of - and continue to participate in - tend to have two major things in common. First, there has to be some sort of friction to join the conversation. Second, there are moderation standards, and these standards are only enforced with active and engaged moderators, and not by easily-gamed populism-driven systems.

>The alternative is to be like 4chan

False. The alternative might be something like spacebattles.

Excellent comment. Disagreeable comments can be sincerely held, supported, but this means little if you do not hold the prevailing opinion with the downvoting/flagging/almost impossible-to-read feint grey text, which is often where the gold is! Weekends are definitely better for more open conversation.

Regarding the grayed-out-text phenomenon, my way around this has been to use the Stylebot extension on Chromium- and Gecko-based browsers and apply the following CSS to HN pages:

  div div a, div p a {
    color: darkblue;
  }
  
  div.commtext.c5A {
    color: #5A0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.c73 {
    color: #730000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.c88 {
    color: #880000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.c9C {
    color: #9C0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.cAE {
    color: #AE0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.cBE {
    color: #BE0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.cCE {
    color: #CE0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.cDD {
    color: #DD0000;
  }
  
  div.commtext.c5A a,
  div.commtext.c73 a,
  div.commtext.c88 a,
  div.commtext.c9C a,
  div.commtext.cAE a,
  div.commtext.cBE a, 
  div.commtext.cCE a, 
  div.commtext.cDD a {
    color: darkred;
  }

  div div pre {
    color: darkgreen;
  }

Good idea. The grey comments often have some of the best comments, if you can read them.

Kind of find it annoying people down vote things they disagree with.

I down vote only things I find that should not be posted like as-persona or something I really know is just wrong.

Of course there is a bit of blur between something being wrong and something we disagree.

Basically anything that doesn't follow the comment guidelines. Once e.g. a comment becomes personal, I downvote it for being unrelated to the subject

> ... "or something I really know is just wrong."

Sometimes I'll up-vote or ignore these if the "wrong" is really common, and there's a reply with a really thorough and valid debunking or explanation attached, just to avoid burying that reply (which TBH, education should be the proper response to someone being wrong). Can't learn if the education is always buried or hidden before people ever have a chance to find it, after all... Or maybe that's the goal for some down-voters, I suppose?

I'm no longer inclined to present a counter view on this site, even with references. It's as close to a polite version of Reddit as it could get without becoming Reddit.

The last libertarian post I saw wasn't getting downvoted and it was by a guy who wanted to set up meetings with cartels to improve the efficiency of their drug dealing business.

For very small values of disagreeable.

The line is closer than you think. Cross it and your words just disappear.

I find downvote-to-oblivion to be more irritating than beneficial.

I particularly dislike it when comment sections erupt into downvote wars on anything that varies from the prevailing opinion in the room, irrespective of whether it makes a logical argument or contributes information or insight to the conversation.

My primary peeve is the righteous confidence that comes with ignorance.

What happened to humility?

This is a forum attached to a billion dollar Silicon Valley startup incubator.

Everyone here wants to look like the next Steve Jobs in front of YC, no one wants to look like Steve Wozniak.

Like the thought.

Fun part is that most likely being Wóz would get you to be hired or partnered with because guys running the show think they all are Jobs.

I'd say--- to a good approx--- everyone here in the comments wants to work like Wóz & sound like Jobs.

(Very few are actively looking to be hired, and those that are would rather post a frontpaging deepdive blog than practise their commentary?)

>Everyone here wants to look like the next Steve Jobs in front of YC, no one wants to look like Steve Wozniak.

I think it's interesting that this wasn't the vibe that was here around the time of the first few YC cohorts. Everyone posting here was chatting as if they wanted to embody the Richard Stallman/Wozniak prototypical hackerman. I think once YC grew and this became a place to network with successful industry insiders rather than tech savvy ultra-geeks doing it for the love of the game that the tone changed hard.

There are many forums with disageeable comments, reddit and others. At least on HN it tends to be constructive disagreement more than nastiness.

I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.

For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector

Just occasionally I do really want to respond with an image because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more complex thing.

At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.

Linking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of the things I appreciate about it.

[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays

On second thoughts given people are downvoting this as a low quality comment rather than responding on the ways they disagree this audience would descend into the exact same problems on Reddit. My position is thus reversed, it is not something that HN would use properly.

Yes, it is frustrating that rather than make an argument, people downvote thoughtful comments as if it was a low quality post. Perhaps the downvoting feature is actually part of the problem.

Frankly, my subjective observation was that downvoting without responding just for disagreeing with a comment increased significantly at the start of the first Trump term.

I think linking to the image works just fine for that, but I do agree that a bit more Markdown would be nice.

The intellectual level achieved in HN is unparalleled in the history of internet. The bad parts, except those mentioned other where:

1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop

2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.

There were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density.

The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.

As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.

I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.

> relative lower quality in other fields except technology

As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here.

It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about.

No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.

Crichton called it the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. HN is such a great resource of brainpower, but too infrequently useful on political issues.

As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation.

This describes Wikipedia more than HN.

There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless

AskHistorians is still pretty great too.

Turns out gatekeeping works

Absolutely. Why wouldn't it? All the useful forums are "gatekept" in some fashion; AskHistorians just has an especially legible set of gates.

What was that weightlifting sub that worshiped "Brodin" and "The Church Of (Something? Maybe Iron?)"

I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.

Oh man this brings back memories! I can’t remember the name either but they would say stuff like “whey-men” after these “prayers”. I think at some point it kind of devolved into the same jokes over and over as those subs tend to do so I drifted away, but it was fun for a while.

You mean this forum?

http://139.177.194.177/worst.date.ever.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/swoleacceptance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Brodinism/

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with a kinda-social-network-ish-in-the-broadest-possible-definition attached.

HN actually is a social network.

I don’t think its a social network — it’s content-focused, not person-focused

You upvote stories on Hacker News and Reddit, as opposed to following people

Yes but I feel like HN does have some lore from time to time as well. I had seen a recent comment where the commenter shares his personal experience with the author and how they helped him in a stackoverflow question and how it led to their startup and saved their asses. Oh yeah just remembered, it was nadernx (sorry if the name wasn't right), and people in the thread were asking if it saved their asses or what they did and they said that they donated to patreon

Like, its not following exactly per se but it was a discussion outside of the post itself which was about python. And it was great.

I feel like this could be an example for the parent comment as well as how I personally feel like HN is more social networky than say wikipedia but not at twitter or trad social media level I guess.

It's wild to see two people in a row, one that's saying Wikipedia isn't a social network and then that HN/Reddit aren't.

Maybe we should all stop trying to narrowly class what's allowed to be a social network?

I think a more precise definition of social network would be nice, actually, considering how much hubbub is being made about them.

When the term first came about, it was mainly used to contrast with what was around earlier.

"Earlier" could be anything from Usenet to forums etc that were based around topics. Your view of content was based around the topics you selected. You followed topics.

A social network was where you connected with other people, and your view of content was based around who those people were and their activity. You followed people not topics.

That's definition I'm sticking to, and why I don't regard reddit or HN as a social network. Although on HN doesn't really have topic following functionality, you just select topics on the fly.

Please convince the Australian government of this. Currently they are trying to "ban" social media for under 16s.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...

"Services including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube meet many of the conditions the legislation uses to define an ‘age-restricted social media platform’.

[snip...blah blah]

Over the coming weeks, eSafety will have more to say about the platforms it considers must comply with the minimum age obligations."

So they are going to start with the big obvious ones and then keep trying to follow the trail of where teens flee to online.

'Tis a silly thing.

4chan apparently won't classify, because its implementing an age gate.

Its not an age-restricted social media platform, under the legislation, because its introducing age restrictions on its social media platform.

I just...

This describes Wikipedia

Does it? Modern Wikipedia is OK, I suppose, but I feel its glory days are far behind it. It's so gated. And any time I try to participate, it's like walking through waist deep mud. I almost feel it forces you to shrink to participate.

Maybe I keep trying to edit long-standing articles, which have custodians that feel ownership over the content? And you're editing articles with less gatekeeping?

I frankly don't even try any more. I've heard the same from others.

That’s more an argument that Wikipedia is a social network with a high barrier to entry than an argument that it’s not a social network.

Facebook was a social network even when the barrier to entry was “must have gotten in to an elite school”.

I didn't say it wasn't a social network.

I was specifically addressing the conjoined "intellectual growth + participation" claim, by saying the 'growth' wasn't there. I even joked that it feels you're shrinking intellectually, to participate.

One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.

That's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page here.

https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's minimalism.

I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:

* The ability to save comments, as well as posts

* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category

* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.

* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.

To favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click "favourite" just after "flag".

You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.

Wow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern.

Good to know though, thank you!

I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!

In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.

It helps when you view it like a graph of people making commitments of their opinion. You can checkout a commit by clicking on the time and then run the commands by clicking on their label. There are also the plumbing commands like 'latest', that you only find, if you know them.

> The ability to save comments

Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.

> * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.

I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.

As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.

And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit something that has been submitted in the past few days, it will count it as a vote on the original instead.

* sort by controversial

Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)

Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?

I'm also interested in hiding AI posts. Is anybody doing this with success that can share what they use?

For mobile HN, I have been using the Hack [0] app for some time now and found it to address some of your wishlist items.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc-reader...

I'm mostly happy with the minimalistic approach that HN takes. Two minor things I'd like to see addressed though:

- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.

- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.

just unflag it if you flag it?

I often din't realize when I accidentally flag something with my big fingers; when I go to my flagged page later I am often surprised to see a few pages I have no memory of and no reason at all for flagging.

Just out of curiosity I cheked my list for flagged comments and posts. There are a few comments I flagged, and they've been marked dead, correctly.

But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.

I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:

> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments

The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.

So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.

I haven’t flagged anything but just checked and yeah. Now unflagging the wrongly flagged.

I've been PSAs before on the front page with a reminder to check your flagged stories. I and others visited the link and were surprised to see how many stories I had fat-finger flagged. In fact I had never intentionally flagged a story yet the list was at least 10-15 long

Wow I checked mine and had about 20. I've never intentionally flagged a submission as far as I can remember and none of these were even close to flag worthy.

I've apparently flagged 6 articles and 1 post by accident.

That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.

The problem is that the user experience is not "oops, I accidentally flagged an article, I should go unflag it."

The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"

Same with hide. Which is about worse since it disappears. I often figure out I've hidden things weeks after the fact.

Sometimes I feel hide can be used as some sort of bookmarking functionality since it can be accessed from profile always.

The flagged thing has come up quite a few times in past similar threads. Unfortunately, I guess if the powers that be were going to fix it they would have.

> I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.

While we're at it - I also would favor a strict subset of markdown, but it would be really nice to have a strict subset of markdown instead of the homebrew thing we have now. The biggest one that regularly catches people out is that

  * foo
  * bar

formats as

* foo * bar

instead of a bullet-point list. And on that note, I'd really like ``` to do code blocks instead of needing 2+ space indentation as the way to make a code block.

And dark mode!

Been using the "Dark Background and Light Text" extension for... dunno a decade or so.

I've been using Hacki, the app (yes, I know) on mobile which adds a couple of features like separating the comment, upvote, flag etc. functions into a separate swipe-right menu and, more to your point: dark mode. It's a great experience. I wish I could find out whether the author has a patreon because a comforting app like this should not go unrewarded but they are obscure. One thing it misses is a menu point for the active link.

Paste that into uBlock Origin:

news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg)) news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white) news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black) news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]

Not my idea, I took it from a comment on HN a few weeks ago.

My browser extension for HN adds confirmation of flagging/hiding on mobile, among other things:

https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

I would like it if you could filter comments by time after, so you don't need to reread a lot to see what's new. There is latest, but then you completely loose the context of any discussion. This feature could additionally leave the two parents of any new comment for context.

I've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.

careful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the natives

See also: the last paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Lol, thanks! :)

But I wasn't saying it was "turning into reddit", just saying how to explain it to an outsider.

it's basically what digg should've been

What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:

1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.

2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.

I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.

Not to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout.

Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.

Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?

> nested/indented comments are confusing

Let me mention my recent app for an alternative view of the HN comments (Hackeray) [1][2]. I'm sure this is not for everyone, but for me this view really helped to read the comments more clearly and basically absorb any big discussion here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571963

[2] https://hackeray.vercel.app

Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.

It's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people to post anonymously.

It was also a great experiment in delegated decentralized moderation (and meta moderation) in a pretty hostile environment.

Just want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making this a great virtual space, everyone!

Agree with author, this is one of my favorite places for discussion due to the moderation and culture of respectful interactions. It really allows for exchanges of ideas and learning.

I follow a Telegram channel with a bot that automatically shows posts with >50 votes. and they're generally interesting articles or stories like this one. and if I'm not interested in any of them, I can just scroll past them. however, the amount of content is overwhelming: as of right now, I have ~300 unread notifications from this channel.

I do appreciate the fact that, generally, this platform provides high-quality or high-effort content.

the one downside I've found is, just like other people mentioned, the gimmicky markdown-like implementation on newlines, having to press enter twice for one to appear. it is kind of annoying, but something I could get used to.

I have read HN for years ... on my profile it says my account was made 11 years ago but I followed it much longer than that. It has been a continual resource of things that I would have never thought of looking into or spark interest in things that I haven't looked at in a long time. As an example, a post on a Lazarus/FP release triggered my multi-month long interest in Pascal again for me.

I do like there is a level of civility and this site is not juiced up with advertising and algorithmic personalization. Sometimes though, I feel like this site has some conversations similar to that I had in real life. I would say something and someone, would say 'but!' with a long explanation on why someone I'm wrong, rinse and repeat. It gets annoying to read, but I can at least not bother, because most issues are simple not hills to die on. I will leave it to others here to elucidate this point in other ways, which I dutifully upvoted.

HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away.

HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".

> Slashdot withered away

/. withered away because it was sold off multiple times and lost its mojo.

People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day.

I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.

You hit the nail on the head. There is no place on the internet more broadly susceptible to the same kinds of "founder brain" malaise that has afflicted so many in Silicon Valley--i.e. "I am good at software development so therefore I am confident I have a good understanding of (and opinion on) all sorts of intellectual topics".

Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.

>All major news stories break here.

No, they don't.

This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.

I would like a way to sort all comments on a topic by net upvotes. I believe the current system ranks toplevel posts by net upvotes, and the same recursively for sibling replies, but that means a highly rated reply to a low rated parent comment will get lost in the nether regions of the page.

Of course I understand that max upvotes is not the be all and end all, but when there are a dozen interesting posts a day, each with 300+ comments that I want to parse, I need a way to still have some life, so a way to get the net reader take on the top few comments would be a nice filter.

Sorry for the self-promo :D, I'm building a project for analyzing comments. Might be helpful, even if it's not exactly what you described.

HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.

    I miss the old HN,
    the bold HN,
    straight from the code HN,
    real founder soul HN.
    I hate the new HN,
    the crew HN,
    the think alike echo HN,
    only talk about LLMs HN.

Hah this is gold.

Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.

Oh! didn't know that bear blog could set up custom CSS but I was wondering about that actually as well!

Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now

I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol.

I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :)

[1]: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/

If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.

Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.

I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.

There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.

Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).

Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)

Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.

If it helps at all, no, we don't do that.

Thanks for the info. (I've seen this at a university, that's where my suspicion came from)

> I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all

Why do you think they're not at least tied to help eachother?

The board of Ycombinator may not be here moderating but do you think they're independent?

> Ycombinator is a business don't forget.

Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.

Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)

For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.

Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).

Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.

> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site

Well that's not the reality thankfully.

> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum

I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.

I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.

> I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product

Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.

There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.

Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet

Usenet was great early on, but near the time of its acquisition it was suffering from the same problems we see now on all social media sites: trolls, objectionable content, power-hungry mods, the works.

All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.

I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.

What "acquisition"? Nobody owns Usenet, it's a cooperative effort between many different server operators which continues to this day.

If a submission becomes popular, more people see it. The more people see it the more people are likely to interact by upvoting, commenting, or flagging.

Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.

Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.

It’s a fashionable opinion to dunk on HN nowadays, but frankly there is nothing else like it, or even close.

(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)

> (In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)

That weirdly rhymes with the criticism of everything else here, like firefox, debian, android, ...

Things to add to hackernews:

Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts

…if you wanted to destroy hackernews

Anything you'd do on Reddit don't do here :). Occasionally a Reddit like humour is allowed though.

> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.

The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".

So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.

There's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.

The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.

The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.

If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.

For real, the downvote access threshold is way too high. If I wanted to get points, I could just join the circle jerk for a while. But actual curiosity is not rewarded.

My only beef with down votes is you often never know why.

Maybe requiring a comment to downvote, or at least if you are the first to down vote a comment would go a long way.

Piece of advice: I used to care more about downvotes, and was very upset when my comments got a "0" or "-1" next to them. Then I realized that they're just internet points that I'm unnecessarily attached to, and that seeing a downvote on my comment is just my pride being offended. This makes me way less upset about unjust downvotes - and, on average, it seems like I get more unjust upvotes (e.g. upvotes on comments that actually aren't substantial) than downvotes (those which I would say are justified).

> at least if you are the first to down vote a comment

This is actually a clever idea (that would avoid endless repetitions of the downvote reason) - I like it!

I don't know how that doesn't immediately create new threads of arguing about why and whether something should be downvoted.

- "Downvoted you because I found your comment rude to OP."

- "How is calling them a cheese-hole-lover rude?! They said they love Swiss cheese and the more Swiss cheese you have, the more cheese holes you have, so they obviously love cheese holes!!"

Honestly I don't care about downvotes if I can at least downvote as well. When I've been on this site for months and made hundreds of killer comments, and the only reason I can't downvote yet is because I don't match the hive mind enough, it really pisses me off. Also, this creates an erroneous impression of which comments are good and which aren't. I reckon most users here have under 500 points or whatever and thus cannot downvote. If I had never been downvoted I'd probably have another thousand points on top of what I already have.

Honestly don't know what this has to do with my comment.

Edit: I guess the topic is downvotes, sure, but I feel like your comment would be better made somewhere further up the comment chain where it's actually relevant.

If I don't care about them (except for the indignity of getting downvoted by people I can't downvote) that implies I wouldn't get into a debate about the cause of the downvote. I might have intended to reply to a different comment at this level though, actually...

In my own experience, I think I am not "match[ing] the hive mind", nor do I try to, and as such my karma growth is slow but not painfully so. I think that I've been treated more or less fairly.

I think your downvotes mainly come on some of your political comments. Political threads are not great to begin with, and I think you're giving yourself some undue credit as to your participation to them. I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled. I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets. I make it a point to not take sides and be critical of all opinions (of course I don't implement it perfectly), and I think I have been treated more or less fairly. I linked some political threads I participated in to demonstrate non-downvoted non-liberal comments. If some of my opinions are "liberal" and others are "conservative", I'll just say that I try to be fair and reasonable.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523600
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653284
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573777

I only downvote people who I think are degrading the conversation who seem outlandishly wrong or off-topic. If I just disagree with someone, I may reply or not. It's reasonable to disagree on the basis of holding different values or beliefs.

One person's "outlandishly wrong" is another's "boringly obvious" opinion.

>I think many non-liberal comments that are downvoted here are done so for being in bad faith, because they may have a point but overextend their argument to other targets.

Liberal comments are often in bad faith. The top/only political posts that get upvoted are entire bad-faith liberal propaganda hit pieces. The liberal commenters find a way to wedge politics into anything remotely political, spewing Trump Derangement Syndrome or climate hysteria narratives. These comments get upvoted. Trying to talk sense into these people gets consistently downvoted unless you're willing to do a lot of waffling and phrase your objection in the most milquetoast way you can think of.

>I commonly hear that HN leans liberal and whatnot, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't say that non-liberal (for severe lack of a better term) comments are necessarily dogpiled.

The audience (that comments, anyway) is mostly a liberal hivemind. There is a lot of dog-piling here. You shouldn't be downvoted for simply disagreeing or presenting a reductio ad absurdum argument but it happens here all the time. It's not as bad as Reddit but still not so good. The rate limit sucks too because you can be spammed by like 5 people and not be able to respond to them quick enough.

I might do better if I pretended to be more on the fence than I am, but I am very opinionated. Some of these comments I respond to are SO stupid that I think shock therapy is the appropriate approach. I try not to be personal. I just point out the absurdity of what they are saying and hope they just snap out of it or say something interesting to prove me wrong.

Based on that last paragraph, I think it's pretty likely you're getting downvoted for your attitude and not for your opinions.

That's actually pretty consistent with a lot of the other comments I see where the author claims their opinion is being downvoted when they're actually just being a jerk.

> and hope they just snap out of it

Is this something you do a lot? Someone talks down to you online and you go "huh! They're right!" and change your mind?

I'm definitely getting downvoted primarily for my opinions and disagreement. I don't know if you've noticed but people really hate being proven wrong or challenged on their opinions. The default is they treat you like a jerk unless you kiss enough ass, and even then they probably still hate it. If I waffle around and get carpal tunnel from typing out overly polite replies to absurd takes, I might avoid some of the downvotes. But there's no pleasing these people. I wouldn't care so much if not for the hive mind effect, where people like me can't downvote anyone no matter how rude or wrong they are. It creates an illusion of consensus, and reinforces bad ideas.

PG's old essay "Keep your identity small", should be required reading.

https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

Haven't read that before, but nicely read. I've had related thoughts on this, and I agree. I like the quote "keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out". Alternatively, change always comes, so be adaptable to change and face it head on. It's not clear how to divorce what I like from my identity, because I'm not a perfect automaton, but I try to minimize its influence and appreciate that we're all the same, standing in different places.

I don't want to know why unless they have a viable counterargument and it isn't descending into a bunch of "nah uh" replies.

>You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.

Consider making article submissions.

Rather not considering how unfairly I already am treated on this platform.

> If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized

What are some examples of this?

>What are some examples of this?

If you ever find yourself encountering the message "you're posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" your account has been deemed "problematic" by the mods and rate limited. You won't be warned beforehand or told why, and the limit is permanent until they decide otherwise. They used to slowban as well - have page loading be extremely slow so the site is almost impossible to use. The intended effect is to frustrate you enough that you eventually leave. They also shadowban but at least they warn you now, they didn't always. People would keep posting completely unaware that their comments were going unseen, for months or sometimes years.

The filter on my account appears to require a two hour cooldown after every five comments. I have no idea when I got it or what for, and I'm reasonably certain it used to just be one hour but they bumped it up at some point.

I feel like I need to decode for the reader that this is relatively high praise from a krapp comment!

I've removed the rate limit from your account now. You're right that the limit is permanent in the sense that it needs to be removed manually, and that's unfair in some cases. The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.

(and no, we didn't bump it up)

>I've removed the rate limit from your account now.

SNפIƎɹ SO∀HƆ

I mean thank you. I know I complain a lot but that's because I care, and I think I've mellowed out over time anyway. I think my greatest sin is just spending too much time here posting.

>The counterargument though is that most accounts just don't change that much, so this ends up being globally the right call even though it fails in specific cases.

If so, it seems to make more sense to apply it by thread rather than by account. Maybe to threads that trip the flamewar detector. For serial trolls the effect would be the same, but it wouldn't interfere with honest participation.

>and no, we didn't bump it up

Fair enough, it can be difficult to tell from the comment timestamps. As long as you're prompting the user anyway maybe add a cooldown timer?

I don't envy you or the other mods your jobs but I do think you put more effort into tone-policing than you need to.

I didn't mean to ask about penalties. Penalties are good and necessary for problematic users trying to bring politics to the site, wage culture war, and erode the standards that make HN tolerable. I meant to ask about specifically the GP views as bad reasons for penalties to be enacted:

> If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here

I don't think that's true, an intellectually curious comment about site moderation would be fine (this one for instance). Usually what I see penalized are broad insults like "everyone on this site is so fucking dumb, why do I even come here" or people complaining about how they got flagged/downvoted for a post.

Cool. I don't disagree.

Looking forward to The Bad Parts.

>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare

Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.

If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".

In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?

Do you have any examples. I don't think I would classify more than a handful posts as political myself

I've noticed a lot of politics creeping into discussions on a bunch of topics. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm not american that makes it a bit more obvious? But every now and then the comments devolve into red v. blue on topics about space, AI, and what not. It's a bit off-putting for those outside the us, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, people will talk about what makes them angry more than about what makes them happy, I guess.

A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty quickly, often for much less.

Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.

I mean honestly if you're new to most sites and your first instinct is to delve into contentious political issues you should probably be shown the exit pretty quick.

So true. Heavy believer in lurking in any community you join prior to being loud. Understanding the norms of micro cultures and adapting to them is an important step to successfully integrating if you plan to be there for awhile.

Which accounts are you referring to?

If you don't want to post names publicly, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

I personally have noticed that 'celebrity' users like WalterBright often great technical contributions to the community but that their contributions in social/political discussions are often patronizing in a way that I don't feel would be considered acceptable if a less 'important' user was to make them.

I can spot a few shallow comments that he's made in the last few days alone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226#45612377

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981#45596209

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900#45595784

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45595919

Not sure if you mean 'acceptable' in the sense of community response or moderator response, but FWIW, I don't think any of those comments are over the line where we'd post a moderation reply. (Or, to put it differently, if we drew the line there, we'd have to post a ton more replies than we usually do.)

Well the community response and moderator response are sort of interconnected, aren't they?

Like as I understand it the system here works because the users moderate each other in a way that will trigger automated action and eventually action from yourself or Tom. Shit post and people will flag your comment. Get flagged too much and you get throttled.

But if that first step doesn't happen because the user base has a parasocial relationship with another user and they consider them a celebrity then they're going to hold that user to a different standard than they do other users.

Which means they won't moderate them the same way and then the algorithmic escalation and moderator actions won't be triggered.

I agree that these aren't the kind of comments that would trigger a moderation comment, but then again, I didn't look too deeply at this particular user's comment list before I found some pretty meh ones.

It's not an issue that keeps me up at night either, I just started noticing it after enjoying reading certain comments from this user and finding other kinds of comments to be pretty sub-par and started pondering the strong difference between them.

The dichotomy between comments they'll make regarding something like aircraft linkages and control surfaces or whatever that I recall them making a few months ago which other uses wanted to nominate as a high quality comment and the all caps old man yelling at clouds type comments that I linked to is problematic for a site like HN but I also agree that there isn't an optimal solution for it.

I am actually building something which does this exactly. I'll probably have it ready this weekend. If you email me (in my profile), I can notify you when it's live.

Thank you for helping keep up the quality of the site

The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.

There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.

Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.

You can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse.

Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.

I get that, what's hard is if my made up chip designer is commenting about UI coding or networking topology or something closer to HNs heart.

Yeah, the technical content on HN is kind of a crapshoot too, unfortunately. Just slightly less so than everything else.

I guess it's better to view HN as entertainment than expertise overall.

That's why I like to read most of the comments on a post, because typically I'll find some useful information scattered throughout. After I'm done, I can roughly get a sense for "excellent comments", "comments that probably have a good point", "medium-quality arguing", and "probably just wrong comments". Then I may seek out other submissions of the same topics to get more data. Over time, I refine which points I think are probably valid. HN has its gems, just perhaps not as often or obvious as advertised.

> The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence...

Three thoughts...

1. I really enjoy seeing what the extremely technically accomplished users think about non-technical topics.

2. I like that only my accumulated knowledge of their usernames allows me to easily connect the dots for thought #1.

3. It is fun when you come to appreciate someone's thinking on many non-technical topics then later, on a technical thread, realize that user is the person behind $SOMETHING_BIG. But that fun relies on accumulating #2.

Whenever one of those rare topics comes up where I consider myself a subject matter expert (or where I have non-public knowledge), very often the top comments and the threads getting the most "action" sound HN-smart, but are totally factually wrong. Extrapolating this, I can only assume that the top comments on other topics are also usually wrong and/or contradict actual experts.

> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.

Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.

How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.

I would not presume to request changes to HN. I think it's sublime and I love what I discover here.

...but if I did, it would be to wish for a tip jar or some way to give back to the unflappable mods.

The one thing that really annoys me about HN is that when you return to a discussion that you read the day before, there is no way to easily find the comments which are new since your previous visit. This is basic functionality which Usenet always had (and still does).

I agree with the good points about the platform. But the points about the userbase reek of pretentiousness.

The New Yorker called it Performative Erudition: frequently, people here are entirely focused on appearing to have insight, appearing smart and avoiding colloquial language to the point where having a straightforward normal conversation is sometimes impossible. To say that the userbase has a "mindset of humility" is almost too ironic for words.

Jargon and special terminology aren't necessarily performative; they can also be 1) how people with a shared profession or interest talk to each other, and 2) preferred for precision or context.

Everything you just said is true.

And yet.

HNers are still often guilty of Performative Erudition. It's not _just_ the use of technical jargon.

Yeah but the lingo's pedigree matters. Some words are practical. The dialect you use in an academic paper or the SF set saying "orthogonal" "isomorphic" "non-zero" whatever is performative.

I completely agree. I actually avoided hackernews for years because the users are all so pretentious. Debating in this context is not generally an exercise in self-development.

Now I’m completely guilty of it myself. :)

So far away from my own experience! I think I have learn so much from reading comments here, and then following up on other sources... Perhaps those commenters are just used to write in those terms or it can even be a subjective perception. I think as human beings we should judge ourselves with a bit more compassion and, if possible, always leaving space for positivity.

If anything it has gotten watered down a bit. I see you’re a fellow sub-10k karma haver, so possibly you weren’t around when it was at its most toxic ~10 years ago.

The problem is that you can't combat pretentiousness by declaring others pretentious, because that is even more pretentious.

Okay but what if you call someone pretentious for declaring others pretentious. Uhoh, is that double more pretentious?

I think it's idempotent

I wonder if non-native English speakers that post a lot on HN might pick up the "pretentious tone" as part of their writing style, sort of by accident.

In the same way like "Reddit English" has its own idioms by now ("Thank you, kind stranger", etc)

I'm not a native English speaker myself, and I think I have some feeling for what sounds casual and what sounds pretentious, but I sometimes wonder if that intuition is really correct or off-base.

HN is just a VC funded echo chamber for out of touch CTO’s to still feel like they are in the game.

I’d be surprised if CTOs and VCs make up more than 3 or 4% of the user base here.

...and there was the A.I. posts.

> The good parts

posts before 2015~2016. that's it.

HN is good as the author says. But you can get a better experience by reading it through https://hn-ai.org/ instead.

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