For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet

Hacker news is good for one particular use case: reasonably informed discussion of technology industry news.

I don't view it as a community and every time a topic goes outside that space (e.g. society, culture, economics etc) I'm frequently horrified by some of the comments I see here.

I'm far more horrified by what I don't see, by how biased and lopsided the flagging is. Constantly covering up interesting relevant topics. The gatekeeping about what to discuss is, imo, a pox. It's easy to avoid, costs nearly nothing to just not read, and it's little but endless naval gazing about what you think the purpose ought to be. It's not productive and trying to levy judgement is harmful, for an upside that even if we could get it perfect is near zero.

I have some sympathy for the cost to mods. But people having strong opinions about what other people are allowed to share is anti my interest and imo a mockery of hacker spirit.

I personally regard hackers who are intersectional, who see the relationships of things broadly & see how aspects of the world reflect in each other as great. But some people are obsessed with limiting and filtering, and I cannot understand what they are going for.

I If I had to choose an online community that resonates with me, it would be Hacker News. For years, it's served as my muse, therapist, book club, and intellectual playground; all rolled into one. I deeply value the culture it fosters, especially the emphasis on thoughtful discussion.

Paul Graham’s essay "How to Disagree" remains essential reading for anyone engaging in online discourse . It provides a clear framework for constructive debate, and I agree that posts falling into the lowest forms of disagreement (ad hominem attacks or name calling) deserve to be flagged.

Yet, I share your concern, sometimes a post isn’t inherently bad, but attracts low quality replies. Flagging the entire thread in such cases feels disproportionate like amputating a limb just because there’s an itch you can’t scratch. It risks silencing potentially valuable discussion due to the behavior of a few.

I empathize with the moderators. Their job is thankless and difficult, and I appreciate that the warnings we see aren’t automated bots but messages from real humans trying their best. We all have limits and that’s ok.

The sympathy I have for mods is very real. But I do want to mention that flagging is typically not a moderator activity (afaik). Hacker News allows anyone whose been around for a bit to join in suppressing whatever they feel like. There's very few checks or balances on this. There's no accountability. Silent veto, silent death.

There is some good stuff here, which is why I am still here. But if you look at the comments on certain topics you can see there are truly awful human beings here that are not being banned. That keeps it from being the best.

Well, if you could complain about these commentators to the moderators.

Note that disagreeing with your positions does not make one a truly awful human being.

If someone’s opinion is that not all human lives have equal value, then yes it does make them awful.

I happen to agree in this principle, but for most of human history it would have been considered a radical idea. Much of the world still doesn't fully buy into it. It's a philosophical position, not a universal truth. You need to persuade, not force. Banning people is not the answer, provided they are communicating in good faith.

> If someone’s opinion is that not all human lives have equal value, then yes it does make them awful.

FWIW, it’s a little more nuanced.

Do all human lives have equal intrinsic moral worth? Many, though not all ethical systems say yes. I think this is the case you’re thinking of.

Are all lives valued equally in decisions, emotions, or outcomes?

If all lives are truly equal, how do we justify medical triage? War? Immigration limits? Prioritizing children over the elderly? Choosing to save your family over strangers?

If lives are not equal, on what basis do we rank them without sliding into cruelty or abuse?

There’s no fully stable resolution to this tension and every society lives with it.

This post disappeared off the front page in record time. I now can't find it on the first 4 pages. I think my point about censorship has been proven correct.

It barely reached the frontpage to begin with: https://hnrankings.info/46660067/

It was at position 6 when I commented. The chart appears to be wrong.

I’d say it’s the best large community. My experience is that the best communities that I’ve been part of have always been pretty small with no more than a few dozen people. (usually in IRC or Discord).

For me, it's a nice way to keep up with what's happening without going through the effort of following the right people in the right places. It's a stretch to call it a community though, although perhaps my definition may be a bit old fashioned. Anonymity just doesn't really fit. I do like seeing the diversity of opinion though. It's rare in real life to have people verbalize their disagreements, much less in a well researched manner.

I agree, HN is the only place I make comments on the WWW.

The only gripe I have is that a certain segment of the community feels compelled to flag comments on topics that don't align with their personal vision of what HN should be.

If there's a topic I'm not interested in, I just ignore it. I don't feel compelled to block other people from having a discussion they are interested in.

Yeah definitely still the best.

Lately I’m seeing more comments though that interact with others like a LLM. Curt demands/instructions as in “show me a source” / “explain this aspect”. Makes me wonder about who the site is attracting

Given that there's very little benefits (that I'm aware off) of a "high score" HN account it does seem that there's little benefit for people to do karma farming.

I'm sure that there's still some people who try (and/or test their pet project) but it seems far less of an issue than on Reddit.

Astroturfing.

HN has become my main feed for non-news stories and I quite like it, particularly because it has a higher density of small web tech articles and those are my favourite. It doesn't have to be highest quality or most innovative, but reading someone's articulated opinion on their blog is what I go on internet for.

I also generally enjoy the comment section because people here tend to at least argue intelligently, even if I don't always agree with the viewpoints. I will say I find the dissonance between the "hacker" and the "tech startup" ethe to be quite amusing. I may work for a large company in their 'tech' area, but I can never feel fully at home among the more entrepreneurial-minded people. I really struggle to cheer for tech companies' stocks like they are football teams, but to each their own.

Thank you HN for being a unique place on the Internet, it's truly refreshing.

It's still a YC property, at the end of the day. HN is more open than a lot of sites, but it has to be. HN's lifeblood is advertising for YC jobs and YC-affiliated startups, without free admission the site would be a self-defeating meritocracy.

Once you land the YC startup job and lurk around here for a few years, it starts to feel like the same links and comments regurgitated over-and-over. It's a valuable resource for brand-new tech workers that want to sharpen their mind a bit, but also a tarpit of backwards thinking once you reach a certain level of seniority.

It's not true, but nothing is perfect anyway, and in any case, the HN is more beautiful than the others.

It’s too easy to downvote and flag someone. It also became extremely difficult to have a substantial discussion here due to “being off topic” and non-transparent post quotas.

There’s also an astonishingly high number of people who supposed to be smart and educated but are in fact just a bunch of idiots with hurt egos rolling on karma.

It helps that downvotes are limited to -4. Can’t have your entire profile obliterated by one misstep comment like on Reddit

Plus on Reddit people often delete their heavily down-voted comments (I dont know if this actually matters for a users karma but people sure do think so) which makes it impossible to follow the entire discussion and see what was actually going on.

Nothing as frustrating as finding what seems to be an interesting and engaging discussion but then finding several key posts missing...

Missing comments in chain is almost always someone using a privacy scrubber

Deletion doesn’t remove negative karma no. Just prevents more. Sorta

Tangentially; I keep finding I flag things accidentally due to mainly browsing on mobile.

Assuming that modifying the minimal user interface is unwanted, a simple confirmation interaction could fix this.

It's always kind of drove me nuts that the "Hide" and "Flag" buttons are right next to each other. The number of times I've fat-fingered Flag by mistake and had to go to my Flagged Submissions and remove it...

pretty low bar

I agree for the most part but I've been getting bored with HN, mostly because anything controversial is censored by the mods and by ideological fans of certain people, especially Elon Musk whose fans will flag and downvote anything negative about him. This thread is a good example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592827

I’ve been an HN participant for ~14 years, the vibe ebbs and flows. You can hide and ignore the folks you mention, what’s important imho is that the mods continue to aggressively cultivate a specific community vibe. Nothings perfect, but this is as close as it’s going to get to perfect imho as it relates to intellectual curiosity and understanding how the systems we exist in work.

> You can hide and ignore the folks you mention

How?

The addon uBlock Origin has an option for rules to change HTML and could be used for this [1]. Replace Username with the persons Username. add to My Filters. I encourage people that dislike or often find themselves disagreeing with or being activated triggered by me to do this for my username.

[1]

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing.comtr:has(a.hnuser):has-text(/\bUsername\b/)

There's a userscript called 'HN Blacklist' that can hide/filter content from users, titles and sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282379

As far as I can tell, censored by mods is quite rare. It's almost always for violating the site guidelines (repeatedly and/or extremely flagrantly), rather than based on the ideology of the content. Most of the "censorship" is downvoting and/or flagging from users, not from mods.

But you can post almost anything here. You want to post Marxist stuff? You can, but you need to be more than just a propagandist. Actually thoughtfully interact with opposing ideas; admit when the data is against you.

You want to support capitalism? You can do that too, but again, be more than a shill (though being a shill for capitalism is more accepted here).

You want to criticize the US? Many of us do, from time to time. But again, don't just be a propagandist or ideologue. "USA is only evil! Down with USA!" gets censored. "The United States is acting like a bully in international relations, and has a long history of doing so" is (mostly) accepted as a reasonable and accurate statement.

You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.

>You want to support Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Yeah, that's a tougher sell here. You're probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for it.

This is not true, which is the worst moderation decision about the site. This site would be greatly improved, if this actually was how it worked.

If you post any actually extremely anti-consensus opinion here you get one or two down votes, your post gets flagged and everyone ignores it. This is obviously an anti-trolling measure, but obviously people will just abusively flag anything they really do not like.

I browse from hckrnews.com and read comments with showdead enabled, so I see both flagged/dead submissions and flagged/dead comments. Flagging isn't abused in a measurable way at either level.

In all fairness there's enough Elon Musk spam in the media and on X.

I'm quite happy that HN seems to stay mostly free of Musk (irrespective of positive/negative posts).

There's are some interesting AI issues with Grok. How do you edit an AI so it says the opposite of the training data because you want it to agree with your ideology? Can a AI image generator which was trained on tons of porn, which Grok was since it was trained on X, ever really be considered safe? Is Grokipedia a fair replacement for Wikipedia which it was derived from?

But alas, we can't discuss any of this without being flagged by Musk fans. Someone commented on the thread I posted that the mods could unflag if they wanted to.