Reddit's Discussion about HN
reddit.com
reddit.com
When you see a mob of unruly teenagers, you should pretend not to notice them and walk on.
Whenever this kind of discussion (about this-better-site users vs. that-worse-site users, subjective judgments galore, obviously) happens, there are always posts about the "strategically correct" behavior to ensure the desired outcome. The prototypical case would be: "Don't feed the trolls."
But, in posting this publicly, on a social site where, in many cases, the troll is targeting said social site, you are feeding the troll. In fact, the troll's goal might simply be to elicit as many "don't feed the troll" posts as possible.
Stated otherwise, reiterating the rule to ignore somebody is effectively un-ignoring them. But at the same time, you want to reinforce these rules into the community, and educate people to follow them. So you have a problem: in order for the rule to be efficient, it needs to be tacit; but it also needs to be widely known, and the efficient way to achieve this is by reiterating it publicly.
Now, there is clearly a puzzle here. Has anyone else thought about this, and came to an elegant attack? I think the most obvious case is to use private messages, although I have no knowledge how well those work (this is a general case and is independent of whether HN has PMs or not).
To quote myself from #startups, "HN basically has one type of person... a much better one type of person [than] youtube has, but still."
We can't 'take a joke' because the purpose of this site does not include humor. We have plenty of other places to go to look for something funny.
As for being boring, then this means to me that the content is not your cup of tea. Plenty of us spend a great deal of time on here reading and contributing.
And lastly, we're far from the same person. We have a niche we reach to so people come from similar places in terms of goals and projects, we're fairly heavy on the programming entrepreneur, but it's still not the 'same person.' We're much closer to the same person than the much broader Reddit, sure.
But the amount of discourse and discussion on this site is quite evident as proof that we have varying opinions.
The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".
Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.
I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)
For me, if it's not fun, it's not worth doing:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be-th... -- For his part, Jeff says he didn't want our new venture to feel "like work" -- that if Stack Overflow wasn't fun to do, he didn't want to be doing it. If I had tried to make him play by my rules, I don't think the project would have come together, at least not as well as it has. --
Good work is fun, almost by definition. And that should come across in your comments about the work, too.
StackOverflow is a nice site, but I wish Jeff would spend less time spreading ignorance and more time programming.
(This is probably exacerbated by the fact that pg has gone on record stating that your Hacker News karma score is factored into any Y Combinator submissions you make. Nothing wrong with this, but it turns this site into a sort of proxy startup / investor pitch for some folks.)
On the whole, I'm more of an advocate of saying what you feel, while being reasonably civil. That said, I do not support 4chan style anarchy, or what the broad Reddit/Digg has turned into. I still think prog.reddit is pretty decent though.
Most discussion on Reddit consists of short attacks (or attempts at jokes). There is plenty of that on HN, sure, but a lot of comments are pretty long explanations of what the poster thinks. I don't find this to be sterile (and I enjoy not knowing about Internet memes anymore).
Interestingly, most of your comments here are significantly longer (and more insightful) than those at Reddit. I think it's because you are replying to comments here with actual substance, whereas on Reddit most of the comments are mindless and don't leave much for you to say. I think this is a sign that HN is doing well, or rather, that it works the way I like. (That's why I spend my time here now, rather than on Reddit.)
The idea that fun and "serious discussion"/work are mutually exclusive is the biggest disappointment, to me, of the HN culture. It's just not true. You can have it both ways. In fact, you should demand it. Remember, this stuff is supposed to be fun!
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000979.html
And given the fact that a flirting article (WTF?) is on the front page, perhaps this part of the HN culture is changing. Unlike the stultifyingly boring drug war article, at least that's sort of fun..
It's a nice change to come here and get away from the 4chan-ness of other sites.
They can hate on the boring-ness of HN all they want, the simplicity of the website, and the inability to downmod for absolutly no reason is a just reason for coming here.