Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News

washingtonpost.com

332 pointsLibertatea247 comments

"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe."

But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to 'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up with the latest hot people on twitter isn't too much work? Makes no sense. Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.

Did you read what Malda said after that? He then explained why that isn't a suitable alternative for the exact reasons you just stated.

He basically explained you have to eat all the insignificant minutia of individual peoples' daily lives, no matter their public stature, if you want their opinions and views on the world at the same time.

Eventually people will do that for you, as a service, and then give you just a digest of the interesting things those people had to say without all the inane minutiae.

These people will be called "editors," and the circle will be complete.

The cool thing that happens on Twitter is that interesting thoughts and news are re-tweeted, so if somebody important says something meaningful, there's a big chance that you'll see it without paying too much attention.

Yes, but you will also see useless minutia about the lives of the people who re-tweeted the originals.

Also mimicing Slashdot: after-the-fact dupes!

I did, and wasn't sure why he even bothered saying the first part (unless it was edited out of sequence or something). Regardless of the problems, he seemed pretty down on aggregators, and seemed more about following specific people for news.

I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)

That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an 80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's extremely simple information. A headline plus a short blurb, like on Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting, and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch people's eye in 80 characters.

On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.

It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks.

I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.

I prefer the headlines here over Reddit’s. What worries me is the quality of the comments. The community and their insightful comments are what keeps me coming back.

Lately I've seen an increase in memes and trollish comments from new IDs. I worry that if HN doesn't move to limited account signup period or invite only, it will end up another Slashdot.

This is exactly what I do here. I start with the first few comments and then click through to read the story after the comments add some context to the headline.

Occasionally the lead comment is dumb. It'll quote a tiny fragment of the article, and follow that with an explanation of why the author is wrong. The fragment will be misquoted or misunderstood and out of context. It might be a tiny part of the article, or not relevant to most of the article. But this post will have been made early, and few will down vote it, and many will up vote it and it'll stay near the top of the comment heap.

Not to mention when the first comment is about the layout of the linked website, or its technology, or whatever, but not about the content.

You're in good company:

  The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be 
  arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any
  conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent
  discourse.

  <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

"I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter." <-135 characters (+conveys the same info)

Having to rewrite yourself constantly in order to fit your thought into a (let's face it, fairly arbitrary) limit is not fun.

The 140 character limit was so that a tweet could fit in to an SMS message (160 characters) and have enough room left over to address it to @someone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Format

And what do we have now? Most people use iMessages or similar, which have arbitrary lengths, and allow much more descriptive and sensible messages. But not on twitter, where it's seen as some kind of hipster badge to be able to reword a thought into a 140 character haiku.

It's a bit silly.

And the SMS messages are limited by the size of the blocks of the first digital celular networks, that got that size because it was enough to fit a "phone #1111-1111, ring" message.

So, in no anybody tought abut what kind of textual content would fit that size. Or, in other words, it's arbitrary.

Not true. GSM texts are encoded in a 7-bit scheme, and twitter started using 8 bit encodings. 7 * 160 = 8 * 140.

Indeed; and the bit-packing code to convert 8 7-bit characters to 7 octets is a PITA (I wrote a Java SMS server)

Getting to the point skillfully has always been difficult, but your readers reward you for doing it.

You're not writing to communicate with yourself, after all.

But it's good for readers. And if you have a lot of followers your tweet will get read a lot more times than it's written.

This has always struck me as a weak justification. If readers value succinctness, the problem should solve itself without any need for restriction, because people would follow those who get to the point and unfollow those who don't.

If somebody chooses to be a windbag and someone else chooses to follow them, why should Twitter be standing in the middle telling them both that they're Doing It Wrong?

For what it's worth, I don't find it good for readers. People tend to leave out context and nuance.

I actually really enjoy the challenge and artistry of it. Surely I'm not alone?

You don't have to rewrite once you've used Twitter enough.

Yeah, and if you live in a submarine long enough your eyes unlearn to focus on things that are far away..

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.

-- George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak"

Yet he also wrote this, in "Politics and the English Language":

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

Of course brevity is generally good, and bloat is generally bad. But you can be concise even in 5000 words if the subject is complex, and waste space even in 140 characters. But one thing is sure, a hard limit of 140 makes discussion of anything remotely complex impossible. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater... the mere possibility of bloat hurts communication less than the impossibility to elaborate, at all, ever. (posting links, or twee+ etc, don't really count IMHO)

It's not a either/or situation. You can be brief on Twitter for the things being brief on Twitter is good for without avoiding longer writing.

And how do you respond to something brief that requires more than a brief response? Blog about it? How many people actually do that, or have it set up so they can do it in one click, so that their decision wether they want to be brief or indepth is not influenced at all by the restrictions imposed by Twitter?

You act like you have a bug up your butt about Twitter and want to make a demon out of it. Twitter is just a medium. Use Twitter if it fits your needs. Use something else if not. Nothing is imposed on you.

I asked you a simple question. You sound like you can't answer a straighforward question and then make a demon out of me. Oh well.

In the meantime, I started to watch a talk by Chris Hedges about Journalism, and when I heard this bit I had to think of this thread right here:

.. it's why I don't go on Fox news. I don't go on CNN either, because the most you're ever gonna get is 4 to 6 minutes. And so you have to use the language of easily identifiable clichés in order for the audience to resonate. And if what you're thinking doesn't fit within those clichés, then you become unintelligible. And that of course has now been carried out through the wider culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAhq-l0LUio&t=4m44s

Twitter is not "just a medium" like those just fall out of the sky in random configurations, it's part of a trend, and THAT I utterly hate, and proudly so. I don't have it in for Twitter as such, rather for the general decline in the ability to think (or answer simple questions). Also, while I'm not forced to use it, if everybody does, there is nobody left to have any meaningful conversations with, so that would kind of suck. To put bluntly: the freedom of people to be stupid, taken to extremes by too many people, kind of intrudes on my freedom to be intelligent. So the very least I can do is ask a simple question. If you can't even stand being asked a question without skipping to ad-hominem plus strawman, I would say the proof is in the pudding.

I talk about interesting things with intelligent people who often share very intelligent--and long, deep--writing using Twitter. It's unfortunate that you feel Twitter is a representation for what you perceive as a decline in thinking, but you're not blaming the real cause. I don't know what the cause is since I don't see a decline in thinking.

How do they share long and deep writing with Twitter? Do they smear it out over a dozen tweets that you then have to navigate with the terribly conversation view interface?

They tweet links to their blogs or the publications they write for.

It promotes consice yet well-thought out statements.

Let's be honest: it gives authors permission to not write a lot.

The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors isn't the well-thought-out-ness of the tweets, it's the volume. When you can't write more than 140 characters, you feel OK tweeting almost anything. And you do, and you do it a lot. A blogging platform is a drag because it feels like work to write a meaningful blog post. You start a dozen blog posts that you never publish because they don't feel finished. So you end up never blogging because you "don't have time for it".

Twitter won because their 140 character limit encouraged constant, thoughtless posting, which allowed for an insane volume of tweets. And it turned out that volume is way, way more important for a social network than quality or thoughtfulness.

Most insightful comment I've read all day. I had never thought of it like that before, but it rings true and now Twitter's success makes perfect sense to me (at last). I'm now wondering how (if) you could tread the line between volume and quality such that you could create lots of content that avoided the "Had ketchup on toast for breakfast - #YOLO" kind of content.

Really? Have you even been near twitter? It promotes slogan like ideas, contrained thinking, ADD, silly one-liners, and BS self-absorbed tibbits.

Concise implies both short and information-rich. In my experience with twitter, the former is certainly true but...

In languages where verbs and adjectives are not superfluously extraneous.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain

Wasn't that Blaize Pascal?

On the internet, everything was said by Mark Twain.

You're right. I almost left it unattributed but went with the first link Google found.

A bunch of startups are working on the problem of creating a customized, ranked, deduplicated newsfeed for you from multiple personal sources. A few that immediately come to mind are: Nuzzel, Prismatic, Flipboard.

Eventually Twitter will have to copy or acquire such filtering, but this also might be an important differentiator for App.net: apps whose filtering and UI innovations shouldn't be held back by platform proprietor restrictions.

I went to Prismatic and was annoyed that there seemed to be nothing on the landing page explaining what it was and how to use it. In search of enlightenment, I clicked the "blog" link, and was suddenly immersed in a series of amazing technical articles about Clojure. If you're interested in Clojure it looks like it's worth following their blog even if you don't care about their product.

And I was so impressed by their work that I tried to sign up. But they demand too many permissions: not only to read from your accounts, which I was ready to grant, but to write to them! No way.

I think that really only applies to Twitter and Facebook, as I signed up with Google and they've never shared anything on my behalf. There is a share button on each article though, which is presumably the use case.

Well worth checking out (even if you do accidentally end up posting about the death of a computer science pioneer a year late :().

"I signed up with Google"

Then you granted them permission to "Manage your data in Google Reader" (yes, it still says that) and "Manage your contacts". For me that means "managing" the contact list on my phone. The risk/benefit ratio is probably way too high.

Sure, but they provided me with a useful service, and I like their audacity and stack. I'm pretty happy with the tradeoff, even if I don't use the service that much.

We don't want write access to your Google account. Unfortunately (at least at the time we set this up) they didn't offer a read-only permissions option for contacts or Reader. We also offer a 'stealth' account with no external services, and you can always choose to attach accounts later once we gain your trust.

Thanks for showing up to respond! Since your website says almost nothing about what Prismatic is, would you mind answering a couple of questions?

Is it just an iPhone App? I'm about to replace my iPhone with an Android phone, so if that's the only way to use Prismatic I'm excluded.

Why do you need to see my contact list? That seems bizarre.

Why does the website say nothing about what Prismatic is or how it works? Is that a marketing strategy?

I signed up because of their Clojure articles. I clicked the little stealth bomber and they let me use it without signing in through Twitter, Facebook, or Google.

They are doing a good job, but not a great job. I find interesting articles, but also some celebrity gossip will sneak in there. For example, I learned yesterday that Jennifer Aniston looks fantastic with or without makeup.

I like it, though, they find some articles that don't seem to be on Reddit or HN but which are still kind of useful.

He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA...

"But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."

But I don't think the power has shifted to individuals; it's just an illusion that it has. Look at some 'celebrities' on Twitter and G+, for example. I don't just mean pop celebs, but celebs in any industry. Has the 'power' shifted to them really? The power is still in the platform and the extent to which those people are exposed to others in that platform. When the rules of the platform change ('real names' only, etc), the people who had 'power' may lose that power overnight.

Moreover, who's interested in following soundbites from "successful people" in isolation? The point of sites like Slashdot and Hacker News is the opportunity for discussion in depth. You can't get that from Twitter.

that seems like such a solvable problem, from a machine learning perspective. every time you read/engage with a tweet or HN post or other content, you are providing training data on what type of tweets/posts you want to read.

now if only we had some benevolent central cloud provider that wanted to provide such a service and had a central repository of news and feeds.

maybe Google could do something like that and call it 'Reader.'

Why do you want to centralize it? Just pull the twitter feeds, and filter them localy.

sure, you could do it locally. Google has a better data set because they know what you read in a lot of different apps and on a lot of different devices.

he goes on to say "But if you follow 50 people, that is an epic time commitment." - which it is, if you try and use it like a filtered hacker news.

I follow like 2,000 people on twitter. I don't read even a small fraction of what's posted; I use it as a news weather-vane - what do the [politicos|hackers|normals] think is annoying/cool enough to tweet about this morning?

I don't even think I know 2,000 people enough to recognize their face let alone name.

a lot of people tweet quite infrequently - I don't see anything of theirs, sadly.

the ones who do tweet often enough I get to recognise (at least, their avatar.) If not, and I see an interesting tweet, I just go and re-read their description. I only "know" about 30 or 40 people who are on twitter at all.

No you don't:

http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-yo...

Proxlet did this as a service back in the day. I've been toying with the idea of creating a project based on Guillermo R's post with a social component for sharing regexes and rules. The truth is that this type of local proxy should be a generalizable service for every service you consume.

This is interesting.

Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?

First you kill off all Twitter replies, those are where the most noise is on a lot of entities you follow. Then you prioritize entities who consistently post interesting stuff, and you quickly filter out people who use Twitter as a chat tool or Facebook.

Twitter at its best is short succinct one liners that quickly summarize the content you want the world to see with links that take you to the long form, and you only go there when the tweet conveys its something that will probably interest you.

The second you start writing stuff longer than 140 chars it gets too long to quickly scan a stream and find the stuff you are really interested in to spend your time on. People who want more than 140 charts on Twitter are NUTS. It would destroy the whole point and the beauty of the thing, they totally don't get the concept.

My client puts the people I am following in a bar on the left prioritized by the ones I like and read the most. @newsyc50 and @newsycombinator are at the top, along with @slashdot. I alwsys tap them first thing every day and I get EXACTLY what Malda was asking for, the top posts on Hacker News recently with no noise. @newsyc50 has links to the Hacker News comments and I go to them on topics that really interest me.

I scroll down my avatar bar and look at other people I follow that aren't as consistently interesting when time permits.

Twitter, if you get a good client, and spend time finding and following the right things, gets you all the news and info you could want, and you only get noise if you want it. I look at my whole stream to get a pulse of what's happening, or for the occasional serendipity, otherwise I just look at the streams of the things I am consistently interested in.

Twitter is a beautiful thing, Dorsey deserves a billion for it. Unfortunately the current Twitter and its executive team have been pretty ghastly for a while, but that's usually what happens when a company heads to IPO.

What client do you use?

You could theoretically use the Streaming API to analyze tweets en masse from different sources/individuals. Coding in a bit of text analysis (length, blacklisting/whitelisting keywords, sentiment, etc.) would discriminate between superfluous tweets and the ones you care about. That'd would be a great way to automate the process of scrolling through crap every morning, but you'd need to build a web app to house the results and scroll through that instead.

Of course, that's how I would do it as a third-party developer. Will Twitter ever support this? Doubt it. I don't think it's relevant to enough users to implement that kind of feature. Most people who use Twitter evidently enjoy reading what Justin Anniston and Jennifer Bieber eat for breakfast.

Not sure if it's what you're suggesting specifically, but if you analyzed common links within a span of time and analyzed them for keywords, you could associate other tweets from certain individuals. Tim Bray or Zed Shaw, as random examples, could tweet about an issue without providing a link to it (to infer context), but you could infer context by looking for relevant links from similar people.

If the system analyzed the links you clicked on (via the t.co URL shortener Twitter operates), the links you posted, and the topics you tweeted about, they could build a profile of interest for you and highlight those tweets.

Their current 'you should check this out' system on twitter.com and in the twitter client seems to be 'hey, here's some stuff everyone else likes', which (the last time I looked at it) was complete tripe about idiotic topics that 'the masses' care about, with nothing about the sort of tech news or political/economic interest that I tend to prefer, but I feel like a personalized feed is something that would be far more useful to me, and probably many other people.

This is essentially what we do with sports news at fancloud.com. By the time the tweets make it through our filters the end result is much more newsworthy then a raw twitter stream.

It seems like there'd be a higher demand for these type of specialised content filters.

I'm a big NHL fan, so I'll check out fancloud.com.

"One man's mundane and desperate existence is another man's Technicolor."

How can the service differenciate? My interests differ from your interests.

Often I see people re-post the same message if they think it will have value to their followers simply because not everyone is online at the same time.

Scoble sucks. The dude has some interesting thoughts, but his signal to noise ratio is abysmal.

But I guess the point of this article is that as communities like Slashdot, Reddit, or HN grow, the signal to noise ratio for any individual user becomes lower and lower.

I think tools like Nuzzle can help solve this. Basically it watches my friends' Twitter and Facebook feeds and bubbles up popular links for today.

Twitter already has that. Check the Discover tab.

yeah, if you want a clear, wide-ranging picture of what's happening in the world, this guy is definitely the source to turn to: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhM...

There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.

Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?

When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".

Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.

There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Wow I just took the time to look up hellban [0] because I always just assumed it's synonymous with permaban. For those too lazy to click the link, it's a ban where you're not informed that you're banned and the content you post is displayed only for you and no one else. That's actually a pretty shitty moderation tactic mainly because it doesn't teach the poster why they made a mistake and it does just waste their time when they could be getting back to being a better user.

Additionally, in the <year time that I've been reading and minimally contributing to HN, I've definitely been disappointed with a trend towards politicization that a lot of people have noted. I'm much happier seeing everyone's static site generators on github than everyone's opinion on Snowden or some other political issue that's related enough to tech to get posted. It strikes me as mission creep for HN to start getting so political. My favorite thing to see on the frontpage is a github repo, not a medium/svbtle article where someone spends two paragraphs telling an anecdote and then one paragraph jumping to a massive generalized conclusion based on that one experience and/or "Lorem Snowden" as you put it. /rant

[0]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

Hellbans aren't meant to teach people what mistake they made. Downvotes and comments are supposed to do that.

That's why it's a shame that downvoting is so disapproved of among a group of HN users, and it's a shame that people "drive-by downvote".

Hell banning is meant to save time of everyone in the community, and it does a pretty good job of that. There's much less meta commentary about whether banning a user is or isn't fair; and there's less to and fro about what should be a bannable offence. The algorithms do all that stuff.

I agree about the political stuff.

I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.

You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6 months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid & misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.

So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if you want.

There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same time.

That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for. And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.

That's true of moderation in general though - it's pernicious because it conceals from the community what exactly is being concealed from the community. I've seen this become a problem on sites as diverse as Groklaw, Jezebel, the Adafruit blog, and a number of other places.

HN is relatively transparent in that it has showdead. On most websites there's no way of telling what's missing.

You guessed the "maker" blog ;-)

It'd be interesting to see upvotes given only to users who've gotten X karma and downvotes being given to users who've gotten Y (Y>X) karma (the way downvotes are implemented now). it would likely encourage people to really browse the comments rather than just assume whatever's at the top is what they must agree with to survive. doubt this would ever work in practice but it's an interesting thought experiment at the least.

> There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Sure, the starts of these things are always great because they have a tight focus. But then they expand, and people post shallowly & intensely interesting stuff, and other people upvote it, and then the community dies.

There's probably a secret HN somewhere, doing better than real HN.

You know, there's always been a very simple solution to "but then they expand"--just cap your userbase.

It's almost like HN is so exposed to web services going for exponential-hockey-stick-viral-growth, that they forget that you can intentionally avoid that curve if you like.

Like Malda said in the submission article: That doesn't make the graph go up and right.

It would be interesting to try that approach out, though. I would think a $5 fee would cap it for you — naturally raising the cap only when the industry your site focuses on grows as well.

The fee seems to have worked for Metafilter. That and active moderation.

This is how private torrent trackers try to keep their content quality high and, for the most part, it seems to work relatively well actually. Obviously it's not the same for a social news site necessarily.

> There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

These days I think Y Combinator is the one thing that keeps Hacker News from falling too far off track. Reddit is a good example of a website with a purely agnostic mission goal, and it's changed to a more mainstream audience over time. Since YC uses HN as a promotional platform, the audience here will typically remain rooted to a specific culture.

Plus one for mentioning the F/OSS "Planets"! They were/are great.

This place is an elitist microcosm of the networking hell that is silicon valley.

I come here because I'm part of the tech world. It's just that the tech world is a corrupt, greedy place--Y Combinator included.

Well, how are you working to change that?

We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched.

We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.

I've never quite understood the impulse to ask that critics be free from blame, as if one must have a solution in order to recognize a problem.

That said, I as a programmer do not work for a tech startup and have quit jobs I felt were complicit in greedy mania.

Another way of looking at it--why is it my problem that the technology sector is dominated by greed?

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Eh? I wasn't really talking about Malda's comments at all, just agreeing with your criticism of HN and adding a diagnosis :P

I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about.

However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate?

When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem.

That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!

Your reference to Slashdot on 9/11 gave me a bout of nostalgia for all the time I spent on that site as a teenager, and led me to checkout archive.org's Slashdot capture from that date. For some reason it doesn't exist, the closest I can get is 9/14.

"Net taps without warrants"[1] was on the front page (already). Very interesting to look back and see the commentary and the way this was received 12 years ago(!) in light of all the NSA/Snowden stuff that's been going on lately.

Some highlights:

"Do we really have any reason to believe that the government is trying to create a giant evil spy machine to watch their own people as opposed to the terrorists? I tend to be more or less trusting of the government, but that's just me."

"This bill is quite limited in its scope, allowing only 48 hours to tap without approval and only for immediate threats to "National Security." Many civil liberties are restricted during threats to "National Security." Ever heard of martial law and curfews?"

"Anything that is truely our rights in a constitutional sense will be protected by the supreme court.

The congress will push, the courts will push back, and life wil lgo on as it has in the US.

I get the feeling a significant cross section of slashdot just likes to run around hystericly like the sky is falling."

"What's so hard about getting a warrant? [..] Or maybe you keep federal courthouses staffed with at least one judge with a security clearance 24x7, if its so important. "

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.or...

slashdot doesn't delete old comments/articles. You can get to it directly on the site:

http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/14/211241/net-taps-without-w...

"I tend to be more or less trusting of the government, but that's just me."

Wow that's kind of creepy. Mainly because I responded to a comment worded exactly the same way on another site recently, in regards to the NSA story. Circulating a meme perhaps?

The concept of trusting your government implicitly just seems so wrong on the face of it, this comment boggles my mind every time I come across it!

Original 9/11 thread:

http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower...

The subject of one of the very top comments reminds me of why I've never cared for the Slashdot community: "We had it coming..."

What's worse is those people who characterise an entire community by one poster's comment, which isn't particularly mirrored in the rest of the thread.

I agree with you about the decline of Slashdot. I'm sure moderating Slashdot frontpage is no small task, but it did start to seem pretty lazy. Stories with obvious typos in the title, stories that linked to terrible blogspam instead of the original source, etc.

Contrast with Metafilter which has fairly aggressive top-down moderation and, IMHO, still has a pretty strong community. I'm not a heavy user but it looks from the outside pretty similar to how it looked years ago.

Charge 5 dollars one time for commenting privileges here and I bet the community would scale down in number and scale up in quality quite nicely.

Maybe. I think there are more than a few people who would be ideologically opposed to paying a for-profit organization in exchange for being able to post on its forum. Maybe if it was a donation to EFF instead?

Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.

> Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.

It's definitely part of the secret sauce, but I wouldn't call the moderation aggressive - it'd call it targeted to preserve culture. If MetaFilter has a first defence then it is the 5$ account wall, the second is the (almost legendary) snark, the third is the moderation. Moderation is almost always employed as a last resort, and it's rationale is normally documented.

The "secret sauce" of MetaFilter is really the community and everything else works to preserve that. The moderators of MetaFilter are the last resort in that process, but their are neither "aggressive" nor numerous, they are just very well chosen - not by algorithms, but by other existing moderators who actually understand the organisation/community they work in.

Fair enough, that might be the wrong word.

(Out of curiosity, do you know if there's any way to see how many threads are closed by moderators? My recollection is that the rationale for closing a thread is included in its comments, but the thread disappears of the frontpage once its been axed so it's hard to know how common that it.)

Either way, I didn't mean it as a bad thing. Personally, I want a moderated experience... so long as I trust the moderator.

The deleted threads do vanish from the home page, but they stay online. There is a GreaseMonkey script if you really want to find them. As a long time active MeFi member, I'd peg the deleted thread rate at less than one per day.

I'm pretty sure it's been discussed in MetaTalk too, so some creative searching of that sub-site might turn up the number.

For anyone curious enough there is a blog [1] that tracks deleted MetaFilter posts.

[1] http://mefideleted.blogspot.co.uk/

I really, really like that idea. Not just EFF, because that would tend to create an echo chamber. Instead, you should be presented with a dropdown list of various unrelated but preapproved nonprofits. A $5 donation to any of them would earn you commenting privileges for a limited time.

Want to comment as an AC? Donate $5.00 for a one-time comment without logging in. Want to comment as a logged-in user? Donate $5.00 for a month.

Somebody should totally do something like this.

From experience of what happened when K5 introduced that: no.

Yeah, if you're going to have editors, they have to, you know, edit. Otherwise all they're doing is slowing things down without adding any value. Slashdot lost me when it lost sight of this.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3227605&cid=4186250...

Interesting. Maybe in hindsight I recalled the early days as being better... or maybe I just had more time to wade through badly edited article summaries as a teenager and didn't care!

In my opinion the two biggest problems with Slashdot now are (1)plagiarism: instead of writing a summary, the submitter copies and pastes a paragraph from the link, and it's presented as "<submitter> writes <text>", but <submitter> did not write it; and (2)credulous moderation: numerous comments consisting of obvious crap just made up by someone imitating expertise get bumped up to +5 insightful, so that moderation becomes useless as a reading filter.

As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm.

The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest.

Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?

The commenting/upvoting system stink over at /. The Reddit/HN style is so much better. They should have switched a while ago. It makes the site still feel like 1997.

Personally, I prefer the slashdot system. Limited voting points makes you think more carefully about spending them, and being able to differentiate between +1 Insightful and +1 Funny is nice too. Also, moving popular posts to the top is great for readers, but voters will then tend to upvote the already popular comments.

Agreed about the value of differentiating between different kinds of +/-1. Also Slashdot's meta-moderation is a significant advancement on its successors.

Disagree with the meta-moderation. It makes the site very echo-chambery, because people start modding up posts in line with the groupthink so that they will get meta-moderated positively.

Lack of a slashdot-like voting system is one of the reasons why, on reddit, subreddits become unreadable when they they hit a number of subscribers (e.g. 100k).

Funny that he says he wants a Hacker News digest with the top 10 stories each day... my Hacker News Daily is precisely that.

Yeah, googling for "top 10 stories from hacker news" returns http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ as the first result.

Maybe he will see this thread and sign up :)

Is there some way to get this in a daily email?

I'm subscribed to the Hacker Newsletter, but it´s weekly:

http://hackernewsletter.com

and for Usenet users - there's a group gwene.net.daemonology.hn-daily

It would be trivial to set it up as an RSS-to-email campaign in Mailchimp, but I wouldn't want to without the permission of the site owner.

Go for it. Let me know when it's set up and I'll add a link to the site.

There's now a subscribe-by-email function:

    http://goo.gl/5xKj5g

There's an RSS feed, so rss2email or anything like it should be fine.

I just follow @newsycombinator on Twitter and use Notifier for Twitter on Chrome.

I use twitter as an RSS feed of sorts, so I just get a popup of tweets as they come in and don't have to spend time going to aggerator sites every day to follow the news.

https://twitter.com/newsycombinator

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notifier-for-twitt...

@newsyc50 and @newsyc20 are better, though less popular. They link to the comments too.

https://twitter.com/newsyc20

he wants 10 best stories that interest him, not top 10 upvoted (that includes the new version of cofeescript or bootstrap).

One idea for jumpstarting a new HN-type site is to spider HNSearch, gathering the first 100,000 stories ever submitted to HN, along with comments. Then set up your site so that your frontpage is a doppelganger of HN's frontpage circa 2007. I.e. today your frontpage should look how the HN frontpage looked on August 7th, 2007.

That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back, which they should because the frontpage is interesting.

This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were a halfway implementation.

Anyway. Just a fun idea.

EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008: http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008...

It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users.

Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization or something.

EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and 5.9 submissions per user.

1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it. Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users in their field but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue." EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is packaged with a full implementation of HN.

2. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot of content.

3. This is a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing. It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.

I just ran across an old dump of HN from April 24, 2008. It contains the first 172,000 items (stories+comments) and the profiles of the first 6,500 users. http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008...

I would guess the secret sauce is spam filtering code. It seems conspicuously absent from Arc releases. The Arc code does come bundled with the HN source code, though, and all of the core features seem to work fine. There's nothing missing except some way of filtering spam.

I think a HN clone might get better traction not necessarily focusing on hackers/programmers, who likely are already perfectly happy being here. Maybe make one for all the stories and things that HN users don't want to see, or for different communities altogether.

The point for someone doing this would presumably be to hope the visitors in question would not notice that they're adding content to the ghost/doppelganger comments.

The secret sauce is that HN is the news aggregator of a successful start up combinator. The secret sauce is popularity.

The secret sauce is green.

I'm not sure why you think there would be (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments on August 7th, 2007.

Also, HNSearch's API won't allow you to gather that many stories.

The best way to do this would be to only take stories with years in the title. These are stories which were old during their original submission, but evidently timeless.

>"Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe."

I tried to start using Twitter that way maybe 5 years ago and found that there was just too much noise - jokes, tales of breakfast and banter that I just don't care to see.

I actually feel like it's the right kind of model though. Aggregating content streams from people of similar interests. It's the filtering that's lacking for me.

Every time I think about following someone on a social site I want for the ability to follow only a specific category of their content and possibly re-share it in the same focused fashion.

G+, Flipboard and likely a host of others have done things toward this direction, but I have yet to see anything gel for me.

Ideally, I see all of this categorization and recommendation happening automatically. If a service could recommend news or articles to me and categorize those I specify with the same accuracy I perceive from Netflix with movies, or even the new Gmail inbox I'd be pretty happy.

I really don't see Twitter providing any value to my life. The structure and concept doesn't fit my way of discovering and consuming news at all. In my mind, Twitter is essentially useless. I don't care about people, I don't wish to be follow anyone, I care about single idea, news and insights.

I would not like a filter in terms of what Google or Netflix imposes on me either. If I only got the news that some filter thought I would like I would miss out on ever discovering anything new. Filters only serves to keep you in your own little bubble, never letting anything controversial enter your life.

I like Hacker News, Slashdot and to some extend Reddit. Most of the stuff on each site is of little interest, but now I know it exists. There's a bunch of stuff that I've been introduced to, which initially did't appeal to me, but later on proved useful. Filters and recommendation engines needs to die, they are harmful because they limit our exposure to new ideas. Twitter should go the same way, you follow the people you agree with or the people you want to hate, never the people who make you stop and rethink your own opinions.

I think you've misconstrued my point as I'm generally in agreement with you.

I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe.

Odd argument, considering that the content on Hacker News is more about products than the people making the products. And I can say with confidence that I've never seen Scoble linked to anywhere on HN.

Agreed. HN is what it is, it's not an all-encompassing tech news aggregator like Slashdot was. HN is fairly focused with a few outside stories that creep in here and there.

I know everyone likes to run the 'back in my day' line every now and then so I might as well. Slashdot is crap now. Back in my day things were fairly relevant and, while there was a slight lag, if the story was interesting it made it to Slashdot quickly. Now stories might not show up for not just hours, but days! By then it's been discussed elsewhere to death so you only read the Slashdot comments for snark and not insight. The technology section of Google News is better than Slashdot (sans comments).

Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. They let the look and feel get too long in the tooth and people abandoned it for better sites.

> Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts.

This is a feature, not a bug. Web design trends have become awful over the past 3-5 years. HN is even better - simple and functional - and it wouldn't be out of place in 1999.

But HN isn't out of place in 2013 and Slashdot is. That's what matters. You can call it a feature all you want but if a new user goes to your site and dismisses it because of the look, you've done something wrong.

You keep referencing dates as though the calendar has something substantive to say about web design; what actual problems do you see with Slashdot's design?

If you think time has no bearing on aesthetic then you don't know much about design. You might not care but engaging people and increasing views are important to a new aggregator.

> If you think time has no bearing on aesthetic then you don't know much about design.

"Design" is not synonymous with "ephemeral fashion"; good design principles appeal to human perception and cognition irrespective of what was popular yesterday or which page of the calendar is facing up today.

You've still yet to articulate any substantive criticism of Slashdot's design.

I guess I should've differentiated between visual design and functional design. I would think I made it clear enough that I was talking about the visual design.

That said, the functional design of the site is fine. Outside of the moderation system, which I think isn't thought out right, and the discussion threads, which seem to push out newer comments, there's not a lot to change.

As for the visual design, not much has changed since early Slashdot. As just a few examples: the rounded corners are dated, the colors are out of style (I'm not sure they were ever 'in'), the left-side menu is wasted space. There is some weird selection of a story that highlights it, which is meaningless in function.

Everything about the site is 'busy'. There's too much going on and I would guess that very little of the excess is used (I would love to see the stats on some features). The threading of discussions could use a ton of work.

Overall, I bet a developer had a lot of input into the design and not designer. It looks like something a capable programmer would create but they have just enough aesthetic ability to cause trouble.

Visual design is very intertwined with 'trend'. Slashdot is way 'off-trend'.

You're still not sufficiently differentiating between "visual design" and "ephemeral fashion".

Visual design is itself a subset of functional design. Its function is to convey ideas - whether logos, ethos, or pathos - in a way that's accessible to human perception.

Perhaps the reason why Slashdot hasn't changed its visual design significantly is because the current design is sufficiently successful at fulfilling this purpose.

If we regard reference to trend and fashion as a subset of visual design, the function of which is to convey ideas, then it becomes clear that one of the ideas being conveyed is "we follow trends", from which we can reasonably extrapolate "we follow the lead of others" or "we care more about novelty than effectiveness in design". Perhaps the people who run Slashdot don't want to say these things?

The only actual substantive criticism you've offered is that you think that Slashdot's design is "busy" (calling things "dated" or "out of style" is unsubstantive). The one thing I'll agree with you on is that the left sidebar might be better implemented as a tag cloud, and included in the right column, or incorporated into a topic index accessible from the main navigation bar.

But this is a relatively trivial complaint, and overall, I much prefer the structured layout of Slashdot to current design trends which arrange content inconsistently in haphazard grids, and separate distinct elements not with clear visual cues, but with vague whitespace.

You're still not sufficiently differentiating between "visual design" and "ephemeral fashion".

I don't need to, these things go together. Visual design is entwined with aesthetics that include trends.

Here's a fun fact: everyone talks about Slashdot in the past tense, specifically how it's become irrelevant. Malda even talks about how it's been replaced by other sites, but it didn't have to be. Want to be perceived as an old site? Look the same as you did a decade ago. Name a successful interface that is practically unchanged for a decade that is not in decline. I've seen database management programs that have made bigger changes than Slashdot.

Perhaps the reason why Slashdot hasn't changed its visual design significantly is because the current design is sufficiently successful at fulfilling this purpose.

It's in steady decline. It's not fulfilling it's purpose.

Complete conjecture. Things become trends for a reason.

> Name a successful interface that is practically unchanged for a decade that is not in decline.

I can name thousands, not just in software, but in almost every area of life. When was the last time you saw a car that didn't have the same dashboard elements and controls arranged in basically the same way? Would you drive a car that had the steering wheel mounted to the ceiling just for the sake of novelty?

Changing UIs for the sake of change, without any substantive benefit, can ruin products just as thoroughly. How successful is Windows 8 right now?

> Complete conjecture. Things become trends for a reason.

Perhaps it is a conjecture, but it's a bit more meaningful than "it happens because of reasons."

The question is: what are the problems with slashdot's design? "Time" is not an answer.

Ever hear of a Regency chair, Tiffany glass, Fallingwater, Lever House, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel, a Ford Thunderbird, Porsche 911? Artistic merit outlasts fashion, and if anyone makes a website as good as one of the above, it will be an accomplishment no matter how dated the design is.

You can pick and choose a lot of items that we think of as having artistic merit but there are countless thousands of others that were artistic failures that you can't name.

There's no argument that artistic merit endures, however, Slashdot has none and never has. I'm not sure what you're even arguing because my comment wasn't against the design of all websites, just Slashdot.

Slashdot died the day it got political and worse when such became entrenched. By political I mean election oriented material to the point that crossover polluted seemingly unrelated stories.

Hence why during a discussion here about politics I stated I would prefer a "hide" flag next to the "flag" link that I could use to remove stories from my view under the notion that maybe someone wants to get into that stuff here.

I think what killed Slashdot was the devolution of commenting to karma-racing with predictable "funny" responses. So-called obligatory "That's no moon..." jokes and so on.

The absence of that was certainly what I found so refreshing when I first discovered Hacker News.

Aren't there a few greasemon... aw hell, I'll just look it up for you.

# Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories from HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721

also mentioned in the thread http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

It's not about linking to Scoble, it's about what Scoble links to on his twitter account.

By following a few prolific and informed people on twitter you get a good sense of what's going on through what they're linking, that was the point being made.

Its the very definition of sticking your head in an echo chamber.

I come here because I don't want Only 3 or 4 people's idea of what's important. That's the point of an aggregator / voting system, let me know what the masses deem important.

> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.

There is hckrnews [0]. You can filter by top 10, top 20, top 50%, homepage and all. I usually start by going through the top 10 and progress outwards if I'm looking for additional posts.

[0] http://hckrnews.com/

Or there's https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 although it's a poor substitue for hckrnews it's better than the home page if you can't access hckrnews because "The category of Hacking has been blocked by your System Administrator".

Why the downvotes? I didn't know about that url till someone else posted it.

I find it interesting that the "tech-related topics" that Malda is "most obsessed with right now" are Bitcoin, Manning, and Snowden/NSA - the ones that the proclaimers of a decline of quality of HN complain about the most.

Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless 'approved', or something similar?

Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't "hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean.

I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.

MetaFilter has successfully used the "pay $5 for an account" model as a means to balance access against exclusivity. It may not be a tech site but considering it's still basically just an open access group blog (with a few bells and whistles) the model seems to have served it quite well.

Agree. The $5 lifetime fee was all it took to keep Metafilter from being diluted after reaching critical mass. Simple and effective.

It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things worse, since it leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is better.

I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great, while it lasted.

A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads.

I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may conflict with closed societies like this.

I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky. Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable information, not to mention some way of validating it.

> while it lasted.

What happened to it? Why did it die?

I've had a similar forum many years ago but haven't been able to replicate the experience since.

I believe the biggest reason for it dying was that a schism appeared in our community. A few people had a public argument, sides were taken, words were spoken, feelings were hurt, etc. We had some people leave, and despite some attempts here or there, we had no new members to fill the gaps.

Another possibility is this place was created back before sites like Facebook, twitter, etc. Once social media came to prominence, some of us started communicating via other methods and we didn't check the forum as much as we used to. When your userbase is that small, it doesn't take much of a disruption to kill it.

Ah, yeah that's obviously a problem.

Maybe some kind of "top 10" of HN as voted on by the "elite" - no extra, private comment area, no special form of communication, no nothing except the additional ability to contribute a vote towards a "top 10".

I'm also not really even sure such a thing is necessary. I still love HN for it's content and conversations.

https://lobste.rs is the "invite-only HN".

Does anyone have an invite to it? It looks interesting (my email is in my profile). Thanks!

As an experiment, I'd like to see a HackerNews or reddit-like site where the older accounts get more voting power. (Actually, there's no reason you couldn't just put a weighted voting system into place parallel with the old system, and just offer different views.)

I don't think it would work, but I'm interested to see how it would fail. It would probably lead to all sorts of weird gaming of the system ("Ebay auction for reddit account #12") and unintended consequences. But those would also be an interesting outcome of the experiment.

I'd prefer a solution that weighted votes on the basis of the quality of the voters' own contributions.

A simple method might be to just build on the "avg. karma" calculation that HN already does, and use that as the value of your upvotes. Have an average karma score of 3? Your upvote adds three points to the score of the post.

This is based on the assumption that people whose own contributions are high-quality are also more likely to appreciate high-quality contributions posted by others. Using cumulative karma or seniority as a basis for vote weighting would make quantity - of posts or time - equivalent to quality, and might dilute things a bit.

The drawback here is that any system of vote-weighting, when coupled with using voting to indicate agreement or disagreement, might encourage a greater level of groupthink, and leave less room for discussion of controversial topics.

How do you know that HN isn't using a weighted voting system? Ever since points were taken out of the UI there could have been an algo added between arrow-clicking and vote-registering.

https://lobste.rs is what you're talking about. Invite-only, hardcore relevance in topic submissions.

http://monocle.io/ - expressly set out to be a HN with a different community vibe.

If they did, would you know about it?

That's the thing about invite-only systems, everyone assumes they're among the ones who would be invited...

I think his logic toward Twitter is very flawed. Sure, you can get the bulk of your interesting news there from specific feeds, but where's the discussion? People use Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Fark, etc., because they could have conversations about each item.

People want to discuss how a story makes them feel and how it affects them. People need access to random people, that's why this doesn't work as well on social sites like Facebook. Finally, it needs to be at least psuedo-anonymous so people can explore their thoughts without real-life repercussions.

There is discussion in twitter but not if you follow Scoble you need to follow people who interact and roughly follow and are followed by similar numbers of people. Its a very social medium if done right...

Not to say Twitter isn't a fine medium but I personally don't think a real discussion can be had 140 characters at a time. It's a severe limit that just doesn't work (wrt discussions).

I enjoyed reading Cmdr Taco's thoughts on the future of "news" (interpret that broadly) and it made do some reflecting on what I think the future will be.

The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that signal vs. noise is the most important criteria for a service to be used, but what a lot of analyses miss is that you have to interpret something before you can decide if it is a signal or not, and that interpretation is by definition individual. I think this is what happens a lot of the time when people complain about a site becoming "too big", idealizing the past when the "riff-raff" hadn't gotten in. But I think this is mistaken for the same reason that generational rants about the fecklessness of the youth are mistaken, ie Occam's razor says that we are probably not all Nietzschean superman vs newcomer's being idiots, but instead we are probably more or less equal. What is happening instead is that as a larger group comes to a site, a larger number of interests and opinions come as well. And what I interpret as noise, what those people interpret as signal.

By this I mean that if a large number of art enthusiasts joined HN and started posting a bunch of articles on art history, I would probably not be interested as my interests lie mostly in the tech arena. Let's further posit that these art enthusiasts are pretty competent in their field and so 90% of what they post is "worthwhile" in some vague broad sense. This influx might actually increase the overall signal to noise content on HN, while for me it would appear as though HN is getting swamped with crap. This is why people talk about trying to keep things exclusive or invite-only, we are trying to keep the broader perspectives involved aligned with our own, so as to not get swamped by noise from perspectives with no overlap to our own.

And this I think is the root of a bunch of the complaints about politics being posted to HN. While I may shrug off art history posts, politics is another word for how we organize ourselves to live together and as such as is much more personal and much more important. And so people's personal reactions to politics they disagree with, and by extension political stories they disagree with, is much more aggressive. So even a small amount of political discourse that you disagree with can seem intolerable.

So what is the solution? Well if I had that, I would be rich, but I do have a few ideas. The first is that reddit is trying to solve the signal interpretation issue with subreddits, wherein people can manually opt in to streams of article that they believe will be signals to them, while blocking out all streams that they will personally interpret as noise. But this still relies on manual intervention as well as discovery, along with user moderation to maintain the signal. And why do we still do things manually when we have computers!? :)

So one area that I think is really overlooked is that right now every site interprets "down/up votes" and flagging as me speaking about what I think is useful for the community. But this is just my interpretation and so aren't I really expressing my own preferences here? Why aren't sites taking my history of voting/flagging and running some machine learning on the the contents of the stories associated with that history to try to tease out patterns in what I appear to approve and disapprove of?

For myself personally I wouldn't care if I ever read another article on coffescript or libertarian politics. But if I downvote those things here on HN I am making a judgement on what I think is best for the rest of the community, and who am I to make that choice? Why can't the HN front-page see that I'm logged, look at my voting history, and just remove those stories from my view of the front page? Ta da, automatic subreddits. I think a lot of work could be done in interpreting my actions in voting/downvoting on a much more personal level, rather that looking at them in a democratic fashion.

Of course, the big unanswered question with the above is how do we avoid the echo-chamber effect, and what about that rare story on coffeescript I might actually want to see? But for now, I think the above would be a good first step, with some sort of bail-out possible if I want to "broaden" my perspective. And anyway, aren't we all trying to create an echo-chamber anyway by coming to HN (aka hacker focused stories)? So what could it hurt to make things a bit more personalized for myself?

The personalization, although helpfull to filter out noise, can have some unwanted side-effects, as described on the Beware online "filter bubbles"[1]

Note that there are already tools that provide some personalization for Hacker News[2]

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

[2] https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter

Actually the personalization is a great idea. But you'd have to not just apply filters but develop a complex recommendation system based on what you upvoted/read in the past. I.e. no more global front page for everybody but an individual one for each person.

But doing this requires quite some work (Machine learning etc.)

I would like to simply have the option to permanently hide stories, see a list of hidden stories, the same for marking them as favourites (so people who care about a submission can more easily carry on the discussion for a bit longer than the brief time it's on the front page).. and then be able to collapse comment threads and remember their state (save it in local storage), and the option to sort comments by date, maybe mark new ones since last visit lightly. I.e. I don't want an echo chamber as such, but some tools to not have to wade around things I already saw and don't further care about would be awesome.

or simply have something like sub-reddits.

some sub-reddits are by nature very focused and high noise/signal ratio (/r/netsec is a good example of this), while something like /r/funny will have multiple posts that won't appeal to everyone. Definitely something that can be done better.

So is it filter bubbling when content from People Magazine is kept from entering the pages of The Economist?

I can't comment much on this problem. It seems very interesting and I'd love to dive into the implementation. One place I think you might want to look for a similar problem is Netflix recommendations. Netflix specifically takes your ratings into account to tailor their recommendations for you. Sometimes I'm impressed with what they can come up with. Other times it seems way off base, but I'm constantly exposed to interesting and new things through their recommendations. I'm also very impressed with how quickly they identify categories of things I'm interested in that are surprisingly specific.

The Netflix recommendation system is definitely not solved yet, but they have had competitions to improve it and you could probably get some good ideas about how to use a user's history to predict their future preferences.

There was actually a timely article a little while ago on Wired (http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/qq_netflix-algorithm/) that talked about the Netflix recommendation engine and how it has had to evolve since the days of the Netflix Prize. Interestingly (to me) was that they have actually had to move away from ratings comparisons with the shift to a primarily "on demand" style of viewership. As there is so little personal investment in a choice when viewing streamed content (you can just switch 5 seconds in) people are far less likely to reliably rate material. Instead, they've had to develop algorithms which rely primarily on recent viewing habits (clicks, content seen to completion, left early, time of the day) for their recommendations. Which then sounds very similar to the goal of recommending viewership topics based on prior reading, rating, and participation in threads. However, as was noted above, there's the issue of "genetic diversity" to your viewing pool, so you'd probably want to do something like Pandora and cross-breed your interests with those of similar, but non-identical viewers to suggest topics that might interest you. Giving a profile of how they are balancing you that you could also edit would help further.

Using votes to customize the experience is exactly what reddit was originally set up to do--that was their big founding idea (long before subreddits existed). I used to vote on every single story that made the front page, hoping to train my personal filter.

They abandoned it after a while, though, and it never really worked.

What you say sounds reasonable, but I believe it is wrong.

Sites like Slashdot back in the day, or Hacker News when it started, start with a core of people who were self-selected in a way that really does select for competent people. That is why they become an "in crowd" that others want to become part of.

As more enter, there is a natural tendency for topics to broaden, AND for average quality to drop.

That is not to say that it is only groups of tech people that can be consistently above average quality. It isn't. But the forums that expand out of their original niche and go mainstream do tend to start off as particularly special places.

The personalisation idea sounds a lot (but not exactly) like what Hubski[1] is trying to do. There is still a certain amount of manual work involved in 'following' individuals and exploring tags (a la del.icio.us) but I find the resulting combination of a personal feed with comments on each item from the wider community quite effective. Of course, for a system that accommodates diversity to work, there must be actual diversity within the group. I'm not sure Hubski is big enough to have that yet.

[1] http://hubski.com/about

Another idea is to allow following certain people. It is easy to create PageRank algorithm that would follow the followers and rank the submitted stories. This can be very robust and explainable system compared to other algorithms.

As others have mentioned, recommendation systems end up creating filter bubble which is not a good idea for "news" site. However enabling downvotes at the least would prevent community subgroups hijacking the frontpage.

I'm actually here for the comments more than the stories. More precisely the good comments. Even more precisely, select sentences inside the good comments.

There's a feature in medium.com that I think is good: commenting on selected portions of the text rather than the entire block.

Perhaps we can extend that to voting, i.e. voting on selected chunks of text?

What you're saying is true for Hacker News, at least until now, but have you seen the discussions taking place on YouTube? Every time I end up reading comments on YouTube, I lose a little faith in humanity.

> The policy parts, I don’t feel like I have a say in that. I don’t have a voice there. I know what I want to see happen. But I don’t feel like I have a say or a voice so I choose to be interested in the technology and think about where that’s going to take us next.

It just burns to hear Rob Malda say this. I wince at the thought. I've heard the words before, in the back of my head: solutionism, powerlessness, voter apathy. I have no good ideas to solve this or even reverse it: no way forward, no 'edge'.

I'm starting to think these news sites live and die like phoenixes. Emotional baggage accumulates, pushing "issues" to the surface, clouding understanding. "Thought-provoking" is the kind of post I like to read, but only when it provokes curiosity, not frustration.

I wonder what would happen to the HN userbase if the entire site goes dark for a whole month. I'd come back. I hope the "issues" disappear and we can all start conversing with clear minds once again.

People want too much from this site: startup news, code, politics, self help, tech gossip. This was fine with fewer users because all this could coexist on the front page, but now a lot of quality content just flies under the radar in lieu of linkbait stories. Unfortunately this is the way the internet works.

A lot of Malda's thesis seems subjective; a more interesting statement was just a brief mention at the top of the article:

> Then, after taking a year off, [Malda] joined WaPo Labs, a technology incubator owned by the Washington Post Company, the parent company of the Washington Post. (WaPo Labs is not among the companies being purchased by Jeff Bezos.)

I wonder why that is? I don't want to derail the discussion, but I had assumed (incorrectly) that Bezos was acquiring the full Washington Post collective. It strikes me as odd that he would neglect one of the elements that made WaPo, in my mind, somewhat unique.

I'll try to stay away from speculation, but I can't help but wonder if some of Bezos's other labs might be integrated into WaPo's technology portfolio? Is that possible, when the purchase was unaffiliated with Amazon?

He didn't buy the actual company, only some of the newspapers: the Post itself, and a number of local papers. The Washington Post Co. itself will remain independent, but will have to change its name, and will retain Kaplan, WaPo Labs, Slate, about 10 local TV stations, SocialCode, and some other things.

But what is the point of WaPo Labs without the WaPo? Are they going to rebrand to some sort of general-purpose tech startup or incubator?

Or are they going to keep doing innovation for WaPo, only now on a contractual basis? (Creating recurring revenue for the public company.)

I dug a bit and found that some kind of cross-licensing deal is included: WaPo Labs gets a 5-year content license, in return for 10% of any profits. However it sounds like they're planning to move towards doing more general tech-for-media stuff rather than WaPo-tied stuff.

Source: 2nd-to-last question from http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-the-sale-of-t...

As I understand things, Kaplan was the big money spinner that subsidized the newspapers. It is interesting they kept that part.

It is curious that Bezos didn't also acquire WaPo labs when he released this statement right after the purchase was announced:

> "There will, of course, be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment...I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention." [1]

Based on Malda's statements, it sounds like they are trying to tackle the same problems.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post-pu...

Yeah, upon hearing the news I assumed that WaPo Labs was what Bezos was really after so this is surprising.

Slightly misleading, only a paragraph or two were really about Hacker News in particular. More about why there won't be another "x", of which Hacker News is one iteration.

I'm glad Malda spoke to the issue of volume. A lot of users on Hacker News (with varying levels of prominence, seniority and notability) have noted the issues arising with volume.

The NSA scandal was the most recent example of this. Political discourse on Hacker News is almost cancerous it's so bad. there is widespread misinformation and a quick glance at the "New" page shows that the guidelines are frequently not even regarded for submissions.

I think Malda is on point with his view of Hacker News being at critical mass right now.

Strangely enough, "new version of blahblahblah" is much more interesting to me than anything "tech culture" ever will be.

I think Malda is circling in the wrong waters. He's following and rubbing shoulders with the folks with money and influence, but the interesting stuff is all being done by a bunch of other people who are spending their time actually doing stuff. Frankly, I don't think Robert Scoble has even the slightest fragment of a fucking clue as to what the tech landscape is going to look like in 2023 or who is going to be a big part of it. Just because they have money, a legacy, and a reputation doesn't mean they are relevant. I think that might apply to Malda as well as anyone else.

Anyone who frequented slashdot can see this. What a preposterous idea that there won't be another Slashdot/digg/HN. Its like saying there won't be another printing press.

Personally I like the fact that HN has a lot of verity. I can read it like a newspaper just like I used to do with /. and get exposed to a lot of things I wouldn't know to look for. I can search if I want to focus on something specific. So I don't agree with the premise that there should be another HN.

Two things that I hated about /. was the summery, which usually confusingly buried the link and was generally not helpful. And the fact that you can't vote and comment in the same article, which means that you trend away from having expert comments that are highly rated.

If you are an expert you can write an informative comment, but then you can't help vote up other expert comments, if you only vote your expert opinion goes unheard. HN doesn't have this problem.

I think the reason HN works is mostly simply the name, and not breaking it as above. It captures the idea of "Why" in the golden circle sense.[0] You could easily do this with news sites focused on other general (but engaging) categories, and I think that is already true, we are just more interested in the hacker type of news so may not notice.

[0]: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...

One thing I learned is don’t spend your entire life playing predictive defense against attacks that will never happen. Real people are very clever. If they choose to attack you they’ll attack you in ways you can’t predict.

I wish our government would heed this advice...

I also liked how Rob said that his CMS was an evolved system and not designed. This has been my experience as well, because I can't think of everything and am better suited to incremental design.

I wonder about the idea that Twitter will fill the role of something like Slashdot/HN/&c. At my Peak Twitter, I followed a couple hundred people, but the stream is so full of noise that the work of picking out the signal began to drown out any possible benefit. Retweets, for instance, I see as 99.99% noise. The ads are annoying, but ads are annoying everywhere.

I aggressively mark people as "do not show retweets from this person", and it makes a huge difference for cutting down on the noise.

In the article, Malda is not all that enthusiastic about Twitter being the heir to those sites: "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting... It’s different, chattier, I get more pictures of what people ate. It doesn’t necessarily bring people insight."

But he does seem to believe that the future is something decentralized like Twitter (which is still run by a single company, however).

http://hubski.com is in many ways a mashup between HN and Twitter. I created it from the HN source code. Building feeds built from following people and tags keeps noise down. People are pretty careful about what they share (retweets). I know Rob has an inactive account, so he is vaguely aware of it. He agreed to let me bend his ear about it (I lived nearby him), but left for the WaPo almost immediately after.

One thing about tags which I think is worth a try is to make them up/down-votable. It's one thing to say: "this is interesting" and it's another to say "this is on topic". Current sites based on tags doesn't allow for much user input in the latter area.

I dream of a day when I can customize youtube to not display anything video game related (when searching for highlights from sport events and stuff). Everything tagged as "sport events" and in fact being video game footage would be downvoted to death and users posting this wrongly tagged stuff flagged as spammers so there would be incenvite for them to tag things properly.

Our approach is that the author can choose up to two tags, and the community (excluding newbies) can add a third. The most suggested community tag is the current tag.

If only Twitter weren't so restrictive with their API, there would probably be a solution for Twitter spam by now.

If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.

Someone needs to tell Rob, I created a digest just over three years ago - http://hackernewsletter.com

It kinda sounds like he's suggesting a massive, public, social media platform where the 'good stuff' naturally bubbles up to the top. 'Good stuff', in this case, being what you're interested in and nothing else.

And while that would indeed be awesome, it's also pretty obviously a pipe dream. Maybe some breakthrough with AI would help with that, but until then I don't think we have the technology to do that.

So, for now humans are in control, and as we all know, the public is filled with marketers, trolls, and other forms of bagbiters that tend to ruin such things when they get big enough. Hakuna matata, I guess.

You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.

>You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I'm not marketing anything because I'm not selling anything for money or goods.

In the same article he wonders how there can be eternal growth (the graph up and to the right quote) while limiting the discussion topics to a very small number, but doesn't see the inherent conflict in the demands.

This is a failure to identify audience. A desire for identical "fundamentalist clones". Maybe you just don't get those in a tech audience.

He made it very clear he's not interested in a coffeescript release. Obviously some subculture is... And thats not necessarily a problem.

This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.

"If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot."

I think the Launch Ticker is probably the closest thing to that. They cover much of the same ground as HN. Of course, you don't get the comments, but that could be a positive to some people.

http://launch.co/

>If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.

Ahem: http://www.hackernewsletter.com/

Only problem is the lag in receiving it, if you care a great deal about participating in the comments.

The TL;DR answer seems to be: because there isn't a good way to get the wisdom of the crowds without the crowds (yet).

Really great interview. Its good to know thoughts of Slashdot founder. I think hacker news is perfect the way it is.

For me, the glory days of Slashdot were when I consumed the daily text based email digest.

Any successor will, by necessity, be named something else, so... Yeah, I agree, there can never be another "Hacker News."

He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it.

IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft & SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it unfortunately didn't evolve.

[edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even today it's hard/annoying to use.

I think you can generalize that to just one reason: the crowd became too large.

It grew to the point that most articles were about things that any given reader wasn't deeply informed on. So the deep technical discussions produced far less chatter than the more general-interest/less-technical discussions and faded out of view.

You also saw a bevy of those less-technical people offering their less-technical opinions on technical articles, whenever those things contained some keyword that registered. And, because there were so many more of them, this caused thread quality to suffer.

So politics floated to the top, technical discussions became mired in less-technical opinion and technical folks left.

Reddit isn't much different.

It just attempts to duck the growth problem by enabling splintering into sub-reddits, which in turn splinter, on and on. And instead of "leaving reddit" the way people just stopped reading /., people just leave various sub-reddits.

Which, as far as discussion goes, is effectively the same thing. The old forums becomes noisy, generalized, politicized and hollows out. People leave to find new ones.

People may not be leaving the reddit platform but that's a distinction that really only matters to the people running reddit. (and maybe someone who's really attached to their profile/karma/whatever)

Add the v2 (2006) redesign to the reasons people like me (uid ~100000) left. It simply became terrible to use, terrible to comment on ("slow down, cowboy!"), terrible to moderate.

It is the "retailer with PDF-only catalog" of news sites.

He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it.

What makes you think so? Why would someone convinced of such things say the following:

"Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now." -Rob Malda

(Taken from TFA.)

Read the entire article. In it he praises hackernews then says it needs to filter to top 10 items, as slashdot did. He says twitter is fundamentally broken. He says reddit is too big.

HN just needs a buffer/digest, so you only see posts that spend some time on the front page.

http://eplenum.com/news?days=.1 posts that have been on the front page in the last 2.5 hours

http://eplenum.com/news?days=1 posts that have been on the front page in the last day

....

http://eplenum.com/news?q=slashdot&sort=lastUpdate,desc

I did read that, I agree with him on those points, I think HN is a great success in tech news, and I don't think these views are contradictory.

I talked to Rob at a LinuxWorld several years ago. I got there kind of late and he was answering questions to a medium sized group of socially awkward computer nerds. No one wanted to get on the mic and ask a question for a Slashdot T-Shirt, so, being the extrovert that I am, stepped up to the plate.

I had recently read an interview with Rob online where someone asked him about Digg and Reddit and the popularity of user chosen content. His answers seemed like the question really got under his skin, so I figured I'd fuck with him in public.

I got on the mic and asked him what he thought about the trend of user submitted content. He immediately snapped at me that someone had already asked a similar question and called me a noob. He rambled on about quality vs quantity and all that, my eyes glazed over and I waited to get my free T-Shirt. I still have it! That experience more or less cemented my opinion of 'ol Robbie. Just thought I'd mention this story..

See, but even in your own words, you seem like more of an ass than he does.

You didn't even listen to his answer after he said someone else asked the same question. Hell, your entire goal was to just annoy him. I think he probably figured as much and decided he didn't want to play your game.

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