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Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately it's really hard to get any reasoned discussion about Experts-Exchange on Hacker News. Ideologies are difficult to discuss. I'm reminded of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to access.

Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they know will get positive feedback/karma.

edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.

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> "exposes itself in search results"

'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I blocked EE in my google search results.

Sorry, I didn't intend to play semantic games here. I don't think anyone has disagreed that they gamed search results. I meant only to call out the difference between sites that explicitly don't end up in search results (because they don't want to) versus those that actively try to get indexed.

Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for Experts-Exchange.

You're getting downvoted because your comment is just complaining about hivemind, followed by a typical proof-by-downvotes addendum.

It's not a complaint, it is an observation, I quite like most of the HN hivemind. It was meant to warn the OP who seemed to think his post, being in an agreeable tone, in general, would be well received.

And I don't understand what makes you think annoyance/hatred of EE has to do with HN identity. You seem to have drawn this conclusion based on the fact that most HN users dislike EE. I would posit that most developers and IT workers who used search engines prior to StackOverflow would dislike EE quite a bit. It is not surprising that the sentiment you see on HN would correlate with that.

You are definitely right that this sentiment is strong throughout the tech industry, so it's just by coincidence that it is strong on HN, however, it does define a strong position in voting behavior on HN. Even when there are reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them), downvotes fly and little discussion is had, it creates a feedback loop that reinforces an entrenched ideology and shuns opposing view points. I'm not making a value judgement about one or the other view, but it does affect how interactions on HN take place.

> reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them)

Then what the hell are you talking about? I am yet to see a reasonable argument in support of their business practices. Please link me to one if I missed it - because I don't think it exists.

The only thing I seem to see repeated is "some googley company did what we did but offered it for free and we have kids to feed so let us do shady things to keep our dated business model afloat and don't hate on us over it!"

So true. You get an up vote for me.

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