Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Pedantry, nitpicking, and pedantry are a step up from pure fluffiness. The question is how we can go the next step.

I find a lot of HN commenters try to put words into one's mouth. They even seem to feel they are being clever, and they are indeed imitating the outward forms of clever commenting. Maybe that's as far as we can expect human society to go.

View on HN

There is no next step. HN occassionally has some good commentary but ultimately it's hampered by the fundamental design of the place. It's not a place where extended, drawn out conversation can occur over a long period of time. A popular conversation topic results in unwieldy threads that hamper continuation of topics. And because of the way topics decay it's rare for a subject to be discussed outside of a 24hr or 48hr window, give or take.

HN compares unfavorably to an older medium: usenet, where read messages wouldn't clutter up threads and where it was easy to continue discussions for indefinite periods (even months) and to return to previous topics or split off side discussions. As long as HN stays the way it is it'll always be hampered by limitations which ultimately cap the quality of discussion.

It's kind of amazing that no forum or other communications system developed in the past 20 years has been as good as USENET (either in the late 1980s, or with a good client with killfiles, global cancels, etc.).

Well, that just concentrates on the good parts of USENET. The spammers had a field day with it and pretty much destroyed it. Maybe there is an opportunity here in the form of something halfway between a moderated forum and USENET.

You could piggyback this onto bitcoin, make a client that listens to specific messages to identify channels embedded in the blockchain? Every message would have to be a payment to a specific address to get a message onto the channel, the moderator(s) of the channel would be the recipient(s) of the bitcoins in reward for moderating the channel.

If a moderator decided to 'kill' a post they'd have to make another message to the same channel so for them (minus transaction costs) it would be a '0' affair.

Before the green card lottery , I don't remember any commercial spam; the worst thing was stupid cross posts (easy to kill) and specific moron posters (kill files). The biggest problem I had was a lot of content which didn't make sense to me (cfps and such) since I wasn't even a teenager, but which came from good posters.

But the green card lottery was shortly after commercial speech was allowed on the Internet, and everything went downhill after that. Even the WWW feels sub-optimal if you want to find information.

So much agree. Another big design flaw hampering good conversation: I'd like to read replies to your comment, but HN funnels me to reading only 1 reply, and then onto 1 reply for that comment, each one hijacking the conversation. And we can't collapse threads which makes it even worse.

This doesn't address the larger community issue, but if you use chrome check out:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Hacker%20News%20Co...

I use the first one and it makes HN much more readable.

https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues

The karma system (and the ratio) also discourages conversation. You cannot expect too many upvotes in a subthread.

Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.

I used to work in a bicylce shop as a kid. In the workshop over the bench hung a sign that read "if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here". It was rude but quite effective. The next level up (for those that didn't get the hint) was that the guy running the shop would pretend to 'oil the spokes' (as if that was ever needed) causing several people to hastily depart the workshop area because they were being splashed with lube oil. He would pretend to see a lot less well and shake a lot more than he usually did during these episodes. Super nice guy by the way, long since deceased.

One problem with internet websites is that it is not clearly separated into work or leisure, which leads to people in leisure mode disrupting other people's work mode.

This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.

> This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.

It's not even a continuum; it depends heavily on cultural notions of how life is divided, or should be divided. The home/work/third place trichotomy isn't universal in the first place, and people on the internet have exhibited plenty of evidence that they consider it every combination of the three.

How does that apply here though --- surely everyone browsing HN is doing it for leisure?

My browsing of HN is leisure about 70% of the time. At other times, I do various kinds of work (in that I am making a concerted effort to create value, rather than intending to enjoy myself) and very occasionally do "home" type things (senses of belonging, kinship, shared struggle, etc.).

By creating value, do you mean that the comments you write are themselves valuable, or do you mean things like driving traffic to/recruiting for your company?

People that post Show HN links are not here for leisure. They want feedback, new users, critique etc. There are many more examples I'm sure.

Surely not.

> Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.

There is a purpose besides leisure, selling to the leisure group or building technologies to improve the internet's effectiveness for selling to the leisure group?

Looking at pictures of cats, pornography and buying trinkets are all clearly leisure activities.. but commenting on vaporous articles about living underwater is something I expect to get academic credit for according to the social norms established by scholastic reports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com