(Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)
mattmaroon.com
mattmaroon.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690
We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.
So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less.
And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).
With that said, I think there's a difference between quitting HN and unsubscribing from say, a online service. When you unsubscribe from a service there's a clear demarcation. Quitting HN is usually a decision of the form "from now on I won't go to HN", a decision which is very easily reversed. Because it is so easy to reverse one's quitting, it doesn't carry as much weight.
On the other hand, let's say pg stays off HN for a year. Eventually people will ask why he quit HN. If he writes an essay about how he came to quit HN and why (past tense) as a response to that question, it's more likely that he has quit for real, as well as being true reasons for why he actually did quit.
Another example: This is my last cigarette, because smoking is bad for my health vs. I quit smoking 10 years ago when I had kids and realized I wanted to be there for them when they got older. It's true smoking is bad for your health, but that might not be the true reason people actually do quit.
Splitting hairs here, but I consider that more of a "I'll no longer be the moderator of HN" type of quitting, which is not a very reversible decision. I was hinting at the fact that he might also quit as a user, considering his two month post hiatus. (Personally I'm hoping he's just taking a well-deserved vacation from HN, rather than leaving it completely).
Oh, I believe you. Been there, done that. I figured I'd absolutely never be back here.
> Eventually it got better (in some ways anyway) and I started sniffing around again.
I'm really happy that you're back.
1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are
disproportionately represented.
2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement
or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because
many people simply cannot see the difference
between the two.
3. The community is full of ideologues to the point
where the comments are most often just predictable
talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum.
4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch
with how the other half lives.
5. It's a time suck.
6. It removes comments from where they should be,
on the destination site.
7. It reduces blogging time.
Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521
"The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Allow downvotes for submissions.
> 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two.
Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.
> 5. It's a time suck.
Make the site faster, it's really slow.
That doesn't avoid procrastinating. Besides, HN is fast, many linked sites are slow and bloated...
(This leads to paranoia about slow-banning or hell-banning.)
I rarely hit the upvote button because it feels broken to me without a downvote. Maybe a handful of articles a week. Flag maybe once or twice a week. Although I liberally use the upvote buttons in comments.
Does that mean that we better down-vote whenever we see a comment does not add value to the topic?
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon
[EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me, for us.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 [2] First comment back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635
HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here.
Did I mention I like complaining?
Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff, lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.
That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?
In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments
for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only
for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned
and well-stated that I disagree with than just another
guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me
square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably
just about any site with voting.
If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.
It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed.
I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.
I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.
But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent memory, I like people who are willing to blame the people responsible for doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at YC??
How?
It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
If I recall correctly PG told me that at a YC event. Damn you PG! :)
So the trick is:
- Change your email address to something like kjghoyvgljhbvljhvkljhbv@mailinator.com.
- If you get a confirmation message to your old address, delete it.
- Change your password to jkhvouyflkjbv7897t^%REjhvljyyf.
- Go to the mailinator address to confirm the change.
- Clear your browser history.
Then you're free of HN forever! ... Or until you make a new account.
If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!
It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)
Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much improved over the time, in my opinion at least.
But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion straight from youtube.
HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture, particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.
"Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic."
Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract intellectuals.
Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called "intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a lively 24/7 community.
The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side, with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works that way, with it's subreddits.
Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which integrate seamlessly with the core platform.
1. Too much fiddling with things by the mods (eg, changing post titles and the like). I find this to be more harmful than helpful, and I think we'd be better served with a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach.
2. The overall tone of the site has drifted towards a more collectivist / socialist / left'ish-wing worldview... to much anti-business, anti-capitalist sentiment which I don't enjoy.
3. Too much general news that you could get at cnn.com or msnbc.com or whatever. I liked the site better when there was more of a focus on startups, entrepreneurship, and deep technical topics. Of course, that's not to say that we don't still get some of that stuff, but the weighting towards those topics seems to have lessened, and I - for one - don't consider that a Good Thing.
OTOH, HN is still (mostly) better than Slashdot, and the comments here are mostly of a higher quality than most other "news aggregator" type sites. Just not as much better as they used to be, IMO.
At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique, intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything. But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated) debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments here.
I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore (filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here.
Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-killed.
One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened, but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they happened.
I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at different ages and in different circumstances.
I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community.
However, I do find the international discussions here particularly enlightening.
One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the *HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy).
If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be informative in some way.
Agreed. The Show:HN posts are some of the best and most important posts of all, but they disappear so quickly now... it really is sad.
I'm okay with that. It used to let me know a bit more about what was going on in the tech space by giving me a direct to source link and some background about the product.
The ability to expose your new thing to a knowledgeable and diverse crowd like this, and get quality feedback on your project, is (or was) a big draw to posting stuff here. But now the "Show HN" posts disappear off the front/new pages so fast, they tend to generate very little actual discussion, more often than not.
I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer.
That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about HN before my blog ended up on the front page).
In 2007 I created The Social Alarm Clock (was my 1st idea on the web) and asked for feedback here. This Matt guy, hated the concept and said so in my Ask HN posted in 2007. Yet it didnt end there, he continued his hate for it in many HN posts throughout the years and even blogged about in 2011 or 2012.
HA, it had an impact on him.
Well, we have moved onto to our second idea and unfortunately I don't think http://SpeakerBlast.com (Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo) is going to have the same effect on Matt. Though maybe...
Cheers, Matt, Cheers!
1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU upgrade.
2. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise. A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted, then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control.
3. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is organic rather than the effect of a social media team.
In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers.
4. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true.
5. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't changed.
6. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck. A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator. The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high quality comments.
7. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing essays though. That's really what good blog posts are.
HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.
They developed an open source mobile operating system, yet get pummelled for adding a few proprietary bits in ways that MS and Apple, who develop completely closed systems, never are.
Whenever they make changes that are obviously beneficial for regular users (featuring the most likely result on top of SERP, sorting e-mail into categories, purging web spam), there's a torrent of articles usually critical of the change. And it would be completely understandable if those were power users who genuinely lose out on many of those changes but no. Those are completely unsubstantiated accusations about trying to boost their bottom line.
Microsoft bashing on the other hand is not some conspiracy against SV outsiders but rather a legacy of their fight against open source, including providing funds to SCO.
With the historical SCO's asset sale came the asset of contractual relationships with Microsoft. In various lawsuits, Microsoft's actions are dictated by those contracts and the exposure various alternative courses would create.
Bashing Microsoft was the cornerstone of a long running multi-billion dollar ad campaign of a popular investor backed Silicon Valley based company. None of it was related to Open Source or SCO. The chief commercial proponent of Open Source was another investor backed Silicon Valley company now owned by Oracle. The company which drove the anti-trust case against Microsoft was an investor backed Silicon Valley company - sold to the tune of $10 billion to a company which mass mailed low quality drink coasters at the turn of the millennium. One of the thereby enriched founders is a leading Silicon Valley VC [a model SVVC so to speak].
Organic MicroSoft bashing looks like Richard Stallman. Done on principle, Google and Apple don't get to buy indulgences.
On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable score. Perhaps by splitting these into two distinct parts would allow to improve accuracy in scoring. Represent up/down vote with some clear graphics, so as to give that feeling of accomplishment when you press the big red downvote button and hopefully you won't feel the need to seek some smaller "not valuable" link below.
As personally disinterested in the subject as I am, the current situation is much better, and the number of articles is unusual these days but justified because of the scale of Apple's announcements. While HN exposure is as usual disproportionate to actual relevance within computing, the Apple news is actually big Apple news.
As for comment scores, there's no such thing as accuracy independent of the actual score. Life's not fair and neither is internet commenting. Upvotes and downvotes are multivalent except in so far as they express a user's inclination to upvote or downvote or not vote. We are talking about 'Internet Points' for fuck's sake.
There was definitely an almost pseudo-religious "newly converted" component to it.
These days if I see Gruber on the front page it's usually because of something genuinely interesting.
But for a couple solid years there, you couldn't say anything that might even be assumed to be critical of an Apple product without getting downvoted. I really wanted a place of smart people who could celebrate Apple's achievements and criticize their failures without descending into religious flamewars, and HN simply wasn't providing this.
It's definitely better now.
The bigger picture is that HN [and YC] have come off the Apple App Store bubble. Mobile apps are now seen as multi-platform programs, and the center of gravity has clearly moved toward open source tool chains and back toward the core idea of Web based software.
That's certainly what was going on yesterday. Microsoft had even more stories on the front page when they held their big to-do a month or so ago. It's a side-effect of the major tech companies stockpiling their big announcements for annual conference days.
I will still occasionally read this site, but will never comment and do anything about it. The silent-downvote is not friendly at all, especially to who that does not know the "rules" well. how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it.
Just give me a way to cleanly close my account.
Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they realistically reflect?
The end result is an ever increasing alignment of 'group-think' where popular opinions are boosted and differing opinions are hidden.
Up/down voters just need to take a second and consider what they're voting for. If it's just because they agree, then don't. If they agree and they've learned something new, then do. If they disagree and but they think the arguments are well presented or they've learned something new, upvote.
Down voting should be reserved only for inappropriate comments, not disagreement.
But back to my main point: When everything is majority rules, with no checks and balances, society collapses into mob rule. Why would it be any different with upvote/downvote?
We're not going to solve this by asking users to think before they click downvote. We should consider removing the upvote/downvote altogether.
Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in software, or visiting with loved ones.
So I thought about quitting too, but there are still enough gems hidden beneath the avalanche of Haskell vs Lisp vs Erlang threads that keep me wanting to come back.
Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN
* Domains popping in when your mouse scrolls over something is annoying. Really annoying. My mouse is not my eyes - just because my eyes are on something does not mean my mouse is, and vice versa. And the popin ends up being movement, which is distracting. The same issue I have with the DDG redesign.
* Said domains popping in do not have a fallback without JS.
* Random icons (and in an icon font, none the less, which again, does not exactly fallback gracefully without JS). I much prefer "1 hour ago" than an icon of a clock. (And said icon of a clock doesn't even change given how old an article is! You have to mouse over it for that. And again, see above for things only showing on mouseover.)
* No way (that I can see) to sort/filter. For example, only seeing articles that were heavily penalized on HN.
* Bug: if you mouseover the photo icon to open the image, and put your mouse over the image and out of that submission, the domain never goes away.
* The feedback links... Don't actually allow you to submit feedback. And "I don't believe you" for negative feedback is condescending.
* Popover on first visit is extremely annoying, to the point where I won't visit it again until it is removed. (My browser clears most things on exit, so I'm assuming that it will pop up every time I restart my browser)
I agree with you on all points. I laughed when you said Ron Burgundy was condescending - I had not considered that. But again you are probably right.
The pop-over you mentioned at the end only appears if its hard coded into the link. I did this to the link as I believe new users will rather have more rather than less information on their first visit.
I will continue working on improving the site.
Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about.
</braindump >
at 3 or 5 downvotes, there is a signal the comment is low value.
I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hostsSometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them than without them.
In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see.
I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.
Hi all,
I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error:
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link, wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my account status is available for submitting. This way I will not submit stories in vain
Thanks,and got no answer.
is the answer. That message appears when you're hogging the new page with your submissions, which means you're pushing other submissions out.
This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN:
1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here.
2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.
1. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around for any period.
2. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page. Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.