Ask HN: Why do people like HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do people like HN?

10 pointsamenghra12 comments

HN is one of the largest tech news sites for english speaking engineers. I visit this site daily and people who have gotten a post to the top know how much traffic & visibility that implies.

I however feel the site's poor design (especially in terms of mobile browser support) is an anachronism. The site also lacks a few features that many people seem to have asked for a long time, things like being able to follow or message each other. And yet, people are totally happy with HN and return to this site!

Another thing which baffles me is that most of us here love & embrace open source ideologies and yet we have no visibility in the karma system and it seems we are fine with the status quo.

What is your take on these questions?

View on HN

At the end of the day, for me, it comes down to the content when considering why I visit the site. HN constantly has interesting, engaging content, and for the most part, insightful discussions. Although, it can get pretty pedantic at times. Where else can one go for this? Reddit involves sifting through multiple subreddits to get the type of content that's on here, which can be tiresome.

Regarding the interface, I love the site's design. No matter what kind of connection I'm on I can browse HN, read comments, etc without the usual modern web clutter. In my opinion, there's no need for a messaging system either (just another site to check over and over) - just have your email in your bio. Easy.

Couldn't agree with you more. I find that I learn a great deal from reading through the discussions. I think most members in HN prefer to be pseudo-anonymous which explains the lack of features like following each other, chat, and other social features.

When Reddit started it was a lot like the current HN--in the pre-subreddit days. Then /r/programming was great for a while, prior to digg throwing in the towel.

HN has a good signal-to-noise ratio compared to similar sites.

HN is a great example if you want to make stuff people use:

focus on the problem you're fixing, and the rest is optional.

the latest tech stack won't get you engaged users. neither will a shiny interface, more features etc

what is hn fixing? noise in news

how is it doing that?

1. good guidelines that were enforced from the start created a culture focused on quality ("this is not reddit")

2. that lead to more and more great people joining and contributing to the discussions, people you wouldn't hear from otherwise

this is why many people just skim the links shared in the forum and focus on the comments

For me personally, I've lurked here for 6 years or so. The main reason is there's a community intersection here of techies and entrepreneurs that I can't find anywhere else. And when I say techies, I mean hardcore techies who like building stuff and are good at it. Reddit ends up being quite juvenile and the signal to noise is typically low.

Don't get me wrong on Reddit. I'm a member and love reading it. But there's times I want serious and times I want jokey.

So, the killer reason people are here are because of the other people that are here. Which is the reason you can't just replicate this by building a clone with better software.

Often times I find the comments about articles here more illuminating than the articles themselves and that speaks to the quality of visitors.

A nice and intelligent community, above all else. I don't care too much about the lack of features; I like the sheer minimalism of it so that it loads very quickly instead of the text being dwarfed by the volume of markup/js/css/whatnot.

I think the quality / substance of the content here, both the links shared and the discussions, essentially makes the issues with design or features nearly irrelevant. There's nothing else out there like HN.

It's the same reason Craigslist continues to do what it does, despite it hardly changing a decade after people were already shocked it was still doing so well.

Reddit is also in the same boat. It's all about the content.

When using HN on desktop, I regularly get annoyed trying to aim and upvote, making sure I don't accidentally downvote. I never use HN on mobile because it's so terrible (there are of course mobile shells for HN out there). Ultimately I end up not caring all that much about the negatives, they minimally detract.

It's the only place on the internet I've been to which you're able to have an intelligent discussion.

I also am not fond of the lack of a mobile layout.

There are a lot of great HN mobile apps for practically all major mobile platforms. Shame they all seem to lack actual interaction features though (submitting links, posting comments), probably a limitation of the API.

The design being an anachronism is irrelevant, its rendering on post-Retina mobile browsers is fine, not being able to conveniently post from a mobile browser is a good thing, being able to follow each other would be stupid. A messaging feature would be stupid too, because if you're unwilling to email somebody you shouldn't be messaging them, and it's another inbox to check. There would also be spam problems and the people running the site would bear the big responsibility of keeping people's private messages private.

I can't see how you could honestly be baffled by the idea that a ranking system on a highly visible website might have all its spam-detection and manipulation-prevention details kept secret. Would Square publicly release its fraud detection algorithms?

Because you always learn something from the comments.

I don't use mobile browsers a whole lot because I quite commonly find mobile websites work poorly. The only thing I actually enjoy about any of the gadgets I own is the music player on my ipad. That's It.

Among the reasons I enjoy HN is that the pages load quickly over my mom's dialup. Mom doesn't get broadband because she doesn't need broadband just to email our family and her friends.

I particularly enjoy the linked articles because I learn so much by reading them however my hard experience is that devoting myself to learning all that stuff means I get nothing else done.

I greatly enjoy the discussions here; they are commonly better than anywhere else. Like the way slashdot was in 1999, or Usenet in 1989.

My most serious gripe is that HN often tells me I'm posting too fast, then I have to wait hours to post a reply.

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