11–20 of 35 posts
The "eggshells" comment is, I think, indicative. HN used to be a place where you could read a post from a position that you disagreed with, and still learn something. Posts had more thought and more interesting points. Users had more tolerance for those who disagreed with them. Those who disagreed had more thoughtful reasons for why they disagreed - it wasn't just "is not". You can't fix that by changing the code. Th…
I would like to see the statistics of how many 'downvotes' are used on a daily basis in 2024 compared with previous years, as I have a suspicion that it is just being used at the detriment of good conversation (heated or otherwise). And if this is the case, just remove the feature if it no longer works like it used to.
Edit: There we go with people downvoting. Couple more and you can hide away my opinion (which has no place on HN, evidently).
Giving a down vote costs you 2 (or more?) of your own votes. As the very least, down votes should require a comment. Even "false", "not true" or "disagree" would help. My sense is, there's a network of HN users who attempt to manipulate the exposure of ideas by downvoting them (to the point those comments aren't even exposed). Don't get me wrong, there are comments that deserve DV'ing. Moi? I can't be bothered. I jus…
The "eggshells" comment is, I think, indicative. HN used to be a place where you could read a post from a position that you disagreed with, and still learn something. Posts had more thought and more interesting points. Users had more tolerance for those who disagreed with them. Those who disagreed had more thoughtful reasons for why they disagreed - it wasn't just "is not". You can't fix that by changing the code. Th…
What do you see as wrong with society and how would you fix it?
I am very aware that this submission is likely to be ‘disappeared’ in minutes. HN submissions are almost never 'disappeared' so that awareness is probably misplaced. The question itself, in various forms, pops up quite frequently - here's one thread from a few months ago and you can find piles more with the search interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38698710
You are wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt it but maybe you can tell me more about the wrongness.
Try logging in as a new account with less than 15K of karma and speak passionately about topics which mean something substantial. It's a different HN world view.
But maybe you can find some links to examples of the bad things you're describing? There's people commenting on all sorts of topics all the time and the overwhelming majority of their comments appear to be doing fine.
It's a very different HN now. HN is now a major tech news site with a large userbase and a large lurker population. That's very different to the medium sized, highly engaged userbase of before.
It's nothing you can change. Spaces with large userbases work and feel differently than spaces with smaller userbases. Discord, Bluesky, and Xitter in that order are where I spend my time more these days. On Discord nobody is going to try to dunk on me because they're jaded or angry or whatever, Bluesky has rich enough moderation that I can ignore the haters, and Xitter gives me the breadth that neither Discord nor Bluesky can. HN is a minority of my time. I just treat it as the "angry tech people site."
If I had to change one thing about HN, architecturally (since trying to change the culture is a fool's errand) it would be better curation. This would go against one of the design goals of HN, having a "non-fragmented" community where everyone sees the same site and the same content. But I would argue that the community is already fragmented. The size and diversity of the userbase is such that people already experience completely different versions of Hacker News depending on when they arrive and what they follow.
Being able to whitelist or blacklist accounts, domains, keywords, etc and curate one's account would improve the subjective quality of the forum across the board. People who want Hacker News to only be strictly technical and startup content can have that. People who want rough-and-tumble politics and debate can have that. And never the twain should meet.
I really do think there is an interesting design space between Twitter and traditional threaded forums that might make for an interesting experience.
And if I had to change a second thing about HN it would be getting rid of voting/karma, because it clearly isn't serving its intended purpose.
HN is having a major influx of users. If you're curious look at https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/overview . It would be strange if it weren't changing into a different place! There's many more lurkers here and that's going to change the dynamic significantly. I suspect a lot of the lowering civility you perceive is coming from a larger userbase that sees less kinship in the other and sees this place more like a…
I looked at a related metric recently - unique users/N comments (i.e. how many unique users per, say, 100k consecutive comments). This number hasn't changed at all for many years.