Hah, not a word about subprime mortgages
The web, on this day 10 years ago
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#62Haha, the HN post about Facebook has a very interesting comment which mentions the internet "a decade from now": > It is just a joke that Facebook could be valued at $6 billion. An absolute joke. > FB has 30 million users, and that's not considering potential duplicates. > The number of active users may be even smaller than that, and some people like I only log on once a week or so. > If FB gets sold for $6 billion,…
Original article (with interesting comments) https://web.archive.org/web/20070715031943/http://battelleme...
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#63Nice to see HN keeping up with the times. No redesigns in how long now? The fonts on this site are hilariously small. Padding is tiny. All the feel of the 1990s, today! Still good content, but come on -- do we not have a designer or artistic front-end who can help out?
I think the anti-modern layout has become too much of a cultural shibboleth at this point, people cherish any feature they feel will drive away casual users and preserve the intellectual purity of the community. PG once mentioned that he wasn't concerned with such trivial things, which makes updating the design difficult without sparking a minor revolt among the userbase, especially if such an update causes the site to look or feel more like Reddit, which it likely would.
Plus, bear in mind that HN doesn't separate its logic from layout in templates, unless it deviates wildly from the original Arc forum code, so redesigning the layout around, say, lists as opposed to tables may be more complicated than it would be on another site.
But on the plus side, since i've been here at least, the expired links bug has been fixed, shadowbanning is community-reversible, Show HN is a thing, users can hide and favorite threads, and there's thread folding. Those are all definite improvements to the user experience.
I agree with you that the text could be more readable - a site meant for intellectual and technical discussion should be encouraging long-form comments, not discouraging it (as it does by fading the text for non-link post) but it does seem that the staff have been improving what they can, when they can get around to it.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you already introducing politics into this discussion?
> introducing politics Any discussion about company valuations is as political as a discussion about US elections. Pretending that "business" and "politics" and "technology" are separated by clearly discernible walls is itself toxic to discussions about any of them.
That may or may not be the case (I would dispute it) but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic. From what I have seen, banning accounts seems to be a last resort for people who post almost exclusively political attacks; one has to be fairly intent on making oneself unpleasant to raise attention. I tend to agree with you that there can be value to political debate, but we must abide by the rules of the forum.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#65This open up a flood of nostalgia for anyone else? Apple, Youtube, and Amazon especially. All sorts of feels.
Yes, I really miss the old YouTube look.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#66Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#67One pattern I notice and dislike is the increase of average font size on the web (and in OSes), and the overall decrease in density of information. BBC 10 years ago vs now side by side shows the difference [1]. [1] http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/1k6i3cajkox2c.png
Don't forget that screen resolutions were lower on average back then, which means that the side-by-side comparison doesn't really account for relative scale.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> introducing politics Any discussion about company valuations is as political as a discussion about US elections. Pretending that "business" and "politics" and "technology" are separated by clearly discernible walls is itself toxic to discussions about any of them.
That may or may not be the case (I would dispute it) but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic. From what I have seen, banning accounts seems to be a last resort for people who post almost exclusively political attacks; one has to be fairly intent on making oneself unpleasant to raise attention. I tend to agree with you that there can be value to political debate, but we must abide by the…
> but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic
This is absolutely untrue. How many times (and how many ways) does dang have to clarify this? Here's the guideline in question:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I'm prepared to argue that a comparison of the aging process of HN comments to tweets from a current US President about a former one is an interesting and novel set of phenomena. And even if it weren't, I think that it's well outside the kinds of stories that are identified by the guideline as off-topic.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> introducing politics Any discussion about company valuations is as political as a discussion about US elections. Pretending that "business" and "politics" and "technology" are separated by clearly discernible walls is itself toxic to discussions about any of them.
But politics are hardly relevant here. Somebody was pointing out interesting comments about Facebook and now I'm reading about Trump? It's low-quality material and has nothing to do with the discussion.
I can understand your reaction, but I will say that it provoked an interesting thought in me. I think that the matter of how well material ages is an interesting and difficult-to-predict metric, and that it is quite interesting that we are now measuring this metric using the unit of tweets from one head-of-state about a former one.
Re: The web, on this day 10 years ago
#70The web, on this day 10 years ago was better.