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Except you can follow all sorts of experts and famous people om there. Not all of them are twits. Even Paul Graham drops the occasional tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg
That's dependent on your interests though. In my field people are too busy writing manuscripts to write a tweet.
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I was wrong about the name. It's "the angry orange website". https://twitter.com/search?q="angry%20orange%20website" - that's just a sample of HN's 'haters'. HN has its share of people who are awful and post horrible opinions (see the discussion about any article on JavaScript, health care, wealth, etc). I believe HN has some value left which is why I still post here, but I can absolutely see why people have abandone…
I wonder why they call it that. After all you get banned here if you post right-wing opinions. It's practically a safe space for them.
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Honest question: which people? HN is too US/California/Bay Area centric for my tastes (most people here are probably from there), it talks a bit too much about money and jobs, but it's still a decent resource.
I was wrong about the name. It's "the angry orange website". https://twitter.com/search?q="angry%20orange%20website" - that's just a sample of HN's 'haters'. HN has its share of people who are awful and post horrible opinions (see the discussion about any article on JavaScript, health care, wealth, etc). I believe HN has some value left which is why I still post here, but I can absolutely see why people have abandone…
These are all consequences of HN's fundamental structure. It's a public, optionally-anonymous forum, so we can't control what gets posted. All we or the community can do is react after it has been posted. That takes time. Even if we ban someone, they can just create a new account in 30 seconds, and plenty do.
Most importantly, HN doesn't have silos, where users follow what they like and block what they dislike. Rather, everybody sees the same material. That means every one of us is more likely to notice stuff that we dislike. This leads to negative impressions, often painfully strong ones. The odd thing is, fundamentally, a non-siloed site is arguably objectively healthier: at least we are all in the same room. But it doesn't feel that way. It can be extremely painful to be in the same room with people saying horrible things one doesn't normally come near. In fact, I wonder whether for some users there may actually be no place other than HN where that regularly happens. Inevitably, the negative impressions get attached to HN itself, since none of these dynamics are at all obvious. That explains why people have such contradictory views of HN—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927454 in this very thread. They are drawing conclusions from different sets of painful impressions.
I'd love to find new ways to mitigate these downsides. We've worked on that for years already, yet I feel like the most we've managed to do is scratch a couple of crude gouges into a boulder. But let's remember that HN's structure has upside consequences too. There's no barrier to entry, so literally anyone can jump in. Wonderful things come from that. The absence of silos means people are talking and relating to people they would not otherwise come into contact with. These are precious things which are easy to forget amid the pressure we all feel. The upsides and downsides come from the same root: deep tradeoffs in the original choices of how to set up a place like this. As it grows and as the energy becomes more intense, the tradeoffs show up in ways that are increasingly difficult to bridge.
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Yeah, on the other hand Twitter is all roses, and those people always side with public figures and companies, lol. Maybe those guys would like HN better if they could use avatars so they could show off their black lipstick and half-shaved heads.
This is exactly the sort of unreasonable and irrational angry generalization that makes people call HN "the angry orange website".
Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way. More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.
It's not just that. Timelines are generally unavoidably toxic. It's not going to stop people from retweeting things and then shouting about it, or writing condescending, smug threads starting with "We need to talk about ...".
I used blame twitter for creating at outrage culture. But then I realized I had it backwards. There have always been people who find it fun to vent outrage, moral indignity, and condescension. They just got it from TV blowhards before.
> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them. I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design fo…
Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuf…
I built a Twitter client just for that, because I find Twitter threads hard to read (https://threader.app).
It turns threads into a single page so it’s easier to read, like an article. We are also working on a way to compile conversations with multiple users: https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88S...