Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

I read Slashdot nearly every day for quite a few years, stepping away at some point in the 2000s.

That particular aspect of the moderation system sounds good on paper, but was rather useless in practice.

Essentially, what "matters" is that people are upvoting or downvoting a particular post. Theoretically, it's good to have a bit of additional metadata telling us why they're doing it: i.e., do they find the post Funny, Insightful, or Informative?

In practicality, it's not that useful, or at least it wasn't put to any practical use by Slashdot when I stopped reading it back in the 2000's. At a moment's glance, it's pretty trivial to see why people might've upvoted a particular post - it's clearly meant to be funny, or it has a lot of informative links, etc. So the metadata of "why" was just redundant.

On the other hand, I suppose the metadata could have been put to some practical use after all. For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" [1] and "Insightful" [2] replies on Slashdot and to focus on the most "Informative" [3] ones. I don't remember the interface allowing you to do that. Perhaps they added it later, or perhaps it's something you might explore in your own system.

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[1] I mean, one can only read so many "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THOSE!" jokes before one wants to jump off of a bridge.

[2] In my experience, 99% of the "Insightful" comments were just those that forcefully/eloquently regurgitated FOSS talking points that resonated well with established Slashdot groupthink. "Insightful" upvotes tended to mean "I agree with the author of this comment" and not "wow, actual new insights are presented here." Perhaps this might have been avoided if there was a separate "I agree with this" upvote method, distinct from "Insightful."

[3] It was easy to farm for karma this way; if you stumbled upon a recent Slashdot article without many replies, you could throw a few easily-Googled relevant links into a reply and be assured of getting a bunch of "Informative" votes. Nonetheless, while imperfect, the replies deemed "Informative" had a decent signal-to-noise ratio relative to the rest of the replies.

All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out.

People come to these places for various reasons:

- To debate

- To learn

- To engage intellectually with other people

- To be heard/validated

- To gain social standing

The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore.

As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).

I think this has the potential for going down an infinite rat-hole, but I always think it would be interesting if downvotes required justification (e.g. a "why?" popup that included stuff like "rules violation", "trolling", "this is wrong", etc) and then other people were allowed to evaluate specific downvote reasons for whether or not they seemed reasonable. You could then weight downvotes based on how legit the reasoning of the downvoter is (does everyone think you're full of shit when you say it's trolling?) and also based on whether you tend to downvote for reasons that are not actually worthy of a downvote (you just disagree with the post).

Wow, that was a blast from the past. 122 comments in 2010, seems that the one thing HN has always liked is meta-commentary about HN :)