Why I stopped reading HN (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#41

Post by kstenerud » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

Splizard wrote: post #38

kstenerud wrote: post #33

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 af…

What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?

The ability to keep track of more than 100 social connections in our head would probably solve the lions share of problems, as that's normally how we keep things civil. So far our only method of dealing with more than that many people has been bureaucracy and rule sets. Bureaucracy crushes and alienates, and rules are cheated.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#42

Post by M4v3R » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

Splizard wrote: post #38

kstenerud wrote: post #33

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 af…

What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?

I believe we would need more empathy, realising that our own voice is not more important that others, trying to understand their position instead of trying to debunk it at all costs, basically less trying to "win the discussion" every time. At least for me this is something that I find lacking nowadays in internet discussions.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#43

Post by harryf » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #33

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 af…

> the initial population has been crowded out

I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming.

One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more"

My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#44

Post by rane » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

RubenvanE wrote: post #32

These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy ( https://hackerdaily.io ). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits: 1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute. 2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not. It also uses an outline.com like style…

The second point is great one. Occasionally I have to stop reading HN and leave the tab open for a day because I want to read the conversation in full instead of rereading again later trying to figure out which comments are new.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#45

Post by reader_mode » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #33

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 af…

Also even though forums are anonymous if you spend enough time somewhere and the community is small you end up getting to know the people and that has a value in itself - I miss that about early Internet forums - unfortunately this doesn't scale at all.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#46

Post by benjaminjosephw » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

I think it's pretty clear that increasing scale is the driver for the degradation of thoughtful connections between users.

The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context?

In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users.

I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example).

Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#47

Post by RubenvanE » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

atorodius wrote: post #40

RubenvanE wrote: post #32

These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy ( https://hackerdaily.io ). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits: 1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute. 2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not. It also uses an outline.com like style…

Nice layout and idea. What do you mean "all posts per day"? Seems it shows a selection?

It takes all posts that were posted on a certain day (based on your local timezone) and shows these posts ordered by their score. To keep it clean only posts with a score of 50 or higher are shown. (I might change this number though, if people would like to see less popular posts)

E.g. the main page is always 'yesterday', so for me it shows the posts that were posted between 00:00 and 23:59 on Wednesday, but if its already Friday where you are it will show the top posts of Thursday.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#48

Post by Ma8ee » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

foldr wrote: post #8

Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have…

I actually agree, and have thought so for a long time, that the discussion about abortion is very much about the meaning of the term life.

One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about.

So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#49

Post by Ma8ee » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

30f0fn wrote: post #22

foldr wrote: post #8

Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have…

Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting…

What happened in 1951?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#50

Post by teekert » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

After this I already zoned out:

"Every community deteriorates over time. Every community gets new members who don’t understand the rules (or the rules just change), and things just deteriorate."

People change, communities change, they grow apart. To call it deterioration is blatant narcissism and failure to look at the situation objectively without judgement.