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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

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Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#61

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#62

Post by foldr »

Ma8ee wrote: post #48
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…

You're then talking about 'meaning' in a deeper sense than just the arbitrary definitions of words, so it's no longer a purely semantic dispute. (Note that the author characterizes semantic disputes as disputes over arbitrary definitions.)

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#63

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

This place is one of the most urbane communities in which I’ve participated. It can still get bit “catty,” but nothing that even comes close to what I’ve experienced (and contributed to -mea culpa) in the past.

Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter.

In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.”

I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive.

I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past.

I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#64

Post by okamiueru »

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…

I like the idea, but I'm wondering about the legality of copying the contents of news.ycombinator. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#65

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

kstenerud wrote: post #41
Splizard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I usually take a REST-like approach when dealing with people on the internet. With most people I just don't keep track of who they are beyond the end of the conversation because it's a waste of time. If we get to discuss again, I will judge that new discussion on its own merit.

Interestingly, this way of thinking has lead me to stop reading user names a lot of the time.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#66

Post by mytailorisrich »

cinntaile wrote: post #17
tom_mellior wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

From what I have seen downvotes get used a lot here on posts that users disagree with, which seems like an unfortunate side-effect. You'd want to reserve them for rude posts or other posts that aren't helpful to a discussion.

Yes, my personal conclusion is that downvotes are not useful and the functionality is usually best removed.

All the more so when they are used to, in effect, remove comments by making downvoted comments more difficult to read.

Now, I can understand the idea of making it easier to navigate through many comments by crowd-sourcing a metric of each comment's 'value', but in practice this is extremely difficult to do while preserving the diversity of views. It usually ends up being the "tyranny of the majority".

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#67

Post by DharmaPolice »

JohnBooty wrote: post #31
tom_mellior wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

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 Funn…

>For example, it would have been perhaps useful to filter out all of the "Funny" replies on Slashdot

The interface did indeed allow you to do this. At least, I remember it being there in about 2001.

Additionally, the metadata on voting was particularly important for meta-moderation which other platforms don't really have. Users were (at random) shown a comment that you've voted on and your vote. They then said whether your vote was fair or not, based on what they see.

Stepping back a bit - the most important difference between the Slashdot system (vs something like Reddit) was that votes were much more limited on Slashdot. Not everyone had modpoints (votes) and you only got a handful at a time. This allowed meta-moderation to actually have some impact - if you continuously abused modpoints by downvoting someone as troll just because you disagreed with them then you wouldn't get banned - just you'd get less votes in the future. The system was a little opaque and I've not used the site in years but that was my understanding back then, it may have changed since then.

While it's a bit complex I think the fundamental idea is very good. Ok making a distinction between informative vs insightful never seemed that useful to me, but certainly allowing people to hide "Funny" content definitely has value because funny one liners tend to crowd out other content by sheer volume.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#68

Post by coldtea »

harryf wrote: post #43
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 feeli…

Hackernews was never about hackers, it was about startup tech founder types (that maybe or maybe not considered themselves as hackers).

A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs.

Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#70

Post by benjaminjosephw »

elorant wrote: post #58
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #46

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…

On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we m…

Absolutely, diversity is incredibly important when we're talking about different kinds of "intellectually curious" people. When diversity means letting in the trolls, the marketers and those less inclined to input constructively, that's when conversations start to degrade and loose value. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to encourage first type of diversity without becoming vulnerable to the second.
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