171–180 of 302 posts
To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how parti…
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It's interesting for me, because I didn't realize at the time that the things that bother me now were present then. The author seems to be more sensitive than me like ten years more.
No doubt that some people consider it interesting. I personally would have appreciated a brief specific list of recommendations of the author of the post on what to improve. Maybe you can give such a list. But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. There are platforms like reddit where you can debate about…
I can't. There isn't always an answer. The author does provide a good list of what's wrong.
But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker.
Online forums working is a very serious hackers' matter. What you're saying is just about that! There has been a lot of discussion about HN's algorithms to vote and select articles for front-page, moderation, etc.
I treat HN as a source of quality links to articles and sites elsewhere that I skim through a few times a day. The discussions are secondary.
I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch.
For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.
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I was surprised that trump being hospitalized for covid hadn't been posted and submitted a link, but it was flagged. Puzzled I checkd the FAQ, which led me to the guidelines and there I found the magic: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's p…
>So politics is mercifully off-topic by design. And yet, in spite of Hacker News' disdain for both politics and repetition, any story about Julian Assange, including daily posts about his hearing, will remain untouched[0]. What's really off topic isn't politics, but politics HN doesn't agree with. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Nobody cares enough about Assange, but a Trump post would be a bloodbath.
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>So politics is mercifully off-topic by design. And yet, in spite of Hacker News' disdain for both politics and repetition, any story about Julian Assange, including daily posts about his hearing, will remain untouched[0]. What's really off topic isn't politics, but politics HN doesn't agree with. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If it’s novel enough, or it won’t attract enough down or up votes regardless, then I don’t really see the issue with this. Nobody cares enough about Assange, but a Trump post would be a bloodbath.
I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist. In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the f…
> To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni. I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective. To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" t…
OTOH, I do think that there are different levels of "bogged down in semantics."
Semantics can sometimes interesting in their own right. That's rarely a help though. The semantics are generally not interesting as used to try and win a debate.
Getting back to the original point, I think the semantic arguments are usually the shallower ones. That's not bad in itself, but being a bog, moving past semantics is a rarity once in. That tends to get annoying and boring faster than rehashing a repetitive but substantive discussion.
Say we're discussing the existence of god. "What if I consider god to be the universe itself?" might be interesting on first pass, but it's kind of boring by the third time. Environmental sustainability. It might be interesting to reflect on the etymology or politics of the term "sustainable" in the context it's used today. It rarely gets us to a more nuanced view though. Usually, it just keeps the debate in shallow water. what does the word "really" mean. What words should we use.
As I said, I think it's important to keep in mind that there is no escape. Professional philosophers get stuck in semantics regularly. OTOH, a forum is probably somewhat susceptible to shallowness (semantics are just one type) regardless. After all, it's a casual medium.
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> Not just discussions about politics, I still find HN to be one of the most politics-free places on the Internet, which is nice. Granted, I avoid almost everything that talks about US computer programmers vs the rest of the world computer programmers, discussions which tend to have not that nice xenophobic nuance to them, but the rest of the discussions are pretty civil. Also (and of course), I also avoid almost eve…
I'd really be interested in hearing which TECHNICAL forums are more political?
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I was surprised that trump being hospitalized for covid hadn't been posted and submitted a link, but it was flagged. Puzzled I checkd the FAQ, which led me to the guidelines and there I found the magic: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's p…
>So politics is mercifully off-topic by design. And yet, in spite of Hacker News' disdain for both politics and repetition, any story about Julian Assange, including daily posts about his hearing, will remain untouched[0]. What's really off topic isn't politics, but politics HN doesn't agree with. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...