I find it mostly fine as long as you avoid political threads or threads with "Rust" in the title that have many comments. I outright just hide the former now. Moderation does good at removing outright trolls, but there is a particular, very sneaky class of trolls that do very here.
Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
181–190 of 302 posts
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I'm not sure what your point was? It sounds like you want to see links to stuff like "Show HN: Here's my first program" 10 PRINT "My Name" 20 GOTO 10 I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. A "Show HN" that's some new programmer implementing their first version of X even though X has been around for years isn't "news" unless they have some novel approach.
I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy.
Interesting. I never though the "News" part meant much at all. A substantial portion of the links that get highly upvoted here, and attract active discussion, are actually quite old.
To my mind, the main "thing" is that submissions be interesting (for some definition of "interesting"), not that they be "news".
I guess it just goes to show how different people can look at the exact same thing and interpret it differently.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#183I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with…
Why don't you just exclusively subscribe to the subreddits that interest you?
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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...
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. I think it's the "hacker" half of the "hacker-politics" that makes it on topic here. The story is developing over time; sure some non-newsworthy Assange articles get posted here sometimes but in general I don't think it's incongruous with HN.
>I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc.
And every possible iteration of that has been hashed and rehashed to death at this point - Assange is a hero and should be pardoned, Assange is a traitor and should be punished, Assange is guilty of sexual assault, Assange was framed, Assange is being tortured, the entire trial is a farce, Assange is a Russian stooge, Assange is a CIA stooge, Assange is a hologram meant to distract you from Epstein, insert rant about the American military industrial complex and war crimes here.
Is there so much new and interesting intellectual content to be gleaned from Assange's hearing that we need to milk it every single day?
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
It's just odd and a bit frustrating that there never seems to be enough people to flag certain politically-charged subjects, whereas there is always someone at the ready to flag others, regardless of the relative merit of the discussions being had.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Depends on the timezone, I guess? When I browse, it's a mix between the two groups and a third group that upvotes and engages with the post you said "hackers in the archetypical sense" would. (The timezone thing is starting to become my stock reply; when I browse the semi-regular threads of how HN is going downhill or no longer populated by hackers, half of the claims disagree with my daily experience on this site. C…
>Depends on the timezone, I guess?
Of course you would say that, given your username!
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Try posting that maybe, just maybe, Assange is a rapist and needs to at least go before the courts to test the allegations and see what happens.
> > It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth.
> Assange is a rapist and needs to at least go before the courts to test the allegations
You can see where I'm going here.
"Assange is an alleged rapist, and needs to at least go before the courts to test the allegations" will probably get you further.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. I think it's the "hacker" half of the "hacker-politics" that makes it on topic here. The story is developing over time; sure some non-newsworthy Assange articles get posted here sometimes but in general I don't think it's incongruous with HN.
>I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. And every possible iteration of that has been hashed and rehashed to death at this point - Assange is a hero and should be pardoned, Assange is a traitor and should be punished, Assange is guilty of sexual assault, Assange was framed, Assange is being tortured, the entire…
The grandparent to my post was talking about politics, not repetition. I shouldn't have strayed and conceded that it's repetitive because this is my point: hacker-politics is on topic here.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#189The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community. 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…
I think it is expectations failure "the more the merrier" is not the case. Having tight 10 person group is so much better than having 100 people group.
You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#190I'll add another one that has transpired: the technical and expert knowledge has gone elsewhere. The board is nowadays predominantly populated by emotional outbursts from people who have next to no idea what they are talking about regarding the subject matter.
The threads on COVID where everyone is a statistics trained doctor is a good showcase of what the board has turned into.
I don't even want to bother discussing tech stuff here anymore. People can make fun of Reddit all they want, but while they have a larger population of people who are there to shitpost, they also have a larger population of people who know what they are talking about.
As one person said, HN is "no longer really populated by hackers". It's an embarrassment.
Others have mentioned that the downvoting brigade is in full swing, and that there seems to be a lot of shitflinging in general.
As for moderation, DanG does a great job of staying out of it but I do wish he would toss his weight around a bit more.