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

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#271

Post by dhimes » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #228

partingshots wrote: post #220

> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS. This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well. What does this mean? Are these…

I gave you an upvote. I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks. Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally…

Early on, karma meant you had an interesting comment. If the comment made you comment, it was pretty automatically worthy of an upvote, even if you disagreed.

Later, it turned into more of an agree-disagree vote.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#272

Post by dang » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

Nemi wrote: post #233

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 just want to say that you NAILED a UX issue I see with Hackernews comments, at least for me - when I am reading through the comments on a HN post, I often find myself several layers deep into a conversation that I realize I am not interested in any more. Either some facet of the topic, or maybe a side conversation (like the one we having now about HackerDaily). I want to "jump out" of this conversation and back to…

My current thought about how to fix this is to have a link called 'parent' or 'up' next to each comment timestamp. Clicking on it would scroll you one level up. Disadvantage: you'd have to click it once for each level you want to go up. Advantage: it's simpler than any alternative I know of.

What percentage of this problem would that fix?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#273

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #169

m463 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#274

Post by dang » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #184

Timpy wrote: post #180

Earlier 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…

Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064097, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211437, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22362035. People accuse us just as often (more often, rather) of suppressing Assange stories.

You're overgeneralizing based on the special case of the extradition trial. Arguably that was over-covered here, but it was hardly because of the sinister situation you're imagining. We just weren't following it very closely.

The principles of how we moderate political topics on HN are well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The principles of how people arrive at inaccurate generalizations about it are also well established:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If there's any aspect of this problem that hasn't been thoroughly discussed and answered at those links, I'd like to know what it is.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#275

Post by dang » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #185

Aeolun wrote: post #176

Earlier 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.

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.

It would be interesting to see links to the highly meritorious politically-charged discussions that were flagged.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#276

Post by LockAndLol » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

wildermuthn wrote: post #200

To some degree, Reddit has addressed the problem of a large online community by subdividing itself and allowing each division to moderate itself (to some degree). However, what might be more interesting is an automated subdivision of users. For example, even if HN has hundreds of thousands of users, philosophic-types would only see links and comments from other philosophic-types. Trolls would get lumped with trolls.…

Google is already showing different results per country and region creating bubbles of thought. News networks filter out information they think most people aren't interested in or (even worse) things they don't want people to know. Youtube messed up somewhere and after only a few clicks you're back in the "popular" video hell.

You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#277

Post by LockAndLol » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

I'm actually also scouting for a reddit and HN alternative. It seems like Reddit users are just spilling over to HN and that shows in the quality of many "discussions".

I think NRKbeta's method of requiring a quiz before one can comment [0] should be tested on bigger platforms. NRKbeta seems to have a good experience with it. Furthermore, it'd be nice to be able to subscribe to moderators or groups thereof. I think Aether[1] uses that method of moderation.

[0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

[1]: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#278

Post by RubenvanE » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #272

Nemi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to say that you NAILED a UX issue I see with Hackernews comments, at least for me - when I am reading through the comments on a HN post, I often find myself several layers deep into a conversation that I realize I am not interested in any more. Either some facet of the topic, or maybe a side conversation (like the one we having now about HackerDaily). I want to "jump out" of this conversation and back to…

My current thought about how to fix this is to have a link called 'parent' or 'up' next to each comment timestamp. Clicking on it would scroll you one level up. Disadvantage: you'd have to click it once for each level you want to go up. Advantage: it's simpler than any alternative I know of. What percentage of this problem would that fix?

This is an interesting idea! The problem is that you regularly get 8+ levels deep, so that's a lot of clicks. Maybe two buttons (for parent and for top-level parent) might do the trick?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#279

Post by dang » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

RubenvanE wrote: post #278

dang wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current thought about how to fix this is to have a link called 'parent' or 'up' next to each comment timestamp. Clicking on it would scroll you one level up. Disadvantage: you'd have to click it once for each level you want to go up. Advantage: it's simpler than any alternative I know of. What percentage of this problem would that fix?

This is an interesting idea! The problem is that you regularly get 8+ levels deep, so that's a lot of clicks. Maybe two buttons (for parent and for top-level parent) might do the trick?

That's a good suggestion—thanks. Maybe 'parent' and 'top', or 'up' and 'top'.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#280

Post by WaitWaitWha » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

mncharity wrote: post #223

ChefboyOG wrote: post #175

The 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…

Why isn't there a greater emphasis on filtering controlled by readers ? "Don't show me anything said by someone who joined after I did". "Show only pairs with historical ratings above this threshold from raters in the weighted set generated by crawling thusly from this seed set." "Prioritize anything on topic X which multiple people from this set like." At 8am: "Don't show me anything this classifier thinks is a pun"…

I am not sure your idea works for my goals.

My goal of reading others is to discuss with my "antiself" to quote CS Lewis and the linked OP.

I would fall into an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing what I already think. That is not good for me.

Alternatively if externally I continue to grow and change, depending on the rate of change, the pattern would provide more and more mismatching results.

In essence we are back to the same problem. I do not know think this can be automated in a simplistic way.