Happy Birthday HN! This is one of my favorite online communities. I enjoy popping in here a few times a day
Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
111–120 of 214 posts
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect this is what most of us do
> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy. Many times a week i type "reddit " a…
This may just be my confirmation bias, but I started using Reddit in 2012 and that felt like the big heyday and the peak of the site. It had reached critical mass to be interesting, but the new UI design hadn't come yet and it still felt niche enough to have the weird, interesting corners.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#113It feels like HN still upholds the early promise of the internet (along with Wikipedia and very small number of other websites). But what will the next 15 year bring about?
What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?
The Venture Capitalists and startuppers that made HN like the internet to be Free enough that new businesses and services can thrive, and Open Source for the accessible and reusable building blocks for their projects, but clearly like commercialization and being the middleman, like in the good old offline days. The headache of moderating their platforms feels more urgent than thinking about Freedom of Speech.
The early internet, to me, was the promise to remove those middlemen and have us directly connect, and, while using mostly free and low-overhead websites or services, contribute back. I expected real estate classifieds posted in an open format to open databases by now, and the job description of "real estate agent" retired.
When I think if "upholding" anything I might think of Slashdot clearly preaching Open Source and the Evils of Microsoft. Naive by today's standards but hey, it kept the old ethos alive for a little longer.
Edit: No doubt many other excellent values were upheld by HN and the moderators, so thanks for that!
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy. Many times a week i type "reddit " a…
This may just be my confirmation bias, but I started using Reddit in 2012 and that felt like the big heyday and the peak of the site. It had reached critical mass to be interesting, but the new UI design hadn't come yet and it still felt niche enough to have the weird, interesting corners.
I think the sad reality may be that the majority of folks out there don't want niche, weird and interesting.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#115This remains my favorite forum on the Internet without customizing things. Curated set of twitter or fb or other friends are pretty good too, but the new user experience without customization here is amazing.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect this is what most of us do
> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy. Many times a week i type "reddit " a…
I like Reddit but I think you have to be very careful about trusting any information on it, it's a populist's wet dream.
There have been multiple times on Reddit I saw a comment about something I personally had deep knowledge of, and was astounded at how inaccurate the comment was relative to the thousands of upvotes and dozens of awards it had.
This has made me wary of comments relating to subjects I have zero expertise in, as I can't properly evaluate if they're correct and I can't trust the responses or upvotes because those might come from people with as little expertise in the subject as me.
Since upvotes don't correlate with truthfulness, they only correlate with popularity, they're useless as a measurement of how accurate a comment is. This is usually exacerbated by how popular a given subreddit is, with smaller niche subreddits being better (in my experience).
That said I do indeed go to Reddit first for most of my purchasing or entertainment decisions, just have to be careful to take any info there with a massive heaping of salt.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#117HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started. Links to interesting Tech, programming and science stories and high quality discussion compared to something like Digg. Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the com…
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to disagree... Things aren't that bad, but I've definitely noticed a lot more cases of downvoting of "against the grain" comments or opinions with often very few responses in the last couple of years. Previously, I rarely noticed heavily downvoted comments, and in the cases they were, there were almost always reply comments explaining the opposite side, leading to IMO much better disc…
Maybe, but 5-10 years ago Apple-bashing was a karma death sentence (never guess how I learned that). Now it seems to be more of an active discussion (mostly due to the MBP keyboard situation I guess?).
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#118HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started. Links to interesting Tech, programming and science stories and high quality discussion compared to something like Digg. Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the com…
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to disagree... Things aren't that bad, but I've definitely noticed a lot more cases of downvoting of "against the grain" comments or opinions with often very few responses in the last couple of years. Previously, I rarely noticed heavily downvoted comments, and in the cases they were, there were almost always reply comments explaining the opposite side, leading to IMO much better disc…
I've only been browsing here for about 10 of the 15 years, but I remember a time when the discussions closely matched what I and the public at large could discuss in private without fear.
But there has been a chilling effect in recent years where more and more topics become verboten and someone will get downvoted, at a minimum, for even bringing them up. Interesting topics and child threads go missing on the regular. We're even at a point now where certain corporate press releases cannot even be questioned at all, despite the same corporations being stuck with heavy fines for similar past behavior they're being accused of now.
I still like HN for the purely technical aspects, but I don't know anyone who still views it as a place where complex ideas that affect society can be discussed anymore.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#119Maybe an unpopular opinion here but I am finding HN to be more and more like Reddit everyday. I normally only read HN articles that have atleast 500 points or more and have notifications setup for it. In the past I used to get only 1 or 2 notifications a week. Now I get atleast 4 a day. I find it hard nowadays to keep up.
I only visit HN sine September 2020 and yet the growth of the user base in just 17 months seems obvious to me.
Covid and WFH probably contributed to that growth as well.
Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
#120HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started. Links to interesting Tech, programming and science stories and high quality discussion compared to something like Digg. Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit. Its still so good I dont even click on the link I click on comments to get a HN summary which gives me a pretty good idea if its worth reading or not. Most of the time the com…
> HN is what reddit used to be like when it first started.
That's exactly the problem -- HN is now reddit-lite.