Happy 15th birthday Hacker News • Hacker News Board

Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

#211

Post by 1_player » Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #167

sph wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame HN, I blame the invention of the downvote button. I find it easier to hold a slightly controversial opinion here than it has ever been possible on Reddit, especially the programming and tech subreddits which are very low quality in general. The downvote button is awful, but why is it surprising that controversial opinions are downvoted? Being downvoted is the proof the opinion is controversial. It would…

Ah, but if you think about it, the upvote button has the same dysfunction as the downvote button, just at the other extreme. The downvote button punishes controversy; but the upvote button rewards orthodoxy . So even without a downvote option, orthodox comments rise to the top. The upvote button also acts a bit like a Rotten Tomatoes score, in that it compresses the full range of "scores" people might give something…

That's an excellent analysis, thank you. One thing I wanted to expand upon:

> posts/root-comments with engaging comments subthreads would still rise to the top, to ensure that those subthreads are surfaced to appreciate. (Probably there'd have to be UX for this case, highlighting the aspect of the post+comments that's so engaging.)

I think HN does something like that, and I appreciate they don't have any particular UX to indicate any "surfacing", but it's just organically applied to the ranking.

Example:

* Just posted top-level comments get the first spot for some time, so people have a chance to interact with them. Often you open a big thread with hundreds of comments and the first comment is 1 minute old. That's great.

* I'm pretty sure HN (and possibly Reddit, but I have no evidence for either) rank a top-level comment higher if a reply has a lot of votes/engagement.

* I'm somewhat positive HN downranks top-level comments that have a very high number of downvoted/controversial/high comment-to-vote ratio replies. I'm certain HN does that for posts (comments > vote = probably controversial post, slightly downranked).

* All of these things don't require UX, so they're a little opaque so people won't try to gamify their comments to manually nudge them toward some position in the thread.

Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

#212

Post by UweSchmidt » Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 12:22 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #124

UweSchmidt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ur…

What's the "early promise of the internet" to you? That should probably be a whole separate post of its own! In fact, I'd encourage you, if you're interested, to consider writing up something on the topic and submit it as a new post. I think there's a lot to dig into with regards to what we all thought the "early promise of the Internet" was, and analyze it in terms of where we were wrong, where we've fallen short of…

It's not possible to go back though, so I wouldn't want to dwell on the past too much. There is probably a really good reason why everything is run by companies, why we have Discord instead of connecting with a variety of clients to an open protocoll. Probably because it's too difficult to make everything run smooth everywhere, so you need a team, so you need monetization. People like the reach and impact they can have on Twitter and Youtube, it's just so much louder than a little, undiscovered self-hosted blog could ever be, so what's the point?

Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.

Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

#213

Post by mzmzmzm » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

HN is worth celebrating, but it's crazy how taking the link back to early days turns up so many dead links... some but not all in wayback. The sense then was things go up on the internet to stay forever, and in not a lot of time that's proven wrong.

Re: Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

#214

Post by tentacleuno » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #189

allochthon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a contingent in the HN comments with a bit of an antisocial streak. I wish people approached comments they take issue with with more of a pedagogical approach, starting with interpretive charity and trying to help the commenter see things in another way. I'd actually use the term "welcoming" in this context.

People get paid to promote shit on HN. It's a job you can get. There's no hope for the old internet these days. You can welcome the spammers, if you want, but all you're gonna get is spam.

> People get paid to promote shit on HN. It's a job you can get.

Do you mind sharing more information about this, please?