101–110 of 150 posts
Every year or two the same thing needs opened for conversation - in some cases.
You can always reference the old post.
What is the age of a Hacker News post before discussion dies on average? It seems like having a feed for any new comments on posts posts older than that age would allow anyone interested in longer-term discussion to opt-in without requiring any additional features.
From my anecdotal observations after using this site for over a decade, it’s about a day, sometimes two, and very rarely longer than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes…
>Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains. I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations. To your point here - that's one of the points I was making above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit of looking in the mirror here) that good writin…
I’m afraid this is the primary value proposition for ChatGPT. It’s a power tool for writers like that. So the signal to noise ratio is about to get much worse.
When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…
When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…
When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…
There's a videogame subreddit that frequently downvotes comments from top tier players. It has gotten to the point where most good players will no longer engage with reddit because of the extreme hostility and incompetence. Top tier players aren't always going to be right about everything, but the things for which they often get downvotes are absurd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This wasn't always the case. I've used Reddit since the Digg days and in the earlier days it was long form comments with sources and the vote system was actually used as a "this is true" signal instead of an "I don't agree with this". The thing that killed it in my opinion was the layout change to embed media directly in Facebook style. Sure there's always old.reddit.com , but the problem is that because of the defau…
I was thinking that HN shows only the writer what the 'value' of the post is (number of upvotes). In Reddit, most subs seem to show that number to the whole world. So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20, you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good comment. Because your br…
This points to a more general problem with all online discussion forums: The signal to noise varies (and may on occasionally be zero) but in the end all the signal is lost / buried deep into some archive (like tears in rain if you want to be melodramatic about it). Think about those millions of people, interacting for billions of hours online over almost two decades now. What is there to show for it at the end of the…
People use technology to manually curate the better bits into things called books, and sometimes implement them on physical biodegradable materials to serve as offline backup and as a low bandwidth distribution method.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Download Apollo and unsubscribe from all mainstream subreddits + remove all and popular, is the key.
I did this myself, but it only kicked the can on my eventual leaving. Sure, niche subreddits are generally better in their content and discussions, but I still noticed that the same behaviors end up being rewarded. It's the format that's the problem, not the content, and that's the one thing shared by all subreddits.
I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so there may be something to that (though I'd chalk it up to becoming more popular/mainstream).
Many people here have contact info in their profiles. If you find a good (dead) comment thread, you can contact the people involved directly. I suspect many of the people here would be willing to continue the conversation.
The other way to restart discussion is to repost (if the topic is more than a year old). That's a pretty common theme on HN. You can link the past discussion in the comment section for context.