Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fark redesign is now live (2007)

fark.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 475 posts

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#321

Post by astrange »

perihelions wrote: post #286
astrange wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was correct to do this, because it was funny. Any true longtime forum poster would recognize this. (Conversely, if it wasn't funny, he should've done it differently.) Although doing Lowtax things may lead to turning into Lowtax, which is probably bad. I can certainly tell you it's not a serious problem, because it'd be illegal if it was. All serious problems with websites are revenue issues or legal issues.

It's not funny when the victim isn't in on the joke and is distressed by it. (Sure, the victim was (probably) a highly unsympathetic and stupid person. What justification is that? It's schoolyard-bully sociology to attack unsympathetic weirdos. Most bullies grow out of it and live with regrets. But 'spez is a fucking adult! What's he doing lurking in the worst subreddits of (his own) website, searching for prey to ga…

No, whether the user is sympathetic or not isn't important, and I don't think there's anything noble about punishing users you don't like. It's just a misconception about what's important in internet forums. If you're a random free account you sometimes get nobly sacrificed (via admin abuse) for the entertainment of the masses and thus benefit society as a whole.

Basically, it's PvP. This is pretty obvious from the design; you post and people reply to you, which they mostly use to argue with you. An example of a product designed for people to be nice to each other is Discourse, which isn't much like HN or reddit.

People do have human rights, which is why I said what matters is if it's illegal or not. Putting slanderous posts under their name would be a real issue - if you think this happened go ahead and sue him - but the most common one would be doxxing: posting your IP and personal info from the admin console. Which he's probably got access to.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#322

Post by dmix »

evolve2k wrote: post #192
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my question: Can HN recover from this? It was already getting choppy with the election and cryptocurrency generating huge emotional hellthreads. Then came Musk and Mastodon. Now it's Reddit. HN is just turning into another hub of tech outrage. This site is giving me pain to read now. Want to see a contrast? Look at the comments on this Reddit drama and compare it against the original Digg redesign drama on HN…

I think some context you might be missing is the intimate connection between Reddit and YC. Reddit is a YC story[1][2] and the founders even claim that Reddit was the first YC Company to launch[1]. As far as I understand it Reddit was one of those key early startups that Paul Graham modelled future YC around. Further reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, rest-in-peace, was a and highly inflential in his contribution to RSS…

That was so long ago it’s almost irrelevant. The only relevant connection is the last remaining YC founder Steve Huffman who likely is going to be heavily influenced by Sam Altman on the LLM=fresh real-time conversational data being valuable.

If stuff like GPT is going to be useful as a Q&A engine on Google/Bing it needs plenty of data feeds that are coming in quickly and fed into training. People claim some old scaped DBs of Reddit comments are enough because some OSS model trained on it but I’m skeptical that’s a serious option for Microsoft and the like.

Otherwise the HN/YCReddit is pretty much just an old founding story, not one relevant to today or the culture of HN.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#323

Post by ttctciyf »

matsemann wrote: post #102
dacryn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away * fire spez * promise a clear committed roadmap of mod tools * promise to review 3rd party API pricing, and delay the current rollout It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle)

Or they can continue their failed attempts at using chatgpt to astroturf a counter-movement, lol: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg Edit, some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/commen... (spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming, hence it still being up)

> it still being up

Must have gone dark in the last two hours, I guess. Clicking on your "context" link gets me:

> The moderators of r/programming have set this community to private. Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions.

The GPT astroturf fail seems like a worthy story in itself, if it could be stood up - amazing!

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#324

Post by vxNsr »

littlestymaar wrote: post #157
randomdata wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Inv…

There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative. In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable. I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, pro…

> I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal.

Just fyi, reddit rose around the same time as Facebook so it’s likely they share a similar governance model, where founders control an outsized part of the board/voting shares. Since Uber and wework semi-imploded investors are less forgiving of that sort of thing but legacy companies like Reddit likely still are run that way.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#325

Post by dmix »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #314
ycombinete wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general the lack of separate communities, and the technical posts that take up a good portion of the front page seem to guard against that kind of Eternal September on HN. The top of the front page right now: 1. Before Reddit and Digg, there was Fark. Then a user-hostile redesign killed it (fark.com) 2. Why Perl? 3. Video to Video with Stable Diffusion (Step-by-Step) – Stable Diffusion Art 4. The Surprising Power…

We can always hit the emergency button labeled "please post and upvote some Erlang stories quick!". Worked well in the past.

That was back when pg still posted here and could rally the troops.

Doesn’t look like he engages much https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

Maybe dang could arrange something or it could happen organically. But that particular event was in response to an acute flood of traffic. Not some long term reduction in comment quality and Reddit-tier rage/politics.

You can’t fight floods with a small temporary dam. Nor can you moderate your way out of it entirely as every major subreddit has shown (hyper modding usually does the opposite by sanctioning a certain ‘acceptable’ set of low quality posting and fuelling meta drama).

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#327

Post by goykasi »

sunaurus wrote: post #63
politelemon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is

In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.

But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email.

Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#329

Post by GreeningRun »

lt wrote: post #241
onion2k wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach (not just for Reddit, but for all internet content sites) is that $9.99 is a significant investment when there are other sites providing content for free. The choice the user has to make isn't "Is Reddit worth $9.99?" but more like "Is Reddit better value at $9.99 than some other website at $0.00?", and Reddit is probably never going to win in that process for the majority of people. It…

Not to mention it’s actually the users generating the content.

Yup that's the key point a lot forget

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#330

Post by jcfrei »

dacryn wrote: post #71
boc wrote: post #12

I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die. If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand tha…

at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away * fire spez * promise a clear committed roadmap of mod tools * promise to review 3rd party API pricing, and delay the current rollout It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle)

As much as I wish that to be true I doubt it. A large portion of users will simply scroll through reddit and look at the latest cat videos or social media stunts. You can scrape this content without any contributors at all. All the separate communities that reddit hosts probably contribute very little to their ad revenue.
Post reply on HN