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Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

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Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#81

Post by tracerbulletx »

d-cc wrote: post #65
ideamotor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter and Reddit used to be open platforms, and were not thought of as centralized. Which is an ongoing massive rug pull.

All of the current large US social media sites would be perfect if ran similarly to wikipedia, moreso the transparency and openness rather than the non-profit corporate model (but that certainly wouldn't hurt anything).

Agreed, Wikipedia should be the model. A good enough organization with financial independence and a mandate can work. Nothing's perfect but we've become too adverse to creating institutions and expecting them to maintain trust. We can't just engineer our way out of every social problem.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#82

Post by debatem1 »

nunez wrote: post #78

I'm with CmdrTaco. Hacker News from the front page is way way WAY too much. I browse Hacker News through skimfeed.com. Whoever is responsible for that does a really good job combing through Hacker News and surfacing stuff I'm interested in. On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by incre…

The funny thing is that while I remember really enjoying a lot of things on the old web, I don't really remember how I found them. My guess is by either following a link and digging or by talking with people and hearing what they liked. I don't think I've had a word of mouth website recommendation in ten years.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#83

Post by joe_the_user »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #68

I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum. One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how S…

The thing about slashdot is they tolerated/encouraged low-quality posts ("first post!") from the start - and it worked... for some people while there were also good quality posts. But I think it had the problem that when some factor causes your good posts to decline, the garbage ratio goes up and then you can't recover. I've seen similar dynamics with smaller forums - tolerating various kind of bullshit can work for a fair while but the end is sudden.

I'd say HN has overall declined in quality over the last years but it's managed to avoid a precipitous decline by having basic standards.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#84

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

ideamotor wrote: post #73
d-cc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the current large US social media sites would be perfect if ran similarly to wikipedia, moreso the transparency and openness rather than the non-profit corporate model (but that certainly wouldn't hurt anything).

It can be for-profit but it can’t be publicly traded. The reason we lost Twitter is because they legally had to sell to Elon. The reason we’ll lose Reddit is because they are going public and will legally be required to chase the money.

I think you have that backwards - Elon never wanted Twitter, he just wanted to see his name in some headlines and make people run around pulling their hair for a bit. However he messed up and put himself in a position where he had to buy Twitter for far more then it was worth and he was held to it. All the top people he fired day one were more then happy to parachute away - was the best thing for them. There is no way he will ever make back that 44 billion on Twitter, he’ll be lucky if he can pay the interest payments on it with what Twitter generates. More then likely all the people who went into Twitter with him will get deals on his other ventures and get their money back that way.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#86

Post by sltkr »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would work for HN.

It would work, the mods just don't like it

Any source on that?

I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#87

Post by Karrot_Kream »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #46
smitty1e wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting to others. If the site becomes successful and more mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on everything and expertise on nothing. I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play o…

You can look at older HN threads since they're all still up. There's definitely been a "mean reversion" here as well, but it seems to vary per topic. I think the threads that have suffered the most are the ones about #dramaoftheweek which as you say tends to attract folks with opinions on everything and experience in nothing.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#88

Post by joe_the_user »

nunez wrote: post #80
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #68

I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum. One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how S…

Yeah, Slashdot's UI refresh definitely killed the site for me. Reddit was a breath of fresh air by comparison. I still remember when a coworker told me about it back in 2012. I literally stopped browsing Slashdot ever since that day. Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit. It's a real shame th…

The sad thing is that having a high quality site seems to be actually worth little to the owners of the site.

If your income is advertising, engagement and users with little impulse control seem to be the thing that brings value. And there seem to be few other ways to monetize a site.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#89

Post by snovv_crash »

jstanley wrote: post #42
cmdrtaco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi.

I got banned from Slashdot and mentioned it in my job interview at Netcraft. I got the job.

I had my voting privileges revoked, but never mentioned it in a job interview. Being a teenager on the early internet was a heady experience.

Re: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

#90

Post by mellosouls »

DonHopkins wrote: post #62
mellosouls wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've no idea what the intent here is but I've noticed the term having moved from its original use of describing a sad subculture of poorly-socialized and sometimes disturbing young men to a more general lazy male-shaming term, often used to intimidate traditional masculine voices in a similar way "slut" is used to shut down women who don't apologise for being women.

And by "traditional" you mean "sexist".

I don't but its a different matter to use a term like "sexist" compared to "incel".

Both are often used as insults where an argument is lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is almost always toxic and bullying.

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