With billions in play in the Social Network universe, someone needs to write an opus on Mitigating Eternal September.
Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
211–220 of 465 posts
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#212Here's the thing: Not everyone is super confident, not everyone has a thick skin. So when people just snipe it really damages that person and potentially their idea. It would be fine if ALL the good ideas were made by super confident thick skinned people but they are not. So we, as a species, just lose the potential of the less confident, thin skinned people. This is a HUGE waste of talent. This community should be h…
However, if they are thin-skinned, a tech startup is not the place to be. Better to weed out the insecure before they invest their entire life into something. If anything HN has made me stronger -- if one of my ideas flies well among this crowd, then talking to a skeptical VC is cake. And, it would seem that most of the harshness is well meaning. In NYC, bluntness isn't considered rude, it's actually doing the other person a favor -- we don't have time for smoke to be blown up one's ass.
I think my main complaint about HN is the cyclical obsession with the Torrent/Kim Dotcom/Wikileaks side of things. There is a sizable minority that seem to have some ignorant idealism that everything should be free and that developers/musicians/filmmakers ought to just produce content simply out of the joy of doing so, while neglecting that if you give away the store, you can't pay your bills. The recent story about the 200,000 downloads game devs who were now homeless illustrates what happens when that logic is actually implemented.
As Fred Wilson has said, the key to reducing piracy (and the need for it) is the frictionless, low-cost ability to acquire desired content.
I'm am glad that the Bitcoin fad seems to have faded from the HN pages. The fringe types (constantly looking for conspiracies, no problems with "warez" and very "hack the planet" (i.e. Hackers (1995)) seem to provide some interesting "color" but also occasionally drown out the original purpose of HN -- startup-related news and the technologies involved therein.
I was a late comer to the party, so perhaps I'm part of the problem, but still, on the whole, HN, even with its snark, is a great place to be and I'm proud to have earned a few Karma points over the last year.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#213Welcome to the Hellbanned club, soon!
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
On one hand, it seems like having the value tied to the voter's karma would make more sense, since someone here from the beginning with little karma says very little about their contributions or judgement. On the other hand, either of these solutions seems destined to increase the inevitable echo-chamber herd mentality groupthink that already tries to creep into any community.
That would leave people like me out. I often find the news here, so I'm very unlikely to submit something. And I only comment when I feel like I'm going to add value to the community or discussion, which isn't that frequently. So I have a clear judgement on when I contribute, it's not much or often, but it tends to present some value. I've had an account for 2.5 years, and used the service for even longer, yet my kar…
I echo this sentiment. I have been here longer and does not comment unless I have something of value to say, but do actively vote on stories or comments. People whom I know in real life and frequent here have the same usage pattern too. I would hazard a guess that there is a substantial amount of people in this category. So a purely karma based approach may not be sufficient.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#215I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions: - Rumors about what Apple will do next week, and the ensuing flamewars between Apple fans and Android fans - TorrentFreak articles of any kind - Overbearing hype about the latest fad (App.net at the moment) - Mindless hatred towards the latest villain (Twitter at the moment) - Anything political tha…
I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions
A separate, heavily moderated forum on HN dedicated to product launches and feedback. Non-constructive criticism like "Your product sucks, it's a terrible idea and you're a terrible person for thinking of it" results in an HN hellban/permaban.
Myself - I'm not opposed to receiving negative feedback. It's the worthless, non-constructive feedback that riles me. Say something positive and/or insightful. Meaningless, parroted comments are what ultimately sinks an online community.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#216Here's a perfect example from a few days ago. Read the most voted-up comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340014
That is such a perfect example, although it's a good example of replies trying to encourage more positive discussion. I wonder if there's a small group of people who just don't care about social disapproval.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes saying an idea is pointless is positive feedback, there are a lot of people here that 'launch a startup' which basically means some half-assed website that does something utterly pointless and then expect the community to be like some kind of benevolent uncle and pat them on the back and say what an awesome idea and execution. Many many ideas really are pointless and negative criticism is very much a part o…
There's a difference between merely hostile, negative commentary and constructive, well-founded criticism. The problem that HN faces is that because of the voting system those drive-by valueless negative comments are getting amplified all out of scale relative to their value. Imagine being in a restaurant. It's not so bad if there is someone in the far corner having an argument that you can just barely overhear or so…
Part of the problem with HN (and reddit) is that the format is still linear. A comment system results in multi-dimensional conversations both in subject and in tone.
Some comments are on-topic and are helpful, some are on-topic and humorous. Some are off-topic and also helpful, some are off-topic and worthless. As so on, and so on.
With only one direction we can "push" a comment (and only one direction with which we can view comments, up & down), there is not all that much filtering that can go on.
Sometimes I enjoy reading the "funny" responses. What if this was a separate comment axis that I could view? Others may not be interested in such a thing, and could ignore it.
In any case, the format of HN doesn't lend itself well when people from all over the world bring their own views into a single topic. I don't know if a good way of solving it easily other than being ruthless about removing content that doesn't belong.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes saying an idea is pointless is positive feedback, there are a lot of people here that 'launch a startup' which basically means some half-assed website that does something utterly pointless and then expect the community to be like some kind of benevolent uncle and pat them on the back and say what an awesome idea and execution. Many many ideas really are pointless and negative criticism is very much a part o…
Here's a thread from 847 days ago full of people being mean and negative about Groupon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288116 Today, Groupon stock is worthless, and the company is doomed. Should the people in that thread be penalized for being right, but mean?
Those comments are mean?
I can see they are skeptical, but I would hardly describe them as "mean".
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#219You can do what I do: don't read the comments. Pretty simple solution and you still get to find some great articles to read.
Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..
#220It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…
I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without c…
Having used to be mod/admin on a rather busy and strife-filled SMF-forum the past 6-7 years, I can confirm that this works surprisingly well.
I say "surprisingly" because, like a lot of tech hackers, I often think about a technical solution before I think about the simple social one. But I've noticed time and time again just how much effect the simplest changes in user-interface can have on the entire "mood" of a community. And "simple change in UI", includes the guidelines, or--I don't know--there's actually a lot of space for a notice below the comment submission form where you can give people the "right" idea (what you want to see in this community).
The personal anecdote goes a little something like this: We have a real solid group of mod/admins with a hands-off approach (way more hands-off than the invisible ones at HN, but that's a different gripe), so we had our fun with the innocent tiny changes, like changing the descriptions of individual sub-forums ever-so-slightly, like a pun, or a little in-joke. After a few years however, all of the descriptions had mutated into something that was not at all descriptive anymore. All the "old" members (which includes the mods of course) knew perfectly well what the sub-forums were meant for. But the new members did not. As new members look to older members for social context, there was a sort of generational loss in relevance, and at some point people almost entirely just posted whatever, wherever. It was chaos! And so I had the brilliant idea that, hey we can change those descriptions so that they're both descriptive and somewhat funny (utter genius, I know).
The amazing thing is, that it took only about 2-3 weeks before people starting posting on-topic things in the right sub-forums again.
The moral of the story is: people really tend to respond really well to just flat-out being told what to do. Really well. Amazingly well. Frighteningly well.
Better than some tech solution that tries to subtly "guide" them, in particular (or at least much easier to implement).