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

Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 465 posts

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#431

Post by thinkingisfun »

niels_olson wrote: post #260
pg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll try that too.

If you would ever consider putting a quote in the guidelines, I heartily recommend and humbly submit Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who er…

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." -- Oscar Wilde

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#432

Post by rdl »

pg wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, I'll try that too.

What I do personally is keep a (relatively short) file of hn usernames I find particularly good and those I find particularly bad. I go and read comments from those I find good sometimes, in addition to encountering them through the normal course of articles.

The bad ones, I reevaluate whenever I see another comment, but I've never yet seen a good reason to remove someone from that list. Sadly they never seem to end up hellbanned. It's uncorrelated largely with agreeing or disagreeing with views; it's just that there are a group of people who are, as the OP said, really negative, irrational, and destructive to civil discourse.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#433

Post by qubot »

On my first submission to this site, I acted like an asshole in the comments section to reciprocate the attitude of the comments I got. My opinionated tone earned me more points, when I hate doing that kind of thing to begin with.

This is a cultural issue. I should not be rewarded for being a dick, nor should anyone else. Period.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#434

Post by DanBC »

VMG wrote: post #424
ericn wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not make the upward facing arrow be text like "good quality" or "useful" or "thoughtful"?

Also remove the downvote button and replace it with "flag this comment"

People would click on [flag] too often, making it hard for mods to monitor the queue of flagged content.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#435

Post by JohnTh »

phaus wrote: post #389
dfc wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've run into just as many dishonorable people as I have in the general population." Can you think of any group this would not be true for given a sample size or population as large as the military?

The point was that I can't. The study mentioned above claims that people act more honestly when they are reminded of a set of values to which they are supposed to adhere. I was simply stating that while I was in the military (for about a decade), we were constantly reminded of the set of values which we were supposed to follow, yet I saw no signs that such a practice has any effect whatsoever on an individual's behav…

In simple, harsh words, basically you say that teaching of good values has no value. I think that the things are much more complex that that.

Perhaps those values from military doesn't have/had any resonance because they weren't, in fact, good? Or, told in a good way? (I'm thinking now that tyranny in teaching generates repulse not acceptance)

Also, if we consider that the teaching was correct (both as content and form - I dunno of course) who knows if the "soldiers who didn't change" would be worse if this teaching would be applied?

I think that the human being is the victim of influence and good influences play a determinant role on his behavior. But now what means "good" - this is entirely another chapter...

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#436

Post by chrisjtow »

Hey Steve, don't let the detractors slow you down. As Steve Jobs aptly responded, "What have you done that is so great?"

Constructive feedback is the best way to test out hypotheses and ideas. It's unfortunate you have to weed out the noise to get to the meat.

Cheers and continue on.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#437

Post by xg »

pg wrote: post #114

It'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…

It’s hard to encourage and nurture positivity on the web. Tumblr’s done it by not explicitly building comments into the product—so if you’re going to say something critical, it shows up in your personal space. It's conflicting to build a growing community vs. a good one. One of the only ways to do it is to have some sort of asymmetric follow relationship that allows all users to create their own smaller communities.

Clay Shirky: “The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.”

David Foster Wallace: “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

David Foster Wallace: “We should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”

http://christmasgorilla.com/post/29694673248/its-a-genuine-p...

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#438

Post by mistercow »

chris_wot wrote: post #392
mistercow wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the problem is so much negativity as it is tone . I think HN is still a very civil place (relative to many other communities), but anyone can see that hostile jabs are gradually getting more popular, and hostile jabs are, for whatever reason, an infectious meme and when you are seeing a lot of them, it takes a lot of restraint to keep from tossing them in yourself. A particular example of a recent top-v…

I have a sneaking suspicion it was my comment. If it wasn't, then you've made me think very hard about what I wrote (it was a mock email). It was pretty harsh, and now I think of it the tone was unwarranted. I thought it was amusing at the time and held truth to power, but now I think it was a dick move. I can't remove the comment now, but I can consider making my criticism more constructive and positive. With the em…

That wasn't the comment that I had in mind, but I'm glad my comment made you think about it. I'm certainly not going to claim immunity to this effect myself. I'm sure if I went through my comment history, I'd find some harsh comments of my own. I do make a conscious effort to notice it before I submit, but it's easy to slip up.

There's no denying that writing a smackdown is fun. We just have to remember that it's not harmless fun.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#439

Post by kristopherwong »

All,

I think constructive criticism is always benefitical however the reality is that HN has form a "elitist" mentality. If you are not putting out world class design or code they'll tell you about it. That is just the way it's evolved and I'd suggest you not give in to it.

Secondly, My suggestion to the "elitist" mentality is we have 1 day a week or month that you cannot be negative. See something negative and that user gets negative karma or something to that nature. We can self regulate and improve the culture within HN if we put some effort in.

-Kris

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#440

Post by reubeneli »

Nice post Steve. Assuming anyone even gets to read this 420 posts later... [Proposed solution at the end] For years I got my daily fix of HN too. PG was a legend of the Valley for me and YC an admirable exclusive club of amazing success stories. Many we work with and many friends have had tremendous success. (Disclosure: we never applied to YC nor tried simply because we had two seasoned founders with many successes under our belts and felt respectfully it wasn't our cup of tea, but we admired and loved HN and the people at YC)

As an entrepreneur for 15+ years, I really admired the community support and its relationship to startups and hackers. Something all founders and tech leaders need. From outside of Silicon Valley it was very inspiring to watch.

When we started http://geekli.st about 1 1/2 years ago we broke into the Silicon Valley scene and hustled like nobody's business to get known, get ahead, raise funds and do all those things all entrepreneurs must do to reach their goals. One of the tools we looked towards was HN. We got some initial love in there, but once they invested (YC) in a company that was copying our every step the HN love shut down. Articles we posted/very relevant news even picked up by Huffington post, TNW and other media outlets, was repeatedly removed and shut out. At least with no transparency to voting or the 'karma factor' we had no way to know why. Along with that came the barrage of complaints from many influential developers and tech leaders we knew about the voting system, the mystical 'Karma' system and basically the fact that something once so simple and pure, full of positivity and support, became a place to lambaste, harass, condescend, denigrate and shut down intelligible and news-worthy items, startups and human beings. But like Friendster, MySpace and the ever famous forums and bulletin boards of past... things evolve from what once was innovative and positive, causing new generations of innovators to learn from the mistakes of their elders and build something better. more relevant. more useable. more friendly and more open... Thank you Paul for Hacker News and everything you and YC have always done for startups. You'll always be loved and respected by me... but for the disenchanted tech and startup link absorbers like me and so many of our close (and not so close) friends there is something new.

Welcome to Geeklist Links. Tech news, startup releases and developer links and resources, organized into your own categories, shared in tagged communities, saved, ^5'd, upvoting and down voting, with complete transparency. http://geekli.st/#link - built by developers for developers and the tech world. - Enjoy. Reuben Katz - these views I own.

Post reply on HN