131–140 of 286 posts
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This approach didn't work for Slashdot, Digg and Reddit, which are all fallen civilisations. If we don't try anything new to solve the problem, this civilisation will fall as well.
Reddit actually has extremely high quality subreddits - it is just the main tags that have degraded.
Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-…
Right at this moment, actually, HN looks a lot like HN of old. There's one vaguely political article (Google fiber), but it's about a technical topic. There's nothing about BitTorrent, only one about Bitcoin (it's even technical!), nothing about Apple, and only this one complaining about how HN has changed. There are three Show HNs.
I think the comment quality is up to good standards in the current frontpage articles. For this reason addressing comment quality is putting the cart before the horse.
Am i missing something? If it costs karma to comment and you have no karma, how are you supposed to earn enough to start commenting again?
> I have a suggestion for improvement: it should cost Karma to comment, and when your Karma drops below a certain threshold you can no longer comment.
HN already does almost this. If I post a lousy comment people will down vote it, and I will lose karma, and if my karma drops below a certain value I will no longer be able to comment.
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I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?
And what might that "n" be that lets the last man over the bridge?
def cutoff():
return min([leader.age for leader in get_leaders("http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders")]
I think this would really solve the problem with rampant downvoting of things people disagree with (as opposed to downvoting low quality content, which is what it's supposed to be for).
But I still find that there are many exceptional comments and so even though I now consume a smaller percentage of overall daily content than I did a few years ago, I don't think the quality of the content I consume via HN has gone down at all.
There are occasionally threads that appear to have no interesting comments in them, and those are usually the sort of vapid, TechCrunch stories or tabloidesque personal interest stories that many of us find annoying.
For what it's worth, I also find it annoying to read weak technical blog posts written by people who are clearly just trying to generate blog traffic and don't really have anything interesting or motivated by a real startup problem.
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I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about: - Apple in glowing terms - a LISP - how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut…
So, you don't seem to like posts about Apple but you do seem to like posts about Android. Isn't this the whole 'problem'? People only object to posts they don't want to see, so to a fandroid any post about Apple proves that HN is full Apple fanboys.
In fact, http://winsupersite.com (run by Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott) has been flagged so much that it is has been hellbanned even from being submitted at all for the crime of being a Microsoft inside news site. This would be hilarious if it weren't sad commentary on the nature of the HN community echo chamber.
I havent been there in years, and I only ever lurked, but I felt like slashdot came close to getting this right, in that you could rate the qualities of something on various axis (ie funny/insightful/interesting), which made scanning the comments really easy. If I didn't want snark I could skip over that easy enough, whereas if I was in the mood for it I could just go all out reading that.
If I were to notice a trend, I would say the site has moved from being a little bit more positive but echo-chambery, to a bit more critical/negative but with more diversity of opinions. I have no opinion on whether that's better or worse, it just feels like a shift of tone to me.
If I were to make a criticism of hacker news though (and it's a minor one -- I'm still here after all), it's that this community is maybe a little too self-serious, out of a terrible fear of becoming redditesque.
Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-…