191–200 of 286 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your all caps typing could be considered rude, unless you are actually meaning to shout those words.
Touché. Caps were just meant to share my frustration ... no yelling.
Problem: HN has problems which seem not to get fixed despite recommendations made to the maintainer(s?). Why? I suspect it's because maintaining HN is one of the lowest priority jobs to the maintainer of HN. The guy is busy! Fixing problems or implementing possible features quickly would have very low ROI to such a person. This isn't to say that he(they?) doesn't care - just doesn't have time because his other responsibilities are actual responsibilities, not a hobby. This is the equivalent of hiring an independently wealthy person to work for your company. The person may really like working for you, but you can't rely on them. They have little incentive to stick around if they get even slightly bored.
Solution: Make a new one. Someone make something better. You know where your primary audience lives (here) so you know where to find users. Monetize it in some way so that I know you'll keep working on it. Make it your full time gig. With the number of users you could get, you wouldn't have to ask for much. A donation model would probably pay you a pretty good salary. Be nice to the community and make reasonable attempts to fix the issues they bring up. They'll probably even help you fix them if you need them to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never seen this, thank you for pointing it out - I will use it, but to be honest this is precisely the kind of valueless bureaucratic comment that irritated me enough to write the blogpost. This is an internet forum, not a hashtable; uniqueness is not a design requirement, conversation, discussion and thought are, so I intend to have many more "Fire Aim Ready" moments. If I think about something strongly enoug…
So you are part of the problem - repetitive content - that you seek to eliminate? The suggestion you made was also made over 1600 days ago. The problem you claim is new was happening before you joined! Maybe the hints and tips for new users could repeat every couple of months? Sorry for grumpiness if this post sounds grumpy.
If a comment gets downvoted the user already loses karma on it, does it really matter if you award one extra karma penalty point? And given that downvotes are free above the threshold I don't see how a comment that adds very little value would not get downvoted by someone, I think that comments that get no downvotes and no upvotes aren't inherently malevolent.
> My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the sake of saying something and collecting Karma.
If collecting karma is the reason they are made not getting any upvotes would already be a deterrent, no?
IMHO this suggestion makes no sense, all it does is deter people from posting on long threads, because few people tend to read those and posts there often end up with no upvotes or downvotes, and to comment articles with many comments, because the pages after the first one are effectively inaccessible.
But I also think that Hacker News has been improving in the last year, so we probably disagree. What I would fix is the "new" page, which is getting filled with trash and too fast moving, decoupling submission karma from comment karma would help. Requiring a minimum comment karma to submit entries would help a lot too and it would single-handedly kill spambots too.
The downward spiral feeling comes from after reading HN for a while, you start to reread the same articles and same comments. It does not mean HN gets worse and worse, it means you extract less and less value.
I feel like this is closer to the root cause. People start out and everything is new, and they have this huge sense of wonder about what is going on around them in the valley, and then after a year or two you realize that bigger picture moves more slowly, a lot of people re-invent the wheel, Etc. But the conversations are actually nearly the same quality, they are just re-hashes of conversations you already know the…
Why does it have to be mainly about Silicon Valley? I like to think that there are a lot of interesting people and companies outside Silicon Valley.
In my opinion, there can be a lot noise here, but the quality postings and comments are much, much better than anywhere else. And, yes, the bigger picture moves more slowly than a lot of us would like. But isn't that the way things work?
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-…
As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you. When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking about it I've realised what has changed: Me. It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeab…
To much dumb posts about something insignificant by somebody in SV or YC that are not interesting to me.
I do think that's their good right, to make their "own" new community ofcourse:) but then we have to look to other sources for quality tech & startup news.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Touché. Caps were just meant to share my frustration ... no yelling.
Italics tend to come across as much less imposing to readers, I use them heavily now.
I wish there where more text modifiers (like bold and underline), as well as some kind of documentation for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what might that "n" be that lets the last man over the bridge?
I just checked mine ... 1337 days seems like a good number :)
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-…
As long as 2-3 years ago, I still got massively upvoted at times for (thoughtful) criticisms of Ayn Rand. The real problem used to be the transhumanists.