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Hacker News is depressing

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Re: Hacker News is depressing

#51

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I do not read the comments on HN of the pieces I write.

I used to. I used to love hearing really smart people help out with whatever was puzzling me. Perhaps I can get back to that.

But damn, this is a negative bunch. Whatever topic, whatever opinion you have, it's somebody's hot-button issue and somebody else doesn't understand what the fuck you are saying. Sometimes this is the same person. Most times this is dozens of people.

At MicroConf a few of us were talking about the kind of junk traffic that HN sends any more. "It's like having a bunch of angry nerds drive by in a bus throwing food at you" one person ventured. Another had a better analogy: "It's like having a busload of grumpy senior citizens show up at your store, picking through stuff, complaining about the prices, going on about irrelevant things, and generally being ornery, obnoxious and trashing everything that you've done."

This is not a problem of individuals. HNers are some of the best folks in the world. This is simply a problem of aggregating tens of thousands of content consumers in one spot and trying to have a single conversation. I think HN has scaled as far out as it's going to.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#52

Post by probably_wrong »

DanBC wrote: post #21

Not sure if it's any consolation, but some people were downvoting personal insults, and in the few minutes I spent reading the thread some people were calling out personal insults as a bad thing, and asking people not to do it. More people need to downvote direct personal insults. The author is right that it's a problem.

I don't have a downvote button, probably because I'm new and I don't have enough karma. I wanted more than once to downvote insulting comments, but alas, I cannot.

I can upvote, however, meaning that I have both the ability to insult in comments and upvote insults that agree with whatever I want to insult at the time. That seems like a recipe for abuse if/when the userbase increases unexpectedly by a large magnitude, as older users wouldn't have the numbers for cutting down this behavior.

But other than closing down registrations and sending new applicants to "Hacker News 2", I don't know how to fix this.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#53

Post by stcredzero »

> They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)

The kind of people I seek out on line are people who understand the truth as something separate from them, which comes from a diverse and complicated objective reality. The kind of people I abhor are those whose personal power derive from punishment/reward of those around them in order to climb the social ladder.

There are more and more of the 2nd kind here on HN. There is more short sightedness, and more ageism. There is far less broad technical knowledge, and the level of Computer Science knowledge seems to have fallen dramatically. There are people who casually mix up "collide" with "collude" and will downvote you for pointing that out.

HN has gotten bigger. As usual, it's gotten stupider as a side effect.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#54

Post by bestdayever »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #8

I thought people were a bit harsh yesterday too

It was mostly people saying personal attacks weren't helpful and self reflection then this post came out and said "IM TOTALLY BUTTHURT SO IM TAKING MY BALL AND GOING HOME". I'm not really sure which is worse but neither is good.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#55

Post by onemorepassword »

There has been a recurring pattern of quite vitriolic ad hominem attacks on certain people on HN in a way that I can only describe as "celebrity-bashing" for quite while now. Other favorite targets are for instance RMS and Gruber.

This isn't just the odd troll. There's a lot of cheerleading going on in the form of upvotes, even though the attacks don't contribute anything, and would normally be downvoted into light grey.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#56

Post by onemorepassword »

There has been a recurring pattern of quite vitriolic ad hominem attacks on certain people on HN in a way that I can only describe as "celebrity-bashing" for quite while now. Other favorite targets are for instance RMS and Gruber.

This isn't just the odd troll. There's a lot of cheerleading going on in the form of upvotes, even though the attacks don't contribute anything, and would normally be downvoted into light grey.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#57

Post by jmduke »

This is tricky.

On one hand, Hacker News, despite being one of the best of its kind, is a programming community, and programming communities (or similarly populated communities: online gaming, etc.) are possibly the most overwhelmingly negative and vitriolic I find online. (Huge exception: StackExchange.) I find it perplexing that the business & finance communities I visit are consistently more civil and constructive. Remember the developer who got flamed for creating (not promoting or arguing the superiority of, merely posting on GitHub) an sed/awk replacement? Our community is an overwhelmingly mean one at times.

(You can dress it up as engineers/developers/hackers being more honest, more blunt, less MBA-y, whatever. It's unpleasant and hurts people's feelings.)

On the other hand, in the midst of all the ad hominem of yesterday's discussion (you can find it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738455) there was a lot of valid commentary which Dave Winer (whom, for the record, I have never talked to nor do I know his accomplishments) seemed to ignore. The reasonable extrapolation from My One Talk with Marissa Mayer was that Winer felt she was an individual whom did not respect developers' viewpoints or a more 'balanced' view of the web. Specifically, he says:

All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.

And I think it's entirely valid to say that, hey, isn't it a massive logical leap to get here from the anecdote of the 'BlogThis!" button?

Winer seems to be asking Hacker News to be polite, which I think is important: but I think it's better that Hacker News is good, and along the way it seems obvious that being polite is better than not being impolite.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#58

Post by michaelochurch »

I put myself on a self-imposed break (which I'm breaking now, sorry; it seems to be more of a one-post-per-day policy) from HN because I don't want to be contributing to the problem. But as long as the quality of my posts doesn't degrade (flame wars do that) I think 1 per day is fine.

I think we, as a group, tend to be shitty judges of character, but our arrogance blinds us to the need for improvement. We're cynical about "people" in general, but we latch on too quickly to businesspeople who seem above-the-fray or decent, often based on superficial signals. (This is like the creepy guy who fabricates a relationship with a girl because she smiles at him.)

A consequence of this is that we can't perceive it when we the people above us play divide-and-conquer games against us. Language wars. This team against that team. IDE-users vs. command-line developers. Efficient but "not dedicated" 8-to-6 family guys vs. inefficient all-nighter types. Pro-Google vs. anti-Google. Facebook users vs. Facebook haters. Young vs. old. We've all been monstrously played and most of us don't even see it.

Your enemy isn't the guy who wrote the shitty code. He was quite possibly working under an obscene deadline in a job he couldn't afford to lose. No, the enemy is the boss who mandates you use the shitty code (using the nicest possible language, i.e. "we won't be able to deliver unless ") instead of letting you rewrite it; when he makes a common enemy out of the original architect, he's fucking playing you.

Most of our road-wear that we get in this career comes from wrong assumptions we make when divide-and-conquer games are played against us. We eventually wise up to the bad character of the players, but we retain those biases for a long time, and start saying things like "every shop I know of that used the JVM (N = 1) was unable to hire good people"... when the real reason that shop couldn't hire talent was that it paid poorly.

Just what I've seen. All this incivility and in-fighting comes out of our willingness to tear each other apart based on superficial differences, and that's something that's been inculcated in us from above. Why? Because we're fucking easy to control that way.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#59

Post by abstractbill »

jgrahamc wrote: post #6

So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News. That could certainly be implemented (either on Hacker News, or by the site owner doing a redirect to a permanent 404 based on the referrer). But that seems like a loss. It's a loss to HN if links to scripting.com were forbidden. Also, within the thread that he is talking about there was a gr…

It seems like there are some more subtle ways of doing it though. If Dave had a mechanism for proving to HN that he was the owner of a particular URL (e.g. by adding something to its html), then perhaps he could tell HN what to do with that url: Don't allow links to it at all; Link, but don't have a comment thread, etc.

Come to think of it, if it was successful this could be generalized to a mechanism that all forums could be expected to support, just like search engines are supposed to honor robots.txt

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#60

Post by DrJokepu »

simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

I don't think this is a "programme-type" thing. Generally, people are often mean, especially if they can get away with it or they can forget that the other person is also a human being (both of them are very easy to do on the Internet). Women too. It's human behaviour.
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