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Hacker News is depressing

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Re: Hacker News is depressing

#71

Post by Udo »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #51

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 dozen…

> This is simply a problem of aggregating tens of thousands of content consumers in one spot and trying to have a single conversation.

If I may offer a counter point. One of the complaints about users on HN is how they treat Show HNs. The worst thing is arguably working on something and getting totally ignored. The second worst thing is probably getting verbal abuse for your project, from people you respect, no less.

When this happened to me (being ignored that is), I decided to try another community for feedback. It was 4chan/g. Now 4chan has the reputation of being somewhat of a sewer, but my experience was as different as night and day. People were interested, and above all: friendly and constructive.

So why am I not hanging out in /g then? I believe that HN has a higher ratio of users who are "my kind of people", commenters who I feel I have a connection with. But as it is, this comes at a price, because HN can be a less civil place. I don't this is written in stone, however, we can and should work on improving this dynamic.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#72

Post by brymaster »

vxNsr wrote: post #11

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point, because above a certain tolerance it stops being a community and becomes a city. CIP: I'm in a rural town for a couple days and everytime I walk outside everyone I pass says "Hi" or "Good Afternoon," the first time that happened I was kinda surprised I tried to figure out if I knew that pers…

> Honestly I feel like the only option is to just stop accepting new members at a certain point

Huh? So what's the cut off date then? I noticed your account was only created 86 days ago.

Making a forum an invite-only clubhouse doesn't improve discussion.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#73

Post by bestdayever »

DanBC wrote: post #39
danso wrote: post #19

I respect Dave but he has to realize, experienced as he is at blogging, that...this is the Internet, where no one knows you're a dog...or even an Internet pioneer. And he's done his fair share of rush-to-judgment posting...my first knowledge of him was during the whole Suggested Users List spat, in which he accused organizations, such as the NYT, of participating in payola: http://scripting.com/stories/2009/03/12/why…

> this is the Internet, The Internet is a big place. If you want YouTube comments ("Lol yuo dikk yo mama haet you die of cancer!!1!" you can go to youtube. > at least it's one in which it's possible for any participant, big or small, to improve the discussion Yes. Let's keep working at making HN better. Comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731152 ) should be vigorously downvoted.

In the same vain, why do we have random blog posts on hn. If you wanna blog, take it to a blog. If you wanna show off some tech or code, bring it to hn.

EDIT: I'm not just talking about this specific post, I don't really care when linus yells at somebody in a mailing list etc. If it's some opinion piece or fluff piece I just don't really get why it's here.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#74

Post by quackerhacker »

First off, most of your guys on here know me now and my background with Google not being a good one, so I don't have a bias opinion.

I think at least the devs at Google DO care and they take pride in their work (like every damn dev should). The problem that happens when your company (Google) services so many is that your voice isn't heard against the noise...(I think weev felt this with ATT).

I didn't get a chance to read the comments on the Mayer article (feel free someone to reply a HN link), but if you were getting personally attacked, that's immature of whoever trolled you. HOWEVER.....You can't generalize your experience with Semantics and assume that Mayer will be the same way. I think Mayer is doing a great job, and given her position at Yahoo will lead it the right way. (Still waiting for Yahoo to redesign that ugly homepage though, wasn't she credited for Google's simplistic search homepage?).

Side Note: I thought I read somewhere that Google's chief PR (the decider) went to work for the Obama Admin?

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#75

Post by davewiner »

jmduke wrote: post #57

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…

Re "seemed to ignore" -- I read every comment in that thread as of this morning.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#76

Post by DanBC »

bestdayever wrote: post #69

Why does HN even allow blog posts. If it isn't showing off new tech or code why is it here?

1) HN is about more than code and tech.

2a) HN wants people to link to the original source article. So, in theory, blogs would not get posted.

2b) HN asks people not to editorialise when submitting links. Thus, if you want to include some text about an article you're submitting you're supposed to make a blog post, with a link to the article in the blog, and then post to HN the link to your blog post.

At least, that's how I understand it. It feels sub-optimal.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#77

Post by marknutter »

npsimons wrote: post #67
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…

EDIT: In the spirit of being less negative, I'm deleting my original comment. I still contend that Mauro was in the wrong, and refused to acknowledge or fix his mistake, but will agree that Linus probably could have handled it better.

> At that point what can you do?

Verbally abuse him, obviously.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#78

Post by brymaster »

vxNsr wrote: post #63
127001brewer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes, pg is not gonna be happy. Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving . And, in my opinion, limiting the number of participants in this community would be a terrible mistake. Perhaps there's other ways to limit trolling, such as limiting the number of comments you can submit pe…

>Communities like this are like water: it changes constantly sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. The only thing to be happy about is whether or not it's thriving. I agree but wouldn't it be nice if we could keep it changing for the better? EDIT: Sorry if I wasn't clear, some really good ideas have been presented here, I only posted the first couple ideas that came to mind, expecting all the other re…

> I agree but wouldn't it be nice if we could keep it changing for the better?

Locking a forum down doesn't change anything. It seems like you're just wanting to censor dissent.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#79

Post by patrickmay »

meritt wrote: post #49

Want to get rid of the majority of trolls, abuse and unnecessarily negative behavior? Remove anonymity. These fake points don't do much at all.

I think I've posted this here before, but there is some evidence that eliminating anonymity does not improve civility: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...

Anonymity or pseudonymity do, however, have benefits that should be considered before eliminating them. Whistleblowers and employees of companies being discussed are the two that come to mind immediately.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#80

Post by fmstephe »

I agree with this sentiment. I was really surprised by the response to Dave's post yesterday. It was extremely disappointing to read such vitriol over what seemed like a fairly straightforward and useful observation about acquisitions.

The real question is how do we fix it? I have often thought that what I would prefer would be a fully curated news feed rather than one managed by the upvote system. But this wouldn't seem to work well in practice. I would be relying on the persistent effort of a small number of curators, who might get sick or bored or go on holiday or they just might never exist in the first place - who wants to hand curate a new feed for some other people?

But what if we provided a very simple tool for producing a curated feed, so a curator could just right click in their browser to add a link to their feed. What then if we allowed the readers to aggregate these curators? The aggregation is yet another (semi)curated feed which can be followed for further aggregated.

This could (possibly) produce a single feed very similar to HN, but it seems likely that we could easily seek out a feed which was heavy on CS theory and light on VC politics (or the other way around).

The biggest challenge that I see is making it engaging to the curators. Right now we allow submissions and you get points for submitting something that gets upvoted or for making upvoted comments. I think we can make the experience rewarding but there are a lot of details, wherein live devils.

Maybe it sounds like I just recreated reddit, but this system would not have any votes, just aggregation of curated feeds.

Any thoughts?

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