There will be something new when it gets bad enough. I still browse slashdot every few days though, and I imagine hackernews will be the same in the not too distant future. If you want something hacker-to-the-core there are still sites like hackaday that focus nearly exclusively on actually building cool stuff. There is a place for everything I guess. I for one like some diversity though and banking all my news gathering on one site has been the opposite of what I have always wanted. In news I try to check in on npr and limbaugh (differing, but influential perspectives (many that I disagree with, but are important to understand none the less)). In the tech world, I check out slashdot for opinions on corpratey sys admin stuff, I check out hackaday for garage hardware hacking stuff, I check out techcrunch for hipster VC stuff, I check out hackernews for mostly new web service stuff, and I checkout reddit for... well, mostly pictures of cute huskies. Each has there own utility, but when something gets too off base, I check it less and let the cream rise to the top in my rss reader of choice. At the moment, we are in a bit of a spot where it is hard to tell where the next solid source of hacking news is, so I have been spending most of my "check it every time the code compiles time" on IRC, which is fantastic for the particular communities I happen to be involved in right now.
HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
51–60 of 264 posts
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.
That's an interesting way of putting it. I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. What you're seeing is simply that at scale, politics is inextricable from tech+business, just as, at scale, business is inextricable from tech.
For me, the issue is that the legal and political (and to a growing degree, the business) discussions here are totally uninteresting; I'm not particularly interested in engaging in those sorts of conversations anywhere. But there are so many really great posters who have such strong, smart technical opinions that I keep coming back.
Tagging might help, at least at the story submission level.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be interesting to know who remembers the days when Slashdot was good
I remember when it was good, but I don't really remember a time that there wasn't a fanatical vibe to it. The content there has always been strongly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft. There was a time where people actually used the phrase, "Year of the Linux Desktop" without being sarcastic. Oh and writing "Micro$oft" was popular too. And there was always stuff about open source and GNU and GPL and etc. The thing that mad…
I always thought "MICROS~1" was funnier.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#54I find this doom-mongering a bit over the top. Slashdot basically was a troll culture at its very core, and while it could be funny at times, it never really elevated itself to a place for serious discussion.
Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links to interesting topics.
Even if the discussion can be a bit asinine at times, the value of the links alone is worth it, and there will be at least one or two interesting discussion threads per link.
Just ignore the crap.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#55As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent. I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to…
The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.
I can discuss politics with politicians and economics with economists, but I still like to discuss both with people I like for no other reason than because I like them.
It also offers a different perspective.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#56What I don't like is that more and more, showing radicalism is encouraged and upvoted and showing restrain and judging words well gets downvoted or ignored.
"This shows that capitalism is evil." - "This shows that free market will solve everything."
Pretty soon we will have "9/11 was an inside job" posters on the top.
I still think the news themselves are great. I just don't like the discussions anymore.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#57I agree completely. I've been on HN for almost six years now (sidenote: wow!), and I'm in the top 40 users on the site by karma. And, despite the exhortations to not think that the site is becoming Reddit, the community is absolutely changing for the worse.
There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:
* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.
* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, there's nothing new to talk about. I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's really boring.
* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041616 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314
As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable).
Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha) everything politics-related.
Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some help from pg.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#58I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. HN has an influx of new users who are somewhat interested in technology and technology businesses, but do not have enough domain expertise to engage on discussion of technical subjects, or subjects related to startups, such as design, customer support, finance, laws (as in interpretation of legal code, not politics), etc. For them, it's easier to engage in political debate. [EDIT] As a secondary theory: politics is a subject which interests a greater number of people than an specific technical subject or business practice.
2. HN's format concentrates debate and attention on articles that get popular just after being submitted: because more pondered or technical articles take more time to get popular, they never reach the front page.
3. With no major shift in the industry in the past year, and with mostly the same players (all of which were implicated in the NSA leaks, for instance), legal issues sparked from executive and judiciary actions are getting more attention, because they make for fresher, more sensational news, and reveal unanswered questions.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#59I still frequent Slashdot (no longer "News for nerds, stuff that matters", mind you), although it's practically redundant given that I frequent HN and Ars Technica.
HN and Ars seem to be complementary, HN gets links to things that Ars wouldn't report on and Ars reports on things that HN wouldn't get links to. There's overlap but that doesn't detract from going from one site to the other.
HN makes Slashdot somewhat redundant. When I read Slashdot, a good chunk of the articles are links to things that appeared on HN three days ago.
Also the Slashdot editors can't edit for shit. I guess they're too busy posting thinly-veiled advertisements for Dice.
If the commentary on Slashdot ever became less informative (although the signal to "Micro$oft $hill!!!!" ratio is decreasing...), then I'd leave.
Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. Do you remember the first dot-com boom? In 1999, it sure seemed like we were going mainstream. Nerds were cool! Of course, once the money stopped, we were thrown aside like a sticky sock.
I was a) too young and b) too sheltered from it we were only just getting consumer dial up in homes about that time in our country. But as i understand it yes although that was more like a gold rush in peoples living rooms. Unlike what we have today, a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute of the day. Dont gete wrong the desktop isnt going anywhere soon we just have a new poster…
>a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute of the day.
- you are speaking of popularizing and monetizing the internet on mobile devices.
In the last dot-com, we were popularizing and monetizing the internet on desktops.
To someone that has lived through both? it looks pretty similar. Lots of dumb ideas that will crater, and a few good ones that will endure. (Of course, it's difficult to tell the difference now... but it will be clear once this business cycle turns downward.)
So yeah. Right now? there's a lot of investment hype (and thus a lot of media hype -- follow the money.) focusing on the folks who write software for the internet (or the internet on cellphones, now.)
Once the money falls back to 'normal' levels? yeah, the media will forget about us. We'll go back to being creepy nerds. After the first dot-com crash, there were a bunch of stories about nerds who became temporarily rich and blew their fortunes on stupid garbage. I think it was a lot like the schadenfreude of focusing on sports stars who ended up blowing their giant gains on fancy houses and cars that forced them into bankruptcy a few years later.
As a youngster? the takeaway should be "I don't know when this will end, but it probably won't last forever."
You need to get good experience while the getting is good. I used the first dot-com to work with some really great people; I still brag about stuff I did when I was 17.
Oh boy, the employment situation after the first dot-com crash? it was terrible. I mean, I was able to fight my way into the top 25% (and was able to exploit some connections) so I stayed employed... but as late as 2004, I was able to hire people I had worked with before; people that weren't worse than I was in 1998, for retail wages. I found one guy I had worked with making sandwiches at a deli. "I can't pay you what you're worth, but I can beat the deli." - this was less than a two hour train ride from silicon valley. And the guy really wasn't bad. Sometime around 2007-2008 he took over one of my (reasonably paying, by silicon valley standards) jobs and did pretty great. He's been fully employed at rates similar to what I would get working for other people since.