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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#131

Post by AJ007 »

Is it the legal stories that are crowding out the technology, or is it the low quality content factories?

Here is a sampling of the worst of what I can see right now (sliding off the front page): over 50 points - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are...

over 50 points - http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-reveals-108-year-o...

over 10 points - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-kindhearted-pe...

None of those belong on HN.

In any community, when the law threatens the existence or basic functionality of that communities interests, the law becomes the primary concern of everyone. Here, Python developers may not be interested in mobile UX design, VR hackers may not be interested in 40 year old PC hardware. However, they are all going to be concerned about legal issues that threaten their ability to operate and explore ideas -- be it laws that break and censor the internet, or laws that criminalize reverse engineering.

We have been under siege since the early 1990s. A few legal losses (in the United States) early on could have resulted in a very different internet than we have today. The level of education and understanding of the basic principles of information freedom and autonomy are poorly understand by many. If the community that builds the digital world turns its back on defending these principles, what we have will be taken away.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#132

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #114
deveac wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. The opposite is true. For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The…

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

[deleted]

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#133

Post by Semaphor »

graeme wrote: post #90
dictum wrote: post #58

I 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] A…

I'm part of #1. I avoid commenting on/upvoting political stories though. They're definitely the easiest to talk about. I stick to issues where I have some expertise. I'm a bit torn by these NSA revelations because most other sites seem to be ignoring them. But I feel they've become too prominent.

Dito. I rarely comment or upvote as I feel I'd contribute to the change in quality I'm seeing myself even though I have only been here for 2 years.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#134

Post by ricardobeat »

deveac wrote: post #112
ricardobeat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have ignored the gist of this whole discussion. As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?

Your point isn't clear. I don't believe I ignored anything, and where I was responding to the poster and the discussion, I quoted him/her so it would be clear what points I was responding to. If you have something specific to say, spell it out and maybe I can answer it for you.

The "anything that good hackers would find interesting" line is not a free pass. The NSA discussion is way past the point where it's interesting to most people. I, for one, despite my interest, don't want to read about the US government, security agencies and it's political system every day.

Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#135

Post by cabalamat »

zanny wrote: post #70
zalew wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN needs tagging or even general categories, so we can filter topics out.

Almost like... subreddits!

Each Reddit post only goes on one subreddit, but if HN allows posts to have more than one tag, then it could be active in several sub-HNs, one for each tag.

This is the same difference as between traditional email folders and gmail tags.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#136

Post by read »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #128
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

While I agree with you that all of those things are ridiculous (and I was vocal in arguing against them), is it fair to characterize the entire forum as being so easily swayed by ant-state sentiments? During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For eve…

Sometimes I wish comments were shorter so you could easily tell what's going on in a discussion.

The parent comment says X, the one below says the opposite, and then someone says X again. Do people click and write mainly to get karma? Should posting also cost karma?

The longer you write the easier it is to say something that's not true and harder for people to follow it accurately.

(I know I'm guilty of this.)

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#137

Post by derefr »

joelg236 wrote: post #123

I've had this opinion for a long time now. I think that voting systems slowly lead towards bad content, over years. It doesn't matter what's special about a website. This is because the users that should be upvoting/downvoting (ie. moderate/reasonable people who have no incentives of 'visibility' or the like) aren't. They just don't have an urge to upvote the things that should be. It's exactly why political stories…

> They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.

Indeed; this is commonly called "signal boosting." It's where there's content you have no personal reason to upvote/retweet/reblog/whatever -- but where you're affiliated with a group that would be furthered by doing that -- and so you do it anyway. I do believe a general policy against it could really help a community, but I don't know exactly how you'd implement that (other than naming-and-shaming users who do it.)

Also, though, voting systems only lead toward bad content when the website is also open-registration. If you'll notice, the first growth-period of these sites is usually pretty decent -- even though there's a voting system, the only people there are "core" members who are all there for the sake of the website's topic, so they only vote up that kind of content. It's when secondary and tertiary users flood the site and overwhelm the core audience that you see the decline. So, the solution could just be... not letting those users vote.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#138

Post by xtracto »

paulhodge wrote: post #30
cpayne wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

You used to find people like John Carmack in there... and electronics stuff was also talked about. Ask Slashdot's were answered with interesting insight. Now everything is mainly one-liners with stupid comments and only very few worthy users (eldavojohn and the like) remain.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#139

Post by hdivider »

Let's use this opportunity to remind ourselves of an adjacent problem: the number of helpful, insightful, creative comments not made for fear of retribution by knee-jerk contrarianism.

I say let's watch out for this, and make an effort to use a friendlier tone in comments. And smileys, when necessary. =)

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