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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#181

Post by scythe »

deveac wrote: post #102
scythe wrote: post #47

I agree. The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal. This may, honestly, have something to do with the fact that pg himself, and the moderating team, were concerned enough to allow these topics to be prominent and widely discussed. Perhaps it was okay for a time, but if the board is to be politically mobilized on occasion (eg SOPA) it should be very infrequent and it needs to end at some point.…

>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…

>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 Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?

I feel that you've highlighted a possible underlying cause of HN's present malaise, which is: many community members here are poorly connected on the Internet. HN is an open website, which means that it is very easy for someone who is new to the Internet to find and browse. If you've been commenting a lot in the recent political threads, I can make the following predictions: you've participated in online fora for less than ten years, and you don't pursue social connections much deeper than reddit user flair.

If you would like to take part in a lot of technical and political discussions regarding surveillance, you should consider joining a newsgroup or mailing list (if there still are any, I know politech and cypherpunks are dead) specifically devoted to this discussion. Usenet requires a modicum of effort (and maybe a subscription fee) to participate, which can help to limit the discussion to serious contribution by serious participants. You may also want to subscribe to and comment on blogs by people who know about these things, so you can get to know people and contribute to a discussion that, in order to be any good, must stretch on far longer than a single comment thread. There are communities devoted to this sort of discussion.

The content-link plus tree-style-comments format of HN is good for day-long free-form discussion on lighthearted issues of interest to technical people. It is not suited for deep, long-term discussion of complex political issues. HN can't be usefully political even if it wants to be, any more than HN can be used to design novel methods of quantum error correction. Some things just aren't suited for the HN style of discussion.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#182

Post by brightsize »

Scryptonite wrote: post #94

I agree that there are some way-off-base topics on HN, but I don't mind the politics that are related to the hacker community. Such involves Aaron, Snowden, Manning, WikiLeaks, various legal and political talk on Startups, privacy rights, Big Tech companies, etc.. in the overarching industry. Some other stuff can also bleed in without disrupting how I feel about the site. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would…

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Bingo. I love HN for this very reason. Each time I visit, which is several times a day, I can count on finding a batch of postings about stuff I'm interested in: tech, startups, theoretical and applied science, law, philosophy, and yes, politics, just to name a few things, and quite often the intersection of one or more of these. I'm not a HN old timer, so may have missed-out on the before-the-Fall HN, but I have no regrets about that because it must have been a duller place.

I was a Slashdot addict before discovering HN. At one point I remember being really, really impressed by the great variety of people who posted there, people who had subject matter expertise that was all over the board. I might see, for example, a posting of an article about research into controlled fusion, and then browsing the comments I find information and insight posted by actual researchers in the field. This is what HN gives me today, and it's fantastic.

Perhaps a bit OT, but another thing that I love about HN is the level of civility in the comments and the swiftness with which people who break those unwritten(?) rules of decorum face chastisement. Rudeness is called out. People often humbly admit when they've made an error and apologize for it. People who make spelling or grammar errors aren't childishly flamed for it. HN feels like a big room full of well-mannered, intelligent adults, whereas /. (now) is a room full of twits and children and trolls and vandals. I have a hard time imagining HN ever becoming THAT because of the quality of this audience.

HN seems to have become not just a forum full of hackers, but a forum full of intellectuals including the non-hacker variety. These intellectuals, hackers and otherwise, have a diverse range of expertise, interests, curiosities, and passions. I learn something new every day from HN, usually tech or business-related, but often not, and I think that HN would be a far less interesting place if it was narrowly tech/startup focused. For me, HN simply ain't broke.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#183

Post by hnriot »

Isn't this simply addresses using a basic classifier, it would be easy enough to build a classifier from the HN API and then write a ux with sliders to balance the content, so if one group are interested in political posts (or comments) then so be it, for other they might prefer vc/entrepreneur content, and then there's the hard core tech content. Some form of SVM or LDA would do the trick. I'm not sure if stories, or comments should be suppressed. I'd implement it similar to how eclipse folds "content" (imports for example)

If anyone thinks this is worthwhile, I'll build it.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#184

Post by alecco »

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…

Exactly. We remember the best comments, not the typical nonsense like first posts, lame in-jokes and the raise of online internet vapid celebrities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#187

Post by potatolicious »

deveac wrote: post #121
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…

>In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Poor analysis by some of the users (there are a lot of non-technical commenters on here) doesn't negate the higher degree of technical discussion that has indeed been present here. Just because opinion and fallacious arguments are present doesn't mean that good technical…

I don't think tptacek is saying that good posts don't exist on HN, of course they do. The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low nowadays that it's hardly worth wading through all the hyper-politicized vitriol just to get to it.

The amount of horribly bad posts on HN has reached a proportion where they're no longer exceptions, they characterize the site as a whole.

Personally I've noticed my participation drop in the last few months because of this. There are fewer and fewer people interested in engaging in a discussion, and more and more religious zealotry where it's clear poster has zero interest in opposing views, and will stoop consistently to hostility and fundamental indecency when confronted.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#188

Post by FireBeyond »

scythe wrote: post #47

I agree. The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal. This may, honestly, have something to do with the fact that pg himself, and the moderating team, were concerned enough to allow these topics to be prominent and widely discussed. Perhaps it was okay for a time, but if the board is to be politically mobilized on occasion (eg SOPA) it should be very infrequent and it needs to end at some point.…

"The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal.”

To me, not as much. The most poignant catalyst, at least in recent times, to me, was Aaron Swartz. It’s just grown from there.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#189

Post by ricardobeat »

deveac wrote: post #147
ricardobeat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Shoul…

>The "anything that good hackers would find interesting" line is not a free pass. Exactly. Which is why I referenced the FAQ which states that most political discussion is discouraged and articulated precisely how and why this debate is not one of those times. > The NSA discussion is way past the point where it's interesting to most people. I think you meant "to me." Judging from the post rankings, frequency, and com…

> I think you meant "to me."

Maybe. You also clearly have a bias towards finding these interesting, so it's a moot point.

Taking rankings at face value is not ideal; there is a feedback loop, political posts are likely to engage an audience that likes and upvotes them, and bring more users with that profile to the site. Taking that to the extreme, you could have porn links take over HN in just a few hours if you let them through. It's a matter of setting directions, not catering to everyone's needs.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#190

Post by mhitza »

bigdogc wrote: post #78

i started coming here after reddit changed years ago. I dont know of any other websites similar to HN... very sad if it changes too.

I came here for the same reason a couple of years ago, but now I spend 90% time on reddit on the non mainstream subreddits.
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