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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#191

Post by ricardobeat »

krapp wrote: post #156
read wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

One problem with posts costing karma is that it would all but guarantee to stifle long discussions amongst any but the highest karma members -- especially if you end up autobanned when you run out.

That could be a good thing. It's very rare to see a deeply nested thread actually worth reading.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#192

Post by jfb »

grogenaut wrote: post #177
zalew wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SOLVE IT WITH TEH TECKNOlOGIES!

Heh. But to be fair, different technologies encourage different usage patterns, and it's reasonable to investigate how, given a goal, technological solutions could be applied. I'm plenty leery of "solutionism" [1], but that's not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] Evgeny Morozov's coinage, see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/evgeny-morozo...

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#193

Post by nitrogen »

anigbrowl wrote: post #4

Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing Ever. I base this on the numerous counterfactual statements showing a lack of historical awareness in discussions on contentious topics. Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.

Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing Ever.

To them, it is. Humanity's progress depends in part on freshly disillusioned young people to overreact to life's shortcomings and fight to correct them.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#194

Post by __david__ »

cabalamat wrote: post #135
zanny wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, I can put a message in 2 IMAP folders... So how are tags different?

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#195

Post by yareally »

karlshea wrote: post #63
smegel wrote: post #54

I 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 b…

I think that's the finer point that's missed when Slashdot (or most of Reddit) is brought up: "troll culture at its very core". Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.

> Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.

HN suffers from a more mild case of it with people being compelled to link at least one or two vaguely relevant xkcd comics in nearly every discussion without additional content. I like xkcd, but there's no reason to create noise by linking to it any time a comment or story reminds someone of it.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#196

Post by sytelus »

A large community often contains many subgroups. When a system allows any subgroups to take over and represent their sentiments as community's sentiments, the community starts to breakdown. To avoid this system needs to allow enough expressiveness. This would mean at least a upvote button as well as downvote button. By only allowing upvotes, HN steals away expressiveness of the community. Any jealous subgroup can essentially upvote a story they had like others to read and get it on top while other members of community have no recourse but to upvote something else and spread their expression thinly. We have seen this many times now. I can see marketers and activists coming over to HN and push a story on top with as little as 100 upvotes while rest of the community just sits back unable to express their preferences.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#197

Post by tzs »

It used to be worth being an XKCD 386 [1] guy when political discussion came up here. If someone said something you thought was wrong, you could spend 30 minutes or an hour writing a well researched response citing primary sources, and good discussion would result.

This is no longer true. Most of the political discussion here is now indistinguishable from /r/politics and /r/technology, where people are only interested in things that agree with the existing beliefs.

Lately, even conspiracy theories that are refutable without outside sources since they are internally inconsistent are getting traction here.

[1] http://xkcd.com/386/

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#198

Post by tptacek »

pg wrote: post #113

I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended tha…

You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads.

There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#199

Post by InclinedPlane »

karlshea wrote: post #63
smegel wrote: post #54

I 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 b…

I think that's the finer point that's missed when Slashdot (or most of Reddit) is brought up: "troll culture at its very core". Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.

I pointed out something similar in another comment but it's worth focusing on. One of the biggest problems of both reddit and slashdot is that they embrace humor at their core. This may not seem so bad but it's poison for mature conversation. Humor is cheap. And it doesn't require engagement.

What you see on both reddit and slashdot is an increasing tendency toward irony as the basic approach to any subject (4chan is the same way too). This overwhelms and actively drives away discussions that are serious and not ironic. This is why the highest quality subreddits (like askscience and askhistorians) enforce very strict rules and actively discourage humor for humor's sake. This is a big reason why stackexchange is so successful as well. And it doesn't mean humor is unwelcome at all these places, just that it needs to be part of something productive or humnorous enough to overcome the strong bias against it.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#200

Post by ceol »

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…

The problem is that many HN users think that because they are qualified to talk about tech, they are also qualified to talk about everything else. In reality, they're often not qualified to talk about anything.
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