HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot • Hacker News Board

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#211

Post by dylangs1030 » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:11 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #206

sytelus wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be good to see some data. For instance, how is the trend of average upvotes per user per month looks like? It is however clear that HN is attracting lot of marketers and activists. While I don't know all the efforts going in to fend this off, the ones I know such as banning specific URLs, dead stories etc look unorganic/bruteforce as opposed to clean algorithmic solutions. One clean solution would be to simp…

[deleted]

I strongly suspect he means stories.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#212

Post by ceol » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:17 AM UTC

anu_gupta wrote: post #97

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #57

I 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 d…

What are the decent alternatives? Or else, let's try to make this into something better, by flagging instead of commenting, and downvoting racist, sexist, bigoted crap instead of feeding the trolls.

If you're fine with more general topics and about a day's delay in "breaking" internet news (re: stuff that doesn't matter), I've found MetaFilter to be good. The pay wall filters out bottom-barrel trolls and the community is mostly nice enough to shame bigoted and extremist bullshit.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#213

Post by joshuaellinger » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:29 AM UTC

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…

I've read through (some of) your essays on HN design and think that, ultimately, you will have to introduce a little more complexity to handle posts that relate to identity cleanly.

The best option that I can see is to allow users to mark a post as 'off-topic' in addition to 'flag'. Subtract the off-topic count in some fashion and generate second set of rankings. Then allow users to chose between the normal front-page and the filtered front-page.

It would not split the community into have/have-nots and it would enable a little self-selected filtering. It feels like a general enough case that it would have merit across a wide range of posts.

It would also provide a lot more information upon which to make judgment calls.

Fascinating site you've got going. This is the only place where I can actually stand to read the comments.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#214

Post by diminoten » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:30 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #164

mjn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole. This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them…

Yes! It's like reading and tracking down sources is a kind of superpower here; sometimes, it feels like threads treat that as a kind of unfair advantage. In fact, if pressed, I could cite examples of commenters on threads asserting that.

I don't have time to hunt for sources, honestly. I'm not attempting to be a bastion of truth when I interact on the Internet, I'm attempting to explain my take on an issue, or ask a question based on what I already know.

Maybe I'm the problem, but I'm not going to change. I just don't have the resources to be 100% right every time I say things online.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#215

Post by vxNsr » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:40 AM UTC

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #207

xyzzy123 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion). I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality. To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mecha…

How recent do you think this shift is? I don't remember when I learned how juicy a target international telephony is, but it had to have bern the late 90s. Certainly defense contractor salesmen have been treating the hotel telephone with great suspicion for a long time.

I did't realize that anyone outside of movies even used hotel telephones anymore (except to call Housekeeping or the front desk).

About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.

Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#216

Post by brg » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:46 AM UTC

jfb wrote: post #53

paulhodge wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read slashdot from 1998 to about 2005, but I never once encountered MICROS~1. I wish I would have, I would have used it so often.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#217

Post by zalew » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:47 AM UTC

jfb wrote: post #192

grogenaut wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm a fan of Morozov too, and yeah, topic organization on discussion boards is a task that can actually be solved with technology :)

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#218

Post by yajoe » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 4:49 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #198

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 --- m…

Could not agree more. I lurked on HN for ~2 years before creating an account, also a 4-digit refugee from /. For the last 3 months I've been quietly mourning and seeking out a replacement for HN. It could be I'm no longer a target demographic and it's simply time for me to go (I'm a reserved cofounder of a profitable startup who has an angel investor and in my 20s).

In addition to the politics, I've noticed what feels like a bifurcation in age or maturity with stories and commenters. My working narrative is that much of the negativity is immaturity from HN's endless september of college and high school students, although I know that's likely incomplete as many simple narratives are. Also, something about reading a blog post with a "Discuss on HN" link at the bottom irks me to the point I feel like the content isn't so much about improving understanding as it is to generate clicks and drive traffic. I am not a fan of personal brands or personalities in any industry, though it feels like many come here to create one.

The issues I see are related to people and their behavior in the community and not the HN site or features. I believe the best way to nudge the community back to neutral is with more people correcting or excluding the negative behavior.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#219

Post by mcantelon » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 5:52 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #198

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 --- m…

The decline is because there are more people on the site, not because of politics per se. The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#220

Post by MattyRad » Mon, Aug 05, 2013, 5:56 AM UTC

I'm surprised, after reading through this thread. I've been frequenting HN for a little over a year now, and I enjoy reading the comments because this is the only forum I've found where users have coherent, interesting, grammatically-correct ideas. Just look at the comments in this thread. Almost every user tries to convey a full argument or counter-point. Take a look at Reddit or YouTube as a comparison. Does HN really seem to be on the decline?

Although I can testify to the click-baiting, sensational, politicized articles and comments, and may be guilty myself. Duly noted.