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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#231

Post by lmm »

ser0 wrote: post #82

I think this is true for most communities as they mature. Issue-of-the-day become more prominent as core topics get discussed to death. For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other programming languages most common experiences have been share…

>For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other programming languages most common experiences have been shared and novel new ideas become fewer.

I don't think that's all there is to it. There are any number of programming languages at a similar level of maturity and popularity to go, but go gets a disproportionate number of stories on HN. Something is distorting the voting.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#232

Post by Terretta »

belorn wrote: post #230
tptacek wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment neatly characterizes the kinds of discussions we have on this issue; it starts with innuendo about how the NSA could have what any reasonable person would refer to as direct access to servers, then retreats to a broad, abstract position crafted to make the innuendo harder to rebut. Thank you.

You seem to frame it in a very odd light. I don't see anything in that comment could be refereed as an "innuendo", nor do I see any source for comment to be crafted as to make something harder to rebut. From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive? In…

Thanks. This thread is a meta discussion about HN, not a technical discussion on concrete data collection methods.

I agree NSA's slides are not innuendo. Neither were BigCom denials. To me it seems reconciling those is neither a rebuttal nor a retreat, it's advancing the conversation from two disputing sides (NSA lying vs corporate collusion) to a third "this is likely what's meant, as seen in multiple concrete cases from 2006 to today, and makes sense of currently available info."

The 19 July story by Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, disclosing one in flight data capture practice well known to the data center community, was not abstract. The latest xkeyscore reveal fits this model as well.

"Are they or aren't they" isn't the most productive debate to have anyway. If they aren't, they could, and if the end result is the same, what should we do about it?

As you suggest, the discussions in this area I do appreciate at HN are on what honest rational policy should be, and on how technologists can assist in ensuring trust in confidentiality and non-repudiation in the cloud of services HNers are building.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#233

Post by regandersong »

After a sudden influx of traffic years back, HN had an Erlang Day where the only thing upvoted was articles about Erlang. I can't tell you if it helped HN get better or not, because it caused me to come back after seeing how much the community cared about the quality of the site. Perhaps it's time to make HN proud of its boringness again?

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#234

Post by consonants »

yareally wrote: post #91
dictum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. On the other hand, maturity often comes with apathy to real societal problems and abuse from bad actors, masked as greater insight: a sense of "that's just the way things are".

A lot of it is indeed the way things have always been, but that absolutely does not excuse allowing such actions to persist in the future. However, posts with a sense of naive shock that nations have only started doing unethical things in the past 20 years (or that a certain nation has changed) instead of realizing nations have always done unethical/questionable things is a hyperbole. Even the most civilized countrie…

Honestly, I blame the way history is taught in America. It's neutered any sense of class solidarity, riddled with retroactive ideological lensing and the worship of personalities.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#235

Post by antitrust »

> HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out.

Activism? The political topics do kind of have a "let's all get along" and "do the right thing" feeling to them. It reminds me of going to the store to get junk food, then when I'm there realizing I should be buying the "lite" and "low salt" versions.

The political dimension to technology has always baffled me. Everyone seems to want me to think something. And yet, no matter what we do, the same problems remain. Where do I sign up to vote against politics?

Regarding Slashdot, all internet sites have a finite lifespan, however, and eventually the cruft builds up. That can be in the code, or the "culture," in the userbase itself.

I guess what we have in common at HN is liking to do things, so we should talk about that, and not theorize about what we should think about how we do it.

I come here for the technology news and the personalities, myself.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#236

Post by antitrust »

mcantelon wrote: post #219
tptacek wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.

Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria?

The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too.

Is that a function of IQ?

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#237

Post by gadders »

gadders wrote: post #225
tptacek wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. I came here to be learn about technology and to be inpsired to one day make the leap from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur. I don't come here to read about politics.

What happened to my spelling there? Jeez.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#238

Post by saraid216 »

zalew wrote: post #31
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.

> Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools. We have civics at high school (of course not in the Finland sense, sadly), and I somehow fail to see the correlation.

I had a civics class in high school. It was the same class as economics, and we truncated the economics class in order to teach to the AP civics test. My only memories of that class were seeing the yearbook students wandering in and out, because they used the same room, and learning and playing card games. I think it may have been mentioned that there were three branches of government at some point.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#239

Post by DanielBMarkham »

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'm not so sure Hacker News succeeding is the top thing in the world of important priorities to me.

And while overly emotional topics are certainly bad currency in a large group -- no doubt about that -- I find it weird that we think we can talk about helping people suffering from starvation, slavery, lack of electricity, and all kinds of other problems and not be able to discuss the impact of the technology we create in the privacy and anonymity realms. I'd go so far as to say it's purposefully myoptic. Seems like all sorts of things are fair game -- as long as it doesn't show us the results of our own work too closely. We'll talk about any problems but the ones we helped create.

I wish HN the best of luck, and I certainly don't want flame wars or policy advocacy here. But hell, we're not morons. Or robots. If you want all that gossipy SV crap on the front page, you're going to have to take some other stuff you don't like as much. People vote based on emotional impact of stories. I can't see how you "fix" HN by continuous tweaking, making the system non-intuitive and frustrating.

Perhaps the best thing to do is go back to just tech and business. But even then, I find it impossible to believe that we can continue to live in some kind of artificial bubble where uncomfortable topics from the outside world never appear. If that's the plan, good luck with that.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#240

Post by derefr »

yajoe wrote: post #218
tptacek wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel…

> 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.

Offtopic, but I've considered adding such a link to my own blog before--not to "generate clicks and drive traffic", but--since I don't have inline comments--simply to give people something to click through if they want to comment on a post of mine without breaking flow. If you know where "the" discussion for your post will be happening, why not just link to it?

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