251–260 of 264 posts
I just wanted to flag this:
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
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That's an interesting way of putting it. I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. What you're seeing is simply that at scale, politics is inextricable from tech+business, just as, at scale, business is inextricable from tech.
I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. It was tech+business before it was tech: The site started out as "Startup News" (which is when I personally have my fondest memories of it).
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>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…
I don't want my news to be funny, if it means they will be generally dull and full of commonly repeated jokes. As it happened in slashdot.
I learned about wiretapping from HN. Likewise, if HN refused to cover wiretapping the entire Internet, I would have a very solid reason to give up on them as a useful news source.
I do not believe HN is in any serious danger. People are obviously pushing back against the less relevant stories.
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> 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?
>Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria? What's sort of mass hysteria has been suggested? >The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too. Is that a function of IQ? My IQ reference was about the general decline in HN/Reddit comment quality, not about concern with the NSA on HN/Redditm which I think is a healthy thing. Being interested in the fact tha…
What's happening is a kind of evaporative-cooling effect- specifically, the very natural rise of cheap wit and sensationalism. These things trigger upvotes more easily. Pithy answers and responses get rewarded quicker by larger crowds, and this discourages the carefully-evaluated-and-reasoned answer.
We don't have to bring IQ into the picture when making sense of this phenomenon, so let's not do that.
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>Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria? What's sort of mass hysteria has been suggested? >The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too. Is that a function of IQ? My IQ reference was about the general decline in HN/Reddit comment quality, not about concern with the NSA on HN/Redditm which I think is a healthy thing. Being interested in the fact tha…
I wouldn't use the term IQ, it can be a bit misleading. High IQ individuals can squander their time arguing about frivolous nonsense (I went to school with a couple of guys like that). Average IQ folk can be thoughtful and engaging. What's happening is a kind of evaporative-cooling effect- specifically, the very natural rise of cheap wit and sensationalism. These things trigger upvotes more easily. Pithy answers and…
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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…
In the good old days, there was usenet... and it felt nice that there was only one place to discuss say a particular subject - and meet with those interested, and specialists within that realm. I couldn't stand the scurge of online forums as it scattered the conversations all over the place. And you also end up with the same conversations and realisations happening in different places. This could be negated if you did a little online homework, and posted a link to someone elses comment that perhaps was inline with yours. Kind of like a +1. But hunting down other comments and trawling through forums isn't efficient or particularly easy so I guess this isn't really that practical.
Anyway the point is that these conversations are happening elsewhere all over the place. So how do you seed/promote the piece and the ensuing conversation in the first place? And how do others know where the conversation is taking place. You could possibly provide a search for backlinks to your article.
It's kind of a shame that everyone doesn't have their own blog, and within their blog they just make a comment referring to what they've read elsewhere, and that link becomes available to read somehow from your article. This could be handled by the browser alone, it could do this by default - in a 'Elsewhere' panel for instance, by doing something like searching for backlinks etc. Pingbacks go some way, but they could be quite distracting.
I'm not sure how eternal HN comments are. Not hosting comments yourself puts you at the mercy of others.
Plus I'm not sure how polite any of this is. Hey myself and others are coming over to your place to discuss matters.
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> 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…
It's a presumption though to assume that the conversation will be happening over there. Or it seems to me a little lofty to suggest that a discussion should take place amongst those people. I get where you are coming from, from a springboard perspective - allowing people a forum for chat, but the thing is these chats could be happening all over the place. In the good old days, there was usenet... and it felt nice tha…
I personally don't have my own blog, I just throw comments into the wind on the web. If I were to host my own blog, I probably wouldn't add a comment system for fear that I'd want to censor or moderate them! But I'd welcome feedback.
My preference may be to have people email me their thoughts and for me to then add feedback to articles at a later time. This might be a little burdensome and not practical whatsoever.
To many the discussion is in part the article. And it feels too difficult to be at every table at the same time.
You could be absent from the conversation and leave your right to reply for a post mortem on your posts. You could do that by hunting down comments and discussions after the fact.
Who'll go back and how will they know to read your post mortem anyway?
It reminds me why I'm not a blogger or a journalist!
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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.
I've become a fan of the micro-paywall. A one-time fee of $5-10 is an amazingly powerful filter. Metafilter, as you said, is one example. Another is the Ruby Rogues Parley mailing list (now Discourse site). I can only imagine what a HN with similar filtering-of-the-noise would be like.