21–30 of 111 posts
This seems like a relevant venue to mention my startup http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info which dampens HN flagging, re-ranks and merges the top submissions along with those from other tech sites. Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN
Wow... everything is a startup nowadays
Matt's reasons: 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. 3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. 4. The comm…
https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521
"The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Only he's back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.
Ah, Jacques - the greatest of the farewells, and the one I'm most glad returned.
Only he's back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN:
1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here.
2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.
In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments
for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only
for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned
and well-stated that I disagree with than just another
guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me
square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably
just about any site with voting.
If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have anything changed since then?
I still get mad about this: 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here.
Did I mention I like complaining?