Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

(Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

mattmaroon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 111 posts

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#31

Post by jacquesm »

oskarth wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #6

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.

The people who quit for real usually don't start with a statement. I think making a big deal out of it is a way of telling oneself why one should quit. Contrast this with someone asking the question "Why did you quit?"and replying with why one did quit.

Considering that I quit for almost a year in much the same way I disagree. The best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I never learned anything as an entrepreneur from the people that just left. But I listened very well to those that left and told me why. Of course HN has no direct commercial incentive to retain Matt or me or anybody else, as long as we're contributing it's fine and when we're not there are 100's like us to take our place.

So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less.

And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#32

Post by hellbreakslose »

Well tbh he has a fair point, and I tend to be true on what I write. I get a lot of down-votes cause I guess I am speaking my mind and I ain't try to write some scientific report for someone to read...

In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see.

I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#33

Post by jacquesm »

iopq wrote: post #28

I still can't downvote after more than a year of commenting. I guess not enough people agreed with my comments so I don't have this power.

How many 'points' you have is mostly a function of how much time you spent here.

If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#34

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

ionwake wrote: post #9

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

Thoughts:

* Domains popping in when your mouse scrolls over something is annoying. Really annoying. My mouse is not my eyes - just because my eyes are on something does not mean my mouse is, and vice versa. And the popin ends up being movement, which is distracting. The same issue I have with the DDG redesign.

* Said domains popping in do not have a fallback without JS.

* Random icons (and in an icon font, none the less, which again, does not exactly fallback gracefully without JS). I much prefer "1 hour ago" than an icon of a clock. (And said icon of a clock doesn't even change given how old an article is! You have to mouse over it for that. And again, see above for things only showing on mouseover.)

* No way (that I can see) to sort/filter. For example, only seeing articles that were heavily penalized on HN.

* Bug: if you mouseover the photo icon to open the image, and put your mouse over the image and out of that submission, the domain never goes away.

* The feedback links... Don't actually allow you to submit feedback. And "I don't believe you" for negative feedback is condescending.

* Popover on first visit is extremely annoying, to the point where I won't visit it again until it is removed. (My browser clears most things on exit, so I'm assuming that it will pop up every time I restart my browser)

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#35

Post by Vik1ng »

baldfat wrote: post #12
thesz wrote: post #8

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 think the only way to discourage people from doing that is adding something like +/- in addition. Won't prevent it, but might improve the situation.

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#36

Post by kirsebaer »

jacquesm wrote: post #6

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.

Is there any place better? Twitter maybe? I lurk here occassionally because the comments are more intelligent than reddit. But I'm not in IT, so most of the posts are not relevant for me. I like that you can post anonymously.

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#37

Post by ColinWright »

ionwake wrote: post #20
ColinWright wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visited to check it out - can't get rid of the bloody great slab that overlays the actual content, clicked in lots of places, closed.

Thanks for checking it out - what browser were you using?

Firefox 11.0 on Ubuntu 12. I finally found that by maneouvering carefully I could find somewhere outside the huge slab and click there. Not easy on my setup. And did I mention that it was annoying?

Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about.

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#39

Post by jacquesm »

kirsebaer wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #6

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.

Is there any place better? Twitter maybe? I lurk here occassionally because the comments are more intelligent than reddit. But I'm not in IT, so most of the posts are not relevant for me. I like that you can post anonymously.

If you're not in IT you will likely get less mileage out of HN, but if you are in IT there is simply no other place like it.

Re: (Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

#40

Post by dasil003 »

davidw wrote: post #22
rawland wrote: post #13

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…

This tweet really expresses one fundamental problem of sites like this: 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."

There should be a corollary about Internet trolling, and why analog trolling never really scaled in the same way.
Post reply on HN