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(Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

mattmaroon.com

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

#81

Post by brudgers »

bane wrote: post #77
brudgers wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be that every Apple announcement no matter how minor produced links to every Mac related site...for days before the event so that people could speculate. Then the day of the announcement there would be links to live reporting, links to every 'first look' article on every Mac site and the official Apple pages. As a bonus there were always many 'Ask HN:' companion threads. As personally disinterested in the…

I totally agree. And the ultra-weird "it's awesome if Apple does a thing, but completely evil if anybody else even sniffs at the idea" groupthink that permeated almost every thread on any topic seems to have abated somewhat. It's still there on occasion, but Gruber's impossibly apologist blog posts are generally off the front page and the ultra-apologists seems to have started fading after Steve Job's death. There wa…

Part of the change in attitude on HN is based on four years experiencing substantial shifts in the terms of the relationship between Apple and software developers since the iPad's release. The death of Jobs made criticism of Apple more acceptable of course, but not criticism of him to any significant degree.

The bigger picture is that HN [and YC] have come off the Apple App Store bubble. Mobile apps are now seen as multi-platform programs, and the center of gravity has clearly moved toward open source tool chains and back toward the core idea of Web based software.

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

#82

Post by pessimizer »

kruczek wrote: post #67
brudgers wrote: post #61

In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article relative to the HN 2010. 1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the ot…

I've never noticed abundance of Apple articles, until this morning. Out of 13 top articles over half of them were leading to apple.com. Some feature to filter out unwanted links might be useful here. On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable scor…

I'm a pure Apple-basher, but most times when they have their big to-do, and especially if they release something as significant to many computer people's future plans as Swift, IMO HN should have a lot of Apple on the front page. I don't miss the Gruber at all, though.

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

#83

Post by danielweber »

RivieraKid wrote: post #50
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…

> 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. Allow downvotes for submissions. > 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. Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.…

I heard the Old Ones say that, before my time, there used to be a downvote button, but it went away because the tribalism led to, e.g., non-Apple stories being voted off the front page.

I rarely hit the upvote button because it feels broken to me without a downvote. Maybe a handful of articles a week. Flag maybe once or twice a week. Although I liberally use the upvote buttons in comments.

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

#84

Post by danielweber »

mkesper wrote: post #66
RivieraKid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. Allow downvotes for submissions. > 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. Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.…

Make the site faster, it's really slow. That doesn't avoid procrastinating. Besides, HN is fast, many linked sites are slow and bloated...

Several times a week I find HN takes 10-20 seconds to load.

(This leads to paranoia about slow-banning or hell-banning.)

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

#85

Post by digitalcreate »

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've had the same experience where I've been downvoted because my comment goes against the prevailing group-think of the site. This has a chilling effect on contribution of new ideas to comments, which thereby reinforces the group-think. It's a vicious cycle. I'm very hesitant to post comments now for fear that they will be downvoted for no good reason.

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

#86

Post by clarry »

SeanDav wrote: post #41
jbeja wrote: post #16

The reason I sometimes wish to quit HN: There are just to many Apple fanboys, and cliche opinions driven by insane fanboyism that just make me cringe sometimes.

There are Apple fanboys, there are Google fanboys, there are Microsoft fanboys, there are Linux fanboys, there are Haskell fanboys...etc etc. Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are prob…

What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-frontpageful of uninteresting articles about (Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was really quite different back when I first got interested in it.

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

#88

Post by j2kun »

Interestingly enough, his comments are closed, so I'll have to post my thoughts here :)

I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer.

That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about HN before my blog ended up on the front page).

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

#89

Post by danielweber »

GrinningFool wrote: post #27

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. Yet it seems that stating that you wish…

There's always the fear of unilaterally disarming: "I am going to vote based on skill, not based on Which Side the person is on. . . . Oh, but everyone else is voting based on Which Side! Now I have to help My Side!"

It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed.

I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.

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