Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
1–10 of 302 posts
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#2seems like a post like this pops up every few months
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#3I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with everything. But it gets harder and harder to keep the political op-eds at bay, or as the author of this blog mentions, the fruitless arguments that don't go anywhere.
I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#4The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#5I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with…
Ditto.
On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#6The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.
the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#7seems like a post like this pops up every few months
I'm not sure of the every few months, but this article was discussed 10 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#8Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have a sensible debate about abortion (and let's definitely not have one here!), but it's not plausible to characterize the disagreement between pro- and anti-abortion folks as a mere disagreement over the meanings of words. In the case of disagreements that are truly merely semantic, it's possible for each side to either (i) come to an agreement on terminology or (ii) agree that they disagree only about terminology.
Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#9The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.
the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.
It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.
Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)
#10I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with…
Ditto. On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.
I guess everybody has different experiences, but by and large, the subreddits I frequent are reasonable enough