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

Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 150 posts

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#111

Post by JakeAl »

mancerayder wrote: post #53

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…

This has been a challenge in online communities for quite sometime. Some approaches I wanted to mention are what Metafilter does, which is require people pay to sign up and comment, and when they sign up they have to wait 30 days to comment. This cuts down a lot of noise and reactionary Twitter type trolling. Another I think is worth mentioning is r/NeutralPolitics on reddit. They have a pretty strict moderation policy that makes for some string signal to noise but due to it's heavy handedness I feel like it does not get enough different perspectives because the least thought out or explored do not get enough attention.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#112

Post by z3c0 »

karmakaze wrote: post #109
z3c0 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this myself, but it only kicked the can on my eventual leaving. Sure, niche subreddits are generally better in their content and discussions, but I still noticed that the same behaviors end up being rewarded. It's the format that's the problem, not the content, and that's the one thing shared by all subreddits.

Most subreddits I visit are low volume and haven't noticed much difference in behaviour other than acceptability of short funny replies. What do you mean about the format, isn't it the same as HN (OP link/text and comments)? I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so there may be something to that (though I'd chalk it up to becoming more popular/mainstream) .

HN only works because of supplemental rules and heavy moderation, which both look very different on Reddit. Even if a subreddit reaches a good set of rules, enforcement is usually poor, due both to mods being volunteers and a generally negative view towards moderation (can you imagine "Mods are gay" flying on HN?)

Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds value to one's life, and that can make the whole website hard to give up. However, after a decade of redditing, I never saw one subreddit maintain that momentum once the larger audience poured in, which always came as a result of the perfect balance. Members of /r/subredditA will hear that /r/subredditB is similar but with better discourse, and then the wave of rufugees from /r/subredditA will pour in, ruining /r/subredditB (eg /r/Gaming and /r/Games.)

On HN, if you don't like the rules, you go find a different website.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#113

Post by akomtu »

mancerayder wrote: post #53

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…

Reddit caters to the young audience, it's mostly them who go on emotional crusades as they have little experience to back up their words. In real life, you wouldn't engage in a serious argument about real estate market with 10 year olds, but on Reddit you can and do.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#114

Post by dang »

akiselev wrote: post #71
thadt wrote: post #38

I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN discussion from years ago and wish I could ask a question, or make a comment in that conversation today. However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of…

> you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time. Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of h…

Yeah, that was great and I added it to the highlights list at the time. That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool comments - we used to publish them periodically (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but it was too much work.

Anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful and tons more are out there, so if anyone finds a post that belongs on it, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com. I figure this'll be useful for something someday.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#115

Post by O__________O »

cientifico wrote: post #19
O__________O wrote: post #6

To me, feels like more pressing issue would be to increase the ease of tagging, grouping, filtering, ranking, etc. Specifically, if you see existing coverage of a topic, it’s easy enough to revive it if you’re aware of how HN handles duplicate detection, but there’s no way to enforce users having to vote on comments with fresh eyes, hide comments that don’t have significant new sub-comments, discover significant new…

For me hn.algolia.com solved some of the needs you mention.

While I haven’t documented specific issues it has, Google frequently finds items I recall, but unable to find using YC enterprise search engine service.

For clarity, this is how you search HN using Google:

https://google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#116

Post by O__________O »

stevekemp wrote: post #16
O__________O wrote: post #6

To me, feels like more pressing issue would be to increase the ease of tagging, grouping, filtering, ranking, etc. Specifically, if you see existing coverage of a topic, it’s easy enough to revive it if you’re aware of how HN handles duplicate detection, but there’s no way to enforce users having to vote on comments with fresh eyes, hide comments that don’t have significant new sub-comments, discover significant new…

Two years ago was the last thread I remember talking about night-mode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472535

Yes, aware of the thread, honestly not super important feature to me, but aware dang agreed it was okay. Also not saying dang need to do anything, he’s obviously in the best position to decide what’s best. Just pointing out the obvious that people would likely be more than happy to help him save time and amplify value HN provides.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#117

Post by dang »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #11

Something that seems kinda unique to this community and the moderation is allowing and encouraging things to be posted again. A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if fo…

Thanks, that's helpful. The one missing piece is a good way of threading the beads together.

I do this informally: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., but that's all just prep for one day fitting it nicely into the software.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#118

Post by ayewo »

dang wrote: post #114
akiselev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time. Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of h…

Yeah, that was great and I added it to the highlights list at the time. That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool comments - we used to publish them periodically ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) but it was too much work. Anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights . It's just a handful and tons more are out there, so if anyone finds a post…

Would you please add https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights to https://news.ycombinator.com/lists so it's easy to find in future?

Thank you for all you do, dang.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#119

Post by The_Colonel »

z3c0 wrote: post #81
testmasterflex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download Apollo and unsubscribe from all mainstream subreddits + remove all and popular, is the key.

I did this myself, but it only kicked the can on my eventual leaving. Sure, niche subreddits are generally better in their content and discussions, but I still noticed that the same behaviors end up being rewarded. It's the format that's the problem, not the content, and that's the one thing shared by all subreddits.

Isn't "reddit format" essentially exactly the same as the "hacker news format"?

Format certainly influences the quality of interactions, but there are some other strong factors as well.

Post reply on HN