Happy 15th birthday Hacker News

From reddit and/or PGs blog.

There was also a lot less diversity (in some ways) however with Web 1. You were fairly likely to be talking to someone quite nerdy or at least with similar hobbies. The barrier to entry is also of course much lower now generally. I agree the upvote / downvote system can SOMETIMES disappear a valid opinion but I cannot currently think of a better way to self moderate discussions like we have here.

The same thing does happen to an extent during in person conversations but the barrier for both making a challenging statement and "downvoting" a challenging statement or action is higher.

HN may not be able to actually BE what Web 1.0 was but it seems to make an honest attempt at it in the modern world.

It's not just Reddit's "etiquette", it's the general direction where most social media comment sections are pushing their users via design and algorithms.

1. Click on the next thing in the feed.

2. Upvote/downvote.

3. Leave one-liner comment.

4. Got to #1.

I remember refreshing slashdot to see the announcement introducing accounts. Teenage me decided to be one of the "the concept of accounts on this site is dumb" folks. (For months after slashdot introduced accounts there were all sorts of AnonymousCowards talking about how dumb the idea was). Eventually I relented and got my 5 digit uid. Years later I would cringe thinking about it, knowing I had an opportunity for a 3 or 4 digit one (when it was still cool and relevant to have such a thing). These days the fact that my reddit account is almost old enough to drive, and my HN account is 14.25 just makes me feel old :D.

The place I really miss is kuro5hin. That site was a gem.

Bear in mind that English not my main language so I can't possibly transfer what I think clearly. This is also the reason of why I don't comment regularly (like never).

HN is still my go to source of news about almost anything. Ukraine crisis, health tech, startups, computer history, new technologies... anything. Right now, I literally have hundreds (yes) tabs open to just read the comments.

But HN also made me learn something. It was first 3-4 years ago and I still see the same signals every month or at least at 2-3 months. It is: "even if you have %98 correlation between things you and other people like there can be some fundamental differences between you and them and if you dig these things you will just drift apart"

We have a lot in common. A lot of us believes on tried and tested technologies instead of latest SmthJS. We still advocate Firefox instead of Chrome to serve libre software. We think that the power and money is highly concentrated on a handful of people and the distribution is not fair (but not the "5 families are managing the world" shit). We want free flowing data. We want the soul of web 1.0 back. Etc..

But what's detail and what's fundamental is different per person and I think the things we agree on is the details. We are different in fundamentals. We have very different world views and we fundamentally want different things from life.

Ok, 2 paragraphs ago I said that I noticed these things 3-4 years ago and here is the samples I remember:

* It was first started with GDPR. I possibly can't find the comment but I literally read a comment saying: "These are the reasons why Europe can't have successful startups. For a 3-4 people startup there is no way to delete PII from db. There is too much foreign keys in db to do that. Also we have sharding, replication etc. This increases the costs for smaller startups".

MVP and "over engineering" are not binary terms. There must be a middle ground. But we can't agree on that because the middle ground changes based on our opinions. And in my opinion Privacy is not something you can gloss over for mvp or because you are a startup. For example can you save clear-text passwords just because you are startup? What about SSL? Even letsencrypt requires some work. Do you thing this is a "burden on startups"? What about people in Germany who wants their home to be blurred on maps software? If you can't satisfy their demands then maybe you are not in their market to sell your software. Just please stop pretending you are immune to the problems because you are not "big enough". What's the difference between the news from 2010s that Facebook employee reading old girlfriends private messages and your developer can do a select * from users where gender="female"?

* Contemning people who prefer a more work-life balanced work and a hand of government on "free market" is another thing bothers me. By the way I'm from Turkey and I don't have a horse in EU-US game but "oh, you make 60k in 1 year? what a loser", "EU don't have startups because they go home at 5pm", "They don't have startups because they don't do hackathons" or "They don't have startups because they have unions" is a just a very myopic way of looking at life.

The United States is the only country among the 38 member OECD nations that has not passed laws requiring businesses and corporations to offer paid maternity leave to their employees. Netherlands will send a nurse for 1 whole week to the home of the mother and they will even do the groceries so the mother can get at least a little sleep. I will just rest my case here. Oh sorry, I also think that no one in Germany gets bankrupt just because they call an ambulance.

* Why can't we have businesses? Just normal businesses without obsession over growth, being a unicorn, getting bought by FAANG or IPO? Why don't we have more pinboard, screenjar, nomadlist, simpleanalytics or lunchmoney? I learned all of this sites from HN and I'm pretty sure they are operating like normal businesses.

I can understand that after you become successful, someone or some company can approach you to buy you. But starting with that idea from day 1? I can't understand that. Linode got acquired, redis also, lastpass too. Why do I have to constantly follow the blog/news pages of the companies I work with so that my information does not fall into the hands of companies I do not want? Why can't you silicon valley guys can't just have an idea, execute that idea with a couple of developers, employ some accountant, hr manager etc and call it a day? Raise the prices yearly a little bir more than inflation and live a life? Maybe answer some customer mails yourself so thay can also feel a connection. Maybe just meet some of your customers? I can't understand the obsession with growth. That's the reason why our planet is in this situation. You can double your growth infinitely and keep a healthy relationship with anything.

But, I love you guys. I can say that in the last 10 years possibly %40 of the things I learned was from HN. I wish you a happy weekend.