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The front page of HN almost exactly 5 years ago

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Re: The front page of HN almost exactly 5 years ago

#21

Post by reitzensteinm »

loboman wrote: post #14
dolphenstein wrote: post #7

6th item on the list --> "8 points by hhm 9 hours ago" Wow, talk about points inflation!

Interesting that you mention that. hhm was my previous username, but I lost its password now. Probably after switching accounts some years ago, after becoming a little paranoid about internet identity (I even sent a mail asking pg to remove that account... he was smarter than me and said he wouldn't do that; thanks pg). I now realize I shouldn't care so much about that really. By that time, I realized that it might b…

I know that feeling all too well.

A few months ago I decided to focus on high quality comments after feeling like I was contributing to the HN noise a bit too much.

As a proxy for that, I tracked my average comment score, trying to get it above 10.

Today it's 14.93, which is quite high - only 4 of the top 100 are higher.

I think my comment quality has risen substantially, but I also subconsciously started making decisions based on score - not posting on topics that were sliding down the front page, or where there were already hundreds of comments but I did have something to say.

In short, the gamification overtook the original goal, and the tail was wagging the dog.

I've now started using a much simpler method - taking a deep breath before hitting reply, and trashing the comment if I don't think I'm adding anything to the conversation. I like this way more.

Re: The front page of HN almost exactly 5 years ago

#22

Post by aviv »

someperson wrote: post #20
aviv wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of good content is buried in archives of good blogs/news sites, and popular aggregators such as Flipboard completely ignore anything but the freshest materials. I worked on FavoritePosts.com a while back, it basically helps you discover older content that's otherwise invisible due to our existing content consumption habits. Maybe I should launch what I have so far.. It's like Prismatic for older stuff.

Yeah do it! I've been thinking about how those who up-vote stories on HN very carefully have an enormous wealth of interesting content in the "saved stories" section their profiles. It's such a shame that this is value is locked away: Somebody could generate pages and pages of amazingly interesting content based on other people who upvote similar to themselves.

One way I used to "detect" good content was by keeping track of the amount of discussion content items generated (ie. blog comments, Reddit/HN submissions and discussion activity). There are other mechanisms including the social elements similar to how Prismatic works.

I'm currently working on a related startup that we actually applied to YC W13 with, so we'll see what happens next. The current version of FavoritePosts will require a couple of weeks before I can launch it as an MVP.

But thanks guys for the encouragement! I'll start dusting off the codebase to see exactly where I'm at.

Re: The front page of HN almost exactly 5 years ago

#25

Post by thinkbohemian »

mintplant wrote: post #18
dkulchenko wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

June 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroku

> Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com. Well, you learn something new every day.

I work at Heroku and sometimes forget sometimes. They're very supportive and very hands-off.

Re: The front page of HN almost exactly 5 years ago

#28

Post by tikhonj »

mintplant wrote: post #17

A few notes as I read through this: - Passwords are still just as broken now as they were then. - Functional programming is still widely discussed, though the focus is more on Lisp than Clojure/Haskell/etc. - Fourth post is the usual, somewhat sensationalist, this commonly-accepted thing is bad! sort of headline that makes the rounds here every so often. - This post on syntax highlighting [1] reminds me of another re…

Discussions on functional programming--particularly Lisp and Erlang--seem much more prevalent then than now. Which is really too bad: functional programming seems to have gotten significantly more awesome in the recent past.

As a simple indicator, there are only two articles about functional programming on the front page, and they're both fairly shallow, general and not current. They're also related: same author and similar subjects.

I'm sure it's just a function (heh) of HN's growing userbase and more diverse audience. Still, I really would like more functional programming stuff. I even vote on interesting FP articles on new, but it often isn't enough, especially because the new page moves fairly quickly and I don't go there that often.

But yeah, ignoring the relative proportions of subjects, the front page actually seems fairly similar to the current one.

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