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HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

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Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#221

Post by nkurz »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #204
tptacek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics on HN, Exhibit A for the prosecution.

My comment is a non-partisan analysis of why most of the NSA story is astroturf. Astroturf can only be debunked by describing the conspiracy. This does not make me a partisan either for or against the astroturfers. If HN stories were showing up simultaneously and with the same headlines as press releases from the John Birch Society, I would direct my flamethrower in their direction. And you ignored the other half of…

Still, I think Thomas is right: your comment is an example of what needs to be avoided to prevent further devolution. The issue isn't whether you are right or wrong, whether the comment is political or non-partisan. Rather it's whether HN or any online community can take on such issues without destroying itself. Historically, the odds are poor. If we want to keep quality of the technical discussion high, I think that comments such as yours need to be reserved for elsewhere.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#222

Post by pushkargaikwad »

Dilution will always happen with user submission sites as the number of users grow, specially if there is no moderation.

Digg/Reddit,they all started as some niche tech site and eventually turned into political/media/news sites (atleast digg was, reddit's savior is its subreddit feature) once the userbase increased.

The only way to keep HN niche is by introducing categories and let people subscribe/unsubscribe to those categories or through strict moderation.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#223

Post by parasubvert »

smegel wrote: post #54

I find this doom-mongering a bit over the top. Slashdot basically was a troll culture at its very core, and while it could be funny at times, it never really elevated itself to a place for serious discussion. Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links to interesting topics. Even if the discussion can be a b…

"[Slashdot] never really elevated itself to a place for serious discussion."

I profoundly disagree with this, as an early Slashdot user. Slashdot had quite a bit of serious discussion - HN scarily replicates much of the feeling of discussion 1998-2002, just with different topics but all the same ups & downs. HN even has its perpetual flame war of Android vs. iOS that mimics Slashdot's Gnome vs KDE.

Yes, there was quirky trollish humour that was forgiven, but the moderating system, once it settled down in 1999, promoted quite a bit of very in-depth conversation.

Columbine and Jon Katz was the first real "political" side track for Slashdot, but it survived and moved on from there... and basically just wound up dying out due to Taco leaving and Reddit/HN.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#224

Post by Legion »

ceol wrote: post #212
anu_gupta wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the decent alternatives? Or else, let's try to make this into something better, by flagging instead of commenting, and downvoting racist, sexist, bigoted crap instead of feeding the trolls.

If you're fine with more general topics and about a day's delay in "breaking" internet news (re: stuff that doesn't matter), I've found MetaFilter to be good. The pay wall filters out bottom-barrel trolls and the community is mostly nice enough to shame bigoted and extremist bullshit.

I've become a fan of the micro-paywall. A one-time fee of $5-10 is an amazingly powerful filter.

Metafilter, as you said, is one example. Another is the Ruby Rogues Parley mailing list (now Discourse site). I can only imagine what a HN with similar filtering-of-the-noise would be like.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#225

Post by gadders »

tptacek wrote: post #198
pg wrote: post #113

I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended tha…

You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads. There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- m…

Agreed. I came here to be learn about technology and to be inpsired to one day make the leap from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur. I don't come here to read about politics.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#226

Post by hrjet »

Houshalter wrote: post #148
rayiner wrote: post #20

As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent. I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to…

What was the theorem-prover as programming language article? I can't seem to find it.

I was wondering the same. I think this is the one the OP meant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156016

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#227

Post by belorn »

mjn wrote: post #161
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been helping the FBI track pressure cooker searche…

> And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole. This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them…

Tracking down sources are not always as simple as spending a few clicks on a search engine. I particularly find talks to be problematic, as the content is not indexed, nor is it easy to remember which n'th talk the speaker said a particular fact. You basically have to re-watch them all, which for a few comments I have done.

Worse is legal case findings which for whatever reason, the media did not pick up. Take the statement that in Swedish law, people who produce or run a webservice can be made liable if the majority of users use the service for illegal purposes? That facts is basically impossible to find using a search, even through it is written plainly as a simple Q&A in the appeal court judgment of the TPB trial. If the case had been that I forgot where I read it, a search query would not have helped me in tracking it down.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#228

Post by thenomad »

nerfhammer wrote: post #29
rayiner wrote: post #20

As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent. I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to…

The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.

Where?

I can't think of anywhere that I can read a discussion on technology politics that's actually dominated by informed, educated technologists. With the best will in the world, the Guardian Comment Is Free section or /r/news doesn't have the quality of commentary.

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#229

Post by rkda »

zalew wrote: post #35
nerfhammer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.

HN needs tagging or even general categories, so we can filter topics out.

You mean like hubski?

http://hubski.com/

Re: HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

#230

Post by belorn »

tptacek wrote: post #167
Terretta wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has been equally embarrassingly bad about taking certain claims at face value, like, "no direct access to the servers", when it is painfully clear to anyone running a colo how NSA PowerPoints could talk about data direct from BigCom servers at the same time as BigCom denies giving direct access to its servers, with both 100% "technically true." What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief base…

This comment neatly characterizes the kinds of discussions we have on this issue; it starts with innuendo about how the NSA could have what any reasonable person would refer to as direct access to servers, then retreats to a broad, abstract position crafted to make the innuendo harder to rebut. Thank you.

You seem to frame it in a very odd light. I don't see anything in that comment could be refereed as an "innuendo", nor do I see any source for comment to be crafted as to make something harder to rebut.

From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive?

In this specific case of "direct access", the facts are the few press-release made, the leaked slides, and any contributing leaked report. The rational arguments is mostly around the definition of "direct access". The truth is thus depended on the quality of the facts, and the derived result of discussing the rational arguments.

Is this bad for HN, and if so, what should be done about it?

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