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Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

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Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#281

Post by Jun8 »

OK, here are some recent Show HN posts that I randomly picked (with more than 2 comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382846 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4381905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396195 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4379278

Skimming through the comments I didn't see much support for the condescending, snarky attitude, many user seem to genuinely help the OP.

You can probably find examples of the other kind (but please do, rather than just saying "I feel like ...") but this at least shows, I think, that the attitude is not very common.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#282

Post by kaizendc »

cplat wrote: post #245
mhartl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to your point, but I fear that the worst offenders are among those least likely even to read the guidelines, much less adhere to them.

Yes, that's true. However, giving proper guidelines can help in a lot of cases. When a person uses a site for the first time, he'd search at least somewhat for some basic guidelines. After that, he'd be tied to the same routine, and might not easily change with the changing guidelines. I know that the worst offenders won't read the guidelines, but a little faith in the rest of them would go a long way improving the q…

Exactly.

There is not going to be a "one-size-fits-all" solution to this problem. A multi-faceted solution including both technical and non-technical elements would likely work best.

The easiest part of the solution to implement would of course be the text in the vicinity of the comment box. This text would establish certain core tenets that we can all vote on with Paul.

The technical aspect of the solution could monitor how often certain users are being down voted. The down-vote history of an account could then be used to "weigh it down" somewhat, so that it takes more up-votes in the future to bring their comment to a higher position on the page.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#283

Post by acabal »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

As I mentioned below, I've run a social network called Scribophile for about 5 years now. What I've learned is that you simply can't engineer away a social problem. People will always find a way to be jerks; the only way to mitigate them is either through:

1) Social pressure: the community must evolve in such a way that its members as a whole frown upon negativity. Hard, because it takes time and can go wrong. Or,

2) Moderation: a group of members you trust is tasked with actively deleting useless comments and threads and banning useless contributors. A zero-tolerance policy for stupidity. Is that elitist? Maybe. But an elite community is hard to grow when idiots are tolerated.

There is literally no way to engineer away jerks. A social problem requires a social solution.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#284

Post by wtetzner »

adrianmoses wrote: post #147
andrewljohnson wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit the nail on the head about what bothers me about HN, after 4 years of using it: "Its a place for Y-combinator folks to share links they are interested in." news.YC is biased and will always be biased towards YC-oriented stories, which means it will never be as good as it could be. The status quo doesn't mean that news.YC isn't any good - it's just suspect and you have to filter everything through that lens -…

News will always be biased, my friend. For as long as it is human generated.

If the people submitting links have different biases, then the overall news site might not have any particular bias overall, even if individual stories do.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#285

Post by mduerksen »

pg wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without c…

Ok, I'll try that too.

Apart from the content itself, I would suggest to place the guideline link more prominently. Maybe even at the top, directly before the "New" link.

To support this proposal: When I first arrived here (from your homepage), I didn't notice anything about guidelines until I stumbled upon a comment which mentioned them. Then I eventually found them on the bottom of the page (which can be quite long), where I seldom look at.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#286

Post by hobbyist »

pg wrote: post #114

It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. I've spent many hours over the past se…

I have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :)

PS: I hope

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#287

Post by hooande »

Can someone provide an example of an online community that has an appropriately positive attitude?

Hacker News is the most civil, useful and intelligent conversation on the internet, period. HN is easily two standard deviations less cruel or petty than any other discussion site you could name. The rest of the internet makes us look like Miss Manners.

I'm sorry that people weren't supportive of your personal projects, sw007. But do you have any idea how much worse things would have been on reddit? TechCrunch comments? God forbid, 4chan?

HN is an amazing resource and I'm glad to have it. The top comment is always 1) the other side of the argument being presented in the story or 2) information from someone on the inside (ie, "I work at fb and here is what is really going on"). If there's any online discussion site that's significantly more positive than Hacker News, I'd love to hear about it.

Re: Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News..

#288

Post by danso »

I've posted several projects to HN, including both of my guides to programming and photography...and I have been extremely disappointed...with the LACK of harsh comments, and the more-than-deserved number of upvotes. And I mean that only half facetiously, because the critical ability of HN posters, on average, is quite high, so I half-expect people to be nitpicking and ripping on me...and that's fine, since I generally don't take it personally.

Obviously my case isn't apples-to-apples, since the OP may have pitched products that were attempting to be successful in a financial sense, whereas I just like showing personal projects. But my experience has been very supportive. This is not to say that OP is wrong, but just to say that whatever corrective measurements are being decided on, that you shouldn't go too far in fixing what may only be partially or rarely broken

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