> (I remember posting a huge thing on slashdot when this article was originally posted)
Appropriate that _this_ comment is buried who-knows-where in slashdot's archives.
HN: The Good Parts (2016)
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#42I like the idea of preserving the best comments as some form of blog. TheBestOfHN.com might be worth starting up by just compiling all comments with > 200 karma?
Those scores are not so interesting by themselves in that they were calculated based on votes at the time and aren't meant for comparing comments on different articles. (The top comment on a high-scoring article will automatically beat the top comment on a low-scoring article)
I would rather like to see what Dan did scaled up 1000x or so: that is, have experts pick out a few of the best comments over the very long term with a number of quality criteria in mind.
Like it or not individual people have characteristics that are mostly stable over time: they are more or less smart, mean, wordy, honest, loyal, interested in different things, make different mistakes, etc. Profiling the author is worthwhile.
The article though is a problem not a solution in terms of sampling: consider that people talked about topic A in 200 articles that hit the front page in the last 5 years; if you put the comments from those 200 articles in pool B and rank the articles in pool B and pick up the top ten you would get the "pure gold".
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#43[flagged]
Wow so you are basically linking people to depictions of teen and child pornography.
That's why I can't.
But that is the level of poison it takes to hold back the commercial slime.
Any "legitimate" enterprise online is part of a tracking economy which is really quite scary when you think that those funny ads for silly old people really come from servers in countries who are famous for their intelligence services.
I hocked my house to start an image sharing site that I eventually had to shut down -- I saw many good sites go down because of the brutal economics, an era from which only Pinterest and Instagram really emerged.
So I am fascinated that anybody is running a sustainable image sharing business on the web and that they're doing it because they're not in the tracking economy.
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#44Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20092118
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#45"HN comments are horrible." Proceeds to list pages of awesome comments. Claims topics he's informed about have mostly wrong comments. Doesn't give any examples. HN comments are a conversation/discussion not a contest of who is right/wrong, and it's great to have differing viewpoints as long as those views don't degrade into logical fallacies like ad hominem, ,anecdotal, or others. There are way less logical fallacies…
I don't think that is a fair reading of danluu's post. It is titled "the good parts", after all. And did you read the closing paragraphs? > "[...] Having flamebait drop off the front page quickly is significant, but it doesn’t seem sufficient to explain why there are so many more well-informed comments on HN than on other forums with roughly similar traffic." > "Maybe the answer is that people come to HN for the same…
It's a sensational opening that he spends the entire rest of the article contradicting.
HN comments are horrible...except here's a thousand line blog about why they're not horrible.
Judging by the content of the entire rest of the post...a better opener should have been "Hacker news comments are mostly awesome and here's a thousand line blog post about it.... but they're not all perfect".
What a bizzare article.
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#46I think we've seen this before. Comments, everywhere are terrible. Heck, this one probably is. But I like HN more than anywhere else (so far). Maybe rot will set in, and the sun will set on our relationship, but not yet. I find many comments to be quite correct. Not all, of course, but many. The ones that I like, are the ones that make me think "orthogonally."
Yeah I come here to read opinions of intelligent / informed people who disagree with me. I even subtly and respectfully try to rile them up sometimes to see what they have to offer.
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#47I think besides dang and other moderators who keep the site somewhat cleaned up through brute force, the fact that HN discourages flashy features and headache-inducing levels of information density and imagery helps to keep a core audience present, unlike most other platforms that start out simple then quickly pile on feature after feature that make the original audience depart.
It definitely does and I wonder if there is a larger lesson for other forum / software. We can't seem to be able help ourself and not change things in the name of "improvements" and appart from OSS I can't think of many other example then HN that just held to it's roots.
Sites like HN tend to plateau unless there are added features to get new sign ups. Full-length profiles, social features like chat, reply notifications and following/subscribing to users are engagement tactics to keep the community engaged with each other. These are site improvements if the goal is to grow beyond the core audience.
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#48Ranking 'quality' is tough because it has multiple dimensions and aggregating multiple kinds of utility is problematic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... developing a good ranking function for bag-of-words full text search is about carefully balancing the attraction of larger vs smaller documents in the collection. If you try to aggregate several bad search engines you get a bad sear…
Are you saying you do know the way to create a good ranking function? Does Arrows theroum stop that?
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#49"HN comments are horrible." Proceeds to list pages of awesome comments. Claims topics he's informed about have mostly wrong comments. Doesn't give any examples. HN comments are a conversation/discussion not a contest of who is right/wrong, and it's great to have differing viewpoints as long as those views don't degrade into logical fallacies like ad hominem, ,anecdotal, or others. There are way less logical fallacies…
I think there's a blend of good and bad.
If you ever see a HN front page story where you have inside information about some event, you can rest assured there will be maddening amounts of completely wrong speculation written as if it were gospel by people with no connection to that event. And then people attack the strawmen with abandon.
And for professional reasons, you grit your teeth, keep your mouth shut, and let it all slide. I'm not in PR.
"Someone is wrong on the Internet": https://xkcd.com/386/
I agree that HN is better than a _lot_ of places. But it's not all wine and roses.
Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)
#50> but maybe consider, at the margin, blogging more and commenting on HN less?
Have considered this seriously (and still am), but a blog post needs more meta context and exposition than an HN comment. The person browsing a blog post vs. playing the HN slot machine (time bandit?) is in a more passive mode than the give and take of HN comments.
The difference to me is that a blog post is a topic of conversation, where HN is a conversation. It's discourse, facilitated by candid pseudonymity, and not just a foil for someone to pose with. (whereas twitter is just the instagram of ideas.)
I have written at the pro level where it really is like a sport, and a lot of my job involves articulating complex things with clarity and pith, and to me, as a form, the blog post is too passive. However, if I get good enough at that form my opinion may change.