41–50 of 106 posts
The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.
This comment ironically at the top
> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide? It doesn't. Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle. > The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comme…
Ditto. Reading HN through Lynx helps, though. As with a lot of things in life, adding a little bit of friction can make everyone happier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought HN caps negative score at -4?
Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousan…
I don't think you should have been downvoted for that post though! It was an interesting comment. (Though perhaps it was more provocative before the edit you mention there.)
! Hacker News
! ===========
! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url)
news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr)
! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments)
news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) + tr
(if someone can suggest a way to merge those 2 CSS selectors into one to avoid repetition, I'd be immensely grateful, as i failed while trying to learn about that arcane syntax)
I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that ther…
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame.
I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about. Why embarrass yourself? Why waste your own time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use. I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news…
Reading the comments on non-tech submissions that a person has some basic knowledge of should make them aware that the vast majority of comments are simply confidently pronounced ignorance. (This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.) Then they should start to notice that, to almost as high a percentage, the comments on tech are just as much confidently pronounced ignorance.
I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts? One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about . You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow yo…
I actually have a toy project that does the complete opposite - I filter Hacker News to keep only the technical content, then use AI to generate summaries (which get translated into my native language since I'm not a native English speaker).
My friends and I have been using this system to consume a lot more content with significantly less reading overhead. Eventually, I turned the generated content into a maintained online website.
I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that ther…
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
Sometimes they make new accounts, of course, especially if we've banned them many times - but even those (what you could call) bad actors are not the bulk of the problem. The bulk of the problem is (what you could call) normal users, who would probably be surprised to find this out, since it's human nature to see such problems as caused by others, not self.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame. I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset t…
I always wonder about the scale part -- why do we want a community to grow? Is it to reach more like-minded people, to enrich the collective knowledge, etc? That would be so great, and not dilute the other two aspects. But so often it seems that "growth" is just for its own sake, a bit like cancer -- consuming the host in the end, and at best reducing what was a vibrant community to a barely palatable sludge that appeals to the common denominator just enough to warrant eyeballs-to-dollars conversion.
It's a testament to HN that it has, so far, resisted this (to borrow a term from mr Doctorow) enshittification.