Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN: The Good Parts (2016)

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#61

Post by sokoloff »

suprfsat wrote: post #27
creata wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.

Color ratio of a typical comment on this web site: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23dddddd-on-%23f6f6ef 1.25, which is well below the minimum of 4.5

I would not characterize the [dead] comments (which are #ddd) as "a typical comment". They're designed to be hard to read. If I turn off showdead (which I believe is an opt-in setting), it looks like the lightest comments are #9c9c9c, which is a 2.5 ratio (and of course are also comments which are intended to be less prominent).

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#62

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bombcar wrote: post #53
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder if the definition of well-informed includes agrees with my viewpoint somewhere in it.

Look at the examples he picks - I take "well informed" to mean not only knowledgable about the subject matter but also providing an insight beyond a platitude.

I think the following does not particularly offer any deep insight:

"Curious why he would need to move to a more prestigious position? Most people realize by their 30s that prestige is a sucker's game; it's a way of inducing people to do things that aren't much fun and they wouldn't really want to do on their own, by lauding them with accolades from people they don't really care about."

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#63

Post by meristohm »

noxToken wrote: post #47
alexbouchard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it okay to plateau? If HN keeps going, gaining and losing people over time and not growing above X% of the population, and eventually declining for whatever reason, that seems the way of things. Change happens, and the best we can do is guide it and prepare. It’s okay to live and then die.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#65

Post by gumby »

peteretep wrote: post #18

I'd like to see the worst-rated comments by anyone with -- say -- over 10k karma.

I have almost 30K points and one of my most recent comments was -1'd. Take a look. It happens a surprising amount, and is IMHO rarely legit (per the HN "rules").

It is certainly legit if someone buries a sarcastic or trivial comment of mine (which happens, though I don't do it often), but I don't bother to delete them -- downvoting them does that effectively anyway.

I'm not sure if there's any actual value to karma and I don't really know how it's assigned and wouldn't really notice if it weren't on the top bar of the page. I haven't tried to do any experiments though.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#67

Post by dang »

noxToken wrote: post #47
alexbouchard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN has been growing at the same rate since shortly after it began over a dozen years ago: basically linear, with a lot of swings (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

We want the community to grow—it would be concerning if it didn't. But the engagement tactics you mention aren't necessary for the kind of growth we want. In fact we consciously avoid them. Certain kinds of engagement—probably just the sort that engagement tactics would juice—would harm what we're trying to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

The interesting aspect of this, I think, is that HN doesn't need to pursue growth at all costs, the way that a startup would. It's not a startup, nor a business per se, but it's not noncommercial either—it's funded by a business that understands that it's more valuable with HN than it would be without it, and is smart enough not to try to squeeze profit out of it beyond that. YC's business interests are in having HN be as good as possible, not as big as possible. That's odd, and oddly satisfying. It seems to be a historical accident that HN ended up in that sweet spot. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#68

Post by krapp »

meristohm wrote: post #63
noxToken wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it okay to plateau? If HN keeps going, gaining and losing people over time and not growing above X% of the population, and eventually declining for whatever reason, that seems the way of things. Change happens, and the best we can do is guide it and prepare. It’s okay to live and then die.

For better or worse, given the contrarian nature of this community, many here would probably view a decline in membership as a good thing.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#69

Post by dang »

meristohm wrote: post #63
noxToken wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it okay to plateau? If HN keeps going, gaining and losing people over time and not growing above X% of the population, and eventually declining for whatever reason, that seems the way of things. Change happens, and the best we can do is guide it and prepare. It’s okay to live and then die.

It's cosmically ok for things to plateau, but from a local perspective I'd be concerned if HN were plateauing. It would mean that something else was wrong. Probably a lot else.

The mandate of the site is to be gratify intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Any website achieving such a thing will naturally grow.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

geerlingguy wrote: post #2

I 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.

I almost agree, but in the HN tradition, I have to pick a nit:

> headache-inducing levels of information density

HN is one of the more information-dense sites of its kind - because the space that isn't wasted on "flashy features" and advertising is filled with content.

Information density is good and desirable. Bloated UIs full of ads and irrelevant distractions are dense with noise.

Post reply on HN