10 ms·
To Paul Graham
I recently read a short blog article talking about the doom of Digg and the final paragraph caught my eye:
But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.
It is, precisely, the simplicity and minimalism of Hacker News' feature set that keeps it usable for everyday, busy, -- real people --. Obviously, the culture on Hacker News keeps submissions and comments in check, but that culture would not exist if HN were trying to become a social network for entrepreneurs.
Your continued interaction and consistent fine-tuning makes this a place that I like to come back to. There is a certain social satisfaction with knowing that one is a part of a community in which the creator is still a participant.
I know you are cognizant of what makes this community tick; I also realize it wouldn't be what it is today if your intentions hadn't been clear (and they obviously are) - so I didn't need to say this, but I did want to say this: thank you.
- tjmaxal 16y agoThis seems like as good a place as any to ask this: Can only some people down vote? B/c I have seen posts with negative scores and as I am only allowed to up vote, I have wondered how someone gets a negative score next to a comment?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- benofsky 16y agoOnly once one gets over a certain karma threshold can they downvote.
- mccutchen 16y agoAccording to the FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html): > Why don't I see down arrows? > There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.
- scorpion032 16y agoUsers with points 200+ can downvote.
- LaPingvino 16y agoWhen you participate enough with quality articles and comments (measured with upvotes) you get a higher karma and at some point this will grant you the ability to downvote. I am mostly passively participating here (although I see myself commenting and submitting a bit more now) so I didn't reach such a karma yet...
- cenazoic 16y agoI'm another one of the mostly passive readers of the site, mostly because I'm teaching myself to program, rather than actually being a programmer. HN has raised my awareness, made me more thoughtful about how and what I actually think about things (part of the passivity comes from the idea that any sloppy thought will be immediately shot down (rightfully so)), and overall contributed to an ongoing desire to be a larger part of the overall tech community online. Thanks to PG (whose essays I often reread -"Keep Your Identity Small" is one I constantly refer to other people - for HN and providing this nonname wannabe programmer a place to learn. And to learn to think. Thank you, PG.
- eru 16y ago> (part of the passivity comes from the idea that any sloppy thought will be immediately shot down (rightfully so)) You can still make a meaningful contribution by asking questions, if you want to.
- tjmaxal 16y agoThanks Everybody!
- tjmaxal 16y agoSorry if this wasn't the right place to ask. I am really proud to be part of such a unique community.
- stevejohnson 16y agoYou are correct. When you reach a certain karma level, you gain the ability to downvote comments to a threshold.
- noodle 16y agoi'll answer this, although this probably isn't a good place to have asked. HN is filled with karma-based features. one of those is down-voting. you're not given access to down-voting comments until you reach a certain level of karma yourself. if you've contributed enough to the community to reach a certain karma score, then you are trusted with more features. see: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bdickason 16y agoAs someone who recently discovered HN as an alternative to digg/reddit I am thankful as well. Things I love: 1) People downvote trolling and negative/witty comments 2) The interface gets out of your way 3) It updates constantly 4) The content is exactly what I'm looking for... and exactly what I couldn't find anywhere else 5) People are genuinely here to help. I am eagerly anticipating launching my startup so I can post an "Ask HN: Review my launch" here! Ok I wanted it to be 'three things I like' but it turned into 5 :) Thanks to Paul and the community!
- gte910h 16y agoYeah, but they need to make votes non permanent. It's a crapshoot if you'll hit the up or down arrow on a mobile device or iPad when you try to rate stuff.
- jokermatt999 16y agoI can see why they are permanent; it makes your votes feel like they mean something. But please, can we at least get an allotted number of "vote revokes" per week or something? I agree, it's too easy to misclick on an arrow on a touchscreen, and there's nothing that can be done.
- alanh 16y agoBetter & simpler solution: Bigger buttons on touchscreen devices, preventing mis-clicks in the first place
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- edw519 16y agoI imagine hn owes a lot of success to its simplicity. I was always confused by slashdot's filters and the threads in almost every other forum, with Post #18 replying to Post #7 and Post #27 replying to Post #3, but only 10 posts visible per page. Busy people don't have the time to wade through stuff like that, so all you're left with are the trolls. hn's nested threads built with <table> are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go. I have no idea how much time and effort pg puts into hn, but I'm sure it's nontrivial. Something as good as hn doesn't get that way purely organically. Also, I would guess that more of his energy goes into the software, not the site's output. Why deal with an issue once when you can build something that will deal with it forever? It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: thank you pg!
- kierank 16y agoHacker News is the craigslist of Social News sites.
- stanleydrew 16y agoBut I hate using craigslist. I only use it because I have to.
- seunosewa 16y agoWhat do you hate about it?
- stanleydrew 16y agoI hate apartment search. It's so so painful. Their data model is all wrong. Location is the most important thing about an apartment in my opinion. That should be the primary method by which you search. And they've tried, but you end up searching within these broad "neighborhoods" in the bigger US cities. And a lot of people mischaracterize their apartment's location in order to make it seem nicer or whatever. Why is craigslist wasting my time? Require posters to put in the actual address or at least an intersection for their apartment. Then show me the postings on a map. Something like hotpads.com works really well for me, but they don't have the volume that craigslist does, so I'm stuck.
- drlisp 16y agoThis level of ass kissing makes me want to puke.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoI have to agree, actually. More to the point, this submission violates both the written and unspoken rules of submissions here: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something", and the unspoken rule that content-less submissions are generally frowned upon. This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.
- ErrantX 16y agoAgreed as well; HN has a "fourth wall" in a sense - meta posts are discouraged where possible. This is the very definition of a meta post (and from a personal perspective I dislike the fawning tone too)
- Ixiaus 16y agoI up voted you because you're correct. It would have easily sufficed as an email to PG. However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent. I want HN to remain what it is and I did not want to be "just another email" in PG's inbox; I suppose by submitting this in the first place I contributed to "what HN is not" but I do still feel that my submission was appropriate in the sense that my intent was an intelligent choice and not a "masturbatory" choice.
- manish 16y agoOne thing that is different here is that this site does not need to generate (ad/any) revenue, so many of the irritating things that will be common in other forums will be absent here.
- Ixiaus 16y agoWhat's interesting, is that Hacker News does generate revenue in a very indirect way. By cultivating a hacker community around his early stage investment company he is ensuring there will always be top-notch thinkers and doers participating in the niche he has created. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know, but it works well for both parties: he has a thriving community of leading edge people, and the people have a leading edge outlet. It's a well balanced form of co-creation.
- jacquesm 16y agoThat's an extremely good point you are making, effectively YC can afford to subsidize HN because of the fact that they make their money in a way that does not require pestering the users of the site. I'm pretty sure that eventually many more really successful websites will find a way to adopt a model like that, it really is one of the best ways to marry a happy users to commerce, find some side-channel that you can exploit. Most websites think that the 'data' they have on their users is the marketable good, google has often been said to see you, their user as the end-product. YC does it different, they see a subset of the users as the raw material to drive their bottom line, the rest are along for the ride. It's a much more direct version of what FB, google and so on do, and it is much better imo because it is more honest and transparent.
- inerte 16y agoWill find? The crazyness about "social media" is exactly that, luring users around your product/brand.
- jacquesm 16y agoNot really, in those cases the 'product' is the data about the users, not the actual engagement of the users to create value outside of the forum where the interaction normally takes place. It's hard to put the difference any clearer than that, but YC engages a small subset of their users in activities that they are peripherally engaged in on the forum. Other 'social' sites sell their users data wholesale, that's a completely different kettle of fish. Most of the users on HN are not engaged in the revenue stream of YC, directly or indirectly whereas almost all the users of other social sites are directly involved in the revenue stream.
- Desireco 16y agodownvote please
- jayruy 16y agoIt's worth noting that hn doesn't aspire to profitability via advertising - pg doesn't have to worry about things like "stickiness" and "reach". So yes - hn is a great service to the community.
- jacquesm 16y agoIf HN ever got as large as digg it would suffer from much of the problems that digg has, and you will not be able to remedy those by 'staying simple'. Digg is complex because it is that large, and I think that if HN ever got that large it would start to suffer in much the same ways. HN is not so much a reflection of the person that built it (though that definitely does help) as it is a reflection of the people that participate here. If and when HN gets to the size of digg and it retains its character it will have broken the pattern that any social news site has so far exhibited, until then the jury is out.
- mortenjorck 16y agoAs long as this document retains the respect of the majority of the users: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html HN will thrive. It's the single best set of "social news" community guidelines I've read. The triumph of HN has been in attracting an initial audience that agrees with the spirit of that document, and in their subtly but firmly encouraging its adherence in newcomers. The character of a community is a tricky thing to build and maintain. A community can easily veer into the superficial and glib territory of Digg, the self-referential and jaded territory of Slashdot, or even the sycophantic territory of Wikipedia. HN has been quite fortunate.
- jacquesm 16y ago> the self-referential and jaded territory of Slashdot, or even the sycophantic territory of Wikipedia In this thread that's richly ironic. It's about as self-referential and sycophantic as I've ever seen here.
- mortenjorck 16y agoYour criticism is fair, but I don't think it really compares. Nowhere in this thread is anyone riffing on in-joke memes a la Slashdot, nor is anyone attempting to achieve advancement in rank like at Wikipedia. There is plenty of self-reference here but it's purely practical, and certainly there's a bit of sycophantic behavior, but what does anyone stand to gain by it at HN? Honestly telling PG you like his site just makes both of you feel good, unlike pretending to like a high-ranking Wikipedia admin in hopes of getting a promotion next round. Either way, I'd be inclined to agree that love-fests like this aren't particularly useful to the HN community. But they happen, and occasional ones are a good sign (and maybe over-frequent ones are a bad sign).
- joegaudet 16y agoHear hear.
- ryanelkins 16y agoI wonder what it says about the human psychology that people feel that they "have to" digg, submit, friend, comment, etc. You can use Digg just like you use HN - just browse for articles, read them, perhaps comment or not. I always found this interesting when points or achievements were in a game - there is a subset of people who feel that they "have to" do those things, even if they are not fun and don't really want to. They get mad at the designers for making things less fun when the entire thing is optional even to the general gameplay of the core game. Actually the more I think of it, the friend system is the only thing that HN doesn't have that Digg has. Or maybe I just haven't looked that closely when I visit Digg lately.
- antidaily 16y agoIt's not the interface or features - Hacker News stays interesting by being mostly hacker news. It serves its niche well.
- blizkreeg 16y agoPerhaps audience curation is a big factor in HN's success? HN attracts a very select band of people. I wouldn't say the same thing about Digg or Reddit (perhaps they were the same when smaller, I never used them). Hacker News, by virtue of its name, reputation, and association with YC is not open (not in the literal sense) to anyone and everyone willing to participate. This, IMO, keeps the quality of posts and comments high and in a way, prevents it from going "mainstream".
- GFischer 16y agoHmm.. it might not be "mainstream" yet (and I hope it remains selective).. however, I'm reminded of Groucho Marx's quote: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member" ... I used to participate on Slashdot actively, I'm a programmer, yet I've never seen a line of Lisp so far, nor started a Startup - and I saw comments from "old-timers" that said they weren't as interested in some of the kind of articles that interest me and would rather HN had stayed focused entirely on startups and hacking. Does that mean HN has gone "mainstream"? I don't know. But it's not as select as it used to be :) (and I hope it's a good thing)
- vladocar 16y agoIt's not only the simplicity but also the purpose. HN gathers people with similar objectives and interest. Designers and developers who want to experiment with the new technologies and create and share there own business.
- pg 16y agoThanks very much. I don't think it's really HN's features or lack of them is the attraction for most users though, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So thank you guys. Ironically I've been thinking of adding some variant of following as a way to deal with the increasing volume of comments. I just haven't had time to yet. I did recently (about 3 weeks ago) tweak the algorithm for ranking comments, and that has had a noticeable effect. Previously it was the same as the one for ranking frontpage stories. Now it also considers among other things the average comment score of the submitter. With any luck this will keep HN poised in its usual position mid-way over the shark for another 6 months.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agoisn't this a less transparent version of the orange users experiment?
- jacquesm 16y agoI think it isn't because it does not assign 'yellow stars' to users for being good boys, the sort order always was open to interpretation, if this one is less gameable than the previous one that would seem to be an improvement to me. The problem I perceive is that average score does not say much about a specific comment being non-productive, so someone with a high average score could toss in some complete junk and get it sorted to the top in spite of better comments by average under producers further below. I'd say that if it remains below the detection threshold it might be a net plus, if too many of such instances appear it might be a loss.
- JesseAldridge 16y agoThe problem with orange users was that it divided the community into two camps. This doesn't have the same issue.
- patio11 16y agoCloser to four -- "had orange" and "wanted orange" were independent booleans.
- kqr2 16y agoI believe this is the blog post which the original poster refers to: Digg is deadd http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2010/06/01/digg-is-deadd.aspx http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2...
- Ixiaus 16y agoThanks, I should have referenced the original post I derived that quote from (it slipped my mind).
- nexneo 16y agoI almost love HN. (will remove `almost` if they remove table layout)
- joshfinnie 16y agoHow does the layout have any bearing on whether or not you enjoy the website, especially when dealing with a website like HN that is basically in tabular form? I don't know, so if there is actually a good reason, I would love to hear it!
- thepumpkin1979 16y agothis is gold: "the simplicity and minimalism of Hacker News' feature set that keeps it usable for everyday, busy, -- real people --" Agreed.
- napierzaza 16y agoOr the doom or Reddit. Sugary one-note posts that are just visual jokes or one persons attempt to get another's attention. cough Anyhow, I just hope posts about "do you hate this" start rising to the top of HN.
- gfodor 16y agoHN has a secret weapon. If it ever gets too Digg-like, we can always unleash Operation Erlang II: Electric Boogaloo.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sswam 16y agoI guess the success of "hacker news" is largely due to: 1. the name "hacker news" is a cool name 2. simple hacker-friendly web interface w/o ads.