3 ms·

To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals c

To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news topics that it once avoided. Moderators have clear political axes to grind. While the site initially shunned submissions related to politics (and even codified this in its guidelines), it's no longer uncommon for flags to be turned off explicitly political stories that lead to viscous flame wars. HN is invaluable, as a reminder in the fragility of communities and of the impermanence of anything we create. If a project that some of the smartest people on the planet put their heart and soul into can fall apart so ruinously, who are we to have any ego about our creations?

zamazingo 8y ago
Do you know where the new elves are?
- lfxyz 8y ago
  Did we know those elves were elves at the time?
  - whatyoucantsay 8y ago
    pmarca had two separate $1B+ exits and the invention of the first mainstream web browser under his belt
- whatyoucantsay 8y ago
  I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives. If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business. It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is. Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.
badcede 8y ago
And yet here you are.
dang 8y ago
People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors. 1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).
- whatyoucantsay 8y ago
  1. Which years? 2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars. Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents. 3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting. Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether. #3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed. My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.
  - dang 8y ago
    Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)

zamazingo 8y ago

Do you know where the new elves are?

lfxyz 8y ago
Did we know those elves were elves at the time?
- whatyoucantsay 8y ago
  pmarca had two separate $1B+ exits and the invention of the first mainstream web browser under his belt
whatyoucantsay 8y ago
I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives. If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business. It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is. Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.

badcede 8y ago

And yet here you are.

dang 8y ago

People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors. 1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).

whatyoucantsay 8y ago
1. Which years? 2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars. Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents. 3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting. Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether. #3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed. My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.
- dang 8y ago
  Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)