9 ms·

How Hacker News Stays Interesting

227 points by zwischenzug 8y ago

buboard 8y ago
maybe you have become blind to the torrent of posts about facebook.
- gjm11 8y ago
  Number of posts about Facebook on the front page right now: Zero.
mosselman 8y ago
The internals of how HN does this are pretty interesting. Is there a write up about the back-end somewhere? Maybe with screenshots or walk-throughs on what it means to be an admin on HN? I would find that interesting.
hoaw 8y ago
I think that was a bit of a weird conclusion. The "flame war detector" is terrible. What is does is cave to the will of the flamers and create a positive feedback loop for them. They will then go on to post on other topics, which why even the most benign posts will have crap comments. It is what it is, but certainly not even close to ideal.
- warp_factor 8y ago
  agree with you. The issue with this is that anything even close to a little bit controversial will start to go down faster. As a result, we will end up with closely selected, safe, politically correct article on the main page where debate can be kept to a minimal on safe topics.
  - emerongi 8y ago
    Maybe an option would be to have a setting to automatically hide "flame wars" if the user does not wish to see those? We already have the manual "hide", but this would hide some posts automatically. I do agree that this automatic de-ranking as soon as a post is considered to be controversial is unexpected and not a feature I like.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
    Assuming today’s typical use of “politically correct”, it really works in the opposite. I. e. stories about racism or sexism in the tech industry have almost no chance of reaching this audience, that could actually have the power to effect change. Meanwhile, stories and comments cynically portaying all of the “mainstream media” as corrupt, biased, and incompetent routinely rise to the top because that POV is now almost universally seen as uncontroversial fact. Explicit right-wing drivel like overt racism have no chance, thankfully. But having written a tech & politics column for 15 years in my native country, I can read my old stuff and see how my politics have developed. And while I have moved a bit on issues like diversity, I feel the tech community has moved somewhat in the opposite direction, or perhaps towards a sort of cynical, self-focused sort of populism. To use one example that’s almost purely about technology: the GPL used to have many proponents in the slashdot era. These days, anything not MIT licensed is quickly derided as “socialism” or “against freedom”. The general understanding of issues also seems to have gone downhill. It appears, for example, that very people even understand the motivation behind GPL 3.0.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kristofferR 8y ago
  Yeah, if you want to hide a post you don't like you can just start an interesting and controversial discussion/flamewar in the comment thread - and the post will be deleted right away.
- jpalomaki 8y ago
  I don’t really see this happening. IMHO There are relatively few really bad comments in most discussions - maybe they get downvoted quickly? HN is not really a place to fight the flame wars. Typically the flame war is not related to topic, but underlaying issue (topic being for example Ubuntu release XY, but the flames revolving around state of Linux desktop).
  - hoaw 8y ago
    It isn't that the comments are extremely bad. It is that the same attitude of essentially "not caring about the community" carries over into less controversial discussions. Which makes hacker news very noise for people who do want to have decent discussions, share information or whatnot. Basically every story will have people who seem more interested of hearing themselves speak, snipe by down voting or one liners, don't make an effort or don't reply at all or can't leave the discussion to those who actually find it interesting. It is those attitudes or expressions that should be moderated, not topics.
Waterluvian 8y ago
Articles by individuals about self discovery are my favourite. "Here's something I learned. Here's how I learned it. Here's how things are different because I learned it." Especially when it's not cutting edge stuff. Especially when it's by individuals who aren't serial bloggers. Honestly, everything else feels like an unfulfilling facebook-like time sink. Current events, advertising, new libraries of random languages I don't use, echo chamber issues, self-serving content where "experts" sell you their perspective for ad revenue.
- kn8 8y ago
  Is the issue esoteric languages or just languages you don’t use? Which languages do you use?
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    My point is more that it's not like I signed up for news about certain languages. So unless I use them all, there will always be some amount of noise.
    - PaulHoule 8y ago
      Everybody has their pet peeve about things that are "too popular" on Hacker News, see this classic: http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ The trouble is people don't agree on what those are! The next article in that series http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ never went viral because it was too emotionally positive. (E.g. rather than complain about the danger of A.I. in the hands of Google/Facebook/Baidu why not apply it to your own needs?) I get sick of the all the "I competed in Kaggle and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" posts that you see on HN, but HN readers who look at that article superficially might not realize that I am solving my own problem, facing down the issues of applying ML to a business problem which has not been carefully curated.
- abbiya 8y ago
  check this out https://www.8hrs.xyz/ https://www.8hrs.xyz/ The site shows all the top page articles since last 8hrs. I am not sure if this will be useful for hn readers. I am the author.
azhenley 8y ago
My favorites are the Show HN. I get to see something that someone else built and read about how they did it. They are often about things that I have long forgot about but have/had an interest in (e.g, programming on TI-84s). I can’t work on everything that I want but at least I get to read about others doing it.
elken 8y ago
Meta.
elorant 8y ago
My favorite posts are the ones about passive-income, and anything science related. Especially in the latter I'm amazed by the diversity of the people commenting in here. You can pick the most advanced and niche topic and there will always be an expert here who can elaborate on the subject. There's no other place like HN in the entire web.
- tnzn 8y ago
  Well there's r/askscience and r/askhistorians which are similar on that matter.
- bookofjoe 8y ago
  FWIW, I like being the resident retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist here.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  > You can pick the most advanced and niche topic and there will always be an expert here who can elaborate on the subject. There's a firearms forum that I frequent that is like this. I believe it's mostly by virtue of it being so large, but strongly suspect that the financial barrier to entry for the hobby favors successful professionals. Unlike HN, though, the S/N is not always high. You'll often find a thread with a dozen extreme or downright incorrect posts for every high-quality, knowledgeable one. It's a useful resource, but you have to have a well-developed filter to use it effectively.
wtmt 8y ago
What I’m most interested in is knowing how moderation works behind the scenes. It can’t be that dang and sctb (and other mods I don’t know about) read every single comment. Yet they rely to comments that violate the guidelines and warn users. There must be some software analyzing comments based on different parameters (length, downvotes, scans of problematic words/phrases, and more...machine learning/AI too?) and flagging them in a queue for attention.
- jorgesborges 8y ago
  Well the article mentions that a thread with more comments than upvotes is ranked lower. In this case it was the top thread for an hour or so before being thrown to #26. This is interesting and I personally never upvote or downvote individual threads, but maybe I'll start.
- trevyn 8y ago
  I think that it would be entirely practical to skim every new comment on HN given a simple chronological list without threading. HN isn’t actually that big. Metafilter is another example of a small-ish, highly moderated community that does a thorough job with a small handful of dedicated moderators.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > I think that it would be entirely practical to skim every new comment on HN given a simple chronological list without threading. HN isn’t actually that big. The oldest comment on the first page of https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments was posted 15 minutes ago. Reading through all of them took me 5 minutes. Ignoring the fact that posting frequency varies throughout the day, reading every comment would require a single person to spend 8 hours a day every day. So it seems possible to moderate HN like that, but I really wouldn't want to be in dang's shoes monitoring the contextless comment stream all day.
    - trevyn 8y ago
      Read, sure, but skimming for the things that moderators call people out for took me about 30 seconds.
njharman 8y ago
It hasn't. Declined a lot over past five years. There are days now not a single front page article is motivating enough for me to click on it. I'm sure HN has grown audience and in general appeal over same period Both that wider appeal and my loss of interest is due to subject shift of content. From mostly high s/n, tech and startup articles to human interest, "life hacks", and long form. From stuff that is directly useful (to a niche audience), to generally applicable entertainment.
- devereaux 8y ago
  I agree, there seem to be fewer in depth articles. It could be that the audience is changing to a less technical audience, or just getting older. Could you suggest a suitable replacement?
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > It could be that the audience is changing to a less technical audience, or just getting older. Or, perhaps certain publications like the Guardian, Bloomberg and others have discovered HN as a "guerilla marketing" platform and are posting clickbait-ish articles...
    - masonic 8y ago
      And certain sites have essentially all their content shoveled onto HN every day by one or two submitters.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    Could your perception of depth have just changed over time?
- anonu 8y ago
  HN threads should be tagged by category... Maybe automatically based on who comments or upvotes, or content.. and threads should be presented to the user based on interests.
fb03 8y ago
Hacker News is really good! I consider it like a pre-buyout Slashdot in its golden era.
- chrisan 8y ago
  It is like a beowulf cluster of interesting stories and comments
- raverbashing 8y ago
  To be honest they are different sites. Born of different times (and even 5yrs on the web is a lot) Just see how the moderation and commenting system works on both. And I have to say the cheap humour of /. got old already.
aklemm 8y ago
My favorites are the highly rated and vetted learning resources or canonical resources for a given topic. It’s gem hunting for knowledge and it pays off frequently.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gnhrgkai 8y ago
>Thanks to moderation, when I open news.ycombinator.com right now, I’m pleased to see interesting new posts about C, Chopin, and concurrency; and no new posts about fake news, anti-vaxxers, or Flat Earth. We only like strong moderation when it enforces our biases and political leanings.
- PakG1 8y ago
  While this is true, the anti-vaccine debate and the flat earth debate is verifiably settled and only continues because people refuse to accept it. Diversity of opinion is great for society, but if it gets in the way of verifiable AND verified fact, I'm not sure how diversity of opinion is helpful.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Simply not true. I like strong moderation even when it sometimes catches, as it has, topics that suit my biases and leanings. Just as with the more strongly moderated reddits, it's the price of achieving a decent factual discussion. Without it there's a predictable race to the bottom. Without it HN would be just another barely moderated reddit with little appeal.
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  You can visit more than one site with news/links to satisfy your curiosity, and I'm sure many people here do. And even more importantly the guidelines are explicit here - you know well what you will not find on this site (example: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"). I think the trouble starts when people are tricked into believing that whatever they're seeing is a fair sample of the world while in reality it's not.
- indigochill 8y ago
  I disagree with "only". I've been a moderator on a couple of game forums, and my line with people who got too heavily into politics was, "We're here to talk about the game. I'm not here to judge political views, but discussing politics isn't the purpose of this forum. So please take that conversation somewhere more suited for it." My experience on HN has been much the same. There's a range of ideas here and some are more controversial than others, but they're pretty much always relevant to the interests of the community. I appreciate the relatively tight focus and that's what keeps HN feeling like a high signal-to-noise place to me.
aboutruby 8y ago
See a post you don't like? Somehow manage to make it have more comments than upvotes and it's gone. I don't see any potential for abuse here /s
raverbashing 8y ago
Good to know "More comments than its score" looks like a nice indicator, though there is probably a threshold, otherwise any new story would probably trigger it. The hard part of the website it seems is not just the "CRUD" part but all the intelligence to make it feel "seamless" (because without it it would be a spam and flame fest) The challenges of course keep evolving and I have my worries about some of those (influence by 3rd parties mainly and some discussions that maybe should be allowed but aren't - though that's more on the editorial line of the site)
- laurentl 8y ago
  “More comments than its score” is something that jumps out at me when I skim the front page. So, for that matter, is “high score and very few comments”. I know that the latter will probably be something really interesting or even awe-inspiring that doesn’t leave much to be discussed. While the former is (sometimes) a sign that the comment section will be more interesting than the article. At the very least I can expect different, well-argued viewpoints, and reading a thoughtful argument is something I enjoy.
  - masonic 8y ago
    high score and very few comments ...can also indicate vote fraud / self-promotion.
vacocake 8y ago
By shadow banning and hide comments. That's how hacker news work today.
evrydayhustling 8y ago
> If you want to blame Facebook and YouTube for allowing the spread of wild conspiracy theories, it’s hard to also blame calmer forums like Hacker News for moderation. This. I would love to see more sites experimenting with transparent, interrogable but impactful moderation schemes that actively shape conversation.
- eitland 8y ago
  lobste.rs They have transparent moderation, and - I believe - you have to state a reason for downvoting.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    > you have to state a reason for downvoting. Yep, you do. I find the quality of discussions there to be worlds above HN. Downvote brigades are basically nonexistent. I don't know if it's because you have to go through an extra step to downvote someone and commentors don't want to be publicly labeled as 'troll' or 'spam', but they are doing seems to be working.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Being invite-only is a less transparent form of moderation.
    - eitland 8y ago
      How? IMO it is very transparent: Anyone can invite and everyone can see who invited who. No secrets or murky procedures there?
lordnacho 8y ago
IMO it works because the moderation keeps things civil and polite. It's not just a question of saying things that are true, the tone of how things are said seems to matter. People get tired of debates where there's a lot of sarcasm. This is actually the only forum I bother with, having tried a few over the years.
yholio 8y ago
A major pet peeve are downvotes on perfectly polite comments from people who have different opinions about the topic you are commenting on. If downvotes were merely used to order comments, I could understand trying to deprioritize unpopular or factually incorrect views. But if downvoted comments are effectively hidden away, a downvote becomes a tool of censorship, a political weapon to punish and banish opposing views. It turns the community to an echo chamber and discourage me to contribute any view that might offend the mainstream groupthink - which is not a unique emergent spirit of the community, but heavily influenced by the demographics of the site. Many of my votes are upvotes to unfairly downvoted, high effort comments.
- baragiola 8y ago
  So much this. Downvotes are not for disagreements, they should be used for trolls, shills and bigots. If the comment adds a view you don't agree with, write an answer or ignore it. Downvoting in this case doesn't adds value. Reddit suffers the same problem.
  - superasn 8y ago
    Which is why it would make sense to write a reason why you're downvoting. A lot of people wouldn't have energy to write an explanation when downvoting on a knee jerk reaction.
    - goalieca 8y ago
      There's another site similar to hackernews and their downvote button requires a reason. One of: off-topic, incorrect, me-too, troll, spam. I bet though a lot of people would still use incorrect for disagreements. I always thought slashdot had a great moderation system where +5 was the max a post could get and everyone only had a few votes every few weeks so you had to be careful. The upvotes also had reasons like (insightful, funny, interesting ..) so a user could sort by those.
      - DrScump 8y ago
rhlala 8y ago
I feel like one mandatory rule on HN should be explicit : Don't upvote because you agree the post, but because it add value to the discussion.
Bizarro 8y ago
The stories that generate flame wars don't go away as long as they align with Dang's and other moderators political views.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  Do you have data that supports this assertion, or is it anecdotal?
raphlinus 8y ago
I find the converse of the observation is true as well. I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. In fact, I usually send around a draft and reword anything that is at risk for being misunderstood. As a result, I often see lower engagement in comments than I would expect for comparable material. Like probably about 0.01% of content creators, I take that as a positive metric. I also have a very good experience on Twitter, being careful only to tweet constructive things, and curating my feed. (I'm interested in political news, and find that following only Kyle Griffin gives me all the signal and none of the noise). That said, though I can tune my personal experiences in these ways, I feel like I'm pissing into the wind. All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement at the expense of everything else, so I think it's increasingly difficult to filter for quality. I try to spend more time with print, but I find it hard to resist the immediacy of digital.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  > I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. I tend to do the same, but my interests are strongly aligned with my politics. Personally, I'm a strong advocate for gun rights and reducing the size of government in all areas. When I post on HN I always try to stay as fact-based as possible, to minimize the "emotional power" of the words I use, and generally to be as respectful as possible. For me, it's more like corresponding in an academic setting than a social one. I'll also add that this approach has resulted in many excellent discussions with people I wouldn't have encountered on the other sites I frequent. When I do post my own opinions - because sometimes, the opinion itself is the reason that I'm compelled to post at all - I make sure that I explicitly recognize that it is in fact my opinion instead of presenting it as fact. > All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement This is what makes HN special to me. HN isn't trying to directly monetize the content. It's beneficial to YC because it builds a community, and it's beneficial to members of that community because of the professional connections that are created and maintained here -- but no one is making any more or less money based on how long people spend reading or writing comments.
notacoward 8y ago
Peer pressure, pure and simple. Yes, there are tons of people who talk loudly and rudely about topics they don't really understand at all. There's plenty of stalking and brigading that people get away with. But there are also just enough people who are informed and articulate to make it worthwhile anyway. The karma/vote/flag system is, similarly, just good enough to make their comments more visible most of the time. It's sort of the worst possible tech news/discussion site, except for all the others. It's also a bit fragile. If a key hundred or so of the top commenters (not highest karma because karma grossly overweights submissions vs. comments) stopped participating here, I and probably many others would no longer find it "just good enough" to bother. It's really only a matter of time before that happens.
ggm 8y ago
I've often wondered if well implemented shadowban works.
writepub 8y ago
I'd argue this is how HN hits a glass ceiling. Somehow the moderators of HN think the community is mature enough to have meaningful discussions, but completely immature and unable to handle topics that the mods don't consider kosher. There's no other place online that would actually attempt an honest discussion about "non-kosher" topics, and the mods are killing that chance by shadow banning
lazyjones 8y ago
What else is there? I‘m looking for publications with medium to highly technical articles about practical technology, esp. material science, manufacturing, IT, automotive, robotics, clean tech etc., but without all the product placement, cultural and political topics and alarmist trends. HN used to be very close to optimal for me, except for the (logical) focus on programming, but recently there‘s just too much politics, climate, „look at my amazing 100 line project“ and self-help stuff to weed out. Any recommendations?
masonic 8y ago
BTW, I consider the quoted moderator response to be very well-written itself.

227 points by zwischenzug 8y ago

buboard 8y ago

maybe you have become blind to the torrent of posts about facebook.

gjm11 8y ago
Number of posts about Facebook on the front page right now: Zero.

mosselman 8y ago

The internals of how HN does this are pretty interesting. Is there a write up about the back-end somewhere? Maybe with screenshots or walk-throughs on what it means to be an admin on HN? I would find that interesting.

hoaw 8y ago

I think that was a bit of a weird conclusion. The "flame war detector" is terrible. What is does is cave to the will of the flamers and create a positive feedback loop for them. They will then go on to post on other topics, which why even the most benign posts will have crap comments. It is what it is, but certainly not even close to ideal.

warp_factor 8y ago
agree with you. The issue with this is that anything even close to a little bit controversial will start to go down faster. As a result, we will end up with closely selected, safe, politically correct article on the main page where debate can be kept to a minimal on safe topics.
- emerongi 8y ago
  Maybe an option would be to have a setting to automatically hide "flame wars" if the user does not wish to see those? We already have the manual "hide", but this would hide some posts automatically. I do agree that this automatic de-ranking as soon as a post is considered to be controversial is unexpected and not a feature I like.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  Assuming today’s typical use of “politically correct”, it really works in the opposite. I. e. stories about racism or sexism in the tech industry have almost no chance of reaching this audience, that could actually have the power to effect change. Meanwhile, stories and comments cynically portaying all of the “mainstream media” as corrupt, biased, and incompetent routinely rise to the top because that POV is now almost universally seen as uncontroversial fact. Explicit right-wing drivel like overt racism have no chance, thankfully. But having written a tech & politics column for 15 years in my native country, I can read my old stuff and see how my politics have developed. And while I have moved a bit on issues like diversity, I feel the tech community has moved somewhat in the opposite direction, or perhaps towards a sort of cynical, self-focused sort of populism. To use one example that’s almost purely about technology: the GPL used to have many proponents in the slashdot era. These days, anything not MIT licensed is quickly derided as “socialism” or “against freedom”. The general understanding of issues also seems to have gone downhill. It appears, for example, that very people even understand the motivation behind GPL 3.0.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kristofferR 8y ago
Yeah, if you want to hide a post you don't like you can just start an interesting and controversial discussion/flamewar in the comment thread - and the post will be deleted right away.
jpalomaki 8y ago
I don’t really see this happening. IMHO There are relatively few really bad comments in most discussions - maybe they get downvoted quickly? HN is not really a place to fight the flame wars. Typically the flame war is not related to topic, but underlaying issue (topic being for example Ubuntu release XY, but the flames revolving around state of Linux desktop).
- hoaw 8y ago
  It isn't that the comments are extremely bad. It is that the same attitude of essentially "not caring about the community" carries over into less controversial discussions. Which makes hacker news very noise for people who do want to have decent discussions, share information or whatnot. Basically every story will have people who seem more interested of hearing themselves speak, snipe by down voting or one liners, don't make an effort or don't reply at all or can't leave the discussion to those who actually find it interesting. It is those attitudes or expressions that should be moderated, not topics.

Waterluvian 8y ago

Articles by individuals about self discovery are my favourite. "Here's something I learned. Here's how I learned it. Here's how things are different because I learned it." Especially when it's not cutting edge stuff. Especially when it's by individuals who aren't serial bloggers. Honestly, everything else feels like an unfulfilling facebook-like time sink. Current events, advertising, new libraries of random languages I don't use, echo chamber issues, self-serving content where "experts" sell you their perspective for ad revenue.

kn8 8y ago
Is the issue esoteric languages or just languages you don’t use? Which languages do you use?
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  My point is more that it's not like I signed up for news about certain languages. So unless I use them all, there will always be some amount of noise.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    Everybody has their pet peeve about things that are "too popular" on Hacker News, see this classic: http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ http://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ The trouble is people don't agree on what those are! The next article in that series http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ never went viral because it was too emotionally positive. (E.g. rather than complain about the danger of A.I. in the hands of Google/Facebook/Baidu why not apply it to your own needs?) I get sick of the all the "I competed in Kaggle and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" posts that you see on HN, but HN readers who look at that article superficially might not realize that I am solving my own problem, facing down the issues of applying ML to a business problem which has not been carefully curated.
abbiya 8y ago
check this out https://www.8hrs.xyz/ https://www.8hrs.xyz/ The site shows all the top page articles since last 8hrs. I am not sure if this will be useful for hn readers. I am the author.

azhenley 8y ago

My favorites are the Show HN. I get to see something that someone else built and read about how they did it. They are often about things that I have long forgot about but have/had an interest in (e.g, programming on TI-84s). I can’t work on everything that I want but at least I get to read about others doing it.

elken 8y ago

Meta.

elorant 8y ago

My favorite posts are the ones about passive-income, and anything science related. Especially in the latter I'm amazed by the diversity of the people commenting in here. You can pick the most advanced and niche topic and there will always be an expert here who can elaborate on the subject. There's no other place like HN in the entire web.

tnzn 8y ago
Well there's r/askscience and r/askhistorians which are similar on that matter.
bookofjoe 8y ago
FWIW, I like being the resident retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist here.
LyndsySimon 8y ago
> You can pick the most advanced and niche topic and there will always be an expert here who can elaborate on the subject. There's a firearms forum that I frequent that is like this. I believe it's mostly by virtue of it being so large, but strongly suspect that the financial barrier to entry for the hobby favors successful professionals. Unlike HN, though, the S/N is not always high. You'll often find a thread with a dozen extreme or downright incorrect posts for every high-quality, knowledgeable one. It's a useful resource, but you have to have a well-developed filter to use it effectively.

wtmt 8y ago

What I’m most interested in is knowing how moderation works behind the scenes. It can’t be that dang and sctb (and other mods I don’t know about) read every single comment. Yet they rely to comments that violate the guidelines and warn users. There must be some software analyzing comments based on different parameters (length, downvotes, scans of problematic words/phrases, and more...machine learning/AI too?) and flagging them in a queue for attention.

jorgesborges 8y ago
Well the article mentions that a thread with more comments than upvotes is ranked lower. In this case it was the top thread for an hour or so before being thrown to #26. This is interesting and I personally never upvote or downvote individual threads, but maybe I'll start.
trevyn 8y ago
I think that it would be entirely practical to skim every new comment on HN given a simple chronological list without threading. HN isn’t actually that big. Metafilter is another example of a small-ish, highly moderated community that does a thorough job with a small handful of dedicated moderators.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > I think that it would be entirely practical to skim every new comment on HN given a simple chronological list without threading. HN isn’t actually that big. The oldest comment on the first page of https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments was posted 15 minutes ago. Reading through all of them took me 5 minutes. Ignoring the fact that posting frequency varies throughout the day, reading every comment would require a single person to spend 8 hours a day every day. So it seems possible to moderate HN like that, but I really wouldn't want to be in dang's shoes monitoring the contextless comment stream all day.
  - trevyn 8y ago
    Read, sure, but skimming for the things that moderators call people out for took me about 30 seconds.

njharman 8y ago

It hasn't. Declined a lot over past five years. There are days now not a single front page article is motivating enough for me to click on it. I'm sure HN has grown audience and in general appeal over same period Both that wider appeal and my loss of interest is due to subject shift of content. From mostly high s/n, tech and startup articles to human interest, "life hacks", and long form. From stuff that is directly useful (to a niche audience), to generally applicable entertainment.

devereaux 8y ago
I agree, there seem to be fewer in depth articles. It could be that the audience is changing to a less technical audience, or just getting older. Could you suggest a suitable replacement?
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > It could be that the audience is changing to a less technical audience, or just getting older. Or, perhaps certain publications like the Guardian, Bloomberg and others have discovered HN as a "guerilla marketing" platform and are posting clickbait-ish articles...
  - masonic 8y ago
    And certain sites have essentially all their content shoveled onto HN every day by one or two submitters.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Could your perception of depth have just changed over time?
anonu 8y ago
HN threads should be tagged by category... Maybe automatically based on who comments or upvotes, or content.. and threads should be presented to the user based on interests.

fb03 8y ago

Hacker News is really good! I consider it like a pre-buyout Slashdot in its golden era.

chrisan 8y ago
It is like a beowulf cluster of interesting stories and comments
raverbashing 8y ago
To be honest they are different sites. Born of different times (and even 5yrs on the web is a lot) Just see how the moderation and commenting system works on both. And I have to say the cheap humour of /. got old already.

aklemm 8y ago

My favorites are the highly rated and vetted learning resources or canonical resources for a given topic. It’s gem hunting for knowledge and it pays off frequently.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gnhrgkai 8y ago

>Thanks to moderation, when I open news.ycombinator.com right now, I’m pleased to see interesting new posts about C, Chopin, and concurrency; and no new posts about fake news, anti-vaxxers, or Flat Earth. We only like strong moderation when it enforces our biases and political leanings.

PakG1 8y ago
While this is true, the anti-vaccine debate and the flat earth debate is verifiably settled and only continues because people refuse to accept it. Diversity of opinion is great for society, but if it gets in the way of verifiable AND verified fact, I'm not sure how diversity of opinion is helpful.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Simply not true. I like strong moderation even when it sometimes catches, as it has, topics that suit my biases and leanings. Just as with the more strongly moderated reddits, it's the price of achieving a decent factual discussion. Without it there's a predictable race to the bottom. Without it HN would be just another barely moderated reddit with little appeal.
YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
You can visit more than one site with news/links to satisfy your curiosity, and I'm sure many people here do. And even more importantly the guidelines are explicit here - you know well what you will not find on this site (example: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"). I think the trouble starts when people are tricked into believing that whatever they're seeing is a fair sample of the world while in reality it's not.
indigochill 8y ago
I disagree with "only". I've been a moderator on a couple of game forums, and my line with people who got too heavily into politics was, "We're here to talk about the game. I'm not here to judge political views, but discussing politics isn't the purpose of this forum. So please take that conversation somewhere more suited for it." My experience on HN has been much the same. There's a range of ideas here and some are more controversial than others, but they're pretty much always relevant to the interests of the community. I appreciate the relatively tight focus and that's what keeps HN feeling like a high signal-to-noise place to me.

aboutruby 8y ago

See a post you don't like? Somehow manage to make it have more comments than upvotes and it's gone. I don't see any potential for abuse here /s

raverbashing 8y ago

Good to know "More comments than its score" looks like a nice indicator, though there is probably a threshold, otherwise any new story would probably trigger it. The hard part of the website it seems is not just the "CRUD" part but all the intelligence to make it feel "seamless" (because without it it would be a spam and flame fest) The challenges of course keep evolving and I have my worries about some of those (influence by 3rd parties mainly and some discussions that maybe should be allowed but aren't - though that's more on the editorial line of the site)

laurentl 8y ago
“More comments than its score” is something that jumps out at me when I skim the front page. So, for that matter, is “high score and very few comments”. I know that the latter will probably be something really interesting or even awe-inspiring that doesn’t leave much to be discussed. While the former is (sometimes) a sign that the comment section will be more interesting than the article. At the very least I can expect different, well-argued viewpoints, and reading a thoughtful argument is something I enjoy.
- masonic 8y ago
  high score and very few comments ...can also indicate vote fraud / self-promotion.

vacocake 8y ago

By shadow banning and hide comments. That's how hacker news work today.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

> If you want to blame Facebook and YouTube for allowing the spread of wild conspiracy theories, it’s hard to also blame calmer forums like Hacker News for moderation. This. I would love to see more sites experimenting with transparent, interrogable but impactful moderation schemes that actively shape conversation.

eitland 8y ago
lobste.rs They have transparent moderation, and - I believe - you have to state a reason for downvoting.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > you have to state a reason for downvoting. Yep, you do. I find the quality of discussions there to be worlds above HN. Downvote brigades are basically nonexistent. I don't know if it's because you have to go through an extra step to downvote someone and commentors don't want to be publicly labeled as 'troll' or 'spam', but they are doing seems to be working.
- masonic 8y ago
  Being invite-only is a less transparent form of moderation.
  - eitland 8y ago
    How? IMO it is very transparent: Anyone can invite and everyone can see who invited who. No secrets or murky procedures there?

lordnacho 8y ago

IMO it works because the moderation keeps things civil and polite. It's not just a question of saying things that are true, the tone of how things are said seems to matter. People get tired of debates where there's a lot of sarcasm. This is actually the only forum I bother with, having tried a few over the years.

yholio 8y ago

A major pet peeve are downvotes on perfectly polite comments from people who have different opinions about the topic you are commenting on. If downvotes were merely used to order comments, I could understand trying to deprioritize unpopular or factually incorrect views. But if downvoted comments are effectively hidden away, a downvote becomes a tool of censorship, a political weapon to punish and banish opposing views. It turns the community to an echo chamber and discourage me to contribute any view that might offend the mainstream groupthink - which is not a unique emergent spirit of the community, but heavily influenced by the demographics of the site. Many of my votes are upvotes to unfairly downvoted, high effort comments.

baragiola 8y ago
So much this. Downvotes are not for disagreements, they should be used for trolls, shills and bigots. If the comment adds a view you don't agree with, write an answer or ignore it. Downvoting in this case doesn't adds value. Reddit suffers the same problem.
- superasn 8y ago
  Which is why it would make sense to write a reason why you're downvoting. A lot of people wouldn't have energy to write an explanation when downvoting on a knee jerk reaction.
  - goalieca 8y ago
    There's another site similar to hackernews and their downvote button requires a reason. One of: off-topic, incorrect, me-too, troll, spam. I bet though a lot of people would still use incorrect for disagreements. I always thought slashdot had a great moderation system where +5 was the max a post could get and everyone only had a few votes every few weeks so you had to be careful. The upvotes also had reasons like (insightful, funny, interesting ..) so a user could sort by those.
    - DrScump 8y ago

rhlala 8y ago

I feel like one mandatory rule on HN should be explicit : Don't upvote because you agree the post, but because it add value to the discussion.

Bizarro 8y ago

The stories that generate flame wars don't go away as long as they align with Dang's and other moderators political views.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
Do you have data that supports this assertion, or is it anecdotal?

raphlinus 8y ago

I find the converse of the observation is true as well. I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. In fact, I usually send around a draft and reword anything that is at risk for being misunderstood. As a result, I often see lower engagement in comments than I would expect for comparable material. Like probably about 0.01% of content creators, I take that as a positive metric. I also have a very good experience on Twitter, being careful only to tweet constructive things, and curating my feed. (I'm interested in political news, and find that following only Kyle Griffin gives me all the signal and none of the noise). That said, though I can tune my personal experiences in these ways, I feel like I'm pissing into the wind. All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement at the expense of everything else, so I think it's increasingly difficult to filter for quality. I try to spend more time with print, but I find it hard to resist the immediacy of digital.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
> I often post things about potentially controversial topics (Rust advocacy, undefined behavior, the suitability of Electron for UI), but I am always very careful to avoid provocative statements. I tend to do the same, but my interests are strongly aligned with my politics. Personally, I'm a strong advocate for gun rights and reducing the size of government in all areas. When I post on HN I always try to stay as fact-based as possible, to minimize the "emotional power" of the words I use, and generally to be as respectful as possible. For me, it's more like corresponding in an academic setting than a social one. I'll also add that this approach has resulted in many excellent discussions with people I wouldn't have encountered on the other sites I frequent. When I do post my own opinions - because sometimes, the opinion itself is the reason that I'm compelled to post at all - I make sure that I explicitly recognize that it is in fact my opinion instead of presenting it as fact. > All of the digital content business is relentlessly optimizing for clicks and engagement This is what makes HN special to me. HN isn't trying to directly monetize the content. It's beneficial to YC because it builds a community, and it's beneficial to members of that community because of the professional connections that are created and maintained here -- but no one is making any more or less money based on how long people spend reading or writing comments.

notacoward 8y ago

Peer pressure, pure and simple. Yes, there are tons of people who talk loudly and rudely about topics they don't really understand at all. There's plenty of stalking and brigading that people get away with. But there are also just enough people who are informed and articulate to make it worthwhile anyway. The karma/vote/flag system is, similarly, just good enough to make their comments more visible most of the time. It's sort of the worst possible tech news/discussion site, except for all the others. It's also a bit fragile. If a key hundred or so of the top commenters (not highest karma because karma grossly overweights submissions vs. comments) stopped participating here, I and probably many others would no longer find it "just good enough" to bother. It's really only a matter of time before that happens.

ggm 8y ago

I've often wondered if well implemented shadowban works.

writepub 8y ago

I'd argue this is how HN hits a glass ceiling. Somehow the moderators of HN think the community is mature enough to have meaningful discussions, but completely immature and unable to handle topics that the mods don't consider kosher. There's no other place online that would actually attempt an honest discussion about "non-kosher" topics, and the mods are killing that chance by shadow banning

lazyjones 8y ago

What else is there? I‘m looking for publications with medium to highly technical articles about practical technology, esp. material science, manufacturing, IT, automotive, robotics, clean tech etc., but without all the product placement, cultural and political topics and alarmist trends. HN used to be very close to optimal for me, except for the (logical) focus on programming, but recently there‘s just too much politics, climate, „look at my amazing 100 line project“ and self-help stuff to weed out. Any recommendations?

masonic 8y ago

BTW, I consider the quoted moderator response to be very well-written itself.