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And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provid

And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment, but would never have become a formal blog post. Invite-only communities intentionally give up on that kind of discourse for... what? Easier moderation?

dorian-graph 7y ago
I’d politely suggest reading the post, especially the “Polite & Knowledgable Community” section. Afterwards, you could have a look through https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats
gonzo41 7y ago
I will jump on and add that the filter options that the OP talks about are a weakness, not a strength. I like HN because I get exposure to ideas and topics that are out of my normal orbit. A lot of the web is very narrow these days and I know HN has it's limitations but it still feels very diverse.
- bnjms 7y ago
  I’m this case you can have your pie and eat it too. All that is missing is a popularity page. It’s true that random professional posts are the best part of HN but I mostly care about the posts that appear in /best for things outside my interests.
just-juan-post 7y ago
> There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment This is now a myth. HN used to be like this but look for yourself, it's no longer like this. It's no longer worth my time to dig for worthwhile nuggets in the HN comments nor is it worth my time to post a high quality comment because I know the only responses will be nitpicks and a few worthless internet points. PS: There's a vague rule about not criticizing HN that gets invoked fairly often. Be prepared for this thread to be gassed. EDIT: Dropped off the internet due to a DOS? Snort is fun. Hi dang and friends!
- untog 7y ago
  I disagree. An example that immediately comes to mind is the 737 MAX grounding. People very experienced in flight systems and the way the Boeing software is designed appeared (from where!) with some absolutely fascinating insight that I haven’t read elsewhere. It doesn’t happen often, but HN doesn’t often discuss things outside of its wheelhouse either. Usually we’re litigating matters of opinion, usually about whether JavaScript is bad or not.
- stedaniels 7y ago
  I come across one of these kind of comments every other day. Some of my favourites are from green accounts that registered just to share their knowledge. So many of HN viewers aren't even registered, but when the urge arrives to share, the low barrier for entry means they can. We all get something from it.
- dang 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the ranking of the current submission, that's because users flagged it, which is the usual reason why stories drop in rank. As for comments by people with domain knowledge, I was just looking at this a couple weeks ago. Here are a few I randomly ran across: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 ("I'm the lead author on this paper") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 ("I can remember when I first met Gary [Starkweather] in 1988") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 ("I’m actually one of the architects of this processor.") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 ("I'm a dentist who regularly treats OSA with dental appliances") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 ("As a working scientist" followed by "Biology postdoc here") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 ("I'm an anesthesiologist") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 ("I wrote the original software for Long Bets") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 ("This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 ("I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched") Edit: from a few minutes ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 ("I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist") Edit: from a few hours ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 ("I'm a researcher working on exactly this problem") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 ("I’m a b-school prof/associate dean") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 ("I used to do the soil lab testing for a guy that dealt with this waste in my state.") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 ("I started this project") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 ("I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days.") There are tons of these, many of which don't get much notice. We've periodically published a highlights list, but I'd like to come up with a way for users to nominate such posts as highlights when they run across them... something like a positive 'flag'.
benjaminjosephw 7y ago
My thoughts exactly. Diversity is really important if you're open to your assumptions being challenged and learning from those with different perspectives. Invite only tech communities can actually be harmful if these open access communities don't also exist. Closed communities end up reinforce existing inequalities and in-group biases. If it were as large and influential as HN, inequality like this would be a real issue.
digitalsushi 7y ago
I think that when our reputations are on the line, that we act much better but also discard the grit and sharp edges that are the catalyst for interest and growth. I believe that we begin to converge on a single, aggregate pseudo-personality that is the most accepted register for communicating within. Karma points enable this convergence because they are the only metric that we can do data analysis on comment quality, and so build into the various user interfaces. So we can all think of many combinations of karma and account - 4chan, reddit, hackernews, youtube (which was trying to require given names); The concept of a website displaying account progeny is both an affront to privacy (in both directions) and a remarkable way to improve comment quality, which I make no effort to define. The invitation only model seems to scale only so far, as all "cool parties" start off cool because only the cool people are invited (cool in this sense means compatible: consider both artificial and natural boundaries such as a physical party of people congregating for social purposes, a private web forum, or even the internet itself, which was initially available to only those that could enter and navigate it). We have euphemisms such as "Eternal September" to connote the perpetual ruining by outsiders infiltrating what was previously more private. I vastly prefer to allow the unsanitized comments to enter a feed, and root through them so that people are not behaving as though being watched. It's exhausting but because both extremes are allowed to exist, the comments with the highest signal to noise ratio are often the most honest. Anecdotally I have found (exceedingly rarely) the most honest, insightful, or inclusive comments are on a site like 4chan, with the least restrictions and the least incentive to build a reputation (it's impossible). On hackernews, and I know I am projecting, I believe that we artificially act better than we are, on average, because we have something here to lose. A clever post turns into a job reference, or a reference to work becomes discovered by a future boss, etc. Ultimately I am glad that all of these combinations exist. Losing a cultivated registry of who's who would have an immediate loss of largely high quality comments, but losing the wild west of anonymous bilge leaves us with no place to be our most honest, regardless of how much or how little it contributes.
- mr_woozy 7y ago
  you've accidentally hit on a strategy that might work well. Have a site with one public user account that is linked to a reputation and a shadow one created simultanously for snark / sharp riposte's / unpopular opinions.
dylanaraps 7y ago
I agree... I've had my projects (see my hn profile) or my blog posts hit lobsters a bunch of times and finding myself unable to respond to the comments as I don't have an account there.
- gerikson 7y ago
  Content authors usually get an invite when one is asked for in the lobste.rs chat.
_wldu 7y ago
Agree 100%. I know people who are domain experts but also very introverted. They don't blog, promote themselves or claim to know things that they don't. But, thankfully, they can and do post here on HN and that benefits us all.
cheez 7y ago
I don't go to HN for the articles, I go for the comments.
oxnrtr 7y ago
Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them". I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters. Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower. The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic. ¹ https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats
Reedx 7y ago
That's a good point. Indeed sometimes the most insightful comments here come from one time use anonymous/throwaway accounts.
- pankajdoharey 7y ago
  That just indicates people are so worried about loosing their reputation on their main account that they resort to throwaway account for projecting their views thats just sad.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    Not true. Sometimes it's whistleblowers and people who rather not have their identity doxxed in case they end up fired at <insert FAANG>. Sometimes people want to share extra info about their startup but w/out divulging who it is... where as their REAL profile has all their personal data so you can easily figure that stuff out. There's plenty of reasons for throwaways besides just being 'nefarious'.

dorian-graph 7y ago

I’d politely suggest reading the post, especially the “Polite & Knowledgable Community” section. Afterwards, you could have a look through https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats

gonzo41 7y ago

I will jump on and add that the filter options that the OP talks about are a weakness, not a strength. I like HN because I get exposure to ideas and topics that are out of my normal orbit. A lot of the web is very narrow these days and I know HN has it's limitations but it still feels very diverse.

bnjms 7y ago
I’m this case you can have your pie and eat it too. All that is missing is a popularity page. It’s true that random professional posts are the best part of HN but I mostly care about the posts that appear in /best for things outside my interests.

just-juan-post 7y ago

> There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment This is now a myth. HN used to be like this but look for yourself, it's no longer like this. It's no longer worth my time to dig for worthwhile nuggets in the HN comments nor is it worth my time to post a high quality comment because I know the only responses will be nitpicks and a few worthless internet points. PS: There's a vague rule about not criticizing HN that gets invoked fairly often. Be prepared for this thread to be gassed. EDIT: Dropped off the internet due to a DOS? Snort is fun. Hi dang and friends!

untog 7y ago
I disagree. An example that immediately comes to mind is the 737 MAX grounding. People very experienced in flight systems and the way the Boeing software is designed appeared (from where!) with some absolutely fascinating insight that I haven’t read elsewhere. It doesn’t happen often, but HN doesn’t often discuss things outside of its wheelhouse either. Usually we’re litigating matters of opinion, usually about whether JavaScript is bad or not.
stedaniels 7y ago
I come across one of these kind of comments every other day. Some of my favourites are from green accounts that registered just to share their knowledge. So many of HN viewers aren't even registered, but when the urge arrives to share, the low barrier for entry means they can. We all get something from it.
dang 7y ago
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the ranking of the current submission, that's because users flagged it, which is the usual reason why stories drop in rank. As for comments by people with domain knowledge, I was just looking at this a couple weeks ago. Here are a few I randomly ran across: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 ("I'm the lead author on this paper") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 ("I can remember when I first met Gary [Starkweather] in 1988") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 ("I’m actually one of the architects of this processor.") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 ("I'm a dentist who regularly treats OSA with dental appliances") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 ("As a working scientist" followed by "Biology postdoc here") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 ("I'm an anesthesiologist") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 ("I wrote the original software for Long Bets") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 ("This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 ("I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched") Edit: from a few minutes ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 ("I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist") Edit: from a few hours ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 ("I'm a researcher working on exactly this problem") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 ("I’m a b-school prof/associate dean") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 ("I used to do the soil lab testing for a guy that dealt with this waste in my state.") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 ("I started this project") Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 ("I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days.") There are tons of these, many of which don't get much notice. We've periodically published a highlights list, but I'd like to come up with a way for users to nominate such posts as highlights when they run across them... something like a positive 'flag'.

benjaminjosephw 7y ago

My thoughts exactly. Diversity is really important if you're open to your assumptions being challenged and learning from those with different perspectives. Invite only tech communities can actually be harmful if these open access communities don't also exist. Closed communities end up reinforce existing inequalities and in-group biases. If it were as large and influential as HN, inequality like this would be a real issue.

digitalsushi 7y ago

I think that when our reputations are on the line, that we act much better but also discard the grit and sharp edges that are the catalyst for interest and growth. I believe that we begin to converge on a single, aggregate pseudo-personality that is the most accepted register for communicating within. Karma points enable this convergence because they are the only metric that we can do data analysis on comment quality, and so build into the various user interfaces. So we can all think of many combinations of karma and account - 4chan, reddit, hackernews, youtube (which was trying to require given names); The concept of a website displaying account progeny is both an affront to privacy (in both directions) and a remarkable way to improve comment quality, which I make no effort to define. The invitation only model seems to scale only so far, as all "cool parties" start off cool because only the cool people are invited (cool in this sense means compatible: consider both artificial and natural boundaries such as a physical party of people congregating for social purposes, a private web forum, or even the internet itself, which was initially available to only those that could enter and navigate it). We have euphemisms such as "Eternal September" to connote the perpetual ruining by outsiders infiltrating what was previously more private. I vastly prefer to allow the unsanitized comments to enter a feed, and root through them so that people are not behaving as though being watched. It's exhausting but because both extremes are allowed to exist, the comments with the highest signal to noise ratio are often the most honest. Anecdotally I have found (exceedingly rarely) the most honest, insightful, or inclusive comments are on a site like 4chan, with the least restrictions and the least incentive to build a reputation (it's impossible). On hackernews, and I know I am projecting, I believe that we artificially act better than we are, on average, because we have something here to lose. A clever post turns into a job reference, or a reference to work becomes discovered by a future boss, etc. Ultimately I am glad that all of these combinations exist. Losing a cultivated registry of who's who would have an immediate loss of largely high quality comments, but losing the wild west of anonymous bilge leaves us with no place to be our most honest, regardless of how much or how little it contributes.

mr_woozy 7y ago
you've accidentally hit on a strategy that might work well. Have a site with one public user account that is linked to a reputation and a shadow one created simultanously for snark / sharp riposte's / unpopular opinions.

dylanaraps 7y ago

I agree... I've had my projects (see my hn profile) or my blog posts hit lobsters a bunch of times and finding myself unable to respond to the comments as I don't have an account there.

gerikson 7y ago
Content authors usually get an invite when one is asked for in the lobste.rs chat.

_wldu 7y ago

Agree 100%. I know people who are domain experts but also very introverted. They don't blog, promote themselves or claim to know things that they don't. But, thankfully, they can and do post here on HN and that benefits us all.

cheez 7y ago

I don't go to HN for the articles, I go for the comments.

oxnrtr 7y ago

Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them". I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters. Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower. The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic. ¹ https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats

Reedx 7y ago

That's a good point. Indeed sometimes the most insightful comments here come from one time use anonymous/throwaway accounts.

pankajdoharey 7y ago
That just indicates people are so worried about loosing their reputation on their main account that they resort to throwaway account for projecting their views thats just sad.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Not true. Sometimes it's whistleblowers and people who rather not have their identity doxxed in case they end up fired at <insert FAANG>. Sometimes people want to share extra info about their startup but w/out divulging who it is... where as their REAL profile has all their personal data so you can easily figure that stuff out. There's plenty of reasons for throwaways besides just being 'nefarious'.