6 ms·

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of

by pg 16y ago

I think if we could see random frontpages from days a few years ago, we'd find that the top stories weren't that different, and that there was the same "jack of all trades, master of none" aspect to the site that Alex complains about. It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. Maybe I'll write something to regenerate past front pages, so we can check if things are different now. That should be possible, because news.arc has always logged vote times.

dools 16y ago
It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical". I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the true Hacker Mentality. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1 http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1
- achompas 16y ago
  The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though. As OPs go further from tech/startups (and towards econ and policy), commenters display a poorer understanding of basic concepts. Bottom line: sure, hackers care about many problems. But that doesn't make up for the poor discussion quality surrounding many non-tech articles here.
  - dools 16y ago
    The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though I've seen what looks like fantastic advice and discussion on a range of non-technical topics (particularly things like venture capital/financing and laws around starting a company and that kind of thing). Of course, not being an expert in any of that stuff I'm at a loss to make a judgement as to it's veracity ;)
    - achompas 16y ago
      Hence my next point: "As OPs go further from tech/startups..." I'm definitely no funding savant, either!
bootload 16y ago
A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries: 2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ 2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ 2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ 2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ 2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663
- barrkel 16y ago
  Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.
  - jaredmck 16y ago
    That Erlamg screenshot is hilarious. Only one story on the front page didn't have Erlang in the title, why HN had been slow...was it due to the amount of Erlang submissions?
    - thorax 16y ago
      The slowdown and Erlangfest was because of a big new influx of users, see pg's post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 And pg's appeal for sanity: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280
  - KirinDave 16y ago
    They were a joke? I thought finally people were interested in something cool. :(
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      What brings a tear to my eye is that, back in those days, it was hard for me to tell at first that it was a deliberate plot. It felt quite natural to have multiple discussions of Erlang on the front page.
tptacek 16y ago
Maybe you should compare random /active pages from years back. I don't know, I only found out about /active this last month, but I'm guessing the problem will be more visible there.
9oliYQjP 16y ago
Most of us that have been around since the beginning (this is my second account) are too busy to participate as regularly as we once did. I'd rather spend time on my business than get hooked on discussions here as much as I did in the past. I will jump in here every so often and I still think HN is relatively great. Doesn't everybody remember the big debate over even linking to Techcrunch articles? We have always been whining about what's wrong to realize that this place has consistently been pretty great. And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.
- weaksauce 16y ago
  I agree. This place has always been mostly good with a sprinkle of fluff pieces every now and then. The one thing that has changed a bit is the comments. Sadly the comments are being muddled a bit by the new kids on the block. Not that the new kids are doing anything intentionally bad, nor are they really bad comments, but I do remember a time where the people replying to comments were actual domain experts in a certain field or they wrote the application that you use every day, etc.... It's a problem with getting a larger user base. I do think that this site has aged about as gracefully as possible though.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Additionally, I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. Which I find very frustrating, and I know people say 'whining about declining quality has always happened', but I really feel that this voting behavior used to be less pronounced.
    - tokenadult 16y ago
      I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. It hasn't just been new users. Rather it has been nearly everyone since the beginning. See what the founder said 1103 days ago about downvoting for disagreement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
jraines 16y ago
I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy. I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  The fact that HN hasn't been overrun by marketing zombies is why I'm not too worried about its direction. If linkbait titles are the big complaint about submissions, it's a good sign.
  - jraines 16y ago
    That's true I guess, but it seems like a low bar.
  - achompas 16y ago
    But it's a slippery slope, right? It's easier to worry now BEFORE marketing zomboids etc. arrive and bombard us.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
petercooper 16y ago
You (pg) will not need this since you have the data.. ;-).. but for anyone else interested in doing analysis over time, HackerSlide stores JSON representations of the HN front page every hour (starting Oct 15 2010). http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json gets you what you want. For example: http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json
- metachris 16y ago
  Wow great! http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json appears to be the earliest. Do you provide this as an "api" and allow people to build apps on top of it? If so, are there any limits?
  - petercooper 16y ago
    No. At least, no more API than what I just explained ;-) It's not my data. It's publicly available because the main http://hackerslide.com/ http://hackerslide.com/ site uses it and if you want to grab it every now and then, that's fine by me. If anyone grabs the same file over and over or anything crazy like that, they'll be blocked, but if you just poach the data and store your own copies, go for it :-)
stcredzero 16y ago
I wonder what Google's reading level rating mechanism would make of changes over time? Disturbing thought -- what about comments by poster?
cachemoney 16y ago
The frontpage content is fine. I'm much more concerned about the comment quality.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- alexknight 16y ago
  That's always a serious concern. It's not surprising that many bloggers either heavily moderate or don't even allow comments on blog posts. It's a difficult issue to solve for sure. Better comments means you need better people offering thoughtful and insightful comments.
shii 16y ago
There was a submission a couple of weeks ago of a site that randomly arranged previous HN submissions of a certain threshold from the past with each refresh. Was really useful and sadly neither Searchyc.com or Google is helping with finding the post. Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?
sophacles 16y ago
I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation. The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this: I've grown. The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises. When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments. edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.
- moultano 16y ago
  A similar effect: The average age on the internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. Think about what effect that has on the density of quality user generated content.
  - sophacles 16y ago
    Haha great... I'm barely 30 and you punks are already calling me old. :)
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      College students started calling me old at 27. Just wait til you hit 40!
    - manvsmachine 16y ago
      Heh, I'm 26 and I've started calling myself old.
      - 16y ago
jsrfded 16y ago
Random highly-ranked hacker news threads: http://www.skrenta.com/hn/ http://www.skrenta.com/hn/
- shii 16y ago
  Yup, this is the one I mentioned in this tree a little earlier.
dewitt 16y ago
There are plenty of cached pages in the Internet Archive: http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombi... The first one saved was on Feb 22, 2007, just after the site launched: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news.... Notice that the second link is to pg's announcement post. Second cached page, Feb 26, 2007: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news.... And so forth: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news.... http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news.... Bounce on the ▸ icon to page from day to day. This one has a gem on it from paul: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news.... The archive is not complete, but it does give a reasonable glimpse into the recent past of HN. [Edit: I think I'll go crazy before getting the line breaks to look correct.]

by pg 16y ago

dools 16y ago

It may be that a site whose design spec is to satisfy hackers' intellectual curiosity would necessarily feel that way. As the infamous "How to Become A Hacker" states "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved"[1]. There is no mention of those problems having to be "deeply technical". I certainly see the tremendous variety of topics that make the homepage of HN as an asset in keeping with the true Hacker Mentality. [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1 http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1

achompas 16y ago
The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though. As OPs go further from tech/startups (and towards econ and policy), commenters display a poorer understanding of basic concepts. Bottom line: sure, hackers care about many problems. But that doesn't make up for the poor discussion quality surrounding many non-tech articles here.
- dools 16y ago
  The non-technical questions on HN have poor associated discussions though I've seen what looks like fantastic advice and discussion on a range of non-technical topics (particularly things like venture capital/financing and laws around starting a company and that kind of thing). Of course, not being an expert in any of that stuff I'm at a loss to make a judgement as to it's veracity ;)
  - achompas 16y ago
    Hence my next point: "As OPs go further from tech/startups..." I'm definitely no funding savant, either!

bootload 16y ago

A diff of past front pages would be interesting. Some historical front page entries: 2007AUG15 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1119991071/ 2008FEB08 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ 2009JAN18 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3205568708/ 2009MAR12 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3347109733/ 2010JUN24 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4728476663

barrkel 16y ago
Of that sampling, it hit the apex for me with Jan 2009 page. The Mar 2009 page is when there was an influx, and we started posting Erlang stories as a joke to stem the flow.
- jaredmck 16y ago
  That Erlamg screenshot is hilarious. Only one story on the front page didn't have Erlang in the title, why HN had been slow...was it due to the amount of Erlang submissions?
  - thorax 16y ago
    The slowdown and Erlangfest was because of a big new influx of users, see pg's post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 And pg's appeal for sanity: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280
- KirinDave 16y ago
  They were a joke? I thought finally people were interested in something cool. :(
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    What brings a tear to my eye is that, back in those days, it was hard for me to tell at first that it was a deliberate plot. It felt quite natural to have multiple discussions of Erlang on the front page.

tptacek 16y ago

Maybe you should compare random /active pages from years back. I don't know, I only found out about /active this last month, but I'm guessing the problem will be more visible there.

9oliYQjP 16y ago

Most of us that have been around since the beginning (this is my second account) are too busy to participate as regularly as we once did. I'd rather spend time on my business than get hooked on discussions here as much as I did in the past. I will jump in here every so often and I still think HN is relatively great. Doesn't everybody remember the big debate over even linking to Techcrunch articles? We have always been whining about what's wrong to realize that this place has consistently been pretty great. And sure, we might be like that dance club that's a bit too mainstream. But pretty soon those early cool kids grow up and are also not cool enough to discover the next hot thing. The next HN will come about and it won't be somebody from here who starts it.

weaksauce 16y ago
I agree. This place has always been mostly good with a sprinkle of fluff pieces every now and then. The one thing that has changed a bit is the comments. Sadly the comments are being muddled a bit by the new kids on the block. Not that the new kids are doing anything intentionally bad, nor are they really bad comments, but I do remember a time where the people replying to comments were actual domain experts in a certain field or they wrote the application that you use every day, etc.... It's a problem with getting a larger user base. I do think that this site has aged about as gracefully as possible though.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Additionally, I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. Which I find very frustrating, and I know people say 'whining about declining quality has always happened', but I really feel that this voting behavior used to be less pronounced.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    I think newer users are conditioned by other sites to use voting as a way to agree or disagree with what is said, rather than as a way to rate the quality of the point being made, regardless of what the point is. It hasn't just been new users. Rather it has been nearly everyone since the beginning. See what the founder said 1103 days ago about downvoting for disagreement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

jraines 16y ago

I think this may be due in part to people learning how to target Hacker News readers with their article and blog post headlines, so while the front page would look similar, the newer linked content is more fluffy. I mean, there has to be some explanation like this, because it just seems so clear from regular reading that the quality has gone down. Then again, maybe I'm projecting the decline of comments onto the content.

mkr-hn 16y ago
The fact that HN hasn't been overrun by marketing zombies is why I'm not too worried about its direction. If linkbait titles are the big complaint about submissions, it's a good sign.
- jraines 16y ago
  That's true I guess, but it seems like a low bar.
- achompas 16y ago
  But it's a slippery slope, right? It's easier to worry now BEFORE marketing zomboids etc. arrive and bombard us.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

petercooper 16y ago

You (pg) will not need this since you have the data.. ;-).. but for anyone else interested in doing analysis over time, HackerSlide stores JSON representations of the HN front page every hour (starting Oct 15 2010). http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json http://hackerslide.com/data/YYYY-MM-DD-HH.json gets you what you want. For example: http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-23.json

metachris 16y ago
Wow great! http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json appears to be the earliest. Do you provide this as an "api" and allow people to build apps on top of it? If so, are there any limits?
- petercooper 16y ago
  No. At least, no more API than what I just explained ;-) It's not my data. It's publicly available because the main http://hackerslide.com/ http://hackerslide.com/ site uses it and if you want to grab it every now and then, that's fine by me. If anyone grabs the same file over and over or anything crazy like that, they'll be blocked, but if you just poach the data and store your own copies, go for it :-)

stcredzero 16y ago

I wonder what Google's reading level rating mechanism would make of changes over time? Disturbing thought -- what about comments by poster?

cachemoney 16y ago

The frontpage content is fine. I'm much more concerned about the comment quality.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
alexknight 16y ago
That's always a serious concern. It's not surprising that many bloggers either heavily moderate or don't even allow comments on blog posts. It's a difficult issue to solve for sure. Better comments means you need better people offering thoughtful and insightful comments.

shii 16y ago

There was a submission a couple of weeks ago of a site that randomly arranged previous HN submissions of a certain threshold from the past with each refresh. Was really useful and sadly neither Searchyc.com or Google is helping with finding the post. Perhaps the submitter sees this comment and shares the link here again?

sophacles 16y ago

I have recently begun to realize that there are 2 aspects to "website degeneration". One is the obvious new people showing up because they heard it's cool psuedo python paradox situation. The other comes from the old-timers themselves. I'm not particularly that old-timer, but in the 3something years I've been here, I can say I have experienced this: I've grown. The "5 awesome vim tips" or "super deep closure stuff" articles that today annoy me as fluff were deep and new to me back then. HN was a fantastic site introducing me to amazing things, and it is introducing a lot of people to the same amazing things now. As such, the quest for truly new content needs to go deeper, but the people who need the lighter content are greater in number and enthusiasm, ensuring the fluff rises. When the older crowd doesn't notice their growth, or the lack of change in content (or the combo) you start to get "it's gone down-hill" type comments. edit: I mean the quest for truly new content for me needs to go deeper, not that the site necessarily needs to go that way.

moultano 16y ago
A similar effect: The average age on the internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. Think about what effect that has on the density of quality user generated content.
- sophacles 16y ago
  Haha great... I'm barely 30 and you punks are already calling me old. :)
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    College students started calling me old at 27. Just wait til you hit 40!
  - manvsmachine 16y ago
    Heh, I'm 26 and I've started calling myself old.
    - 16y ago

jsrfded 16y ago

Random highly-ranked hacker news threads: http://www.skrenta.com/hn/ http://www.skrenta.com/hn/

shii 16y ago
Yup, this is the one I mentioned in this tree a little earlier.

dewitt 16y ago

There are plenty of cached pages in the Internet Archive: http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://waybackmachine.org/20070221033032*/http://news.ycombi... The first one saved was on Feb 22, 2007, just after the site launched: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070221033032/http://news.... Notice that the second link is to pg's announcement post. Second cached page, Feb 26, 2007: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070226001637/http://news.... And so forth: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070405032412/http://news.... http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070406195336/http://news.... Bounce on the ▸ icon to page from day to day. This one has a gem on it from paul: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071001102019/http://news.... The archive is not complete, but it does give a reasonable glimpse into the recent past of HN. [Edit: I think I'll go crazy before getting the line breaks to look correct.]