6 ms·

Withdrawing from Hacker News

pg 16y ago
Colin, is the problem more a decrease in the quality of the stories on the frontpage, or a decrease in the quality of the comment threads?
- deleted 16y ago
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- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  I started to try to work that out, and after a while found myself unable to care. In the end, that was what made the decision for me to stop interacting with the site so much. The following are observations from my personal point of view, obviously, and it's worth keeping in mind that I'm not necessarily your target demographic anyway. I've tried not to let this turn into a rant. I may not have succeeded ... Anyway. The front page does feel a little worse, but there's still stuff that does belong there. There's still a lot that's good, and perhaps my perception that it's worse is simply because I've grown. I talked with Ward Cunningham once about this - any good community helps you to grow, but after a time you outgrow it. Perhaps they should be like a book - you read them, and then after that you dip into them for a bit, then less often, and eventually you don't pick them up again. So maybe the front page isn't that much different. Later this week I'll try to get the time to compare some of my snapshots from two years ago. If I have thoughts, where do you want me to send/put them? But the comments, they definitely feel worse. There are still brilliant and insightful comments, and there are many, many good and valuable comments. But there are also many valueless comments that nevertheless get upvotes, and there's definitely a more snarky feel. I've felt myself being dragged into that at times and had to pull myself back. That didn't used to happen. I also hang about on the "New" page because I think the longer-standing members should do that, and I'm really, really tired of the apparently endless repeat submissions of the same stories, endless re-submission of older (although admittedly valuable) items, and the rise in content-free gossip. But if the experienced members don't read it, how will "the right items" get upvoted, and inappropriate items get flagged? You can't do much about how people vote, but people seem to be upvoting things that they find amusing or entertaining, and confusing that with "gratifies intellectual curiosity." People down-vote things they don't agree with, even when they are genuinely valuable. Er ... That's it. I hope that helps.
  - pg 16y ago
    I'm definitely concerned about this problem. Comment threads have gotten meaner and stupider. And as you say, what makes it worse is that the mean and/or stupid comments often get massively upvoted. Do you have any suggestions for things that might fix the problem? I have all kinds of ideas I'm half considering, but I'm curious to hear what you think. We're on mostly uncharted territory here. Maybe I'll ask HN generally...
    - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
      As with all these things, I think the problem is complex, and has many intertwingled aspects and factors. I have many thoughts on what the problems are, but fewer on how to fix them. In part, I don't understand the mentality, so find it hard to understand why things are thus. I observe, however, that what you need to do is to find a way to "incentivize" the behavior you want. Upvoting a comment that's mean-spirited, unhelpful, or otherwise of negative value should carry a visible cost. But who makes that decision? You can't rely on the community to do so, because that puts you in the same position. Perhaps you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they have the right to declare comments to be of negative value. Then any upvotes such a comment accrued, count as negative karma for the upvoter. There might be other, simpler and more visible ways to achieve the same net result. I know good hackers are interested in many things besides hacking, but "intellectual curiosity" is being interpreted very broadly. Any definition will lead to people playing the lawyer game on the words, so that's a hard one to try to narrow down. Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent. The idea would be that higher ranks get to decide if the decisions by lower ranks are right or wrong, and hence those of lower rank can advance if they behave in a manner you choose to reward. Or something. These are quick "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They won't work, but perhaps suitably clever people on HN can find mutations of them that will. A few ideas were being tossed around here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873 ... although that was more specifically to try to solve the "submission race" problem that jacquesm had identified. But some of those ideas, mated with some of the above, might produce more fit children.
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- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Maybe. Probably. But after being here for 2 1/2 years, and getting in the top 20 on the leader board, and having replied to so many people, I thought it courteous to let them know.
  - ericb 16y ago
    As the FAQ says, this is a common noob delusion. But I'm not a noob either, and I've noticed reddit-ification too--mainly in the comments. Pun/joke threads at the top, rather than insightful comments, snark, etc. Looking at the articles submitted, (with the exception of the cartoon "the end of evolution") the articles still look solid to me. The comments have always been the best part of HN though. If the acculturated core of users are overwhelmed by an influx that is larger in number than the core, it seems to me that is when a culture shift happens. I think the first thing many noobs (myself included at one time) think when they see HN is "oh, reddit for tech stuff and startups!" so I think that is where the revolution is taking us.
  - grellas 16y ago
    This was an exceedingly gracious and thoughtful post. Thank you, Colin (and please do make that "occasional contribution" from time to time - it will always be appreciated).
- lionhearted 16y ago
  RiderofGiraffes has been an awesome, insightful contributor here for years. I've learned a ton from his comments, and he's always been helpful and cool to anyone who asks his perspective on something. Everyone in the community should really think twice before upvoting snarky crap like this. ROG has made three years of awesome contributions here, whereas this is krambs's fourth comment and he's contributed nothing to the community. Yeah, we don't want too much meta and we wouldn't want to see tons of these announcements, but when a longtime contributor explains why they're leaving, what they're interested in, and how to get in touch with them - that's cool and snarky sarcastic jerkiness in response is not. Everyone think twice before you upvote mean-spirited comments, please. ROG - godspeed and much prosperity. Drop a line if I can ever lend a hand with anything.
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
If anyone wants to follow my writings I intend to post them here: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?HN http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?HN There's nothing there yet, and I won't be posting every day.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Wow, I've got to say I'm a bit shocked. Thanks for all you've done around here, not the least your role as a kind of "institutional memory" when it comes to dupes and previous discussions. Best of luck to you further.
- imurray 16y ago
  Please consider providing a rss or atom feed.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Completely experimental - I'm trying to do this "by hand" as a learning experience. I'd be interested if you would tell me if this works: * http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml Cheers!
    - imurray 16y ago
      Yes it works for me: I could click it in firefox and subscribe in Google Reader as usual. You could put the following in the head of your page: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Colin's Blog" href="rss.xml"> That enables an orange RSS button in some browsers (not Firefox 4, but still creates a feeds listing in the page info). Edit: clicking on it in chrome gives an unformated mess. You can provide some formatting by adding a css file. As an example, I made this: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml more-or-less by hand, and it links to a css file.
dman 16y ago
You will be missed. You were an integral part of my hn experience and I will miss your ability to supply relevant links and commentary to the topic being discussed.
rudiger 16y ago
Is this the evaporative cooling effect[1] in action? [1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665
- shii 16y ago
  Yep, and RiderOfGiraffes is not the first to go :( After nickb, mattmaroon, jacquesm, and many other "greats" that you'll find in the searchyc.com logs left, I always questioned why I stick around here anymore. Certainly not to see junk linkbait posted all the time.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    Realistically unless you have someone who is willing to spend 1,000+ hours per year making qualitative judgments about the quality of every active contributor, and who is then willing to go around being kind of an asshole, the community is eventually going to fall apart. And right now that's not going to happen, because there's no profit motive. You could do something where you collect everyone's email address, and then give anyone willing to spend the time to be HN's curator the ability to send out 3 emails a year to the entire list that they could sell advertising against and promote their own projects. But short of that, I don't see anyone stepping up to put in the time and emotional labor required. The only other solution is to implement a paywall, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
    - shii 16y ago
      Yeah, a one-time paywall is what has kept Metafilter and Something Awful going strong. Don't think pg et al. will ever pull that though.
    - skmurphy 16y ago
      I think you may have mis-assessed "no profit motive" HN support YCombinator in several ways. In particular consider how much less visibility YC would have without HN. YC has been very clear that they evalute HN contributions of new applicants. I am not being critical of YC or HN, I just wanted to point out that YC is run as a money making venture and HN is managed to support it.
Tycho 16y ago
Does this mean we don't get to see results of your proposed saved stories experiment? Anyway you're one of the names that have stuck out in my time here so far. Maybe the site will change for the better then you can come back.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  No, it doesn't mean that. If anything comes of any of the experiments it will be posted to my blog or web site, and I'll probably tweet it as well. If people read those and think they're relevant, they'll get posted here. Certainly anyone who helps will get personal replies.
  - Tycho 16y ago
    So are you looking for people to send in their 4 pages of saved stories, or are you not ready yet?
    - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
      Not ready yet - I will return to that thread and contact anyone with contact details in their profile. At least one of them will probably post for me. Thanks. PS: Also attempting to set up an RSS feed on my "blog".
z92 16y ago
> As the site has become popular so the population of exceptional individuals has become diluted. As someone who has made the journey from slashdot to reddit to hacker news starting from 90s, I have strong believe that right now, somewhere, a new community site for programmers is rising. I only need to find it.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I've heard it's Quora. Personally, I've been trying to focus more on coding than on reading about coding. After 5 years bouncing between different programming sites, I think I've learned most of what can be learned in 15-minute blogpost soundbites. The really interesting stuff requires that I buckle down for an afternoon with a textbook or editor window.
- Tekahera 16y ago
  I get the same feeling as you. I only recently discovered HN and at first I was put off by the large amount of noise. After sticking with it for a while, I now get a better feeling for what's worth reading and what doesn't deserve a second glance. Like you say though, I'm sure somewhere, well guarded from the unwashed masses, there's an utopian community of smart people having smart conversation, much like how RoG describes the early HN to have been.
- abraham 16y ago
  Check out Forrst. It might be what you are looking for. http://forrst.com/ http://forrst.com/
  - btipling 16y ago
    Wrong type of community for me personally. It's mostly designers and not enough interesting stuff from an engineering perspective. One too many HTML5 CSS3 show off links. I'm more interested in systems programming topics.
    - abraham 16y ago
      I would say Forrst tends to be tilted towards web development but of the 30 most recent code snippet posts only two were design related.
Sandman 16y ago
First jacquesm leaves, now RiderOfGiraffes... that's a loss of two very active contributors in a relatively short period. Hopefully none of the other great contributors to HN have any similar thoughts about leaving. Anyway, I think that we may soon have to see some new names on HN that can provide such good articles and thoughtful comments.
reader5000 16y ago
To be fair, I'm an HN user who has been here 594 days and have never heard of you, and am sort of confused why largely anonymous users of a site like HN feel the need to post their own dramatic farewell posts. If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend.
- ig1 16y ago
  If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend. That's exactly the kind of snide comment that's making HN a less pleasant place and pushing good contributors away.
  - reader5000 16y ago
    Sorry you interpreted it that way but it was legitimate advice. Real life relationships trump pseudo anonymous internet relationships.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Perhaps this might help stir your understanding of who the major contributors to HN, as decided by its membership, are: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- Sandman 16y ago
  I'm a little bit surprised you've never heard of ROG, he has been an active contributor to HN both with articles and with comments. Anyway, take a look at the leader board, he's there. Number 13. http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- mml 16y ago
  i've never heard of him either, and i've been around long enough to not know, or care how long i've been around on nyc. i personally find this sort of "farewell" ludicrously over-dramatic. to be sure, if i ever leave, i'll just leave, secure in the knowledge that nobody really gives a wit.
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SandB0x 16y ago
Sorry to see you go. I'll miss your valuable insights, tireless cross referencing work and your occasional maths tutoring threads.
kidmenot 16y ago
I'm new here (this is my first comment by the way, so hello everybody), but I'm sorry to see a long-time contributor go. The fact that I'm new doesn't mean I don't see that the signal-to-noise ratio is not really good. I came across some very good and inspirational articles, but also a lot of things that in no way have something to do with the reason people follow HN. And I share z92's belief in a cool community we have yet to discover. On the other hand, this is probably the fate of every community: it's great while few people are a part of it, but its quality degrades rapidly when it gains serious traction. Best of luck, even though we don't know each other.
jacquesm 16y ago
Take good care Colin, enjoy your longer days and please stay in touch. Thanks for your tireless efforts at making HN a better place, they'll be sorely missed. Where else would one find a juggling, programming mathematician :)
ig1 16y ago
Maybe what the startup community needs is a closed forum, something like Forrst where you need an invite, and if you violate the community rules both you and your inviter gets punished. There are advantages in having an open community in that it encourages people thinking about startup and not well connected to the community to get involved, but I'm starting to think the benefits of a closed community may outweigh the disadvantages.
artmageddon 16y ago
I haven't been a part of the community for very long but have come across a number of threads that had your cross-postings or insight on the subject at hand. I enjoyed seeing your contributions and am sad to see you go. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on your blog. (Also: loved your username)
- shii 16y ago
  Yeah, the username is not for without reason either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692
Panoramix 16y ago
Thank you for sharing so much interesting stuff. It has come to the point where, if I see your name next to a submission I think to myself "oh , here's a good one". I wish you all the best.
riskish 16y ago
RiderOfGiraffes: I feel the same dilution since joining over three years ago, especially lately.
blhack 16y ago
I totally agree with this, but it's kindof sad to see people just give up on this community. I've seen some things tried in the past (like hiding karma in comment threads), and I think it would be great if we could try a few more things in the future. I'd love to see HN try making users "earn" karma. You "spend" your karma when you upvote or downvote somebody. Upvotes cost one point, downvotes cost two. This is good because it incentivizes people not to downvote people (it's "expensive"), and also prevents brand new users who don't yet understand the conventions from downvoting things just because they disagree with them. I think that one of the big problems lately has been comments being inappropriately downvoted. I asked a question a couple of days ago about how google justifies things like google charts (which I use heavily), and was downvoted to -4 for it. 3 years ago (when I joined) this wouldn't have been the case. Meanwhile I'm starting reddit-style to see joke threads pop up in the comments. I really think that a lot of this is new users, and I really think that slashdot's style of earning the right to moderate is a solid concept. We should try it.
- Sargis 16y ago
  I think the best solution would be to make HN invite-only.
  - jaysonelliot 16y ago
    I'm afraid that making HN invite-only would just create a more insular community, prone to inside jokes, self-referential memes, and an "us vs. them" mentality.
    - JoshCole 16y ago
      What about invite only with periods in which the site was opened to new members?
  - Perceval 16y ago
    If it had been invite only I would never have been able to join HN or make the contributions that I have (minor though they may be). I just don't run in the same circles and don't have some other web presence (a blog for example) that might serve as credentials. Invite-only would put a real hard-limit on growth. Is growth the key problem or is it something slightly different?
da_coke_chef 16y ago
he doesn't want crack anymore. he wants that brown. i feel him.
da_coke_chef 16y ago
he doesn't want crack anymore. he wants that brown. i feel him.
ajx 16y ago
Thanks for the profound news flash. I'll be sure to write a blog entry the next time I fart.
pclark 16y ago
RiderOfGiraffes was certainly one of the top contributors to the site - and I'll miss him and his brilliant submissions. Duplicate content simply comes with the territory of socially powered sites. If I look at the top 10 stories right now, I feel like it perfectly encapsulates Hackers: http://cl.ly/5iFy http://cl.ly/5iFy This reminds me of a software project I made ages ago, and one of our initial goals was "seeing duplicate content on the web is lame, and we can solve that" what we realised after a number of months of building a reasonably elaborate Google Reader API powered service, was that the solution for users is to simply ensure there is other content to look at, case in point: having 50 or so stories on each Hacker News page. Since then, I have tried very hard to never over think why someone would use a service. My only worry with Hacker News is how much people jump on bandwagons such as the Color funding debate, and I just found myself shaking my head at peoples snide comments over peoples creations and accomplishments. On the flip side, every time I check Hacker News I am blown away by the community, such as this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184
benjaminlotan 16y ago
Thanks for posting, as a newer HN user (8 months), i now have a deeper respect for the system and will try harder to keep quality here and only submit quality content. generally, i follow HN on twitter, that provides me a nice flow of the good stuff. and i always know i can go comment and participate when something strikes me.
alain94040 16y ago
It's called experience: before you discovered HN, you knew less. HN lifted you to a certain level. But now that you have reached that level, you are no longer impressed, you feel like it's all repetitions. Be assured that there are hundreds of people who were like you two years ago, who are discovering HN today, and are benefiting immensely. What HN can't provide you is a community that will grow more and more specialized as yourself grows. It's funny because in my latest startup (http://letslunch.com http://letslunch.com), we have a very strong notion of reputation, so we match entrepreneurs with increasingly experienced entrepreneurs, as your reputation rises. I believe it works for in-person interaction, but I doubt it can be built for an online forum.
- alex_c 16y ago
  I was going to say something very similar. I've been irritated by repetitive content / themes, but a lot of that is simply because I've read it many times before - it's not necessarily a sign that the community is getting stale, it just means I've been reading it way too much. Interesting point about the community growing more specialized - I thought that HN losing its focus on startups (circa the Startup News -> Hacker News rename) was overall a negative thing, since that's what attracted me in the first place, but in retrospect it's probably not. I think I would've got bored much faster reading effectively the same posts about startups over and over again. The wider scope has probably helped to keep the site fresh for me, at the cost of somewhat lower signal/noise.
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Kilimanjaro 16y ago
The more a community grows, the more susceptible it is to PR attacks to manipulate its content. With just 100 fake ids, any attacker can bring to the front page any news they want, even astroturfing becomes easy, downvote everything you don't like and upvote your agenda. ie. one thing is to call Ubuntu's latest release a disaster, another one to call it just different from previous releases or just point out the differences and let every reader decide. Linkbaiting should be banned, sensationalism should be banned, highly biased news should be banned, hype should be banned. Once groupon (just to name one of many) appeared more than ten times a day in the front page, now their PR machine has slowed down to a halt. Yes, they pay PR agencies to launch torpedoes at every news outlet, we all know that. But without proper monitoring it can become tiresome to the reader. Moderation is key, news should be moderated according to every forum's interest, in our case tech news and entrepreneurship. I hope someday PG understands that to avoid the fate of slashdot, digg, TC, etc he must enforce stricter rules for quality content, even if he has to pay a couple of editors to maintain the front page and the comments clean. And no, HN is not untouchable, it may fade into oblivion too. Unless he is in bed with some PR agencies (like TC) in that case, everything I said is moot.
- igrekel 16y ago
  Moderation to represent the interests of the users is moderation done by the users. If you and everyone upvote appropriate content (including on the new page) it will eventually reflect what people find interesting. It is about the users do, not just about what PG does. HN has always been about finding the right mechanisms so that the right balance in content is reached. What has changed is the number and the kind of people on the site, it has changed what type of submission is upvoted, it has also made the number of submissions increase, making it more difficult for the interesting ones to come through.
- mckoss 16y ago
  Does HN have an independent revenue model? Is there enough revenue to support hiring editors here? Arn'te we all just free riding on PG's beneficence?
rboyd 16y ago
as we say in poker (when someone's giving up the game), "see you next week"
rbanffy 16y ago
It just crossed my head. What if we use a flag count (times a comment or submission was flagged and flagging was agreed on by a moderator) to "counter vote". If someone who get flagged often upvotes something, that upvote acts as a flag and could, maybe, be turned into a downvote... I'll edit it and make it clearer in the next hour, but I wanted to leave it here while I have lunch (and think over it) so others can demolish (it's always nice to be corrected by people smarter than me) my idea.
kunley 16y ago
I guess quite a solution to the submissions quality problem would be allowing down-voting of submissions at some karma level cap. This way, a group of users with best karma would be allowed to just stop crappy submissions. Otherwise, they have to be here all the time to promote non-crappy submissions only to not let them sink in a flood of crappy ones, which is dumb.
solipsist 16y ago
I will be probably downvoted for saying this (as I see other people who tried to convey a similar message on this thread were), but I think that posts like these are of little interest to many of us. I don't mean to offend anyone, especially not RiderOfGiraffes who I greatly admire, but I think it's worth pointing out what other HN users have been trying to say. Posts like these are bad for HN for a few reasons: - they appear often and usually repeat the same message - they support the minority of elitists who already dominate HN - their content is only news-worthy to users who've been on HN for a while and not the new ones Basically, any content that is submitted to HN and refers to a user or a user's experience of HN is simply a popularity contest. Whether it becomes popular on HN depends on the popularity of the user. The active and prominent users then feel the need to upvote and comment as they can relate to the poster. However, any budding new user that is trying to 'break in' to the community is confronted with what appears to be a form of exclusivity. What results is a thread in which the OP, upvoters, and commenters that are supporting news that only apply to them. HN shouldn't have threads like these - threads should apply to as many people as they can. I'm not saying that life has to be fair, but I think the end of these posts would help make HN feel like a more inclusive place.
- erik_landerholm 16y ago
  I 100% agree. I think threads announcing you are leaving something are bad form.
- ig1 16y ago
  The majority of other posts doing so were downvoted not for their message but due to the fact they were expressing it in the form of a personal attack against the OP. The value posts like this provide to the community is to allow us to have a period of introspection, evaluating where we were as a community and how we've changed, and if that change has been for the better or for the worse. I agree that if they occur frequently without adding new information into the discussion they have less value, but I don't feel we've got to that point. If people don't step up and make posts like this then we're run the very real risk of not noticing a deterioration in our community until it becomes too late to fix that problem. A high-quality HN is to the benefit of all HN users, not just those most active in the community.
physcab 16y ago
It does seem like fatigue is setting in for some of the leaders. I think that's normal. When you give so much energy and time to something you expect the same in return. You expect that people are going to care as much as you and you become disappointed when they don't. So change your expectations. When I joined over 2 years ago I remember contributing every feasible moment. It was exhausting and I remember feeling so demoralized from the downvoting or from the fact I didn't receive as many upvotes as I thought I should from what I thought was an insightful comment. Finally I decided that for me HN was best used as passively as possible. I read HN often but I try to only contribute when a topic is in my domain. That solves the confidence problem and the burnout problem. I dont foresee myself leaving anytime soon. I havent noticed degrading quality in articles submitted or comments like others have. Maybe it's because I don't watch the site as closely, but for me the site still works as intended.
antidaily 16y ago
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg
- power78 16y ago
  This is not reddit
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mattyroze 16y ago
It's Ok to walk away.
Mz 16y ago
One of the things that a post like this offers is closure. People are notified that "Elvis has left the building" and something has changed. I've had a couple of cases where I made it clear I planned to leave an online community and the listowner and others begged me to stay/come back. In both cases, I was ultimately thrown off. I now think that if it's no longer a good personal fit for a major contributor, it's a mistake to try to keep them. If the community values what they contributed, this might be an opportunity to consider what the remaining members wish to do to create something of value which can draw the interest of high quality members. But begging someone to stay who is no longer satisfied is coming from a position of "you have something of value to give us but we don't really have much of value to give you". It's not a healthy, sustainable thing. Of course, the door is always open. It's not like ROG or Jacqesm or whomever else has left was thrown off. But it's probably not a good idea to make too big of a deal out of it should they choose to post again/occasionally. Peace and good luck in your life's journey, wherever it may take you.
Natsu 16y ago
I was afraid of something like this when I saw you reply to something I asked with the phrase "if I'm still here." Please don't vanish completely.
petar 16y ago
This pain point has been addressed before. One proposed solution is given here: http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1 Implementation pends user excitement and suggestion for how to start-up.
torpor 16y ago
Paul Graham could learn a lot from L. Ron Hubbard.

pg 16y ago

Colin, is the problem more a decrease in the quality of the stories on the frontpage, or a decrease in the quality of the comment threads?

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RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
I started to try to work that out, and after a while found myself unable to care. In the end, that was what made the decision for me to stop interacting with the site so much. The following are observations from my personal point of view, obviously, and it's worth keeping in mind that I'm not necessarily your target demographic anyway. I've tried not to let this turn into a rant. I may not have succeeded ... Anyway. The front page does feel a little worse, but there's still stuff that does belong there. There's still a lot that's good, and perhaps my perception that it's worse is simply because I've grown. I talked with Ward Cunningham once about this - any good community helps you to grow, but after a time you outgrow it. Perhaps they should be like a book - you read them, and then after that you dip into them for a bit, then less often, and eventually you don't pick them up again. So maybe the front page isn't that much different. Later this week I'll try to get the time to compare some of my snapshots from two years ago. If I have thoughts, where do you want me to send/put them? But the comments, they definitely feel worse. There are still brilliant and insightful comments, and there are many, many good and valuable comments. But there are also many valueless comments that nevertheless get upvotes, and there's definitely a more snarky feel. I've felt myself being dragged into that at times and had to pull myself back. That didn't used to happen. I also hang about on the "New" page because I think the longer-standing members should do that, and I'm really, really tired of the apparently endless repeat submissions of the same stories, endless re-submission of older (although admittedly valuable) items, and the rise in content-free gossip. But if the experienced members don't read it, how will "the right items" get upvoted, and inappropriate items get flagged? You can't do much about how people vote, but people seem to be upvoting things that they find amusing or entertaining, and confusing that with "gratifies intellectual curiosity." People down-vote things they don't agree with, even when they are genuinely valuable. Er ... That's it. I hope that helps.
- pg 16y ago
  I'm definitely concerned about this problem. Comment threads have gotten meaner and stupider. And as you say, what makes it worse is that the mean and/or stupid comments often get massively upvoted. Do you have any suggestions for things that might fix the problem? I have all kinds of ideas I'm half considering, but I'm curious to hear what you think. We're on mostly uncharted territory here. Maybe I'll ask HN generally...
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    As with all these things, I think the problem is complex, and has many intertwingled aspects and factors. I have many thoughts on what the problems are, but fewer on how to fix them. In part, I don't understand the mentality, so find it hard to understand why things are thus. I observe, however, that what you need to do is to find a way to "incentivize" the behavior you want. Upvoting a comment that's mean-spirited, unhelpful, or otherwise of negative value should carry a visible cost. But who makes that decision? You can't rely on the community to do so, because that puts you in the same position. Perhaps you need 10% of your community to be "trusted elders," and they have the right to declare comments to be of negative value. Then any upvotes such a comment accrued, count as negative karma for the upvoter. There might be other, simpler and more visible ways to achieve the same net result. I know good hackers are interested in many things besides hacking, but "intellectual curiosity" is being interpreted very broadly. Any definition will lead to people playing the lawyer game on the words, so that's a hard one to try to narrow down. Perhaps bands of karma, expressed as a percentage of the population (or something) could be used to grant and deny more access to features. Making someone's position is the ranking visible will help that be more transparent. The idea would be that higher ranks get to decide if the decisions by lower ranks are right or wrong, and hence those of lower rank can advance if they behave in a manner you choose to reward. Or something. These are quick "toss in the air and see what happens" ideas. They won't work, but perhaps suitably clever people on HN can find mutations of them that will. A few ideas were being tossed around here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387873 ... although that was more specifically to try to solve the "submission race" problem that jacquesm had identified. But some of those ideas, mated with some of the above, might produce more fit children.

deleted 16y ago

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RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Maybe. Probably. But after being here for 2 1/2 years, and getting in the top 20 on the leader board, and having replied to so many people, I thought it courteous to let them know.
- ericb 16y ago
  As the FAQ says, this is a common noob delusion. But I'm not a noob either, and I've noticed reddit-ification too--mainly in the comments. Pun/joke threads at the top, rather than insightful comments, snark, etc. Looking at the articles submitted, (with the exception of the cartoon "the end of evolution") the articles still look solid to me. The comments have always been the best part of HN though. If the acculturated core of users are overwhelmed by an influx that is larger in number than the core, it seems to me that is when a culture shift happens. I think the first thing many noobs (myself included at one time) think when they see HN is "oh, reddit for tech stuff and startups!" so I think that is where the revolution is taking us.
- grellas 16y ago
  This was an exceedingly gracious and thoughtful post. Thank you, Colin (and please do make that "occasional contribution" from time to time - it will always be appreciated).
lionhearted 16y ago
RiderofGiraffes has been an awesome, insightful contributor here for years. I've learned a ton from his comments, and he's always been helpful and cool to anyone who asks his perspective on something. Everyone in the community should really think twice before upvoting snarky crap like this. ROG has made three years of awesome contributions here, whereas this is krambs's fourth comment and he's contributed nothing to the community. Yeah, we don't want too much meta and we wouldn't want to see tons of these announcements, but when a longtime contributor explains why they're leaving, what they're interested in, and how to get in touch with them - that's cool and snarky sarcastic jerkiness in response is not. Everyone think twice before you upvote mean-spirited comments, please. ROG - godspeed and much prosperity. Drop a line if I can ever lend a hand with anything.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

If anyone wants to follow my writings I intend to post them here: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?HN http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/ColinsBlog.html?HN There's nothing there yet, and I won't be posting every day.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
Wow, I've got to say I'm a bit shocked. Thanks for all you've done around here, not the least your role as a kind of "institutional memory" when it comes to dupes and previous discussions. Best of luck to you further.
imurray 16y ago
Please consider providing a rss or atom feed.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Completely experimental - I'm trying to do this "by hand" as a learning experience. I'd be interested if you would tell me if this works: * http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml http://www.solipsys.co.uk/rss.xml Cheers!
  - imurray 16y ago
    Yes it works for me: I could click it in firefox and subscribe in Google Reader as usual. You could put the following in the head of your page: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Colin's Blog" href="rss.xml"> That enables an orange RSS button in some browsers (not Firefox 4, but still creates a feeds listing in the page info). Edit: clicking on it in chrome gives an unformated mess. You can provide some formatting by adding a css file. As an example, I made this: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/it/news.xml more-or-less by hand, and it links to a css file.

dman 16y ago

You will be missed. You were an integral part of my hn experience and I will miss your ability to supply relevant links and commentary to the topic being discussed.

rudiger 16y ago

Is this the evaporative cooling effect[1] in action? [1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665

shii 16y ago
Yep, and RiderOfGiraffes is not the first to go :( After nickb, mattmaroon, jacquesm, and many other "greats" that you'll find in the searchyc.com logs left, I always questioned why I stick around here anymore. Certainly not to see junk linkbait posted all the time.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Realistically unless you have someone who is willing to spend 1,000+ hours per year making qualitative judgments about the quality of every active contributor, and who is then willing to go around being kind of an asshole, the community is eventually going to fall apart. And right now that's not going to happen, because there's no profit motive. You could do something where you collect everyone's email address, and then give anyone willing to spend the time to be HN's curator the ability to send out 3 emails a year to the entire list that they could sell advertising against and promote their own projects. But short of that, I don't see anyone stepping up to put in the time and emotional labor required. The only other solution is to implement a paywall, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
  - shii 16y ago
    Yeah, a one-time paywall is what has kept Metafilter and Something Awful going strong. Don't think pg et al. will ever pull that though.
  - skmurphy 16y ago
    I think you may have mis-assessed "no profit motive" HN support YCombinator in several ways. In particular consider how much less visibility YC would have without HN. YC has been very clear that they evalute HN contributions of new applicants. I am not being critical of YC or HN, I just wanted to point out that YC is run as a money making venture and HN is managed to support it.

Tycho 16y ago

Does this mean we don't get to see results of your proposed saved stories experiment? Anyway you're one of the names that have stuck out in my time here so far. Maybe the site will change for the better then you can come back.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
No, it doesn't mean that. If anything comes of any of the experiments it will be posted to my blog or web site, and I'll probably tweet it as well. If people read those and think they're relevant, they'll get posted here. Certainly anyone who helps will get personal replies.
- Tycho 16y ago
  So are you looking for people to send in their 4 pages of saved stories, or are you not ready yet?
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Not ready yet - I will return to that thread and contact anyone with contact details in their profile. At least one of them will probably post for me. Thanks. PS: Also attempting to set up an RSS feed on my "blog".

z92 16y ago

> As the site has become popular so the population of exceptional individuals has become diluted. As someone who has made the journey from slashdot to reddit to hacker news starting from 90s, I have strong believe that right now, somewhere, a new community site for programmers is rising. I only need to find it.

nostrademons 16y ago
I've heard it's Quora. Personally, I've been trying to focus more on coding than on reading about coding. After 5 years bouncing between different programming sites, I think I've learned most of what can be learned in 15-minute blogpost soundbites. The really interesting stuff requires that I buckle down for an afternoon with a textbook or editor window.
Tekahera 16y ago
I get the same feeling as you. I only recently discovered HN and at first I was put off by the large amount of noise. After sticking with it for a while, I now get a better feeling for what's worth reading and what doesn't deserve a second glance. Like you say though, I'm sure somewhere, well guarded from the unwashed masses, there's an utopian community of smart people having smart conversation, much like how RoG describes the early HN to have been.
abraham 16y ago
Check out Forrst. It might be what you are looking for. http://forrst.com/ http://forrst.com/
- btipling 16y ago
  Wrong type of community for me personally. It's mostly designers and not enough interesting stuff from an engineering perspective. One too many HTML5 CSS3 show off links. I'm more interested in systems programming topics.
  - abraham 16y ago
    I would say Forrst tends to be tilted towards web development but of the 30 most recent code snippet posts only two were design related.

Sandman 16y ago

First jacquesm leaves, now RiderOfGiraffes... that's a loss of two very active contributors in a relatively short period. Hopefully none of the other great contributors to HN have any similar thoughts about leaving. Anyway, I think that we may soon have to see some new names on HN that can provide such good articles and thoughtful comments.

reader5000 16y ago

To be fair, I'm an HN user who has been here 594 days and have never heard of you, and am sort of confused why largely anonymous users of a site like HN feel the need to post their own dramatic farewell posts. If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend.

ig1 16y ago
If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend. That's exactly the kind of snide comment that's making HN a less pleasant place and pushing good contributors away.
- reader5000 16y ago
  Sorry you interpreted it that way but it was legitimate advice. Real life relationships trump pseudo anonymous internet relationships.
ghshephard 16y ago
Perhaps this might help stir your understanding of who the major contributors to HN, as decided by its membership, are: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Sandman 16y ago
I'm a little bit surprised you've never heard of ROG, he has been an active contributor to HN both with articles and with comments. Anyway, take a look at the leader board, he's there. Number 13. http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
mml 16y ago
i've never heard of him either, and i've been around long enough to not know, or care how long i've been around on nyc. i personally find this sort of "farewell" ludicrously over-dramatic. to be sure, if i ever leave, i'll just leave, secure in the knowledge that nobody really gives a wit.

deleted 16y ago

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SandB0x 16y ago

Sorry to see you go. I'll miss your valuable insights, tireless cross referencing work and your occasional maths tutoring threads.

kidmenot 16y ago

I'm new here (this is my first comment by the way, so hello everybody), but I'm sorry to see a long-time contributor go. The fact that I'm new doesn't mean I don't see that the signal-to-noise ratio is not really good. I came across some very good and inspirational articles, but also a lot of things that in no way have something to do with the reason people follow HN. And I share z92's belief in a cool community we have yet to discover. On the other hand, this is probably the fate of every community: it's great while few people are a part of it, but its quality degrades rapidly when it gains serious traction. Best of luck, even though we don't know each other.

jacquesm 16y ago

Take good care Colin, enjoy your longer days and please stay in touch. Thanks for your tireless efforts at making HN a better place, they'll be sorely missed. Where else would one find a juggling, programming mathematician :)

ig1 16y ago

Maybe what the startup community needs is a closed forum, something like Forrst where you need an invite, and if you violate the community rules both you and your inviter gets punished. There are advantages in having an open community in that it encourages people thinking about startup and not well connected to the community to get involved, but I'm starting to think the benefits of a closed community may outweigh the disadvantages.

artmageddon 16y ago

I haven't been a part of the community for very long but have come across a number of threads that had your cross-postings or insight on the subject at hand. I enjoyed seeing your contributions and am sad to see you go. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on your blog. (Also: loved your username)

shii 16y ago
Yeah, the username is not for without reason either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692

Panoramix 16y ago

Thank you for sharing so much interesting stuff. It has come to the point where, if I see your name next to a submission I think to myself "oh , here's a good one". I wish you all the best.

riskish 16y ago

RiderOfGiraffes: I feel the same dilution since joining over three years ago, especially lately.

blhack 16y ago

I totally agree with this, but it's kindof sad to see people just give up on this community. I've seen some things tried in the past (like hiding karma in comment threads), and I think it would be great if we could try a few more things in the future. I'd love to see HN try making users "earn" karma. You "spend" your karma when you upvote or downvote somebody. Upvotes cost one point, downvotes cost two. This is good because it incentivizes people not to downvote people (it's "expensive"), and also prevents brand new users who don't yet understand the conventions from downvoting things just because they disagree with them. I think that one of the big problems lately has been comments being inappropriately downvoted. I asked a question a couple of days ago about how google justifies things like google charts (which I use heavily), and was downvoted to -4 for it. 3 years ago (when I joined) this wouldn't have been the case. Meanwhile I'm starting reddit-style to see joke threads pop up in the comments. I really think that a lot of this is new users, and I really think that slashdot's style of earning the right to moderate is a solid concept. We should try it.

Sargis 16y ago
I think the best solution would be to make HN invite-only.
- jaysonelliot 16y ago
  I'm afraid that making HN invite-only would just create a more insular community, prone to inside jokes, self-referential memes, and an "us vs. them" mentality.
  - JoshCole 16y ago
    What about invite only with periods in which the site was opened to new members?
- Perceval 16y ago
  If it had been invite only I would never have been able to join HN or make the contributions that I have (minor though they may be). I just don't run in the same circles and don't have some other web presence (a blog for example) that might serve as credentials. Invite-only would put a real hard-limit on growth. Is growth the key problem or is it something slightly different?

da_coke_chef 16y ago

he doesn't want crack anymore. he wants that brown. i feel him.

da_coke_chef 16y ago

he doesn't want crack anymore. he wants that brown. i feel him.

ajx 16y ago

Thanks for the profound news flash. I'll be sure to write a blog entry the next time I fart.

pclark 16y ago

RiderOfGiraffes was certainly one of the top contributors to the site - and I'll miss him and his brilliant submissions. Duplicate content simply comes with the territory of socially powered sites. If I look at the top 10 stories right now, I feel like it perfectly encapsulates Hackers: http://cl.ly/5iFy http://cl.ly/5iFy This reminds me of a software project I made ages ago, and one of our initial goals was "seeing duplicate content on the web is lame, and we can solve that" what we realised after a number of months of building a reasonably elaborate Google Reader API powered service, was that the solution for users is to simply ensure there is other content to look at, case in point: having 50 or so stories on each Hacker News page. Since then, I have tried very hard to never over think why someone would use a service. My only worry with Hacker News is how much people jump on bandwagons such as the Color funding debate, and I just found myself shaking my head at peoples snide comments over peoples creations and accomplishments. On the flip side, every time I check Hacker News I am blown away by the community, such as this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184

benjaminlotan 16y ago

Thanks for posting, as a newer HN user (8 months), i now have a deeper respect for the system and will try harder to keep quality here and only submit quality content. generally, i follow HN on twitter, that provides me a nice flow of the good stuff. and i always know i can go comment and participate when something strikes me.

alain94040 16y ago

It's called experience: before you discovered HN, you knew less. HN lifted you to a certain level. But now that you have reached that level, you are no longer impressed, you feel like it's all repetitions. Be assured that there are hundreds of people who were like you two years ago, who are discovering HN today, and are benefiting immensely. What HN can't provide you is a community that will grow more and more specialized as yourself grows. It's funny because in my latest startup (http://letslunch.com http://letslunch.com), we have a very strong notion of reputation, so we match entrepreneurs with increasingly experienced entrepreneurs, as your reputation rises. I believe it works for in-person interaction, but I doubt it can be built for an online forum.

alex_c 16y ago
I was going to say something very similar. I've been irritated by repetitive content / themes, but a lot of that is simply because I've read it many times before - it's not necessarily a sign that the community is getting stale, it just means I've been reading it way too much. Interesting point about the community growing more specialized - I thought that HN losing its focus on startups (circa the Startup News -> Hacker News rename) was overall a negative thing, since that's what attracted me in the first place, but in retrospect it's probably not. I think I would've got bored much faster reading effectively the same posts about startups over and over again. The wider scope has probably helped to keep the site fresh for me, at the cost of somewhat lower signal/noise.

deleted 16y ago

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Kilimanjaro 16y ago

The more a community grows, the more susceptible it is to PR attacks to manipulate its content. With just 100 fake ids, any attacker can bring to the front page any news they want, even astroturfing becomes easy, downvote everything you don't like and upvote your agenda. ie. one thing is to call Ubuntu's latest release a disaster, another one to call it just different from previous releases or just point out the differences and let every reader decide. Linkbaiting should be banned, sensationalism should be banned, highly biased news should be banned, hype should be banned. Once groupon (just to name one of many) appeared more than ten times a day in the front page, now their PR machine has slowed down to a halt. Yes, they pay PR agencies to launch torpedoes at every news outlet, we all know that. But without proper monitoring it can become tiresome to the reader. Moderation is key, news should be moderated according to every forum's interest, in our case tech news and entrepreneurship. I hope someday PG understands that to avoid the fate of slashdot, digg, TC, etc he must enforce stricter rules for quality content, even if he has to pay a couple of editors to maintain the front page and the comments clean. And no, HN is not untouchable, it may fade into oblivion too. Unless he is in bed with some PR agencies (like TC) in that case, everything I said is moot.

igrekel 16y ago
Moderation to represent the interests of the users is moderation done by the users. If you and everyone upvote appropriate content (including on the new page) it will eventually reflect what people find interesting. It is about the users do, not just about what PG does. HN has always been about finding the right mechanisms so that the right balance in content is reached. What has changed is the number and the kind of people on the site, it has changed what type of submission is upvoted, it has also made the number of submissions increase, making it more difficult for the interesting ones to come through.
mckoss 16y ago
Does HN have an independent revenue model? Is there enough revenue to support hiring editors here? Arn'te we all just free riding on PG's beneficence?

rboyd 16y ago

as we say in poker (when someone's giving up the game), "see you next week"

rbanffy 16y ago

It just crossed my head. What if we use a flag count (times a comment or submission was flagged and flagging was agreed on by a moderator) to "counter vote". If someone who get flagged often upvotes something, that upvote acts as a flag and could, maybe, be turned into a downvote... I'll edit it and make it clearer in the next hour, but I wanted to leave it here while I have lunch (and think over it) so others can demolish (it's always nice to be corrected by people smarter than me) my idea.

kunley 16y ago

I guess quite a solution to the submissions quality problem would be allowing down-voting of submissions at some karma level cap. This way, a group of users with best karma would be allowed to just stop crappy submissions. Otherwise, they have to be here all the time to promote non-crappy submissions only to not let them sink in a flood of crappy ones, which is dumb.

solipsist 16y ago

I will be probably downvoted for saying this (as I see other people who tried to convey a similar message on this thread were), but I think that posts like these are of little interest to many of us. I don't mean to offend anyone, especially not RiderOfGiraffes who I greatly admire, but I think it's worth pointing out what other HN users have been trying to say. Posts like these are bad for HN for a few reasons: - they appear often and usually repeat the same message - they support the minority of elitists who already dominate HN - their content is only news-worthy to users who've been on HN for a while and not the new ones Basically, any content that is submitted to HN and refers to a user or a user's experience of HN is simply a popularity contest. Whether it becomes popular on HN depends on the popularity of the user. The active and prominent users then feel the need to upvote and comment as they can relate to the poster. However, any budding new user that is trying to 'break in' to the community is confronted with what appears to be a form of exclusivity. What results is a thread in which the OP, upvoters, and commenters that are supporting news that only apply to them. HN shouldn't have threads like these - threads should apply to as many people as they can. I'm not saying that life has to be fair, but I think the end of these posts would help make HN feel like a more inclusive place.

erik_landerholm 16y ago
I 100% agree. I think threads announcing you are leaving something are bad form.
ig1 16y ago
The majority of other posts doing so were downvoted not for their message but due to the fact they were expressing it in the form of a personal attack against the OP. The value posts like this provide to the community is to allow us to have a period of introspection, evaluating where we were as a community and how we've changed, and if that change has been for the better or for the worse. I agree that if they occur frequently without adding new information into the discussion they have less value, but I don't feel we've got to that point. If people don't step up and make posts like this then we're run the very real risk of not noticing a deterioration in our community until it becomes too late to fix that problem. A high-quality HN is to the benefit of all HN users, not just those most active in the community.

physcab 16y ago

It does seem like fatigue is setting in for some of the leaders. I think that's normal. When you give so much energy and time to something you expect the same in return. You expect that people are going to care as much as you and you become disappointed when they don't. So change your expectations. When I joined over 2 years ago I remember contributing every feasible moment. It was exhausting and I remember feeling so demoralized from the downvoting or from the fact I didn't receive as many upvotes as I thought I should from what I thought was an insightful comment. Finally I decided that for me HN was best used as passively as possible. I read HN often but I try to only contribute when a topic is in my domain. That solves the confidence problem and the burnout problem. I dont foresee myself leaving anytime soon. I havent noticed degrading quality in articles submitted or comments like others have. Maybe it's because I don't watch the site as closely, but for me the site still works as intended.

antidaily 16y ago

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg

power78 16y ago
This is not reddit

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mattyroze 16y ago

It's Ok to walk away.

Mz 16y ago

One of the things that a post like this offers is closure. People are notified that "Elvis has left the building" and something has changed. I've had a couple of cases where I made it clear I planned to leave an online community and the listowner and others begged me to stay/come back. In both cases, I was ultimately thrown off. I now think that if it's no longer a good personal fit for a major contributor, it's a mistake to try to keep them. If the community values what they contributed, this might be an opportunity to consider what the remaining members wish to do to create something of value which can draw the interest of high quality members. But begging someone to stay who is no longer satisfied is coming from a position of "you have something of value to give us but we don't really have much of value to give you". It's not a healthy, sustainable thing. Of course, the door is always open. It's not like ROG or Jacqesm or whomever else has left was thrown off. But it's probably not a good idea to make too big of a deal out of it should they choose to post again/occasionally. Peace and good luck in your life's journey, wherever it may take you.

Natsu 16y ago

I was afraid of something like this when I saw you reply to something I asked with the phrase "if I'm still here." Please don't vanish completely.

petar 16y ago

This pain point has been addressed before. One proposed solution is given here: http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1 Implementation pends user excitement and suggestion for how to start-up.

torpor 16y ago

Paul Graham could learn a lot from L. Ron Hubbard.