24 ms·

Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

254 points by obilgic 6y ago

foldr 6y ago
Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have a sensible debate about abortion (and let's definitely not have one here!), but it's not plausible to characterize the disagreement between pro- and anti-abortion folks as a mere disagreement over the meanings of words. In the case of disagreements that are truly merely semantic, it's possible for each side to either (i) come to an agreement on terminology or (ii) agree that they disagree only about terminology. Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.
- 30f0fn 6y ago
  Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting a lot of weight on a distinction which became discredited in 1951).
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    What happened in 1951?
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    I mean, I think there _is_ some semantic debate, in that there are always semantic debates about what is life and what isn't on the edges (see the endless rather tedious argument about whether viruses, or, more esoterically, mitochondria, are life whenever anyone brings it up), but it's largely irrelevant to the actual question.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  I actually agree, and have thought so for a long time, that the discussion about abortion is very much about the meaning of the term life. One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about. So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".
  - foldr 6y ago
    You're then talking about 'meaning' in a deeper sense than just the arbitrary definitions of words, so it's no longer a purely semantic dispute. (Note that the author characterizes semantic disputes as disputes over arbitrary definitions.)
    - Ma8ee 6y ago
      I reread the relevant parts of the text again, and I don't find anything that supports that the author meant anything else with "semantics" than I do. Semantics is about "meaning", not only on a superficial level.
      - foldr 6y ago
        "Semantic arguments are particularly insidious. Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary (unless the actual argument is about language). The worst thing you can do is to have an argument in which you talk past each other because you each have a different idea about what the words mean." It doesn't make sense to dismiss an argument as merely semantic if you are talking about something more than just arbitrary definitions. In many cases, pro- and anti-abortion people have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins. This isn't merely a disagreement about how to define a particular word. You can, if you want to, characterize it as a dispute about what it 'means' for something to be alive, but that's a much deeper issue than a mere semantic quibble. (The debate can't, for example, be resolved by introducing two new terms alive* and alive†, with both sides of the debate agreeing that a foetus is alive* but not alive†.)
wraptile 6y ago
Real question here is whether HN a community or a glorified news feed? I think it's the latter and there's nothing wrong with that, I actually don't want a forum community, just a place where I can read the _news_ and some related comments. I don't think the design of this website is intended for extensive discussions people try to have here. My actual problem with HN is clear astroturfing. The forums is clearly being gamed the same way reddit is, if not more and it's awfully offputting and honestly - scary.
- monoideism 6y ago
  Can you give me some examples of "clear astroturfing"? I see what I presume to be astroturfing occasionally, but only on hot-button political issues that I've come to believe we usually shouldn't discuss on HN anyway.
memory_vandal 6y ago
seems like a post like this pops up every few months
- polote 6y ago
  I'm not sure of the every few months, but this article was discussed 10 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Wow, that was a blast from the past. 122 comments in 2010, seems that the one thing HN has always liked is meta-commentary about HN :)
dwrodri 6y ago
I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with everything. But it gets harder and harder to keep the political op-eds at bay, or as the author of this blog mentions, the fruitless arguments that don't go anywhere. I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.
- LeCow 6y ago
  Ditto. On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.
  - etripe 6y ago
    I'm relatively new to HN but a reddit "senior", and one of the things I really appreciate about this place is the relative lack of toxicity. To me, it seems people really come here for civil discussion and default to asking questions instead of flaming. Well, that and more people source their claims.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      From a 30 year view of communities, including Fido, Usenet, Reddit and many others, I’d attribute that to @dang’s and @pg’s benevolent dictatorship. Many communities start out nice and well meaning, but at some point devolve into a Wild West. HN did not, and I think that’s thanks to dang’s moderation (and pg’s at an earlier time) Also, “small” things like dropping the vote counts, and having canonical rules for titles (which are, as pg noted, a “commons” but treated in other platforms as a land grab) reduces competition and bragging rights. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of what keeps the people looking for conversation here, and those looking mostly for signaling and gratification out.
bot41 6y ago
The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.
- httpsterio 6y ago
  the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      But did it actually work better? I am inclined to think not as lots of people moved from ./ to HN.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        I think a lot has to do with culture itself and not the moderation system. Slashdot was always a bit unruly.
      - gwd 6y ago
        I think it did. I'm an old-skool Slashdot person who just moved over to HN a year or two ago, and there are lots of things I really miss about the Slashdot moderation system. One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems. That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts. As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.
timonoko 6y ago
I remember in Usenet there was often a competition how much you expand a thread sideways. This might the optimal format. A discussion board with only one thread branching infinite. You could then search for significant node points, which have created more discussion and node points. Now to avoid endless wallowing in same shit year after year, I suggest automatic AI system, which does not cancel anything, but moves an arcticle to the node it mostly belongs. And as high as possible regardless of creation time.
friendlybus 6y ago
I agree with the spectator sport aspect. There seems to be a bunch of comments which exist to further the endless tennis match.
cryptica 6y ago
I think one of the problems may be that many people on HN have moved from the lower and middle class to the upper class and so their attitude of fighting for innovation has morphed into an attitude of defending the status quo and suppressing innovation while shunning the contrarian 'hacker' ideals which they used to harbor. Unfortunately, for those of us who fell through the cracks of the system and are left behind (and who are still fighting for innovation), we are finding that more and more HN community members who used to fight alongside us are now turning against us. The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur. Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude. The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.
- mola 6y ago
  I grew up middle class, still am (although middle class has almost vanished), and hope to remain middle class. Infact, my moral compass says striving to be rich is bad. I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful. The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Agreed. And while my moral compass does allow for a very small subset of ways to be rich that I don't consider bad, as I grew up, I've learned this about innovation in tech: 90% of time it's just marketing bullshit, plain and simple. I've grown a cynical perception of the startup scene not because I hate innovation, or want to preserve status quo - it's because I love innovation, but all I keep seeing is startups arbitraging whatever random potential gradient they can find on the market. For every true innovation like people shipping medical supplies via UAVs in developing countries, there's many more startups that just try to suck on the sweet flow of adtech money, or to make cash arbitraging laws and social trust. The way I feel about both entrepreneurship and corporations these days: we've refined the ways of making money down to science, but in the process, we've got self-referential. We've lost sight of the big picture: that all that activity is meant to do something useful in the real world. And what's less hackery than self-serving innovation, where the actual thing being done is the free variable, and the only goal is to redirect the flow of dollars?
RubenvanE 6y ago
These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy (https://hackerdaily.io https://hackerdaily.io). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits: 1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute. 2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not. It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself. It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome! Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.
- atorodius 6y ago
  Nice layout and idea. What do you mean "all posts per day"? Seems it shows a selection?
  - RubenvanE 6y ago
    It takes all posts that were posted on a certain day (based on your local timezone) and shows these posts ordered by their score. To keep it clean only posts with a score of 50 or higher are shown. (I might change this number though, if people would like to see less popular posts) E.g. the main page is always 'yesterday', so for me it shows the posts that were posted between 00:00 and 23:59 on Wednesday, but if its already Friday where you are it will show the top posts of Thursday.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rane 6y ago
  The second point is great one. Occasionally I have to stop reading HN and leave the tab open for a day because I want to read the conversation in full instead of rereading again later trying to figure out which comments are new.
  - RubenvanE 6y ago
kstenerud 6y ago
All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out. People come to these places for various reasons: - To debate - To learn - To engage intellectually with other people - To be heard/validated - To gain social standing The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore. As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).
- nabla9 6y ago
  > initial population has been crowded out. This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity. You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.
  - names_are_hard 6y ago
    This is something that's bothered me for a while, but I'm beginning to make peace with it. Everything is ephemeral, nothing good lasts, and if you want to find the good stuff you have to keep searching. It's the cycle of life for anything of value - first it's niche, then it goes mainstream, then it turns to crap. True for online communities, products (digital and physical), and probably much more. Ok, there's one thing that seems to last: the linux desktop never takes off. Some people bemoan this, I like it. It means that the Linux I love won't go away...not just yet, anyway. Every year that linux fails to popularize on the desktop is another year I don't have to go looking for a new niche tool that will do what I want instead of what its creators want. edit: typos
- teekert 6y ago
fjfaase 6y ago
I wonder if anybody has tried to train an AI on comments to weed out all the rubbish and troll replies.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  Wow that’s a totally unexpected and novel idea! /s
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
I think it's pretty clear that increasing scale is the driver for the degradation of thoughtful connections between users. The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context? In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users. I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example). Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.
- elorant 6y ago
  On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we must cherish it for what it offers.
  - benjaminjosephw 6y ago
    Absolutely, diversity is incredibly important when we're talking about different kinds of "intellectually curious" people. When diversity means letting in the trolls, the marketers and those less inclined to input constructively, that's when conversations start to degrade and loose value. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to encourage first type of diversity without becoming vulnerable to the second.
    - elorant 6y ago
teekert 6y ago
After this I already zoned out: "Every community deteriorates over time. Every community gets new members who don’t understand the rules (or the rules just change), and things just deteriorate." People change, communities change, they grow apart. To call it deterioration is blatant narcissism and failure to look at the situation objectively without judgement.
- codegladiator 6y ago
  I don't know, rest of the post goes on to describe comments like the one you make here.
eightails 6y ago
It's interesting reading this because I've recently been trying to wean myself off Reddit for the similar reasons, and one of the communities I have used to replace it has been HN -- because (in my experience) HN generally tends to avoid the issues in the way discussions play out characterised by this article. It's worth remembering that a forum completely devoid of 'bad arguments' is realistically never going to happen. I guess (as the author notes) it's a matter of 'personal thresholds'.
CharlesMerriam2 6y ago
Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.
- sradman 6y ago
  > ...to drive people to paywalls. You are making assumptions about motivations. Dang’s post Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic [1] explains the rationale that many here adhere to. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Here's another explanation: not all bad stories are upvoted, just those that work well to spin up a good discussion. I know I upvote in this pattern. I read HN for comments first, stories second. The linked story is immaterial, as long as there's something interesting in it that can be discussed on a better level. Take "pop science" articles - the comment thread under those tends to contain links to original research, corrections to the article, opinions of actual scientists in the field, and much better explanations of the described phenomena (as well as the standard set of complaints about paywalls and "journalism these days"; I myself am sometimes guilty of the latter). Would an arXiv paper be preferable to a "pop science" article? Perhaps. And we get our fair share of papers submitted here too. But I have a feeling that the "articles for the masses" are statistically more likely to create an insightful comment thread, and end up being upvoted more. Also worth noting is that moderators often update the submission link, when better sources on the same topic are surfaced.
rntksi 6y ago
The author is actually still reading HN: https://sealedabstract.com/posts/metapolitics/ https://sealedabstract.com/posts/metapolitics/
doublesCs 6y ago
He's right. I'm done here. Good bye.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
This place is one of the most urbane communities in which I’ve participated. It can still get bit “catty,” but nothing that even comes close to what I’ve experienced (and contributed to -mea culpa) in the past. Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter. In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.” I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive. I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past. I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.
buro9 6y ago
There is a life to a forum... for badly run forums it's measured in years, for the best of the best a couple of decades. There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth. Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all. The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so. I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent. What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.
jariel 6y ago
I have to disagree with the commentary a little bit HN is still one of the only places where the insights are consistently thoughtful. There are a lot of smart people on FT it's paywalled and quite expensive (ie professionals only) and even it can be a little reddity at times. Don't fully discount some forums on Reddit as there are some smart people there, and there's something to be said for 'raw' authenticity, sometimes a poorly articulated point can be enlightening, but you have to wade through a lot. I don't actually agree fully with the moderating approach but you have to give them credit here. As far as 'cutting edge programming' well - is there such a thing? We can only argue so much about concepts that have been addressed before. One might say 'AI' or at least Deep Learning is the domain of 'cutting edge programming' wherein there's enough new fodder. And there's been a Cambrian Explosion of startups so pure novelty is going to be hard to find. A simple rule: "Would you miss it if it were gone?" I think so, which is something to say in 2020.
ykevinator 6y ago
What a healthy ego
names_are_hard 6y ago
To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.
- narag 6y ago
  To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results. What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.
  - goto11 6y ago
    Do you have some examples of quality technical comments (conforming to the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) being downvoted to hell? (Not disputing you at all, just curious for some concrete examples.)
    - cj 6y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS887US887&hl=en-US&sxsrf=ALeKk00ltlOggJncJkI_G_PYucBptWazsQ%3A1602157602955&ei=Ivx-X_zvOe2iggfJ2aigBQ&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+not+sure+why+you%27re+being+downvoted%22&oq=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+not+sure+why+you%27re+being+downvoted%22&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEANQritYrZ4BYMWiAWgCcAB4AIABuAKIAYYEkgEFMy4zLTGYAQCgAQHAAQE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS887US887&hl=en...
dt3ft 6y ago
I bet he's back here right now, reading this thread.
netcan 6y ago
I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist. In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints. What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:" "Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics" While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often. To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni. I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising. ..no conclusion.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. I think it works like this: blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted. Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol). I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above. > This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni. I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning. Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff: Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions. TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..
Chris2048 6y ago
HN is a great place to study bad logic - people are smart enough to avoid the common fallacies, so you get some interesting bad forms. That said, where can you have an conversation, without requiring qualification to entry, about complex topics without bad arguments getting in the way of progress?
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Ok, you've got my attention. Where can you have a conversation that requires qualification and is about similar topics?
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    I'd assume academic institutions, forums, etc, plus those associated w/ industry (e.g. acm etc). Also, places where conversations are jargon-heavy such that it would be hard to participate as an outsider.
usr1106 6y ago
The bigger and the more successful a forum/group/channel gets the more it attracts traffic. With more traffic comes more low-value traffic. Whether that is less than or more than or quite exactly proportional I don't want to speculate about. If a forum gets too big, those who value lower volume higher quality traffic will leave. It often doesn't raise the level of the community remaining. Most clearly we have seen that with Stack Overflow. Where Stack Overflow is still useful as a "static" resource for questions/answers who have not changed for some time.
Rochus 6y ago
So someone stopped visiting HN ten years ago. Is this really worth a post on HN and more than a hundred comments? Personally, I can't understand the statements of the person concerned; what bothers me more are those posts that don't contribute anything relevant to technological development. Basically, I find HN very helpful and both a good source of information and inspiration. The discussions are also generally quite good. And we should be able to trust adults to have a little bit of a culture of debate.
- narag 6y ago
  It's interesting for me, because I didn't realize at the time that the things that bother me now were present then. The author seems to be more sensitive than me like ten years more.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    No doubt that some people consider it interesting. I personally would have appreciated a brief specific list of recommendations of the author of the post on what to improve. Maybe you can give such a list. But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. There are platforms like reddit where you can debate about any topic out there, but HN should be more focussed.
    - narag 6y ago
      Maybe you can give such a list. I can't. There isn't always an answer. The author does provide a good list of what's wrong. But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. Online forums working is a very serious hackers' matter. What you're saying is just about that! There has been a lot of discussion about HN's algorithms to vote and select articles for front-page, moderation, etc.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      HN isn't obviously more focused than Reddit unless you're browsing the front page; for example, the Rust subreddit.
usr1106 6y ago
That is from 2010. Does anybody have the facts handy? How many posts per day now and then? Velocity of the front page? Comments per article? HN has an API, so it's probably not difficult to get some data. But I have a day job and several hobbies already...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bananaface 6y ago
Forums like this, reddit, etc. become worse over time partly because people demand (superficially) high-quality comments. People who's time is valuable are less likely to comment. When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that. That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave. Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem. The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.
brettermeier 6y ago
This is the same "Everything was better in the old days" stuff... I just can lol about it.
prawn 6y ago
I'd be interested to know how often Paul Graham reads HN these days, compared to the past. Last post was 6 months ago. Prior to that, only responses to his announcement of Bel. Other than Bel, no submissions since 2014. I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children? I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deostroll 6y ago
This looks like a problem because of faceless conversations happening over the internet. But I agree how it can be unproductive. In fact, I spent about 3 hours writing this comment. But can't technology today save us from this pit? Why not make it fun!!! First ingredient is a never-ending argument which the author has exhaustively talked about. Second ingredient is a common availability of the debaters or the various debater camps. Third ingredient is to make the "debate" for public to access live/offline. Fourth ingredient is, we need a neutral person who can moderate and more importantly co-ordinate this. Why not ask HN-ers; its just another Ask HN post away? Is it against community guidelines? And if this person is a little elder that the debators, the much better. The fifth and final ingredient, is a self-pledge. Towards 3 things - tolerance, civility, and, anti-social-dilemma. Think all dimensions of tolerance. Time. The relative age of the OP. What if the OP is a student or a novice? Can he/she speak English properly? Can you tolerate the way he/she speaks? Can you tolerate the speed of his/her broadband connection? Know a bit of the person's background. Can you all agree on a lingua franca? Can you not stoke any innate blood curdling racism? But once the match has begun it is going to be a "social dilemma", after-match. What if I took the wrong side of an argument and now my job prospects have all gone bad...?! It is something to expect. Which is why civility is important. At the end of the debate all parties, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or, time zones, must dissolve peacefully... I certainly don't want a 3rd world war born out of this... :) So I am literally suggesting a death match of sorts between the debaters. I am suggesting a healthy way towards unraveling your internet-anonymity. But its important to be civil. Its important to forgo the comfort of the relative pseudo-anonymity we all seem to enjoy while arguing. And the prize is a healthy argument. Sadly we all go home and eat our own cakes. If you want solace, then, take pride in the fact that this is the normal discourse of a civilization, and, you participated in it. We will have lots to love, and, hate. But that is life. Today, we have the means to make this happen...Google Meet, Hangouts, Zoom, etc. If this goes as dreamed, perhaps we might see sponsors from some media outlets...that is a plate with a dash of humanity in it. It is something we all might have to live with. So in essence, yes, the practicality of "this" can be debated. At length if need be. But I think I have covered the healthy and right way to behave on the internet - anonymously or otherwise - especially when having an argument, or, not when having an argument. Peace out folks!! _\m/
DanBC 6y ago
Here's the front page from 10 years ago if people want to compare: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-07 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-07
- mturmon 6y ago
  OP complains about being drawn to post comments to harvest karma. IIRC, 10 years ago, the comment karma was displayed next to the comment itself. This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes). I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.
  - sradman 6y ago
    Another technical fix might be separating Submission karma from Comment karma. I'm guessing that good Comment karma is associated with civility and adherence to community norms. That assumption could be validated by someone with access to the underlying data. I agree that continuous oversight by quality moderators like dang are probably more important than technical tweaks.
mansoor_ 6y ago
TL;DR Things were so much better in my days.
cortexio 6y ago
yeah the karma thing is problematic. im -20, im not even sure people if people can still see my comments. Anyway, getting karma is easy, just say the most generic opinion u can find. Just agree with the majority and dont say what you think. It's just a numbers game.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Like all discussions - HN degrades when the number of people involved increases - I rarely look at an items comments if there are more than a hundred or so because I know that the amount of uninteresting (to me) 'chaff' to wheat will be high (there are exceptions obviously). I treat HN as a source of quality links to articles and sites elsewhere that I skim through a few times a day. The discussions are secondary.
ChefboyOG 6y ago
The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community. I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch. For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.
- ozim 6y ago
  I think it is expectations failure "the more the merrier" is not the case. Having tight 10 person group is so much better than having 100 people group. You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.
  - natmaka 6y ago
    The Evaporative Cooling Effect hits hard. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ... ... and, more generally, "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big" (L. Kohr).
    - karmakaze 6y ago
      The link referenced there is 404. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
the_only_law 6y ago
I find it mostly fine as long as you avoid political threads or threads with "Rust" in the title that have many comments. I outright just hide the former now. Moderation does good at removing outright trolls, but there is a particular, very sneaky class of trolls that do very here.
troughway 6y ago
I'll add another one that has transpired: the technical and expert knowledge has gone elsewhere. The board is nowadays predominantly populated by emotional outbursts from people who have next to no idea what they are talking about regarding the subject matter. The threads on COVID where everyone is a statistics trained doctor is a good showcase of what the board has turned into. I don't even want to bother discussing tech stuff here anymore. People can make fun of Reddit all they want, but while they have a larger population of people who are there to shitpost, they also have a larger population of people who know what they are talking about. As one person said, HN is "no longer really populated by hackers". It's an embarrassment. Others have mentioned that the downvoting brigade is in full swing, and that there seems to be a lot of shitflinging in general. As for moderation, DanG does a great job of staying out of it but I do wish he would toss his weight around a bit more.
phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
TLDR people get on internet forums to debate topics, and leave because topics aren't debated, they're screamed about from opposing sides, and nobody is willing to say "I might be wrong, change my mind"
troughway 6y ago
People in this thread have forgotten - or were not here when it happened, but there was an exodus of worthwhile, contributive people from 2010-2012 or so. The fellow who kept bringing up how "everything is fine" with his ASCII chart of cyclical HN population graph trying to justify the onboarding of stupidity to this site hasn't showed up for quite a number of years.
dontcarethrow2 6y ago
This place definitely does not deserve any of my impulsive cynicism. I want to be able to read your discussions without my poor input, I've changed my pw on older accounts to gibberish just so I block myself from commenting. HN has given me tons of hope for online communities, but every now and then, I run into what Yahoo article discussions looked like post 9/11(lots of whistling to the same tune, started by IC speakers). Don't go there, and you will not hear from me. These are my terms.
wildermuthn 6y ago
To some degree, Reddit has addressed the problem of a large online community by subdividing itself and allowing each division to moderate itself (to some degree). However, what might be more interesting is an automated subdivision of users. For example, even if HN has hundreds of thousands of users, philosophic-types would only see links and comments from other philosophic-types. Trolls would get lumped with trolls. With a significant percentage of outside-your-demographic to keep things lively as well as gather further data about what kind of community a user truly enjoys engaging with. Especially important is identifying constructive conflict — the type of person you enjoy disagreeing with (if not in the moment, at least afterward). So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.
- mentos 6y ago
  What about HN experimenting with tabs in the comments so if you want to have a more philosophical discussion click on the ‘Philosophy’ tab or if not maybe the ‘Technical’ discussion is more your speed. I could even see supporting an ‘Offtopic’ tab as a place where you can share ideas inspired by the post that are not exactly relevant but could spark inspiration in others. It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  Google is already showing different results per country and region creating bubbles of thought. News networks filter out information they think most people aren't interested in or (even worse) things they don't want people to know. Youtube messed up somewhere and after only a few clicks you're back in the "popular" video hell. You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?
tmaly 6y ago
I think the Ask HN section has some great ideas and advice. I have discovered a ton of interesting books and other resources from that section alone. If you simply avoid the politics and news and stick with sections like Ask HN, I think you gain much upside and little downside.
lofikrom 6y ago
Because it is highly moderated and biased?!
darepublic 6y ago
Gimme one reason to stay here... And I'll turn my back around
partingshots 6y ago
> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS. This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well. What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  This is why I think the future is actually in smaller action-based forums. Like, if you want to achieve something, you would join a group based on that goal, and it would not be structured around posts/news, it would instead be structured in a way that would break down the goal into finer and finer chunks, that people could collaborate on and actually submit/assign/judge tasks to perform. All this karma circlejerking is getting boring. Nothing gets done.
  - cromka 6y ago
    Totally agree. We could even give it a name, like Usenet or sth?
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      > sth What is sth?
      - reducesuffering 6y ago
        something[0] [0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth
- mrfredward 6y ago
  The same author has a post from 2013 (3 years after "Why I stopped reading HN") addressing what is lost when programmers chase internet points. https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-talk/index.html https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-... It resonates with me because I often find myself scrolling HN when I was meaning to be working on a project, both at work and at home.
nudpiedo 6y ago
This applies surprisingly well to Twitter and most of online communities I met. The logner and less elitist they are the more the conversation quality deteriorates, it is after all a sign of popularization or vulgarization, which ironically both words used to mean the same but nowadays the last one is definetely pejorative.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
One thing from diving into the code of early release of HN (it was running on racket) seems there are quite bit gatekeeper, and the people who has the power to downvote. That seems like an issue of top of the head.
jerome-jh 6y ago
I am quite at the opposite of the article author. I see HN as a news aggregator, especially through the excellent hckrnews.com. I do post a few comments, read answers, seldom answer back. I certainly receive enlightening answers and upvote them. I often receive downvotes, and generally ignore the noise. I do not thing it is possible to have a real followed argument on HN and possibly on any open forum on the web.
luord 6y ago
HN collects links from sites I couldn't hope to think about. nor could I hope to know they existed (a good example is the site about the searchlights the other day), and also sites that I don't follow because in general I'm not interested in the topic except for the odd article that ends up in first page here. So to me, HN actually has a huge value as a news site. As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.
LockAndLol 6y ago
I'm actually also scouting for a reddit and HN alternative. It seems like Reddit users are just spilling over to HN and that shows in the quality of many "discussions". I think NRKbeta's method of requiring a quiz before one can comment [0] should be tested on bigger platforms. NRKbeta seems to have a good experience with it. Furthermore, it'd be nice to be able to subscribe to moderators or groups thereof. I think Aether[1] uses that method of moderation. [0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers-test-their-article-comprehension/ https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers... [1]: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/ https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/
AnonsLadder 6y ago
Personally, I've just come to terms HN is good for tech news. There's always some good people calling out any bullcrap in the comment sections which is wonderful, but when it comes to sharing opinions, it just feels like a karma battle. A similar reason why I ditched Reddit years ago. I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling

254 points by obilgic 6y ago

Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have a sensible debate about abortion (and let's definitely not have one here!), but it's not plausible to characterize the disagreement between pro- and anti-abortion folks as a mere disagreement over the meanings of words. In the case of disagreements that are truly merely semantic, it's possible for each side to either (i) come to an agreement on terminology or (ii) agree that they disagree only about terminology. Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.

30f0fn 6y ago
Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting a lot of weight on a distinction which became discredited in 1951).
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  What happened in 1951?
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I mean, I think there _is_ some semantic debate, in that there are always semantic debates about what is life and what isn't on the edges (see the endless rather tedious argument about whether viruses, or, more esoterically, mitochondria, are life whenever anyone brings it up), but it's largely irrelevant to the actual question.
Ma8ee 6y ago
I actually agree, and have thought so for a long time, that the discussion about abortion is very much about the meaning of the term life. One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about. So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".
- foldr 6y ago
  You're then talking about 'meaning' in a deeper sense than just the arbitrary definitions of words, so it's no longer a purely semantic dispute. (Note that the author characterizes semantic disputes as disputes over arbitrary definitions.)
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    I reread the relevant parts of the text again, and I don't find anything that supports that the author meant anything else with "semantics" than I do. Semantics is about "meaning", not only on a superficial level.
    - foldr 6y ago
      "Semantic arguments are particularly insidious. Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary (unless the actual argument is about language). The worst thing you can do is to have an argument in which you talk past each other because you each have a different idea about what the words mean." It doesn't make sense to dismiss an argument as merely semantic if you are talking about something more than just arbitrary definitions. In many cases, pro- and anti-abortion people have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins. This isn't merely a disagreement about how to define a particular word. You can, if you want to, characterize it as a dispute about what it 'means' for something to be alive, but that's a much deeper issue than a mere semantic quibble. (The debate can't, for example, be resolved by introducing two new terms alive* and alive†, with both sides of the debate agreeing that a foetus is alive* but not alive†.)

wraptile 6y ago

Real question here is whether HN a community or a glorified news feed? I think it's the latter and there's nothing wrong with that, I actually don't want a forum community, just a place where I can read the _news_ and some related comments. I don't think the design of this website is intended for extensive discussions people try to have here. My actual problem with HN is clear astroturfing. The forums is clearly being gamed the same way reddit is, if not more and it's awfully offputting and honestly - scary.

monoideism 6y ago
Can you give me some examples of "clear astroturfing"? I see what I presume to be astroturfing occasionally, but only on hot-button political issues that I've come to believe we usually shouldn't discuss on HN anyway.

memory_vandal 6y ago

seems like a post like this pops up every few months

polote 6y ago
I'm not sure of the every few months, but this article was discussed 10 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704275
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Wow, that was a blast from the past. 122 comments in 2010, seems that the one thing HN has always liked is meta-commentary about HN :)

dwrodri 6y ago

I uninstalled my 3rd party reddit app the other day for very similar reasons. I love reddit as a way for getting my tech news, but there's just so much about the platform that I don't like which is becoming harder and harder to avoid. The communities I really enjoy (r/cpp, r/MachineLearning, r/DataScience) are still for the most part wonderful communities and they provide killer feeds that let me stay up to date with everything. But it gets harder and harder to keep the political op-eds at bay, or as the author of this blog mentions, the fruitless arguments that don't go anywhere. I think HN has provided me with enough benefit through meeting people on the platform that I'm keeping it around, but the author makes great points nonetheless.

LeCow 6y ago
Ditto. On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.
- etripe 6y ago
  I'm relatively new to HN but a reddit "senior", and one of the things I really appreciate about this place is the relative lack of toxicity. To me, it seems people really come here for civil discussion and default to asking questions instead of flaming. Well, that and more people source their claims.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    From a 30 year view of communities, including Fido, Usenet, Reddit and many others, I’d attribute that to @dang’s and @pg’s benevolent dictatorship. Many communities start out nice and well meaning, but at some point devolve into a Wild West. HN did not, and I think that’s thanks to dang’s moderation (and pg’s at an earlier time) Also, “small” things like dropping the vote counts, and having canonical rules for titles (which are, as pg noted, a “commons” but treated in other platforms as a land grab) reduces competition and bragging rights. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of what keeps the people looking for conversation here, and those looking mostly for signaling and gratification out.

bot41 6y ago

The post and it's content is exactly what I would expect to find here. From my experience reading HN, I think it is the best community of comments online. I am creating an online Reddit-style web app at the moment and I am going to borrow a lot of things I think HN does right.

httpsterio 6y ago
the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    But did it actually work better? I am inclined to think not as lots of people moved from ./ to HN.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      I think a lot has to do with culture itself and not the moderation system. Slashdot was always a bit unruly.
    - gwd 6y ago
      I think it did. I'm an old-skool Slashdot person who just moved over to HN a year or two ago, and there are lots of things I really miss about the Slashdot moderation system. One of the most noticeable things is trying to skim a discussion with thousands of comments. On Slashdot, you can set your threshold to +5, and see only the very most insightful comments, no matter where they are in the thread. On HN, there's a lot more digging required to get the gems. That said, I do think HN's "story-selection" algorithm is an improvement. What shows up on the front page relies a lot less on the quirks of the editors, and seems to result in a much more diverse set of posts. As others have mentioned, I think the top-level moderation is the most important factor keeping HN worth reading. It's dang intervening and setting the tone which does the most for HN at the moment. We need to keep him happy; and I hope that he has a "succession" in place in case he's ever unable to continue the work.

timonoko 6y ago

I remember in Usenet there was often a competition how much you expand a thread sideways. This might the optimal format. A discussion board with only one thread branching infinite. You could then search for significant node points, which have created more discussion and node points. Now to avoid endless wallowing in same shit year after year, I suggest automatic AI system, which does not cancel anything, but moves an arcticle to the node it mostly belongs. And as high as possible regardless of creation time.

friendlybus 6y ago

I agree with the spectator sport aspect. There seems to be a bunch of comments which exist to further the endless tennis match.

cryptica 6y ago

I think one of the problems may be that many people on HN have moved from the lower and middle class to the upper class and so their attitude of fighting for innovation has morphed into an attitude of defending the status quo and suppressing innovation while shunning the contrarian 'hacker' ideals which they used to harbor. Unfortunately, for those of us who fell through the cracks of the system and are left behind (and who are still fighting for innovation), we are finding that more and more HN community members who used to fight alongside us are now turning against us. The next generation of HN readers are being prepped for the role of a corporate servant, not that of a hacker entrepreneur. Those of us who remember how things used to be are having a hard time adjusting to the reality that the opportunities are all gone, we missed the boat and we are told to line up with the juniors and prepare for a life of bureaucratic corporate servitude. The great tragedy of the situation is that those of us who are left behind and still participate in HN are probably some of the most persistent, hard working, ambitious and most skilled (struggle is the best teacher) entrepreneurs/hackers in existence - We're still waiting for our first opportunity and it's looking like we will never get it.

mola 6y ago
I grew up middle class, still am (although middle class has almost vanished), and hope to remain middle class. Infact, my moral compass says striving to be rich is bad. I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful. The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just think differently than you.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Agreed. And while my moral compass does allow for a very small subset of ways to be rich that I don't consider bad, as I grew up, I've learned this about innovation in tech: 90% of time it's just marketing bullshit, plain and simple. I've grown a cynical perception of the startup scene not because I hate innovation, or want to preserve status quo - it's because I love innovation, but all I keep seeing is startups arbitraging whatever random potential gradient they can find on the market. For every true innovation like people shipping medical supplies via UAVs in developing countries, there's many more startups that just try to suck on the sweet flow of adtech money, or to make cash arbitraging laws and social trust. The way I feel about both entrepreneurship and corporations these days: we've refined the ways of making money down to science, but in the process, we've got self-referential. We've lost sight of the big picture: that all that activity is meant to do something useful in the real world. And what's less hackery than self-serving innovation, where the actual thing being done is the free variable, and the only goal is to redirect the flow of dollars?

RubenvanE 6y ago

These sentiments are quite familiar to me. That's why I've been building my own HN copy (https://hackerdaily.io https://hackerdaily.io). It shows all posts per day, which has a few benefits: 1. It doesn't become an addictive slot machine that updates every minute. 2. The conversations have already happened, which makes it easier to see which threads are interesting and informative and which are not. It also uses an outline.com like style for the articles, which removes the tracking and spamming and places the focus on the articles itself. It's still in active development and so far I've only used it myself, so all feedback is welcome! Ps. It’s an PWA, so you can add it to your homescreen and use it like an app.

atorodius 6y ago
Nice layout and idea. What do you mean "all posts per day"? Seems it shows a selection?
- RubenvanE 6y ago
  It takes all posts that were posted on a certain day (based on your local timezone) and shows these posts ordered by their score. To keep it clean only posts with a score of 50 or higher are shown. (I might change this number though, if people would like to see less popular posts) E.g. the main page is always 'yesterday', so for me it shows the posts that were posted between 00:00 and 23:59 on Wednesday, but if its already Friday where you are it will show the top posts of Thursday.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rane 6y ago
The second point is great one. Occasionally I have to stop reading HN and leave the tab open for a day because I want to read the conversation in full instead of rereading again later trying to figure out which comments are new.
- RubenvanE 6y ago

kstenerud 6y ago

All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out. People come to these places for various reasons: - To debate - To learn - To engage intellectually with other people - To be heard/validated - To gain social standing The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that after awhile only the loudest are heard anymore. As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds, so it's no wonder that our social graces fall apart after we get too big. The solution throughout the ages has been to leave the "bad" forum and build our own forum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-94qrgxH35M).

nabla9 6y ago
> initial population has been crowded out. This is called Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September If everyone is allowed to join, and there is little moderation, there is reversion to the mean aka reversion to mediocrity. You need really strict moderation to keep the quality up. One of my favourite subreddits is /r/AskHistorians It's generally useless to post anything but question into the comments there because the quality of discussion is so high.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  This is something that's bothered me for a while, but I'm beginning to make peace with it. Everything is ephemeral, nothing good lasts, and if you want to find the good stuff you have to keep searching. It's the cycle of life for anything of value - first it's niche, then it goes mainstream, then it turns to crap. True for online communities, products (digital and physical), and probably much more. Ok, there's one thing that seems to last: the linux desktop never takes off. Some people bemoan this, I like it. It means that the Linux I love won't go away...not just yet, anyway. Every year that linux fails to popularize on the desktop is another year I don't have to go looking for a new niche tool that will do what I want instead of what its creators want. edit: typos
teekert 6y ago

fjfaase 6y ago

I wonder if anybody has tried to train an AI on comments to weed out all the rubbish and troll replies.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
Wow that’s a totally unexpected and novel idea! /s

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

I think it's pretty clear that increasing scale is the driver for the degradation of thoughtful connections between users. The past 20 years of the internet has been one big experiment in human communities where interactions are faceless and it has becoming increasingly difficult to imagine who you're speaking to. It's also often impossible to guess how many people will see what you post and much much harder to guess what kind of people will want to discuss it. How can you have a meaningful discussion with so little context? In the past, communities like HN had a much more homogeneous user base and, like the article talks about, had a much narrower focus for discussion (i.e. more focused around CS). They also had fewer overall users. I wonder if we need to redefine "internet scale" to include some organic constraints on healthy and well functioning human interactions. The social sciences might be somewhat woolly on that question but that's not to say such constraints don't exist (Dunbar's number being the best example). Boundless community growth clearly doesn't work well. There have to be alternatives worth exploring.

elorant 6y ago
On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we must cherish it for what it offers.
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  Absolutely, diversity is incredibly important when we're talking about different kinds of "intellectually curious" people. When diversity means letting in the trolls, the marketers and those less inclined to input constructively, that's when conversations start to degrade and loose value. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to encourage first type of diversity without becoming vulnerable to the second.
  - elorant 6y ago

teekert 6y ago

After this I already zoned out: "Every community deteriorates over time. Every community gets new members who don’t understand the rules (or the rules just change), and things just deteriorate." People change, communities change, they grow apart. To call it deterioration is blatant narcissism and failure to look at the situation objectively without judgement.

codegladiator 6y ago
I don't know, rest of the post goes on to describe comments like the one you make here.

eightails 6y ago

It's interesting reading this because I've recently been trying to wean myself off Reddit for the similar reasons, and one of the communities I have used to replace it has been HN -- because (in my experience) HN generally tends to avoid the issues in the way discussions play out characterised by this article. It's worth remembering that a forum completely devoid of 'bad arguments' is realistically never going to happen. I guess (as the author notes) it's a matter of 'personal thresholds'.

CharlesMerriam2 6y ago

Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.

sradman 6y ago
> ...to drive people to paywalls. You are making assumptions about motivations. Dang’s post Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic [1] explains the rationale that many here adhere to. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Here's another explanation: not all bad stories are upvoted, just those that work well to spin up a good discussion. I know I upvote in this pattern. I read HN for comments first, stories second. The linked story is immaterial, as long as there's something interesting in it that can be discussed on a better level. Take "pop science" articles - the comment thread under those tends to contain links to original research, corrections to the article, opinions of actual scientists in the field, and much better explanations of the described phenomena (as well as the standard set of complaints about paywalls and "journalism these days"; I myself am sometimes guilty of the latter). Would an arXiv paper be preferable to a "pop science" article? Perhaps. And we get our fair share of papers submitted here too. But I have a feeling that the "articles for the masses" are statistically more likely to create an insightful comment thread, and end up being upvoted more. Also worth noting is that moderators often update the submission link, when better sources on the same topic are surfaced.

rntksi 6y ago

The author is actually still reading HN: https://sealedabstract.com/posts/metapolitics/ https://sealedabstract.com/posts/metapolitics/

doublesCs 6y ago

He's right. I'm done here. Good bye.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

This place is one of the most urbane communities in which I’ve participated. It can still get bit “catty,” but nothing that even comes close to what I’ve experienced (and contributed to -mea culpa) in the past. Will I stay forever? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I have left many communities; some, in which I enjoyed some status. They all hurt, but I have always gotten to the point where I no longer miss them. I barely ever visit Facebook. I have to maintain an account, because I’m a senior figure in a tech group there, but I find the community to be a bit corrosive to my personal sense of well-being. So, months ago, I stopped doing anything more than brief daily checks for posts in the group. I pretty much never read Twitter. In fact, this is really the only social media in which I participate. I have many accounts, but most are there as “placeholders.” I do try to be a “good citizen,” by following the rules and walking away, when I feel like all I would bring is darkness, and I will occasionally remove or revise comments that I feel are not productive. I know that I come across as a “stuffed shirt,” but one reason is that it’s important for me to be fairly careful about what I put out there. I have been...pithy, in the past. I’m also fairly good at apologizing. That’s because I get a lot of practice.

buro9 6y ago

There is a life to a forum... for badly run forums it's measured in years, for the best of the best a couple of decades. There is a tension... between the core audience ageing and evolving, and the forum staying still. If the forum evolves too then it is less accessible to newer people, if it stays stagnant it drives away the core as it doesn't keep track with their growth. Those forums that walk a middle path extend the life of the forum the longest, at the risk of excluding some original members and being slightly less accessible... but overall good for all. The real key to it is not preserving the forums themselves but to preserve the connections people make... to split larger communities into multiple communities when they get too big so that they continue to serve each audience and those who navigate across those audiences will do so. I'm not a believer in the Reddit model of subreddits as I think communities need a stronger identity of their own, an independence and freedom to be whatever they will be... rather than a micro-clone of the parent and still living at home with the parent. What should be easier: Creating and running forums, cheaply, by yourself or hosted, and driving engagement around an interest. If the cost (mental, time, $$$) for this is massively reduced then it becomes easier to create forums and split large struggling communities into smaller thriving ones... in total the audience increases, but there's a natural limit to what a single forum can do.

jariel 6y ago

I have to disagree with the commentary a little bit HN is still one of the only places where the insights are consistently thoughtful. There are a lot of smart people on FT it's paywalled and quite expensive (ie professionals only) and even it can be a little reddity at times. Don't fully discount some forums on Reddit as there are some smart people there, and there's something to be said for 'raw' authenticity, sometimes a poorly articulated point can be enlightening, but you have to wade through a lot. I don't actually agree fully with the moderating approach but you have to give them credit here. As far as 'cutting edge programming' well - is there such a thing? We can only argue so much about concepts that have been addressed before. One might say 'AI' or at least Deep Learning is the domain of 'cutting edge programming' wherein there's enough new fodder. And there's been a Cambrian Explosion of startups so pure novelty is going to be hard to find. A simple rule: "Would you miss it if it were gone?" I think so, which is something to say in 2020.

ykevinator 6y ago

What a healthy ego

names_are_hard 6y ago

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.

narag 6y ago
To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results. What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.
- goto11 6y ago
  Do you have some examples of quality technical comments (conforming to the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) being downvoted to hell? (Not disputing you at all, just curious for some concrete examples.)
  - cj 6y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS887US887&hl=en-US&sxsrf=ALeKk00ltlOggJncJkI_G_PYucBptWazsQ%3A1602157602955&ei=Ivx-X_zvOe2iggfJ2aigBQ&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+not+sure+why+you%27re+being+downvoted%22&oq=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+not+sure+why+you%27re+being+downvoted%22&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEANQritYrZ4BYMWiAWgCcAB4AIABuAKIAYYEkgEFMy4zLTGYAQCgAQHAAQE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS887US887&hl=en...

dt3ft 6y ago

I bet he's back here right now, reading this thread.

netcan 6y ago

I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist. In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the forum. I mean, as we hang out someplace, it becomes old to us. Cliches become trite. Insights become banal. Patterns become annoyance triggers. All stuff that tends to show up in these "sick of this" endpoints. What made me think of it here is the first "bad argument:" "Arguments that reduce to a disagreement about semantics" While I agree that this is a bad argument, it's a pretty common one anytime anything abstract is discussed. Even professional philosophers exchanging letters, debating on podcasts or publishing in journals succumb to semantics disturbingly often. To me, I might get drawn into some topic/debate and eventually conclude that it's just boring semantics. At that point, the whole thing annoys me whenever it comes up. This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni. I don't know if it matters to the individual, but to forum designers it might have opposite implications. If it's the forum that changes for the worse, a cultural defence is the right approach. If it's the person who changes, then the solution is an evolving forum. It's also hard to get feedback on this. I can't imagine many forums ever avoid this sort of sentiment from arising. ..no conclusion.

Chris2048 6y ago
> I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. I think it works like this: blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted. Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol). I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above. > This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni. I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning. Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff: Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions. TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..

Chris2048 6y ago

HN is a great place to study bad logic - people are smart enough to avoid the common fallacies, so you get some interesting bad forms. That said, where can you have an conversation, without requiring qualification to entry, about complex topics without bad arguments getting in the way of progress?

kubanczyk 6y ago
Ok, you've got my attention. Where can you have a conversation that requires qualification and is about similar topics?
- Chris2048 6y ago
  I'd assume academic institutions, forums, etc, plus those associated w/ industry (e.g. acm etc). Also, places where conversations are jargon-heavy such that it would be hard to participate as an outsider.

usr1106 6y ago

The bigger and the more successful a forum/group/channel gets the more it attracts traffic. With more traffic comes more low-value traffic. Whether that is less than or more than or quite exactly proportional I don't want to speculate about. If a forum gets too big, those who value lower volume higher quality traffic will leave. It often doesn't raise the level of the community remaining. Most clearly we have seen that with Stack Overflow. Where Stack Overflow is still useful as a "static" resource for questions/answers who have not changed for some time.

Rochus 6y ago

So someone stopped visiting HN ten years ago. Is this really worth a post on HN and more than a hundred comments? Personally, I can't understand the statements of the person concerned; what bothers me more are those posts that don't contribute anything relevant to technological development. Basically, I find HN very helpful and both a good source of information and inspiration. The discussions are also generally quite good. And we should be able to trust adults to have a little bit of a culture of debate.

narag 6y ago
It's interesting for me, because I didn't realize at the time that the things that bother me now were present then. The author seems to be more sensitive than me like ten years more.
- Rochus 6y ago
  No doubt that some people consider it interesting. I personally would have appreciated a brief specific list of recommendations of the author of the post on what to improve. Maybe you can give such a list. But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. There are platforms like reddit where you can debate about any topic out there, but HN should be more focussed.
  - narag 6y ago
    Maybe you can give such a list. I can't. There isn't always an answer. The author does provide a good list of what's wrong. But still I ask myself why I see an increasing number of posts (at least a third) where I don't understand why they should be relevant for me as a hacker. Online forums working is a very serious hackers' matter. What you're saying is just about that! There has been a lot of discussion about HN's algorithms to vote and select articles for front-page, moderation, etc.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    HN isn't obviously more focused than Reddit unless you're browsing the front page; for example, the Rust subreddit.

usr1106 6y ago

That is from 2010. Does anybody have the facts handy? How many posts per day now and then? Velocity of the front page? Comments per article? HN has an API, so it's probably not difficult to get some data. But I have a day job and several hobbies already...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bananaface 6y ago

Forums like this, reddit, etc. become worse over time partly because people demand (superficially) high-quality comments. People who's time is valuable are less likely to comment. When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that. That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave. Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem. The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.

brettermeier 6y ago

This is the same "Everything was better in the old days" stuff... I just can lol about it.

prawn 6y ago

I'd be interested to know how often Paul Graham reads HN these days, compared to the past. Last post was 6 months ago. Prior to that, only responses to his announcement of Bel. Other than Bel, no submissions since 2014. I'd guess he has some resentment of increasingly polarised discussions (and maybe procrastination by users?); I've run a forum for 10+ years and resent a lot of the trends in the way people talk to each other, and I certainly read/post a lot less on my own site as a result. Or could just be changes in priorities in having children? I've long suspected that he and/or a small subset of valued users have migrated somewhere else, even if to a private Slack/similar. Often feels like some past regulars are missing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deostroll 6y ago

This looks like a problem because of faceless conversations happening over the internet. But I agree how it can be unproductive. In fact, I spent about 3 hours writing this comment. But can't technology today save us from this pit? Why not make it fun!!! First ingredient is a never-ending argument which the author has exhaustively talked about. Second ingredient is a common availability of the debaters or the various debater camps. Third ingredient is to make the "debate" for public to access live/offline. Fourth ingredient is, we need a neutral person who can moderate and more importantly co-ordinate this. Why not ask HN-ers; its just another Ask HN post away? Is it against community guidelines? And if this person is a little elder that the debators, the much better. The fifth and final ingredient, is a self-pledge. Towards 3 things - tolerance, civility, and, anti-social-dilemma. Think all dimensions of tolerance. Time. The relative age of the OP. What if the OP is a student or a novice? Can he/she speak English properly? Can you tolerate the way he/she speaks? Can you tolerate the speed of his/her broadband connection? Know a bit of the person's background. Can you all agree on a lingua franca? Can you not stoke any innate blood curdling racism? But once the match has begun it is going to be a "social dilemma", after-match. What if I took the wrong side of an argument and now my job prospects have all gone bad...?! It is something to expect. Which is why civility is important. At the end of the debate all parties, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or, time zones, must dissolve peacefully... I certainly don't want a 3rd world war born out of this... :) So I am literally suggesting a death match of sorts between the debaters. I am suggesting a healthy way towards unraveling your internet-anonymity. But its important to be civil. Its important to forgo the comfort of the relative pseudo-anonymity we all seem to enjoy while arguing. And the prize is a healthy argument. Sadly we all go home and eat our own cakes. If you want solace, then, take pride in the fact that this is the normal discourse of a civilization, and, you participated in it. We will have lots to love, and, hate. But that is life. Today, we have the means to make this happen...Google Meet, Hangouts, Zoom, etc. If this goes as dreamed, perhaps we might see sponsors from some media outlets...that is a plate with a dash of humanity in it. It is something we all might have to live with. So in essence, yes, the practicality of "this" can be debated. At length if need be. But I think I have covered the healthy and right way to behave on the internet - anonymously or otherwise - especially when having an argument, or, not when having an argument. Peace out folks!! _\m/

DanBC 6y ago

Here's the front page from 10 years ago if people want to compare: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-07 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-07

mturmon 6y ago
OP complains about being drawn to post comments to harvest karma. IIRC, 10 years ago, the comment karma was displayed next to the comment itself. This was removed because it was generating positive vote feedback loops (reinforcing both upvotes and downvotes). I'm not suggesting simple technical fixes can be enough to remove the objections such as OP -- rather, that both a continuous oversight of technical stuff, and granular moderation, seem to be needed.
- sradman 6y ago
  Another technical fix might be separating Submission karma from Comment karma. I'm guessing that good Comment karma is associated with civility and adherence to community norms. That assumption could be validated by someone with access to the underlying data. I agree that continuous oversight by quality moderators like dang are probably more important than technical tweaks.

mansoor_ 6y ago

TL;DR Things were so much better in my days.

cortexio 6y ago

yeah the karma thing is problematic. im -20, im not even sure people if people can still see my comments. Anyway, getting karma is easy, just say the most generic opinion u can find. Just agree with the majority and dont say what you think. It's just a numbers game.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Like all discussions - HN degrades when the number of people involved increases - I rarely look at an items comments if there are more than a hundred or so because I know that the amount of uninteresting (to me) 'chaff' to wheat will be high (there are exceptions obviously). I treat HN as a source of quality links to articles and sites elsewhere that I skim through a few times a day. The discussions are secondary.

ChefboyOG 6y ago

The fact that this was posted ten years ago underscores that this is not an HN problem, but a perennial challenge of any large community. I don't think most people grok exactly how difficult moderation is, and how that difficulty doesn't just scale, but rather evolves fundamentally as a community grows. Moderating a smaller community is sort of like setting a certain tone within your group of friends and figuring out ways to encourage them to follow suit. Moderating huge communities is more like designing a judicial branch. For what it's worth, I think HN is one of the best examples of successful moderation. The team balances their roles as curators and moderators well, they seem to work hard at intellectual honesty in their policy design, and they do a fantastic job of combatting marketing schemes and bots. No doubt there are areas where I don't entirely enjoy HN, but by and large it is the most consistently enjoyable community of its size for me.

ozim 6y ago
I think it is expectations failure "the more the merrier" is not the case. Having tight 10 person group is so much better than having 100 people group. You probably don't want to get new ideas directly from 100 of sources but new ideas filtered trough trusted people. From time to time it is good to get someone new and give it a shot, but most of the time it is better to stick to known group. Unless your group is about drugs and alcohol only then maybe just change the group.
- natmaka 6y ago
  The Evaporative Cooling Effect hits hard. https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ... ... and, more generally, "Wherever something is wrong, something is too big" (L. Kohr).
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    The link referenced there is 404. http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

the_only_law 6y ago

I find it mostly fine as long as you avoid political threads or threads with "Rust" in the title that have many comments. I outright just hide the former now. Moderation does good at removing outright trolls, but there is a particular, very sneaky class of trolls that do very here.

troughway 6y ago

I'll add another one that has transpired: the technical and expert knowledge has gone elsewhere. The board is nowadays predominantly populated by emotional outbursts from people who have next to no idea what they are talking about regarding the subject matter. The threads on COVID where everyone is a statistics trained doctor is a good showcase of what the board has turned into. I don't even want to bother discussing tech stuff here anymore. People can make fun of Reddit all they want, but while they have a larger population of people who are there to shitpost, they also have a larger population of people who know what they are talking about. As one person said, HN is "no longer really populated by hackers". It's an embarrassment. Others have mentioned that the downvoting brigade is in full swing, and that there seems to be a lot of shitflinging in general. As for moderation, DanG does a great job of staying out of it but I do wish he would toss his weight around a bit more.

phjesusthatguy3 6y ago

TLDR people get on internet forums to debate topics, and leave because topics aren't debated, they're screamed about from opposing sides, and nobody is willing to say "I might be wrong, change my mind"

troughway 6y ago

People in this thread have forgotten - or were not here when it happened, but there was an exodus of worthwhile, contributive people from 2010-2012 or so. The fellow who kept bringing up how "everything is fine" with his ASCII chart of cyclical HN population graph trying to justify the onboarding of stupidity to this site hasn't showed up for quite a number of years.

dontcarethrow2 6y ago

This place definitely does not deserve any of my impulsive cynicism. I want to be able to read your discussions without my poor input, I've changed my pw on older accounts to gibberish just so I block myself from commenting. HN has given me tons of hope for online communities, but every now and then, I run into what Yahoo article discussions looked like post 9/11(lots of whistling to the same tune, started by IC speakers). Don't go there, and you will not hear from me. These are my terms.

wildermuthn 6y ago

To some degree, Reddit has addressed the problem of a large online community by subdividing itself and allowing each division to moderate itself (to some degree). However, what might be more interesting is an automated subdivision of users. For example, even if HN has hundreds of thousands of users, philosophic-types would only see links and comments from other philosophic-types. Trolls would get lumped with trolls. With a significant percentage of outside-your-demographic to keep things lively as well as gather further data about what kind of community a user truly enjoys engaging with. Especially important is identifying constructive conflict — the type of person you enjoy disagreeing with (if not in the moment, at least afterward). So basically, instead of subdividing by interesting-content-type, subdivide by healthy-community-type. This might solve the problem of when communities get too large, without creating a lifeless echo-chamber of endless up-votes.

mentos 6y ago
What about HN experimenting with tabs in the comments so if you want to have a more philosophical discussion click on the ‘Philosophy’ tab or if not maybe the ‘Technical’ discussion is more your speed. I could even see supporting an ‘Offtopic’ tab as a place where you can share ideas inspired by the post that are not exactly relevant but could spark inspiration in others. It would allow posts with hundreds of comments to be a bit more organized?
LockAndLol 6y ago
Google is already showing different results per country and region creating bubbles of thought. News networks filter out information they think most people aren't interested in or (even worse) things they don't want people to know. Youtube messed up somewhere and after only a few clicks you're back in the "popular" video hell. You're suggesting echo-chambers. I don't think that's a good idea. How are you supposed to see a different viewpoint if all you do is talk to like-minded folks?

tmaly 6y ago

I think the Ask HN section has some great ideas and advice. I have discovered a ton of interesting books and other resources from that section alone. If you simply avoid the politics and news and stick with sections like Ask HN, I think you gain much upside and little downside.

lofikrom 6y ago

Because it is highly moderated and biased?!

darepublic 6y ago

Gimme one reason to stay here... And I'll turn my back around

partingshots 6y ago

> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS. This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well. What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

koheripbal 6y ago
This is why I think the future is actually in smaller action-based forums. Like, if you want to achieve something, you would join a group based on that goal, and it would not be structured around posts/news, it would instead be structured in a way that would break down the goal into finer and finer chunks, that people could collaborate on and actually submit/assign/judge tasks to perform. All this karma circlejerking is getting boring. Nothing gets done.
- cromka 6y ago
  Totally agree. We could even give it a name, like Usenet or sth?
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    > sth What is sth?
    - reducesuffering 6y ago
      something[0] [0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth
mrfredward 6y ago
The same author has a post from 2013 (3 years after "Why I stopped reading HN") addressing what is lost when programmers chase internet points. https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-talk/index.html https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-... It resonates with me because I often find myself scrolling HN when I was meaning to be working on a project, both at work and at home.

nudpiedo 6y ago

This applies surprisingly well to Twitter and most of online communities I met. The logner and less elitist they are the more the conversation quality deteriorates, it is after all a sign of popularization or vulgarization, which ironically both words used to mean the same but nowadays the last one is definetely pejorative.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

One thing from diving into the code of early release of HN (it was running on racket) seems there are quite bit gatekeeper, and the people who has the power to downvote. That seems like an issue of top of the head.

jerome-jh 6y ago

I am quite at the opposite of the article author. I see HN as a news aggregator, especially through the excellent hckrnews.com. I do post a few comments, read answers, seldom answer back. I certainly receive enlightening answers and upvote them. I often receive downvotes, and generally ignore the noise. I do not thing it is possible to have a real followed argument on HN and possibly on any open forum on the web.

luord 6y ago

HN collects links from sites I couldn't hope to think about. nor could I hope to know they existed (a good example is the site about the searchlights the other day), and also sites that I don't follow because in general I'm not interested in the topic except for the odd article that ends up in first page here. So to me, HN actually has a huge value as a news site. As for the discussions, I make it a rule not to reply to comments—though sometimes, very rarely, I break it when I think I can truly contribute to the discussion. As for gathering the gist of the conversation, I usually read the three top comments to see what the most commonly agreed perspectives are, and the downvoted comments (with their replies, if any) to see what has caused dissent. It has worked for me so far in getting different perspectives of almost every article.

LockAndLol 6y ago

I'm actually also scouting for a reddit and HN alternative. It seems like Reddit users are just spilling over to HN and that shows in the quality of many "discussions". I think NRKbeta's method of requiring a quiz before one can comment [0] should be tested on bigger platforms. NRKbeta seems to have a good experience with it. Furthermore, it'd be nice to be able to subscribe to moderators or groups thereof. I think Aether[1] uses that method of moderation. [0]: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers-test-their-article-comprehension/ https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers... [1]: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/ https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/

AnonsLadder 6y ago

Personally, I've just come to terms HN is good for tech news. There's always some good people calling out any bullcrap in the comment sections which is wonderful, but when it comes to sharing opinions, it just feels like a karma battle. A similar reason why I ditched Reddit years ago. I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling