5 ms·

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

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
I've said this before but, given time, the HN comment sections always sort themselves nicely. I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.
- 1_player 6y ago
  Either HN has some incredibly smart sorting algorithm, or the level of discussion here is amazing for the number of users. On sites like Reddit the first 2 or 3 top level comments are puns, sarcastic one liners or a variation on the current meme. Or it might be a matter of etiquette: the same user on HN upvotes the smart comment and then goes on Reddit and upvotes the dismissive and overused quip.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's the etiquette. The community standards are by no means perfect, or always adhered to, but in general, if you want to dismiss something or post a joke, you have to put some work into it.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    > level of discussion here is amazing The demographics is different. Reddit audience is 50% random teenagers and 90% teens + college students -- browsing on an app looking for quickly-consumed content. HN is probably majority people slacking off at work and hence more "mature"... (It doesn't hurt that dang will just delete the content-free pun/meme comments when people get tempted to up-vote them.)
Splizard 6y ago
What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?
- kstenerud 6y ago
  The ability to keep track of more than 100 social connections in our head would probably solve the lions share of problems, as that's normally how we keep things civil. So far our only method of dealing with more than that many people has been bureaucracy and rule sets. Bureaucracy crushes and alienates, and rules are cheated.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    I usually take a REST-like approach when dealing with people on the internet. With most people I just don't keep track of who they are beyond the end of the conversation because it's a waste of time. If we get to discuss again, I will judge that new discussion on its own merit. Interestingly, this way of thinking has lead me to stop reading user names a lot of the time.
- M4v3R 6y ago
  I believe we would need more empathy, realising that our own voice is not more important that others, trying to understand their position instead of trying to debunk it at all costs, basically less trying to "win the discussion" every time. At least for me this is something that I find lacking nowadays in internet discussions.
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  > What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? birds, fishes, insects basically some kind of hive mind
harryf 6y ago
> the initial population has been crowded out I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming. One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more" My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.
- greggman3 6y ago
  I'm not sure what your point was? It sounds like you want to see links to stuff like "Show HN: Here's my first program" 10 PRINT "My Name" 20 GOTO 10 I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. A "Show HN" that's some new programmer implementing their first version of X even though X has been around for years isn't "news" unless they have some novel approach.
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. Interesting. I never though the "News" part meant much at all. A substantial portion of the links that get highly upvoted here, and attract active discussion, are actually quite old. To my mind, the main "thing" is that submissions be interesting (for some definition of "interesting"), not that they be "news". I guess it just goes to show how different people can look at the exact same thing and interpret it differently.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Hackernews was never about hackers, it was about startup tech founder types (that maybe or maybe not considered themselves as hackers). A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs. Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...
reader_mode 6y ago
Also even though forums are anonymous if you spend enough time somewhere and the community is small you end up getting to know the people and that has a value in itself - I miss that about early Internet forums - unfortunately this doesn't scale at all.
netcan 6y ago
>> As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck. The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.
- dash2 6y ago
  Think there's a missing chunk from this comment :-)
  - netcan 6y ago
    You mean my garbled sentences, or something else?
    - dash2 6y ago
      "It is in YNH's view what"...

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

I've said this before but, given time, the HN comment sections always sort themselves nicely. I may encounter a nice article that I want to send to the management of my company for example, I refrian from doing this immediatly. Instead I leave the tab open and after a couple of hours I refresh en the top comment are almost always insightful and either reinforce my choice to send the article or make me decide not to.

1_player 6y ago
Either HN has some incredibly smart sorting algorithm, or the level of discussion here is amazing for the number of users. On sites like Reddit the first 2 or 3 top level comments are puns, sarcastic one liners or a variation on the current meme. Or it might be a matter of etiquette: the same user on HN upvotes the smart comment and then goes on Reddit and upvotes the dismissive and overused quip.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's the etiquette. The community standards are by no means perfect, or always adhered to, but in general, if you want to dismiss something or post a joke, you have to put some work into it.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  > level of discussion here is amazing The demographics is different. Reddit audience is 50% random teenagers and 90% teens + college students -- browsing on an app looking for quickly-consumed content. HN is probably majority people slacking off at work and hence more "mature"... (It doesn't hurt that dang will just delete the content-free pun/meme comments when people get tempted to up-vote them.)

Splizard 6y ago

What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?

kstenerud 6y ago
The ability to keep track of more than 100 social connections in our head would probably solve the lions share of problems, as that's normally how we keep things civil. So far our only method of dealing with more than that many people has been bureaucracy and rule sets. Bureaucracy crushes and alienates, and rules are cheated.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  I usually take a REST-like approach when dealing with people on the internet. With most people I just don't keep track of who they are beyond the end of the conversation because it's a waste of time. If we get to discuss again, I will judge that new discussion on its own merit. Interestingly, this way of thinking has lead me to stop reading user names a lot of the time.
M4v3R 6y ago
I believe we would need more empathy, realising that our own voice is not more important that others, trying to understand their position instead of trying to debunk it at all costs, basically less trying to "win the discussion" every time. At least for me this is something that I find lacking nowadays in internet discussions.
romanoderoma 6y ago
> What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? birds, fishes, insects basically some kind of hive mind

harryf 6y ago

> the initial population has been crowded out I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming. One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more" My gut feeling is the hackers still here have aged, and aren't doing much in the way of real programming any more. And HN isn't really attracting the next generation... I could be wrong... needs data to prove.

greggman3 6y ago
I'm not sure what your point was? It sounds like you want to see links to stuff like "Show HN: Here's my first program" 10 PRINT "My Name" 20 GOTO 10 I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. A "Show HN" that's some new programmer implementing their first version of X even though X has been around for years isn't "news" unless they have some novel approach.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  I guess I always assumed Hacker "News" means it's something semi news worthy. Interesting. I never though the "News" part meant much at all. A substantial portion of the links that get highly upvoted here, and attract active discussion, are actually quite old. To my mind, the main "thing" is that submissions be interesting (for some definition of "interesting"), not that they be "news". I guess it just goes to show how different people can look at the exact same thing and interpret it differently.
coldtea 6y ago
Hackernews was never about hackers, it was about startup tech founder types (that maybe or maybe not considered themselves as hackers). A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs. Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...

reader_mode 6y ago

Also even though forums are anonymous if you spend enough time somewhere and the community is small you end up getting to know the people and that has a value in itself - I miss that about early Internet forums - unfortunately this doesn't scale at all.

netcan 6y ago

>> As a species, we're not fully evolved for big crowds I think we may be starting to overstate the "Dunbar argument." In some sense, including the position in "Sapiens," operating in large groups is the key trait of Homo Sapiens... That which eventually made us unique and allowed us to become what we are. It is in YNH's view what These aren't really opposing views. Large groups are suboptimal. We obviously struggle with the downsides of large group size and these dynamics are often our bottleneck. The nuance is: An organism can be highly evolved to tolerate something that is outside its optimal range. A fish might be evolved to tolerate really low oxygen. That lets them live where other fish can't, less competition. But... that same fish's "optimal range" for health or whatnot might be different. Same with temperature, where I think most of the research is.

dash2 6y ago
Think there's a missing chunk from this comment :-)
- netcan 6y ago
  You mean my garbled sentences, or something else?
  - dash2 6y ago
    "It is in YNH's view what"...