6 ms·

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, muc

This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation. Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist" lol and nearly all of the political spectrum here is represented well IMO, and even personal attacks/strawman arguments are not immediately banned but first discouraged. Thanks dang!

saagarjha 6y ago
Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.
  - chki 6y ago
    You can (and I propose you should) use Twitter with the chronological timeline feature enabled. It's why Twitter is usable for me while Facebook is not.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars. See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
  - kody 6y ago
    I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    realtwitter.com is a redirect to the search query you want, and then click "Latest".
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    > Twitter itself added noise to my feed. Agreed for the actual Twitter site, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as much with Tweetdeck. (In fact, I'm not sure Tweetdeck even shows ads.) https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
    - jon-wood 6y ago
      One of these days someone at Twitter will remember they bought Tweetdeck and start messing with it in the same way they do for the main site and apps, but until then it’s fantastic.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    It might be useful to note that I don’t actually have a Twitter account. So I just read a handful of people’s pages once in a while who do a good job of pulling in all the best things of the communities I care about, and also people send me tweets from time to time. So usually I can skip over most of the drama.
- pratik661 6y ago
  I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post. I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
  - erulabs 6y ago
    That’s part of Krugman’s persona - he does plenty of ranting - agreed on trying other economists. I like Stiglitz but no one is immune from human moments on twitter :P
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person) The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason). Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
    - krapp 6y ago
      > HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.
rainingcatndogs 6y ago
>Can I fork the codebase somehow? You can try: https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ or https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
dang 6y ago
The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. > One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN. Out of curiosity, absent such a release, is there a public changelog anywhere? If not, that would be a great start.
  - dang 6y ago
    pg used to do one, but I forget the URL. We should probably start again.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > pg used to do one, but I forget the URL. We should probably start again. I'll keep an eye out for one then.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
I wonder how many doctors browse HN... Sometimes I find some great posts by MDs here and it's really interesting.
- sungam 6y ago
  I have for many years (since nearly the beginning).
  - david-gpu 6y ago
    Thank you very much for adding much needed diversity to HN. I'm one of the gazillion software people here and it's great to have insightful comments from experts in other fields.
krapp 6y ago
dang has already mentioned the original Arc forum but I'd be remiss not to mention Anarki[0], the public fork. It's diverged quite a bit from Hacker News though so don't expect feature parity. [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

saagarjha 6y ago

Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

cgriswald 6y ago
Can it? Last I used it (which was a long time ago) Twitter itself added noise to my feed.
- chki 6y ago
  You can (and I propose you should) use Twitter with the chronological timeline feature enabled. It's why Twitter is usable for me while Facebook is not.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars. See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
- kody 6y ago
  I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.
- skybrian 6y ago
  realtwitter.com is a redirect to the search query you want, and then click "Latest".
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > Twitter itself added noise to my feed. Agreed for the actual Twitter site, but it doesn't seem to happen nearly as much with Tweetdeck. (In fact, I'm not sure Tweetdeck even shows ads.) https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
  - jon-wood 6y ago
    One of these days someone at Twitter will remember they bought Tweetdeck and start messing with it in the same way they do for the main site and apps, but until then it’s fantastic.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It might be useful to note that I don’t actually have a Twitter account. So I just read a handful of people’s pages once in a while who do a good job of pulling in all the best things of the communities I care about, and also people send me tweets from time to time. So usually I can skip over most of the drama.
pratik661 6y ago
I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post. I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
- erulabs 6y ago
  That’s part of Krugman’s persona - he does plenty of ranting - agreed on trying other economists. I like Stiglitz but no one is immune from human moments on twitter :P
- ethbr0 6y ago
  HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person) The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason). Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
  - krapp 6y ago
    > HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person) And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.

rainingcatndogs 6y ago

>Can I fork the codebase somehow? You can try: https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ https://github.com/sebst/pythonic-news/ or https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

dang 6y ago

The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN.

webmaven 6y ago
> The original codebase is at http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ and many forums have started with it over the years. > One of these years we'll release an update of it that incorporates a lot of the changes we've made to HN. Out of curiosity, absent such a release, is there a public changelog anywhere? If not, that would be a great start.
- dang 6y ago
  pg used to do one, but I forget the URL. We should probably start again.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > pg used to do one, but I forget the URL. We should probably start again. I'll keep an eye out for one then.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

I wonder how many doctors browse HN... Sometimes I find some great posts by MDs here and it's really interesting.

sungam 6y ago
I have for many years (since nearly the beginning).
- david-gpu 6y ago
  Thank you very much for adding much needed diversity to HN. I'm one of the gazillion software people here and it's great to have insightful comments from experts in other fields.

krapp 6y ago

dang has already mentioned the original Arc forum but I'd be remiss not to mention Anarki[0], the public fork. It's diverged quite a bit from Hacker News though so don't expect feature parity. [0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki