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Hacker News is a masterpiece

137 points by jrberendt 4y ago

SaarRyan 4y ago
drumhead 4y ago
The things that make HN so good are the clean no nonsense design. The extremley good moderation and the level of knowledge and expertise of the posters, especially in relation to technology.
sharno 4y ago
I love Hacker News, the community here even being known to be harsh sometimes in opinions but I appreciate the strong opinions even if I disagree with them. It's an amazing community and I relate to it a lot. I check it everyday and mostly have a ton of interesting advice/news to share with family and friends. Thank you HN!
MrTrvp 4y ago
You might like https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/
nunez 4y ago
Gotta thank @dang et. al. for keeping the quality of Hacker News (both submissions and discussion) so incredibly high. Browsing HN feels like what browsing Reddit felt like back in 2012. There are a lot of great viewpoints on here from all sorts of people (though it is a bit of a monoculture being that most of us are in the tech industry). Meanwhile, outside of some niche subreddits, an increasing number of submissions onto Reddit make you wonder "is this real?", and top-voted comments are often called out for misinformation by much less popular replies. A lot of this, I think, comes back to motivations. Hacker News doesn't need to chase growth above everything. It's run by a super successful VC as a kind-of side project that also doubles as a funnel for applicants into YC. From what I understand, Reddit makes almost all their money from ads, so they absolutely need to grow the site and increase per-user engagement, which makes them take several pages from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram's playbook, and none of those pages have "quality text content" as a leading KPI.
keyle 4y ago
Sure is the first and last website I check every day. I don't know of any other website which is so straight forward, hasn't shafted itself down to hell and has been as consistent as this. home page, cmd+click article, cmd+click comments, repeat. Because the comments are often as insightful if not more insightful as the article linked. I still miss the count of upvotes since they removed that though, it helped sift through the comments quicker. :)
- iamben 4y ago
  Agree completely and browse in an almost identical way - particularly useful if I'm about to hop on a tube! It's the only site I've visited virtually every day since I joined (2010) - that really says something. Nothing else has stood anywhere near that kind of test of time.
roenxi 4y ago
The genius is in the revenue model. It isn't hard, in theory, to build a website like HN (well, in practice it probably is - but not outside the top 10% of web coders). The tricky part is why should people like pg and dang sink so much time into growing the garden and keeping it pruned. The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Dan is doing this work because he loves it. (It's been almost a decade since Graham was involved with HN.)
- krapp 4y ago
  > The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to. The market HN is selling itself to is misanthropic nerds who want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg. The community's loathing of ads and images and the whole anti-modernist zeitgeist pays for itself in hacker "street cred" when someone's crazy idea makes a return on YC's investment.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It’s also interesting to consider that with two (?) full time employees and a few servers you can support something like HN. Compared to its reach, that’s surprisingly cheap. And “hacker news” isn’t even the domain!
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Many online communities have financial value because they trade eyeballs for ad dollars. What is the financial value of a digital community like HN? Is there a way to estimate its worth in dollars?
  - MarcellusDrum 4y ago
    Other than someone buying it for the prestige, I doubt that HN is worth much in itself. Other than email addresses, there is no data of value to mine that I can think of. The only way to make money without digging the site's grave is to give a boost to posts advertising something. It has to be done infrequently and in a very subtle way so the users don't notice, and they will have a hard time finding advertisers without people finding out that they do it. So yeah, I don't think its really worth it.
Eupraxias 4y ago
"What I like most, though, is that the news doesn’t make the front page based on your interests, but instead the interests of others." When internet websites started getting "smart" and feeding "my interests", I stopped using internet websites. Hacker News and Wikipedia are... the _only_ sites I use with regularity.
- indigochill 4y ago
  On one hand I agree, but on the other this rule interestingly isn't universal. I'm happy that Spotify caters to my taste in music, for example, rather than just surfacing "top hits", even if I can quibble that I'd like a control to let it venture a bit further afield at times. It's probably my favorite recommendation algorithm, come to think of it. Though if there was something like a Reddit of music where I could drop in on discussions around a general genre (or tag collection, to use the Pandora model?), that'd be pretty cool and would probably beat Spotify's algorithm for diversity (though yes, there are subreddits already for plenty of genres - maybe I should see how worthwhile they are).
MatthiasWandel 4y ago
So what makes Haker News great is a lot of "features" that it doesn't have. How ironic that others spend so much resources adding features that are ultimately detrimental. But I guess it's a matter of who the audience is. If you want to appeal to the masses, some of these "features" probably do help.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Theres a "filtering for higher abstractions" argument to be made here, which can be applied to the whole internet. Usenet was great, but casual video chat (tiktok) obviously grabs more people. I have a suspicion many of the people who really enjoy HN, problably dislike much video and audio content; at least consuming less of it proportional to the general population. I read faster than anyone talks and tfind text more efficient; I expect others share that. And also that there are other reasons people prefer text.
rpigab 4y ago
There aren't even thumbnails of images present in articles, which nowadays are flooded with irrelevant stock pictures that mislead users into think the picture is really related to the event. No pictures means you can't just let your lizard brain take over, you have to read titles, I think I skip over many interesting articles on news sites because flashy images trick my brain.
whiskey14 4y ago
HN being text only is the number one reason (imo). I think the shift of internet content going from text->images->video has pulled the internet away from it's original purpose, communicating text and the written word. And HN still has that original essence. That and the community ofc
ptero 4y ago
HN is still the best tech news site for me and discussions on what I consider general topics on HN are better than on any social media site. Unfortunately it is consistently getting worse. 10 years ago a message would only be mass-downvoted for tone, but never for specific opinion expressed or defended. So HN would be a place for interesting discussions without flamewars. Not anymore. Now I seldom bother posting opinions on touchy topics that are against the "SF bay mainstream" view -- no point of wasting time it the post gets hidden in minutes. On other topics it is still a good discussion place where one doesn't have to fear expressing a minority opinion. My 2c.
- moistly 4y ago
  Downvoting on HN has become irrational. Perfectly innocuous, factual statements now get downvoted. Harmless opinions get downvoted. Personal experiences get downvoted. Not because the commentator has said something untrue, not because the commentator is expressing hate or encouraging violence: just that the commentator said something that someone doesn’t like. As a result, I now spend much more time delivering upvotes to downvoted comments. It’s a pain in the ass, because I have to log in to do it, and I’d much rather remain logged-out because it hides all the crap that dang has to deal with.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Downvotes don't feel much different to me than they did in the beginning, but HN is definitely much busier now, and voting can only ever be probabilistically accurate, so you're much more apt to see a janky vote now than you were in 2009. Give it time; the votes usually even out.
- iamben 4y ago
  You really think so? I think discussion and moderation is consistently good. Perhaps the 'SF bay mainstream' is more just a reflection of the HN audience in general?
  - ptero 4y ago
    I do. Before (in PG's times) one could express an unpopular view and folks would jump in en masse to refute it on merits. Posts in a lively discussion would not get downvoted for content that doesn't fit a narrative. Now minority opinions, even rationally expressed are just downvoted, which discourages writing them at all. I think HN is slowly losing ability to have a discussion with people who hold different views. Now it is "my votes are stronger than your votes". Which is sad. Mt 2c.
0wis 4y ago
I think HN has found its perfect niche and business model, and has the level of simplicity required to never get old. Even if it has a dark « false productivity » side, i think its purpose goes towards progress of mankind. PG, YC and its administrators take way less from it than they create. A true inspiration for any project. And there are even settings to limit your time on the website and avoid unproductive rabbit holes. « Simplicity makes me happy. » Alicia Keys (For a lack of a better quote without being cheesy)
drawingthesun 4y ago
I value the community here as I feel I’m getting thoughts and opinions that are not being filtered to suit my desires like Reddit and Twitter can. For example I’m a long term Cryptocurrency user/investor/advocate and Hacker News is one of the few places I read negative discussions on Cryptocurrency that are well reasoned and anchored in reality. Most discussion I see on other sites is either negative out of bitterness (and it shows) or positive for no reason other than misplaced hope. There are other topics too I find insightful and the comments section often valuable even though it’s a topic that makes me feel not so good. For example topics regarding getting old, ageism, what we spend out time on in life. Often confronting but helpful to see and read, sometimes causing me to change trajectory. Again I rarely find a similar level of confrontation on websites to my wants and desires outside Hacker News. I have a healthy group of friends that will confront me with similar levels of unease, never letting me get to comfortable. Just wish more websites offered a similar experience. Twitter and Reddit I find are time sinks with little return other than a place to burn time.
- enlyth 4y ago
  I also find that HackerNews doesn't suffer from groupthink as bad as other platforms. It is common to find Opinion A the top voted comment, and Opinion B which is completely contrary will be the most upvoted child comment, because both present valid points. It feels more like an adult conversation where people can agree to disagree and carry on with their lives. The high standard of moderation also helps.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is one of the reasons that I upvote comments I disagree with. If it’s posited even a bit well, it’s valuable.
    - pfarrell 4y ago
      Agreed. IMO, the down-vote should be used for comments that don’t add to the discussion or devolve to personal attacks, not to express disagreement.
michaelwww 4y ago
I love Hacker News because it's a place people share their expertise. People usually don't get away with b.s. because other experts will correct them. So many times I've read an interesting article and then checked the comments to find out why it was flawed and or conversely, why my interest was well placed. HN can be a tough crowd for your medium article or weekend project, but it wouldn't be interesting or useful if it wasn't. Diversity of thought is encouraged but personal attacks are not. It's a good balance. I'd like to thank dang for his hard work in making HN what it is day in and day out.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Surprisingly comments sections often have this - if you can wade through them. Watching a video on a repair on YouTube? Before commencing check the comments and see if there’s anyone pointing something out. Often there is and you can find tips or pitfalls to avoid. The value of HN-style moderation becomes clear when reading years old threads - most everything is on point and relevant even decades later.
- walls 4y ago
  … and then you hit a COVID related thread and realize it’s really just Reddit for people with more self confidence.
  - JBits 4y ago
    In general, I don't think hn is great for politics. In general, people here seem good at using articles submitted as a prompt for discussions. I think this works wonderfully for tech as lots of people have interesting adjacent knowledge and it helps put things into context. The thing with this though is that reading the article properly isn't always necessary to join the conversation. For politics, I find that people tend to fixate on certain points while ignoring the rest of an article's argument.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Epidemiology isn’t an obvious core competence for a site named Hacker News, though. IMHO the best part of HN is anything that benefits from a perspective on software history because somebody will jump in with “Yeah I was there at Sun in 1986…” and tell the story. The closer it gets to everyday politics or JavaScript framework du jour, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.
didgetmaster 4y ago
My wife grew up in North Dakota where the brutal winters make life miserable for many people. I once asked what the benefit to living there might be and she repeated the oft-given reason the locals usually say - "It keeps the riff-raff out". One of the reasons HN has a really good signal/noise ratio is that its simple design and lack of 'flashiness' does not attract the usual Internet crowd. Only people who really care about technology and the details of how it all works stick around here for very long. Those who want cat videos and meme discussions quickly move on.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  I grew up in North Dakota, and yeah, everyone said that but it was only because we couldn't think of any other logical reason to live there. (I grew up in the western part of the state during the 1970s and 1980s, when the economy was terrible.)
- wickedsickeune 4y ago
  I was going to write about how I would prefer to have HN a bit more user friendly / clear in UX, but you know what, you're kind of right. HN's UX takes a certain commitment which may contribute to people being more invested in the site.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  This is usually the meaning behind places that are expensive, or have similar barriers to entry - but how does cold tolerance correlate with riff-raff-iness? I would assume it would correlate higher with having few choices, or stubbornly refusing to move..
- nunez 4y ago
  another great point. HN isn't even responsive. it's designed for older times, and i love it. (i also love that i can browse HN on lynx or w3m; definitely can't do that with reddit.com, you can, sort of, with old.reddit.com, and you can with i.reddit.com)
- bombcar 4y ago
  HN doesn’t really give you the dopamine hit of a well-placed tweet or Reddit comment (though I’ve never submitted through to the front page so maybe that does). Some older forums feel similar but they’ve often fallen to spammers who automate attacks against phpbb
daemond 4y ago
In fact, when I first opened HN, I couldn't read the comments very well. Because the font is too small, the layout is dense, and there are no pictures. But when I started reading the comments carefully, I was really surprised by so many people being active on it and so insightful most of the comments are. Now I'm actually getting used to reading these text-only pages.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
It's the better reddit /r/popular to me. People here are less mentally mainstreamed, homogenized and lobotomized. And since this page doesn't have to fulfil any user interaction metrics it can simply stay the way it is (almost perfect) without having to support new media, getting redesigned and filled full of tracking JS, A/B testing JS and other trash.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Less mainstream, sure. Less homogenized? It's hard for me to believe you mean that, but I'll suggest instead that it's homogenized more closely around your interests, so that you don't notice the homogeneity. Less lobotomized? So long as you skip threads about crypto, Tesla, SpaceX... just anything even tangentially related to Musk, then sure, less lobotomized.
desperadovisa 4y ago
Hacker News is in absolutely no way a “masterpiece”; it’s a site, one of many, that aggregates articles, sorted by popularity. Because it’s run by the largest startup accelerator in the world, it attracts people other sites don’t. The only special thing about HN is its association with YC. That’s it. But people have this inherent need to worship just about anything, so we get self congratulatory articles like this one. Maybe the fact that this article does well here will make a few of you see through the bull crap? Probably not, but a girl can dream…
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  The only other forum most people know is reddit, which is mostly a braindead wasteland. In contrast to that, Hacker News is a masterpiece.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    That wasn't always the case, and there are still a few good sub-reddits to prove this. In the case of Reddit, it was purposefully trashed by its new owners who decided that anything less than a east-coast-lib groupthink would prevent growth, or something - or maybe they are just incompetent. Feels a similar story with Stack-Overflow.
  - nunez 4y ago
    reddit is infinitely curate-able. if you remove all the default subs and sub to communities about topics you care about, it is a much better experience (except for large communities; those are trash, but large forums back in the day were also trash)
  - desperadovisa 4y ago
    Unfortunately that’s probably true, despite the facts that a) Reddit is a gigantic mixed bag of quality, and thinking Reddit is “all bad” is admitting to not understanding how to use it, and b) being unable to understand that the category isn’t actually “forums” is sad. You can get this level of quality (which is to say, not the real draw of HN in the first place) by directly visiting the sites posted here.
pwinnski 4y ago
HackerNews susceptible to flattery, as evidenced by this submission! That said, I agree whole-heartedly. HN is the start and end to most of my days as well.
cxf12 4y ago
Like all things internet, if its history isn't being curated and cataloged, yesterday links eventually break and old content is lost. This is the only weakness in an otherwise solid technical and professional atmosphere.

137 points by jrberendt 4y ago

The things that make HN so good are the clean no nonsense design. The extremley good moderation and the level of knowledge and expertise of the posters, especially in relation to technology.

sharno 4y ago

I love Hacker News, the community here even being known to be harsh sometimes in opinions but I appreciate the strong opinions even if I disagree with them. It's an amazing community and I relate to it a lot. I check it everyday and mostly have a ton of interesting advice/news to share with family and friends. Thank you HN!

MrTrvp 4y ago

You might like https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/

nunez 4y ago

Gotta thank @dang et. al. for keeping the quality of Hacker News (both submissions and discussion) so incredibly high. Browsing HN feels like what browsing Reddit felt like back in 2012. There are a lot of great viewpoints on here from all sorts of people (though it is a bit of a monoculture being that most of us are in the tech industry). Meanwhile, outside of some niche subreddits, an increasing number of submissions onto Reddit make you wonder "is this real?", and top-voted comments are often called out for misinformation by much less popular replies. A lot of this, I think, comes back to motivations. Hacker News doesn't need to chase growth above everything. It's run by a super successful VC as a kind-of side project that also doubles as a funnel for applicants into YC. From what I understand, Reddit makes almost all their money from ads, so they absolutely need to grow the site and increase per-user engagement, which makes them take several pages from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram's playbook, and none of those pages have "quality text content" as a leading KPI.

keyle 4y ago

Sure is the first and last website I check every day. I don't know of any other website which is so straight forward, hasn't shafted itself down to hell and has been as consistent as this. home page, cmd+click article, cmd+click comments, repeat. Because the comments are often as insightful if not more insightful as the article linked. I still miss the count of upvotes since they removed that though, it helped sift through the comments quicker. :)

iamben 4y ago
Agree completely and browse in an almost identical way - particularly useful if I'm about to hop on a tube! It's the only site I've visited virtually every day since I joined (2010) - that really says something. Nothing else has stood anywhere near that kind of test of time.

roenxi 4y ago

The genius is in the revenue model. It isn't hard, in theory, to build a website like HN (well, in practice it probably is - but not outside the top 10% of web coders). The tricky part is why should people like pg and dang sink so much time into growing the garden and keeping it pruned. The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.

tptacek 4y ago
I'm pretty sure Dan is doing this work because he loves it. (It's been almost a decade since Graham was involved with HN.)
krapp 4y ago
> The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to. The market HN is selling itself to is misanthropic nerds who want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg. The community's loathing of ads and images and the whole anti-modernist zeitgeist pays for itself in hacker "street cred" when someone's crazy idea makes a return on YC's investment.
bombcar 4y ago
It’s also interesting to consider that with two (?) full time employees and a few servers you can support something like HN. Compared to its reach, that’s surprisingly cheap. And “hacker news” isn’t even the domain!
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Many online communities have financial value because they trade eyeballs for ad dollars. What is the financial value of a digital community like HN? Is there a way to estimate its worth in dollars?
- MarcellusDrum 4y ago
  Other than someone buying it for the prestige, I doubt that HN is worth much in itself. Other than email addresses, there is no data of value to mine that I can think of. The only way to make money without digging the site's grave is to give a boost to posts advertising something. It has to be done infrequently and in a very subtle way so the users don't notice, and they will have a hard time finding advertisers without people finding out that they do it. So yeah, I don't think its really worth it.

Eupraxias 4y ago

"What I like most, though, is that the news doesn’t make the front page based on your interests, but instead the interests of others." When internet websites started getting "smart" and feeding "my interests", I stopped using internet websites. Hacker News and Wikipedia are... the _only_ sites I use with regularity.

indigochill 4y ago
On one hand I agree, but on the other this rule interestingly isn't universal. I'm happy that Spotify caters to my taste in music, for example, rather than just surfacing "top hits", even if I can quibble that I'd like a control to let it venture a bit further afield at times. It's probably my favorite recommendation algorithm, come to think of it. Though if there was something like a Reddit of music where I could drop in on discussions around a general genre (or tag collection, to use the Pandora model?), that'd be pretty cool and would probably beat Spotify's algorithm for diversity (though yes, there are subreddits already for plenty of genres - maybe I should see how worthwhile they are).

MatthiasWandel 4y ago

So what makes Haker News great is a lot of "features" that it doesn't have. How ironic that others spend so much resources adding features that are ultimately detrimental. But I guess it's a matter of who the audience is. If you want to appeal to the masses, some of these "features" probably do help.

h2odragon 4y ago
Theres a "filtering for higher abstractions" argument to be made here, which can be applied to the whole internet. Usenet was great, but casual video chat (tiktok) obviously grabs more people. I have a suspicion many of the people who really enjoy HN, problably dislike much video and audio content; at least consuming less of it proportional to the general population. I read faster than anyone talks and tfind text more efficient; I expect others share that. And also that there are other reasons people prefer text.

rpigab 4y ago

There aren't even thumbnails of images present in articles, which nowadays are flooded with irrelevant stock pictures that mislead users into think the picture is really related to the event. No pictures means you can't just let your lizard brain take over, you have to read titles, I think I skip over many interesting articles on news sites because flashy images trick my brain.

whiskey14 4y ago

HN being text only is the number one reason (imo). I think the shift of internet content going from text->images->video has pulled the internet away from it's original purpose, communicating text and the written word. And HN still has that original essence. That and the community ofc

ptero 4y ago

HN is still the best tech news site for me and discussions on what I consider general topics on HN are better than on any social media site. Unfortunately it is consistently getting worse. 10 years ago a message would only be mass-downvoted for tone, but never for specific opinion expressed or defended. So HN would be a place for interesting discussions without flamewars. Not anymore. Now I seldom bother posting opinions on touchy topics that are against the "SF bay mainstream" view -- no point of wasting time it the post gets hidden in minutes. On other topics it is still a good discussion place where one doesn't have to fear expressing a minority opinion. My 2c.

moistly 4y ago
Downvoting on HN has become irrational. Perfectly innocuous, factual statements now get downvoted. Harmless opinions get downvoted. Personal experiences get downvoted. Not because the commentator has said something untrue, not because the commentator is expressing hate or encouraging violence: just that the commentator said something that someone doesn’t like. As a result, I now spend much more time delivering upvotes to downvoted comments. It’s a pain in the ass, because I have to log in to do it, and I’d much rather remain logged-out because it hides all the crap that dang has to deal with.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Downvotes don't feel much different to me than they did in the beginning, but HN is definitely much busier now, and voting can only ever be probabilistically accurate, so you're much more apt to see a janky vote now than you were in 2009. Give it time; the votes usually even out.
iamben 4y ago
You really think so? I think discussion and moderation is consistently good. Perhaps the 'SF bay mainstream' is more just a reflection of the HN audience in general?
- ptero 4y ago
  I do. Before (in PG's times) one could express an unpopular view and folks would jump in en masse to refute it on merits. Posts in a lively discussion would not get downvoted for content that doesn't fit a narrative. Now minority opinions, even rationally expressed are just downvoted, which discourages writing them at all. I think HN is slowly losing ability to have a discussion with people who hold different views. Now it is "my votes are stronger than your votes". Which is sad. Mt 2c.

0wis 4y ago

I think HN has found its perfect niche and business model, and has the level of simplicity required to never get old. Even if it has a dark « false productivity » side, i think its purpose goes towards progress of mankind. PG, YC and its administrators take way less from it than they create. A true inspiration for any project. And there are even settings to limit your time on the website and avoid unproductive rabbit holes. « Simplicity makes me happy. » Alicia Keys (For a lack of a better quote without being cheesy)

drawingthesun 4y ago

I value the community here as I feel I’m getting thoughts and opinions that are not being filtered to suit my desires like Reddit and Twitter can. For example I’m a long term Cryptocurrency user/investor/advocate and Hacker News is one of the few places I read negative discussions on Cryptocurrency that are well reasoned and anchored in reality. Most discussion I see on other sites is either negative out of bitterness (and it shows) or positive for no reason other than misplaced hope. There are other topics too I find insightful and the comments section often valuable even though it’s a topic that makes me feel not so good. For example topics regarding getting old, ageism, what we spend out time on in life. Often confronting but helpful to see and read, sometimes causing me to change trajectory. Again I rarely find a similar level of confrontation on websites to my wants and desires outside Hacker News. I have a healthy group of friends that will confront me with similar levels of unease, never letting me get to comfortable. Just wish more websites offered a similar experience. Twitter and Reddit I find are time sinks with little return other than a place to burn time.

enlyth 4y ago
I also find that HackerNews doesn't suffer from groupthink as bad as other platforms. It is common to find Opinion A the top voted comment, and Opinion B which is completely contrary will be the most upvoted child comment, because both present valid points. It feels more like an adult conversation where people can agree to disagree and carry on with their lives. The high standard of moderation also helps.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is one of the reasons that I upvote comments I disagree with. If it’s posited even a bit well, it’s valuable.
  - pfarrell 4y ago
    Agreed. IMO, the down-vote should be used for comments that don’t add to the discussion or devolve to personal attacks, not to express disagreement.

michaelwww 4y ago

I love Hacker News because it's a place people share their expertise. People usually don't get away with b.s. because other experts will correct them. So many times I've read an interesting article and then checked the comments to find out why it was flawed and or conversely, why my interest was well placed. HN can be a tough crowd for your medium article or weekend project, but it wouldn't be interesting or useful if it wasn't. Diversity of thought is encouraged but personal attacks are not. It's a good balance. I'd like to thank dang for his hard work in making HN what it is day in and day out.

bombcar 4y ago
Surprisingly comments sections often have this - if you can wade through them. Watching a video on a repair on YouTube? Before commencing check the comments and see if there’s anyone pointing something out. Often there is and you can find tips or pitfalls to avoid. The value of HN-style moderation becomes clear when reading years old threads - most everything is on point and relevant even decades later.
walls 4y ago
… and then you hit a COVID related thread and realize it’s really just Reddit for people with more self confidence.
- JBits 4y ago
  In general, I don't think hn is great for politics. In general, people here seem good at using articles submitted as a prompt for discussions. I think this works wonderfully for tech as lots of people have interesting adjacent knowledge and it helps put things into context. The thing with this though is that reading the article properly isn't always necessary to join the conversation. For politics, I find that people tend to fixate on certain points while ignoring the rest of an article's argument.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Epidemiology isn’t an obvious core competence for a site named Hacker News, though. IMHO the best part of HN is anything that benefits from a perspective on software history because somebody will jump in with “Yeah I was there at Sun in 1986…” and tell the story. The closer it gets to everyday politics or JavaScript framework du jour, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.

didgetmaster 4y ago

My wife grew up in North Dakota where the brutal winters make life miserable for many people. I once asked what the benefit to living there might be and she repeated the oft-given reason the locals usually say - "It keeps the riff-raff out". One of the reasons HN has a really good signal/noise ratio is that its simple design and lack of 'flashiness' does not attract the usual Internet crowd. Only people who really care about technology and the details of how it all works stick around here for very long. Those who want cat videos and meme discussions quickly move on.

bachmeier 4y ago
I grew up in North Dakota, and yeah, everyone said that but it was only because we couldn't think of any other logical reason to live there. (I grew up in the western part of the state during the 1970s and 1980s, when the economy was terrible.)
wickedsickeune 4y ago
I was going to write about how I would prefer to have HN a bit more user friendly / clear in UX, but you know what, you're kind of right. HN's UX takes a certain commitment which may contribute to people being more invested in the site.
Chris2048 4y ago
This is usually the meaning behind places that are expensive, or have similar barriers to entry - but how does cold tolerance correlate with riff-raff-iness? I would assume it would correlate higher with having few choices, or stubbornly refusing to move..
nunez 4y ago
another great point. HN isn't even responsive. it's designed for older times, and i love it. (i also love that i can browse HN on lynx or w3m; definitely can't do that with reddit.com, you can, sort of, with old.reddit.com, and you can with i.reddit.com)
bombcar 4y ago
HN doesn’t really give you the dopamine hit of a well-placed tweet or Reddit comment (though I’ve never submitted through to the front page so maybe that does). Some older forums feel similar but they’ve often fallen to spammers who automate attacks against phpbb

daemond 4y ago

In fact, when I first opened HN, I couldn't read the comments very well. Because the font is too small, the layout is dense, and there are no pictures. But when I started reading the comments carefully, I was really surprised by so many people being active on it and so insightful most of the comments are. Now I'm actually getting used to reading these text-only pages.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

It's the better reddit /r/popular to me. People here are less mentally mainstreamed, homogenized and lobotomized. And since this page doesn't have to fulfil any user interaction metrics it can simply stay the way it is (almost perfect) without having to support new media, getting redesigned and filled full of tracking JS, A/B testing JS and other trash.

pwinnski 4y ago
Less mainstream, sure. Less homogenized? It's hard for me to believe you mean that, but I'll suggest instead that it's homogenized more closely around your interests, so that you don't notice the homogeneity. Less lobotomized? So long as you skip threads about crypto, Tesla, SpaceX... just anything even tangentially related to Musk, then sure, less lobotomized.

desperadovisa 4y ago

Hacker News is in absolutely no way a “masterpiece”; it’s a site, one of many, that aggregates articles, sorted by popularity. Because it’s run by the largest startup accelerator in the world, it attracts people other sites don’t. The only special thing about HN is its association with YC. That’s it. But people have this inherent need to worship just about anything, so we get self congratulatory articles like this one. Maybe the fact that this article does well here will make a few of you see through the bull crap? Probably not, but a girl can dream…

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
The only other forum most people know is reddit, which is mostly a braindead wasteland. In contrast to that, Hacker News is a masterpiece.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  That wasn't always the case, and there are still a few good sub-reddits to prove this. In the case of Reddit, it was purposefully trashed by its new owners who decided that anything less than a east-coast-lib groupthink would prevent growth, or something - or maybe they are just incompetent. Feels a similar story with Stack-Overflow.
- nunez 4y ago
  reddit is infinitely curate-able. if you remove all the default subs and sub to communities about topics you care about, it is a much better experience (except for large communities; those are trash, but large forums back in the day were also trash)
- desperadovisa 4y ago
  Unfortunately that’s probably true, despite the facts that a) Reddit is a gigantic mixed bag of quality, and thinking Reddit is “all bad” is admitting to not understanding how to use it, and b) being unable to understand that the category isn’t actually “forums” is sad. You can get this level of quality (which is to say, not the real draw of HN in the first place) by directly visiting the sites posted here.

pwinnski 4y ago

HackerNews susceptible to flattery, as evidenced by this submission! That said, I agree whole-heartedly. HN is the start and end to most of my days as well.

cxf12 4y ago

Like all things internet, if its history isn't being curated and cataloged, yesterday links eventually break and old content is lost. This is the only weakness in an otherwise solid technical and professional atmosphere.