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The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. Hacker News is heavily moderated by smart people, that's why it's a nice place to visit. A poorly moderated HN would

by rchaud 3y ago

The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. Hacker News is heavily moderated by smart people, that's why it's a nice place to visit. A poorly moderated HN would turn the site into influence-spamming hellscape like Quora. Amazon.com is the ugliest e-commerce site going, but they aren't worried about losing visitors to Wayfair.com, because they're not competing on looks. Same thing with HN, they are not in direct competition with any other site. The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it. There are lots of alternative front-ends to HN, those are personal projects and not done to try to boost HN traffic, just to improve the UX for regular visitors. For example I use a browser extension that adds additional menu items to the HN orange bar, like "shownew".

mey 3y ago
Thank you Dan. If I ever meet you in person, beverage/meal on me.
bigthymer 3y ago
> The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm going to disagree somewhat...I think it has _some_ to do with it. I think the UI acts as a sort of pre-filter. I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others.
- krapp 3y ago
  >I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others. It is true that HN draws some types of people and repels others, but I think it's because of the culture more than the UI. I mean, old Reddit looked almost exactly like HN and it's as mainstream as a site could be. Craigslist was even more minimalist than HN.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    Old reddit was at least a bit more tech and intellectual adjacent than new reddit. The "mainstreamification" of Reddit came largely with the UI change and mobile app. Even with old Reddit it was more mainstream because of UI aspects YC doesn't have (social media sharing, video embedding, custom subreddit CSS)
- basch 3y ago
  I do like some things better about https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ as a front page. The left numbers almost act as a bar graph to tell you how popular something is, and it is otherwise chronological. High text interfaces are also dense compared to modern mobile touch based interfaces trying to render on a desktop. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
  - sshine 3y ago
    I also like hckrnews.com because of chronological and the lights of the numbers. I find that some of them are not highlighted even though the numbers seem high enough. I'm sure it's an algorithm cut-off thing, but I'd like if the lighting scale was a little more linear.
- SilasX 3y ago
  This. I’ve long thought that you get better users when you filter out the people who both need the site to be pretty and are incapable of tweaking it on their end.
- tennisflyi 3y ago
  Chans look pretty similar...
  - xcdzvyn 3y ago
    I'd wager HN has a larger overlap with /g/ than Reddit does.
mattrighetti 3y ago
> HN is heavily moderated by smart people I don’t think it’s as moderated as you’re saying. I would say, on the other hand, that the average comment is much more thoughtful, in-depth, as it originates from individuals who possess extensive insights on the topics they comment on. This deters people from making dumb or useless comments and look like fools in front of smart people that visit HN. People that is not deterred by that will most likely learn the lesson a couple of minutes later from HN members feedbacks.
- mtrpcic 3y ago
  The average comment is more in-depth because there's a long history of thoughtful moderation by people like dang. The community has learned what the bar is, and now holds itself to it (more or less). The social standards here didn't come for free, and if you were to take a random selection of the HN audience and get their Reddit profiles, I strongly suspect you'd see a notable difference in the quality of the content they post to the different platforms.
badpun 3y ago
> The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it. How do search engines recognize discussions as high quality?
- rchaud 3y ago
  Search engines probably just look at page length and domain authority. Anybody can create a 10,000 word blog post on [topic] but something that gets a lot of discussion on a message board (Hacker News, Reddit, Metafilter) is a reasonably good proxy for relevant content (if not "high quality").

by rchaud 3y ago

mey 3y ago

Thank you Dan. If I ever meet you in person, beverage/meal on me.

bigthymer 3y ago

> The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm going to disagree somewhat...I think it has _some_ to do with it. I think the UI acts as a sort of pre-filter. I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others.

krapp 3y ago
>I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others. It is true that HN draws some types of people and repels others, but I think it's because of the culture more than the UI. I mean, old Reddit looked almost exactly like HN and it's as mainstream as a site could be. Craigslist was even more minimalist than HN.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Old reddit was at least a bit more tech and intellectual adjacent than new reddit. The "mainstreamification" of Reddit came largely with the UI change and mobile app. Even with old Reddit it was more mainstream because of UI aspects YC doesn't have (social media sharing, video embedding, custom subreddit CSS)
basch 3y ago
I do like some things better about https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ as a front page. The left numbers almost act as a bar graph to tell you how popular something is, and it is otherwise chronological. High text interfaces are also dense compared to modern mobile touch based interfaces trying to render on a desktop. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
- sshine 3y ago
  I also like hckrnews.com because of chronological and the lights of the numbers. I find that some of them are not highlighted even though the numbers seem high enough. I'm sure it's an algorithm cut-off thing, but I'd like if the lighting scale was a little more linear.
SilasX 3y ago
This. I’ve long thought that you get better users when you filter out the people who both need the site to be pretty and are incapable of tweaking it on their end.
tennisflyi 3y ago
Chans look pretty similar...
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  I'd wager HN has a larger overlap with /g/ than Reddit does.

mattrighetti 3y ago

> HN is heavily moderated by smart people I don’t think it’s as moderated as you’re saying. I would say, on the other hand, that the average comment is much more thoughtful, in-depth, as it originates from individuals who possess extensive insights on the topics they comment on. This deters people from making dumb or useless comments and look like fools in front of smart people that visit HN. People that is not deterred by that will most likely learn the lesson a couple of minutes later from HN members feedbacks.

mtrpcic 3y ago
The average comment is more in-depth because there's a long history of thoughtful moderation by people like dang. The community has learned what the bar is, and now holds itself to it (more or less). The social standards here didn't come for free, and if you were to take a random selection of the HN audience and get their Reddit profiles, I strongly suspect you'd see a notable difference in the quality of the content they post to the different platforms.

badpun 3y ago

> The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it. How do search engines recognize discussions as high quality?

rchaud 3y ago
Search engines probably just look at page length and domain authority. Anybody can create a 10,000 word blog post on [topic] but something that gets a lot of discussion on a message board (Hacker News, Reddit, Metafilter) is a reasonably good proxy for relevant content (if not "high quality").