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Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News (2013)

118 points by teleforce 3y ago

skilled 3y ago
https://archive.is/Y5P61 https://archive.is/Y5P61
skilled 3y ago
> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the 10 best links every day. But I don’t recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is much less so these days. The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  I thought that was a odd comment too. I think it is just fine. Maybe people with that concern can join ##hntop on liberachat to get a better feed.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    We kind of already have a "Top HN stories" list, and it's the hidden /active URL[1] which sorts by number of comments [made within N hours?]. Not everyone agrees with this. dang himself doesn't, and has said he thinks /active tends to end up with the threads that devolved into flamewars or got otherwise "too overheated." Fine, that's probably also true, but what News actually matters? Some package I've never heard of being ported to Rust? or some controversial event that broadly impacts the tech industry or computing, which yes happened to get a lot of "spirited" discussion? The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very, very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated. If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles that probably affect you in some way, you can't beat /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the comments. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active
    - bolasanibk 3y ago
      I use /front. It’s a day old, but good enough for me.
- smitty1e 3y ago
  > Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
  - layer8 3y ago
    Didn’t Edenic charm already prove to fail at three (counting the snake)? ;)
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting to others. If the site becomes successful and more mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on everything and expertise on nothing. I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless. The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless. I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      You can look at older HN threads since they're all still up. There's definitely been a "mean reversion" here as well, but it seems to vary per topic. I think the threads that have suffered the most are the ones about #dramaoftheweek which as you say tends to attract folks with opinions on everything and experience in nothing.
- DamnInteresting 3y ago
  I don't consume HN via RSS, so I am just speculating, but perhaps the RSS feed has a lot of turnover. HN on the web is nice because links stay on the front page for a while, but a chronological delivery such as RSS might be messier.
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    The "messy" nature of RSS feeds is an advantage when dealing with sites like HN since you're not affected by any type of ranking mechanism, i.e. you get to see those posts which for some reason or another are quickly moved off the front page.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  > Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in the past handful of days than I ever have. HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit. EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it stays (close) to it's original intent.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    I feel like I've heard people saying that about HN every month for the past 8 years and I've never observed any real pattern. Think there's just some observation bias going on: a website always seems like it's recently been worse than you remember, at any point in time, because you remember recent bad things but not further back ones.
  - ezekg 3y ago
    That was likely due to the Reddit blackout. I'd imagine a lot of those users will go back to Reddit since HN generally doesn't appreciate shitposting.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    HN has had a huge influx in users since December, probably a result of the Twitter ownership transition and the Reddit blackout. I tend to agree that a lot of the worse elements of those posting cultures are starting to leak through here and HN is starting to feel more like a generic tech subreddit but I'm not sure whether that'll be sustained or not.
    - Noumenon72 3y ago
      How are you tracking the number of HN users over time?
      - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
        https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis
- Kiro 3y ago
  How was he wrong?
  - skilled 3y ago
    > Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. Clearly it's not. Not sure why I have to repeat myself though. ;-)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - teolandon 3y ago
      Because you quoted a passage with about 5 statements that he could have been "wrong" about, and didn't specify which one you were talking about. (insert snarky emoticon here)
      - skilled 3y ago
        It was literally one statement. Please don't pull my leg like this because this site does have guidelines and it is very hard to obey by them when you're being challenged with ignorance.
        teolandon 3y ago
        Not doing any leg-pulling. The passage you quoted is the following: > Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. The statements that could have been interpreted as the subject of your "at the time he was completely wrong" sentence: 1. Hacker News is awesome. 2. It's getting too big. 3. The value of reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. 4. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. 5 A digest of the 10 best items from Hacker News would be a really good Slashdot. Hey thanks for following the guidelines despite my "ignorance", but you're basically telling me that if you could, you would be insulting me right now. I'm not typing all of this to be snarky or to do a "technically..." gotcha. I also didn't know which statement you were actually talking about when I read your comment.
- dasil003 3y ago
  I've been here a while and I think the truth is somewhere in between. HN has grown and shifted somewhat in the process, but ultimately dodged the bullet of cancerous growth. My take is that because HN started as a side-project of a successful technologist and investor who made his money elsewhere, there was never the financial pressure that hits most online services. Couple that with shared interests, strong culture, and a healthy dose of even-handed and principled moderation (thank you Dang!), and HN ended up with way-above average sustainability.
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    HN is such a great example for studies of social-capitalism.
doublerabbit 3y ago
[flagged]
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Can you provide some examples of what the aforementioned "incel culture" looks like?
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    I've no idea what the intent here is but I've noticed the term having moved from its original use of describing a sad subculture of poorly-socialized and sometimes disturbing young men to a more general lazy male-shaming term, often used to intimidate traditional masculine voices in a similar way "slut" is used to shut down women who don't apologise for being women.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      And by "traditional" you mean "sexist".
      - mellosouls 3y ago
        I don't but its a different matter to use a term like "sexist" compared to "incel". Both are often used as insults where an argument is lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is almost always toxic and bullying.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    You don't know what flaming is? And no I can't because there's no controversial threads at the moment. But the toxicity between users is awful.
    - unmole 3y ago
      So, how does that tie into incel culture?
jacquesm 3y ago
He's still a user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco
- cmdrtaco 3y ago
  Hi.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Hi as well! One day we should do a get together of the people that made the top 100 web sites work prior to 1998 or so. I'm sure there would be lots of interesting stories.
    - cmdrtaco 3y ago
      Has-beenternet
      - jedberg 3y ago
        I refuse to be called a has-been yet! :P ps. Hi Rob.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Give it some time ;)
        midasuni 3y ago
        You must be new here
        cykros 3y ago
        Get off my lawn! No really, it's protected by sharks with friggin lasers on their heads.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Hehe, yes, definitely. The ratio of interesting content:junk would be nice to visualize. In the early days of the web I hardly ever ran into a website that wasn't interesting. /. (why not ./ by the way?) was a nice way to discover new stuff when that ratio first started to decrease.
karaterobot 3y ago
> I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what's happening around the universe. This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!
- sctb 3y ago
  I would read that as editorial/curatorial power being decentralized.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    The sad fact is that the fediverse has the worse of both worlds where, in the end, it still seems like following a block list of an admin who is accountable to no one (instead of a popular person with some specific track record) and the fragmentation means the discoverability and interaction is minimal. Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement. Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
    - basch 3y ago
      having each persons identity tied to the instance makes the whole thing way too unstable and centralized. identity needs to exist outside the bounds of instances.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 - Aug 2013 (246 comments)
anderspitman 3y ago
> People get bored fairly quickly, but the rare person never gets bored ever, and you have to be very careful of that person because they might be your best user or they might be a terrible person. And if you give them too much control they could do bad things.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
bhouston 3y ago
Have you seen https://programming.dev https://programming.dev? There could be…
23B1 3y ago
I disagree with his point that HN is being reddit-ized especially given reddit's recent mishegoss. The overall comment quality around here is still quite high.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  The last line of the HN guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, addresses this pretty brilliantly in my opinion. Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it never quite "gets there" because people still make this complaint all the time.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum. One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4 redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the new design so hard to use.
- UberFly 3y ago
  When old.reddit goes it will have the same effect for many browser users I'm sure.
  - cykros 3y ago
    Assuming that crowd isn't mostly the crowd that's already left over the API and nsfw issues, as well as the general unpleasant attitude the CEO has toward the user base. Lemmy sure has gotten a lot more traffic in the last few weeks.
- nunez 3y ago
  Yeah, Slashdot's UI refresh definitely killed the site for me. Reddit was a breath of fresh air by comparison. I still remember when a coworker told me about it back in 2012. I literally stopped browsing Slashdot ever since that day. Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit. It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of experience.
nunez 3y ago
I'm with CmdrTaco. Hacker News from the front page is way way WAY too much. I browse Hacker News through skimfeed.com. Whoever is responsible for that does a really good job combing through Hacker News and surfacing stuff I'm interested in. On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-obnoxious ads. The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to need to be paid, eventually.
- debatem1 3y ago
  The funny thing is that while I remember really enjoying a lot of things on the old web, I don't really remember how I found them. My guess is by either following a link and digging or by talking with people and hearing what they liked. I don't think I've had a word of mouth website recommendation in ten years.
jrh3 3y ago
I miss Slashdot's moderation system... Flame Bait (so you filter it out), informative, etc.

118 points by teleforce 3y ago

https://archive.is/Y5P61 https://archive.is/Y5P61

> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the 10 best links every day. But I don’t recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is much less so these days. The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.

jmclnx 3y ago
I thought that was a odd comment too. I think it is just fine. Maybe people with that concern can join ##hntop on liberachat to get a better feed.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  We kind of already have a "Top HN stories" list, and it's the hidden /active URL[1] which sorts by number of comments [made within N hours?]. Not everyone agrees with this. dang himself doesn't, and has said he thinks /active tends to end up with the threads that devolved into flamewars or got otherwise "too overheated." Fine, that's probably also true, but what News actually matters? Some package I've never heard of being ported to Rust? or some controversial event that broadly impacts the tech industry or computing, which yes happened to get a lot of "spirited" discussion? The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very, very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated. If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles that probably affect you in some way, you can't beat /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the comments. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active
  - bolasanibk 3y ago
    I use /front. It’s a day old, but good enough for me.
smitty1e 3y ago
> Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
- layer8 3y ago
  Didn’t Edenic charm already prove to fail at three (counting the snake)? ;)
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting to others. If the site becomes successful and more mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on everything and expertise on nothing. I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless. The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless. I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    You can look at older HN threads since they're all still up. There's definitely been a "mean reversion" here as well, but it seems to vary per topic. I think the threads that have suffered the most are the ones about #dramaoftheweek which as you say tends to attract folks with opinions on everything and experience in nothing.
DamnInteresting 3y ago
I don't consume HN via RSS, so I am just speculating, but perhaps the RSS feed has a lot of turnover. HN on the web is nice because links stay on the front page for a while, but a chronological delivery such as RSS might be messier.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  The "messy" nature of RSS feeds is an advantage when dealing with sites like HN since you're not affected by any type of ranking mechanism, i.e. you get to see those posts which for some reason or another are quickly moved off the front page.
nullindividual 3y ago
> Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong. Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in the past handful of days than I ever have. HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit. EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it stays (close) to it's original intent.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  I feel like I've heard people saying that about HN every month for the past 8 years and I've never observed any real pattern. Think there's just some observation bias going on: a website always seems like it's recently been worse than you remember, at any point in time, because you remember recent bad things but not further back ones.
- ezekg 3y ago
  That was likely due to the Reddit blackout. I'd imagine a lot of those users will go back to Reddit since HN generally doesn't appreciate shitposting.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  HN has had a huge influx in users since December, probably a result of the Twitter ownership transition and the Reddit blackout. I tend to agree that a lot of the worse elements of those posting cultures are starting to leak through here and HN is starting to feel more like a generic tech subreddit but I'm not sure whether that'll be sustained or not.
  - Noumenon72 3y ago
    How are you tracking the number of HN users over time?
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis
Kiro 3y ago
How was he wrong?
- skilled 3y ago
  > Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. Clearly it's not. Not sure why I have to repeat myself though. ;-)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - teolandon 3y ago
    Because you quoted a passage with about 5 statements that he could have been "wrong" about, and didn't specify which one you were talking about. (insert snarky emoticon here)
    - skilled 3y ago
      It was literally one statement. Please don't pull my leg like this because this site does have guidelines and it is very hard to obey by them when you're being challenged with ignorance.
      - teolandon 3y ago
        Not doing any leg-pulling. The passage you quoted is the following: > Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. The statements that could have been interpreted as the subject of your "at the time he was completely wrong" sentence: 1. Hacker News is awesome. 2. It's getting too big. 3. The value of reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. 4. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. 5 A digest of the 10 best items from Hacker News would be a really good Slashdot. Hey thanks for following the guidelines despite my "ignorance", but you're basically telling me that if you could, you would be insulting me right now. I'm not typing all of this to be snarky or to do a "technically..." gotcha. I also didn't know which statement you were actually talking about when I read your comment.
dasil003 3y ago
I've been here a while and I think the truth is somewhere in between. HN has grown and shifted somewhat in the process, but ultimately dodged the bullet of cancerous growth. My take is that because HN started as a side-project of a successful technologist and investor who made his money elsewhere, there was never the financial pressure that hits most online services. Couple that with shared interests, strong culture, and a healthy dose of even-handed and principled moderation (thank you Dang!), and HN ended up with way-above average sustainability.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  HN is such a great example for studies of social-capitalism.

doublerabbit 3y ago

[flagged]

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Can you provide some examples of what the aforementioned "incel culture" looks like?
- mellosouls 3y ago
  I've no idea what the intent here is but I've noticed the term having moved from its original use of describing a sad subculture of poorly-socialized and sometimes disturbing young men to a more general lazy male-shaming term, often used to intimidate traditional masculine voices in a similar way "slut" is used to shut down women who don't apologise for being women.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    And by "traditional" you mean "sexist".
    - mellosouls 3y ago
      I don't but its a different matter to use a term like "sexist" compared to "incel". Both are often used as insults where an argument is lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is almost always toxic and bullying.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  You don't know what flaming is? And no I can't because there's no controversial threads at the moment. But the toxicity between users is awful.
  - unmole 3y ago
    So, how does that tie into incel culture?

jacquesm 3y ago

He's still a user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco

cmdrtaco 3y ago
Hi.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Hi as well! One day we should do a get together of the people that made the top 100 web sites work prior to 1998 or so. I'm sure there would be lots of interesting stories.
  - cmdrtaco 3y ago
    Has-beenternet
    - jedberg 3y ago
      I refuse to be called a has-been yet! :P ps. Hi Rob.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Give it some time ;)
      - midasuni 3y ago
        You must be new here
      - cykros 3y ago
        Get off my lawn! No really, it's protected by sharks with friggin lasers on their heads.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Hehe, yes, definitely. The ratio of interesting content:junk would be nice to visualize. In the early days of the web I hardly ever ran into a website that wasn't interesting. /. (why not ./ by the way?) was a nice way to discover new stuff when that ratio first started to decrease.

karaterobot 3y ago

> I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what's happening around the universe. This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!

sctb 3y ago
I would read that as editorial/curatorial power being decentralized.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  The sad fact is that the fediverse has the worse of both worlds where, in the end, it still seems like following a block list of an admin who is accountable to no one (instead of a popular person with some specific track record) and the fragmentation means the discoverability and interaction is minimal. Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement. Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
  - basch 3y ago
    having each persons identity tied to the instance makes the whole thing way too unstable and centralized. identity needs to exist outside the bounds of instances.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time: Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 - Aug 2013 (246 comments)

anderspitman 3y ago

> People get bored fairly quickly, but the rare person never gets bored ever, and you have to be very careful of that person because they might be your best user or they might be a terrible person. And if you give them too much control they could do bad things.

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

bhouston 3y ago

Have you seen https://programming.dev https://programming.dev? There could be…

23B1 3y ago

I disagree with his point that HN is being reddit-ized especially given reddit's recent mishegoss. The overall comment quality around here is still quite high.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The last line of the HN guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, addresses this pretty brilliantly in my opinion. Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it never quite "gets there" because people still make this complaint all the time.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum. One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4 redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the new design so hard to use.

UberFly 3y ago
When old.reddit goes it will have the same effect for many browser users I'm sure.
- cykros 3y ago
  Assuming that crowd isn't mostly the crowd that's already left over the API and nsfw issues, as well as the general unpleasant attitude the CEO has toward the user base. Lemmy sure has gotten a lot more traffic in the last few weeks.
nunez 3y ago
Yeah, Slashdot's UI refresh definitely killed the site for me. Reddit was a breath of fresh air by comparison. I still remember when a coworker told me about it back in 2012. I literally stopped browsing Slashdot ever since that day. Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit. It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of experience.

nunez 3y ago

I'm with CmdrTaco. Hacker News from the front page is way way WAY too much. I browse Hacker News through skimfeed.com. Whoever is responsible for that does a really good job combing through Hacker News and surfacing stuff I'm interested in. On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-obnoxious ads. The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to need to be paid, eventually.

debatem1 3y ago
The funny thing is that while I remember really enjoying a lot of things on the old web, I don't really remember how I found them. My guess is by either following a link and digging or by talking with people and hearing what they liked. I don't think I've had a word of mouth website recommendation in ten years.

jrh3 3y ago

I miss Slashdot's moderation system... Flame Bait (so you filter it out), informative, etc.