22 ms·

A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings

356 points by jcmp 3y ago

Sovann102 3y ago
[dead]
kgbcia 3y ago
We need more sites like hackernews. X /twitter used to be that , but it's now overwhelmed with bots and SEO. The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.
- beachy 3y ago
  Downvoted but true. HN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience. - no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger - no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring - limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word - no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans
  - mikestew 3y ago
    no visible karma for anyone but the top few It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?
    - beachy 3y ago
      Oops. I was really meaning no badges, karma etc. showing next to people's posts but forgot you can see it by clicking in.
    - foolswisdom 3y ago
      I wonder the same, I can definitely see the karma of users who have only double digit (and I think I have seen single digit) karma.
    - radley 3y ago
      You did. His score has little to do with anything on the site. That's the point.
    - justech 3y ago
      I think it's a lot less obvious here than on Reddit you could hover over a username and see it.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      There's no meaningful leaderboard.
      - kibwen 3y ago
        There is, but the fact that almost nobody knows that it exists might be a feature. I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.
        throwanem 3y ago
        My qualifier is empirical, and not at all pejorative.
    - echelon_musk 3y ago
      I interpreted this point to mean that there is no visible karma for any of a user's posts. E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.
  - lnauta 3y ago
    On top of that no sharing/@ing: no notifications for responses (there's probably an addon for that if you want it). At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions. Peace and quiet.
    - RGamma 3y ago
      Would be nice to have the option. I've missed more than one belated response for sure...
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Optimized for thoughtful discussion over engagement.
  - ho4 3y ago
    I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.
    - beachy 3y ago
      Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself. In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
      - mcmoor 3y ago
        That's new reddit for you. Old reddit is bland af, and some people love it for that.
        baq 3y ago
        It isn’t love of old Reddit, it sucked, you needed RES to make it usable. It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up. I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.
        vik0 3y ago
        There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.
      - ho4 3y ago
        It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.
  - rldjbpin 3y ago
    with the experimental spirit of the site, the barebones look is enough for the "mvp". but for most of the web users today, it is not quite as engaging to use. most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      > most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here. Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that: 1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!) 2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger. 3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.
      - rldjbpin 3y ago
        would like to check it out and see how to set it up for my browser!
        lelanthran 3y ago
        Place this into your `userContent.css` file in `$FIREFOX_PROFILE/chrome`. The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not. https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99dc97f6a7 https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  bots and SEO have really destroyed the internet. and now that we have AI to further streamline the production of BS, I feel like the Internet is just going to become even more of a quality content wasteland.
  - theturtletalks 3y ago
    Goodharth’s Law destroyed the internet. The constant game of chess between Google and SEO marketers has the turned the whole search product to crap. It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
  - 1270018080 3y ago
    I'm just waiting for some kind of real person yet anonymous protocol that gets introduced in the next era of forums.
  - Devasta 3y ago
    I fully believe that, especially with the rise of AI models, the future of the internet is going to be small enclaves of a few thousand people on invite only message boards. Anything else is just going to be far and away too much effort for anyone to maintain, especially when advertisers twig that their ads are mostly being shown to bots. I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
    - quickslowdown 3y ago
      So just like that past? Bring it on, that was the better internet
      - throwanem 3y ago
        It was and it wasn't. Search engines arose to solve a very real problem, and did so quite well for a long time. Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least. Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
- fsflover 3y ago
  Mastodon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  HN requires no javascript and is accessible through Tor without issues. It feels right for those of us who are usually marginalised by a wish for better security. Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
  - ametrau 3y ago
    Exactly right. Whereas with Reddit you get the feeling the moderators have a very unhealthy relationship with the site.
- jseliger 3y ago
  You can still (basically) create your own HN / Twitter using RSS—my favorite reader is NetNewsWire, but there are others—particularly with the rise of Substack. I have a couple hundred feeds in mine, and it's great. On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources. That most people do is itself revealing.
  - Retr0id 3y ago
    The more interesting/useful part of HN is the comment section, not necessarily the articles themselves.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      I often read the comments more thoroughly than the article itself
      - baq 3y ago
        I often do not read the articles until a comment points out it’s really worth it.
- spartanatreyu 3y ago
  Slight disagree. "More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one. There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture." The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good) Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed. And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users. ------------------------------ It's like how twitter was at the start, but better. If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice. You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
  - jerbear4328 3y ago
    Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it. Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason. I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      HN is not small and hasn't been for many years. Your comment is item (comment or story) number 39 million 425 thousand 162.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  We need more old school forums. Decentralized communities focused on their respective niches.
- wnevets 3y ago
  > We need more sites like hackernews HN is heavily moderated (censored) and people love to complain when that happens on sites like twitter.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    It’s moderated for quality, not opinions. That’s what people complain about (and I haven’t seen done elsewhere).
    - wnevets 3y ago
      You don't believe HN is moderated for low quality opinions?
- daemonologist 3y ago
  I think a large part of the reason hackernews is good is that operator's incentives are more closely aligned to the desires of users than average. Ycombinator benefits if HN is the best place to discuss the creation of technology/software because it boosts their brand and gives their companies a communication and recruiting advantage; most other platforms are primarily interested in ad revenue and are only incentivized to provide a good experience to users as a factor in that equation. Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
- ctrw 3y ago
  Reddit was the more popular hn replacement. Twitter has too weird a form factor to ever allow the possibly of anything but hot takes.
- trashtester 3y ago
  In a world where AI can impersonate people to virtual perfection, how would one even KNOW who to invite? I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there. And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the defense there?
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Prohibition of new user registrations.
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    It doesn't have to be prohibition which over time would harm HN badly, just slower and delayed approach of earning good access. Or show age and karma of users commenting next to their nick, some scam patterns will become obvious.
- jcmp 3y ago
  Bit afraid about that. Honestly it is suprising how spam free HN is, so maybe they have some good anti spam system in place. Also i think it would make sense to set all outside links to "nofollow" so google ingores them and therefore it is less interesting for SEO.
  - MrBlueIncognito 3y ago
    That would also eliminate any positive effect that HN has on Google search results.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I wonder if nofollow actually does anything nowadays. I feel like the rules that used to be enforced have been replaced with hacky 'AI' that have been hacked together by thousands of SWEs trying to improve some metric for their promotion packet.
    - jcmp 3y ago
      the "google way" would be to use instead of "nofollow" "ugc" which stands for user generated content.[1] In the same document they state "We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes". However they lied often about their ranking signals ;) https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n...
monero-xmr 3y ago
Maybe it’s because HN is well moderated and open to automated scraping, unlike other systems that are being locked down (reddit, Twitter) so the user generated content is now significantly more valuable to search engines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 3y ago
  doesn't chrome track your browsing history? Could be that people spend time on certain sites, affects what google trusts and/or thinks is popular and ieeds into the ranking for searches. who knows.
m2mdas2 3y ago
Eternal september more accelerated.
tcldr 3y ago
Dear Google, we were only adding ‘site:reddit.com’ or ‘site:news.ycombinator.com’ to search queries so we could get to opinions that weren’t being manipulated by SEO fiddlers. What’s our alternative now?
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  Spammers have been heavily targeting reddit for years and site:reddit.com is still useful. Why Google have not bought reddit, I don't know (beyond moderation issues, but AMZN made it work with twitch).
  - tmpz22 3y ago
    I don't think Reddit has ever been a clean acquisition - either because they've raised at high valuations many times or because of an undesirable content/moderation problem.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    I've become really skeptical of Reddit comments around products for this reason. Searching "best X site:reddit.com" and going off the top comment recommendation seems really sketchy when that top comment is only 5-10 points. Maybe I'm just really paranoid these days, but I would bet looking at searches with Reddit in them and creating threads or commenting on old ones and paying for up votes is probably lucrative.
    - whiterknight 3y ago
      You should be skeptical. Every marketing professional knows and uses Reddit. Sentiment is casually discussed in meetings etc.
    - echelon_musk 3y ago
      Reddit has been astroturfed for a good 10yrs at this point. EDIT: https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
    - 3y ago
aaron695 3y ago
> I had a weird experience today. I saw the forum Hackernews in my Google results Click the 3 dots (kebab) beside individual search results and see if it was - "Personalised for you" This is the most likely answer. [Edit] "where was gta made" does come back as "Not Personalised" in incognito mode and I see OP is in SEO. I get a lot of results like this but all OPs examples seem "Not Personalised"
Scubabear68 3y ago
HN deserves to be at or near the top of search results because the quality of discourse is so high here, and on a very wide range of topics. I have noticed an increase in errors here in the past few months though, I wonder if this is the cause.
chipweinberger 3y ago
I think the only defense for increased spam is accounts will need to be tied to real people through some other identification. Sucks, but is there an alternative? I’m open to the idea of no new accounts if it got bad enough. I recently switched to more actively using my account that has my name as the username, anticipating the growing problem of spam detection, and trying to make it more clear this account is not spam.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Which identification is that? Also, identification is not something that is revocable. If someone steals and abuses your identity (though no fault of your own?), are you now banned from the internet?
  - chipweinberger 3y ago
    those are solvable problems, but no one is solving them today. there’s no identity system today that I would want HN to use.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      I can promise you, if you think those are solvable problems, you're missing something that doesn't create an insurmountable problem for one group or another (not even talking about bad guys in this case)
      - scubbo 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Also, ID is not available to everyone. I can't get ID right now due to being an illegal immigrant.
- em-bee 3y ago
  how about submissions only from accounts that are no longer green (if that's not the case already), and possibly also have a positive comment posting history. although with AI it will be possible to make bots that write seemingly coherent and positive comments, so unfortunately this will continue to be an arms race. maybe submissions only after reaching a certain number of points. that would reduce the number of people that can submit though. another alternative would be to clearly identify which submissions come from posters with a high number of points. that would allow anyone to submit but make it easy to give posts by weak accounts a greater scrutiny.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
What's worrying here also is Google's willingness to use a random comment as the source for its snippets. I understand that the average HN commenter puts more effort into their comments, and their veracity, than the average internet user elsewhere, but still. (For me, the top "result" for Monaco in italian is the Google Translator widget with Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia and Quora the top 3 links. HN is 4 or 5 links below.) Oh, and yes, let's hope spammers don't overwhelm dang!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tayo42 3y ago
What happens when hn outgrows it's current self? Even now, the front page is pretty fast paced. Things get burried pretty quick. Sometimes I see an interesting post and comments and think to my self I want to come back later when I have more time but it'll be a few pages off the front by then.
- dang 3y ago
  Curiously, the number of submissions per day hasn't grown much since 2011. Everything else on HN grows more or less linearly, but not that.
pknerd 3y ago
Is it not called "Parasite SEO"[1]? [1] https://www.kiwop.com/en/blog/parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-how-to-do-it#:~:text=Parasite%20SEO%2C%20also%20known%20as%20parasitic%20SEO%2C%20refers%20to%20a,the%20ranking%20of%20another%20site https://www.kiwop.com/en/blog/parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-ho....
DiscourseFan 3y ago
I started using this website after downloading brave, and I typed "news" into the search bar and it automatically directed me here. I was instantly fascinated by the diversity of articles and high quality discourse, and so I've stayed for way longer than I thought. But, yes, unfortunately, as with Reddit and Xitter, one day HN with suffer the fate of popular social media, probably not too long from now. Social control is the name of the game, and you can't win without monopolizing. I only hope Dang can hold down the fort for as long as possible; HN will be the Masada of the internet. (Well, I suppose there is still 4chan, but that's not going anywhere. 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website.)
- marbartolome 3y ago
  > 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website 4chan: the roaches of the Internet :)
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    Eh, I remember what it was like back in the day when it was spicy and fun, but ever since moot left and then sold it, it's just not the same. I haven't really bothered going back, I'd like to say I've grown up since being like 14 and getting pretty accustomed to seeing some pretty terrible stuff on there.
- modeless 3y ago
  If you're new you may not know this but the meme that HN is turning into Reddit is at least 17 years old, and has been the last entry in the Hacker News Guidelines since forever: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the statistics bear out differently this time.
- 3y ago
throwawa14223 3y ago
Sadly the broader the topics gets on hacker news the less relevant searching site:news.ycombinator.com becomes. This isn't a value judgement on the articles a lot of them are very interesting, but more narrow had some value for finding things.
lobito14 3y ago
Google knows your preferences and tailors your search results accordingly. You are The hidden gem. Use anti tracking and privacy tools.
xnx 3y ago
I'm pretty suspicious of any 3rd party seo tools. Only true data comes from Google Search Console or hacker news logs.
tussa 3y ago
I often find myself searching on HN, then Reddit (via google) and then good old sad google, in that order. When Google arrived, it had the solution people were desperately waiting for. It was pretty much everything we wanted. And it even "wasn't evil!" Now it feels like people at Google are just making sure they'll qualify for their annual bonus with total disregard to what happens to the company. I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. But Google, don't worry, they'll "just be a search company".
- vik0 3y ago
  >I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. Really? Do you think this company exists today?
  - calderknight 3y ago
    I would guess the new chatbots have already stolen a bit of the market.
  - tussa 3y ago
    We'd know about them if they existed as a company today. Remember that what became Google was Larry's and Sergey's PhD project that no one wanted to buy.
  - rixthefox 3y ago
    * huge asterisk since I pay to use it and feel the need to disclose that upfront. Kagi is a very strong and viable candidate IMHO. The search is actually useful and I’ve noticed on a few occasions that my search was “too focused” and yielded “no results found” and I had to rethink my query to better find what I was looking for. Google on the other hand would have spared no opportunity to spam my results with ads even if it couldn’t find what I was looking for. Anything to put more ads in my face.
figassis 3y ago
I've always thought it was strange that HN never appeared in search results. I mean content here has a very high SNR and seems to me that it checks all of Google's SEO boxes. So I always assumed not showing up was intentional, as in dang has been delisting it on purpose and blocking bots. Now that it's showing up, I kind of want it to go back the way it was. The only reason I read HN so much is because I have given it a high degree of trust, that even though I don't know most commenters, I can easily reason about content, find the sources, discover amazing tools and read from founders directly. I really, really do not want to worry about whether the front page is now ads.
- culi 3y ago
  The frontpage has always been ads. That's like the entire point of this website... I mean just look at the domain name
jart 3y ago
Ruh roh. Google is finally fixing the search ranking problem, good and hard. Be careful what you wish for.
CamelCaseName 3y ago
I suspect this is because when they rolled out their Perspectives \ Discussions tab, Reddit completely dominated the results. One article I read said they appeared in 97.2% of results.
Qem 3y ago
It seems with the recent wave of layoffs people now have more free time to be on Hacker News.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
65 3y ago
Next Google should boost the rankings of forums. And we can all go back to forums. And the internet can be good again.
mianos 3y ago
The weird thing is I just saw a few crypto scammers posting on other threads. Sucks to be popular.
akdaadensb 3y ago
This is karma for us originally starting the fire about typing reddit in our Google searches (I believe it's fair to say this was discovered independently by many technically proficient people over the course of the preceding half decade), but we definitely had a hand in publicizing it. I'm curious what the end result will be but will be disappointed if the quality of HN decreases to be more in line with Reddit et al. What makes HackerNews different from Reddit is that people I actually respect frequent here, real players at the game of life and whatnot (whatever that means), and I can't say the same about Reddit. If it gets too popular I can see that being jeopardized.
- baq 3y ago
  The sad thing is those people most definitely have been on Reddit, but the enshittification hit too hard and most of them just quit.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"It is also noteworthy what it HN ranking for: A comment is the top result for "where was gta made"." Not for me. Wikipedia is #1. I retrieved 100 results. None of them were HN comments. "A comment from desdiv is ranking #1 for the question "Monaco in italian"" For me Wikipedia was again #1. HN comment was #2. "Another article that ranks well for several keywords like "ruined my life" is GRAHAM PANTHER's article, and HN also ranks well for brand-related KW, such as every question about the cost of youtube tv, where Google favours the post from thunderbong." For the search "cost of youtube tv", NerdWallet ranked #1. HN comment was #10. It is baffling to me that people, who certainly know that results for the same query can vary according to a number of factors, e.g., geolocation, pretend every computer user performing some Google search query is getting identical results. Ideally that is how search should work. But Google web search is not ideal. Far from it. It is advertising company search. The goal is not to return results in a consistent, transparent manner according to a relatively simple, well-known algorithm. It is to sell advertising services. The goal is not truth. It's money.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Why would you even want the same results everywhere? Local results will be better for many queries.
- jcmp 3y ago
  You are right ofcourse, results variey a lot. The results in the post where sourced from a third party tool for the UK and the US so kind of the results you would get in inkognito mode.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "Local search" when using Google is not optional. The user cannot choose a region when searching www.google.com. The advertising company chooses the region. Why. For the user of course. The company is a trillion dollar charity run by volunteers working on users' behalf for "the good of the web". Right. Does local search benefit sales of advertising services. Proponents of so-called "tech" companies will always try to justify the choices of the so-called "tech" company^1 as being for the benefit of the user. It could be half true. To use DNS as an analaogy, EDNS0 client subnet (ECS) was another one of Google's magnificient "improvements" to the internet. Google fans would argue that ECS is 100% for the benefit of users. However it just so happens to be useful for advertising.^2 What a fortuitous coincidence. 1. The user does not choose. Choice is removed. 2. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/13993698.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/13993698.json
bimguy 3y ago
For years I had no idea of this forum, no Apple technicians I worked with ever mentioned this site. Rixstep.com linked this forum (in 2016) in one of their articles and that's how I found it. Definitely felt like being given a gift. HN is/was a true hidden gem.
throw10920 3y ago
@dang I would like to make the argument that the increased attention from Google will exert a downwards pressure in HN quality due to marketers taking advantage of its influence and search ranking to conduct influence operations. Would you be willing to consider the possibility of delisting the site with robots.txt?
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Mentions do not work here, you should send an email to hn [at] ycombinator.com. (BTW, if this is gonna be done, we should also block all AI bots and search engines at the IP address level.)
  - throw10920 3y ago
    > (BTW, if this is gonna be done, we should also block all AI bots and search engines at the IP address level.) That's not possible or necessary. Not possible, because it simply isn't possible in the general case to differentiate real papers from scrapers, without using device attestation. For an extreme example of this, see the Recap the Law project[1], which gives real human users an extension which scrapes as they browse. Not necessary, because scrapers for AI training data an entirely separate problem completely unrelated to marketing, and because robots.txt will serve to stop the majority of search engine indexing, which is all that we need. Actual blocking of engines isn't necessary, because all the big ones are well-behaved, and after they stop indexing HN, marketers won't care about HN for the purposes of SEO-related influence campaigns any more.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39384026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39384026
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    While @‘s aren’t an implemented feature, dang has quite the ability to find them.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Interesting observation but nothing more than a bit of fearmongering after that. It seems likely that HN content would appear more regularly because it's one of few places left on the net that regular fresh discussion on recent topics is occurring with solid moderation. Community is hard. And requires moderation. And it's done here with great care. Don't worry about the spam, the fight is real but the problem is also very appreciated on the ground here by Dang and mods as you can tell. Keep it up. And meanwhile you can help by submitting quality content from regularly reliable sources, not upvoting dupes, contributing thoughtful discussion and keeping discussion focused/organized, as many of you do.
coretx 3y ago
Since everyone more or less seems to agree on some shape or form of the "problem", what about the following solution; Create a devils pact with the elite astroturfing people who no one seems to be bothered by or able to identify. Exchange data, and root out the "problem". If you can't beat them, join them. The lesser evil is still perceived as a better experience after all. Our enemy his enemy is our friend.
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
Is it possible that google is now turning to sites that have a strong moderation policy, as a vetting strategy against LLM generated posts? (Maybe November 2022 is turning out to be a new kind of Eternal September for the rest of the Web...)
- baq 3y ago
  I'd go a bit further and ask what other choice do they have...? Unless they can make a reasonably effective LLM-generated content detection (sounds tough!) they're faced with a rather inconvenient problem of mining the internet for known human-generated content (while we still agree what 'to know' even means). Interesting parallels to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel.
  - thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
    It’s certainly hard to detect authorship per se, but I expect very easy to detect content people produce using LLMs. You can target affiliate marketing blogs and other SEO garbage, entirely ignoring whether it’s literally written by human hands.
    - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
      > It’s certainly hard to detect authorship per se, but I expect very easy to detect content people produce using LLMs. Yes. For now. Just flag the use of the words "delve" and "deep dive," flag bullet-pointed paragraphs and lists, and flag anything that closes with a too-neat one-paragraph conclusion — and you've just caught 85% of AIspam. But this is already changing, and in about 6-10 months I expect it'll be impossible to detect at more than 70% confidence whether an article is written by an AI or a human. (You could say: The human writes with soul, with style, whereas the AI is totally bland, irritatingly didactic, and generic. But you can quite easily coax an AI into imitating any literary style, and some of the best AI-generated content is warped in this way.)
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samuell 3y ago
I basically stick 'site:news.ycombinator.com' to most of my searches these days anyways, to the extent I should look for a plugin to have it permanently added (although mostly via DuckDuckGo or Brave Search). It is a preciously rare gem on today's web.
- guappa 3y ago
  That seems terribly limiting.
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    Much better signal to noise ratio though.
  - pynappo 3y ago
    one can always fall back to regular search queries as needed. i find that searching"<query> reddit" and falling back to "<query>" is usually going to get me an answer faster than the other way around.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Side note: Why do people add site:... to their search query instead of just ... the name of the website? I do the latter and it works perfectly well, for example "apple vision pro hackernews" or "apple vision pro reddit".
  - ufo 3y ago
    On duckduckgo, the apple vision query only returns 3/8 results actually from hackernews. (I myself prefer using the native HN search / duckduckgo bangs, because it can sort by date and shows the comment count for each thread).
globular-toast 3y ago
Note to the author, if reading: the page is marked as German language which makes some browsers prompt to translate from German, despite being in English.
- jcmp 3y ago
  Thanks, fixed!
TradingPlaces 3y ago
Not for nothing, but I was able to raise HN in my Kagi search rankings (and demote others) because I wanted to do it, not because a Googler on the Search Team made a slide deck about HN. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalized-results.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize... Best $10 I spend every month.
- jadodev 3y ago
  This comment finally pushed me to try out Kagi and WOW. I did not realize how much I was missing out from a search engine - pinning & blocking websites on my search???? It seems so obvious now, but damn is that incredible.
nojvek 3y ago
I noticed that Google is ranking Quora very high lately. Which is absurd because the first answer on Quora is usually auto-LLM answered post. I have to actively exclude Quora to get a better answer. The enshittification of the Web has truly begun.

356 points by jcmp 3y ago

[dead]

We need more sites like hackernews. X /twitter used to be that , but it's now overwhelmed with bots and SEO. The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.

beachy 3y ago
Downvoted but true. HN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience. - no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger - no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring - limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word - no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans
- mikestew 3y ago
  no visible karma for anyone but the top few It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?
  - beachy 3y ago
    Oops. I was really meaning no badges, karma etc. showing next to people's posts but forgot you can see it by clicking in.
  - foolswisdom 3y ago
    I wonder the same, I can definitely see the karma of users who have only double digit (and I think I have seen single digit) karma.
  - radley 3y ago
    You did. His score has little to do with anything on the site. That's the point.
  - justech 3y ago
    I think it's a lot less obvious here than on Reddit you could hover over a username and see it.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    There's no meaningful leaderboard.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      There is, but the fact that almost nobody knows that it exists might be a feature. I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.
      - throwanem 3y ago
        My qualifier is empirical, and not at all pejorative.
  - echelon_musk 3y ago
    I interpreted this point to mean that there is no visible karma for any of a user's posts. E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.
- lnauta 3y ago
  On top of that no sharing/@ing: no notifications for responses (there's probably an addon for that if you want it). At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions. Peace and quiet.
  - RGamma 3y ago
    Would be nice to have the option. I've missed more than one belated response for sure...
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Optimized for thoughtful discussion over engagement.
- ho4 3y ago
  I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.
  - beachy 3y ago
    Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself. In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
    - mcmoor 3y ago
      That's new reddit for you. Old reddit is bland af, and some people love it for that.
      - baq 3y ago
        It isn’t love of old Reddit, it sucked, you needed RES to make it usable. It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up. I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.
      - vik0 3y ago
        There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.
    - ho4 3y ago
      It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.
- rldjbpin 3y ago
  with the experimental spirit of the site, the barebones look is enough for the "mvp". but for most of the web users today, it is not quite as engaging to use. most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here. Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that: 1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!) 2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger. 3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.
    - rldjbpin 3y ago
      would like to check it out and see how to set it up for my browser!
      - lelanthran 3y ago
        Place this into your `userContent.css` file in `$FIREFOX_PROFILE/chrome`. The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not. https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99dc97f6a7 https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...
bobthepanda 3y ago
bots and SEO have really destroyed the internet. and now that we have AI to further streamline the production of BS, I feel like the Internet is just going to become even more of a quality content wasteland.
- theturtletalks 3y ago
  Goodharth’s Law destroyed the internet. The constant game of chess between Google and SEO marketers has the turned the whole search product to crap. It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
- 1270018080 3y ago
  I'm just waiting for some kind of real person yet anonymous protocol that gets introduced in the next era of forums.
- Devasta 3y ago
  I fully believe that, especially with the rise of AI models, the future of the internet is going to be small enclaves of a few thousand people on invite only message boards. Anything else is just going to be far and away too much effort for anyone to maintain, especially when advertisers twig that their ads are mostly being shown to bots. I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
  - quickslowdown 3y ago
    So just like that past? Bring it on, that was the better internet
    - throwanem 3y ago
      It was and it wasn't. Search engines arose to solve a very real problem, and did so quite well for a long time. Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least. Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
fsflover 3y ago
Mastodon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356
nonrandomstring 3y ago
HN requires no javascript and is accessible through Tor without issues. It feels right for those of us who are usually marginalised by a wish for better security. Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
- ametrau 3y ago
  Exactly right. Whereas with Reddit you get the feeling the moderators have a very unhealthy relationship with the site.
jseliger 3y ago
You can still (basically) create your own HN / Twitter using RSS—my favorite reader is NetNewsWire, but there are others—particularly with the rise of Substack. I have a couple hundred feeds in mine, and it's great. On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources. That most people do is itself revealing.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  The more interesting/useful part of HN is the comment section, not necessarily the articles themselves.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    I often read the comments more thoroughly than the article itself
    - baq 3y ago
      I often do not read the articles until a comment points out it’s really worth it.
spartanatreyu 3y ago
Slight disagree. "More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one. There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture." The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good) Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed. And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users. ------------------------------ It's like how twitter was at the start, but better. If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice. You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
- jerbear4328 3y ago
  Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it. Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason. I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    HN is not small and hasn't been for many years. Your comment is item (comment or story) number 39 million 425 thousand 162.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
We need more old school forums. Decentralized communities focused on their respective niches.
wnevets 3y ago
> We need more sites like hackernews HN is heavily moderated (censored) and people love to complain when that happens on sites like twitter.
- Auracle 3y ago
  It’s moderated for quality, not opinions. That’s what people complain about (and I haven’t seen done elsewhere).
  - wnevets 3y ago
    You don't believe HN is moderated for low quality opinions?
daemonologist 3y ago
I think a large part of the reason hackernews is good is that operator's incentives are more closely aligned to the desires of users than average. Ycombinator benefits if HN is the best place to discuss the creation of technology/software because it boosts their brand and gives their companies a communication and recruiting advantage; most other platforms are primarily interested in ad revenue and are only incentivized to provide a good experience to users as a factor in that equation. Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
ctrw 3y ago
Reddit was the more popular hn replacement. Twitter has too weird a form factor to ever allow the possibly of anything but hot takes.
trashtester 3y ago
In a world where AI can impersonate people to virtual perfection, how would one even KNOW who to invite? I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there. And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the defense there?

matheusmoreira 3y ago
Prohibition of new user registrations.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be prohibition which over time would harm HN badly, just slower and delayed approach of earning good access. Or show age and karma of users commenting next to their nick, some scam patterns will become obvious.
jcmp 3y ago
Bit afraid about that. Honestly it is suprising how spam free HN is, so maybe they have some good anti spam system in place. Also i think it would make sense to set all outside links to "nofollow" so google ingores them and therefore it is less interesting for SEO.
- MrBlueIncognito 3y ago
  That would also eliminate any positive effect that HN has on Google search results.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I wonder if nofollow actually does anything nowadays. I feel like the rules that used to be enforced have been replaced with hacky 'AI' that have been hacked together by thousands of SWEs trying to improve some metric for their promotion packet.
  - jcmp 3y ago
    the "google way" would be to use instead of "nofollow" "ugc" which stands for user generated content.[1] In the same document they state "We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes". However they lied often about their ranking signals ;) https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n...

monero-xmr 3y ago

Maybe it’s because HN is well moderated and open to automated scraping, unlike other systems that are being locked down (reddit, Twitter) so the user generated content is now significantly more valuable to search engines.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m463 3y ago
doesn't chrome track your browsing history? Could be that people spend time on certain sites, affects what google trusts and/or thinks is popular and ieeds into the ranking for searches. who knows.

m2mdas2 3y ago

Eternal september more accelerated.

tcldr 3y ago

Dear Google, we were only adding ‘site:reddit.com’ or ‘site:news.ycombinator.com’ to search queries so we could get to opinions that weren’t being manipulated by SEO fiddlers. What’s our alternative now?

teruakohatu 3y ago
Spammers have been heavily targeting reddit for years and site:reddit.com is still useful. Why Google have not bought reddit, I don't know (beyond moderation issues, but AMZN made it work with twitch).
- tmpz22 3y ago
  I don't think Reddit has ever been a clean acquisition - either because they've raised at high valuations many times or because of an undesirable content/moderation problem.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  I've become really skeptical of Reddit comments around products for this reason. Searching "best X site:reddit.com" and going off the top comment recommendation seems really sketchy when that top comment is only 5-10 points. Maybe I'm just really paranoid these days, but I would bet looking at searches with Reddit in them and creating threads or commenting on old ones and paying for up votes is probably lucrative.
  - whiterknight 3y ago
    You should be skeptical. Every marketing professional knows and uses Reddit. Sentiment is casually discussed in meetings etc.
  - echelon_musk 3y ago
    Reddit has been astroturfed for a good 10yrs at this point. EDIT: https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
  - 3y ago

aaron695 3y ago

> I had a weird experience today. I saw the forum Hackernews in my Google results Click the 3 dots (kebab) beside individual search results and see if it was - "Personalised for you" This is the most likely answer. [Edit] "where was gta made" does come back as "Not Personalised" in incognito mode and I see OP is in SEO. I get a lot of results like this but all OPs examples seem "Not Personalised"

Scubabear68 3y ago

HN deserves to be at or near the top of search results because the quality of discourse is so high here, and on a very wide range of topics. I have noticed an increase in errors here in the past few months though, I wonder if this is the cause.

chipweinberger 3y ago

I think the only defense for increased spam is accounts will need to be tied to real people through some other identification. Sucks, but is there an alternative? I’m open to the idea of no new accounts if it got bad enough. I recently switched to more actively using my account that has my name as the username, anticipating the growing problem of spam detection, and trying to make it more clear this account is not spam.

pixl97 3y ago
Which identification is that? Also, identification is not something that is revocable. If someone steals and abuses your identity (though no fault of your own?), are you now banned from the internet?
- chipweinberger 3y ago
  those are solvable problems, but no one is solving them today. there’s no identity system today that I would want HN to use.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I can promise you, if you think those are solvable problems, you're missing something that doesn't create an insurmountable problem for one group or another (not even talking about bad guys in this case)
    - scubbo 3y ago
      [flagged]
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Also, ID is not available to everyone. I can't get ID right now due to being an illegal immigrant.
em-bee 3y ago
how about submissions only from accounts that are no longer green (if that's not the case already), and possibly also have a positive comment posting history. although with AI it will be possible to make bots that write seemingly coherent and positive comments, so unfortunately this will continue to be an arms race. maybe submissions only after reaching a certain number of points. that would reduce the number of people that can submit though. another alternative would be to clearly identify which submissions come from posters with a high number of points. that would allow anyone to submit but make it easy to give posts by weak accounts a greater scrutiny.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago

What's worrying here also is Google's willingness to use a random comment as the source for its snippets. I understand that the average HN commenter puts more effort into their comments, and their veracity, than the average internet user elsewhere, but still. (For me, the top "result" for Monaco in italian is the Google Translator widget with Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia and Quora the top 3 links. HN is 4 or 5 links below.) Oh, and yes, let's hope spammers don't overwhelm dang!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tayo42 3y ago

What happens when hn outgrows it's current self? Even now, the front page is pretty fast paced. Things get burried pretty quick. Sometimes I see an interesting post and comments and think to my self I want to come back later when I have more time but it'll be a few pages off the front by then.

dang 3y ago
Curiously, the number of submissions per day hasn't grown much since 2011. Everything else on HN grows more or less linearly, but not that.

pknerd 3y ago

Is it not called "Parasite SEO"[1]? [1] https://www.kiwop.com/en/blog/parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-how-to-do-it#:~:text=Parasite%20SEO%2C%20also%20known%20as%20parasitic%20SEO%2C%20refers%20to%20a,the%20ranking%20of%20another%20site https://www.kiwop.com/en/blog/parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-ho....

DiscourseFan 3y ago

I started using this website after downloading brave, and I typed "news" into the search bar and it automatically directed me here. I was instantly fascinated by the diversity of articles and high quality discourse, and so I've stayed for way longer than I thought. But, yes, unfortunately, as with Reddit and Xitter, one day HN with suffer the fate of popular social media, probably not too long from now. Social control is the name of the game, and you can't win without monopolizing. I only hope Dang can hold down the fort for as long as possible; HN will be the Masada of the internet. (Well, I suppose there is still 4chan, but that's not going anywhere. 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website.)

marbartolome 3y ago
> 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website 4chan: the roaches of the Internet :)
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  Eh, I remember what it was like back in the day when it was spicy and fun, but ever since moot left and then sold it, it's just not the same. I haven't really bothered going back, I'd like to say I've grown up since being like 14 and getting pretty accustomed to seeing some pretty terrible stuff on there.
modeless 3y ago
If you're new you may not know this but the meme that HN is turning into Reddit is at least 17 years old, and has been the last entry in the Hacker News Guidelines since forever: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the statistics bear out differently this time.
3y ago

throwawa14223 3y ago

Sadly the broader the topics gets on hacker news the less relevant searching site:news.ycombinator.com becomes. This isn't a value judgement on the articles a lot of them are very interesting, but more narrow had some value for finding things.

lobito14 3y ago

Google knows your preferences and tailors your search results accordingly. You are The hidden gem. Use anti tracking and privacy tools.

xnx 3y ago

I'm pretty suspicious of any 3rd party seo tools. Only true data comes from Google Search Console or hacker news logs.

tussa 3y ago

I often find myself searching on HN, then Reddit (via google) and then good old sad google, in that order. When Google arrived, it had the solution people were desperately waiting for. It was pretty much everything we wanted. And it even "wasn't evil!" Now it feels like people at Google are just making sure they'll qualify for their annual bonus with total disregard to what happens to the company. I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. But Google, don't worry, they'll "just be a search company".

vik0 3y ago
>I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. Really? Do you think this company exists today?
- calderknight 3y ago
  I would guess the new chatbots have already stolen a bit of the market.
- tussa 3y ago
  We'd know about them if they existed as a company today. Remember that what became Google was Larry's and Sergey's PhD project that no one wanted to buy.
- rixthefox 3y ago
  * huge asterisk since I pay to use it and feel the need to disclose that upfront. Kagi is a very strong and viable candidate IMHO. The search is actually useful and I’ve noticed on a few occasions that my search was “too focused” and yielded “no results found” and I had to rethink my query to better find what I was looking for. Google on the other hand would have spared no opportunity to spam my results with ads even if it couldn’t find what I was looking for. Anything to put more ads in my face.

figassis 3y ago

I've always thought it was strange that HN never appeared in search results. I mean content here has a very high SNR and seems to me that it checks all of Google's SEO boxes. So I always assumed not showing up was intentional, as in dang has been delisting it on purpose and blocking bots. Now that it's showing up, I kind of want it to go back the way it was. The only reason I read HN so much is because I have given it a high degree of trust, that even though I don't know most commenters, I can easily reason about content, find the sources, discover amazing tools and read from founders directly. I really, really do not want to worry about whether the front page is now ads.

culi 3y ago
The frontpage has always been ads. That's like the entire point of this website... I mean just look at the domain name

jart 3y ago

Ruh roh. Google is finally fixing the search ranking problem, good and hard. Be careful what you wish for.

CamelCaseName 3y ago

I suspect this is because when they rolled out their Perspectives \ Discussions tab, Reddit completely dominated the results. One article I read said they appeared in 97.2% of results.

Qem 3y ago

It seems with the recent wave of layoffs people now have more free time to be on Hacker News.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

65 3y ago

Next Google should boost the rankings of forums. And we can all go back to forums. And the internet can be good again.

mianos 3y ago

The weird thing is I just saw a few crypto scammers posting on other threads. Sucks to be popular.

akdaadensb 3y ago

This is karma for us originally starting the fire about typing reddit in our Google searches (I believe it's fair to say this was discovered independently by many technically proficient people over the course of the preceding half decade), but we definitely had a hand in publicizing it. I'm curious what the end result will be but will be disappointed if the quality of HN decreases to be more in line with Reddit et al. What makes HackerNews different from Reddit is that people I actually respect frequent here, real players at the game of life and whatnot (whatever that means), and I can't say the same about Reddit. If it gets too popular I can see that being jeopardized.

baq 3y ago
The sad thing is those people most definitely have been on Reddit, but the enshittification hit too hard and most of them just quit.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"It is also noteworthy what it HN ranking for: A comment is the top result for "where was gta made"." Not for me. Wikipedia is #1. I retrieved 100 results. None of them were HN comments. "A comment from desdiv is ranking #1 for the question "Monaco in italian"" For me Wikipedia was again #1. HN comment was #2. "Another article that ranks well for several keywords like "ruined my life" is GRAHAM PANTHER's article, and HN also ranks well for brand-related KW, such as every question about the cost of youtube tv, where Google favours the post from thunderbong." For the search "cost of youtube tv", NerdWallet ranked #1. HN comment was #10. It is baffling to me that people, who certainly know that results for the same query can vary according to a number of factors, e.g., geolocation, pretend every computer user performing some Google search query is getting identical results. Ideally that is how search should work. But Google web search is not ideal. Far from it. It is advertising company search. The goal is not to return results in a consistent, transparent manner according to a relatively simple, well-known algorithm. It is to sell advertising services. The goal is not truth. It's money.

skybrian 3y ago
Why would you even want the same results everywhere? Local results will be better for many queries.
jcmp 3y ago
You are right ofcourse, results variey a lot. The results in the post where sourced from a third party tool for the UK and the US so kind of the results you would get in inkognito mode.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Local search" when using Google is not optional. The user cannot choose a region when searching www.google.com. The advertising company chooses the region. Why. For the user of course. The company is a trillion dollar charity run by volunteers working on users' behalf for "the good of the web". Right. Does local search benefit sales of advertising services. Proponents of so-called "tech" companies will always try to justify the choices of the so-called "tech" company^1 as being for the benefit of the user. It could be half true. To use DNS as an analaogy, EDNS0 client subnet (ECS) was another one of Google's magnificient "improvements" to the internet. Google fans would argue that ECS is 100% for the benefit of users. However it just so happens to be useful for advertising.^2 What a fortuitous coincidence. 1. The user does not choose. Choice is removed. 2. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/13993698.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/13993698.json

bimguy 3y ago

For years I had no idea of this forum, no Apple technicians I worked with ever mentioned this site. Rixstep.com linked this forum (in 2016) in one of their articles and that's how I found it. Definitely felt like being given a gift. HN is/was a true hidden gem.

throw10920 3y ago

@dang I would like to make the argument that the increased attention from Google will exert a downwards pressure in HN quality due to marketers taking advantage of its influence and search ranking to conduct influence operations. Would you be willing to consider the possibility of delisting the site with robots.txt?

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Mentions do not work here, you should send an email to hn [at] ycombinator.com. (BTW, if this is gonna be done, we should also block all AI bots and search engines at the IP address level.)
- throw10920 3y ago
  > (BTW, if this is gonna be done, we should also block all AI bots and search engines at the IP address level.) That's not possible or necessary. Not possible, because it simply isn't possible in the general case to differentiate real papers from scrapers, without using device attestation. For an extreme example of this, see the Recap the Law project[1], which gives real human users an extension which scrapes as they browse. Not necessary, because scrapers for AI training data an entirely separate problem completely unrelated to marketing, and because robots.txt will serve to stop the majority of search engine indexing, which is all that we need. Actual blocking of engines isn't necessary, because all the big ones are well-behaved, and after they stop indexing HN, marketers won't care about HN for the purposes of SEO-related influence campaigns any more.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39384026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39384026
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  While @‘s aren’t an implemented feature, dang has quite the ability to find them.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Interesting observation but nothing more than a bit of fearmongering after that. It seems likely that HN content would appear more regularly because it's one of few places left on the net that regular fresh discussion on recent topics is occurring with solid moderation. Community is hard. And requires moderation. And it's done here with great care. Don't worry about the spam, the fight is real but the problem is also very appreciated on the ground here by Dang and mods as you can tell. Keep it up. And meanwhile you can help by submitting quality content from regularly reliable sources, not upvoting dupes, contributing thoughtful discussion and keeping discussion focused/organized, as many of you do.

coretx 3y ago

Since everyone more or less seems to agree on some shape or form of the "problem", what about the following solution; Create a devils pact with the elite astroturfing people who no one seems to be bothered by or able to identify. Exchange data, and root out the "problem". If you can't beat them, join them. The lesser evil is still perceived as a better experience after all. Our enemy his enemy is our friend.

MichaelMoser123 3y ago

Is it possible that google is now turning to sites that have a strong moderation policy, as a vetting strategy against LLM generated posts? (Maybe November 2022 is turning out to be a new kind of Eternal September for the rest of the Web...)

baq 3y ago
I'd go a bit further and ask what other choice do they have...? Unless they can make a reasonably effective LLM-generated content detection (sounds tough!) they're faced with a rather inconvenient problem of mining the internet for known human-generated content (while we still agree what 'to know' even means). Interesting parallels to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel.
- thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
  It’s certainly hard to detect authorship per se, but I expect very easy to detect content people produce using LLMs. You can target affiliate marketing blogs and other SEO garbage, entirely ignoring whether it’s literally written by human hands.
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    > It’s certainly hard to detect authorship per se, but I expect very easy to detect content people produce using LLMs. Yes. For now. Just flag the use of the words "delve" and "deep dive," flag bullet-pointed paragraphs and lists, and flag anything that closes with a too-neat one-paragraph conclusion — and you've just caught 85% of AIspam. But this is already changing, and in about 6-10 months I expect it'll be impossible to detect at more than 70% confidence whether an article is written by an AI or a human. (You could say: The human writes with soul, with style, whereas the AI is totally bland, irritatingly didactic, and generic. But you can quite easily coax an AI into imitating any literary style, and some of the best AI-generated content is warped in this way.)
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

samuell 3y ago

I basically stick 'site:news.ycombinator.com' to most of my searches these days anyways, to the extent I should look for a plugin to have it permanently added (although mostly via DuckDuckGo or Brave Search). It is a preciously rare gem on today's web.

guappa 3y ago
That seems terribly limiting.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Much better signal to noise ratio though.
- pynappo 3y ago
  one can always fall back to regular search queries as needed. i find that searching"<query> reddit" and falling back to "<query>" is usually going to get me an answer faster than the other way around.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
Side note: Why do people add site:... to their search query instead of just ... the name of the website? I do the latter and it works perfectly well, for example "apple vision pro hackernews" or "apple vision pro reddit".
- ufo 3y ago
  On duckduckgo, the apple vision query only returns 3/8 results actually from hackernews. (I myself prefer using the native HN search / duckduckgo bangs, because it can sort by date and shows the comment count for each thread).

globular-toast 3y ago

Note to the author, if reading: the page is marked as German language which makes some browsers prompt to translate from German, despite being in English.

jcmp 3y ago
Thanks, fixed!

TradingPlaces 3y ago

Not for nothing, but I was able to raise HN in my Kagi search rankings (and demote others) because I wanted to do it, not because a Googler on the Search Team made a slide deck about HN. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalized-results.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize... Best $10 I spend every month.

jadodev 3y ago
This comment finally pushed me to try out Kagi and WOW. I did not realize how much I was missing out from a search engine - pinning & blocking websites on my search???? It seems so obvious now, but damn is that incredible.

nojvek 3y ago

I noticed that Google is ranking Quora very high lately. Which is absurd because the first answer on Quora is usually auto-LLM answered post. I have to actively exclude Quora to get a better answer. The enshittification of the Web has truly begun.