8 ms·
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
by 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 agoDownvoted 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 agono 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 agoOops. 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 agoI 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 agoYou did. His score has little to do with anything on the site. That's the point.
- justech 3y agoI think it's a lot less obvious here than on Reddit you could hover over a username and see it.
- throwanem 3y agoThere's no meaningful leaderboard.
- echelon_musk 3y agoI 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 agoOn 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 agoWould be nice to have the option. I've missed more than one belated response for sure...
- toomuchtodo 3y agoOptimized for thoughtful discussion over engagement.
- ho4 3y agoI 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 agoGo 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 agoThat's new reddit for you. Old reddit is bland af, and some people love it for that.
- baq 3y agoIt 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 agoThere 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 agoIt'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 agowith 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 agowould like to check it out and see how to set it up for my browser!
- lelanthran 3y agoPlace 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 agobots 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 agoGoodharth’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 agoI'm just waiting for some kind of real person yet anonymous protocol that gets introduced in the next era of forums.
- Devasta 3y agoI 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 agoSo just like that past? Bring it on, that was the better internet
- throwanem 3y agoIt 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 agoMastodon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224356
- nonrandomstring 3y agoHN 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 agoExactly right. Whereas with Reddit you get the feeling the moderators have a very unhealthy relationship with the site.
- jseliger 3y agoYou 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 agoThe more interesting/useful part of HN is the comment section, not necessarily the articles themselves.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI often read the comments more thoroughly than the article itself
- baq 3y agoI often do not read the articles until a comment points out it’s really worth it.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoSlight 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 agoAnother 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 agoHN 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 agoWe 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.
- daemonologist 3y agoI 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 agoReddit 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 agoIn 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.