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@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

@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.
  - dang 3y ago
    It's random. Modulo an occasional email that points me to one.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      Darn, I just assumed that you had some sort of super-hacky patch where one of the Arc functions used as part of the comment submission process looked for the string "@dang" and emailed you if it was found. Email it is!
sfmike 3y ago
Would like to see this argument made. There should also be an argument made that more good contributors would come. In face, more people without the mentality of this post to block and hinder visibility, in effect, would mean this is a net positive for aggregate sentiment.
Erratic6576 3y ago
I would like to make the argument that the increased attention from Google will exert an enshittification pressure in code quality due to the sudden appearance and accumulation of trackers, until the web is finally sold to any big publishing company, and, eventually, to an AI training company. Browsing HN is a relief in times of Surveillance Capitalism Edit: HN uses google tagmanager and analytics; amplitude and branch.io
- dang 3y ago
  > HN uses google tagmanager and analytics; amplitude and branch.io We do? No we don't? I don't even know what those are.
- piva00 3y ago
  I don't see any requests to any analytics or Google Tagmanager, actually the only requests I see when opening a post are to the `news.ycombinator.com` domains to fetch the document itself, a CSS file, a JS file, an image and a couple of SVGs, nothing else. If you see requests outside of that there's something fishy going on in your browser, I believe.
ogurechny 3y ago
I think you are trying to build walls around something that isn't entirely yours, both personally and “you-as-the-voice-of-the-community yours”. The linked blog post actually describes that Google is drowning in ad-driven crap, and has to rely on manually chosen external structures to keep quality tolerable, not that “HN has became cool”.
- throw10920 3y ago
  > I think you are trying to build walls around something that isn't entirely yours, both personally and “you-as-the-voice-of-the-community yours”. Profiling other users, in addition to being extremely bad form, is a pretty good sign that you don't actually have a valid argument to make - which, reading your comment, you don't.
  - ogurechny 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - nindalf 3y ago
    It is a valid argument. Certainly it resonated with me. Your original comment made it seem like you were the voice of the community, that a majority or at least a plurality of users want your proposed change. But there’s no indication that they do.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      You are incorrect. It is not a valid argument - it's profiling, uncharitable assumptions, and ad-hominem attacks with no actual logic, or any redeeming qualities whatsoever for that matter. My language was "Would you be willing to consider the possibility" - a polite request. There's no way that a logical person could even read that as either a command or like I was acting as "the voice of the majority" or "a plurality of users" - you pulled that out of thin air Dang is not a tool or an idiot - if he thinks something is a bad idea, he won't do it. If he thinks that it might be worth doing, he'll think about it. If he needs to poll users, he will.
    - 3y ago
dang 3y ago
HN has been under downward quality pressure for a long time. Figuring out how to withstand it has been the core idea all along: HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html pg wrote that over 15 years ago. I've been saying for (a mere) 10 years that we're trying to stave off the arrow of internet entropy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=stave%20off%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... – not doable forever, no doubt, but doable for a while if we expend enough energy. Based on experience so far, the way to do this is through a combination of a dedicated community, software that does what software can, and moderation to bump the system out of its failure modes. Trying to hide from the outside world is mostly not the way. pg used to do tricks like Erlang Day on occasion, but having that as the main strategy would be like trying to avoid infection by never going outside. Far better is to have a robust immune system, if possible. Trying to avoid (resistible) pathogens weakens the immune system, and hiding HN from new users is a path to decrepitude. The latter is probably a greater threat IMO, and too easy for established users to discount. Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn't the hardest problem on HN. That's because of the dedicated community, which flags these things, reports them when they escape in the wild, and is vigilant about quality. Without such a community, HN would have died long ago. By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don't mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don't intend to and don't realize they're doing that. There's an unholy dynamic between those and the upvote system, so worse comments often get upvoted more than better comments do—often enough to choke the threads with weeds. That's the high-order bit and what I spend more time worrying about—not Cassandra E Oakley and her trading system*, nor the latest startup voting ring and whatnot. If those ever become the high bit, we might be doomed, but we should see it happening long enough in advance to readjust. p.s. (@dang doesn't work - I only saw this by accident. Well, not by accident because it ended up at the top of the thread) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425371 - unkilled for the occasion

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.
- dang 3y ago
  It's random. Modulo an occasional email that points me to one.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    Darn, I just assumed that you had some sort of super-hacky patch where one of the Arc functions used as part of the comment submission process looked for the string "@dang" and emailed you if it was found. Email it is!

sfmike 3y ago

Would like to see this argument made. There should also be an argument made that more good contributors would come. In face, more people without the mentality of this post to block and hinder visibility, in effect, would mean this is a net positive for aggregate sentiment.

Erratic6576 3y ago

I would like to make the argument that the increased attention from Google will exert an enshittification pressure in code quality due to the sudden appearance and accumulation of trackers, until the web is finally sold to any big publishing company, and, eventually, to an AI training company. Browsing HN is a relief in times of Surveillance Capitalism Edit: HN uses google tagmanager and analytics; amplitude and branch.io

dang 3y ago
> HN uses google tagmanager and analytics; amplitude and branch.io We do? No we don't? I don't even know what those are.
piva00 3y ago
I don't see any requests to any analytics or Google Tagmanager, actually the only requests I see when opening a post are to the `news.ycombinator.com` domains to fetch the document itself, a CSS file, a JS file, an image and a couple of SVGs, nothing else. If you see requests outside of that there's something fishy going on in your browser, I believe.

ogurechny 3y ago

I think you are trying to build walls around something that isn't entirely yours, both personally and “you-as-the-voice-of-the-community yours”. The linked blog post actually describes that Google is drowning in ad-driven crap, and has to rely on manually chosen external structures to keep quality tolerable, not that “HN has became cool”.

throw10920 3y ago
> I think you are trying to build walls around something that isn't entirely yours, both personally and “you-as-the-voice-of-the-community yours”. Profiling other users, in addition to being extremely bad form, is a pretty good sign that you don't actually have a valid argument to make - which, reading your comment, you don't.
- ogurechny 3y ago
  [flagged]
- nindalf 3y ago
  It is a valid argument. Certainly it resonated with me. Your original comment made it seem like you were the voice of the community, that a majority or at least a plurality of users want your proposed change. But there’s no indication that they do.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    You are incorrect. It is not a valid argument - it's profiling, uncharitable assumptions, and ad-hominem attacks with no actual logic, or any redeeming qualities whatsoever for that matter. My language was "Would you be willing to consider the possibility" - a polite request. There's no way that a logical person could even read that as either a command or like I was acting as "the voice of the majority" or "a plurality of users" - you pulled that out of thin air Dang is not a tool or an idiot - if he thinks something is a bad idea, he won't do it. If he thinks that it might be worth doing, he'll think about it. If he needs to poll users, he will.
  - 3y ago

dang 3y ago

HN has been under downward quality pressure for a long time. Figuring out how to withstand it has been the core idea all along: HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html pg wrote that over 15 years ago. I've been saying for (a mere) 10 years that we're trying to stave off the arrow of internet entropy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=stave%20off%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... – not doable forever, no doubt, but doable for a while if we expend enough energy. Based on experience so far, the way to do this is through a combination of a dedicated community, software that does what software can, and moderation to bump the system out of its failure modes. Trying to hide from the outside world is mostly not the way. pg used to do tricks like Erlang Day on occasion, but having that as the main strategy would be like trying to avoid infection by never going outside. Far better is to have a robust immune system, if possible. Trying to avoid (resistible) pathogens weakens the immune system, and hiding HN from new users is a path to decrepitude. The latter is probably a greater threat IMO, and too easy for established users to discount. Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn't the hardest problem on HN. That's because of the dedicated community, which flags these things, reports them when they escape in the wild, and is vigilant about quality. Without such a community, HN would have died long ago. By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don't mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don't intend to and don't realize they're doing that. There's an unholy dynamic between those and the upvote system, so worse comments often get upvoted more than better comments do—often enough to choke the threads with weeds. That's the high-order bit and what I spend more time worrying about—not Cassandra E Oakley and her trading system*, nor the latest startup voting ring and whatnot. If those ever become the high bit, we might be doomed, but we should see it happening long enough in advance to readjust. p.s. (@dang doesn't work - I only saw this by accident. Well, not by accident because it ended up at the top of the thread) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425371 - unkilled for the occasion