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Hacker News is a perfect example of the "Worse is better" mantra applied to social engineering. I mean, slashdot had more features and functionality in the late
by zoogeny 1y ago
Hacker News is a perfect example of the "Worse is better" mantra applied to social engineering. I mean, slashdot had more features and functionality in the late 1990s.
What makes HN work is the tight focus and heavy moderation.
- dang 1y agoFinally a Lisp system wins the worse-is-better crown!
- keeganpoppen 1y agooh man... this comment is just so, so incredibly apt.
- dotancohen 1y agoIt's also by the guy who mods here.
- 90s_dev 1y ago"Incidentally, very few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN now, and what an amazing job he does." -Paul Graham, https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103 https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103
- 90s_dev 1y agoMy comment definitely has more points than the two above it, but it's lower, even though that pattern isn't true with my other comments. Probably because Daniel manually demoted it as part of his manual/automatic hybrid moderation tooling, and probably for the sake of being humble about the amount of work he does for HN. Which I think is an interesting example of my other comment's point about how dang probably moderates HN. I'd be curious whether I'm very far off with this Daniel.
- owl57 1y agoInterestingly, I think this is one of the cases where both the "For context…" comment and yours add important context for the parent comment that some readers may be not familiar with. Although that second one serves this purpose better, not because of the subject but because it's more directly informative.
- c22 1y agoHow do you know how many points the other comments got?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- oblio 1y agoWell, Facebook is PHP so...
- dx4100 1y agoAny idea of how much of their code is still primarily PHP? Curious myself.
- lokar 1y agoWell “hack”, but the same idea
- loeg 1y agoThe entire website is still a PHP-like derivative language (with an optimizing compiler, etc). Backend services are largely C++.
- School-Cotton 1y agoIf you mean stock vanilla php: none. If you mean Hack, Meta’s PHP dialect which is internally just called “PHP” colloquially: a lot. Basically everything that responds to a public HTTP request, both for APIs and for the website. And since Meta is a lot less “service-oriented” than some companies, a lot more application logic happens in the web server process than you might expect. Backend services in languages other than Hack do exist, of course. When I left Meta (then called Facebook) in 2019, they were almost exclusively in C++. Now I don’t know for sure but I think Rust is gaining a lot of popularity for non-Hack stuff.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoIG should still be Django I would think? I'm kind of curious about Facebook / IG's use of GraphQL, is it hack or just nodejs?
- School-Cotton 1y agoYou might be right about IG, I never worked on it so I’m not sure. Certainly there was still some Django when I joined in 2015 but now, who knows. I’m not sure what you mean about the GraphQL question. Meta doesn’t use Node at all, or at least not to any significant extent.
- kqr 1y agoFor context, "worse is better" refers to Gabriel's observation that products with simple implementations and complicated interfaces tend to achieve adoption faster than products with complex implementations and elegant interfaces. One of the original motivating examples were Unix-like systems (simple implementation, few correctness guarantees in interfaces) vs. Lisp-based systems (often well specified interfaces, but with complicated implementations as the cost.)
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoI think Richard Gabriel attributes it to Jamie Zawinski?
- amiga386 1y agoHe does not. https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html > One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good. He then wrote Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html) for his EuroPAL keynote speech > JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections [from Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big] and sent them to his friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them to their friends everywhere. The excerpt: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- b112 1y agoNow the 'God wrote in lisp' song makes even more sense. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54
- b112 1y agoI'm going to write a scifi story, the plot? The lisp path won, Lispus instead of Linux, and we had AGI in 1997 due to code elegance.
- paxcoder 1y agoYay
- nickpeterson 1y agoAlso the lack of needing to make money helps a lot.
- mike_hearn 1y agoI'd say that's the main thing. People hate ads, HN uses unobtrusive text ads. The moderation isn't that a competitive advantage, IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. It's just a plain old up/down system with the added filip of a "super down" button, for those who are really committed to banning their opponents. I read with showdead turned on because perfectly reasonable comments are so often greyed out or dead. That used to happen much less on Slashdot because there were far fewer people with moderation rights and the bad ones got filtered out via metamod. Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.
- oblio 1y ago> "super down" button The flag button?
- palmotea 1y ago> IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. Really? IIRC, Slashdot's moderation was garbage, remember penis-bird, GNAA, goatse?
- philwelch 1y agoMost of that was downmodded and hidden by default though.
- pram 1y agoYou just reminded me of the beautifully rendered, colored penisbird ascii art dipshits would spam on IRC lol
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoTurns out those GNAA guys are actually white supremacists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev
- johnisgood 1y agoHN may have less features, but do we even need them? I do not think it makes it worse because of that. You could call it minimalistic, which puts it into a more positive light. :) Edit: or as someone else who has phrased it better: "less is more".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 1y agoI think that the classical phrasing is "less is more". At least, that's how my bash pager has it in the manpage.
- johnisgood 1y agoYou are right!
- jrockway 1y agoI liked the "friends" and "foes" system that Slashdot had, though I would say generally the "foes" here just get banned which is convenient. I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?
- raverbashing 1y agoHonestly it's not "worse" But I think HN built on what Reddit got right (at least old reddit) and also on a context of more online/faster interactions as opposed to Slashdot that brought some of the old forums structure and on a context of slower and more meaningful (ahem, for the most part) interactions. Hence why moderation was more precise, upvotes had color and you still had things like user signatures In a way, users and posts on HN are "cattle", not pets ;)
- throwawaymaths 1y agoyour comment assumes that features and functionality are a good thing. "worse is better" does not apply here. "worse is better" is people putting up with footguns like this in python, because it's percieved easier to find a python job: def fun(a = []): HN is very much "less is better", not "worse is better".
- zoogeny 1y agoI'm not sure what you mean? The literal quote from the Wikipedia article on "worse is better" is: > It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. For that reason, I think I am applying the term precisely as it was defined. The irony of my comment, which dang picked up, is that the original idea was a criticism against Lisp, suggesting that the bloat of features was a part of the reason its adoption had lagged behind languages like C. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- 90s_dev 1y agoYou're both saying the same thing: fewer features = higher quality. Swiss army knives are not as good at being screwdrivers as screwdrivers are.
- quinnirill 1y agoIn general: yes. But I’ve certainly had to use swathes of screwdrivers that are worse at being screwdrivers than my Swiss army knife is. Same I believe applies here: there’s a relation, but it’s nuanced. The same screwdriver is a better screwdriver when carried in a hand than in a toolbox full of other high-quality tools, but worse for everything else.
- throwawaymaths 1y agohuh. til i actually thought "worse is better" is more recent than that but it stems from an era where feature count was the measure of quality. how times have changed!! thanks!
- smokel 1y agoThe ugliness scares most people away, or at least it doesn't accidentally lure them in.
- marssaxman 1y agoSome of us genuinely like the way it looks.
- froh 1y agoindeed. I love it. no frills, just contents.
- encom 1y agoHN is like 4chan, but house-broken.
- drweevil 1y agoI find aesthetically pleasing, tbh.
- jt_b 1y agoHN's aesthetic has grown on me honestly!
- 7bit 1y agoI like Hackernews. I like the simplicity. I don't bother with better AI. I prefer it that way and I acknowledge that the look and feel of Hackernews does not suite everyone. But I don't value the look and feel of Hackernews, because it drives people away -- as if these people are of lesser value. That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality.
- DaSHacka 1y ago> That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality. This sounds good in theory until you realize just who it is that is being "gatekept". Peruse through any sufficiently large Discord server or the comments on a YouTube Shorts / Instagram Reels video to see what our fellow "valued internet compatriots" are up to. I, for one, have had enough of dealing with neuron-fried dopamine addicts and literal children from those aforementioned circles to last me a lifetime, I'd prefer HN doesn't become (more) like that. There's always Reddit for those who prefer a community with the front gates blasted wide open.
- Aurornis 1y ago> and heavy moderation. I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It’s primarily user-driven, aside from obvious abusive behavior. The downvote and flagging mechanisms do the heavy lifting. The heuristics that detect a high ratio of arguments to upvotes (as far as I can tell) can be frustrating at times, but they also do a good job of driving ragebait off the front page quickly. The moderators are also very good at rescuing overlooked stories and putting them in the second chance pool for users to consider again, which feels infinitely better than moderators forcing things to the front page. It also seems that some times moderators will undo some of the actions that push a story off the front page if it’s relevant. I’ve seen flagged stories come back from the dead or flame war comment sections get a section chance at the front page with a moderator note at the top. Back in the Slashdot days I remember people rotating through multiple accounts for no reason other than to increase their chances of having one of them with randomly granted moderation points so they could use them as weapons in arguments. Felt like a different era.
- 90s_dev 1y ago> I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.
- baq 1y agoI'm still missing being able to read only +5 insightful comments after 20 years. I'd expect Slashdot's point systems and meta moderation to make a comeback in the LLM slop world we live in currently, but nobody knows about it anymore. Steam kinda rediscovered it in their reviews, perhaps even was inspired by it (I hope...)
- Tijdreiziger 1y agoDutch tech news website Tweakers.net basically has this. Comments are moderated on a scale from -1 to +3, and then you can choose to expand only +2 and up.
- spockz 1y agoI have it set to 2 by default which helps but can also be annoying on fresh posts as unmoderated posts are also hidden. And then if there is a +2 post it totally only makes sense in the context of the tree so now I’m manually unfolding the parent comments. All of this to say that one feature brings in a whole set of additional complications. Less is more.
- busymom0 1y agoCan you explain how that works? I visited the site but don't understand their language.
- AStonesThrow 1y agohttps://m.xkcd.com/810/ https://m.xkcd.com/810/ https://m.xkcd.com/1019/ https://m.xkcd.com/1019/ https://m.xkcd.com/2159/ https://m.xkcd.com/2159/
- andai 1y agoPerfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- throw73484848 1y ago[flagged]
- donnachangstein 1y agoThe genius of Slashdot's moderation system is that it forced you to be fastidious with how your limited mod points were allocated, only using them on posts that really deserved them. As opposed to tearing through a thread and downvoting any and everything you disagree with. Slashdot encouraged more positive moderation, unless you were obviously trolling. The meta-moderators kept any moderation abuse in check. It's sad to see we have devolved from this model, and conversations have become far more toxic and polarized as a direct result of it. (Dissenting opinions are quickly hidden, and those that reinforce existing norms bubble to the top.) I believe HN papers over these problems by relying on a lot of manual hand-moderation and curation which sounds very labor intensive, whereas Slashdot was deliberately hands-off and left the power to the people.
- perching_aix 1y agoHow are you determining the causative relationship?
- bawolff 1y agoI remember slashdot being full of "M$ is teh evill111!!" and other childish nonsense. At the end of the day what matters is the results, and i much prefer the discusions on hn than /.
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y agoFor HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek. Slashdot is struggling a bit these days. The lower the comment count, the worse the moderation, so it's a bit of a snowball effect. The UI could use some help; there are many who don't want it to change at all, but it would be nice if an alternate UI were available, hitting the same API.
- vacuity 1y ago> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. I think HN leans towards deriding both MS and Musk (see any thread on MS and FOSS). In any case, I think that part of being well-spoken is that you speak out against severely bad actors often. It's never useful to reflexively criticize something, but people may contemplate and still decide they're right. Making a comment is the bare minimum of accountability for bad actors who should know better. It may not be to your taste that HN is such a platform, but that's not up to your decision any more than it is mine. There are many problems from a society that struggles to speak well or ill as a subject deserves, which is to say to speak the truth when it should be spoken, and not to speak mistruths except in exceptional circumstances. It would surely be best if one reasoned critique solved the problem and we never would hear of it again, but alas.
- andsoitis 1y agoΤο λακωνίζειν εστί φιλοσοφείν To be spartan is to philosophize.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoI'm curious why λακωνίζειν needs to be nominalized and φιλοσοφείν doesn't.
- andsoitis 1y agoλακωνίζειν gets nominalized when you want to discuss the concept itself (to act like a Spartan/speak laconically) φιλοσοφείν often remains as an infinitive because it's describing an activity someone does or wants to do (to philosophize)
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoThe heavy, thick irony of these people running their own platform on as little technology as possible and depending heavily on human input. It's like they know somewhere deep inside that "mo tech" is not helping anyone.
- dang 1y agoThere's a less cynical interpretation of that which is not so far from the case.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoIt's not ironic whatsoever.
- hbsbsbsndk 1y agoThere's a few levels going on here: - technologists and startup wannabes feeling like HN is "underground" because of the stripped down aesthetic and weird tech stack - out of touch VCs who are successful because of money and connections but want to cosplay as technical - the end users of the startups, who are fed the enshittified products funded by the VCs and created by the technologists
- akomtu 1y agoHN's dry text-only design is what repels most of the problems. Mods only polish it a bit.
- gchamonlive 1y agoMaybe it's an effect of not having to compete with other outlets.
- chairmansteve 1y agoSlashdot sold out to Conde Nast. That killed it. It was very well designed.
- jgalt212 1y agoI think HN has some pretty sophisticated automated and human-in-the-loop moderation features that few other sites possess, or throw as much resources at. Because HN is not ad-supported it does not fall victim to tragedy of the commons.
- peepeepoopoo130 1y ago[flagged]
- quantadev 1y ago"Worst and First beats Perfect and Last" - Every Venture Capitalist Ever.
- rmason 1y agoThe exception to that rule was Google. Which coincidentally might have been one of the best VC investments of all time.
- quantadev 1y agoGoogle was just the right idea at the right time. Ranking pages based on how many other pages link to it wasn't a brilliant idea, it was just the most obvious thing to do next. It was an algo that you could basically implement in a weekend. Tons of tech companies are just this. Something done at the right time, that was super easy to implement, by people capable of getting others to try it.
- wltr 1y agoWhat makes HN work is being popular. Nothing more. Stop praising mediocrity.
- soapdog 1y agoI don't think that was what made HN prevail against similar sites that were popular in the past. In my opinion, it is the fact that it is tied to Y Combinator and lots of startups/founders that made it stick. Something that is not technical at all.
- udev4096 1y agoA lot of people on HN do infact hate YC and pretty much everything VC
- jaza 1y agoNot me! For a number of years, I was like "what's with that domain, never heard of ycombinator, oh well, can't be bothered reading up on it right now, anyway, great content here, and nice minimal interface, I'll keep coming back".
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y agoMaybe this was tongue-in-cheek in a way that eludes me, but in case any innocent and curious bystanders are as confused as me by your comment, I'm not sure "Worse Is Better" refers to what you think it does. It isn't about "features and functionality", it's about how ease of implementation beats everything else. I can't see how that applies here, or what your comment means in that light. Here's the original essay -- https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html This is a good little overview entitled "Worse is Better Considered Harmful" -- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-11/WorseIsBetter/index43bb.html?title=Main_Page&oldid=86 https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-... -- in which the authors argue for "Growable Is Better". In summary - it's about ease of implementation trumping all else. C and Unix are memorably labelled "the ultimate computer viruses".