27 ms·

Evolution of Hacker News

333 points by sriramk 13y ago

sriramk 13y ago
If memory serves me right, there was a lot of discussion in the early days of HN about not being Reddit (when Reddit was much more low quality and getting beaten by Digg).
- davidw 13y ago
  Reddit got a bunch of its initial users via a link or two from PG essays. Indeed, there are some of the early users there who I recognize as early users here, too. It was pretty good at that stage. And then reddit started growing, and linking to all kinds of stuff like Ron Paul, and lots of "outrage" stories, and other flamewar topics, and promptly went to hell in a handbasket.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
ben0x539 13y ago
Is this a press release?
- Achshar 13y ago
  How can it possibly be?
ryanholiday 13y ago
HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them. It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. It seems crazy but there is value in passing on certain kinds of growth. The only hiccup to this plan in HN's case is that the very specific community it is targeted to is itself growing and growing. So staying "small" might be impossible.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 13y ago
  > It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. Speaking of which, I wonder what became of this one? http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart Apologies for deviating from the thread's topic, but I re-read that the other day and got to wondering.
  - miles 13y ago
    Snapper/Simplicity ended up being bought by Briggs & Stratton, which apparently decided to back peddle a bit: Walmart to sell Briggs & Stratton Snapper mowers http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2013/01/17/walmart-to-sell-briggs-stratton.html http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2013/01/17/walmart... Here is a forum comment apparently from Jim Wier ("The Man Who Said No to Walmart") regarding the Sears deal after his departure: http://ppecongress.com/showpost.php?s=b79ee2a3f907acf9594e2667735c8d06&p=7174&postcount=1 http://ppecongress.com/showpost.php?s=b79ee2a3f907acf9594e26...
hayksaakian 13y ago
Interesting, the only thing I really learned though was the orange names between YC founders.
tptacek 13y ago
Man I miss Flashdot.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Flashdot was replaced by HTML5dot and now it's much better.
- hko 13y ago
  Perhaps she meant ſlashdot.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - minimaxir 13y ago
      He's referring to the author of the OP, Leena Rao.
      - yareally 13y ago
        Oh. I'm half asleep. Mea Culpa.
lazyjones 13y ago
It's sad and indicative of the quality of tech journalism when this line gets written by thenextweb and then quoted by techcrunch without being questioned: > Having a big audience isn’t really the goal. In comparison, Hacker News’ inspiration and the first big YC exit, Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day. If 4.4 million page views in a given day were special for Reddit, it would not be the hugely successful page it is and tech journalists should have a rough idea of traffic figures like these. The same thenextweb post claims further down that Reddit averaged 3 billion page views a month in 2012. (it was the Obama AMA subreddit that hit 4.4 million page views in a single day)
- chrisacky 13y ago
  I'm a Brit, so take my token apology for calling you out on this [1], but the way you frame your comment is actually the thing that frustrates me the most about a lot of HN comments. So much negativity, which is often based on some extremely esoteric fact, that actually takes away from the original point of the article, and is just counter to any continuing discussion. Branching off is great. We get some really great discussions on HN that side-step the original point of an article, but when it's just for the sake of bashing, I can't ever support such comments. [1] : We like to apologise for things
  - larrys 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with you unless I'm misunderstanding the point of what you mean by what the parent said that was "extremely esoteric". The point seems to be that we are reading a story about hacker news and someone takes issue with what appears to be an example of lazy journalism. I could find my own examples in the article. Right off the top there are only quotes from PG and tptacek when it would have been really easy to email other users and get some thoughts to round out the story. (Not to mention the fact that it left out a fairly important point - that tptacek has the most karma on HN other than PG).
1wheel 13y ago
> With 1.6 million page views a day (...) Hacker News > Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day These numbers didn't seem right to me; reddit gets way more than 3 times hn's traffic. Last December, reddit had 2 billion page views [http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html] which works out to over 60 million a page views a day and over 30 times hn's count.
- B-Con 13y ago
  I don't get it either. 4.4 is way too low to be Reddit's current page view average. (Now, 44 would be closer.)
Vivtek 13y ago
I for one am glad the community has been diluted to the point that I can participate.
MarkMc 13y ago
4 hours per day! Thanks, pg
chrisvineup 13y ago
"The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007." This coming from Tech... crunch/fund?
gregpilling 13y ago
I am happy HN is here, even if the small village has become a big city. On a given day, there is a decent percentage of the front page that I don't understand at all, and I enjoy reading the articles and comments. I find it an interesting way to learn new things. Thank you PG for creating Hacker News. I read it daily.
- amboar 13y ago
  This is exactly what drew me to it as well; I was awed by the opportunity for so much learning. Anecdotally I've found the focus of the front page has shifted a little from hard-core CS (my degree) and maths topics to more startup and web-development oriented projects and articles. However, there is still often one or two articles that give me the hn hit of old. I don't often comment or submit links, and when I do I don't really care for the karma beyond hoping I've provided something constructive, but despite the shift in focus I continually enjoy the spirited, structured and technical discussion that hn provides. Like gregpilling I read it daily, and would like to thank pg amongst others for continuing to curate such an interesting community.
- jfb 13y ago
  I like it here a lot, but I'm noticing that fewer submissions are interesting to me, and that the overall zeitgeist is moving away from one that I enjoy. But discussion here still tends to bubble up really good stuff and I still enjoy reading HN. That I'm not as interested in the technical submissions any longer, and the non-technical ones continue to leave me cold is more about me and my preferences than the HN community.
jakobe 13y ago
I get the feeling that at the very top of every Hacker News comment thread, there's someone who claims that the author of the article is an incompetent idiot because they found a factual error somewhere in the article. Often this leads to a pedantic discussion of some insignificant details. With all these extremely knowledgeable people from different fields, I wish I found more big picture insights in the comments here.
- scott_s 13y ago
  You're not the only one - pg has called these posts "the middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    The problem is that HN actually incentivizes commenters via a feedback loop of upvotes to make this kind of comment. HN loves facts and disagreement with facts is like playing trivial pursuit, you can show off your knowledge with 0 risk because you don't need to take up any position other than pointing out a flaw. As they say, you don't have to play the violin at all or as well as Yehudi Menuhin to be able to point out that he just missed a note. Criticism is easy, creation is hard.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      And just to prove your point, I'll nitpick a little. Creation is hard, but criticism can still have value.
- rubinelli 13y ago
  In general, I found that the first reply to the first comment (which is more often than not a counter-dismissal) is an excellent indicator of the quality of the rest of the comments.
- 13y ago
scott_s 13y ago
Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page. Remember the above the next time someone claims that a rogue contingent must be flagging stories on a particular topic because it is further down the page than other stories submitted at a similar time and with a similar number of points.
- macathorpe 13y ago
  From the article: >Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down. So it could be that reason too, and it's hard to tell which one it is. Displaying the number of flags a story gets can help. The problem with the flamebait detector is that if people want to bring down a post, they can turn it into a flamebait purposefully.
- krapp 13y ago
  It might just be me, but this seems like the kind of feature you wouldn't want automated. How do you algorithmically tell the difference between a flamewar and a spirited debate?
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2002 advocating the use of Bayesian classification for detecting spam (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html). I bet he's doing something similar to detect flame wars, but with more modern techniques and more CPU power.
    - lobster_johnson 13y ago
      Given how little attention Paul Graham seems to give to HN's tech, I very much doubt there is anything sophisticated there. Apparently HN is a single-threaded Arc process with in-memory state [1] and flat files, running on a single server. It's so low-tech that HN runs a log tailer that bans your IP if it sees a "suspicious" number of requests, the threshold being something like 4-5 reqs within 1-2 seconds. Personally I don't do anything weird (I just browse in Chrome on my Mac and on my iPad), but still I manage to get my IP banned frequently. Instead of fixing the algorithm, Graham added a way to unban your IP [2]. A hypothesis was put forward recently that Graham has intentionally designed HN to be technologically backward to attract serious hackers and repel everyone else. In that light, everything -- the "unknown or expired URL" errors, the impossible-to-hit-without-zooming-on-a-mobile-device up/down arrows, the IP banning, the awful UI, etc. -- makes perfect sense. I am not convinced that it's all intentional, though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102
mkoble11 13y ago
He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” I hope not. This is one of the best & brightest online communities I've ever seen. I learn so much every single day from the content & insights posted on this site, I'm not sure where I'd be without it :)
quackerhacker 13y ago
I genuinely appreciate HN. I'm a convicted hacker and am nowhere as bright as some of you guys on here (I have my moments). Being accepted by you guys really does help me get back into tech and do what I know best. THANK YOU!
- jacquesm 13y ago
  hey Michael, I've read your story the other day and I thought it was both amusing and clever, even if it was also clearly unethical. 5 years seems disproportional but great to see you on the outside. If there is any way in which I can help you to jumpstart your career should you need it or throw work your way let me know and I'll see what I can do for you, email in my profile.
  - quackerhacker 13y ago
    Thank you! I got 15months, the OP on that thread got 5yrs. Definitely, I appreciate the contact, I'll email you soon (programming right now).
kevinalexbrown 13y ago
I'm curious about the degree to which decreasing quality is a consequence of dilution in which "less desirable" individuals lower the mean quality (or some other holistic measure), versus the social effects due purely to size. I'm curious because a large community will probably change the behavior of all individuals, regardless of quality. One such effect is they way discussions happen. In a village, town halls can have discussions with every member. An idea is brought forth, multiple people make changes, it gets amended, reworked, changed. In short, topics have some amount of "persistence", and opinions have more dynamism. In a city, discussions are more like a broadcast: any member might be able to speak, but they're not sparking discussion, they're broadcasting a point of view, and with so many points of view broadcast at any given moment, it's hard to have a discussion that lasts more than a few hours before the next topic of interest is brought forth. In short, topics seem to have little persistence, and opinions have far less dynamism. It seems much more rewarding in a city to make comments designed to convince the audience of how intelligent I am, because I only have the city's attention for a moment. Perhaps this leads to the preponderance of middlebrow dismissals or other "how can I look smart here?" comments. In a village, by contrast, these comments are much less lucrative. If I walk around and the only comment I can give to others is that their new crop idea might not work, I'm probably not going to be very valued, because people will notice over time that those are the only comments I give. It's difficult for me to articulate quite what I mean, perhaps someone could help.
- scott_s 13y ago
  I think of this as conversational intimacy. If too many people are involved, the intimacy is lost. It's still possible, even on the HN of today. Focused technical articles, which are not conventionally controversial, often produce the most valuable discussions to me. They may only have on the order of 30 comments, but those commenters are either interested in learning about the topic, or knowledgable of the topic.
  - harryf 13y ago
    Something I've observed on both Reddit and to a lesser extent HN is as popularity grows, the comment UI rewards speed and brevity if you want to get your point of view heard. If you're one of the first posters and manage to say something provocative with few words, you get more attention. Someone who takes more time (relative to the time the link was posted) to make a reasoned argument with many words (a paragraph or two) will start lower down and have a lower chance of getting up votes as it takes more effort read the entire comment. In other words those that take more time to consider what they post are effectively punished compared to those that post quickly and wittily.
Cakez0r 13y ago
Well, there goes the neighbourhood.
venomsnake 13y ago
HN is becoming my main tech related hub recently. Almost any article worth reading from the big tech sites will find its place here and comments are noting short of amazing sometimes. The depth on some technical topics surpasses even stackexchange. Also if there is downwards slope in the quality it is very mild - for the two years I have been here it is quite consistent.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  My main problem with HN recently is that we're getting way too much political crap on the front page. And, along with that, we seem to be getting more a skew to the "left" (in the modern, American sense of the term) which I'm not crazy about (being neither exactly "right" nor exactly "left" I don't want to see HN moving in either of those directions). I also get the feeling that "groupthink" is a growing problem and that people are getting downvoted for simply having the audacity to go against the local "received wisdom", but that's pretty subjective and I may be wrong.
- mkoble11 13y ago
  Almost any article worth reading from the big tech sites will find its place Also, journalists find stories here. I've seen Show HN's that turn into news stories - even journalists that give the hat tip to OP within the originating thread. That's pretty cool :)
clicks 13y ago
I too have noticed pg's growing frustration with HN a little bit. I joined HN almost 6 years ago -- then I was a naive teenager with a scattered view of the world, though with a ferocious appetite for intelligent debate. I used to do light design work then and usually shied away from hardcore backend programming. I have HN to thank for getting me to take the jump. I also have HN to thank for keeping me informed on various fronts so I could make right decisions that were key in seeing my first 'startup' project surviving (thanks patio11 for your instructive thoughts on a/b testing; grellas for legal stuff; potatolicious for thoughts on design, etc. etc. :)). One thing I want to say is: I think it's okay to be ... well, a little bit mean sometimes. My favorite commenter on this site is rayiner -- one of the reasons I like him is he's never afraid to say what he really believes (sometimes in a slightly mean diction), even if it's going against HN userbase consensus. He's not out to get karma (as some other opportunist high-karma users here are sometimes... complete with amazon affiliate links in their comments, indeed, that is singularly the only thing that annoys me about HN). There's inevitably going to be disagreement when we're discussing important things we have strong feelings on. As long as the discussion doesn't devolve into corrosive name-calling and ad hominems it's fine, and I don't think we go that low very much. I think HN will be fine going forward -- there's a strong identity that is enforced by all users. Thanks pg et al. for keeping this hangout alive and rocking.
Chirono 13y ago
On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.” Wow, Really? I'd say that is pretty remarkable, yes. Is there anywhere that goes into more detail about this?
- hfsktr 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364 There are a few details here. I don't know jack about servers and stuff but this was the only place I knew it was mentioned. From what I gather in the thread it is impressive. More specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548 (pasbesoin's comment)
- wfn 13y ago
  I think it's also notable that HN is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect of pg's own devising. [1] All those "?fnid"s in the URL are pointers to functions.. Some sample code (HN might have morphed quite a bit from it - no idea) linked to in one of the comments referred to by hfsktr is on github. [2] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29 [2]: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc
- mcfunley 13y ago
  That's actually a remarkable feat of not scaling.
  - to3m 13y ago
    Scaling is surely about handling demand, which HN seems to do a decent enough job of.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    It's an impressive feat of scaling by the engineers at Intel et al. :)
- krapp 13y ago
crock 13y ago
Maybe HN is evolving, but the community doesn't seem to be, considering all of the sensationalist news titles that constantly make up the top news, and the fact that the comments to every post contain the same overused, lame industry phrases/buzzwords: 'orders of magnitude', 'value proposition', etc.
austenallred 13y ago
I would like to see an article on The Evolution of TechCrunch.
benologist 13y ago
The article (perhaps ironically) neglected to mention an enormous volume of submissions exist just to harvest pageviews from this community. There is a constant flow advertisements posing as articles where startups write random fluff to get their otherwise unrelated and uninteresting startups on the front page. There is a constant flow of mainstream blogs and people meticulously tailoring content for this site. There have been numerous large companies that have blatantly spammed the site for years undetected, and probably plenty more that still haven't been detected judging by all the 'submissions-only' accounts churning out generic links to mainstream sites. I don't think routine exploitation fosters a healthy, happy community.
- MrMan 13y ago
  your points illustrate some reasons why I do not consider this a community,in a positive sense. there is a lot of interesting discussion, which is good, but it exists to serve and is largely constrained by the need to create a social engine for private investment in tech companies, and the ecosystem that entails.
DanielRibeiro 13y ago
If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. I've been aware of this for a while (a few YC founders I got to meet confided this to me), but it is the first time I've seen it being publicly admitted. Along with the DMCA[1] link below, I'm happy to see this ever increasing level of transparency on Hacker News. I believe it is a great way to foster trust among the community. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html
d0m 13y ago
I'd really like to see the YC alumns. in orange. It would make reading the comments so much more interesting : )
matb33 13y ago
Maybe a de-amalgamation is in order. I'm thinking a sort of inner ring system, where higher karma users contribute but lower karma have read-only. I'm sure this has big issues, just throwing it out there
- krapp 13y ago
  What incentive is there for new users to stick around if they can't contribute to threads though? How do they reach the karma threshold where they can participate? You can't necessarily correlate age and karma with quality. that said I did once have a fiendish (and probably terrible) idea for a similar system where you could only post if you had a certain amount of karma, but also, where you could buy karma points outright.
  - jbicha 13y ago
    Without karma it's very difficult to submit links that anyone will see.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  If lower karma is read only, how do you propose users gain karma?
  - yareally 13y ago
    Perhaps he means with only submitting articles? Alternatively, there could be a time period before users can post comments or articles, though I don't really like having a time limit for posting comments, since that hinders insightful comments from throwaway accounts. It would also hurt users that only want to post because an article is extremely relevant to them and they know the subject well (or are involved in it). Really no winning scenario to this. We could have some sort of user "turing test" to see if users are ready to post/submit on HN, but then one is left with answering "how does one know a user is ready and what are the qualifications?" On some of the Android forums where every user (hyperbole sorta) that roots their phone thinks they're a development expert, I always wanted to implement forcing users to look up various parts of the AOSP source (and/or answer questions about terminology) before they could comment in the development specific subforums. Though that is a bit more black and white than something similar applied to HN.
bmoresbest55 13y ago
I am brand new to HN (and reddit (I'm a noob)). I am a hacker though, I think, and love reading the articles that I would have no other way to read. I am trying to be a more involved member to the hacker/developer community. I think that more people is a good thing overall, it brings more view points and opinion to the site. I do see the downsides to the growth too, though I think that the good far outweighs the bad. I ma not a new member that is a troll or a bad commenter and I think most new users to HN are the same way. Just my $0.02.
DanBC 13y ago
It's interesting to hear that all moderation is done by just a few people. It's easy to knock mods, but I think the moderation is pretty good here. I like the choice that people make here. People decide to be constructive and useful. It'd be interesting to see how that can be replicated in other places. Reddit has some good subs. Ask science and ask history are great. They have big moderation teams who frequently delete comments. (That's a good thing!). SE is good for their very narrow tasks - they really need to open an ad-supported open discussion version of the sites. At the moment there is a site, its meta site, and its chat site. Having a noodling discussion site would allow people to have that interesting chat stuff. It's interesting that wikipedia, while being brilliant, is also really toxic and unpleasant for some people.
elteto 13y ago
You can tell that the quality of the comments (and hence of the community) is going down when you can just by looking at the title of a post, predict the type of negative comments that you will see inside. However the question (which might not have a satisfactory answer) is whether you can keep the same quality standards while still growing. I think that forcibly keeping the community small can be worse than dilution itself.
throwaway125 13y ago
What bothers me personally the most is the way in which downvotes seem to happen. Don't get me wrong, a lot of users downvote in a good way, so it's not all bad. Still, I often find grey comments that are brought in a completely respectable way. I feel like these comments are getting downvoted because someone disagrees with them, rather than because they are bad or toxic comments. The opposite is also true, I often find comments with a positive amount of votes that are in the "internet jokester" style and don't really contribute anything meaningful to the topic at hand.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Jokester comments (I leave quite a few because I enjoy being a smart-arse) are hit and miss on HN. You can't overplay the joke and you can't use memes. That rules out a lot of easy jokes, so in practice the effective humour is a bit better than the stuff you find on Reddit.
- mynameishere 13y ago
  A lot of people are hellbanned. The algo seems to take into account the lifespan of the account, and most such banned people have only existed a few weeks.
- pseut 13y ago
  Often if you go back later, you'll see that the downvote has been "corrected" by another reader. I'll sometimes upvote a reasonable comment only because it has negative karma. And I've... uh... in the name of science, made some relatively useless disagreeable comments that had downvotes, then upvotes, then downvotes,... before reaching equilibrium at +1, so other people do too.
- pullo 13y ago
  this was precisely the comment i was going to post and you beat me to it :) you run the very real risk of having a bunch of comments that mutually agree to the same point being up voted, while the contrarian post or a different opinion is 'shouted down'. Taking the time to distinguish a comment that you disagree with (may be even dislike ) and a comment you think is unproductive to the discussion is our responsibility. I wish we did a better job at it.
hkmurakami 13y ago
>Could This Be A Business? Without a doubt. In fact, if a prominent hacker in a non-english speaking country set up something similar, it will definitely become influential. Hatena Bookmark of Japan used to be like the old reddit with predominantly hacker subject articles, but it grew and became mainstream, kind of like new reddit. Now the hacker community there is yearning for something like hacker news; something that is for them.
- MrMan 13y ago
  It's officially a business! It's called YC.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    well I mean HN standalone.
pshin45 13y ago
> If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. Silicon Valley is supposed to be this great meritocracy where it doesn't matter where you went to school or who you know, all that matters is how well you can build and "make something people want." However, it always amazes me how much cronyism (for lack of a better word) there still is in Silicon Valley. Even Y Combinator is not immune to it. To their credit, PG et al are great at pattern recognition and identifying what separates good/great teams from the bad, but I feel like there is still too much cronyism, personal bias, and subjective judgment in their model that excludes a lot of entrepreneurs who don't fit their "type". Given how influential PG's essays and YC's model have been on other VCs and angel investors, I wonder if it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and/or vicious cycle in the industry where because YC prefers a certain subset of successful founder, it causes many/most investors to also prefer that subset, which makes it easier and easier for this subset of founders to quickly get funding and access to critical resources and networks, while it becomes harder and harder for new subsets of entrepreneurs to break through this walled garden. DISCLAIMER: I really like YC and I read HN every day. I just think that if e.g. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins were VC 1.0 and YC was VC 2.0, a new VC 3.0 that addresses the shortcomings of the current model is way overdue.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I actually used to think a bit like how you do. But humans form groups. That's what we do. And this group is pretty easy to join. You don't need a particular skin colour or religion. Just rock up and rock on.
grandalf 13y ago
It's not a decline in overall quality, just a decrease in signal to noise ratio. Which is a consequence not of user growth but of the startup culture becoming more mainstream and less nerdy. Still my favorite site and primary source (directly or indirectly) of new knowledge.
420365247 13y ago
part of me wants HN to remain somewhat of a "secret" so it doesnt become reddit.
waltz 13y ago
I think I might be hellbanned :/
- krapp 13y ago
  Not yet.
tokenadult 13y ago
"Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a 'prudent and thoughtful guy,' and has been doing a great job ever since." I didn't know this. I think the prudent and thoughtful guy is doing a generally good job. I don't think anyone can read every thread here exhaustively, but there is some good signal:noise ratio here even after all the years of growth. "I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean" is pg's summary of what still needs to be fixed. I'm on board with that too.
- krapp 13y ago
  I assumed that once you got enough karma here you started to get mod rights... maybe not though.
  - yareally 13y ago
    Mod rights as in flagging articles/users or downvoting? Those are all based on a certain amount of karma (with downvoting having the highest threshold since it can cause the most damage).
brownbat 13y ago
To those who have been here from the early days, thanks for letting us newer folks crash the party. I don't have a lot of +50 comments, but I try to self-censor if I'm not getting more +2s than not. No idea if or when eternal September kicks in here, but... I guess the upside is what pg has proved: anyone dissatisfied with online communities can just build a new one, use a singular purpose and a stripped-down ad-free interface, and people will come (for better or worse).
mwfunk 13y ago
I think what I love most about HN is that PG (and others?) take an active role in trying to steer the tone of the comments in specific directions, and don't try to make it a super democratic site like Reddit where everything about the community is allowed to just grow organically in a hands-off manner. I see lots of complaints about supposed censorship or excessive moderation or hellbans, and I understand why those things might frustrate people. Really, I do. But it's not like this is the only place on the Internet where people can go to post comments about tech news. The fact that HN isn't trying to be all things to all people, and isn't trying to be as fair as possible to everyone at all times, is actually what I love about it. I'm glad that there's places like Reddit where everything is community-driven and the maintainers are totally hands-off as to the content of the site, and I frequently enjoy Reddit as well. But I'm also glad that there are places like HN which are actively molded into being a specific kind of site with specific standards of discourse, even if I don't always agree with it. I wish more news sites had such specific visions for content and comments. Not necessarily the same vision, just some vision other than avoiding even the perception of censorship at all costs.
- suppressingfire 13y ago
  I don't quite know why, but your post made me open up 4chan for the first time in years.
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    Maybe because it's cool to enjoy 4chan even though it is fundamentally effed up in so many ways. :) Just like it's cool to enjoy HN even though it's fundamentally effed up in a completely inverse way. I figure all of these places are great sources of information seen through different prisms, you just have to understand the prism to get the most out of it. I try to make up for it by hitting up a bunch of different places with different approaches to moderation and different kinds of communities.
Luyt 13y ago
If you want to see on which date you joined Hacker News, click your login name in the right top of the page (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Username https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Username) and note the 'created: 1397 days ago'. Then plug in this number into a date calculation: $ python >>> import datetime >>> print datetime.date.today() - datetime.timedelta(1397) 2009-07-22 Interesting. I joined in the summer of 2009 ;-)
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Wow... >>> datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=1894) datetime.datetime(2008, 3, 12, 16, 24, 16, 996897) Time really flies.
sutro 13y ago
Thanks a lot for HN, PG.
mcgwiz 13y ago
I might be mistaken but I get the sense that, especially to older members, it's not just "declining quality of discussion" (uninformed/irrelevant, discompassionate, outright rude, inflammatory comments) that is threatening the value of the site. There may actually be a less tangible/measurable quality, that of the early "feel" of the community, that was of great value to those members. It might have come from the particular set of voices that made up the bulk of comments in the early days, or the relative obscurity of the site. While discussion quality can be improved, I doubt some members can ever feel fully satisfied, without the old feel. Also, there are many innovations in comment systems. Gawker's Kinja system is quite good at surfacing or organizing interesting comments, among other things. Post segmentation and comment filtering are techniques used by Slashdot and Reddit, which dampen the impact of growth on community "feel". But, despite the massive growth, there is strong aversion to incorporating any deep changes here. I perceive two specific challenges: prominent voices might actually want a feeling that is (or appears to be) impossible to restore, and there's general apprehension about messing too much with the magic formula that brought HN to the point it's at today. With the influx of users, this appears to create an identity crisis for the site. I wish I could suggest solutions along with these observations. Edit: I do think it would be useful to understand what members of varying karma levels subjectively/qualitatively perceive to be the values and valuable traits of the site.

333 points by sriramk 13y ago

If memory serves me right, there was a lot of discussion in the early days of HN about not being Reddit (when Reddit was much more low quality and getting beaten by Digg).

davidw 13y ago
Reddit got a bunch of its initial users via a link or two from PG essays. Indeed, there are some of the early users there who I recognize as early users here, too. It was pretty good at that stage. And then reddit started growing, and linking to all kinds of stuff like Ron Paul, and lots of "outrage" stories, and other flamewar topics, and promptly went to hell in a handbasket.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

ben0x539 13y ago

Is this a press release?

Achshar 13y ago
How can it possibly be?

ryanholiday 13y ago

HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them. It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. It seems crazy but there is value in passing on certain kinds of growth. The only hiccup to this plan in HN's case is that the very specific community it is targeted to is itself growing and growing. So staying "small" might be impossible.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
davidw 13y ago
> It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. Speaking of which, I wonder what became of this one? http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart Apologies for deviating from the thread's topic, but I re-read that the other day and got to wondering.
- miles 13y ago
  Snapper/Simplicity ended up being bought by Briggs & Stratton, which apparently decided to back peddle a bit: Walmart to sell Briggs & Stratton Snapper mowers http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2013/01/17/walmart-to-sell-briggs-stratton.html http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2013/01/17/walmart... Here is a forum comment apparently from Jim Wier ("The Man Who Said No to Walmart") regarding the Sears deal after his departure: http://ppecongress.com/showpost.php?s=b79ee2a3f907acf9594e2667735c8d06&p=7174&postcount=1 http://ppecongress.com/showpost.php?s=b79ee2a3f907acf9594e26...

hayksaakian 13y ago

Interesting, the only thing I really learned though was the orange names between YC founders.

tptacek 13y ago

Man I miss Flashdot.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 13y ago
Flashdot was replaced by HTML5dot and now it's much better.
hko 13y ago
Perhaps she meant ſlashdot.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    He's referring to the author of the OP, Leena Rao.
    - yareally 13y ago
      Oh. I'm half asleep. Mea Culpa.

lazyjones 13y ago

It's sad and indicative of the quality of tech journalism when this line gets written by thenextweb and then quoted by techcrunch without being questioned: > Having a big audience isn’t really the goal. In comparison, Hacker News’ inspiration and the first big YC exit, Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day. If 4.4 million page views in a given day were special for Reddit, it would not be the hugely successful page it is and tech journalists should have a rough idea of traffic figures like these. The same thenextweb post claims further down that Reddit averaged 3 billion page views a month in 2012. (it was the Obama AMA subreddit that hit 4.4 million page views in a single day)

chrisacky 13y ago
I'm a Brit, so take my token apology for calling you out on this [1], but the way you frame your comment is actually the thing that frustrates me the most about a lot of HN comments. So much negativity, which is often based on some extremely esoteric fact, that actually takes away from the original point of the article, and is just counter to any continuing discussion. Branching off is great. We get some really great discussions on HN that side-step the original point of an article, but when it's just for the sake of bashing, I can't ever support such comments. [1] : We like to apologise for things
- larrys 13y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with you unless I'm misunderstanding the point of what you mean by what the parent said that was "extremely esoteric". The point seems to be that we are reading a story about hacker news and someone takes issue with what appears to be an example of lazy journalism. I could find my own examples in the article. Right off the top there are only quotes from PG and tptacek when it would have been really easy to email other users and get some thoughts to round out the story. (Not to mention the fact that it left out a fairly important point - that tptacek has the most karma on HN other than PG).

1wheel 13y ago

> With 1.6 million page views a day (...) Hacker News > Reddit has seen as much as 4.4 million page views in a given day These numbers didn't seem right to me; reddit gets way more than 3 times hn's traffic. Last December, reddit had 2 billion page views [http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html] which works out to over 60 million a page views a day and over 30 times hn's count.

B-Con 13y ago
I don't get it either. 4.4 is way too low to be Reddit's current page view average. (Now, 44 would be closer.)

Vivtek 13y ago

I for one am glad the community has been diluted to the point that I can participate.

MarkMc 13y ago

4 hours per day! Thanks, pg

chrisvineup 13y ago

"The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007." This coming from Tech... crunch/fund?

gregpilling 13y ago

I am happy HN is here, even if the small village has become a big city. On a given day, there is a decent percentage of the front page that I don't understand at all, and I enjoy reading the articles and comments. I find it an interesting way to learn new things. Thank you PG for creating Hacker News. I read it daily.

amboar 13y ago
This is exactly what drew me to it as well; I was awed by the opportunity for so much learning. Anecdotally I've found the focus of the front page has shifted a little from hard-core CS (my degree) and maths topics to more startup and web-development oriented projects and articles. However, there is still often one or two articles that give me the hn hit of old. I don't often comment or submit links, and when I do I don't really care for the karma beyond hoping I've provided something constructive, but despite the shift in focus I continually enjoy the spirited, structured and technical discussion that hn provides. Like gregpilling I read it daily, and would like to thank pg amongst others for continuing to curate such an interesting community.
jfb 13y ago
I like it here a lot, but I'm noticing that fewer submissions are interesting to me, and that the overall zeitgeist is moving away from one that I enjoy. But discussion here still tends to bubble up really good stuff and I still enjoy reading HN. That I'm not as interested in the technical submissions any longer, and the non-technical ones continue to leave me cold is more about me and my preferences than the HN community.

jakobe 13y ago

I get the feeling that at the very top of every Hacker News comment thread, there's someone who claims that the author of the article is an incompetent idiot because they found a factual error somewhere in the article. Often this leads to a pedantic discussion of some insignificant details. With all these extremely knowledgeable people from different fields, I wish I found more big picture insights in the comments here.

scott_s 13y ago
You're not the only one - pg has called these posts "the middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920
- jacquesm 13y ago
  The problem is that HN actually incentivizes commenters via a feedback loop of upvotes to make this kind of comment. HN loves facts and disagreement with facts is like playing trivial pursuit, you can show off your knowledge with 0 risk because you don't need to take up any position other than pointing out a flaw. As they say, you don't have to play the violin at all or as well as Yehudi Menuhin to be able to point out that he just missed a note. Criticism is easy, creation is hard.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    And just to prove your point, I'll nitpick a little. Creation is hard, but criticism can still have value.
rubinelli 13y ago
In general, I found that the first reply to the first comment (which is more often than not a counter-dismissal) is an excellent indicator of the quality of the rest of the comments.
13y ago

scott_s 13y ago

Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page. Remember the above the next time someone claims that a rogue contingent must be flagging stories on a particular topic because it is further down the page than other stories submitted at a similar time and with a similar number of points.

macathorpe 13y ago
From the article: >Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down. So it could be that reason too, and it's hard to tell which one it is. Displaying the number of flags a story gets can help. The problem with the flamebait detector is that if people want to bring down a post, they can turn it into a flamebait purposefully.
krapp 13y ago
It might just be me, but this seems like the kind of feature you wouldn't want automated. How do you algorithmically tell the difference between a flamewar and a spirited debate?
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2002 advocating the use of Bayesian classification for detecting spam (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html). I bet he's doing something similar to detect flame wars, but with more modern techniques and more CPU power.
  - lobster_johnson 13y ago
    Given how little attention Paul Graham seems to give to HN's tech, I very much doubt there is anything sophisticated there. Apparently HN is a single-threaded Arc process with in-memory state [1] and flat files, running on a single server. It's so low-tech that HN runs a log tailer that bans your IP if it sees a "suspicious" number of requests, the threshold being something like 4-5 reqs within 1-2 seconds. Personally I don't do anything weird (I just browse in Chrome on my Mac and on my iPad), but still I manage to get my IP banned frequently. Instead of fixing the algorithm, Graham added a way to unban your IP [2]. A hypothesis was put forward recently that Graham has intentionally designed HN to be technologically backward to attract serious hackers and repel everyone else. In that light, everything -- the "unknown or expired URL" errors, the impossible-to-hit-without-zooming-on-a-mobile-device up/down arrows, the IP banning, the awful UI, etc. -- makes perfect sense. I am not convinced that it's all intentional, though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623268 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102

mkoble11 13y ago

He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” I hope not. This is one of the best & brightest online communities I've ever seen. I learn so much every single day from the content & insights posted on this site, I'm not sure where I'd be without it :)

quackerhacker 13y ago

I genuinely appreciate HN. I'm a convicted hacker and am nowhere as bright as some of you guys on here (I have my moments). Being accepted by you guys really does help me get back into tech and do what I know best. THANK YOU!

jacquesm 13y ago
hey Michael, I've read your story the other day and I thought it was both amusing and clever, even if it was also clearly unethical. 5 years seems disproportional but great to see you on the outside. If there is any way in which I can help you to jumpstart your career should you need it or throw work your way let me know and I'll see what I can do for you, email in my profile.
- quackerhacker 13y ago
  Thank you! I got 15months, the OP on that thread got 5yrs. Definitely, I appreciate the contact, I'll email you soon (programming right now).

kevinalexbrown 13y ago

I'm curious about the degree to which decreasing quality is a consequence of dilution in which "less desirable" individuals lower the mean quality (or some other holistic measure), versus the social effects due purely to size. I'm curious because a large community will probably change the behavior of all individuals, regardless of quality. One such effect is they way discussions happen. In a village, town halls can have discussions with every member. An idea is brought forth, multiple people make changes, it gets amended, reworked, changed. In short, topics have some amount of "persistence", and opinions have more dynamism. In a city, discussions are more like a broadcast: any member might be able to speak, but they're not sparking discussion, they're broadcasting a point of view, and with so many points of view broadcast at any given moment, it's hard to have a discussion that lasts more than a few hours before the next topic of interest is brought forth. In short, topics seem to have little persistence, and opinions have far less dynamism. It seems much more rewarding in a city to make comments designed to convince the audience of how intelligent I am, because I only have the city's attention for a moment. Perhaps this leads to the preponderance of middlebrow dismissals or other "how can I look smart here?" comments. In a village, by contrast, these comments are much less lucrative. If I walk around and the only comment I can give to others is that their new crop idea might not work, I'm probably not going to be very valued, because people will notice over time that those are the only comments I give. It's difficult for me to articulate quite what I mean, perhaps someone could help.

scott_s 13y ago
I think of this as conversational intimacy. If too many people are involved, the intimacy is lost. It's still possible, even on the HN of today. Focused technical articles, which are not conventionally controversial, often produce the most valuable discussions to me. They may only have on the order of 30 comments, but those commenters are either interested in learning about the topic, or knowledgable of the topic.
- harryf 13y ago
  Something I've observed on both Reddit and to a lesser extent HN is as popularity grows, the comment UI rewards speed and brevity if you want to get your point of view heard. If you're one of the first posters and manage to say something provocative with few words, you get more attention. Someone who takes more time (relative to the time the link was posted) to make a reasoned argument with many words (a paragraph or two) will start lower down and have a lower chance of getting up votes as it takes more effort read the entire comment. In other words those that take more time to consider what they post are effectively punished compared to those that post quickly and wittily.

Cakez0r 13y ago

Well, there goes the neighbourhood.

venomsnake 13y ago

HN is becoming my main tech related hub recently. Almost any article worth reading from the big tech sites will find its place here and comments are noting short of amazing sometimes. The depth on some technical topics surpasses even stackexchange. Also if there is downwards slope in the quality it is very mild - for the two years I have been here it is quite consistent.

mindcrime 13y ago
My main problem with HN recently is that we're getting way too much political crap on the front page. And, along with that, we seem to be getting more a skew to the "left" (in the modern, American sense of the term) which I'm not crazy about (being neither exactly "right" nor exactly "left" I don't want to see HN moving in either of those directions). I also get the feeling that "groupthink" is a growing problem and that people are getting downvoted for simply having the audacity to go against the local "received wisdom", but that's pretty subjective and I may be wrong.
mkoble11 13y ago
Almost any article worth reading from the big tech sites will find its place Also, journalists find stories here. I've seen Show HN's that turn into news stories - even journalists that give the hat tip to OP within the originating thread. That's pretty cool :)

clicks 13y ago

I too have noticed pg's growing frustration with HN a little bit. I joined HN almost 6 years ago -- then I was a naive teenager with a scattered view of the world, though with a ferocious appetite for intelligent debate. I used to do light design work then and usually shied away from hardcore backend programming. I have HN to thank for getting me to take the jump. I also have HN to thank for keeping me informed on various fronts so I could make right decisions that were key in seeing my first 'startup' project surviving (thanks patio11 for your instructive thoughts on a/b testing; grellas for legal stuff; potatolicious for thoughts on design, etc. etc. :)). One thing I want to say is: I think it's okay to be ... well, a little bit mean sometimes. My favorite commenter on this site is rayiner -- one of the reasons I like him is he's never afraid to say what he really believes (sometimes in a slightly mean diction), even if it's going against HN userbase consensus. He's not out to get karma (as some other opportunist high-karma users here are sometimes... complete with amazon affiliate links in their comments, indeed, that is singularly the only thing that annoys me about HN). There's inevitably going to be disagreement when we're discussing important things we have strong feelings on. As long as the discussion doesn't devolve into corrosive name-calling and ad hominems it's fine, and I don't think we go that low very much. I think HN will be fine going forward -- there's a strong identity that is enforced by all users. Thanks pg et al. for keeping this hangout alive and rocking.

Chirono 13y ago

On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.” Wow, Really? I'd say that is pretty remarkable, yes. Is there anywhere that goes into more detail about this?

hfsktr 13y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364 There are a few details here. I don't know jack about servers and stuff but this was the only place I knew it was mentioned. From what I gather in the thread it is impressive. More specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548 (pasbesoin's comment)
wfn 13y ago
I think it's also notable that HN is written in Arc, a Lisp dialect of pg's own devising. [1] All those "?fnid"s in the URL are pointers to functions.. Some sample code (HN might have morphed quite a bit from it - no idea) linked to in one of the comments referred to by hfsktr is on github. [2] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29 [2]: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc
mcfunley 13y ago
That's actually a remarkable feat of not scaling.
- to3m 13y ago
  Scaling is surely about handling demand, which HN seems to do a decent enough job of.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  It's an impressive feat of scaling by the engineers at Intel et al. :)
krapp 13y ago

crock 13y ago

Maybe HN is evolving, but the community doesn't seem to be, considering all of the sensationalist news titles that constantly make up the top news, and the fact that the comments to every post contain the same overused, lame industry phrases/buzzwords: 'orders of magnitude', 'value proposition', etc.

austenallred 13y ago

I would like to see an article on The Evolution of TechCrunch.

benologist 13y ago

The article (perhaps ironically) neglected to mention an enormous volume of submissions exist just to harvest pageviews from this community. There is a constant flow advertisements posing as articles where startups write random fluff to get their otherwise unrelated and uninteresting startups on the front page. There is a constant flow of mainstream blogs and people meticulously tailoring content for this site. There have been numerous large companies that have blatantly spammed the site for years undetected, and probably plenty more that still haven't been detected judging by all the 'submissions-only' accounts churning out generic links to mainstream sites. I don't think routine exploitation fosters a healthy, happy community.

MrMan 13y ago
your points illustrate some reasons why I do not consider this a community,in a positive sense. there is a lot of interesting discussion, which is good, but it exists to serve and is largely constrained by the need to create a social engine for private investment in tech companies, and the ecosystem that entails.

DanielRibeiro 13y ago

If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. I've been aware of this for a while (a few YC founders I got to meet confided this to me), but it is the first time I've seen it being publicly admitted. Along with the DMCA[1] link below, I'm happy to see this ever increasing level of transparency on Hacker News. I believe it is a great way to foster trust among the community. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html

d0m 13y ago

I'd really like to see the YC alumns. in orange. It would make reading the comments so much more interesting : )

matb33 13y ago

Maybe a de-amalgamation is in order. I'm thinking a sort of inner ring system, where higher karma users contribute but lower karma have read-only. I'm sure this has big issues, just throwing it out there

krapp 13y ago
What incentive is there for new users to stick around if they can't contribute to threads though? How do they reach the karma threshold where they can participate? You can't necessarily correlate age and karma with quality. that said I did once have a fiendish (and probably terrible) idea for a similar system where you could only post if you had a certain amount of karma, but also, where you could buy karma points outright.
- jbicha 13y ago
  Without karma it's very difficult to submit links that anyone will see.
hayksaakian 13y ago
If lower karma is read only, how do you propose users gain karma?
- yareally 13y ago
  Perhaps he means with only submitting articles? Alternatively, there could be a time period before users can post comments or articles, though I don't really like having a time limit for posting comments, since that hinders insightful comments from throwaway accounts. It would also hurt users that only want to post because an article is extremely relevant to them and they know the subject well (or are involved in it). Really no winning scenario to this. We could have some sort of user "turing test" to see if users are ready to post/submit on HN, but then one is left with answering "how does one know a user is ready and what are the qualifications?" On some of the Android forums where every user (hyperbole sorta) that roots their phone thinks they're a development expert, I always wanted to implement forcing users to look up various parts of the AOSP source (and/or answer questions about terminology) before they could comment in the development specific subforums. Though that is a bit more black and white than something similar applied to HN.

bmoresbest55 13y ago

I am brand new to HN (and reddit (I'm a noob)). I am a hacker though, I think, and love reading the articles that I would have no other way to read. I am trying to be a more involved member to the hacker/developer community. I think that more people is a good thing overall, it brings more view points and opinion to the site. I do see the downsides to the growth too, though I think that the good far outweighs the bad. I ma not a new member that is a troll or a bad commenter and I think most new users to HN are the same way. Just my $0.02.

DanBC 13y ago

It's interesting to hear that all moderation is done by just a few people. It's easy to knock mods, but I think the moderation is pretty good here. I like the choice that people make here. People decide to be constructive and useful. It'd be interesting to see how that can be replicated in other places. Reddit has some good subs. Ask science and ask history are great. They have big moderation teams who frequently delete comments. (That's a good thing!). SE is good for their very narrow tasks - they really need to open an ad-supported open discussion version of the sites. At the moment there is a site, its meta site, and its chat site. Having a noodling discussion site would allow people to have that interesting chat stuff. It's interesting that wikipedia, while being brilliant, is also really toxic and unpleasant for some people.

elteto 13y ago

You can tell that the quality of the comments (and hence of the community) is going down when you can just by looking at the title of a post, predict the type of negative comments that you will see inside. However the question (which might not have a satisfactory answer) is whether you can keep the same quality standards while still growing. I think that forcibly keeping the community small can be worse than dilution itself.

throwaway125 13y ago

What bothers me personally the most is the way in which downvotes seem to happen. Don't get me wrong, a lot of users downvote in a good way, so it's not all bad. Still, I often find grey comments that are brought in a completely respectable way. I feel like these comments are getting downvoted because someone disagrees with them, rather than because they are bad or toxic comments. The opposite is also true, I often find comments with a positive amount of votes that are in the "internet jokester" style and don't really contribute anything meaningful to the topic at hand.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Jokester comments (I leave quite a few because I enjoy being a smart-arse) are hit and miss on HN. You can't overplay the joke and you can't use memes. That rules out a lot of easy jokes, so in practice the effective humour is a bit better than the stuff you find on Reddit.
mynameishere 13y ago
A lot of people are hellbanned. The algo seems to take into account the lifespan of the account, and most such banned people have only existed a few weeks.
pseut 13y ago
Often if you go back later, you'll see that the downvote has been "corrected" by another reader. I'll sometimes upvote a reasonable comment only because it has negative karma. And I've... uh... in the name of science, made some relatively useless disagreeable comments that had downvotes, then upvotes, then downvotes,... before reaching equilibrium at +1, so other people do too.
pullo 13y ago
this was precisely the comment i was going to post and you beat me to it :) you run the very real risk of having a bunch of comments that mutually agree to the same point being up voted, while the contrarian post or a different opinion is 'shouted down'. Taking the time to distinguish a comment that you disagree with (may be even dislike ) and a comment you think is unproductive to the discussion is our responsibility. I wish we did a better job at it.

hkmurakami 13y ago

>Could This Be A Business? Without a doubt. In fact, if a prominent hacker in a non-english speaking country set up something similar, it will definitely become influential. Hatena Bookmark of Japan used to be like the old reddit with predominantly hacker subject articles, but it grew and became mainstream, kind of like new reddit. Now the hacker community there is yearning for something like hacker news; something that is for them.

MrMan 13y ago
It's officially a business! It's called YC.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  well I mean HN standalone.

pshin45 13y ago

> If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. Silicon Valley is supposed to be this great meritocracy where it doesn't matter where you went to school or who you know, all that matters is how well you can build and "make something people want." However, it always amazes me how much cronyism (for lack of a better word) there still is in Silicon Valley. Even Y Combinator is not immune to it. To their credit, PG et al are great at pattern recognition and identifying what separates good/great teams from the bad, but I feel like there is still too much cronyism, personal bias, and subjective judgment in their model that excludes a lot of entrepreneurs who don't fit their "type". Given how influential PG's essays and YC's model have been on other VCs and angel investors, I wonder if it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and/or vicious cycle in the industry where because YC prefers a certain subset of successful founder, it causes many/most investors to also prefer that subset, which makes it easier and easier for this subset of founders to quickly get funding and access to critical resources and networks, while it becomes harder and harder for new subsets of entrepreneurs to break through this walled garden. DISCLAIMER: I really like YC and I read HN every day. I just think that if e.g. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins were VC 1.0 and YC was VC 2.0, a new VC 3.0 that addresses the shortcomings of the current model is way overdue.

jacques_chester 13y ago
I actually used to think a bit like how you do. But humans form groups. That's what we do. And this group is pretty easy to join. You don't need a particular skin colour or religion. Just rock up and rock on.

grandalf 13y ago

It's not a decline in overall quality, just a decrease in signal to noise ratio. Which is a consequence not of user growth but of the startup culture becoming more mainstream and less nerdy. Still my favorite site and primary source (directly or indirectly) of new knowledge.

420365247 13y ago

part of me wants HN to remain somewhat of a "secret" so it doesnt become reddit.

waltz 13y ago

I think I might be hellbanned :/

krapp 13y ago
Not yet.

tokenadult 13y ago

"Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a 'prudent and thoughtful guy,' and has been doing a great job ever since." I didn't know this. I think the prudent and thoughtful guy is doing a generally good job. I don't think anyone can read every thread here exhaustively, but there is some good signal:noise ratio here even after all the years of growth. "I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean" is pg's summary of what still needs to be fixed. I'm on board with that too.

krapp 13y ago
I assumed that once you got enough karma here you started to get mod rights... maybe not though.
- yareally 13y ago
  Mod rights as in flagging articles/users or downvoting? Those are all based on a certain amount of karma (with downvoting having the highest threshold since it can cause the most damage).

brownbat 13y ago

To those who have been here from the early days, thanks for letting us newer folks crash the party. I don't have a lot of +50 comments, but I try to self-censor if I'm not getting more +2s than not. No idea if or when eternal September kicks in here, but... I guess the upside is what pg has proved: anyone dissatisfied with online communities can just build a new one, use a singular purpose and a stripped-down ad-free interface, and people will come (for better or worse).

mwfunk 13y ago

I think what I love most about HN is that PG (and others?) take an active role in trying to steer the tone of the comments in specific directions, and don't try to make it a super democratic site like Reddit where everything about the community is allowed to just grow organically in a hands-off manner. I see lots of complaints about supposed censorship or excessive moderation or hellbans, and I understand why those things might frustrate people. Really, I do. But it's not like this is the only place on the Internet where people can go to post comments about tech news. The fact that HN isn't trying to be all things to all people, and isn't trying to be as fair as possible to everyone at all times, is actually what I love about it. I'm glad that there's places like Reddit where everything is community-driven and the maintainers are totally hands-off as to the content of the site, and I frequently enjoy Reddit as well. But I'm also glad that there are places like HN which are actively molded into being a specific kind of site with specific standards of discourse, even if I don't always agree with it. I wish more news sites had such specific visions for content and comments. Not necessarily the same vision, just some vision other than avoiding even the perception of censorship at all costs.

suppressingfire 13y ago
I don't quite know why, but your post made me open up 4chan for the first time in years.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  Maybe because it's cool to enjoy 4chan even though it is fundamentally effed up in so many ways. :) Just like it's cool to enjoy HN even though it's fundamentally effed up in a completely inverse way. I figure all of these places are great sources of information seen through different prisms, you just have to understand the prism to get the most out of it. I try to make up for it by hitting up a bunch of different places with different approaches to moderation and different kinds of communities.

Luyt 13y ago

If you want to see on which date you joined Hacker News, click your login name in the right top of the page (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Username https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Username) and note the 'created: 1397 days ago'. Then plug in this number into a date calculation: $ python >>> import datetime >>> print datetime.date.today() - datetime.timedelta(1397) 2009-07-22 Interesting. I joined in the summer of 2009 ;-)

rbanffy 13y ago
Wow... >>> datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=1894) datetime.datetime(2008, 3, 12, 16, 24, 16, 996897) Time really flies.

sutro 13y ago

Thanks a lot for HN, PG.

mcgwiz 13y ago

I might be mistaken but I get the sense that, especially to older members, it's not just "declining quality of discussion" (uninformed/irrelevant, discompassionate, outright rude, inflammatory comments) that is threatening the value of the site. There may actually be a less tangible/measurable quality, that of the early "feel" of the community, that was of great value to those members. It might have come from the particular set of voices that made up the bulk of comments in the early days, or the relative obscurity of the site. While discussion quality can be improved, I doubt some members can ever feel fully satisfied, without the old feel. Also, there are many innovations in comment systems. Gawker's Kinja system is quite good at surfacing or organizing interesting comments, among other things. Post segmentation and comment filtering are techniques used by Slashdot and Reddit, which dampen the impact of growth on community "feel". But, despite the massive growth, there is strong aversion to incorporating any deep changes here. I perceive two specific challenges: prominent voices might actually want a feeling that is (or appears to be) impossible to restore, and there's general apprehension about messing too much with the magic formula that brought HN to the point it's at today. With the influx of users, this appears to create an identity crisis for the site. I wish I could suggest solutions along with these observations. Edit: I do think it would be useful to understand what members of varying karma levels subjectively/qualitatively perceive to be the values and valuable traits of the site.