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Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News

332 points by Libertatea 13y ago

minimaxir 13y ago
I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe. Odd argument, considering that the content on Hacker News is more about products than the people making the products. And I can say with confidence that I've never seen Scoble linked to anywhere on HN.
- eterm 13y ago
  It's not about linking to Scoble, it's about what Scoble links to on his twitter account. By following a few prolific and informed people on twitter you get a good sense of what's going on through what they're linking, that was the point being made.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  Agreed. HN is what it is, it's not an all-encompassing tech news aggregator like Slashdot was. HN is fairly focused with a few outside stories that creep in here and there. I know everyone likes to run the 'back in my day' line every now and then so I might as well. Slashdot is crap now. Back in my day things were fairly relevant and, while there was a slight lag, if the story was interesting it made it to Slashdot quickly. Now stories might not show up for not just hours, but days! By then it's been discussed elsewhere to death so you only read the Slashdot comments for snark and not insight. The technology section of Google News is better than Slashdot (sans comments). Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. They let the look and feel get too long in the tooth and people abandoned it for better sites.
  - Shivetya 13y ago
    Slashdot died the day it got political and worse when such became entrenched. By political I mean election oriented material to the point that crossover polluted seemingly unrelated stories. Hence why during a discussion here about politics I stated I would prefer a "hide" flag next to the "flag" link that I could use to remove stories from my view under the notion that maybe someone wants to get into that stuff here.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Aren't there a few greasemon... aw hell, I'll just look it up for you. # Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories from HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721 also mentioned in the thread http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
    - prawn 13y ago
      I think what killed Slashdot was the devolution of commenting to karma-racing with predictable "funny" responses. So-called obligatory "That's no moon..." jokes and so on. The absence of that was certainly what I found so refreshing when I first discovered Hacker News.
  - Gormo 13y ago
    > Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. This is a feature, not a bug. Web design trends have become awful over the past 3-5 years. HN is even better - simple and functional - and it wouldn't be out of place in 1999.
    - Zimahl 13y ago
      But HN isn't out of place in 2013 and Slashdot is. That's what matters. You can call it a feature all you want but if a new user goes to your site and dismisses it because of the look, you've done something wrong.
      - deleted 13y ago
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  Its the very definition of sticking your head in an echo chamber. I come here because I don't want Only 3 or 4 people's idea of what's important. That's the point of an aggregator / voting system, let me know what the masses deem important.
cperciva 13y ago
Funny that he says he wants a Hacker News digest with the top 10 stories each day... my Hacker News Daily is precisely that.
- swanson 13y ago
  Yeah, googling for "top 10 stories from hacker news" returns http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ as the first result. Maybe he will see this thread and sign up :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - kylelibra 13y ago
    Is there some way to get this in a daily email?
    - gabemart 13y ago
      There's now a subscribe-by-email function: http://goo.gl/5xKj5g
    - gabemart 13y ago
      It would be trivial to set it up as an RSS-to-email campaign in Mailchimp, but I wouldn't want to without the permission of the site owner.
      - cperciva 13y ago
        Go for it. Let me know when it's set up and I'll add a link to the site.
    - GFischer 13y ago
      I'm subscribed to the Hacker Newsletter, but it´s weekly: http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com
    - 13y ago
jfb 13y ago
I wonder about the idea that Twitter will fill the role of something like Slashdot/HN/&c. At my Peak Twitter, I followed a couple hundred people, but the stream is so full of noise that the work of picking out the signal began to drown out any possible benefit. Retweets, for instance, I see as 99.99% noise. The ads are annoying, but ads are annoying everywhere.
- cperciva 13y ago
  I aggressively mark people as "do not show retweets from this person", and it makes a huge difference for cutting down on the noise.
- msie 13y ago
  If only Twitter weren't so restrictive with their API, there would probably be a solution for Twitter spam by now.
- Thrymr 13y ago
  In the article, Malda is not all that enthusiastic about Twitter being the heir to those sites: "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting... It’s different, chattier, I get more pictures of what people ate. It doesn’t necessarily bring people insight." But he does seem to believe that the future is something decentralized like Twitter (which is still run by a single company, however).
- markkat 13y ago
  http://hubski.com http://hubski.com is in many ways a mashup between HN and Twitter. I created it from the HN source code. Building feeds built from following people and tags keeps noise down. People are pretty careful about what they share (retweets). I know Rob has an inactive account, so he is vaguely aware of it. He agreed to let me bend his ear about it (I lived nearby him), but left for the WaPo almost immediately after.
  - bluecalm 13y ago
    One thing about tags which I think is worth a try is to make them up/down-votable. It's one thing to say: "this is interesting" and it's another to say "this is on topic". Current sites based on tags doesn't allow for much user input in the latter area. I dream of a day when I can customize youtube to not display anything video game related (when searching for highlights from sport events and stuff). Everything tagged as "sport events" and in fact being video game footage would be downvoted to death and users posting this wrongly tagged stuff flagged as spammers so there would be incenvite for them to tag things properly.
D9u 13y ago
Any successor will, by necessity, be named something else, so... Yeah, I agree, there can never be another "Hacker News."
mgkimsal 13y ago
"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe." But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to 'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up with the latest hot people on twitter isn't too much work? Makes no sense. Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.
- RockyMcNuts 13y ago
  that seems like such a solvable problem, from a machine learning perspective. every time you read/engage with a tweet or HN post or other content, you are providing training data on what type of tweets/posts you want to read. now if only we had some benevolent central cloud provider that wanted to provide such a service and had a central repository of news and feeds. maybe Google could do something like that and call it 'Reader.'
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    Why do you want to centralize it? Just pull the twitter feeds, and filter them localy.
    - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
      sure, you could do it locally. Google has a better data set because they know what you read in a lot of different apps and on a lot of different devices.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- cholmon 13y ago
  He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA... "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."
VLM 13y ago
In the same article he wonders how there can be eternal growth (the graph up and to the right quote) while limiting the discussion topics to a very small number, but doesn't see the inherent conflict in the demands. This is a failure to identify audience. A desire for identical "fundamentalist clones". Maybe you just don't get those in a tech audience. He made it very clear he's not interested in a coffeescript release. Obviously some subculture is... And thats not necessarily a problem.
- binarybits 13y ago
  This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.
iblaine 13y ago
He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft & SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it unfortunately didn't evolve. [edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even today it's hard/annoying to use.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Add the v2 (2006) redesign to the reasons people like me (uid ~100000) left. It simply became terrible to use, terrible to comment on ("slow down, cowboy!"), terrible to moderate. It is the "retailer with PDF-only catalog" of news sites.
- roc 13y ago
  I think you can generalize that to just one reason: the crowd became too large. It grew to the point that most articles were about things that any given reader wasn't deeply informed on. So the deep technical discussions produced far less chatter than the more general-interest/less-technical discussions and faded out of view. You also saw a bevy of those less-technical people offering their less-technical opinions on technical articles, whenever those things contained some keyword that registered. And, because there were so many more of them, this caused thread quality to suffer. So politics floated to the top, technical discussions became mired in less-technical opinion and technical folks left. Reddit isn't much different. It just attempts to duck the growth problem by enabling splintering into sub-reddits, which in turn splinter, on and on. And instead of "leaving reddit" the way people just stopped reading /., people just leave various sub-reddits. Which, as far as discussion goes, is effectively the same thing. The old forums becomes noisy, generalized, politicized and hollows out. People leave to find new ones. People may not be leaving the reddit platform but that's a distinction that really only matters to the people running reddit. (and maybe someone who's really attached to their profile/karma/whatever)
- pohl 13y ago
  He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. What makes you think so? Why would someone convinced of such things say the following: "Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now." -Rob Malda (Taken from TFA.)
diminoten 13y ago
Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless 'approved', or something similar? Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't "hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean. I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.
- michaelbuckbee 13y ago
  http://monocle.io/ http://monocle.io/ - expressly set out to be a HN with a different community vibe.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things worse, since it leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is better.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Ah, yeah that's obviously a problem. Maybe some kind of "top 10" of HN as voted on by the "elite" - no extra, private comment area, no special form of communication, no nothing except the additional ability to contribute a vote towards a "top 10". I'm also not really even sure such a thing is necessary. I still love HN for it's content and conversations.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great, while it lasted. A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads. I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may conflict with closed societies like this. I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky. Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable information, not to mention some way of validating it.
sillysaurus 13y ago
One idea for jumpstarting a new HN-type site is to spider HNSearch, gathering the first 100,000 stories ever submitted to HN, along with comments. Then set up your site so that your frontpage is a doppelganger of HN's frontpage circa 2007. I.e. today your frontpage should look how the HN frontpage looked on August 7th, 2007. That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back, which they should because the frontpage is interesting. This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were a halfway implementation. Anyway. Just a fun idea. EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008: http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008-04-24.zip http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008... It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users. Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization or something. EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek. EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and 5.9 submissions per user.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  I'm not sure why you think there would be (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments on August 7th, 2007. Also, HNSearch's API won't allow you to gather that many stories.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it. Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users in their field but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue." EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is packaged with a full implementation of HN. 2. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot of content. 3. This is a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing. It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.
TheCraiggers 13y ago
It kinda sounds like he's suggesting a massive, public, social media platform where the 'good stuff' naturally bubbles up to the top. 'Good stuff', in this case, being what you're interested in and nothing else. And while that would indeed be awesome, it's also pretty obviously a pipe dream. Maybe some breakthrough with AI would help with that, but until then I don't think we have the technology to do that. So, for now humans are in control, and as we all know, the public is filled with marketers, trolls, and other forms of bagbiters that tend to ruin such things when they get big enough. Hakuna matata, I guess.
- omarchowdhury 13y ago
  You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    >You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion. I do not think that word means what you think it means. I'm not marketing anything because I'm not selling anything for money or goods.
Zimahl 13y ago
I think his logic toward Twitter is very flawed. Sure, you can get the bulk of your interesting news there from specific feeds, but where's the discussion? People use Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Fark, etc., because they could have conversations about each item. People want to discuss how a story makes them feel and how it affects them. People need access to random people, that's why this doesn't work as well on social sites like Facebook. Finally, it needs to be at least psuedo-anonymous so people can explore their thoughts without real-life repercussions.
- justincormack 13y ago
  There is discussion in twitter but not if you follow Scoble you need to follow people who interact and roughly follow and are followed by similar numbers of people. Its a very social medium if done right...
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    Not to say Twitter isn't a fine medium but I personally don't think a real discussion can be had 140 characters at a time. It's a severe limit that just doesn't work (wrt discussions).
D9u 13y ago
One thing I learned is don’t spend your entire life playing predictive defense against attacks that will never happen. Real people are very clever. If they choose to attack you they’ll attack you in ways you can’t predict. I wish our government would heed this advice... I also liked how Rob said that his CMS was an evolved system and not designed. This has been my experience as well, because I can't think of everything and am better suited to incremental design.
dylangs1030 13y ago
Slightly misleading, only a paragraph or two were really about Hacker News in particular. More about why there won't be another "x", of which Hacker News is one iteration. I'm glad Malda spoke to the issue of volume. A lot of users on Hacker News (with varying levels of prominence, seniority and notability) have noted the issues arising with volume. The NSA scandal was the most recent example of this. Political discourse on Hacker News is almost cancerous it's so bad. there is widespread misinformation and a quick glance at the "New" page shows that the guidelines are frequently not even regarded for submissions. I think Malda is on point with his view of Hacker News being at critical mass right now.
muraiki 13y ago
I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about. However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate? When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem. That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!
- jjindev 13y ago
  As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm. The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest. Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?
- eli 13y ago
fotbr 13y ago
Strangely enough, "new version of blahblahblah" is much more interesting to me than anything "tech culture" ever will be.
incision 13y ago
>"Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe." I tried to start using Twitter that way maybe 5 years ago and found that there was just too much noise - jokes, tales of breakfast and banter that I just don't care to see. I actually feel like it's the right kind of model though. Aggregating content streams from people of similar interests. It's the filtering that's lacking for me. Every time I think about following someone on a social site I want for the ability to follow only a specific category of their content and possibly re-share it in the same focused fashion. G+, Flipboard and likely a host of others have done things toward this direction, but I have yet to see anything gel for me. Ideally, I see all of this categorization and recommendation happening automatically. If a service could recommend news or articles to me and categorize those I specify with the same accuracy I perceive from Netflix with movies, or even the new Gmail inbox I'd be pretty happy.
- mrweasel 13y ago
  I really don't see Twitter providing any value to my life. The structure and concept doesn't fit my way of discovering and consuming news at all. In my mind, Twitter is essentially useless. I don't care about people, I don't wish to be follow anyone, I care about single idea, news and insights. I would not like a filter in terms of what Google or Netflix imposes on me either. If I only got the news that some filter thought I would like I would miss out on ever discovering anything new. Filters only serves to keep you in your own little bubble, never letting anything controversial enter your life. I like Hacker News, Slashdot and to some extend Reddit. Most of the stuff on each site is of little interest, but now I know it exists. There's a bunch of stuff that I've been introduced to, which initially did't appeal to me, but later on proved useful. Filters and recommendation engines needs to die, they are harmful because they limit our exposure to new ideas. Twitter should go the same way, you follow the people you agree with or the people you want to hate, never the people who make you stop and rethink your own opinions.
  - incision 13y ago
    I think you've misconstrued my point as I'm generally in agreement with you.
david_shaw 13y ago
A lot of Malda's thesis seems subjective; a more interesting statement was just a brief mention at the top of the article: > Then, after taking a year off, [Malda] joined WaPo Labs, a technology incubator owned by the Washington Post Company, the parent company of the Washington Post. (WaPo Labs is not among the companies being purchased by Jeff Bezos.) I wonder why that is? I don't want to derail the discussion, but I had assumed (incorrectly) that Bezos was acquiring the full Washington Post collective. It strikes me as odd that he would neglect one of the elements that made WaPo, in my mind, somewhat unique. I'll try to stay away from speculation, but I can't help but wonder if some of Bezos's other labs might be integrated into WaPo's technology portfolio? Is that possible, when the purchase was unaffiliated with Amazon?
- _delirium 13y ago
  He didn't buy the actual company, only some of the newspapers: the Post itself, and a number of local papers. The Washington Post Co. itself will remain independent, but will have to change its name, and will retain Kaplan, WaPo Labs, Slate, about 10 local TV stations, SocialCode, and some other things.
  - cschmidt 13y ago
    As I understand things, Kaplan was the big money spinner that subsidized the newspapers. It is interesting they kept that part.
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    But what is the point of WaPo Labs without the WaPo? Are they going to rebrand to some sort of general-purpose tech startup or incubator? Or are they going to keep doing innovation for WaPo, only now on a contractual basis? (Creating recurring revenue for the public company.)
    - _delirium 13y ago
      I dug a bit and found that some kind of cross-licensing deal is included: WaPo Labs gets a 5-year content license, in return for 10% of any profits. However it sounds like they're planning to move towards doing more general tech-for-media stuff rather than WaPo-tied stuff. Source: 2nd-to-last question from http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-the-sale-of-the-washington-post-jeff-bezos-and-the-pace-of-newsroom-innovation/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-the-sale-of-t...
duaneb 13y ago
People want too much from this site: startup news, code, politics, self help, tech gossip. This was fine with fewer users because all this could coexist on the front page, but now a lot of quality content just flies under the radar in lieu of linkbait stories. Unfortunately this is the way the internet works.
phusion 13y ago
I talked to Rob at a LinuxWorld several years ago. I got there kind of late and he was answering questions to a medium sized group of socially awkward computer nerds. No one wanted to get on the mic and ask a question for a Slashdot T-Shirt, so, being the extrovert that I am, stepped up to the plate. I had recently read an interview with Rob online where someone asked him about Digg and Reddit and the popularity of user chosen content. His answers seemed like the question really got under his skin, so I figured I'd fuck with him in public. I got on the mic and asked him what he thought about the trend of user submitted content. He immediately snapped at me that someone had already asked a similar question and called me a noob. He rambled on about quality vs quantity and all that, my eyes glazed over and I waited to get my free T-Shirt. I still have it! That experience more or less cemented my opinion of 'ol Robbie. Just thought I'd mention this story..
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  See, but even in your own words, you seem like more of an ass than he does. You didn't even listen to his answer after he said someone else asked the same question. Hell, your entire goal was to just annoy him. I think he probably figured as much and decided he didn't want to play your game.
mikeurbanski 13y ago
There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator. I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating. Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum? When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets". Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else. There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.
- Helianthus 13y ago
  This place is an elitist microcosm of the networking hell that is silicon valley. I come here because I'm part of the tech world. It's just that the tech world is a corrupt, greedy place--Y Combinator included.
  - mikeurbanski 13y ago
    Well, how are you working to change that? We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched. We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.
    - Helianthus 13y ago
      I've never quite understood the impulse to ask that critics be free from blame, as if one must have a solution in order to recognize a problem. That said, I as a programmer do not work for a tech startup and have quit jobs I felt were complicit in greedy mania. Another way of looking at it--why is it my problem that the technology sector is dominated by greed?
dmunoz 13y ago
> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. There is hckrnews [0]. You can filter by top 10, top 20, top 50%, homepage and all. I usually start by going through the top 10 and progress outwards if I'm looking for additional posts. [0] http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/
- Flenser 13y ago
  Or there's https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 although it's a poor substitue for hckrnews it's better than the home page if you can't access hckrnews because "The category of Hacking has been blocked by your System Administrator".
  - Flenser 13y ago
    Why the downvotes? I didn't know about that url till someone else posted it.
arh68 13y ago
> The policy parts, I don’t feel like I have a say in that. I don’t have a voice there. I know what I want to see happen. But I don’t feel like I have a say or a voice so I choose to be interested in the technology and think about where that’s going to take us next. It just burns to hear Rob Malda say this. I wince at the thought. I've heard the words before, in the back of my head: solutionism, powerlessness, voter apathy. I have no good ideas to solve this or even reverse it: no way forward, no 'edge'. I'm starting to think these news sites live and die like phoenixes. Emotional baggage accumulates, pushing "issues" to the surface, clouding understanding. "Thought-provoking" is the kind of post I like to read, but only when it provokes curiosity, not frustration. I wonder what would happen to the HN userbase if the entire site goes dark for a whole month. I'd come back. I hope the "issues" disappear and we can all start conversing with clear minds once again.
pessimizer 13y ago
I find it interesting that the "tech-related topics" that Malda is "most obsessed with right now" are Bitcoin, Manning, and Snowden/NSA - the ones that the proclaimers of a decline of quality of HN complain about the most.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I think Malda is circling in the wrong waters. He's following and rubbing shoulders with the folks with money and influence, but the interesting stuff is all being done by a bunch of other people who are spending their time actually doing stuff. Frankly, I don't think Robert Scoble has even the slightest fragment of a fucking clue as to what the tech landscape is going to look like in 2023 or who is going to be a big part of it. Just because they have money, a legacy, and a reputation doesn't mean they are relevant. I think that might apply to Malda as well as anyone else.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Anyone who frequented slashdot can see this. What a preposterous idea that there won't be another Slashdot/digg/HN. Its like saying there won't be another printing press.
joshuak 13y ago
Personally I like the fact that HN has a lot of verity. I can read it like a newspaper just like I used to do with /. and get exposed to a lot of things I wouldn't know to look for. I can search if I want to focus on something specific. So I don't agree with the premise that there should be another HN. Two things that I hated about /. was the summery, which usually confusingly buried the link and was generally not helpful. And the fact that you can't vote and comment in the same article, which means that you trend away from having expert comments that are highly rated. If you are an expert you can write an informative comment, but then you can't help vote up other expert comments, if you only vote your expert opinion goes unheard. HN doesn't have this problem. I think the reason HN works is mostly simply the name, and not breaking it as above. It captures the idea of "Why" in the golden circle sense.[0] You could easily do this with news sites focused on other general (but engaging) categories, and I think that is already true, we are just more interested in the hacker type of news so may not notice. [0]: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...
jgon 13y ago
I enjoyed reading Cmdr Taco's thoughts on the future of "news" (interpret that broadly) and it made do some reflecting on what I think the future will be. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that signal vs. noise is the most important criteria for a service to be used, but what a lot of analyses miss is that you have to interpret something before you can decide if it is a signal or not, and that interpretation is by definition individual. I think this is what happens a lot of the time when people complain about a site becoming "too big", idealizing the past when the "riff-raff" hadn't gotten in. But I think this is mistaken for the same reason that generational rants about the fecklessness of the youth are mistaken, ie Occam's razor says that we are probably not all Nietzschean superman vs newcomer's being idiots, but instead we are probably more or less equal. What is happening instead is that as a larger group comes to a site, a larger number of interests and opinions come as well. And what I interpret as noise, what those people interpret as signal. By this I mean that if a large number of art enthusiasts joined HN and started posting a bunch of articles on art history, I would probably not be interested as my interests lie mostly in the tech arena. Let's further posit that these art enthusiasts are pretty competent in their field and so 90% of what they post is "worthwhile" in some vague broad sense. This influx might actually increase the overall signal to noise content on HN, while for me it would appear as though HN is getting swamped with crap. This is why people talk about trying to keep things exclusive or invite-only, we are trying to keep the broader perspectives involved aligned with our own, so as to not get swamped by noise from perspectives with no overlap to our own. And this I think is the root of a bunch of the complaints about politics being posted to HN. While I may shrug off art history posts, politics is another word for how we organize ourselves to live together and as such as is much more personal and much more important. And so people's personal reactions to politics they disagree with, and by extension political stories they disagree with, is much more aggressive. So even a small amount of political discourse that you disagree with can seem intolerable. So what is the solution? Well if I had that, I would be rich, but I do have a few ideas. The first is that reddit is trying to solve the signal interpretation issue with subreddits, wherein people can manually opt in to streams of article that they believe will be signals to them, while blocking out all streams that they will personally interpret as noise. But this still relies on manual intervention as well as discovery, along with user moderation to maintain the signal. And why do we still do things manually when we have computers!? :) So one area that I think is really overlooked is that right now every site interprets "down/up votes" and flagging as me speaking about what I think is useful for the community. But this is just my interpretation and so aren't I really expressing my own preferences here? Why aren't sites taking my history of voting/flagging and running some machine learning on the the contents of the stories associated with that history to try to tease out patterns in what I appear to approve and disapprove of? For myself personally I wouldn't care if I ever read another article on coffescript or libertarian politics. But if I downvote those things here on HN I am making a judgement on what I think is best for the rest of the community, and who am I to make that choice? Why can't the HN front-page see that I'm logged, look at my voting history, and just remove those stories from my view of the front page? Ta da, automatic subreddits. I think a lot of work could be done in interpreting my actions in voting/downvoting on a much more personal level, rather that looking at them in a democratic fashion. Of course, the big unanswered question with the above is how do we avoid the echo-chamber effect, and what about that rare story on coffeescript I might actually want to see? But for now, I think the above would be a good first step, with some sort of bail-out possible if I want to "broaden" my perspective. And anyway, aren't we all trying to create an echo-chamber anyway by coming to HN (aka hacker focused stories)? So what could it hurt to make things a bit more personalized for myself?
initself 13y ago
For me, the glory days of Slashdot were when I consumed the daily text based email digest.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
>If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Ahem: http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ Only problem is the lag in receiving it, if you care a great deal about participating in the comments.
MattRogish 13y ago
"If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot." I think the Launch Ticker is probably the closest thing to that. They cover much of the same ground as HN. Of course, you don't get the comments, but that could be a positive to some people. http://launch.co/ http://launch.co/
tareqak 13y ago
The TL;DR answer seems to be: because there isn't a good way to get the wisdom of the crowds without the crowds (yet).
duck 13y ago
If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Someone needs to tell Rob, I created a digest just over three years ago - http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com
yapsody 13y ago
Really great interview. Its good to know thoughts of Slashdot founder. I think hacker news is perfect the way it is.

332 points by Libertatea 13y ago

I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe. Odd argument, considering that the content on Hacker News is more about products than the people making the products. And I can say with confidence that I've never seen Scoble linked to anywhere on HN.

eterm 13y ago
It's not about linking to Scoble, it's about what Scoble links to on his twitter account. By following a few prolific and informed people on twitter you get a good sense of what's going on through what they're linking, that was the point being made.
Zimahl 13y ago
Agreed. HN is what it is, it's not an all-encompassing tech news aggregator like Slashdot was. HN is fairly focused with a few outside stories that creep in here and there. I know everyone likes to run the 'back in my day' line every now and then so I might as well. Slashdot is crap now. Back in my day things were fairly relevant and, while there was a slight lag, if the story was interesting it made it to Slashdot quickly. Now stories might not show up for not just hours, but days! By then it's been discussed elsewhere to death so you only read the Slashdot comments for snark and not insight. The technology section of Google News is better than Slashdot (sans comments). Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. They let the look and feel get too long in the tooth and people abandoned it for better sites.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  Slashdot died the day it got political and worse when such became entrenched. By political I mean election oriented material to the point that crossover polluted seemingly unrelated stories. Hence why during a discussion here about politics I stated I would prefer a "hide" flag next to the "flag" link that I could use to remove stories from my view under the notion that maybe someone wants to get into that stuff here.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Aren't there a few greasemon... aw hell, I'll just look it up for you. # Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories from HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1085721 also mentioned in the thread http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
  - prawn 13y ago
    I think what killed Slashdot was the devolution of commenting to karma-racing with predictable "funny" responses. So-called obligatory "That's no moon..." jokes and so on. The absence of that was certainly what I found so refreshing when I first discovered Hacker News.
- Gormo 13y ago
  > Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. This is a feature, not a bug. Web design trends have become awful over the past 3-5 years. HN is even better - simple and functional - and it wouldn't be out of place in 1999.
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    But HN isn't out of place in 2013 and Slashdot is. That's what matters. You can call it a feature all you want but if a new user goes to your site and dismisses it because of the look, you've done something wrong.
    - deleted 13y ago
hayksaakian 13y ago
Its the very definition of sticking your head in an echo chamber. I come here because I don't want Only 3 or 4 people's idea of what's important. That's the point of an aggregator / voting system, let me know what the masses deem important.

cperciva 13y ago

Funny that he says he wants a Hacker News digest with the top 10 stories each day... my Hacker News Daily is precisely that.

swanson 13y ago
Yeah, googling for "top 10 stories from hacker news" returns http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ as the first result. Maybe he will see this thread and sign up :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kylelibra 13y ago
  Is there some way to get this in a daily email?
  - gabemart 13y ago
    There's now a subscribe-by-email function: http://goo.gl/5xKj5g
  - gabemart 13y ago
    It would be trivial to set it up as an RSS-to-email campaign in Mailchimp, but I wouldn't want to without the permission of the site owner.
    - cperciva 13y ago
      Go for it. Let me know when it's set up and I'll add a link to the site.
  - GFischer 13y ago
    I'm subscribed to the Hacker Newsletter, but it´s weekly: http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com
  - 13y ago

jfb 13y ago

I wonder about the idea that Twitter will fill the role of something like Slashdot/HN/&c. At my Peak Twitter, I followed a couple hundred people, but the stream is so full of noise that the work of picking out the signal began to drown out any possible benefit. Retweets, for instance, I see as 99.99% noise. The ads are annoying, but ads are annoying everywhere.

cperciva 13y ago
I aggressively mark people as "do not show retweets from this person", and it makes a huge difference for cutting down on the noise.
msie 13y ago
If only Twitter weren't so restrictive with their API, there would probably be a solution for Twitter spam by now.
Thrymr 13y ago
In the article, Malda is not all that enthusiastic about Twitter being the heir to those sites: "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting... It’s different, chattier, I get more pictures of what people ate. It doesn’t necessarily bring people insight." But he does seem to believe that the future is something decentralized like Twitter (which is still run by a single company, however).
markkat 13y ago
http://hubski.com http://hubski.com is in many ways a mashup between HN and Twitter. I created it from the HN source code. Building feeds built from following people and tags keeps noise down. People are pretty careful about what they share (retweets). I know Rob has an inactive account, so he is vaguely aware of it. He agreed to let me bend his ear about it (I lived nearby him), but left for the WaPo almost immediately after.
- bluecalm 13y ago
  One thing about tags which I think is worth a try is to make them up/down-votable. It's one thing to say: "this is interesting" and it's another to say "this is on topic". Current sites based on tags doesn't allow for much user input in the latter area. I dream of a day when I can customize youtube to not display anything video game related (when searching for highlights from sport events and stuff). Everything tagged as "sport events" and in fact being video game footage would be downvoted to death and users posting this wrongly tagged stuff flagged as spammers so there would be incenvite for them to tag things properly.

D9u 13y ago

Any successor will, by necessity, be named something else, so... Yeah, I agree, there can never be another "Hacker News."

mgkimsal 13y ago

"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe." But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to 'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up with the latest hot people on twitter isn't too much work? Makes no sense. Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.

RockyMcNuts 13y ago
that seems like such a solvable problem, from a machine learning perspective. every time you read/engage with a tweet or HN post or other content, you are providing training data on what type of tweets/posts you want to read. now if only we had some benevolent central cloud provider that wanted to provide such a service and had a central repository of news and feeds. maybe Google could do something like that and call it 'Reader.'
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Why do you want to centralize it? Just pull the twitter feeds, and filter them localy.
  - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
    sure, you could do it locally. Google has a better data set because they know what you read in a lot of different apps and on a lot of different devices.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cholmon 13y ago
He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA... "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."

VLM 13y ago

In the same article he wonders how there can be eternal growth (the graph up and to the right quote) while limiting the discussion topics to a very small number, but doesn't see the inherent conflict in the demands. This is a failure to identify audience. A desire for identical "fundamentalist clones". Maybe you just don't get those in a tech audience. He made it very clear he's not interested in a coffeescript release. Obviously some subculture is... And thats not necessarily a problem.

binarybits 13y ago
This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.

iblaine 13y ago

He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft & SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it unfortunately didn't evolve. [edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even today it's hard/annoying to use.

rhizome 13y ago
Add the v2 (2006) redesign to the reasons people like me (uid ~100000) left. It simply became terrible to use, terrible to comment on ("slow down, cowboy!"), terrible to moderate. It is the "retailer with PDF-only catalog" of news sites.
roc 13y ago
I think you can generalize that to just one reason: the crowd became too large. It grew to the point that most articles were about things that any given reader wasn't deeply informed on. So the deep technical discussions produced far less chatter than the more general-interest/less-technical discussions and faded out of view. You also saw a bevy of those less-technical people offering their less-technical opinions on technical articles, whenever those things contained some keyword that registered. And, because there were so many more of them, this caused thread quality to suffer. So politics floated to the top, technical discussions became mired in less-technical opinion and technical folks left. Reddit isn't much different. It just attempts to duck the growth problem by enabling splintering into sub-reddits, which in turn splinter, on and on. And instead of "leaving reddit" the way people just stopped reading /., people just leave various sub-reddits. Which, as far as discussion goes, is effectively the same thing. The old forums becomes noisy, generalized, politicized and hollows out. People leave to find new ones. People may not be leaving the reddit platform but that's a distinction that really only matters to the people running reddit. (and maybe someone who's really attached to their profile/karma/whatever)
pohl 13y ago
He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. What makes you think so? Why would someone convinced of such things say the following: "Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now." -Rob Malda (Taken from TFA.)

diminoten 13y ago

Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless 'approved', or something similar? Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't "hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean. I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.

michaelbuckbee 13y ago
http://monocle.io/ http://monocle.io/ - expressly set out to be a HN with a different community vibe.
minimaxir 13y ago
It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things worse, since it leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is better.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Ah, yeah that's obviously a problem. Maybe some kind of "top 10" of HN as voted on by the "elite" - no extra, private comment area, no special form of communication, no nothing except the additional ability to contribute a vote towards a "top 10". I'm also not really even sure such a thing is necessary. I still love HN for it's content and conversations.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great, while it lasted. A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads. I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may conflict with closed societies like this. I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky. Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable information, not to mention some way of validating it.

sillysaurus 13y ago

One idea for jumpstarting a new HN-type site is to spider HNSearch, gathering the first 100,000 stories ever submitted to HN, along with comments. Then set up your site so that your frontpage is a doppelganger of HN's frontpage circa 2007. I.e. today your frontpage should look how the HN frontpage looked on August 7th, 2007. That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back, which they should because the frontpage is interesting. This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were a halfway implementation. Anyway. Just a fun idea. EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008: http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008-04-24.zip http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008... It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users. Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization or something. EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek. EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and 5.9 submissions per user.

minimaxir 13y ago
I'm not sure why you think there would be (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments on August 7th, 2007. Also, HNSearch's API won't allow you to gather that many stories.
dylangs1030 13y ago
1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it. Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users in their field but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue." EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is packaged with a full implementation of HN. 2. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot of content. 3. This is a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing. It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.

TheCraiggers 13y ago

It kinda sounds like he's suggesting a massive, public, social media platform where the 'good stuff' naturally bubbles up to the top. 'Good stuff', in this case, being what you're interested in and nothing else. And while that would indeed be awesome, it's also pretty obviously a pipe dream. Maybe some breakthrough with AI would help with that, but until then I don't think we have the technology to do that. So, for now humans are in control, and as we all know, the public is filled with marketers, trolls, and other forms of bagbiters that tend to ruin such things when they get big enough. Hakuna matata, I guess.

omarchowdhury 13y ago
You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.
- TheCraiggers 13y ago
  >You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion. I do not think that word means what you think it means. I'm not marketing anything because I'm not selling anything for money or goods.

Zimahl 13y ago

I think his logic toward Twitter is very flawed. Sure, you can get the bulk of your interesting news there from specific feeds, but where's the discussion? People use Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Fark, etc., because they could have conversations about each item. People want to discuss how a story makes them feel and how it affects them. People need access to random people, that's why this doesn't work as well on social sites like Facebook. Finally, it needs to be at least psuedo-anonymous so people can explore their thoughts without real-life repercussions.

justincormack 13y ago
There is discussion in twitter but not if you follow Scoble you need to follow people who interact and roughly follow and are followed by similar numbers of people. Its a very social medium if done right...
- Zimahl 13y ago
  Not to say Twitter isn't a fine medium but I personally don't think a real discussion can be had 140 characters at a time. It's a severe limit that just doesn't work (wrt discussions).

D9u 13y ago

One thing I learned is don’t spend your entire life playing predictive defense against attacks that will never happen. Real people are very clever. If they choose to attack you they’ll attack you in ways you can’t predict. I wish our government would heed this advice... I also liked how Rob said that his CMS was an evolved system and not designed. This has been my experience as well, because I can't think of everything and am better suited to incremental design.

dylangs1030 13y ago

Slightly misleading, only a paragraph or two were really about Hacker News in particular. More about why there won't be another "x", of which Hacker News is one iteration. I'm glad Malda spoke to the issue of volume. A lot of users on Hacker News (with varying levels of prominence, seniority and notability) have noted the issues arising with volume. The NSA scandal was the most recent example of this. Political discourse on Hacker News is almost cancerous it's so bad. there is widespread misinformation and a quick glance at the "New" page shows that the guidelines are frequently not even regarded for submissions. I think Malda is on point with his view of Hacker News being at critical mass right now.

muraiki 13y ago

I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about. However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate? When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem. That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!

jjindev 13y ago
As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm. The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest. Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?
eli 13y ago

fotbr 13y ago

Strangely enough, "new version of blahblahblah" is much more interesting to me than anything "tech culture" ever will be.

incision 13y ago

>"Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe." I tried to start using Twitter that way maybe 5 years ago and found that there was just too much noise - jokes, tales of breakfast and banter that I just don't care to see. I actually feel like it's the right kind of model though. Aggregating content streams from people of similar interests. It's the filtering that's lacking for me. Every time I think about following someone on a social site I want for the ability to follow only a specific category of their content and possibly re-share it in the same focused fashion. G+, Flipboard and likely a host of others have done things toward this direction, but I have yet to see anything gel for me. Ideally, I see all of this categorization and recommendation happening automatically. If a service could recommend news or articles to me and categorize those I specify with the same accuracy I perceive from Netflix with movies, or even the new Gmail inbox I'd be pretty happy.

mrweasel 13y ago
I really don't see Twitter providing any value to my life. The structure and concept doesn't fit my way of discovering and consuming news at all. In my mind, Twitter is essentially useless. I don't care about people, I don't wish to be follow anyone, I care about single idea, news and insights. I would not like a filter in terms of what Google or Netflix imposes on me either. If I only got the news that some filter thought I would like I would miss out on ever discovering anything new. Filters only serves to keep you in your own little bubble, never letting anything controversial enter your life. I like Hacker News, Slashdot and to some extend Reddit. Most of the stuff on each site is of little interest, but now I know it exists. There's a bunch of stuff that I've been introduced to, which initially did't appeal to me, but later on proved useful. Filters and recommendation engines needs to die, they are harmful because they limit our exposure to new ideas. Twitter should go the same way, you follow the people you agree with or the people you want to hate, never the people who make you stop and rethink your own opinions.
- incision 13y ago
  I think you've misconstrued my point as I'm generally in agreement with you.

david_shaw 13y ago

A lot of Malda's thesis seems subjective; a more interesting statement was just a brief mention at the top of the article: > Then, after taking a year off, [Malda] joined WaPo Labs, a technology incubator owned by the Washington Post Company, the parent company of the Washington Post. (WaPo Labs is not among the companies being purchased by Jeff Bezos.) I wonder why that is? I don't want to derail the discussion, but I had assumed (incorrectly) that Bezos was acquiring the full Washington Post collective. It strikes me as odd that he would neglect one of the elements that made WaPo, in my mind, somewhat unique. I'll try to stay away from speculation, but I can't help but wonder if some of Bezos's other labs might be integrated into WaPo's technology portfolio? Is that possible, when the purchase was unaffiliated with Amazon?

_delirium 13y ago
He didn't buy the actual company, only some of the newspapers: the Post itself, and a number of local papers. The Washington Post Co. itself will remain independent, but will have to change its name, and will retain Kaplan, WaPo Labs, Slate, about 10 local TV stations, SocialCode, and some other things.
- cschmidt 13y ago
  As I understand things, Kaplan was the big money spinner that subsidized the newspapers. It is interesting they kept that part.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  But what is the point of WaPo Labs without the WaPo? Are they going to rebrand to some sort of general-purpose tech startup or incubator? Or are they going to keep doing innovation for WaPo, only now on a contractual basis? (Creating recurring revenue for the public company.)
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I dug a bit and found that some kind of cross-licensing deal is included: WaPo Labs gets a 5-year content license, in return for 10% of any profits. However it sounds like they're planning to move towards doing more general tech-for-media stuff rather than WaPo-tied stuff. Source: 2nd-to-last question from http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-the-sale-of-the-washington-post-jeff-bezos-and-the-pace-of-newsroom-innovation/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-the-sale-of-t...

duaneb 13y ago

People want too much from this site: startup news, code, politics, self help, tech gossip. This was fine with fewer users because all this could coexist on the front page, but now a lot of quality content just flies under the radar in lieu of linkbait stories. Unfortunately this is the way the internet works.

phusion 13y ago

I talked to Rob at a LinuxWorld several years ago. I got there kind of late and he was answering questions to a medium sized group of socially awkward computer nerds. No one wanted to get on the mic and ask a question for a Slashdot T-Shirt, so, being the extrovert that I am, stepped up to the plate. I had recently read an interview with Rob online where someone asked him about Digg and Reddit and the popularity of user chosen content. His answers seemed like the question really got under his skin, so I figured I'd fuck with him in public. I got on the mic and asked him what he thought about the trend of user submitted content. He immediately snapped at me that someone had already asked a similar question and called me a noob. He rambled on about quality vs quantity and all that, my eyes glazed over and I waited to get my free T-Shirt. I still have it! That experience more or less cemented my opinion of 'ol Robbie. Just thought I'd mention this story..

dkuntz2 13y ago
See, but even in your own words, you seem like more of an ass than he does. You didn't even listen to his answer after he said someone else asked the same question. Hell, your entire goal was to just annoy him. I think he probably figured as much and decided he didn't want to play your game.

mikeurbanski 13y ago

There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator. I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating. Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum? When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets". Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else. There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

Helianthus 13y ago
This place is an elitist microcosm of the networking hell that is silicon valley. I come here because I'm part of the tech world. It's just that the tech world is a corrupt, greedy place--Y Combinator included.
- mikeurbanski 13y ago
  Well, how are you working to change that? We've made the decision to run our company like a free software project and have been actively ignoring buyout/funding offers since before we launched. We'll keep applying to YC, but, considering they didn't even read our last application, I'd say it's a fair bet that we'll get to keep running our company our way for the foreseeable future.
  - Helianthus 13y ago
    I've never quite understood the impulse to ask that critics be free from blame, as if one must have a solution in order to recognize a problem. That said, I as a programmer do not work for a tech startup and have quit jobs I felt were complicit in greedy mania. Another way of looking at it--why is it my problem that the technology sector is dominated by greed?

dmunoz 13y ago

> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. There is hckrnews [0]. You can filter by top 10, top 20, top 50%, homepage and all. I usually start by going through the top 10 and progress outwards if I'm looking for additional posts. [0] http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/

Flenser 13y ago
Or there's https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 although it's a poor substitue for hckrnews it's better than the home page if you can't access hckrnews because "The category of Hacking has been blocked by your System Administrator".
- Flenser 13y ago
  Why the downvotes? I didn't know about that url till someone else posted it.

arh68 13y ago

> The policy parts, I don’t feel like I have a say in that. I don’t have a voice there. I know what I want to see happen. But I don’t feel like I have a say or a voice so I choose to be interested in the technology and think about where that’s going to take us next. It just burns to hear Rob Malda say this. I wince at the thought. I've heard the words before, in the back of my head: solutionism, powerlessness, voter apathy. I have no good ideas to solve this or even reverse it: no way forward, no 'edge'. I'm starting to think these news sites live and die like phoenixes. Emotional baggage accumulates, pushing "issues" to the surface, clouding understanding. "Thought-provoking" is the kind of post I like to read, but only when it provokes curiosity, not frustration. I wonder what would happen to the HN userbase if the entire site goes dark for a whole month. I'd come back. I hope the "issues" disappear and we can all start conversing with clear minds once again.

pessimizer 13y ago

I find it interesting that the "tech-related topics" that Malda is "most obsessed with right now" are Bitcoin, Manning, and Snowden/NSA - the ones that the proclaimers of a decline of quality of HN complain about the most.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I think Malda is circling in the wrong waters. He's following and rubbing shoulders with the folks with money and influence, but the interesting stuff is all being done by a bunch of other people who are spending their time actually doing stuff. Frankly, I don't think Robert Scoble has even the slightest fragment of a fucking clue as to what the tech landscape is going to look like in 2023 or who is going to be a big part of it. Just because they have money, a legacy, and a reputation doesn't mean they are relevant. I think that might apply to Malda as well as anyone else.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
Anyone who frequented slashdot can see this. What a preposterous idea that there won't be another Slashdot/digg/HN. Its like saying there won't be another printing press.

joshuak 13y ago

Personally I like the fact that HN has a lot of verity. I can read it like a newspaper just like I used to do with /. and get exposed to a lot of things I wouldn't know to look for. I can search if I want to focus on something specific. So I don't agree with the premise that there should be another HN. Two things that I hated about /. was the summery, which usually confusingly buried the link and was generally not helpful. And the fact that you can't vote and comment in the same article, which means that you trend away from having expert comments that are highly rated. If you are an expert you can write an informative comment, but then you can't help vote up other expert comments, if you only vote your expert opinion goes unheard. HN doesn't have this problem. I think the reason HN works is mostly simply the name, and not breaking it as above. It captures the idea of "Why" in the golden circle sense.[0] You could easily do this with news sites focused on other general (but engaging) categories, and I think that is already true, we are just more interested in the hacker type of news so may not notice. [0]: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...

jgon 13y ago

I enjoyed reading Cmdr Taco's thoughts on the future of "news" (interpret that broadly) and it made do some reflecting on what I think the future will be. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that signal vs. noise is the most important criteria for a service to be used, but what a lot of analyses miss is that you have to interpret something before you can decide if it is a signal or not, and that interpretation is by definition individual. I think this is what happens a lot of the time when people complain about a site becoming "too big", idealizing the past when the "riff-raff" hadn't gotten in. But I think this is mistaken for the same reason that generational rants about the fecklessness of the youth are mistaken, ie Occam's razor says that we are probably not all Nietzschean superman vs newcomer's being idiots, but instead we are probably more or less equal. What is happening instead is that as a larger group comes to a site, a larger number of interests and opinions come as well. And what I interpret as noise, what those people interpret as signal. By this I mean that if a large number of art enthusiasts joined HN and started posting a bunch of articles on art history, I would probably not be interested as my interests lie mostly in the tech arena. Let's further posit that these art enthusiasts are pretty competent in their field and so 90% of what they post is "worthwhile" in some vague broad sense. This influx might actually increase the overall signal to noise content on HN, while for me it would appear as though HN is getting swamped with crap. This is why people talk about trying to keep things exclusive or invite-only, we are trying to keep the broader perspectives involved aligned with our own, so as to not get swamped by noise from perspectives with no overlap to our own. And this I think is the root of a bunch of the complaints about politics being posted to HN. While I may shrug off art history posts, politics is another word for how we organize ourselves to live together and as such as is much more personal and much more important. And so people's personal reactions to politics they disagree with, and by extension political stories they disagree with, is much more aggressive. So even a small amount of political discourse that you disagree with can seem intolerable. So what is the solution? Well if I had that, I would be rich, but I do have a few ideas. The first is that reddit is trying to solve the signal interpretation issue with subreddits, wherein people can manually opt in to streams of article that they believe will be signals to them, while blocking out all streams that they will personally interpret as noise. But this still relies on manual intervention as well as discovery, along with user moderation to maintain the signal. And why do we still do things manually when we have computers!? :) So one area that I think is really overlooked is that right now every site interprets "down/up votes" and flagging as me speaking about what I think is useful for the community. But this is just my interpretation and so aren't I really expressing my own preferences here? Why aren't sites taking my history of voting/flagging and running some machine learning on the the contents of the stories associated with that history to try to tease out patterns in what I appear to approve and disapprove of? For myself personally I wouldn't care if I ever read another article on coffescript or libertarian politics. But if I downvote those things here on HN I am making a judgement on what I think is best for the rest of the community, and who am I to make that choice? Why can't the HN front-page see that I'm logged, look at my voting history, and just remove those stories from my view of the front page? Ta da, automatic subreddits. I think a lot of work could be done in interpreting my actions in voting/downvoting on a much more personal level, rather that looking at them in a democratic fashion. Of course, the big unanswered question with the above is how do we avoid the echo-chamber effect, and what about that rare story on coffeescript I might actually want to see? But for now, I think the above would be a good first step, with some sort of bail-out possible if I want to "broaden" my perspective. And anyway, aren't we all trying to create an echo-chamber anyway by coming to HN (aka hacker focused stories)? So what could it hurt to make things a bit more personalized for myself?

initself 13y ago

For me, the glory days of Slashdot were when I consumed the daily text based email digest.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

>If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Ahem: http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ Only problem is the lag in receiving it, if you care a great deal about participating in the comments.

MattRogish 13y ago

"If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot." I think the Launch Ticker is probably the closest thing to that. They cover much of the same ground as HN. Of course, you don't get the comments, but that could be a positive to some people. http://launch.co/ http://launch.co/

tareqak 13y ago

The TL;DR answer seems to be: because there isn't a good way to get the wisdom of the crowds without the crowds (yet).

duck 13y ago

If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot. Someone needs to tell Rob, I created a digest just over three years ago - http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com

yapsody 13y ago

Really great interview. Its good to know thoughts of Slashdot founder. I think hacker news is perfect the way it is.