6 ms·

Slightly offtopic but related: can someone explain the difference between HN and Slashdot like I'm five?

by kudu 13y ago

fleitz 13y ago
HN is the new cool piece of playground equipment, the old cool piece of playground equipment has been overrun by losers and is now lame. Eventually HN will become /. or reddit and we'll move on. It's essentially nerd fashion.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  This comment made my day. It is all about your community and once it becomes too biased one way or the other, everyone else moves on.
  - pmh 13y ago
    FWIW, I think it's less about bias (as a sort of measure of noise) and more about the general quality of conversation. Even if all of the biased camps balanced each other out, the noise just becomes too much and people start looking for another forum. Or perhaps I'm just projecting my own experiences with /., digg, reddit, et al.
- randomhunt 13y ago
  Many years ago towards the beginning of my career proper in technology I first came across the phrase "the September that never ended." Asking a close grey beard he chuckled, explained poetically about newsgroups and finished with the anecdote that when he first started his career he had come across a similar phrase, asked a similar question and thus the cycle was complete.
  - fleitz 13y ago
    That's funny, I was going to make the post about eternal september, and compare HN to /. and /. to USENET.
drblast 13y ago
HN and Slashdot are the exact same site at different stages of life. They begin as the news site with articles that only about 1000 people care about. So you'll go there because reading every single post on Lambda the Ultimate takes too long and you want a community that does the hard work for you of picking out the wheat from the chaff. Then, after about three years, articles that compare the performance of subroutine threading vs. switch statements in interpreters slowly disappear and are replaced by articles about how the new Apple product is ingenious because it's the size of most people's thumb. Then comments become shorter, and you realize you no longer read the comments to gain a depth of knowledge. Where before you were continually amazed at some people's insight, now when you ask an honest question you are more likely to be flamed by a nerd with a chip on his shoulder that's desperate to start and win an argument. For another year or two occasional glimpses of the better articles and comments keep you coming back, but after a while you start to go looking for the next site that's long on interesting and short on raging arrogance. Then, five years after that, you might go back to the old site to see if it ever changed, and instead marvel at the cesspool it's become. As a techie, you will have this experience once or twice a decade. Slashdot in its heyday (1997-98) was the HN of its time.

Slightly offtopic but related: can someone explain the difference between HN and Slashdot like I'm five?

by kudu 13y ago

Slightly offtopic but related: can someone explain the difference between HN and Slashdot like I'm five?

HN is the new cool piece of playground equipment, the old cool piece of playground equipment has been overrun by losers and is now lame. Eventually HN will become /. or reddit and we'll move on. It's essentially nerd fashion.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
This comment made my day. It is all about your community and once it becomes too biased one way or the other, everyone else moves on.
- pmh 13y ago
  FWIW, I think it's less about bias (as a sort of measure of noise) and more about the general quality of conversation. Even if all of the biased camps balanced each other out, the noise just becomes too much and people start looking for another forum. Or perhaps I'm just projecting my own experiences with /., digg, reddit, et al.
randomhunt 13y ago
Many years ago towards the beginning of my career proper in technology I first came across the phrase "the September that never ended." Asking a close grey beard he chuckled, explained poetically about newsgroups and finished with the anecdote that when he first started his career he had come across a similar phrase, asked a similar question and thus the cycle was complete.
- fleitz 13y ago
  That's funny, I was going to make the post about eternal september, and compare HN to /. and /. to USENET.

drblast 13y ago

HN and Slashdot are the exact same site at different stages of life. They begin as the news site with articles that only about 1000 people care about. So you'll go there because reading every single post on Lambda the Ultimate takes too long and you want a community that does the hard work for you of picking out the wheat from the chaff. Then, after about three years, articles that compare the performance of subroutine threading vs. switch statements in interpreters slowly disappear and are replaced by articles about how the new Apple product is ingenious because it's the size of most people's thumb. Then comments become shorter, and you realize you no longer read the comments to gain a depth of knowledge. Where before you were continually amazed at some people's insight, now when you ask an honest question you are more likely to be flamed by a nerd with a chip on his shoulder that's desperate to start and win an argument. For another year or two occasional glimpses of the better articles and comments keep you coming back, but after a while you start to go looking for the next site that's long on interesting and short on raging arrogance. Then, five years after that, you might go back to the old site to see if it ever changed, and instead marvel at the cesspool it's become. As a techie, you will have this experience once or twice a decade. Slashdot in its heyday (1997-98) was the HN of its time.