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HN very much has a hive mind. HN used to have great articles all the time. Now it feels like reddit. Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity while

by jwegan 13y ago

HN very much has a hive mind. HN used to have great articles all the time. Now it feels like reddit. Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity while HN upvotes the meme of the day (Snowden, NSA, 2048, etc).

dragonwriter 13y ago
Seems to me that's not evidence for or against a hive mind, its evidence that, whether or not it has a hive mind at all, the aggregated preferences of the current HN user base don't align as well with your preferences as those of the user base did at one time in the past. But having a user base whose aggregated preferences disagree with yours more often than they used to is no more evidence of a hive mind than having what you perceive to be "great articles all the time" is.
- davemel37 13y ago
  There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? Maybe HN should take articles that get more than one up vote but die down to resurface in new several times to see if it slipped though the cracks or if it really has no value to the community.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? There's probably pretty big effects from time of day and other things on whether or not things get upvotes. That's not a "hive mind", that's just the fact that upvotes come from people coming here as they feel like doing so, not from a bunch of 24/7 staff that are paid to apply objective, consistent criteria (which would be a kind of hive mind.)
dang 13y ago
Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity Can you provide examples? This is the problem we're going to work on next, after we've made some progress on comment incivility. (I'm going to demote this subthread as off-topic so it doesn't interfere with the real discussion.)

by jwegan 13y ago

dragonwriter 13y ago

Seems to me that's not evidence for or against a hive mind, its evidence that, whether or not it has a hive mind at all, the aggregated preferences of the current HN user base don't align as well with your preferences as those of the user base did at one time in the past. But having a user base whose aggregated preferences disagree with yours more often than they used to is no more evidence of a hive mind than having what you perceive to be "great articles all the time" is.

davemel37 13y ago
There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? Maybe HN should take articles that get more than one up vote but die down to resurface in new several times to see if it slipped though the cracks or if it really has no value to the community.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? There's probably pretty big effects from time of day and other things on whether or not things get upvotes. That's not a "hive mind", that's just the fact that upvotes come from people coming here as they feel like doing so, not from a bunch of 24/7 staff that are paid to apply objective, consistent criteria (which would be a kind of hive mind.)

dang 13y ago

Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity Can you provide examples? This is the problem we're going to work on next, after we've made some progress on comment incivility. (I'm going to demote this subthread as off-topic so it doesn't interfere with the real discussion.)