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(Why) I quit Hacker News (2010)

92 points by rawland 12y ago

yiedyie 12y ago
I recently sent them an email about a thing I really find frustrating at HN: Hi all, I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error: You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link, wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my account status is available for submitting. This way I will not submit stories in vain Thanks, Ed and got no answer.
- dfc 12y ago
  It looks like you submit a lot of stories, 545 submissions in 320 days and six submissions in the last 24 hours. You submitted the same askubuntu link twice today. Maybe you should try to only submit one thing a day?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. is the answer. That message appears when you're hogging the new page with your submissions, which means you're pushing other submissions out.
mp4box 12y ago
should add 2010 to the title.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- thesz 12y ago
  Have anything changed since then?
  - baldfat 12y ago
    I still get mad about this: 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      We all have good days and bad days. On some days I write stuff that is marginal, on others downright nonsense. HN is an excellent critic and I take my lumps. It upset me in the beginning but over time I've come to appreciate the downvotes. On subjects where your view goes against the majority / accepted dogma be prepared to get yourself voted straight into the ground just because the supporters of the dogma outnumber those that are critical of it in some way. Remember HN is young, US centric and rich. If you take a position that is likely to offend young, wealthy Americans then you're likely going to find yourself in negative vote territory. Don't let that stop you from speaking your mind, don't attach too much value to the points. I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
    - Vik1ng 12y ago
      I think the only way to discourage people from doing that is adding something like +/- in addition. Won't prevent it, but might improve the situation.
    - digitalcreate 12y ago
      I've had the same experience where I've been downvoted because my comment goes against the prevailing group-think of the site. This has a chilling effect on contribution of new ideas to comments, which thereby reinforces the group-think. It's a vicious cycle. I'm very hesitant to post comments now for fear that they will be downvoted for no good reason.
- rawland 12y ago
  Done. Thanks.
JacobAldridge 12y ago
I'd be interested in the update - "Why I came back to Hacker News" (given in the 4 years since writing this, Matt has returned, though not as active as I remember). https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon [EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me, for us. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 [2] First comment back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635
jacquesm 12y ago
Only he's back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.
- JacobAldridge 12y ago
  Ah, Jacques - the greatest of the farewells, and the one I'm most glad returned.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    That left me reasonably speechless. Thanks Jacob!
- oskarth 12y ago
  The people who quit for real usually don't start with a statement. I think making a big deal out of it is a way of telling oneself why one should quit. Contrast this with someone asking the question "Why did you quit?"and replying with why one did quit.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Considering that I quit for almost a year in much the same way I disagree. The best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I never learned anything as an entrepreneur from the people that just left. But I listened very well to those that left and told me why. Of course HN has no direct commercial incentive to retain Matt or me or anybody else, as long as we're contributing it's fine and when we're not there are 100's like us to take our place. So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less. And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).
    - 12y ago
ionwake 12y ago
This seems like a relevant venue to mention my startup http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info which dampens HN flagging, re-ranks and merges the top submissions along with those from other tech sites. Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN
- fuj 12y ago
  Wow... everything is a startup nowadays
  - ionwake 12y ago
    Sure seems that way
- ColinWright 12y ago
  Visited to check it out - can't get rid of the bloody great slab that overlays the actual content, clicked in lots of places, closed.
  - ionwake 12y ago
    Thanks for checking it out - what browser were you using?
    - ColinWright 12y ago
      Firefox 11.0 on Ubuntu 12. I finally found that by maneouvering carefully I could find somewhere outside the huge slab and click there. Not easy on my setup. And did I mention that it was annoying? Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about. </braindump >
rawland 12y ago
Matt's reasons: 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. 3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. 4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. 5. It's a time suck. 6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. 7. It reduces blogging time. Food for thought... How can we improve? Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
- diminish 12y ago
  > Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two Does that mean that we better down-vote whenever we see a comment does not add value to the topic?
  - RivieraKid 12y ago
    No, only comments with a sufficiently negative value should be downvoted.
- davidw 12y ago
  This tweet really expresses one fundamental problem of sites like this: https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521 https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521 "The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
  - dasil003 12y ago
    There should be a corollary about Internet trolling, and why analog trolling never really scaled in the same way.
- 12y ago
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
I found a sentence in his follow up post that pretty much sums up this very common "I quit" rant: "Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic." Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract intellectuals. Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called "intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a lively 24/7 community. The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side, with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works that way, with it's subreddits. Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which integrate seamlessly with the core platform.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jbeja 12y ago
The reason I sometimes wish to quit HN: There are just to many Apple fanboys, and cliche opinions driven by insane fanboyism that just make me cringe sometimes.
- SeanDav 12y ago
  There are Apple fanboys, there are Google fanboys, there are Microsoft fanboys, there are Linux fanboys, there are Haskell fanboys...etc etc. Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them than without them.
  - clarry 12y ago
    What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-frontpageful of uninteresting articles about (Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was really quite different back when I first got interested in it.
jebus989 12y ago
Always relevant in these discussions: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.
etfb 12y ago
I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit. What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
- carrotleads 12y ago
  well the OP mentioned changing the password to long unrecoverable string. How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at YC?? How?
  - etfb 12y ago
    Made a new account? I don't know. It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
  - mhartl 12y ago
    I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so it's possible he talked to PG directly.
    - mattmaroon 12y ago
      There is a password reset feature. It works via typing in the wrong password. Go to the login page, type in a wrong pwd, and it magically appears. If I recall correctly PG told me that at a YC event. Damn you PG! :)
RivieraKid 12y ago
I agree with the "lack of downvotes" and "disagree downvotes" and am neutral or disagree with the rest. This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN: 1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here. 2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.
- dfc 12y ago
  I thought I would take a clue from the submission and provide a response to people who have been silently downvoted. 1. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around for any period. 2. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page. Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.
GrinningFool 12y ago
In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned and well-stated that I disagree with than just another guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably just about any site with voting. Yet it seems that stating that you wish people would vote on merit puts you in the majority of people who comment on voting systems. If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.
- davidcbc 12y ago
  The majority of the people who comment on voting systems is a much smaller number than the majority of people who use a voting system.
- danielweber 12y ago
  There's always the fear of unilaterally disarming: "I am going to vote based on skill, not based on Which Side the person is on. . . . Oh, but everyone else is voting based on Which Side! Now I have to help My Side!" It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed. I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.
iopq 12y ago
I still can't downvote after more than a year of commenting. I guess not enough people agreed with my comments so I don't have this power.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  How many 'points' you have is mostly a function of how much time you spent here. If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!
  - RankingMember 12y ago
    He who controls the spice... It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I've yet to quit or come back. I find it's much more relaxing just to hang out and bitch about things. HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here. Did I mention I like complaining?
hellbreakslose 12y ago
Well tbh he has a fair point, and I tend to be true on what I write. I get a lot of down-votes cause I guess I am speaking my mind and I ain't try to write some scientific report for someone to read... In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see. I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.
a3voices 12y ago
If you quit Hacker News, where do you go instead? Is there some magical fairyland place on the Internet better than here for discussion?
mayeesha 12y ago
I think the points he made is really valid for any kind of forum type thing, and he should be using Quora to get the experience he wants. They have the downvoting abilities and blogging features, and he can definitely gain more distribution there. Whether he is back or not is never the point, the problems he said seems to be fairly good.
fantomass 12y ago
Everything is relative ... Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much improved over the time, in my opinion at least. But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion straight from youtube. HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture, particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.
threepipeproblm 12y ago
TSA agents aren't bad, they're "just following orders." Okay not a quote from the article, but it seems to be his attitude. Actually his attitude is worse, that they are somehow the victims. But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent memory, I like people who are willing to blame the people responsible for doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.
sphildreth 12y ago
I wish I knew how to quit you...
- kh_hk 12y ago
  echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts
crusso 12y ago
The news consolidation on HN is great, for the most part. Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in software, or visiting with loved ones.
davidcbc 12y ago
Adding a downvote seems potentially dangerous to me. Sure a lot of "groupthink" articles rise to the top now, but a downvote means that the same vocal minority could suppress stories that don't fit into their ideology. Definitely a double edged sword
- carrotleads 12y ago
  IMO downvotes needs to take effect only after a set number. Say 3 or 5 downvotes or so. at 3 or 5 downvotes, there is a signal the comment is low value.
debacle 12y ago
Hacker News used to be brimming with content. I would regularly read 50-60% of the articles. Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff, lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.
- RankingMember 12y ago
  I thought so too, but I think it's just that the "newness" wears off and we start to realize that what we once thought was novel and interesting is seen as less so when the theme stays the same week after week. That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?
websitescenes 12y ago
Time to find a rock to hide under because these are not just problems with Hacker news but also life.
brudgers 12y ago
In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article relative to the HN 2010. 1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU upgrade. 2. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise. A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted, then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control. 3. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is organic rather than the effect of a social media team. In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers. 4. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true. 5. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't changed. 6. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck. A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator. The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high quality comments. 7. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing essays though. That's really what good blog posts are. HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.
vfxGer 12y ago
My main issue with Hacker News at the moment is that it is NOT NEWS! An article from 2010 about quitting hn is not news. I used to kid myself that I go here "to keep up-to-date" or find out what is happening. I used to think this was a valid news source but it is not. It's got some interesting articles that suck up my time but I've stopped kidding myself that it is news.
thathonkey 12y ago
I HAVE to take a break from Hacker News whenever some hot button story like Ed Snowden or Heartbleed is dominating the entire front page. I don't need to see a dozen blogger's opinions on simple news items like that. If I want thorough analysis of those types of important issues, I'm definitely not looking to the Hacker News crowd to source them. Prog blogs are awful. And so is some amateur libertarian paranoid's half-baked, uninformed opinion on complicated issues like NSA surveillance programs.
patsplat 12y ago
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html
ryanspahn 12y ago
HA this guy. For years he went on and on and on about my first start-up idea and not in a positive way. In 2007 I created The Social Alarm Clock (was my 1st idea on the web) and asked for feedback here. This Matt guy, hated the concept and said so in my Ask HN posted in 2007. Yet it didnt end there, he continued his hate for it in many HN posts throughout the years and even blogged about in 2011 or 2012. HA, it had an impact on him. Well, we have moved onto to our second idea and unfortunately I don't think http://SpeakerBlast.com http://SpeakerBlast.com (Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo) is going to have the same effect on Matt. Though maybe... Cheers, Matt, Cheers!
bane 12y ago
HN has its problems for sure, but I think it's currently the best general tech/interest site on the Internet at the moment. If I find I'm getting jaded with the mindless groupthink here, I just usually take a couple weeks off. Usually by then, whatever hot topic that was irritating me is out of the news cycle and the hive mind has moved on. At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique, intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything. But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated) debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments here. I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore (filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here. Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-killed. One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened, but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they happened. I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at different ages and in different circumstances. I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community. However, I do find the international discussions here particularly enlightening. One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the *HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy). If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be informative in some way.
normloman 12y ago
The author points out that users upvote a comment based on whether they agree with it or not, and not based on how useful it is to the discussion. Did you really expect it to work any other way? You're expecting internet commentators to be impartial? Even supreme court judges have a hard time remaining impartial. Why do you think someone who spends 15 minutes a day reading articles about technology here would give a shit? Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they realistically reflect?
- _mulder_ 12y ago
  The problem with linking karma to up/down votes is that it prevents people from posting anything that is contrary to popular opinion and therefore downvoted, even if it may be well thought out or, shock horror, factually accurate too!! The end result is an ever increasing alignment of 'group-think' where popular opinions are boosted and differing opinions are hidden. Up/down voters just need to take a second and consider what they're voting for. If it's just because they agree, then don't. If they agree and they've learned something new, then do. If they disagree and but they think the arguments are well presented or they've learned something new, upvote. Down voting should be reserved only for inappropriate comments, not disagreement.
  - normloman 12y ago
    I don't even see the point of karma. It's like fake internet points that mean noting. I have a karma of 583 on HN. What does that mean exactly? What can I do with 583 that I couldn't do before? To me, it's just a pointless scoreboard for how popular my opinions are. It gives me incentive to post a karma-baiting comment once in a while, so I get a burst of dopamine whenever the number jumps by 10 or more. But back to my main point: When everything is majority rules, with no checks and balances, society collapses into mob rule. Why would it be any different with upvote/downvote? We're not going to solve this by asking users to think before they click downvote. We should consider removing the upvote/downvote altogether.
ausjke 12y ago
Can't agree more, in fact I'm searching right now on how to close my account here at HN, I mean, totally erasing it, not just changing to a soon-to-be-forgotten password. I will still occasionally read this site, but will never comment and do anything about it. The silent-downvote is not friendly at all, especially to who that does not know the "rules" well. how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it. Just give me a way to cleanly close my account.
ausjke 12y ago
suddenly this post disappeared from HN first few pages?
- ausjke 12y ago
  why down-vote me? I have a legitimate reason to ask this question, no? HN better show whoever just down-voted, hate lurking jerks.
j2kun 12y ago
Interestingly enough, his comments are closed, so I'll have to post my thoughts here :) I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer. That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about HN before my blog ended up on the front page).
JimmaDaRustla 12y ago
Things haven't changed I see.
mindcrime 12y ago
The main reasons I sometimes consider quitting are: 1. Too much fiddling with things by the mods (eg, changing post titles and the like). I find this to be more harmful than helpful, and I think we'd be better served with a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach. 2. The overall tone of the site has drifted towards a more collectivist / socialist / left'ish-wing worldview... to much anti-business, anti-capitalist sentiment which I don't enjoy. 3. Too much general news that you could get at cnn.com or msnbc.com or whatever. I liked the site better when there was more of a focus on startups, entrepreneurship, and deep technical topics. Of course, that's not to say that we don't still get some of that stuff, but the weighting towards those topics seems to have lessened, and I - for one - don't consider that a Good Thing. OTOH, HN is still (mostly) better than Slashdot, and the comments here are mostly of a higher quality than most other "news aggregator" type sites. Just not as much better as they used to be, IMO.
MatthiasP 12y ago
I miss Paul Graham's influence on HN. My impression is that since he "retired", the topics now are more uniformly focused on core hacking/startup stuff and HN lost its "good hackers are interested in anything" approach that I so fell in love with when I first discovered the site. So I thought about quitting too, but there are still enough gems hidden beneath the avalanche of Haskell vs Lisp vs Erlang threads that keep me wanting to come back.

92 points by rawland 12y ago

I recently sent them an email about a thing I really find frustrating at HN: Hi all, I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error: You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link, wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my account status is available for submitting. This way I will not submit stories in vain Thanks, Ed and got no answer.

dfc 12y ago
It looks like you submit a lot of stories, 545 submissions in 320 days and six submissions in the last 24 hours. You submitted the same askubuntu link twice today. Maybe you should try to only submit one thing a day?
jacquesm 12y ago
> You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. is the answer. That message appears when you're hogging the new page with your submissions, which means you're pushing other submissions out.

mp4box 12y ago

should add 2010 to the title.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
thesz 12y ago
Have anything changed since then?
- baldfat 12y ago
  I still get mad about this: 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    We all have good days and bad days. On some days I write stuff that is marginal, on others downright nonsense. HN is an excellent critic and I take my lumps. It upset me in the beginning but over time I've come to appreciate the downvotes. On subjects where your view goes against the majority / accepted dogma be prepared to get yourself voted straight into the ground just because the supporters of the dogma outnumber those that are critical of it in some way. Remember HN is young, US centric and rich. If you take a position that is likely to offend young, wealthy Americans then you're likely going to find yourself in negative vote territory. Don't let that stop you from speaking your mind, don't attach too much value to the points. I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
  - Vik1ng 12y ago
    I think the only way to discourage people from doing that is adding something like +/- in addition. Won't prevent it, but might improve the situation.
  - digitalcreate 12y ago
    I've had the same experience where I've been downvoted because my comment goes against the prevailing group-think of the site. This has a chilling effect on contribution of new ideas to comments, which thereby reinforces the group-think. It's a vicious cycle. I'm very hesitant to post comments now for fear that they will be downvoted for no good reason.
rawland 12y ago
Done. Thanks.

JacobAldridge 12y ago

I'd be interested in the update - "Why I came back to Hacker News" (given in the 4 years since writing this, Matt has returned, though not as active as I remember). https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon [EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me, for us. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 [2] First comment back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635

jacquesm 12y ago

Only he's back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690 We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.

JacobAldridge 12y ago
Ah, Jacques - the greatest of the farewells, and the one I'm most glad returned.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That left me reasonably speechless. Thanks Jacob!
oskarth 12y ago
The people who quit for real usually don't start with a statement. I think making a big deal out of it is a way of telling oneself why one should quit. Contrast this with someone asking the question "Why did you quit?"and replying with why one did quit.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Considering that I quit for almost a year in much the same way I disagree. The best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I never learned anything as an entrepreneur from the people that just left. But I listened very well to those that left and told me why. Of course HN has no direct commercial incentive to retain Matt or me or anybody else, as long as we're contributing it's fine and when we're not there are 100's like us to take our place. So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less. And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).
  - 12y ago

ionwake 12y ago

This seems like a relevant venue to mention my startup http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info which dampens HN flagging, re-ranks and merges the top submissions along with those from other tech sites. Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN

fuj 12y ago
Wow... everything is a startup nowadays
- ionwake 12y ago
  Sure seems that way
ColinWright 12y ago
Visited to check it out - can't get rid of the bloody great slab that overlays the actual content, clicked in lots of places, closed.
- ionwake 12y ago
  Thanks for checking it out - what browser were you using?
  - ColinWright 12y ago
    Firefox 11.0 on Ubuntu 12. I finally found that by maneouvering carefully I could find somewhere outside the huge slab and click there. Not easy on my setup. And did I mention that it was annoying? Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about. </braindump >

rawland 12y ago

Matt's reasons: 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. 3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. 4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. 5. It's a time suck. 6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. 7. It reduces blogging time. Food for thought... How can we improve? Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.

diminish 12y ago
> Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two Does that mean that we better down-vote whenever we see a comment does not add value to the topic?
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  No, only comments with a sufficiently negative value should be downvoted.
davidw 12y ago
This tweet really expresses one fundamental problem of sites like this: https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521 https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521 "The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
- dasil003 12y ago
  There should be a corollary about Internet trolling, and why analog trolling never really scaled in the same way.
12y ago

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

I found a sentence in his follow up post that pretty much sums up this very common "I quit" rant: "Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic." Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract intellectuals. Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called "intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a lively 24/7 community. The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side, with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works that way, with it's subreddits. Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which integrate seamlessly with the core platform.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jbeja 12y ago

The reason I sometimes wish to quit HN: There are just to many Apple fanboys, and cliche opinions driven by insane fanboyism that just make me cringe sometimes.

SeanDav 12y ago
There are Apple fanboys, there are Google fanboys, there are Microsoft fanboys, there are Linux fanboys, there are Haskell fanboys...etc etc. Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them than without them.
- clarry 12y ago
  What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-frontpageful of uninteresting articles about (Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was really quite different back when I first got interested in it.

jebus989 12y ago

Always relevant in these discussions: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.

etfb 12y ago

I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit. What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.

carrotleads 12y ago
well the OP mentioned changing the password to long unrecoverable string. How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at YC?? How?
- etfb 12y ago
  Made a new account? I don't know. It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
- mhartl 12y ago
  I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so it's possible he talked to PG directly.
  - mattmaroon 12y ago
    There is a password reset feature. It works via typing in the wrong password. Go to the login page, type in a wrong pwd, and it magically appears. If I recall correctly PG told me that at a YC event. Damn you PG! :)

RivieraKid 12y ago

I agree with the "lack of downvotes" and "disagree downvotes" and am neutral or disagree with the rest. This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN: 1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here. 2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.

dfc 12y ago
I thought I would take a clue from the submission and provide a response to people who have been silently downvoted. 1. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around for any period. 2. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page. Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.

GrinningFool 12y ago

In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned and well-stated that I disagree with than just another guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably just about any site with voting. Yet it seems that stating that you wish people would vote on merit puts you in the majority of people who comment on voting systems. If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.

davidcbc 12y ago
The majority of the people who comment on voting systems is a much smaller number than the majority of people who use a voting system.
danielweber 12y ago
There's always the fear of unilaterally disarming: "I am going to vote based on skill, not based on Which Side the person is on. . . . Oh, but everyone else is voting based on Which Side! Now I have to help My Side!" It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed. I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.

iopq 12y ago

I still can't downvote after more than a year of commenting. I guess not enough people agreed with my comments so I don't have this power.

jacquesm 12y ago
How many 'points' you have is mostly a function of how much time you spent here. If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!
- RankingMember 12y ago
  He who controls the spice... It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I've yet to quit or come back. I find it's much more relaxing just to hang out and bitch about things. HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here. Did I mention I like complaining?

hellbreakslose 12y ago

Well tbh he has a fair point, and I tend to be true on what I write. I get a lot of down-votes cause I guess I am speaking my mind and I ain't try to write some scientific report for someone to read... In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see. I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.

a3voices 12y ago

If you quit Hacker News, where do you go instead? Is there some magical fairyland place on the Internet better than here for discussion?

mayeesha 12y ago

I think the points he made is really valid for any kind of forum type thing, and he should be using Quora to get the experience he wants. They have the downvoting abilities and blogging features, and he can definitely gain more distribution there. Whether he is back or not is never the point, the problems he said seems to be fairly good.

fantomass 12y ago

Everything is relative ... Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much improved over the time, in my opinion at least. But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion straight from youtube. HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture, particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.

threepipeproblm 12y ago

TSA agents aren't bad, they're "just following orders." Okay not a quote from the article, but it seems to be his attitude. Actually his attitude is worse, that they are somehow the victims. But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent memory, I like people who are willing to blame the people responsible for doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.

sphildreth 12y ago

I wish I knew how to quit you...

kh_hk 12y ago
echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts

crusso 12y ago

The news consolidation on HN is great, for the most part. Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in software, or visiting with loved ones.

davidcbc 12y ago

Adding a downvote seems potentially dangerous to me. Sure a lot of "groupthink" articles rise to the top now, but a downvote means that the same vocal minority could suppress stories that don't fit into their ideology. Definitely a double edged sword

carrotleads 12y ago
IMO downvotes needs to take effect only after a set number. Say 3 or 5 downvotes or so. at 3 or 5 downvotes, there is a signal the comment is low value.

debacle 12y ago

Hacker News used to be brimming with content. I would regularly read 50-60% of the articles. Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff, lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.

RankingMember 12y ago
I thought so too, but I think it's just that the "newness" wears off and we start to realize that what we once thought was novel and interesting is seen as less so when the theme stays the same week after week. That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?

websitescenes 12y ago

Time to find a rock to hide under because these are not just problems with Hacker news but also life.

brudgers 12y ago

In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article relative to the HN 2010. 1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU upgrade. 2. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise. A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted, then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control. 3. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is organic rather than the effect of a social media team. In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers. 4. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true. 5. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't changed. 6. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck. A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator. The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high quality comments. 7. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing essays though. That's really what good blog posts are. HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.

vfxGer 12y ago

My main issue with Hacker News at the moment is that it is NOT NEWS! An article from 2010 about quitting hn is not news. I used to kid myself that I go here "to keep up-to-date" or find out what is happening. I used to think this was a valid news source but it is not. It's got some interesting articles that suck up my time but I've stopped kidding myself that it is news.

thathonkey 12y ago

I HAVE to take a break from Hacker News whenever some hot button story like Ed Snowden or Heartbleed is dominating the entire front page. I don't need to see a dozen blogger's opinions on simple news items like that. If I want thorough analysis of those types of important issues, I'm definitely not looking to the Hacker News crowd to source them. Prog blogs are awful. And so is some amateur libertarian paranoid's half-baked, uninformed opinion on complicated issues like NSA surveillance programs.

patsplat 12y ago

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html

ryanspahn 12y ago

HA this guy. For years he went on and on and on about my first start-up idea and not in a positive way. In 2007 I created The Social Alarm Clock (was my 1st idea on the web) and asked for feedback here. This Matt guy, hated the concept and said so in my Ask HN posted in 2007. Yet it didnt end there, he continued his hate for it in many HN posts throughout the years and even blogged about in 2011 or 2012. HA, it had an impact on him. Well, we have moved onto to our second idea and unfortunately I don't think http://SpeakerBlast.com http://SpeakerBlast.com (Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo) is going to have the same effect on Matt. Though maybe... Cheers, Matt, Cheers!

bane 12y ago

HN has its problems for sure, but I think it's currently the best general tech/interest site on the Internet at the moment. If I find I'm getting jaded with the mindless groupthink here, I just usually take a couple weeks off. Usually by then, whatever hot topic that was irritating me is out of the news cycle and the hive mind has moved on. At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique, intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything. But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated) debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments here. I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore (filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here. Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-killed. One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened, but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they happened. I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at different ages and in different circumstances. I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community. However, I do find the international discussions here particularly enlightening. One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the *HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy). If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be informative in some way.

normloman 12y ago

The author points out that users upvote a comment based on whether they agree with it or not, and not based on how useful it is to the discussion. Did you really expect it to work any other way? You're expecting internet commentators to be impartial? Even supreme court judges have a hard time remaining impartial. Why do you think someone who spends 15 minutes a day reading articles about technology here would give a shit? Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they realistically reflect?

_mulder_ 12y ago
The problem with linking karma to up/down votes is that it prevents people from posting anything that is contrary to popular opinion and therefore downvoted, even if it may be well thought out or, shock horror, factually accurate too!! The end result is an ever increasing alignment of 'group-think' where popular opinions are boosted and differing opinions are hidden. Up/down voters just need to take a second and consider what they're voting for. If it's just because they agree, then don't. If they agree and they've learned something new, then do. If they disagree and but they think the arguments are well presented or they've learned something new, upvote. Down voting should be reserved only for inappropriate comments, not disagreement.
- normloman 12y ago
  I don't even see the point of karma. It's like fake internet points that mean noting. I have a karma of 583 on HN. What does that mean exactly? What can I do with 583 that I couldn't do before? To me, it's just a pointless scoreboard for how popular my opinions are. It gives me incentive to post a karma-baiting comment once in a while, so I get a burst of dopamine whenever the number jumps by 10 or more. But back to my main point: When everything is majority rules, with no checks and balances, society collapses into mob rule. Why would it be any different with upvote/downvote? We're not going to solve this by asking users to think before they click downvote. We should consider removing the upvote/downvote altogether.

ausjke 12y ago

Can't agree more, in fact I'm searching right now on how to close my account here at HN, I mean, totally erasing it, not just changing to a soon-to-be-forgotten password. I will still occasionally read this site, but will never comment and do anything about it. The silent-downvote is not friendly at all, especially to who that does not know the "rules" well. how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it. Just give me a way to cleanly close my account.

ausjke 12y ago

suddenly this post disappeared from HN first few pages?

ausjke 12y ago
why down-vote me? I have a legitimate reason to ask this question, no? HN better show whoever just down-voted, hate lurking jerks.

j2kun 12y ago

Interestingly enough, his comments are closed, so I'll have to post my thoughts here :) I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer. That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about HN before my blog ended up on the front page).

JimmaDaRustla 12y ago

Things haven't changed I see.

mindcrime 12y ago

The main reasons I sometimes consider quitting are: 1. Too much fiddling with things by the mods (eg, changing post titles and the like). I find this to be more harmful than helpful, and I think we'd be better served with a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach. 2. The overall tone of the site has drifted towards a more collectivist / socialist / left'ish-wing worldview... to much anti-business, anti-capitalist sentiment which I don't enjoy. 3. Too much general news that you could get at cnn.com or msnbc.com or whatever. I liked the site better when there was more of a focus on startups, entrepreneurship, and deep technical topics. Of course, that's not to say that we don't still get some of that stuff, but the weighting towards those topics seems to have lessened, and I - for one - don't consider that a Good Thing. OTOH, HN is still (mostly) better than Slashdot, and the comments here are mostly of a higher quality than most other "news aggregator" type sites. Just not as much better as they used to be, IMO.

MatthiasP 12y ago

I miss Paul Graham's influence on HN. My impression is that since he "retired", the topics now are more uniformly focused on core hacking/startup stuff and HN lost its "good hackers are interested in anything" approach that I so fell in love with when I first discovered the site. So I thought about quitting too, but there are still enough gems hidden beneath the avalanche of Haskell vs Lisp vs Erlang threads that keep me wanting to come back.