Slashdot became more about the legal issues surrounding technology than about technology. It had a militant, fanatical vibe that soured the taste of its brilliant gems.
HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out. The topics are certainly important and worth discussing - but the tone takes away from the lightness and fun of technology. It's like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time. The two are good on their own, but they don't go well together.
Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.
I feel much of those sort of posts would be remedied if people were more interested in the history of the world going back more than just within their own lifetimes + 20 to 30 years. I'm still in my late 20s, but most people I know only have a passing interest in history (even less so when it's not about their country) and saw such courses in school as a burden, rather than useful. I was just lucky to have family that encouraged having an interest in history and how it shaped the world. To me, it's just as important as teaching one's children about Science, Programming and Mathematics.
News and information are also much more widespread now than they were 10 to 20 years ago, so many start to think this is a new phenomenon as it used to be more difficult to stay informed. History is just repeating itself with some additional ingredients mixed in and outrage is not useful when nothing comes of it.
The phrase "Why should I care about history?" never range more true when people express outrage over issues such as the NSA. The "good old days" are not as good as many people like to believe. That does not mean we should roll over and accept everything though.
The thing that made it good was the camaraderie, the general helpfulness, and the quality of posters. You used to be able to find some really intelligent content in the Slashdot comments, since some the smartest people related to that particular topic were probably Slashdot users themselves.
I still visit it every day just to skim the articles, but only about 20% of them are interesting/something I didn't see posted somewhere else.
To them, it is. Humanity's progress depends in part on freshly disillusioned young people to overreact to life's shortcomings and fight to correct them.
We have civics at high school (of course not in the Finland sense, sadly), and I somehow fail to see the correlation.
I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.
I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site (the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).
And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there used to be.
It also offers a different perspective.
I can't think of anywhere that I can read a discussion on technology politics that's actually dominated by informed, educated technologists. With the best will in the world, the Guardian Comment Is Free section or /r/news doesn't have the quality of commentary.
There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:
* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.
* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, there's nothing new to talk about. I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's really boring.
* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041616 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314
As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable).
Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha) everything politics-related.
Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some help from pg.
Let's not ban politics, let's just drastically lower the amount of noise in political threads.
There is a lot more to discuss about the Snowden/NSA brouhaha. It's just not regurgitation of existing bits of information that have already been posted hundreds of times. We burn out on the repetition and get annoyed.
What is relevant, and in my eyes disappointing, is that there has been little deep discourse on the topic. Every article starts at the basic "OMFG" and doesn't take a broader view of new developments.
There is some incentive that is driving the decline of quality content and interaction on the site. Whether it is attention, karma, or whatever, site members have responded with a focus on shallow quantity.
For example, there hasn't been a deep discussion on why privacy is a right. There've been a few comments, such as Schneier's "What's your salary?" that evoke the fear of having privacy violated, but people who are afraid of negative stimulus will override their fear for a more meaningful or important goal. Why is what the NSA doing bad, from basic philosophical principles, and what will the impact be on business, technology, and society in the coming years?
Solving the problem is not simple or trivial, but I'm sure Paul has given many approaches significant thought. It's difficult to implement them without changing the essential simplicity of the site.
There is the Reddit path of subreddits and the various "this thread moved to IYFCategory" forums. I'm not sure that helps. However, there is a natural clustering of some of these topics. While a "politics" cluster is too broad, some shorter-lived and more specialized clusters, such as Snowden/Angular/whatever grouping, would afford discussion among those interested, encapsulate the babble storm, yet give an indication of activity so that individuals can determine their own level of involvement. "I see you're posting a link to a story about Edward Snowden. I'm adding it to the Snowdenball."
Another approach is to limit karma. The people who post karma-bait will top out very quickly and either lose interest, or focus less on the score they have accumulated. It could just be another exponential function of up votes. 1:1 when getting started, then decrease the karma adjustment of each vote over time. Then one has positive and negative feedback, especially among "newer" accounts, and less of a desire even to look at the number past 2,000 or some arbitrary figure.
It's a tough problem. We can self-regulate by avoiding the xkcd 386 impulse. Stop giving votes to shallow thought. Stop posting one-line replies that are obvious and superficial.
It's possible to have civil political discourse, but it takes a lot of effort, much more than maintaining the entire rest of a site. You can't do it by tweaking things here and there, you need active moderators who can maintain cool heads themselves about topics they are passionate about.
I don't think it's worth HN spending that effort, and what's more important it doesn't look like HN wants to spend that effort.
If you want a swimming pool, you have to maintain it. If you can't, fill it in. HN should either invest a lot more maintenance on political posts, or take a very very heavy ax to them.
this will eventually degrade to more elitism, like (now just people with a big karma)
HN is like a collective mind.. more pop ot gots, more of the average mind it will represent.. its something i fell about facebook too.. with the first open-minded friends, it was a good environment.. than.. the thing get popular, and your news feed look like a toillet flush..
i think whats bother some, its what attract others.. for me particularly i dont mind some political biased posts.. more than i do for the startup mentality stuff..
but then both of them get they fair share of the HN front page.. i think people here at HN do a very good review of things that are important, also for the moment, for the modern times.. live in broaders and bigger communities is this.. the average collective IQ gets lower.. but it make sense to say: "i dont want to grow anymore if thats whats grows means?"
should we kick off the average and make they fell unwelcome?
maybe i am the average, how can i possible know that?
There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.
In addition to the politics, I've noticed what feels like a bifurcation in age or maturity with stories and commenters. My working narrative is that much of the negativity is immaturity from HN's endless september of college and high school students, although I know that's likely incomplete as many simple narratives are. Also, something about reading a blog post with a "Discuss on HN" link at the bottom irks me to the point I feel like the content isn't so much about improving understanding as it is to generate clicks and drive traffic. I am not a fan of personal brands or personalities in any industry, though it feels like many come here to create one.
The issues I see are related to people and their behavior in the community and not the HN site or features. I believe the best way to nudge the community back to neutral is with more people correcting or excluding the negative behavior.
1. Why is it not a cause to worry if Hacker News declines at all? It doesn't matter if it happens by default when it does happen. It might not be reversible.
2. Corollary to that, I believe it has happened. During the NSA scandal, I tried to do what I could to dispel what could best be described as hysteria. I don't believe the majority of people on Hacker News can be described by hysteria, but a hugely vocal minority can be, and they direct the movements of the front page.
3. I am not pessimistic about Hacker News, I don't like to believe the forum is succumbing to the inexorable march of time, or some such. And I'm not going to soapbox comparisons to reddit. However, I don't think optimism is enough. You don't seem to be particularly concerned about this, but I see sentiments of concern at least daily in some form or another.
I understand I'm not a powerhouse of karma and influence here on Hacker News, but I've tried twice to raise proposals for some sort of change to the political atmosphere of the forum. It hasn't worked. What else do you have but optimism, to put it bluntly?
EDIT: When I joined Hacker News in 2011, I wasn't as savvy to the mechanics of the forum as I am now. I thought that the front page being dominated by political fads every few months or so was just regular. But in being here to the present, I've seen that it has only gotten worse from 2011 to 2013, and in reading archives/the comments of senior members, I can see how this pattern developed. That's why I've tried before to submit a proposal to the changes thread.
I submit that it doesn't matter if politics can be intellectually gratifying or even relevant, as per the guidelines. It's categorically unrelated to startups or technology, save for being indirectly so in occasional cases when those two topics scale. Whatever benefit comes with political discourse is eliminated by the sheer level of scathing derision that comes from combatting sides debating the topic.
The best option that I can see is to allow users to mark a post as 'off-topic' in addition to 'flag'. Subtract the off-topic count in some fashion and generate second set of rankings. Then allow users to chose between the normal front-page and the filtered front-page.
It would not split the community into have/have-nots and it would enable a little self-selected filtering. It feels like a general enough case that it would have merit across a wide range of posts.
It would also provide a lot more information upon which to make judgment calls.
Fascinating site you've got going. This is the only place where I can actually stand to read the comments.
And while overly emotional topics are certainly bad currency in a large group -- no doubt about that -- I find it weird that we think we can talk about helping people suffering from starvation, slavery, lack of electricity, and all kinds of other problems and not be able to discuss the impact of the technology we create in the privacy and anonymity realms. I'd go so far as to say it's purposefully myoptic. Seems like all sorts of things are fair game -- as long as it doesn't show us the results of our own work too closely. We'll talk about any problems but the ones we helped create.
I wish HN the best of luck, and I certainly don't want flame wars or policy advocacy here. But hell, we're not morons. Or robots. If you want all that gossipy SV crap on the front page, you're going to have to take some other stuff you don't like as much. People vote based on emotional impact of stories. I can't see how you "fix" HN by continuous tweaking, making the system non-intuitive and frustrating.
Perhaps the best thing to do is go back to just tech and business. But even then, I find it impossible to believe that we can continue to live in some kind of artificial bubble where uncomfortable topics from the outside world never appear. If that's the plan, good luck with that.
We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.
My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.
I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.
Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.
The opposite is true.
For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?
No. Just no.
>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...
This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.
And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.
This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
I'm going to disagree with the highlighted portion. On pretty much any topic related to law and government, HN in the aggregate is willfully ignorant - people rarely take the time to do research or provide citations, but go about declaring this or that to be illegal or unconstitutional with no evidence and frequently without even fielding an argument. The discussions here are as bad as the comment section at, say, the Huffington Post. A lot of people seem to think that because they're handy with computers they have special insight into every other intellectual topic. This is, sadly, not the case.
As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?
I feel that you've highlighted a possible underlying cause of HN's present malaise, which is: many community members here are poorly connected on the Internet. HN is an open website, which means that it is very easy for someone who is new to the Internet to find and browse. If you've been commenting a lot in the recent political threads, I can make the following predictions: you've participated in online fora for less than ten years, and you don't pursue social connections much deeper than reddit user flair.
If you would like to take part in a lot of technical and political discussions regarding surveillance, you should consider joining a newsgroup or mailing list (if there still are any, I know politech and cypherpunks are dead) specifically devoted to this discussion. Usenet requires a modicum of effort (and maybe a subscription fee) to participate, which can help to limit the discussion to serious contribution by serious participants. You may also want to subscribe to and comment on blogs by people who know about these things, so you can get to know people and contribute to a discussion that, in order to be any good, must stretch on far longer than a single comment thread. There are communities devoted to this sort of discussion.
The content-link plus tree-style-comments format of HN is good for day-long free-form discussion on lighthearted issues of interest to technical people. It is not suited for deep, long-term discussion of complex political issues. HN can't be usefully political even if it wants to be, any more than HN can be used to design novel methods of quantum error correction. Some things just aren't suited for the HN style of discussion.
Is there a clear solution to stopping it? No? Do we know the extent of what the NSA's doing? No? Then we haven't discussed it enough.
This is a historically unprecedented issue. In no period in history has any state has anything akin to this power. This issue is more important than your distaste at seeing content you're not interested in.
To me, not as much. The most poignant catalyst, at least in recent times, to me, was Aaron Swartz. It’s just grown from there.
1. HN has an influx of new users who are somewhat interested in technology and technology businesses, but do not have enough domain expertise to engage on discussion of technical subjects, or subjects related to startups, such as design, customer support, finance, laws (as in interpretation of legal code, not politics), etc. For them, it's easier to engage in political debate. [EDIT] As a secondary theory: politics is a subject which interests a greater number of people than an specific technical subject or business practice.
2. HN's format concentrates debate and attention on articles that get popular just after being submitted: because more pondered or technical articles take more time to get popular, they never reach the front page.
3. With no major shift in the industry in the past year, and with mostly the same players (all of which were implicated in the NSA leaks, for instance), legal issues sparked from executive and judiciary actions are getting more attention, because they make for fresher, more sensational news, and reveal unanswered questions.
That's a really interesting point. As much as I've generally enjoyed the quality of front-pagers on HN over the years, I am now wondering about all the really good stuff that never made it there -- whether because the posters didn't optimize the timing properly, didn't game the headlines, or simply posted material that took awhile to digest and sink in.
Overall, there's probably a strong correlation between material that makes the front page and material that this community considers upworthy. But timing plays a huge role. I wish there was some way to counterbalance the effect a tiny bit. I can think of a few -- most of which would, unfortunately, be just as likely to harm as to help the reading experience.
I think that a simpler explanation is that politics is universal while technical topics will only be interesting to the subset of people that are affected by said technologies. Not everyone uses AngularJS/Python/Haskell/etc.
As a result political discussions become largely unresolvable. People participate not to share information but to give witness to their particular beliefs, which inspires others to do exactly the same.
More technical conversations may grow for a while, as more interesting points and lines are opened, but after a while what there is to be said, has been said, and the conversation moves on.
With those dynamics, political conversations are likely to add noise around signal until they drown it out. Unless actively beaten back.
The real solution is to change the way people talk and think about politics. This seems unlikely.
I'm a bit torn by these NSA revelations because most other sites seem to be ignoring them. But I feel they've become too prominent.
How do you enforce this? I don't know. It seems to be... subtly enforced in person. How do you enforce it on a website?
I think we have a broader problem with politics; There are many people that I have a lot of respect for technically, who have political ideas I can only describe as 'kooky' - I mean, that's okay, but I don't really want to hear about it, you know? I /really/ don't want to get sucked into that discussion.
I am just as susceptible to the siren song of a political discussion as anyone else; I often find myself writing two-page rants, only to save myself at the last minute by hitting the delete button.
But this might be part of how this is enforced in person. In person, well, the level of vitriol that political discussions have is just not acceptable.
It might be nice place to discuss the legal ecosystem for startups, too.
At the moment I think I would highlight 10 users and killfile 2, and I think both moves would improve my HN experience.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hacker News community when Google confirmed that Hacker News market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming close on the heels of a recent Alexa survey which plainly states that Hacker News has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Hacker News is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent web community IQ test.
You don't need to be Paul Graham to predict Hacker News's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Hacker News faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Hacker News because Hacker News is dying. Things are looking very bad for Hacker News. As many of us are already aware, Hacker News continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
That said, it's got a few features that people have pitched as the solution for HN (tags being one of them).
I ask because a forum project is on the back burner for me and this kind of thing is relevant to my interests.
I also think their invite-only membership policy puts them on a different community-growth curve than an HN, Reddit, Metafilter. I used to scan through the lobste.rs headlines, but i've switched back to a mixture of subreddits, because I can actually contribute more there.
Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links to interesting topics.
Even if the discussion can be a bit asinine at times, the value of the links alone is worth it, and there will be at least one or two interesting discussion threads per link.
Just ignore the crap.
I profoundly disagree with this, as an early Slashdot user. Slashdot had quite a bit of serious discussion - HN scarily replicates much of the feeling of discussion 1998-2002, just with different topics but all the same ups & downs. HN even has its perpetual flame war of Android vs. iOS that mimics Slashdot's Gnome vs KDE.
Yes, there was quirky trollish humour that was forgiven, but the moderating system, once it settled down in 1999, promoted quite a bit of very in-depth conversation.
Columbine and Jon Katz was the first real "political" side track for Slashdot, but it survived and moved on from there... and basically just wound up dying out due to Taco leaving and Reddit/HN.
Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.
What you see on both reddit and slashdot is an increasing tendency toward irony as the basic approach to any subject (4chan is the same way too). This overwhelms and actively drives away discussions that are serious and not ironic. This is why the highest quality subreddits (like askscience and askhistorians) enforce very strict rules and actively discourage humor for humor's sake. This is a big reason why stackexchange is so successful as well. And it doesn't mean humor is unwelcome at all these places, just that it needs to be part of something productive or humnorous enough to overcome the strong bias against it.
HN suffers from a more mild case of it with people being compelled to link at least one or two vaguely relevant xkcd comics in nearly every discussion without additional content. I like xkcd, but there's no reason to create noise by linking to it any time a comment or story reminds someone of it.
In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.
If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?
As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.
Do you remember the first dot-com boom? In 1999, it sure seemed like we were going mainstream. Nerds were cool!
Of course, once the money stopped, we were thrown aside like a sticky sock.
Yet, without exception, they have all expressed to me that they think that the site has substantially lowered in quality since the details of PRISM were leaked.
I think the fundamental problem is that that story brought in a large influx of new members at once. This disrupts the 'integration' process that most older members of this site went through when they first joined. Any post that was trite or lacked in quality was quickly downvoted, and it become apparent very quickly that this is a site that encourages thoughtful, mature, calm comments. On the other hand, during an influx of new users, this process is disrupted. The new users, especially if they share a similar ideology, will upvote each other if they agree with the idea of the post, even if it lacks in quality or is counter-productive to intelligent discourse. They will then look around the site, and see that similar comments are upvoted across the board, and think that this is acceptable behaviour.
There is a lot of anger at these new users, but I do not feel it is their fault, as they are acting as they would on any other forum, and they simply do not understand that they are hurting the site. I think it is our duty, as older members of this website, to fix this problem.
So, what is the solution? Well, I think that it is clear at this point that sitting back and hoping that the situation will resolve itself is not going to work. I think that there needs to be a concerted effort between the mods and the users with high karma to discipline new users who do not following proper posting etiquette. I think that more voting 'power' should be given to the older users with higher karma. Giving trusted members of this website more voting power will allow their votes to outweigh the large number of new members, and will allow the trusted members to teach new users what types of posts are acceptable and which types of posts are not. One of the problems that arises is that users will create uncivil posts that are clearly very partisan in nature, but that will be propped up by people who agree with them. This is poisonous for the environment of this site and clearly does not encourage useful discourse. These posts need to be ruthlessly downvoted, and it must be made very apparent to new users that they must be civil, regardless of how many people agree with them.
This will allow for a closer adherence to the rules, in particular, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". I want to hear every new detail about PRISM because it is clearly a very, very important topic for the tech industry. However, the vast majority of the recent posts about Snowden or the NSA or PRISM are completely lacking in any original content, and are merely repeating the same ideas over and over again, diluting the content of this site.
I think it is our duty, as older members of this website, to fix this problem.
That's what I would assume. The man would have to be insane to try and claim seniority with an hour old account.
The community is boring to people who want interesting things, but interesting to those who want to advocate some position. And the upvotey-downvotey nature makes non-activism and contrary opinions go away, since activists tend to be poor caretakers of the community itself, instead looking to push a particular position (ie, they downvote everyone else away).
HN still has a share if engaging technical news that is big enough to keep it interesting for me. But another thing that differentiates it from slashdot is that discussion is intelligent and no nonsense.
I think the beowulf comments and the GNAA trolls were actually in a time when the overall quality of the comments were OK. There problem was when all comments started having no content whatsoever, but were just a response-for-the-sake-of-it. It is like if people just needed to write something.
I check the new stories in a few topic areas regularly. Many interesting tech stories I check are not getting upvotes or comments.
But, even if more of those stories made the front page, the NSA story marks an epoch. Computing and the Internet have changed. It all comes with surveillance inside. That is unattractive. Creepy. Unfree. Undemocratic. Unhealthy. We let our industry get poisoned. It will take years for that story to play out. And it will get discussed here.
HN and Ars seem to be complementary, HN gets links to things that Ars wouldn't report on and Ars reports on things that HN wouldn't get links to. There's overlap but that doesn't detract from going from one site to the other.
HN makes Slashdot somewhat redundant. When I read Slashdot, a good chunk of the articles are links to things that appeared on HN three days ago.
Also the Slashdot editors can't edit for shit. I guess they're too busy posting thinly-veiled advertisements for Dice.
If the commentary on Slashdot ever became less informative (although the signal to "Micro$oft $hill!!!!" ratio is decreasing...), then I'd leave.
For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other programming languages most common experiences have been shared and novel new ideas become fewer.
I don't really see it as a problem. Most political posts are identifiable by title. Although the SvN ratio may not be perfect, I doubt it ever could be without HN implementing something like /.'s customisation options for topics and the ability for users' to block them.
I don't think that's all there is to it. There are any number of programming languages at a similar level of maturity and popularity to go, but go gets a disproportionate number of stories on HN. Something is distorting the voting.
This is because the users that should be upvoting/downvoting (ie. moderate/reasonable people who have no incentives of 'visibility' or the like) aren't. They just don't have an urge to upvote the things that should be.
It's exactly why political stories and comments pop up to the top very quickly. It's an "impulse buy" for a lot of people. They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.
I just don't see a site that heavily relies on what people upvote and downvote forever remaining "pristine" or, in HN's case, hacker-based. Sure, we're all hackers. But a lot of us care about the politics. And when people care about a topic, they're much more likely to go out of their way to upvote the things.
I'm guilty of this too. I don't vote often, and I spend a large amount of time on a lot of vote-driven sites.
The solution? I'm not sure. It's possible that there just isn't a solution. We might just need to keep moving from site to site, with new ideas on content aggregation each time. One day, we might find the perfect solution.
Until then, my feeling is that it's our responsibility as users and content viewers to upvote and downvote appropriately.
Indeed; this is commonly called "signal boosting." It's where there's content you have no personal reason to upvote/retweet/reblog/whatever -- but where you're affiliated with a group that would be furthered by doing that -- and so you do it anyway. I do believe a general policy against it could really help a community, but I don't know exactly how you'd implement that (other than naming-and-shaming users who do it.)
Also, though, voting systems only lead toward bad content when the website is also open-registration. If you'll notice, the first growth-period of these sites is usually pretty decent -- even though there's a voting system, the only people there are "core" members who are all there for the sake of the website's topic, so they only vote up that kind of content. It's when secondary and tertiary users flood the site and overwhelm the core audience that you see the decline. So, the solution could just be... not letting those users vote.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Bingo. I love HN for this very reason. Each time I visit, which is several times a day, I can count on finding a batch of postings about stuff I'm interested in: tech, startups, theoretical and applied science, law, philosophy, and yes, politics, just to name a few things, and quite often the intersection of one or more of these. I'm not a HN old timer, so may have missed-out on the before-the-Fall HN, but I have no regrets about that because it must have been a duller place.
I was a Slashdot addict before discovering HN. At one point I remember being really, really impressed by the great variety of people who posted there, people who had subject matter expertise that was all over the board. I might see, for example, a posting of an article about research into controlled fusion, and then browsing the comments I find information and insight posted by actual researchers in the field. This is what HN gives me today, and it's fantastic.
Perhaps a bit OT, but another thing that I love about HN is the level of civility in the comments and the swiftness with which people who break those unwritten(?) rules of decorum face chastisement. Rudeness is called out. People often humbly admit when they've made an error and apologize for it. People who make spelling or grammar errors aren't childishly flamed for it. HN feels like a big room full of well-mannered, intelligent adults, whereas /. (now) is a room full of twits and children and trolls and vandals. I have a hard time imagining HN ever becoming THAT because of the quality of this audience.
HN seems to have become not just a forum full of hackers, but a forum full of intellectuals including the non-hacker variety. These intellectuals, hackers and otherwise, have a diverse range of expertise, interests, curiosities, and passions. I learn something new every day from HN, usually tech or business-related, but often not, and I think that HN would be a far less interesting place if it was narrowly tech/startup focused. For me, HN simply ain't broke.
I frequent HN because it does serve that purpose that Slashdot once did - bringing content to my attention that I otherwise would have missed.
HN has always had a small smattering of political stories upvoted and discussed, with a specific focus on those that actually matter to hackers. Recent events have increased the proportion of political stories that get upvotes and discussion, but not across the board: there's a specific focus on NSA/surveillance stories, and in the absence of those I think the political content has not dramatically increased. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that the HN audience has become more political, but rather that HN has a higher threshold for wanting to talk about politics and recent stories pass that threshold far too often for comfort.
Politics on Slashdot has so little impact, because it shows up far too often. Politics on HN tends to focus on the most important issues, filtering out the noise. And the recent NSA stories are by far the most important news in tech politics in years. As long as the political stories remain confined to issues of that level of importance, and leave out the daily sources of new outrage, I wouldn't fear for the future of HN. (It also helps that HN doesn't have Slashdot's blatant editorialization to stir up those types of stories.)
HN may be an island away from real-world news, but that island still carries tsunami warning stories.
I have generally come down on the side of considering complaints about the downward slide of the site as mostly rosy-painted nostalgia, but I do think an article as blatantly off-topic and political as that would have quickly been flagged as recently as 3 or 4 months ago.
These posts were typically defended in two ways: "politics affects nerds, therefore it is a legitimate topic" Bogus in my opinion, because I can go anywhere to get general politics talk, Slashdot derived value from being nerd/tech-specific; and second, "the motto is news for nerds, stuff that matters--politics matter, therefore it is on-topic"--for crying out loud, it was joking on the fact that gadget news or who is in the new sci-fi movie is largely inconsequential. The latter may not apply to here, but the former can, reframed as "this affects the tech/VC/whatever community, therefore it is relevant." It might be, but if you let it become the focus of the site, it will attract posters who would rather generate heat, and they will overwhelm the posters who generate light and would rather not spend their time arguing.
I don't exempt myself from this, I am a relative latecomer to HN. I catch myself many times resisting posting because I don't want to help this place to become another Slashdot. I know I'm doing it right now and I'm sorry :-(
Here is a sampling of the worst of what I can see right now (sliding off the front page): over 50 points - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are...
over 50 points - http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-reveals-108-year-o...
over 10 points - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-kindhearted-pe...
None of those belong on HN.
In any community, when the law threatens the existence or basic functionality of that communities interests, the law becomes the primary concern of everyone. Here, Python developers may not be interested in mobile UX design, VR hackers may not be interested in 40 year old PC hardware. However, they are all going to be concerned about legal issues that threaten their ability to operate and explore ideas -- be it laws that break and censor the internet, or laws that criminalize reverse engineering.
We have been under siege since the early 1990s. A few legal losses (in the United States) early on could have resulted in a very different internet than we have today. The level of education and understanding of the basic principles of information freedom and autonomy are poorly understand by many. If the community that builds the digital world turns its back on defending these principles, what we have will be taken away.
HN, for all its faults, does a much better job fostering high quality discussion. And probably promoting interesting submissions as well, although I think the system is much more flawed in that regard.
Anyway, I think that a good chunk of "political" stories that have become popular on HN lately do belong here. Surveillance and freedom and how they pertain to the online world are big, fundamental issues of serious historical importance that we need to grapple with today. To remove those from our view because today it tends to be difficult to have a high quality discussion about a political topic is, I think, a mistake.
I think the issue is not one of whether or not HN should abandon talking about political subjects I think the issue is making sure that HN concerns itself with subjects that are legitimately important and conducts discussions that are mature, well-reasoned, and intellectually stimulating. And I think those things are well within the grasp of the HN community.
On the other hand to really talk about product engineering, software innovation, business management, etc., you have to have experience and expertise.
So as technical forums grow, they trend toward political topics.
This is no longer true. Most of the political discussion here is now indistinguishable from /r/politics and /r/technology, where people are only interested in things that agree with the existing beliefs.
Lately, even conspiracy theories that are refutable without outside sources since they are internally inconsistent are getting traction here.
I've gained a lot of useful information on HN in my past two years as a user and I hope I've helped a few a long the way as well. I do find myself skipping over a lot more posts, especially during the whole Snowden fiasco. I don't know how it used to be "back in the day" but I wish I could have experienced it.
So great.
Couldn't agree more.
I read Slashdot for years and there were also great comments...but a much higher number of top-voted/expanded comments that were akin to the clever/cute/meme-funny comments that plague Reddit today. Also, IIRC, Slashdot's commenting system required a lot of clicks to expand discussions...I pretty much never did that...which meant that Slashdot discussions required work to get past the witty upvoted one-liners...whereas with HN, it's just a quick flick of the mousewheel to get to more substantial comments.
"This shows that capitalism is evil." - "This shows that free market will solve everything."
Pretty soon we will have "9/11 was an inside job" posters on the top.
I still think the news themselves are great. I just don't like the discussions anymore.
(Normally, meta is discouraged, but since the initial question is meta, an I think there's a signal to imply there's a real shift, I'm commenting on this. More is needed, perhaps a dump of topics to determine of politics has really taken an unusually strong signal here, perhaps using the Bayesian methods described a week or so ago...)
If you don't reflexively agree with knee-jerk libertarianism you are persona non grata here.
A good way to ensure that new facts are not discovered, that new scientific discoveries don't happen, and that people don't listen to you, is to make things political.
Thing is I do not really care that much what are posted into here, people are pretty much free to post almost anything interesting. What I dislike is that most of the stuff is resubmitted from another news site pretty often. Though it is not as bad as one automatic news aggregation website I use to check my local news. Though the reason why I can live with these things is that my brain has become my best spam filter.
The only thing I really do not like is how popular HN has become among news sites on picking stories to their own site. Just few weeks back one blog article posted into here got their way into a local news site and this news site was even doing horrible job at quoting the blog article.
The level of journalism has fallen so much and they can use web sites like hacker news to pick up stories which should bring visitors to their own site. Hacker News, Reddit and every other news discussion site provides good statistics for news papers what to put on their site for people who do not visit these websites we use.
Activism? The political topics do kind of have a "let's all get along" and "do the right thing" feeling to them. It reminds me of going to the store to get junk food, then when I'm there realizing I should be buying the "lite" and "low salt" versions.
The political dimension to technology has always baffled me. Everyone seems to want me to think something. And yet, no matter what we do, the same problems remain. Where do I sign up to vote against politics?
Regarding Slashdot, all internet sites have a finite lifespan, however, and eventually the cruft builds up. That can be in the code, or the "culture," in the userbase itself.
I guess what we have in common at HN is liking to do things, so we should talk about that, and not theorize about what we should think about how we do it.
I come here for the technology news and the personalities, myself.
I say let's watch out for this, and make an effort to use a friendlier tone in comments. And smileys, when necessary. =)
And http://sidebar.io/ for Design links. But we cannot post or comment there.
I'm new, pointed in by the coursera startup engineering course. I have no idea how large that cohort is, or how uniform it is.
I certainly scan the headlines for startup themes (tech and other practices). I have found a lot of great things. My humble thanks for all it.
If I'm curious about one thing, it is the idea that people visit many times a day, and then expect many new high quality threads. If I understand the purpose, shouldn't visits be less frequent (to sync with startup world) and the front page less changing? Because if the front page "must" have new items, it must go further afield. The algorithm, which seems to [be] based on "velocity" of new items rather than strict rank, may favor the "topical" at this point.
PG is trying, and you have to tip your hat, if the 4-hours-per-day stories are true, but talk about Sisyphean.
(1) "I" or "We"
Unlike Reddit, HN doesn't have subreddits to handle constrained topics. Whatever is on the front page is whatever users want to read and upvote. You are also free to start your own technology only clone if you wish.
This has been brought up before many times. The ones who have been around longer would usually talk about the good old days. Well so do my parents and everyone else who is older ("Oh the kids these days"). I for one like what HN has become and think it is a positive development. People do care about legal issues and health insurance issues and other things not just twiddling bits and that's good.
This is certainly a departure from the current model, and the mere notion of front page could be fatally affected, but, after all and just to name two, Amazon and Spotify are pretty good at anticipating my taste. Simply correlating voting patterns with other users and weighting their upvotes more, for instance, could go a long way towards a site where everyone sees more of what they like.
There are also certainly arguments to be made against such an approach ("filter bubble" etc.). If a strong case has been made before, I'd be curious to read it.
If anyone thinks this is worthwhile, I'll build it.
Although I can testify to the click-baiting, sensational, politicized articles and comments, and may be guilty myself. Duly noted.
I learned about wiretapping from HN. Likewise, if HN refused to cover wiretapping the entire Internet, I would have a very solid reason to give up on them as a useful news source.
I do not believe HN is in any serious danger. People are obviously pushing back against the less relevant stories.
Digg/Reddit,they all started as some niche tech site and eventually turned into political/media/news sites (atleast digg was, reddit's savior is its subreddit feature) once the userbase increased.
The only way to keep HN niche is by introducing categories and let people subscribe/unsubscribe to those categories or through strict moderation.
In comparison, HN is more emergent, less filtered, and fueled more by dopamine than by any other kind of motivation.
I don't want my news to be funny, if it means they will be generally dull and full of commonly repeated jokes. As it happened in slashdot.
I just wanted to flag this:
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)