HN has become host to feminist shilling and corporate endorsements, on top of the already flawed content model that encourages disengagement to the point where people are just reposting headlines and treating HN as a comments section for the article itself.
Either way, there's something to be said for constructive criticism like this, and HN can potentially learn from this.
It won't. But it could.
This is exactly what I do. What is the right way to use HN?
Learn what? The whole thread is basically a fond pop at HN, with the usual 4chan dribble thrown in (like the faggot/nigger shock commentary).
I'm not sure how the vein of commentary about the headlines being business/startup oriented is a negative criticism, since that's the point of HN - and if anything, the business side of the forum has been dying off for quite a while.
no, those aren't my legitimate opinions. i'm a brainwashed shill. you've got me.
Perhaps people became more aware of the causes of feminism? Whenever a belief of mine is very convenient for me I always try to tear it down just in case there is some hidden bias or other logical fallacy.
We're disrupting the 1gorillion dollar [insert industry] sign up for our beta to check it out[0].
[0]We just need your name, address, credit card, and birth date. To verify your a human.[1]
[1] and we store all of this in clear text files on our server.[2]
[2] which was written using [insert new hipster language] by some guy who's been programming for 3 weeks.[3]
[3] but we promise not use your data to mine the shit out of you and sell it to advertisers.[4]
[4] jk
[0] Like this.
[1000 points] Some hot-button political issue that we know nothing about
[-1 points] An O(n) time algorithm for multiplying matrices
It's really enjoyable watching the 4chan folks take the piss out of here--though a lot of the posts are, I suspect, newfags (in the vernacular) posting purposefully bigoted things in language that isn't typical to /g/.
I liked this one.
HN community VS 4chan community ? Really ? What if we'd stop pretending for just 1 sec, and just admit that many, many people are just the same here and there ? Where does this lead ? As many here pretend to play the game, and play hardly, because they're aware of the rules, at least a small part of them, deep in their brain, also hate it. The feeling that most of time, crazy VC and tech race just lead nowhere is real. The worm is in the fruit already, and really, I'm pleased to record so.
Some of this doesn't come from HN itself but from the overall tech culture. But I think a big part of the story is that the site saw a massive expansion in users, thus becoming more generic and "public", meaning people have to be a bit more reflexive about what they say on here. When your audience is a trusted community of people with a shared understanding of the rights and protections that discussion participants grant to one another, you can cut through the bullshit a lot easier.
That said:
> [600 points] Why only web development matters (http :// nautil.us medium wordpress theverge gawker .com)
Some really good ones in there.
The existence of that sentence (written in all seriousness) suggests that it doesn't really stand a chance though.
> Anonymous 06/26/15(Fri)17:51:52 No.48697104 [600 points] [meta] 4chan technology board satires hacker news, hilarious.
> How I rewrote Bash in javascript.
> I decided to re-implement Javascript in Javascript. It failed. Here is my story.
> [450 points] Why I have private Github repos at my startup but everyone else should give away their software for free.
It's so true ;~;
I know people that don't read HN because it's too virulently sexist, so having 4chan see it as too SJW is interesting.
Will we end up with two "social justice" realities, like we have with vaccination, creationism/evolution and climate change, where it's entirely possible to spend your entire browsing time on sites that agree with your opinions on everything?
An important difference between HN and other fourms I frequent(ed) however is that instead of taking offense and going on the defensive when 'attacked' by 4chan, they recognize the joke and find it funny. That alone puts HN lightyears ahead of those other organizations.
And regardless of why, it's exactly this kind of self-awareness and identity that enables people to discuss ideas without feeling threatened by them, something which has held back both social and scientific progress in the past.
This. This comment could just as easily have been on that 4chan thread as a great example of HN think to be laughed at.
How many people know who Terry Davis is?
Gold!
"Ask HN: Why won't VCs invest in our dating app, and why is it because we're women founders?"
"[1583] We taught 13 women from Sierra Leone node.js"
[1] theatlantic.com [2] theverge.com [3] blog.tumblr.com
I wouldn't be surprised to see this in a few years.
I actually like this layout. It's fast and easy to read, renders ok on mobile and is lightweight. I'm grateful that the maintainers didn't switch to an over-the-top look-at-my-framework.js thing just to make it look modern at the detriment of usability.
And goddamn is this hilarious.