Ask HN: Why has HackerNews succeeded despite the rise of Reddit?
It is unusual that HackerNews is still a powerful, vibrant community despite Reddit's rise:
- Every subject you can find on HackerNews is also found on Reddit: programming, entrepreneurship, academic news, etc.
- HN celebrities don't participate that often, so I don't think that is the difference
- Reddit has more features (esp. when combined with RES)
How do you explain the success of HN despite the rise of reddit, and does this mean other reddit-style communities might succeed despite their similarity to Reddit?
78 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadI wonder because it seems someone could emulate HN simply by unsubscribing from the defaults and subscribing to HN-related subreddits (programming, startups, etc.).
He probably means that the "Lowest Common Denominator" level is too low. Probably not that, even, after a more careful analysis. More like the average is pulled too low, because the "Level" is weighted by volume, and the loudest voices are often the stupidest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418891
My main reason why I like HN over Reddit is not what HN has, but what it not has: inlined GIFs, avatar images, signature lines, etc. Focus on content > all for me.
Reddit has great content, but it never clicked for me like HN did (maybe because I can remember Usenet and still like mailing lists). But things can change, e.g. if HN gets user hostile with ads or "features"...
Wait what? Reddit doesn't have avatar images
I'd even argue that you can write more freely if you are not tied to your avatar, signature lines, etc. -> your arguments stand on their own.
The comments are the content.
That doesn't mean Hacker News is perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.
The very idea that people collect here to talk about a topic at hand means that it's keeps the conversation a bit higher than elsewhere. I don't think I've ever seen people here push their number of upvotes as something that mattered. There is a lot of buy-in from users to ignore joke comments, even if they're on-topic jokes. How the community became like this I can't say since I have only been here about half a year/year I think, but it's a refreshing change of pace when you just want to discuss something.
It's kinda crazy what people here are "sensitive" about! For example, today I have managed to offend Hacker News by questioning the universality of maths. It's a subject on which I am rather qualified to have an opinion, but since it does not match others' I got downvoted. That's just a recipe for homogeneity.
I think downvotes should be removed entirely. Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it. The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.
I think because HN is focused on non-popular topics it may avoid the masses of idiots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Note: I am not an active contributor to either community - just someone who reads the articles and comments and votes up the things I like.
Hacker News has a moderation policy and mod team that gives the discussion some very desirable characteristics:
- a sort of professional level of conversation is maintained. Roughly equivalent to a casual conversation with a co-worker, over lunch, is sort of the overall tone.
- general rejection of memes and shitposting as being against the purpose of the site -- the point is real discussion an exchange of information, not low effort karma generation
- Paul Graham's essay about different levels of disagreement: generally people attempt to discuss the core ideas of the posts and not just hammer away to trivilaties
Most of the programming related subreddits don't have anything like the overall tone, cohesiveness, or moderator activity/discipline of Hacker News. There are some subreddits that I would say are as good as Hacker News for discussions about their chosen topic, for example, http://reddit.com/r/spacex . But the overall programming subreddits are not equal to this.
Reddit moderation tends to boil down to camps and high school politics pretty darn quickly where it's more common than not for moderators to push their own agendas.
This is overall a pretty broken moderation model which only really works on private forums.
You need to have a "professional" (joblike) moderation where the moderator enforce rules rather than opinions and philosophies.
On the other side of the spectrum you can have a "detached" core-rules only extreme violations level of moderation which what makes places like 4/8Chan work even tho it seems that they aren't moderated at all.
In short: HN is a more controlled, limited experience, which is preferable for me because I neither need nor want to spend the time necessary to craft my own out of the raw materials of Reddit.
HN is like an upscale department store hidden in a well manicured industrial park. Most visitors, I imagine, are there to enhance their self actualization, not just follow the latest fads in fashion and things to do on a Saturday.
When I first stumbled across HN years ago I was intrigued how vibrant this little-known community was. I noticed that the quality of posts here was much higher than any other tech forum I had seen. People were much more serious when it suited the topic and humor had real effort behind it when humor was called for.
And when I first noticed a silly Reddit-style meme, the Meme Active Defense (MAD) system kicked in and the poster got down-voted to oblivion, told to return to Reddit and that was that.
One thing I might say differently however is that most people on Reddit don't come to the mall to go to their favorite shops, they come to the mall to come to the mall -- the fact that their favorite shops are there comes secondary. You can try to have a lot of specialized communities with high-quality content and thoughtful discussion, but to a lot of users these places are just sideshows in a site that they go to primarily for entertainment.
Reddit is basically generic internet comments but with a mob mentality, full of trolls and garbage links, the whole thing is reminiscent of a filthy public toilet that you wouldn't want to use. The early days weren't like that and maybe there are subreddits that are still not like that, but I find the whole experience distasteful.
The net result is that there's a strong professional ethos and strong incentive to maintain it from a lot of people in the community, such that the few who try to troll, post garbage, etc. tend to get voted down into oblivion and calmly told they don't belong.
This is because those type of comments are extremely easy to make and very easy to grok and vote up. Their easiness leads them to swamp out high-effort, high-content posts. The more they are tolerated, the more they are seen. This feedback loop eventually leads to a Digg-like sea of recycled garbage. HN has been inevitably slipping... But, the sea has been held back much longer than I expected already.
Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) achieved real scale by forcing people to connect with one another in order to create de-facto smaller communities, which has the effect of giving focus to your stream, but it dilutes the ability to have a topical discussion with the best set of participants (unless they happen to know each other already).
I believe HN succeeded because all this history was well understood by pg when he created it, and he had the following to seed it with the right group of people to maintain the culture that he wanted. It's actually no small feat because once you birth an internet community it takes on its own life and you can't really control it directly. I'm surprised and delighted that HN can exist in 2016; over the years I've spent on Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Twitter and Reddit, the internet has only gotten more bombastic and shrill, but HN maintains a bar that is as good as anything I remember stretching back to the 80s.
The quality there has since gone bad. But other subreddits have flourished. HN on the other hand is dedicated to nerdy/geeky/all tech stuff.
partly because of this, larger reddit communities tend to be even more repetitive than HN.
Different content guidelines and moderation policies.
The last two points mean that most reddit communities have way worse signal-noise-ratio for me, which makes reading them tedious. The first means you have to deal with stuff you probably don't care about on HN, but I generally can just ignore those threads completely (basically anything involving politics. It's tempting to take part in the brawling, but it's better for me to just ignore them.)
For small niche-topics, subreddits can work, but I prefer traditional forums even more. The news format and the focus on external links just doesn't allow for proper long-term discussions, which are often the most valuable in small communities. 150-page phpbb threads for a long-evolving topic are unwieldly, but still better than sifting through hundreds or thousands of submissions on reddit or HN, each of which rehashes the same basics over and over.
HN is more curated and is less of a content churning machine than Reddit.