To Paul Graham
But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.
It is, precisely, the simplicity and minimalism of Hacker News' feature set that keeps it usable for everyday, busy, -- real people --. Obviously, the culture on Hacker News keeps submissions and comments in check, but that culture would not exist if HN were trying to become a social network for entrepreneurs.
Your continued interaction and consistent fine-tuning makes this a place that I like to come back to. There is a certain social satisfaction with knowing that one is a part of a community in which the creator is still a participant.
I know you are cognizant of what makes this community tick; I also realize it wouldn't be what it is today if your intentions hadn't been clear (and they obviously are) - so I didn't need to say this, but I did want to say this: thank you.
161 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] thread> Why don't I see down arrows?
> There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.
I am mostly passively participating here (although I see myself commenting and submitting a bit more now) so I didn't reach such a karma yet...
HN has raised my awareness, made me more thoughtful about how and what I actually think about things (part of the passivity comes from the idea that any sloppy thought will be immediately shot down (rightfully so)), and overall contributed to an ongoing desire to be a larger part of the overall tech community online.
Thanks to PG (whose essays I often reread -"Keep Your Identity Small" is one I constantly refer to other people - for HN and providing this nonname wannabe programmer a place to learn. And to learn to think. Thank you, PG.
You can still make a meaningful contribution by asking questions, if you want to.
HN is filled with karma-based features. one of those is down-voting. you're not given access to down-voting comments until you reach a certain level of karma yourself.
if you've contributed enough to the community to reach a certain karma score, then you are trusted with more features.
see: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Things I love: 1) People downvote trolling and negative/witty comments 2) The interface gets out of your way 3) It updates constantly 4) The content is exactly what I'm looking for... and exactly what I couldn't find anywhere else 5) People are genuinely here to help. I am eagerly anticipating launching my startup so I can post an "Ask HN: Review my launch" here!
Ok I wanted it to be 'three things I like' but it turned into 5 :) Thanks to Paul and the community!
4 points by alanh 18 minutes ago | link | parent | flag | upvote | downvote
This should be easy as a greasemonkey script to save other people having to make changes to support it.
---------------
EDIT: Out of curiosity I made up a javascript bookmarklet that seems to do the trick... upsize all the page's upvotes to 30x30
Cut and paste that into your browser URL bar, or bookmark etc. It's easy to validate by eye, for the worried[up] 7 points [down] by alanh 35 minutes ago | link | parent | flag
...but I understand the misclicks. Maybe an "undo" button for a short time, like 10 seconds or until your next click that just nulls your vote?
Can't both comments be good?
Then you are doing it right.
You can see a demo video of the app here: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/
I was always confused by slashdot's filters and the threads in almost every other forum, with Post #18 replying to Post #7 and Post #27 replying to Post #3, but only 10 posts visible per page. Busy people don't have the time to wade through stuff like that, so all you're left with are the trolls.
hn's nested threads built with <table> are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go.
I have no idea how much time and effort pg puts into hn, but I'm sure it's nontrivial. Something as good as hn doesn't get that way purely organically. Also, I would guess that more of his energy goes into the software, not the site's output. Why deal with an issue once when you can build something that will deal with it forever?
It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: thank you pg!
Location is the most important thing about an apartment in my opinion. That should be the primary method by which you search. And they've tried, but you end up searching within these broad "neighborhoods" in the bigger US cities. And a lot of people mischaracterize their apartment's location in order to make it seem nicer or whatever.
Why is craigslist wasting my time? Require posters to put in the actual address or at least an intersection for their apartment. Then show me the postings on a map. Something like hotpads.com works really well for me, but they don't have the volume that craigslist does, so I'm stuck.
Now, Thats some value creation.
The biggest turn-off for me on digg is not so much the complexity of the site but the level of the discussion.
Still, I find myself gradually spending more and more time here and less and less time and reddit. I think if I didn't mod a few subreddits there, I'd pretty much have solely switched to HN.
I don't think <table>s should get undue praise. With <div>s, the code would be easier to read mechanically (for manipulation with Greasemonkey, say) and even though there'd be a little more CSS, the page weight might be reduced a little (I'd have to make a mockup to be sure ;-))
It's always a lot easier at first to overlook structure in your app/code/whatever. It's when you or others come to work with your code or extend it in some way (with Greasemonkey, say) that all the extra work comes along.
If you have to "spend time thinking about" writing tests, it takes longer to build the prototype of your software but.. that's not a particularly good rationale for not using tests (though it is still a rationale, of course). Same goes for semantic markup in my book.
I don't think that's been true for several years.
I am not a front end developer, but I agree to the philosophy to an extent in terms of generic software development.
As software developers, our job is not to thrive for the perfect solution, but writing maintainable, code that we ship. I understand that many people (probably not HN users) take "real artists ship", as an excuse to put ugly unmanageable "hack", which I am not supporting either (infact I think I would be one of the last guys to compromise of code quality), but truth of the matter is, we live in an non-ideal-finite-time-full-of-deadline world, and as every thing has a cost-to-benefit ratio (short and long term). I think as software developers, its a part of out job to judge that cost-to-benefit ratio and if the cost starts to become much for the benefit offered, its time to rethink about software puritanism.
http://toadjaw.com/hn/comments/1398250
This is something that could have been equally effective as a brief email to pg. As the current top-ranked post here, it's kind of ... masturbatory.
This is the very definition of a meta post (and from a personal perspective I dislike the fawning tone too)
However, the impact of appreciating something and having communal pooling of appreciation affirms the intent. I want HN to remain what it is and I did not want to be "just another email" in PG's inbox; I suppose by submitting this in the first place I contributed to "what HN is not" but I do still feel that my submission was appropriate in the sense that my intent was an intelligent choice and not a "masturbatory" choice.
While I also like the same HN features you like, I didn't upvote your post because it just felt too obsequious.
This is an incredibly convoluted explanation of what can simply be called grandstanding. I appreciate your intent, but please - we all want HN to remain what it is. If your intent was to thank pg, email him. If your intent was to communicate your want for HN to stay the same - do so when there is some threat to what we hold valuable. Otherwise: post intelligent replies, downvote trolls and submit the occasional illuminating article. Threads like this (and others like it) do no good for any of your stated aims.
It can be curbed with a culture of self moderation, it can be curbed with enforced rules and other barriers, a good early example of this is Something Awful's combination of introducing a registration fee along with a reputation for banning users who posted crap. It's survived through the years and I'd venture this was a factor.
But the point is if your site becomes highly popular there will always be the risk of drowning under a low signal:noise ratio. Hence the sensitivity to posts like this here because <asskissing>the HN crowd as a whole has a lot of experience with this phenomenom</asskissing>.
Disagree - I think this thread will be far more well-read than the site guidelines by new members and will show them why we love this place and why we want to preserve it.
Nobody wants a post like on the frong page every week, but once per six months or a year is probably good for the community.
I'm pretty sure that eventually many more really successful websites will find a way to adopt a model like that, it really is one of the best ways to marry a happy users to commerce, find some side-channel that you can exploit.
Most websites think that the 'data' they have on their users is the marketable good, google has often been said to see you, their user as the end-product. YC does it different, they see a subset of the users as the raw material to drive their bottom line, the rest are along for the ride.
It's a much more direct version of what FB, google and so on do, and it is much better imo because it is more honest and transparent.
It's hard to put the difference any clearer than that, but YC engages a small subset of their users in activities that they are peripherally engaged in on the forum. Other 'social' sites sell their users data wholesale, that's a completely different kettle of fish.
Most of the users on HN are not engaged in the revenue stream of YC, directly or indirectly whereas almost all the users of other social sites are directly involved in the revenue stream.
I can assure you, in publicity and marketing circles, when social media is mentioned it is precisely to attract consumers for your product.
The type of interaction between HN and YC is not new. It's just hard to replicate. Companies are trying this since the dawn of the internet. Think about what is the forum on the World of Warcraft website. The social media craze is an attempt to apply this community feeling to other markets.
So yes - hn is a great service to the community.
Digg is complex because it is that large, and I think that if HN ever got that large it would start to suffer in much the same ways. HN is not so much a reflection of the person that built it (though that definitely does help) as it is a reflection of the people that participate here.
If and when HN gets to the size of digg and it retains its character it will have broken the pattern that any social news site has so far exhibited, until then the jury is out.
The triumph of HN has been in attracting an initial audience that agrees with the spirit of that document, and in their subtly but firmly encouraging its adherence in newcomers.
The character of a community is a tricky thing to build and maintain. A community can easily veer into the superficial and glib territory of Digg, the self-referential and jaded territory of Slashdot, or even the sycophantic territory of Wikipedia. HN has been quite fortunate.
In this thread that's richly ironic.
It's about as self-referential and sycophantic as I've ever seen here.
Nowhere in this thread is anyone riffing on in-joke memes a la Slashdot, nor is anyone attempting to achieve advancement in rank like at Wikipedia.
There is plenty of self-reference here but it's purely practical, and certainly there's a bit of sycophantic behavior, but what does anyone stand to gain by it at HN? Honestly telling PG you like his site just makes both of you feel good, unlike pretending to like a high-ranking Wikipedia admin in hopes of getting a promotion next round.
Either way, I'd be inclined to agree that love-fests like this aren't particularly useful to the HN community. But they happen, and occasional ones are a good sign (and maybe over-frequent ones are a bad sign).
Actually the more I think of it, the friend system is the only thing that HN doesn't have that Digg has. Or maybe I just haven't looked that closely when I visit Digg lately.
This, IMO, keeps the quality of posts and comments high and in a way, prevents it from going "mainstream".
I used to participate on Slashdot actively, I'm a programmer, yet I've never seen a line of Lisp so far, nor started a Startup - and I saw comments from "old-timers" that said they weren't as interested in some of the kind of articles that interest me and would rather HN had stayed focused entirely on startups and hacking.
Does that mean HN has gone "mainstream"? I don't know. But it's not as select as it used to be :) (and I hope it's a good thing)
Ironically I've been thinking of adding some variant of following as a way to deal with the increasing volume of comments. I just haven't had time to yet.
I did recently (about 3 weeks ago) tweak the algorithm for ranking comments, and that has had a noticeable effect. Previously it was the same as the one for ranking frontpage stories. Now it also considers among other things the average comment score of the submitter. With any luck this will keep HN poised in its usual position mid-way over the shark for another 6 months.
The problem I perceive is that average score does not say much about a specific comment being non-productive, so someone with a high average score could toss in some complete junk and get it sorted to the top in spite of better comments by average under producers further below.
I'd say that if it remains below the detection threshold it might be a net plus, if too many of such instances appear it might be a loss.
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort “We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”
And, whenever they met some, when they were out walking, They’d hike right on past them without even talking.
Here is a link to the detailed thread about the experiment of putting user names of high-karma/comment users in orange,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181
which as you'll see was a controversial experiment. (I post this link for the newer members of HN who weren't participating when the experiment was tried.)
This would still serve as a filter, but this wouldn't result in some kind of whitelist where you effectively only really notice the people you know you're going to agree with anyway. Whitelists encourage groupthink, and incorrectly penalize low-karma users. (Nobody is going to friend users who only occasionally comment even though the quality of their comments is really high.)
I prefer any solution that filters out the noise over any solution that gives emphasis to the opinions of popular users with high karma.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/55745
I also second the suspicions about whitelisting being a desirable thing.
Thoughts?
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...
Does this create a rich-get-richer type scenario, where users with high averages get more exposure, thus leading to higher averages?
Otherwise they get poor real fast.
So someone with a huge number of highly rated comments, could make a lot of dumb comments before it started hurting them.
I'm sure pg will come up with an appropriate formula.
The whole thing has a circular dependency: if ranking acts as a filter, then higher rank means more readers, and that in turn means more upvotes and so a higher ranking. It is probably not so much the top being undeserving, but that deserving stuff gets missed.
This seems to be a fundamental weakness in all similar 'ranking' systems, but I am not sure of the full character and implications...
(There is certainly a substantial component of being an automated system of 'social-proof'. And the filtering can never be entirely effective: if you show everyone only the good stuff, the filtering would not get done at all.)
An alternative way to think about it is that it adds more stability to the system, for better or for worse.
http://searchyc.com/pg
(you will notice the numbers are different on the HN leaders page for people, I think perhaps searchyc is an all-time average?)
Like the frontpage ranking algorithm, the comment ranking algorithm also considers recency.
I think we all owe you a great deal of thanks for HN, and I certainly think that we may not share this sentiment enough. Thank you, Mr. Graham. Simplicity in design truly is elegance, and I feel that--sometimes--too much flashy Web 2.0-related cruft tends to distract from the content (as the submitter points out). Certainly the Twitters and Facebooks of today and tomorrow have their uses, but I'm not so sure it's a good thing for society at large that we're moving toward content consumption limited to 140 characters. Worse, when one is so distracted by the interface of a site like Digg--as the submitter mentioned with regards to votes and such--does the visitor cross a dangerous threshold between actually reading/enjoying the content or does it spiral downwards into some sort of meta-evaluation for pseudo-rewards instead of a truly rewarding and educational experience? Me, I think I'll stay here. I don't read news to be entertained.
For me, reading HN truly is a great joy to experience, and I know a great deal of that is in the community you have created. Whenever I click on "comments" from an article, I've grown to expect that I'm going to read through a meaningful chain of conversations and am far less likely to encounter something unpleasant. Aesthetics aside (and these certainly play a significant part of why I like HN--the simplicity is an amazing breath of fresh air), one of the the more qualitative reasons I find HN so much more appealing is the community. It has been my experience that comments generally don't devolve into flamewars, and it is delightful to see that disagreements here remain respectful and substantive. Perhaps part of this is precisely because of the simplicity: Those who come here expecting to be entertained go elsewhere; those who come here to browse meaningful submissions stay and contribute.
I was (and still am, I suppose) a long time reader of Slashdot, but I could never quite get interested in Digg and its kin; they're all effectively modern tabloids with over-sensationalized submissions (this includes Slashdot). HN is an altogether different beast, and it wasn't until about a year ago when a friend of mine directed me to something posted here. I was greatly astounded at the time that, in 2008-2009, there would exist a site that doesn't hide itself behind flashy UIs and simply delivers raw content, bottled at the source. What a breath of fresh air! Make no mistake about it: HN is deceptive. What it might lack in fanciful (and, IMO, obnoxious) features, it more than makes up for in its submissions. When I come here, I know that I'll immediately have access to meaningful content--I won't be distracted by fluff.
My only regret with regards to HN is that I didn't seen the site sooner!
Once again, thank you Mr. Graham.
-- A short-time reader of HN who truly wishes he'd experienced it much earlier on!
I guess what I like about HN is the high expectations it allows us to keep.
Still, it's unfortunate that explaining why one happens to appreciate something like HN is considered "ass kissing" these days. My post wouldn't read any different even if Mr. Graham were someone completely different. I appreciate HN for what it is.
Posts like yours, sadly, give me pause for thought that perhaps I jumped the gun too early, but then I am reminded that certain subsets of the community generally frown upon verbose thank yous.
I'll be more cautious in the future with regards to my praise. Thanks for correcting me.
Digg is deadd
http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2...
(will remove `almost` if they remove table layout)
I don't know, so if there is actually a good reason, I would love to hear it!
Agreed.
Anyhow, I just hope posts about "do you hate this" start rising to the top of HN.
1. the name "hacker news" is a cool name 2. simple hacker-friendly web interface w/o ads.