And the day they do will be the last day I (deliberately) visit that site. The new UI is just so non-functional for me. Some quality-of-life improvements (I think there are some improvements in the markdown handling in comments), but beyond that the old one is just faster to load and much easier to use.
I wasn’t big on Digg, but I was moderately active. And I switched at the same time. This pattern plays out over and over. At least Reddit has left old.reddit up.
Original reddit shows me 12 threads "above the fold" (without scrolling). Current old.reddit shows me 8. New reddit shows me 3. The extra space is taken up by useless garbage like "give award", "share", and "save", operations that I'm not going to want until I've actually clicked through to the thread. I don't see how that's progress.
It's become the worst kind of echo chamber. The comments feel like they're written by GPT-3, and there's a lot of prideful ignorance or confidence when it's undeserved.
I had to laugh when they added "avatars" and everyone started setting theirs to dancing seizure cockroaches.
My avatar is the Digg logo.
> backstage access to celebs
AMA was sincere when it started. Now it's just lame cash grab marketing and self-promotion.
> And it's YC.
Yeah. I feel like they exited too early. Conde Nast made all the money here.
This is why I exclusively stick to technical subreddits. r/programming suffered from severe moderation a few years back which knocked me out of even looking at it (posts were heavily moderated and their front page wouldn't change for days). But the various programming language subreddits (in aggregate) make for good reading for me.
AskHistorians moderation is legendary -- and unique.
Tiny subreddits (like usbchardware where I am mod) are easy to keep nice. But most larges ones are horrible, horrible toxic cesspools. It is basically a phenomenon that communities break off the larger one when it becomes too toxic -- but all too often the larger one won't wither. /r/canada and /r/onguardforthee/ is a classic example.
Nah man, that's the beauty of Reddit. Reddit isn't a single thing. /r/esp8266 is dope. /r/prusa3d is ledge. They figured out the mop/geek problem by just allowing arbitrary namespacing. Way better than any free community. Maybe Metafilter is better if you want to spend the $5. Dunno.
Lobste.rs tried that for technical stuff with tags and that engine is really powerful but the community never took off.
HN, of course, well, you know what it's like here when people of diverse interests and moral foundations are placed together.
HN is basically a Reddit clone (deliberatly so, it was created before Reddit has subreddits). Since the sites are so similar it kind of makes sense that they attract the same type of people.
Reddit was funded by ycombinator in summer ‘05, which probably explains part of it. Then the rest I would say is down to similarities between the two sites (primarily acting as link aggregators, although reddit has gradually diverged from this).
Reddit is one of the largest sites that embodies the earliest and most Utopic use-cases of the Internet: largely anonymous parties discussing different topics. The size to which it has scaled makes it an inherently fascinating artifact.
At the same time it embodies the dystopic outcomes of the Internet as well. For example it does not embody the decentralization of Usenet and is instead run by a single company. Its back-and-forths about acceptable speech and moderator power remind us of the tension between everything goes free speech and formenting and abetting hate groups. The twist it added (while not pioneered) to historical discussion boards, the upvoting and karma systems, lead to a very interesting hive mind phenomenon where you can very much see a meta personality at play based on the actions of millions of actual personalities. And then on the other side of the count, you see sophisticated attempts by smaller groups to manipulate the larger groups' opinions through both fraudulent and overt means. Alongside that are the side effects of majority-rules opinionizing, where alternate narratives get vaporized, or seem inherently laughable because one knows they'll be downvoted, which seems like an offshoot of mob mentality and lends a weird causality shift to the discussion, where the focus turns to accruing social capital rather than sharing honest opinions.
All in all quite fascinating if you're interested in that kind of stuff; not fascinating at all if you aren't. But as Hacker News is structured in a similar fashion, it's pretty clear the general audience would have an interest overlap with Reddit (I certainly follow the programming section there).
I wish there was a giant, global social network protocol. Open and distributed that connected all of us. Email, but more modern to capture the kind of stuff that Reddit and Twitter are great at. Photos, videos, discussion.
I then wish we could overlay filtering to keep out the high-noise drivel and advertising. Probably using social graph metadata.
I'd like to have an anonymous or pseudonymous presence, the ability to cryptographically sign my posts, and automatically elevate the score of individuals along my interest graph. This should "just work" and be invisible to the average user. It shouldn't seem like geeky technology.
I know that this is probably a terrible thing to bring into the world given all the conspiracy theory groups (it keeps them in their filter bubble), but I'm dying to have something that removes marketing and spam and only brings me high quality content.
Marketing and spam are still the biggest problems on the Internet.
Because your mom, like many people, probably trusts corporations more than random service hosts. Plus her social circle is already on Facebook, network effects.
Low effort spam is easier to deal with then "marketing", because marketing is about reputation and intent not content.
If there is a thread on the HN front page for some Cisco zero day and the top comment is explaining the user's positive "personal experience" with Ubiquiti gear, is that marketing or just some network engineers sharing their genuine opinion on a tech forum?
The content is the same but is received differently based on the user's reputation and their intent.
HN, Reddit, Slashdot + many more try the score/points approach but it hasn't solved the problem.
I've been thinking about a reddit like site where the communities are organized categorically using a btree like structure. Posts bubble up through the tree as they get more attention.
Filtering would be easy. Don't like cooking? Clip that subtree. Only want nsfw? Make that subtree your root.
Did you recently find Stargate SG1 and want to know what other kind of sci-fi is out there? Check /t/tv/sci-fi and see what else is popular.
It would be tough making sure subtrees are categorized correctly. Modding would also be tough since parents probably need ways to block children but that feature can be abused.
Many topics should have multiple parents which would complicate things some. Maybe internally everything is a single graph that's represented as a tree visually for users.
I guess there's plenty left to think through but it would be a cool experiment.
The comments below are well worth a read. Here's a sample:
"...yaaawn...
it's going to take a REALLY impressive phone for anyone to give a damn at this point.
and as far as that pug-fugly blue & green mockup goes, if that's the phone (and it's not, where are the numbers? ive would not let something that ugly be associated w/ apple) it would be a disaster."
I had never heard of aimfight.com, or the lady who turns pets into pillows. Also interesting that Boeing adding wi-fi was news at that time, something taken for granted on flights in 2020.
More comments from ^ iphone link:
"I would be much more excited about an Apple-branding smartphone with iPod level storage capacity. This is neat, but doesn't appeal to me."
"lol, i think that the target demographic are the crazy consumer who since the Ipod have been running rampant buying up any and all things related to "i" or "pod". just look at the naming of podcast or the iscreen and u can see that a lot of ppl are hopping on the i bandwagon. they probably just see a way to make some moneys with their iphone. altho, i must say if the phone looks like the 1 in that picture, thats kinda cool."
Yes - a rival mp3 player producer pioneered the idea of episodic audio content that was automatically downloaded to the device to listen to on the go. But then they went bankrupt, and other developers implemented it for the iPod, which was the most popular device and that's the medium on which they caught on first, hence the name. Especially helped when Apple added actual support for iTunes.
Also why the iTunes directory is the defacto podcast directory used by most independent podcast applications.
Used to be the idea was you subscribed to a podcast, and that meant your computer would download the files and then when you synced your iPod next, it would have the latest episodes, since iPods didn’t have WiFi back then.
That wasn't talking about the actual iPhone (which wasn't introduced until 2007), but about some hypothetical Motorola cobranded iTunes phone that hypothetically looked like this:
Oh, nice. That was announced September 7, 2005, and the article above was posted July 20, so I guess the article was right about the upcoming announcement, and the comments were right about the phone's future.
But the article's mock-up looks nothing like the phone.
I left Reddit because the extreme levels of opinion mixed with self-righteous cynicism inevitable in every single thread was unbearable. I enjoy reading conversation threads, which I think Hacker News has basically mastered. Reddit, not so much.
These people think they know everything, dramatize the crap out of their hostile opinions, and yet as time goes on, they're quite often proven wrong. But that's what they seem to enjoy, so let 'em at it.
I see Reddit as a rite of passage. Go there in your youth and pretend you know everything. Once you grow up and learn you don't know everything, move onto less obnoxious forums where you can discuss things like an adult. Not everything has to end in a meme of the day or an attack based on someone's assumptions of your personality/ knowledge/ skill/ appearance/ etc.
I wouldn't say HN has mastered the conversation. There are still major issues, like how late comments can be drowned out by the noise, despite being really high quality. And how there's a tendency to brigade one side of an issue on particular topics.
I think these problems are solvable with a bit of creativity.
Yes there is that issue. If someone posts something, and you post the one and only correct answer 12 hours later, it is highly likely nobody will notice.
But it does suit my attention span, so I don't even mind missing upvotes if I'm able to answer something a bit late for the party. Upvotes just mean that something I've said might be worth looking back on just in case there are replies to reply to. If I get an upvote for something I said more than 12 hours ago, I will at least notice that and get a chance to reply to it. Without that, they're lost, too. I just hope the OP notices whatever it was I tried to add, and move on. I'm not the center of what OP was presenting. Unlike Reddit, where everyone is competing to be that center.
It's why I always upvote anything resembling a good thread. Sometimes its the only hope of noticing if a comment got any traction.
There probably is no way to solve it for everyone. But at least here it doesn't automatically devolve into a meme or fire storm of utter hatred. When that is the norm, I know I'm not among peer and search for a different site.
And I say all that knowing that nearly nobody will notice. ;p
I heard in the beginning most of the posts were posted by the admins. They had a box where they could just type in a new username for each post, to make it look like people were using the site.
there's a thread here somewhere with an OG founder describing how they would seed entire threads emulating the sort of voice and attitudes they wanted to encourage. with that and technology like GPT3 (plus downright scary shit I've seen from SubredditSimulator) I can't shake the suspicion that reddit is largely artificial.
I also can't shake the suspicion that aside from the very carefully moderated subs it's mostly a completely natural toxic cesspit. triketora's recent AMA was truly something else.
I know this gets said over and over again, but it's so depressing to look at what major social networking sites have become. I remember actually having fun on Facebook and twitter when they were in there early years. I feel like when I used Facebook in high school I didn't have this overwhelming sadness and whenever I logged off.
I won't say I don't get negatively affected at all, but I still have a huge amount of fun on twitter.
I curate my "feeds" by using special follow lists (usually an obscured feature probably to make people think they can only use the main feed). I have a few different baseball lists, a list for automobile news since I'm into races like Super GT, and a couple other specific lists.
While I do wind up seeing negative stuff on my main tweet feed, it's easy to choose to only look at stuff I enjoy reading and responding to.
I'm sure most of the blame goes to Twitter because as I said, they sort of made that lists feature obscure. But I feel like there's a lot that users can do to take their own control of what they see on Twitter. I certainly do.
Oh wow, this also is such a record in time - Armstrong wins in France - that's when I was there, on that very day, the day before my birthday :) The next day I was in Warsaw celebrating over some fireworks that were apparently in celebration of a former communist holiday, and a local guy we needed up hanging out with told us "We don't let invaders change us, but we'll keep the fireworks and beer they leave behind."
As Lance Armstrong heads for a record seventh win in the Tour de France, Denis Campbell analyses the physical and emotional strengths that make him great
hmmmm
'Genetically Lance is a freak,' says his friend Tony Doyle, the British former pursuit cycling world champion. 'His heart and lungs are bigger than most people's, and most other elite cyclists', so they make him more efficient as an athlete. He also generates far less lactic acid than the others, and he recovers quicker - vital in a race where you push yourself to the limit day after day after day.'
Exactly - you’re compelled to cheat and have to find out how to get away with it since you _know_ others are doing it.
It’s a huge issue. Very interesting psychology. Joe Rogan has a few episodes on it but I can’t remember who he interviewed. I think there’s a documentary related to this, perhaps Icarus if I recall correctly.
If everyone is cheating and everyone knows it and no-one says anything then the whole thing stinks, and I don't want to read fawning articles telling me what amazing physical and emotional strengths all the competitors have. Conspiratorial cheating is not an emotional strength.
Lance Armstrong was a great athlete, period. It's unfortunate he had to use drugs but he had no choice. It was a price to pay to compete at the highest level.
You need to define 'Sport' and also 'cheating'. You have a definition for the former but apparently not for the latter.
e.g. if one of Lance's competitors on the Tour had (lets imagine) added some magically small but powerful electric motor to his bike and used that to win, would that be fair game?
I’m poking at the idea of sportsmanship being as relevant as you’re making it seem to sport—especially at the top—not the concept of cheating or fair play.
But to answer your question, if the sport has a profusely well documented history of electric motor usage that’s over a century long [0], with a huge proportion of its winners using them, then arguably “yes”. For all intents and purposes it’s now part of it! Assuming you’re trying to win, at least.
And in the same way, getting caught is totally fair too. It’s just losing by another name.
This is extremely off-topic at this point but I'm interested in other's thoughts on this:
I personally have a pretty solid 'no phone use while driving' policy. Honestly I don't really like talking on the phone so it's not that hard for me to ignore it in the rare cases that it rings while I'm driving.
However on Friday my mother had an outpatient surgical procedure and while I was driving her home my phone repeatedly rang, and I don't get many calls so this was very odd. On the third time I decided I would answer it. It turned out to be the nurse who had brought my mother out for me to pick up (no visitors in the hospital at this time) and she was afraid that she had not removed my Mother's IV. My mother checked and indeed it was still in place. So we turned around and went back to the hospital. The nurse was waiting outside in the same place, she opened the back door where my Mother was sitting with her leg up on the front passenger seat back which was folded all the way down, and removed the IV and wrapped the area.
There may be an opportunity for someone to create what reddit was meant to be. A minimally designed and curated site that enforces some sort of unique ID system to prevent all the trouble of online communities.
94 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadIt was. Now it's a cesspool.
> Recommendations, discussion,
It's become the worst kind of echo chamber. The comments feel like they're written by GPT-3, and there's a lot of prideful ignorance or confidence when it's undeserved.
I had to laugh when they added "avatars" and everyone started setting theirs to dancing seizure cockroaches.
My avatar is the Digg logo.
> backstage access to celebs
AMA was sincere when it started. Now it's just lame cash grab marketing and self-promotion.
> And it's YC.
Yeah. I feel like they exited too early. Conde Nast made all the money here.
All of it?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians for example.
Tiny subreddits (like usbchardware where I am mod) are easy to keep nice. But most larges ones are horrible, horrible toxic cesspools. It is basically a phenomenon that communities break off the larger one when it becomes too toxic -- but all too often the larger one won't wither. /r/canada and /r/onguardforthee/ is a classic example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_... and an example post from /r/canada within the last hour, you don't need to look far for stuff like this "I feel like ISIS would be better the liberals at this point for canada."
Let's not even mention the childfree subs because what the original one became is shudder
Lobste.rs tried that for technical stuff with tags and that engine is really powerful but the community never took off.
HN, of course, well, you know what it's like here when people of diverse interests and moral foundations are placed together.
One of the founders is still quite active on HN.
I believe it was Paul Graham who recommended them to create subreddits. They have some shared history at least.
Reddit still holds a ton of geeky subreddits but has grown into this monster on the outside.
I also imagine most HN’ers get they technical news from reddit and HN.
And honestly, I just can’t see what other platform HN should obsess about. Slashdot, maybe?
At the same time it embodies the dystopic outcomes of the Internet as well. For example it does not embody the decentralization of Usenet and is instead run by a single company. Its back-and-forths about acceptable speech and moderator power remind us of the tension between everything goes free speech and formenting and abetting hate groups. The twist it added (while not pioneered) to historical discussion boards, the upvoting and karma systems, lead to a very interesting hive mind phenomenon where you can very much see a meta personality at play based on the actions of millions of actual personalities. And then on the other side of the count, you see sophisticated attempts by smaller groups to manipulate the larger groups' opinions through both fraudulent and overt means. Alongside that are the side effects of majority-rules opinionizing, where alternate narratives get vaporized, or seem inherently laughable because one knows they'll be downvoted, which seems like an offshoot of mob mentality and lends a weird causality shift to the discussion, where the focus turns to accruing social capital rather than sharing honest opinions.
All in all quite fascinating if you're interested in that kind of stuff; not fascinating at all if you aren't. But as Hacker News is structured in a similar fashion, it's pretty clear the general audience would have an interest overlap with Reddit (I certainly follow the programming section there).
I then wish we could overlay filtering to keep out the high-noise drivel and advertising. Probably using social graph metadata.
I'd like to have an anonymous or pseudonymous presence, the ability to cryptographically sign my posts, and automatically elevate the score of individuals along my interest graph. This should "just work" and be invisible to the average user. It shouldn't seem like geeky technology.
I know that this is probably a terrible thing to bring into the world given all the conspiracy theory groups (it keeps them in their filter bubble), but I'm dying to have something that removes marketing and spam and only brings me high quality content.
Marketing and spam are still the biggest problems on the Internet.
So exactly what social media sites do already?
If there is a thread on the HN front page for some Cisco zero day and the top comment is explaining the user's positive "personal experience" with Ubiquiti gear, is that marketing or just some network engineers sharing their genuine opinion on a tech forum?
The content is the same but is received differently based on the user's reputation and their intent.
HN, Reddit, Slashdot + many more try the score/points approach but it hasn't solved the problem.
Filtering would be easy. Don't like cooking? Clip that subtree. Only want nsfw? Make that subtree your root.
Did you recently find Stargate SG1 and want to know what other kind of sci-fi is out there? Check /t/tv/sci-fi and see what else is popular.
It would be tough making sure subtrees are categorized correctly. Modding would also be tough since parents probably need ways to block children but that feature can be abused.
Many topics should have multiple parents which would complicate things some. Maybe internally everything is a single graph that's represented as a tree visually for users.
I guess there's plenty left to think through but it would be a cool experiment.
The comments below are well worth a read. Here's a sample:
"...yaaawn...
it's going to take a REALLY impressive phone for anyone to give a damn at this point.
and as far as that pug-fugly blue & green mockup goes, if that's the phone (and it's not, where are the numbers? ive would not let something that ugly be associated w/ apple) it would be a disaster."
I had never heard of aimfight.com, or the lady who turns pets into pillows. Also interesting that Boeing adding wi-fi was news at that time, something taken for granted on flights in 2020.
More comments from ^ iphone link:
"I would be much more excited about an Apple-branding smartphone with iPod level storage capacity. This is neat, but doesn't appeal to me."
"lol, i think that the target demographic are the crazy consumer who since the Ipod have been running rampant buying up any and all things related to "i" or "pod". just look at the naming of podcast or the iscreen and u can see that a lot of ppl are hopping on the i bandwagon. they probably just see a way to make some moneys with their iphone. altho, i must say if the phone looks like the 1 in that picture, thats kinda cool."
Also why the iTunes directory is the defacto podcast directory used by most independent podcast applications.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061103062221/http://www.applei...
It's nothing like the iPhone, and easy to see why no one was excited by that.
https://www.cultofmac.com/444315/apple-history-motorola-rokr...
But the article's mock-up looks nothing like the phone.
These people think they know everything, dramatize the crap out of their hostile opinions, and yet as time goes on, they're quite often proven wrong. But that's what they seem to enjoy, so let 'em at it.
I see Reddit as a rite of passage. Go there in your youth and pretend you know everything. Once you grow up and learn you don't know everything, move onto less obnoxious forums where you can discuss things like an adult. Not everything has to end in a meme of the day or an attack based on someone's assumptions of your personality/ knowledge/ skill/ appearance/ etc.
I think these problems are solvable with a bit of creativity.
But it does suit my attention span, so I don't even mind missing upvotes if I'm able to answer something a bit late for the party. Upvotes just mean that something I've said might be worth looking back on just in case there are replies to reply to. If I get an upvote for something I said more than 12 hours ago, I will at least notice that and get a chance to reply to it. Without that, they're lost, too. I just hope the OP notices whatever it was I tried to add, and move on. I'm not the center of what OP was presenting. Unlike Reddit, where everyone is competing to be that center.
It's why I always upvote anything resembling a good thread. Sometimes its the only hope of noticing if a comment got any traction.
There probably is no way to solve it for everyone. But at least here it doesn't automatically devolve into a meme or fire storm of utter hatred. When that is the norm, I know I'm not among peer and search for a different site.
And I say all that knowing that nearly nobody will notice. ;p
I curate my "feeds" by using special follow lists (usually an obscured feature probably to make people think they can only use the main feed). I have a few different baseball lists, a list for automobile news since I'm into races like Super GT, and a couple other specific lists.
While I do wind up seeing negative stuff on my main tweet feed, it's easy to choose to only look at stuff I enjoy reading and responding to.
I'm sure most of the blame goes to Twitter because as I said, they sort of made that lists feature obscure. But I feel like there's a lot that users can do to take their own control of what they see on Twitter. I certainly do.
https://i.reddit.com/
As Lance Armstrong heads for a record seventh win in the Tour de France, Denis Campbell analyses the physical and emotional strengths that make him great
hmmmm
'Genetically Lance is a freak,' says his friend Tony Doyle, the British former pursuit cycling world champion. 'His heart and lungs are bigger than most people's, and most other elite cyclists', so they make him more efficient as an athlete. He also generates far less lactic acid than the others, and he recovers quicker - vital in a race where you push yourself to the limit day after day after day.'
hmmmm
It’s a huge issue. Very interesting psychology. Joe Rogan has a few episodes on it but I can’t remember who he interviewed. I think there’s a documentary related to this, perhaps Icarus if I recall correctly.
He would have been a much much better athlete if he took no drugs and finished 20th
It might be cultural, but that attitude strikes me as the very heart of sport in all honesty.
e.g. if one of Lance's competitors on the Tour had (lets imagine) added some magically small but powerful electric motor to his bike and used that to win, would that be fair game?
But to answer your question, if the sport has a profusely well documented history of electric motor usage that’s over a century long [0], with a huge proportion of its winners using them, then arguably “yes”. For all intents and purposes it’s now part of it! Assuming you’re trying to win, at least.
And in the same way, getting caught is totally fair too. It’s just losing by another name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France
Cycling
to
Cycling While Pretending Not To Be On Drugs
Everyone would know where they stood then.
http://bugbear.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20061130234337/http://reddit.com...
15 years later and we still haven't solved that one. It's interesting how much has changed and how much has stayed the same in 15 years.
I personally have a pretty solid 'no phone use while driving' policy. Honestly I don't really like talking on the phone so it's not that hard for me to ignore it in the rare cases that it rings while I'm driving.
However on Friday my mother had an outpatient surgical procedure and while I was driving her home my phone repeatedly rang, and I don't get many calls so this was very odd. On the third time I decided I would answer it. It turned out to be the nurse who had brought my mother out for me to pick up (no visitors in the hospital at this time) and she was afraid that she had not removed my Mother's IV. My mother checked and indeed it was still in place. So we turned around and went back to the hospital. The nurse was waiting outside in the same place, she opened the back door where my Mother was sitting with her leg up on the front passenger seat back which was folded all the way down, and removed the IV and wrapped the area.