Okay, I get the idea here, but... my account is younger than that and I'm sort of miffed by the notion that my votes shouldn't count at all. Furthermore, having the cutoff date be in the past means that I could never earn that right regardless of how much I participated after that.
I would be much more well-disposed to a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts, while still allowing people to eventually count as old-timers.
What I want is a news aggregator like HN but where I can control (possibly have it learnt) how to rank based on network effects. Preferably in an interpretable fashion if any machine learning gets involved. Heck, I would even be happy for it to be partially probabilistic to get me to “read across the aile” at times.
Hate to be the stereotypical pedantic HN commenter, but fwiw this normally works, I believe there's an exception with Ask HN posts where clicking "hide" will not fully hide it, at least last time I tried.
I have always avoid pushing “hide” since I assumed a new submission would pop up at the bottom and I never wanted to go beyond the top 30 as I feared I would stay on the site for a bit too long.
Smart personalised and decentralised search with comment aggregation and sharing.
It shows you what you're interested in, not what adtech, or social media barons, or VCs, think you should be reading for your own good. Or for "engagement."
Something something echo chamber? Probably. But it's not as if we don't have those already.
I've thought about that, however I worry about it turning into what Facebook does and put you in an echo chamber (with the occasional "across the isle" item thrown in to "make you angry"). But I still like the idea, just not sure what the best implementation would be.
Some ideas I've had include having multiple up/down vote buttons for different criteria -- one that says if you agree or not with the content, and another one that says if it is a well reasoned and interesting post. That way I can pull up things that people in my cohort think is a good post but also disagree with content wise. But this requires that people are reliable able to judge something fairly that goes against their view.
Then I'd like to see "bubbles" that show which cohort(s) I belong to and which other ones are out there so I can choose which to read at any one time.
It already is an echo chamber. Except that you have zero control over the content you see, so you're stuck in someone else's echo chamber. It can be really fucking frustrating, which is why I closed my main account after 8 years.
I don't really want to be here. This account will be gone too as soon as I close my browser. I won't make another one unless something very urgent comes up.
Slashdot moderation has this, with separate voting for insightful, interesting, funny, etc, and the corresponding toggles on the view side if you want to prioritize or exclude particular categories.
It was an experimental feature slapped together by pg in 2009, and has been largely forgotten about ever since. The motive then was to see if there was any difference if you filtered out newer users. There wasn't then, just as there isn't now.
Its continued existence is just a historical artefact.
As far as I can see it's not linked from anywhere in the UI, and is only occasionally referenced in comments.
Your vote counts in the "primary" ;). You are part of selecting stories for the main page. Overwhelmingly, "classic" voters will vote for things that are already visible on the regular main page.
Why was the arbitrary date of Feb 13, 2008 chosen?
I think a mechanism with filter-by-date might be interesting but that date of 13 years ago is arbitrarily excluding most 30-something year olds (all but the precocious 18~low 20s that created a HN account?)
This sounds entirely reasonable. A bunch of web sites went the route of having a bunch of smart, reasonable people get together and make something real.
When those grew, they became popular with idiots, with spamming/SEO/astroturf, and/or taken over by extremists in some direction (at which point, everyone else heads for the door). The web sites became cesspools of crap.
I'm fine being excluded if that means HN continue to have high-quality content. If the pre-2008 accounts start falling off, it wouldn't be too hard to find a pool of high-quality contributors from 12 years of comments, upvotes by pre-2008'ers, etc.
Indeed, I wouldn't mind having explicit tiers, even if I am in a lower one.
Would love to see this for comments as well. I swear some years ago, I used to be able to find some really interesting stuff browsing the "comments" link now I'm more likely to find throwaway_xyz posting flamebait takes.
I don't think it'll work for comments. But maybe, maybe their upvotes can count more than one vote. Or their downvotes (i think it will create more readable comments)
Filtering the comments tab on karma would be good.
Roughly the same as your suggestion of course, since if an early user is still commenting, they almost certainly have accrued a lot over the years, but it would also allow newer entrants that have had well enough received (or enough well received) comments to qualify.
- Promote extremism and groupthink. Try posting any comment which isn't far-left on reddit (outside of the far-right forums, which will be the opposite). You'll be -50.
- Be gameable for SEO and spamming.
- Target the mean. Try posting anything particularly erudite on a reddit or a late slashdot.
I kinda like the crowd which set up HN. It's diverse enough, intelligent enough, and works for me.
I think a lot of the comments here are incorrectly assuming that this is a new page. The classic page was first announced by pg in 2009 [0]. He created it because:
> I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality.
It's interesting for historical purposes to see if the tastes of the "old timers" are different from the tastes of the "newcomers."
It would be hard to measure this directly simply by comparing the front page from 2008 to today, because different articles will have been posted on different days, so a direct comparison is imposssible.
By simply seeing what old-timers vote on vs what everybody votes on, you can make a better apples-to-apples comparison. Not a perfect one, of course, because many old-timers may have quit long ago if HN had changed too drastically, and similarly their own ideas of what HN should be may have changed.
i think his hypothesis which isnt tested by the classic page, is that if 90% of the old timers left hn, the 10% who remain could be those who vote similarly to the newcomers, making both pages appear similar, even though a significant group of old timers may have voted differently.
Which is quite helpful. It’s my default bookmark as I prefer the mix.
// This account is 2010; I had been in the earlier cohort under different account. A decade later I still find the early but still active cohort votes a mix of links I prefer.
I made a similar piece of software to Hacker News about a year ago and I found what was probably an earlier copy of the source code for hacker news somewhere.
I seem to remember that the score that items are sorted by was a weighted sum of the inverse of the age and the votes. I don't remember if the votes themselves were assigned different values based on some context.
Perhaps ask pg? Who knows, he might tell us :-)
(I'm not a Lisp'er, and I've never been particularly fond of Lisp, but I have to admit I enjoyed reading the Hacker News source. It had a lovely minimalism to it)
To give an example, I'd rather not have votes count from people who are upset about this one particular method of ranking. I might start using this view more!
It's possible that someone who thinks that Hacker News was "a bit better earlier on" favours that, especially as (as pointed out elsewhere in this very discussion) those are noticeably lacking from the page at hand. So let's see what the answer to my question is.
Dicussion on Hacker News is not qualitatively better than on any number of well moderated technical subreddits or niche trade forums, and most of the articles posted here are cross-posted from Reddit and other sites. The only real differentiating factor is that Hacker News aggressively downvotes humor and polices for tone.
Every now and then threads pop up asking about alternative HN-like forums, here are some:
> If the HN veterans did not like the 2020 content of HN they would simply not use it.
I’m not sure how accurate that is. For example, I strongly dislike new Reddit, but I feel forced to go there as the niche communities are still far more populated than their respective forums scattered across the internet.
I’m not sure HN has quite the same holding force, but I’ve yet to see anything that feeds my curiosity in the same way.
I feel that this experiment can prove nothing about the quality. It does show that votes from initial users have roughly same distribution as votes from later users, but only because the initial exposure to the front page highly correlates to subsequent votes. So it rather proves that both group of users have the same usage pattern: mainly watching the (non-classic) front page. It would have been more interesting to see the front page that only consists of submissions from initial users.
Obviously nobody who was an adult in 2008 is still able to operate a computer or comprehend the latest tech trends.
This is clearly aimed at tapping the wisdom of the savvy investors who have made a bet on vintage hn accounts as the latest digital store of wealth, indicator of wealth and conferrer of legitimacy. If you were smart then you spent the last decade picking up these heirlooms in estate sales and recovering old logins from fossilised magnetic tape.
Apparently a lot, if you compare the vote counts on the "normal" homepage with the "classic" homepage. Actually the difference is so small that I highly doubt the "2008" claim in the title - I think it's still counting accounts that are over one year old!
You could expand the cutoff date by modeling lookalike audiences. A 2018 account that votes on similar things to a 2008 account might be admitted. This affords the moderator an easy “exploration” spigot they can tune up or down.
But overall, the ranking is much the same, and all the differences you see might simply be because there is only a handful of votes for some pages from old-timer accounts (ie. the quantization noise is pretty big).
Seems to be true. I have an account which is apparently from 2007, so included for the classic page. When I upvoted the article on place 29 and refreshed it jumped to 28. When I upvoted the article that was now in place 29 it jumped to place 24. Votes on the normal homepage don't seem to have anywhere near that effect.
There's nothing surprising to the ranking being similar.
Old accounts don't use classic, they use the normal HN homepage like everybody else. Which means, they see the same top links as everybody else, and upvote them, like everybody else.
In other words, /classic is remarkably useless. It might have been useful when it was created (11 years ago!), if a sizeable part of those old accounts would use /classic, and only /classic.
I use /classic, slightly less dross. It’s gotten gradually less different through time, perhaps something to the point that others may not be using it.
I think it's supposed to be about the "startup" users. So you can't use a dynamic cutoff date.
Nowadays, HN is more of a general tech aggregator, but discussions where some users lament the turning away from exclusively startup content still happen every now and then.
(Personally I'm happy with how it went. Startup stuff bores me.)
That does introduce the risk that people actually use this. Now, this page is a gimmick, a historical artifact. If it were actually used by more than a handful of users, that would be right alienating for new users, especially if it's a fixed date that you have to manually update.
Same difference for me, but most of the clicked links are from one day ago. It mostly just seems that the classic page has a slower turnover (due to less votes).
Any specific explanation for ignoring 12 years of newer accounts? To me that’s potentially a whole generation of new engineers’ comments/questions/insights that are being ignored, again for no discernable reason.
If there was a spam problem (or similar) I could understand, but this just seems arbitrary.
Again I would just want to understand the reasoning for it, as it could be legitimate.
It was a quick experiment in 2009, and soon forgotten by most. It's not linked from anywhere in the site's UI. It doesn't seem intended to be used anymore, and seems to exist as a historical artefact. Certainly nothing for people to be offended by.
Was there any discussion about that experiment at the time?
Again, mostly curious as to the reasoning, as this kind of thing would tend to go against fostering a community, which is what the idea behind HN seems to be.
It would be interesting to see how many votes are cast by accounts from that range, rather than just sorting it that way and displaying votes from all users.
144 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadI would be much more well-disposed to a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts, while still allowing people to eventually count as old-timers.
The issue with having a model that does it for you is that your going to immediately start fighting against it and its decisions.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I have always avoid pushing “hide” since I assumed a new submission would pop up at the bottom and I never wanted to go beyond the top 30 as I feared I would stay on the site for a bit too long.
It shows you what you're interested in, not what adtech, or social media barons, or VCs, think you should be reading for your own good. Or for "engagement."
Something something echo chamber? Probably. But it's not as if we don't have those already.
Some ideas I've had include having multiple up/down vote buttons for different criteria -- one that says if you agree or not with the content, and another one that says if it is a well reasoned and interesting post. That way I can pull up things that people in my cohort think is a good post but also disagree with content wise. But this requires that people are reliable able to judge something fairly that goes against their view.
Then I'd like to see "bubbles" that show which cohort(s) I belong to and which other ones are out there so I can choose which to read at any one time.
I'm sure there's a good amount of obscure content that doesn't get appreciated because it never reaches the people that would enjoy it.
> a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts
Are you sure you know what the motiviation for accounts older than 2008 is (are you sure it's reducing young/drive-by accounts?)
Have you thought about what that motivation might be?
Also, nothing has been removed, only added. You can see more of the data which was hidden before.
Its continued existence is just a historical artefact.
As far as I can see it's not linked from anywhere in the UI, and is only occasionally referenced in comments.
Nothing to be miffed about!
That said, could be implemented as a rolling decade. The term is “classic”. For cars that takes 25 years. Ten for tech seems fine.
I just scrolled to its frontpage[0] and the top story was “Immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry”[1].
Any other explanations why `https://news.ycombinator.com/classic` turned back to this date?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-02-13
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115094
Funny, since I remember lurking for years before making mine!
I think a mechanism with filter-by-date might be interesting but that date of 13 years ago is arbitrarily excluding most 30-something year olds (all but the precocious 18~low 20s that created a HN account?)
20008 determines more than 'classic', then, it determines 'early adopter'
edit - I see your other comment about /classic being from 2009. That makes a lot of sense!
It's like calculating market quotes only from deals by old enough participants.
When those grew, they became popular with idiots, with spamming/SEO/astroturf, and/or taken over by extremists in some direction (at which point, everyone else heads for the door). The web sites became cesspools of crap.
I'm fine being excluded if that means HN continue to have high-quality content. If the pre-2008 accounts start falling off, it wouldn't be too hard to find a pool of high-quality contributors from 12 years of comments, upvotes by pre-2008'ers, etc.
Indeed, I wouldn't mind having explicit tiers, even if I am in a lower one.
Roughly the same as your suggestion of course, since if an early user is still commenting, they almost certainly have accrued a lot over the years, but it would also allow newer entrants that have had well enough received (or enough well received) comments to qualify.
Karma tends to:
- Promote extremism and groupthink. Try posting any comment which isn't far-left on reddit (outside of the far-right forums, which will be the opposite). You'll be -50.
- Be gameable for SEO and spamming.
- Target the mean. Try posting anything particularly erudite on a reddit or a late slashdot.
I kinda like the crowd which set up HN. It's diverse enough, intelligent enough, and works for me.
> I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
The results are just showing the particular interests of that group of people who still enjoy the site after 12 years.
It would be hard to measure this directly simply by comparing the front page from 2008 to today, because different articles will have been posted on different days, so a direct comparison is imposssible.
By simply seeing what old-timers vote on vs what everybody votes on, you can make a better apples-to-apples comparison. Not a perfect one, of course, because many old-timers may have quit long ago if HN had changed too drastically, and similarly their own ideas of what HN should be may have changed.
// This account is 2010; I had been in the earlier cohort under different account. A decade later I still find the early but still active cohort votes a mix of links I prefer.
I seem to remember that the score that items are sorted by was a weighted sum of the inverse of the age and the votes. I don't remember if the votes themselves were assigned different values based on some context.
Perhaps ask pg? Who knows, he might tell us :-)
(I'm not a Lisp'er, and I've never been particularly fond of Lisp, but I have to admit I enjoyed reading the Hacker News source. It had a lovely minimalism to it)
However, HN is also effectively a monopoly. There's really nowhere else to go to find the same type of discussions.
Here is its climate models in Fortran discussion: https://lobste.rs/s/zlwgmm/why_are_climate_models_written
On Hacker News you will find anthropology, politics, philosophy, startup advice.
Every now and then threads pop up asking about alternative HN-like forums, here are some:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20023209
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16342192
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23402797
I’m not sure how accurate that is. For example, I strongly dislike new Reddit, but I feel forced to go there as the niche communities are still far more populated than their respective forums scattered across the internet.
I’m not sure HN has quite the same holding force, but I’ve yet to see anything that feeds my curiosity in the same way.
This is clearly aimed at tapping the wisdom of the savvy investors who have made a bet on vintage hn accounts as the latest digital store of wealth, indicator of wealth and conferrer of legitimacy. If you were smart then you spent the last decade picking up these heirlooms in estate sales and recovering old logins from fossilised magnetic tape.
Can we do this by other criteria? I.e. another year or points? The opposite of the classic could be also interesting.
Yes there is an un-official list of undocumented hacker news features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Prior to only a few years ago, I considered all website comments to be throwaway and never bothered to sign up or comment.
It's sortof a new exercise to share my thoughts with the group.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438990
Amusingly, it seems to re-surface every now and then.
There is less:
- pop-culture & humanities
- notifications about momentary outages across the web
There is more:
- hard-science topics
- algorithms
- posts about VCs
Seems to be true. I have an account which is apparently from 2007, so included for the classic page. When I upvoted the article on place 29 and refreshed it jumped to 28. When I upvoted the article that was now in place 29 it jumped to place 24. Votes on the normal homepage don't seem to have anywhere near that effect.
There is less:
There is more:So is there a reason to think now that the cutoff date is Feb 13, 2008, or could it be dynamically counting accounts over a year old?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
So why bother tuning it to be even more similar?
Old accounts don't use classic, they use the normal HN homepage like everybody else. Which means, they see the same top links as everybody else, and upvote them, like everybody else.
In other words, /classic is remarkably useless. It might have been useful when it was created (11 years ago!), if a sizeable part of those old accounts would use /classic, and only /classic.
You're surprised that the general tech population is remarkably similar to the elite tech population? :-p
Nowadays, HN is more of a general tech aggregator, but discussions where some users lament the turning away from exclusively startup content still happen every now and then.
(Personally I'm happy with how it went. Startup stuff bores me.)
Damn, March 31 2008 account here. Juts over a month too late :)
Any specific explanation for ignoring 12 years of newer accounts? To me that’s potentially a whole generation of new engineers’ comments/questions/insights that are being ignored, again for no discernable reason.
If there was a spam problem (or similar) I could understand, but this just seems arbitrary.
Again I would just want to understand the reasoning for it, as it could be legitimate.
Again, mostly curious as to the reasoning, as this kind of thing would tend to go against fostering a community, which is what the idea behind HN seems to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
Nobody seemed to have a problem with it, and quite clearly the community has grown a lot since then.