In a hypothetical scenario where HN would disappear for whatever reason more or less permanently, what alternatives would there be?
Where someone could find similar quality of commenters?
One issue with lobste.rs invites is they are a mechanism to vouch for a person. Whoever invited you will show up in your public profile. So there’s a reputation risk if you invite who later gets a lot of negative attention. (Which is why I’ve yet to invite anyone.)
Edit: Here is the text for that.
Invitations are unlimited, but persons you invite will be associated with your account in the user tree and you may be responsible for them if they cause problems. Please use your discretion when inviting persons you don't personally know.
The replacement*s* would not arise until after the original died; if that was a sudden and final thing then they'd pop up quickly and try to transplant the community as a first focus. If it changes more subtly then there's a long process of new communities growing and nothing quite like the original ever happens again.
I think the hours I spend here go towards satisfying my need to feel part of a community. Without it, I suspect I'd spend the same amount of time on another social media site.
I started on digg, hackaday and slashdot, before moving here when those services crumbled (afaict had is still going strong, my interests changed a bit though!
I think if yc fell, communities may segregate a bit into different interest groups.
I’m sure there’s a few yc quality subreddit’s also, If you can stand the user hostile ux
old.reddit.com is still available, which is only slightly user hostile. There's a setting to default to it if you're logged in, otherwise it's pretty trivial to either install an extension or write a userscript to automatically redirect you to that subdomain.
at least on mobile you can use Boost or Sync, but on desktop it's more difficult, really only old.reddit.com and experience is vastly inferior to mobile apps
Drop an email in your HN profile, I'm sure someone will send you an invite.
I find the quantity of comments on lobste.rs to be lacking compared to HN, they are much higher quality but there's not a lot of discussion for some reason.
Funny to see a complaint about comment quality when your comment is effectively a restatement of what parent comment said.
Not trying to be rude of course, I do this myself occasionally (my editing skills are bad on mobile in particular), but to me it’s obvious that fewer comments increases the signal-to-noise ratio.
> but there's not a lot of discussion for some reason
I mean... this is directly related to accounts being invite only.
It's a bit of a catch-22, the less friction to comment, the lower the quality but the higher the quantity.
Generally (let me preface: I do like HN as a whole) I dislike vote based or algorithmically driven discussion platforms. Vote based eventually ends up with the site having a certain inherent 'culture', and any comment not fitting in will at most get mildly upvoted and usually just ends up downvoted and collapsed / greyed out.
Algorithmically driven, the engagement factor eventually just crowds out any other metric for valuing comments.
I like the setup of image boards (discussion boards?) the most. By default, everyone comments anonymously. Votes don't exist. There is no way to gain reputation points. Your post or comment stands on its own merit. Boring or (most) bait interaction get ignored whilst high quality interaction gets bumped to the front page more often.
(Don't let 4Chan's two most infamous boards color your opinion for most other boards)
My personal perfect platform would be the imageboard way for content valuation and Reddit's old UI / UX.
I think part of it is Lobsters has an "average karma per comment / post" feature which means Lobsters users usually don't post a lot of "wow!" or "thank you!" comments and instead prefer to speak up when they feel something substantive is meriting attention. I've posted threads there that were #1 for a day and got like two comments. I've seen other smaller threads I've posted explode with comments when, for instance, there was a weakness in my project's design. It makes Lobsters a hard crowd to please, although the important thing to understand is they actually still love you. The website design just has different incentives for discussion.
I've found an amazing community (generally not techy though) at boards.straightdope.com. Some smart folks and interesting topics from all sectors of life.
That's good. I remember reading years ago how they weren't going to remove it. Glad they left it up the server admins to make the call for their communities.
58 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadmaybe bring good old'school forums back. man, i miss those times.
One with a strong, mostly fresh take on mobile access would be super interesting.
Edit: Here is the text for that.
Invitations are unlimited, but persons you invite will be associated with your account in the user tree and you may be responsible for them if they cause problems. Please use your discretion when inviting persons you don't personally know.
By the way, your Amiga collection is amazing. My dad and I play with his collection once in a while. So many great games!
https://twitter.com/vyrotek/status/1479932078267396100
I think if yc fell, communities may segregate a bit into different interest groups.
I’m sure there’s a few yc quality subreddit’s also, If you can stand the user hostile ux
I'd like to see a group like early $PLACE on something like IPFS or whatever to keep the bar high enough.
old.reddit.com is still available, which is only slightly user hostile. There's a setting to default to it if you're logged in, otherwise it's pretty trivial to either install an extension or write a userscript to automatically redirect you to that subdomain.
[1] https://teddit.net/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206
at least on mobile you can use Boost or Sync, but on desktop it's more difficult, really only old.reddit.com and experience is vastly inferior to mobile apps
Although that part of it also sucks a bit because you can't comment if you're not an invited member (which I'm not).
Many of the articles are found on HN first, but some are easier to see there because the front-page doesn't change as much as HN.
I find the quantity of comments on lobste.rs to be lacking compared to HN, they are much higher quality but there's not a lot of discussion for some reason.
Not trying to be rude of course, I do this myself occasionally (my editing skills are bad on mobile in particular), but to me it’s obvious that fewer comments increases the signal-to-noise ratio.
He complimented the quality.
Thanks!
I mean... this is directly related to accounts being invite only.
It's a bit of a catch-22, the less friction to comment, the lower the quality but the higher the quantity.
Generally (let me preface: I do like HN as a whole) I dislike vote based or algorithmically driven discussion platforms. Vote based eventually ends up with the site having a certain inherent 'culture', and any comment not fitting in will at most get mildly upvoted and usually just ends up downvoted and collapsed / greyed out. Algorithmically driven, the engagement factor eventually just crowds out any other metric for valuing comments.
I like the setup of image boards (discussion boards?) the most. By default, everyone comments anonymously. Votes don't exist. There is no way to gain reputation points. Your post or comment stands on its own merit. Boring or (most) bait interaction get ignored whilst high quality interaction gets bumped to the front page more often. (Don't let 4Chan's two most infamous boards color your opinion for most other boards)
My personal perfect platform would be the imageboard way for content valuation and Reddit's old UI / UX.
Isn't that for Rust users only?
A bouncer solves these issues.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773