Sorry, What's Going on Here?
What is this site? I came across a discussion about a programming question I had from 2013, which isn't uncommon, but to my surprise this place appears to still be thriving a decade later. It calls itself a news site but appears not to be an actual journalist organization, but rather some kind of... archival feed? Is it a social media platform? I've see it compared to Reddit in a couple of the community guidelines and FAQs. What is the purpose and the history of this site, how has it managed to stay up and running for nearly 15 years without me ever hearing about it? For those of you who are still here, why?
I must say I'm a bit exited. I find myself mourning the deaths of so many independent forums and smaller social media platforms which thrived tn the 2000s-early 2010's but have now mostly gone offline or faded into complete disuse. I'm not sure exactly what you guys have going on here, but it's seems... Good.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread… Fighting fang, tooth, and claw, over critically important concepts, such as whether or not we should all be forced to use type-safe languages.
/s
But the one thing that's amazing here is that the smartest people in the room inevitably turn out to be either 14 year olds who invented a new category of social app, or 74 year olds who worked for NASA... everyone in between being sort of ephemeral.
edit: another reason behind its success I think it's due to its functional interface (html and just a bit of styling: how the web should be), that make it pleasant to use.
Somehow it still thrives under his benevolent though remote stewardship (he rarely post himself, realising you can't be a "player character" in the forum that you are in charge of). I think mainly it works because it has remained consistently usable and well moderated and nobody has messed around with it.
As to why I return (not been 15 years in my case probably?) is that I usually get to find out about interest new tech, what people are building and read interesting opinions from intelligent people. Not to stroke HNs ego or anything, but I think the community here probably has a higher degree of critical thinking than what you find on other platforms (especially social media).
Edit: Also, welcome back! Edit 2: some wordsmithing
Which entity are you claiming is the owner and funder of HN? The FAQ says:
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
The unreasonable effectiveness of dang.
> and a fucking shitton of venture capital.
Certainly something that Y Combinator doesn't lack is money, but I can't imagine running HN being that expensive. Its traffic is way less than most mainstream sources and there's little to no development.
I'd rather say it managed to become a cultural icon in its niche, hence its continued success.
When I was a kid in LA, there was this coffee house that had 6 tables inside, shotgun sized place, started by a guy and his sister who moved from Oklahoma City with the eventual intention of starting tiki bars. When they got successful in the bar business, they were about to shut down the coffee place. But it was an all night joint - I was working there a few nights a week, and mostly I would play chess or cards with the regulars when I didn't have to get up and serve coffee. People were really distraught that it was being shut down. One of the regulars, a guy named Jeremy, bought it. Didn't make a dime. Just wanted his place to come have coffee and cigarettes all night. And he knew how to keep people in check, which is what you need to run any good establishment. This is a bit like that.
HN is very startup-focused. For example, it contains job listings for startups funded by YCombinator (reddit itself was one of them, many years ago), and a monthly thread with jobs from other companies. It caters to this crowd.
Famously, if you have a problem with Google, it's often easier to post here about it than contact Google's support. That's because Googlers (Google employees) also browse this site. (also Google has no support). In this sense, posting on HN is the nerdier equivalent to @calling companies on Twitter.
Like every social platform, it is the way it is due to network effects: it was first to fill a niche and other platforms didn't capture this mindshare. And unlike most forums, this one is thriving. Why is that, I'm not sure; maybe the style of moderation is part of the reason. But maybe some day reddit will finally eat HN, and, after some years or decades, it will make sense to ask why people are still here!
I'm always nervous when people share these kinds of quirks about HN. It feels like its one viral YouTube or TikTok "pro tip" video away before it starts flooding with "can't log in to my google account".
Maybe it's an irrational thought, though.
Seems every week a shady enterprise that got its stripe account locked down is on the front page complaining about stripe while being vague / evasive about what it is they actually sell.
Also, the worry was that if word got out that HN gets you secret access to support at companies then it would get overused and that access would dry up.
I'm already at the point where even if someone legitimately innocent gets swept up in a stripe ban I just assume they are another scoundrel trying one last Hail Mary attempt here to get their account back.
It's run by the startup accelerator YCombinator, and it often has launches, job ads etc. from YC companies. YC employs a professional moderator (user name dang), and pays for hosting, so they don't sell ads on it. In "return", YC gains startups from the community here.
Although IMHO, this site has attracted toxicity and off-topic articles in more recent years. Now in the dawn of AI generated content, not many forums are going to survive the new era.
Now image 150,000 AI bots in addition. That's actually an overkill, you don't need that many. But those bots (or whoever rules them) will rule the discourse. This is of course assuming that you can't tell the difference of a bot and a human.
Then of course we have to ask, what's bot owner's agenda. Political? Promotions? Educational?
The human voice is going to drown in there. Humans get exhausted, emotional, personal, just to name a few. The bots are always in the zone. Human are not going to last an argument with an (good) AI botnet.
We're not there yet. But there's so much money in that category, that as soon as the tech will allow we will be.
Imagine a HN where AI finds and submits the articles, provides a neutral title and brief description, generates high-level discussion about it, and moderates for bad behavior. It would be a win for everyone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
- Post then appears under "new" (a chronological list of all posts), where anyone can upvote or downvote it - and/or discuss it in the comments section.
- If the post gains any traction (by quickly accruing votes, comments, etc.), it will then show up on the main page (list of "currently trending" posts) as well.
- Increasing age of a post will cause it to go lower and lower and eventually drop out of the main page again, typically within hours.
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Typically any more or less big tech news will make it to the main page pretty quickly. Often much faster than you'd hear about it anywhere else.
That being said, you'll definitely find a lot of stuff that isn't news as well.
Also there's a heap of mean comments like mine. But it's all in the spirit of intellectual curiosity. It's not like reddit, that's for sure.
Welcome and read the community guidelines. Seriously.
It's also an amazing internet art experiment on how to establish reputation and legitimacy automatically.
It's only in the last couple of days that real humans have stumbled onto the site. Welcome to you and all the early adopters!
According to the Omphalos hypothesis, God created the redshift in light received from other galaxies to fool humans (beginning in the 20th century, but not before that time) into thinking that the universe is billions of years old. Among the many problems with this hypothesis (including lack of any evidence and lack of reference to the phenomenon in the Bible) is that it would require that God adjusted the shift in exquisitely precise ways for each of the billions of individual galaxies, and did so to deceive humans about the age of the universe in a way that was not detectable by humans until the 20th century.[6]
Think of it as commentary on news by hackers with hackers being the definition of people that like to build stuff and are interested in STEM, not the breaching info-security definition.