Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
I follow posts from Hacker News using RSS, specifically https://hnrss.github.io/. It's great to consume posts at my own pace, but often a discussion is already dead when I participate.
It's an acceptable trade-off to me. But I wonder if others would also be interested in longer term discussions, and if there could be a way to have them. I thought about old forums, where old threads get bumped even if they were created years ago, and wondered if an hybrid model could be of interest to HN users.
Just a thought, I'm glad to have this site as is. Enjoy your Sunday everyone!
149 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadIs there a middle ground? I don't know. Edit : Daily/Weeky email (=slower) updates ?
As for old threads getting bumped, I think this is here equivalent to reposting the link (or re-asking). The old thread is almost "dead", but this is how it works "in real life discussions". So maybe that is not so bad. This is (as a call it) a (fast) stream model, where there is no (direct) accumulation : it is more twitter than Stack Overflow, more blogs than Wikis.
Forums and chats do have a solution to too big size : they can just split into others (or subforums) once the linear discussion becomes unmanageable.
I don't get your solution. It seems to me that HN threads are already tree-like.
I sometimes read the new ones by first reading all of them, and later manually scanning every comment newer than X hours, but it's tedious.
I guess a system that would automatically hid old comments (except their immediate parent) might work ?
I know there are a couple third-party services that you can sign up on to monitor that for you (they email you when someone replies to you, AFAIK), but I opted to just go with the flow and hit my "threads" link every now and then to see if someone has replied to something.
Agreed - built-in, opt-in HN notifs (or easy-to-opt-out) would be good to help with what OP is asking about, IMO.
It would be similar to a forum.
All and all, reliving prior content and/or having a complex multifunctional interface would take away from the centrality and freshness of the home page experience.
I have wondered if dang would be open to allowing community to contribute to various approved feature additions; for example, better search, night mode, duplicate detection, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472535
For clarity, this is how you search HN using Google:
https://google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com
And honestly, I love that approach. In my time on HN features have rolled out slowly, and you can tell that they were selected very carefully as being important quality of life improvements that don't fundamentally change the interactions.
Most features that people propose that HN needs are likely to substantially or subtly alter the dynamics, with potentially catastrophic results over the long haul.
I use HN replies (and RSS)... but very few others do, so the the change of getting a reply to this comment is low, even though I got here within a day.
When I say a system, I'm including everything, including the community. It's not any one part of HN, it's the way all the parts interact. Seemingly small changes can have a dramatic impact on the way the system operates, which includes the community. Suddenly different voices become amplified while others feel marginalized, and it's hard to predict if that will be a good outcome.
I'm not saying that it would for sure be a problem, but I sympathize with dang wanting to be very careful before introducing something like that.
Not that I am complaining but this place often elevates pretentious, "high brow" shit posting as opposed to the vanilla thing practiced the us commoners. As if rich tech bro's trolling is better. Gotta say, this place really like smelling its own farts.
However, there's a lot of good stuff, too, and the moderation is better than /. where the majority of visible posts are made by the same 10 guys. Been like that for past 20 years.
Sorry. Got carried away. That beer had 7% alcohol in it. How is this place anything like the phpbb (now, xenforo) style forums?
A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if folks are curious to dig deeper into the history.
IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great.
This is where I am at. The notion that HN posts die off relatively quickly (i.e. within ~48h) is potentially a very important part of what gives them the quality they have today.
If every post was eternal and duplicates were always closed, you'd wind up with effectively perma-stickied comments in these god threads that become the law for that topic until the end of time.
You could have an AI to summarize the last N comments, giving an overview on the most recent opinion.
I do this informally: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., but that's all just prep for one day fitting it nicely into the software.
For example, are all the various ChatGPT threads related? What about coverage of an event (e.g. there are six or seven threads regarding the recent earthquake in Turkiye—all empty apart from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672314 —however I've seen it where basically the same story is being carried across several outlets and discussions are on the same topics, just one post gets more traction than the other).
It's easy enough to link articles which refer to the same exact source and mark duplicates, but harder to link posts which rely on different sources to cover the exact same topic.
I used "slrn" to read news and it was great. It would only show me new posts. I could kill a thread to filter it so I didn't have to see it. I could just hit one button to go to the next post on the thread or to the next thread.
In many ways it was superior to modern web based forums.
I’d say, pick any server that’s close enough and just play with it for a while. That way you can get a feel for what it’s like, and you can also see if you end up repeatedly following people from a specific server. If you do, you can move over to that server if you want.
I started on hachyderm.io and it seems vaguely like what you describe, though I also follow a few people from infosec.exchange
The server you join effects who are the people who can ban you. Lately, mstdn.science has been banning scientists who have discussed the coronavirus lab leak theory.
(For example in a new proposed rocket technology, after 100 or 200 comments there will be a huge discussion about how to use it to get FTL travel like in a popular sci-fi movie.)
I did a Show HN back in April and have been quietly continuing to develop the site. Open to ideas/suggestions as well.
https://sqwok.im
Shallow, reflexive engagement (especially from a "large" number of participants) has no actual value except to platforms needing eyeballs for ad revenue, which isn't the HN model. So.
Brought to you by the letters I, M, and O.
However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time.
Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.
Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of her descendants here on HN? She had 11 and it's been more than half a century now…”. Minutes later…
> Hi! I’m her great-great granddaughter. I actually met the thru-hiker mentioned in the comment above, Dixie, in October 21 and we still keep in touch!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321521
Anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful and tons more are out there, so if anyone finds a post that belongs on it, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com. I figure this'll be useful for something someday.
Thank you for all you do, dang.
In lieu of a built-in solution I've been using https://www.hnreplies.com/ which seems to work well.
To encourage longer term discussion without changing the existing design, one idea is to add longer term notification to keep the engagement on a thread discussion, e.g. a daily summary of the responses to my comments coming as a notification. One is not constantly bombarded with instant notifications but still have a chance to catch up on the responses.
I remember Usenet newsgroups were sync’ed daily via uucp, which forced a delayed notification of new responses.
Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification).
There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overall it has a culture of people who write well but their reasoning stinks. They have strong opinions and make assertions speculatively. I can't read any real estate investment, market or nerdy thread on Reddit without encountering armchair bullshitisms from people who happen to write well but don't research anything, and respond with hostility when questioned.
So maybe this is my way of saying, don't change HN too much.
Reddit may be fine for very specific subs, but overall it's a real mess where power hungry mods have fun without any kind of accountability.
HN does not have this kind of behavior and I don't really miss the lengthy conversations that can be found in other forums.
I've said far more hostile things out loud about Agile at my workplace to senior management.
Three months later, somebody didn’t like a political comment I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post, and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned people about a criminal’s behavior. Heh.
I've been on reddit since before subreddits existed and I've never been banned. Now I'm sure you've had your run-ins with some unhinged mods now and then but to be banned 100 times, you should probably take an honest look at your own behavior.
Do they really think they are a force for positive change?
Isn’t every other fictional story some parable about how the means don’t justify the ends? It feels weird to me that people don’t absorb that idea at some point.
Again, that's just what I think makes sense and personally believe. It's certainly possible I'm incorrect.
Has this person never been around a group of assholes for more than a few hours at a time? Some places are toxic and attract toxic personalities. Reddit is one of those places(the internet as a whole, really)
Did a moderator ban you from a subreddit?
Or did Reddit ban your account?
Some subreddits have trigger-happy mods that will ban people for everything from the wrong tone to simply holding the wrong opinion. Subreddits like the Lex Fridman sub are famous for banning anyone who posts comments that aren't in total glowing agreement with Lex Fridman, for example.
But getting banned from Reddit, the platform, is a rare occurrence. If you're getting repeatedly banned from Reddit (not just individual subreddits) then you really should step back and take a look at how you're writing your comments.
There are so many possible reasons for being banned in a subreddit.
Mods on Reddit are pretty free to do what they want. There are guidelines by Reddit but they are nothing more than suggestions and unless the mods of a subreddit are racists, they won't do anything. Sometimes not even then look how long it took for /r/TheDonald to being banned.
Ok, but what was your comment?
And next question, would you have phrased that comment around here in the same way?
Top tier players aren't always going to be right about everything, but the things for which they often get downvotes are absurd.
I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so there may be something to that (though I'd chalk it up to becoming more popular/mainstream).
Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds value to one's life, and that can make the whole website hard to give up. However, after a decade of redditing, I never saw one subreddit maintain that momentum once the larger audience poured in, which always came as a result of the perfect balance. Members of /r/subredditA will hear that /r/subredditB is similar but with better discourse, and then the wave of rufugees from /r/subredditA will pour in, ruining /r/subredditB (eg /r/Gaming and /r/Games.)
On HN, if you don't like the rules, you go find a different website.
I would mention /r/credibledefense as a counter example. It was a niche subreddit before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the aftermath got popular, but still managed to keep its quality.
But I agree with your general point, it's not a huge problem for me, though. Some subreddits get popular and thus bad, some new subreddits get created. Reddit's relative anarchy is its saving grace, communities can split/fork, but still stay within reddit platform.
Format certainly influences the quality of interactions, but there are some other strong factors as well.
I deleted the account immediately and never regretted it once. I recreated a new ne to engage in purely technical discussions.
Tl,Dr when it was primarily a text based website the discussions were better. The gifs, video, meme layout is like junk food.
So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20, you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good comment. Because your brain will process "100" before reading a paragraph of words.
“I stopped watching after the second season. The writing had become so reddit.”
“The steak itself was good but this sauce is a bit reddit.”
“Rose Street is a good night out but Raeburn Place is completely reddit.”
"Redditsplain"
v. "To make confident, even angry assertions about facts without a strong backing, but in a literary and well-reasoned style. To make bold statements about a subject where one is still a dilettante."
I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes are default good, and "rationalists" are the only ones who see the world for how it really is. The contrarian superiority is becoming vaguely reminiscent of conspiracy theorist circles. Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains.
I finally unsubscribed after a series of posts where posters wrote at length about their frustrations with dating, blaming their failures on women and women's behaviors as if women were a foreign species. The straw that broke the camel's back was when someone complained about taking women out on dates and not receiving sex in return for their effort, which I assumed would have been readily downvoted and dismissed. Instead, it was upvoted (100+ votes) and most of the upvoted comments agreed with the OP's take. When weird incel ideology becomes front and center accepted in a community, I'm out.
I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations.
To your point here - that's one of the points I was making above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit of looking in the mirror here) that good writing can cover up shoddy thinking. I've made a concerted effort to sometimes pause when I'm replying to something, and look things up to make sure what what I just said is true is actually true. Probably because I ran into smart people who questioned things here on HN.
One time I was replying to some sort of big article/thread in a real estate sub which touched upon housing affordability, the number of unregulated versus unregulated units in my city. I replied with a pretty neutral tone and linked the city's yearly datasheet in a PDF format which backed up what I said in terms of the breakdown of housing types in the city. There was a pie graph in the PDF document.
Well, I got downvoted to grey/invisible and there were a ton of replies in the style of "How arrogant that you think you're going to make us read THAT." I thought it was incredible how the people reacted.
Could it be that instead of stating in the comment both the relevant, precise figures and a conclusion derived from them, you merely linked out to the PDF in a way that only by reading the PDF could your point be fully seen?
By and large, on forums and social media it is heavily frowned upon to rely on outlinks and open ended reasoning. As in the line of thought: "if you will not state your point clearly for everyone to see at a glance and then back it up with sources, why should I bother?".
It may seem unreasonable or even anti-intellectual at first until you draw parallels with in-person discussion: imagine someone describing their point in detail for 10 minutes only for the other person to hand over a whole book and say "you're ignorant, go read this and learn why you're so wrong".
I will repeat again: I do not know what you actually said in that comment, but I've seen this play out a few times and my gut tells me that unless the point was extremely controversial, a deluge of downvotes is likely explained by this scenario.
I’m afraid this is the primary value proposition for ChatGPT. It’s a power tool for writers like that. So the signal to noise ratio is about to get much worse.
Short, spiteful condescension that circles back to the authors preferences (HN). No explicit language, I guess, but I learned nothing except some internet rando has a BS opinion.
If you did any research you’d see the same on HN.
Public forums are noise generators which, once reasoned around, makes it more fun. I email academics doing work I find interesting for the best signal; most reply.