Very smart people. Far less snark than other open communities, except on certain topics. But the snark will get downvoted most of the time.
Humor is a little suppressed here, but after going to Reddit, I think that's a good thing. Otherwise, attempts at humor becomes disruptive to the conversation.
I'd love to see an experiment with no downvotes. For a long time HN was my only "talking with strangers on the internet" spot but in the last couple of years I've joined a few old school forums.
I found that no downvotes meant that people who disagreed ended up talking to each other the most (since you can't downvote, if you disagree you need to argue), leading them to become rivals and then friends. Actual synthesis of viewpoints happened.
Perhaps HN is too big for that effect and it would turn into chaos, but I'd be curious to see it tried.
HN bars downvotes until you hit 501 karma, but maybe the limit needs to be increased. I’ve often had people downvote my posts without explaining why they disagreed with it, which stifles opportunities to broaden my mind to other perspectives that other people have.
Something like Lesswrong’s dual voting system of up/downvotes + agree/disagree may also help, but I’ve never engaged with discussions on Lesswrong to tell if this works on larger communities such as this one.
There was a bot on FB that posted random submissions from Hacker News. I think that was a good study of no downvotes.
Comments get loaded with unpopular opinions, which is often things like the ineffectiveness of masks in stopping pandemics, or people who post evidence on how dangerous vaccines are. When someone dies, someone will post all kinds of slander about them. Because there are only upvotes and no downvotes, these float to the top, and the comments are usually counted as engagement, further boosting the comment.
A lot of the most commented on submissions were actually flagged/killed on HN.
There would still be the flag mechanism, the same community, and the same rules would apply, so I'm not sure if I would draw any particular conclusion from that natural experiment.
It's certainly possible it would turn out the same way though.
Communities are self-selective too. I moved far away from the HN Facebook, haha. dang also described downvotes as white blood cells - they can backfire, but are powerful and necessary ways for the community to moderate itself.
Welp, HN has nerdsniped me again: After some unpaid pondering, here's my suggestion for a middle ground on downvoting:
1) Reduce issue-related downvoting by only allowing some random subset of the current active users to downvote, a different set per post. Don't let the user know their vote won't work in advance, but tell them after.
2) Reduce vote sockpuppeting by recording which pairs of voters downvoted a post, then disallow that pair from downvoting a post again. This includes votes that failed due to 1).
humor does sometimes get upvoted for sure. But most people just don't come to HN for humor. For me and many others it serves a way to keep a pulse on tech and tech sentiment.
Some dislike the site design. It's one of my favorites though. It's just...different from most other places on the internet nowadays. I think it compliments the type of community/content here, too.
Politics seems largely community/self moderated here, it is not outright avoided but purely ideological posts tend to get down voted or ignored. It seems a nice balance and I do not have to tiptoe around accidently triggering people who are ruled by the absolutes of their ideology and derailing a thread.
It results in a community which can be somewhat slack when it comes to the rules, makes everything more conversational which is important for having quality discussion on anything.
On any topic it’s common that the people who comment have both range and depth of experience. From people who built foundational technologies 30 years ago to unicorn founders/C-suite responding directly to user feedback (and lots of super thoughtful folks in between).
Many people unfortunately do, especially on threads with a certain amount of politics to it, and without engaging in a conversation to explain why they disagree.
Better validation to your thoughts, more so on tech. No Ads/Images/GIFs/Flash; lesser distraction. Talk to the point or thread is downvoted. Better managed Karma! Difficult to fake it.
The Signal to Noise Ratio isn’t that great. Depending on topics and your level of understanding on the subject. It could be 90-95% noise. But if you compare to other internet forum, which could easily be 99% or 99.9999999999999% noise. Measuring signals only HN is many orders of magnitude better.
And then, possibly the most important part, the quality of signal. You have SVPs, CTO of not small startups, but large established companies, many veterans over 60s talking about the good old days from Mainframe, IBM, Microsoft era. Engineers from TSMC, ASML, Intel and Samsung Foundry. People working for NASA, Government officials, Lawyers, Scientist from ITER, Experts working on State of the Art Compiler techniques. Engineers from WebKit, Safari, Edge, Chrome, People who worked on the original USB-C ( Hint not Apple ), and the list goes on and on. ( I am not going to name them )
While I agree with some of the comments about high SNR, I’ve noticed an increasing Redditization of HN, where a shallow, snarky comment or joke gets upvoted to the top. Some voting limits (say, a user can give out no more than 10 upvotes a day) may help.
Others have pointed out to several other points. I agree with those. My personal reasons are these:
1. Without HN, I would not have known about Nand2Tetris, OCaml, Non-Linear Dynamics, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, or Aaron Schwartz. In a way, HN has changed my life. I came to know and love functional programming, I came to know about great resources on Computation, Programming, advanced Math and so many more things. Culture outside of HN is much duller, and no offense, are for people with much lesser intelligence. Especially for someone like me who weren’t born in Stanford or UCLA-B uni campus. I am sure that there are places with better culture exist- that are better fit for the intellectual minds. But, HN is a paradise to me. It honestly changed my life. I come here regularly for the educational resources recommended in comments and posted here as stories.
2. It is a good news source, and that news that are super interesting for hackers are encouraged to post here- is super nice.
3. It has less political noise and the discussions are nuanced. I can find, albeit in minority, sane right wing voices here. Where all other major outlets are overrun by the super-woke ideology, and even sane RW voices are deplatformed and banned from forums, it is refreshing to see some opposing voices in here. (I am a common-sense abiding humanist, and definitely more left than right, I still see reasons in many RW arguments and agree to some of their policies.) It's very nice that, in HN, RW voices are not supressed.
My MO on most article driven forums including this one is to skim the comments first to see if the article is worth reading. This site has, by far, the highest chance of me actually going off to read the article.
A lot of fluff in this post's comments. I will be brutally honest and simply say there is nothing better.
The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.
The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.
It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.
Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.
No politics, on topic discussions, well moderated, good insights in the comments, surfaces news I want to see without many temptations I need to avoid.
43 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadHumor is a little suppressed here, but after going to Reddit, I think that's a good thing. Otherwise, attempts at humor becomes disruptive to the conversation.
I found that no downvotes meant that people who disagreed ended up talking to each other the most (since you can't downvote, if you disagree you need to argue), leading them to become rivals and then friends. Actual synthesis of viewpoints happened.
Perhaps HN is too big for that effect and it would turn into chaos, but I'd be curious to see it tried.
Something like Lesswrong’s dual voting system of up/downvotes + agree/disagree may also help, but I’ve never engaged with discussions on Lesswrong to tell if this works on larger communities such as this one.
Comments get loaded with unpopular opinions, which is often things like the ineffectiveness of masks in stopping pandemics, or people who post evidence on how dangerous vaccines are. When someone dies, someone will post all kinds of slander about them. Because there are only upvotes and no downvotes, these float to the top, and the comments are usually counted as engagement, further boosting the comment.
A lot of the most commented on submissions were actually flagged/killed on HN.
It's certainly possible it would turn out the same way though.
1) Reduce issue-related downvoting by only allowing some random subset of the current active users to downvote, a different set per post. Don't let the user know their vote won't work in advance, but tell them after.
2) Reduce vote sockpuppeting by recording which pairs of voters downvoted a post, then disallow that pair from downvoting a post again. This includes votes that failed due to 1).
It results in a community which can be somewhat slack when it comes to the rules, makes everything more conversational which is important for having quality discussion on anything.
Bonus: Watch new JS frameworks every week.
For serious: Know how many people agree/disagree with you. (I recommend HN to change upvote/downvote into agree/disagree).
I've also learned that there's an attitude type here that I struggle to appreciate. There's a negativity that makes this place almost unbearable.
I'm terrified of my first "Show HN".
And the lack of clout, images, gaming too.
The Signal to Noise Ratio isn’t that great. Depending on topics and your level of understanding on the subject. It could be 90-95% noise. But if you compare to other internet forum, which could easily be 99% or 99.9999999999999% noise. Measuring signals only HN is many orders of magnitude better.
And then, possibly the most important part, the quality of signal. You have SVPs, CTO of not small startups, but large established companies, many veterans over 60s talking about the good old days from Mainframe, IBM, Microsoft era. Engineers from TSMC, ASML, Intel and Samsung Foundry. People working for NASA, Government officials, Lawyers, Scientist from ITER, Experts working on State of the Art Compiler techniques. Engineers from WebKit, Safari, Edge, Chrome, People who worked on the original USB-C ( Hint not Apple ), and the list goes on and on. ( I am not going to name them )
It’s unfortunate a lot of them no longer do HN.
1. Without HN, I would not have known about Nand2Tetris, OCaml, Non-Linear Dynamics, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, or Aaron Schwartz. In a way, HN has changed my life. I came to know and love functional programming, I came to know about great resources on Computation, Programming, advanced Math and so many more things. Culture outside of HN is much duller, and no offense, are for people with much lesser intelligence. Especially for someone like me who weren’t born in Stanford or UCLA-B uni campus. I am sure that there are places with better culture exist- that are better fit for the intellectual minds. But, HN is a paradise to me. It honestly changed my life. I come here regularly for the educational resources recommended in comments and posted here as stories.
2. It is a good news source, and that news that are super interesting for hackers are encouraged to post here- is super nice.
3. It has less political noise and the discussions are nuanced. I can find, albeit in minority, sane right wing voices here. Where all other major outlets are overrun by the super-woke ideology, and even sane RW voices are deplatformed and banned from forums, it is refreshing to see some opposing voices in here. (I am a common-sense abiding humanist, and definitely more left than right, I still see reasons in many RW arguments and agree to some of their policies.) It's very nice that, in HN, RW voices are not supressed.
* Low-effort comments generally don't get upvoted.
The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.
The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.
It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.
Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.