> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.
Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the 10 best links every day.
But I don’t recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is much less so these days.
The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.
We kind of already have a "Top HN stories" list, and it's the hidden /active URL[1] which sorts by number of comments [made within N hours?]. Not everyone agrees with this. dang himself doesn't, and has said he thinks /active tends to end up with the threads that devolved into flamewars or got otherwise "too overheated." Fine, that's probably also true, but what News actually matters? Some package I've never heard of being ported to Rust? or some controversial event that broadly impacts the tech industry or computing, which yes happened to get a lot of "spirited" discussion?
The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very, very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated.
If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles that probably affect you in some way, you can't beat /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the comments.
> Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm.
I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting to others. If the site becomes successful and more mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on everything and expertise on nothing.
I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless.
The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless.
I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
You can look at older HN threads since they're all still up. There's definitely been a "mean reversion" here as well, but it seems to vary per topic. I think the threads that have suffered the most are the ones about #dramaoftheweek which as you say tends to attract folks with opinions on everything and experience in nothing.
I don't consume HN via RSS, so I am just speculating, but perhaps the RSS feed has a lot of turnover. HN on the web is nice because links stay on the front page for a while, but a chronological delivery such as RSS might be messier.
The "messy" nature of RSS feeds is an advantage when dealing with sites like HN since you're not affected by any type of ranking mechanism, i.e. you get to see those posts which for some reason or another are quickly moved off the front page.
> Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in the past handful of days than I ever have.
HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit.
EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it stays (close) to it's original intent.
I feel like I've heard people saying that about HN every month for the past 8 years and I've never observed any real pattern. Think there's just some observation bias going on: a website always seems like it's recently been worse than you remember, at any point in time, because you remember recent bad things but not further back ones.
HN has had a huge influx in users since December, probably a result of the Twitter ownership transition and the Reddit blackout. I tend to agree that a lot of the worse elements of those posting cultures are starting to leak through here and HN is starting to feel more like a generic tech subreddit but I'm not sure whether that'll be sustained or not.
Because you quoted a passage with about 5 statements that he could have been "wrong" about, and didn't specify which one you were talking about. (insert snarky emoticon here)
It was literally one statement. Please don't pull my leg like this because this site does have guidelines and it is very hard to obey by them when you're being challenged with ignorance.
> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.
The statements that could have been interpreted as the subject of your "at the time he was completely wrong" sentence:
1. Hacker News is awesome.
2. It's getting too big.
3. The value of reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page.
4. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now.
5 A digest of the 10 best items from Hacker News would be a really good Slashdot.
Hey thanks for following the guidelines despite my "ignorance", but you're basically telling me that if you could, you would be insulting me right now.
I'm not typing all of this to be snarky or to do a "technically..." gotcha. I also didn't know which statement you were actually talking about when I read your comment.
I've been here a while and I think the truth is somewhere in between. HN has grown and shifted somewhat in the process, but ultimately dodged the bullet of cancerous growth. My take is that because HN started as a side-project of a successful technologist and investor who made his money elsewhere, there was never the financial pressure that hits most online services. Couple that with shared interests, strong culture, and a healthy dose of even-handed and principled moderation (thank you Dang!), and HN ended up with way-above average sustainability.
I've no idea what the intent here is but I've noticed the term having moved from its original use of describing a sad subculture of poorly-socialized and sometimes disturbing young men to a more general lazy male-shaming term, often used to intimidate traditional masculine voices in a similar way "slut" is used to shut down women who don't apologise for being women.
I don't but its a different matter to use a term like "sexist" compared to "incel".
Both are often used as insults where an argument is lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is almost always toxic and bullying.
Hi as well! One day we should do a get together of the people that made the top 100 web sites work prior to 1998 or so. I'm sure there would be lots of interesting stories.
Hehe, yes, definitely. The ratio of interesting content:junk would be nice to visualize. In the early days of the web I hardly ever ran into a website that wasn't interesting. /. (why not ./ by the way?) was a nice way to discover new stuff when that ratio first started to decrease.
the new llm craze should make moderation and metamoderation even easier. i think we will see a resurgence of some slashdot inventions, albeit more automated.
collect votes from power users. extrapolate how they would have voted on stories they havent seen. feed people stories based on similar voting patterns, to test if you predicted their votes correctly. maybe a synthesis of two random voters accurately predicts a power voter.
id like to see something akin to a reverse subreddit. instead of having posts, i add 50 people to a list and turn them into a voting block. then i follow multiple voting blocks. i can follow other peoples voting blocks. my feed tells me which voting block elected to show me a story. let teams of people build voting blocks together, collaboratively. different voting blocks can have different purposes, like populism or expertise. being able to stumble into well made, premade blocks solves discovery and initialization problems, without having to bootstrap a feed from a low number of my own votes.
there are so many building blocks of good ideas, of which metamoderation is still one of the best, that it leaves me both exited for a future where somebody picks up the baton, and disheartened that somebody hasnt yet. is it time for a slashslashdotdot?
I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.
The source is that the HN mods know about Slashdot, and people have been asking for those features here for 15 years, and they haven't been implemented.
Thanks for old slashdot, was one of my favorite sites and got me into linux and cool open technology back then. btw the thing you are looking for in the article (10 best stories from hackernews) has already been built (not by me), check out: https://brutalist.report/topic/tech?limit=10
Im going to join the mini-appreciate session here and add that there’s still lines from Geeks in Space that give me a smile and chuckle when they pop into my mind well on 20 years later.
> I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what's happening around the universe.
This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!
The sad fact is that the fediverse has the worse of both worlds where, in the end, it still seems like following a block list of an admin who is accountable to no one (instead of a popular person with some specific track record) and the fragmentation means the discoverability and interaction is minimal.
Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
having each persons identity tied to the instance makes the whole thing way too unstable and centralized. identity needs to exist outside the bounds of instances.
So having a central identity has pros and cons, right? One of the cons is you’d then be beholden to whomever runs the identity service and that takes away a lot of the autonomy of the Fediverse.
you can have decentralized identity separate from the instances.
maybe all the lemmyverse instances share an identity chain, and all the mastadon instances share an identity chain, and they are both cross compatible with any other instance variant that supports the standard.
Join a member-owned co-op instance :) If set-up correctly the admins/mods are legally bound to be responsible to the members of the co-op.
Judging by your comment though, I think we prefer very different levels of moderation, and I'd agree that culturally Masto trends towards heavier moderation.
I don't know why everyone is talking about mastodon. I'm not taking about mastodon. I've never used it nor do I like twitter as a space for conversation.
I'm talking about the fediverse in general (activity pub protocol) and the paradigm of "basically following a block list" which, after seeing how mono narrative and US centric some online spaces tend to be, I don't find appealing.
In particular my qualms were comparing it to the likes of reddit, which is usually heavily moderated.
I appreciate the suggestion of co-op. Don't think it will solve the "as an individual I don't want to be bound by the majority's Blocklist when people are so prone to behave like mobs" but I do understand the appeal. It works as a small wrbbof trust. För very small communities, it can work. But not much chance to grow and be an interesting compendium of ideas and shared content.
I mention Masto w.r.t. its moderation culture. I find other corners of the fedi have far different/laissez-faire moderation norms (e.g. Pleroma). Regardless of what the activitypub app is, moderation norms and moires form.
Large instance sizes are definitely a challenge re: accountability and much ink has been spilled on what the optimal instance size should be. There is definitely a sweet spot where one has strong representation but also belongs to a larger community that is capable, among other things, to maintain operations.
It's impressive that you have evaluated 20k+ instances to summarize the Fediverse.
I have accounts on 5 separate Mastodon instances, and on none of them is the experience as you describe it. You also seem to believe that if you get on an instance run by a reactionary martinet that you are somehow forced to stay there or stop using the Fediverse. Of course, a lot of people seem to believe this about Twitter.
It's impressive how you don't get that the point stands because of the paradigm of users being tied to instances and not having the ability to construct themselves, what they want to see.
You're comfortable with whatever you're doing and that's fine but for someone who is looking for my usecase ,which is more akin to Reddit and being able to pick the subs I see for myself, it's absolutely limiting.
I don't care about mastodon or twitter but that's beside the point.
My points stand. If you want to address them make sure you read them again.
Sounds like what you need is more like an overlaid comment section, perhaps through an app or browser extension, which you can apply to any website and article. Would be cool if such a thing existed.
People did build things like that a couple of times, but it’s probably telling that my last vague recollection of one is several US newspapers piling up on one of them because people used it to put mean and perhaps even hurtful things on pages of news websites (opt-in via a browser extension, mind you).
Users can move to other instances on Mastodon without tremendous effort, and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical. Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you? Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself.
I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
> Users can move to other instances on Mastodon without tremendous effort
Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendous or not
> and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical.
What a disingenuous comment. You went from "have surveyed the 200k instances" to "it's hypothetical then".
No. It has already happened in a few of the instances recommended on Reddit. It happened in the first 2 I created accounts for.
> Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you?
I was following one that I thought was more open than the initial one I found myself in and suddenly it wasn't and the argument of some users was "of course the admin can defederate at any point for vague reasons"
> Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself.
I'm also capable of hosting my own email and plenty other things but it's unnecessary effort for the value. It really is amazing how after disingenuous takes I get a ridiculous appeal to geekdom or something.
> I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
You're puzzled because you're unwilling to read them for what they are and instead produce strawmen in order to deny they are a reality.
Mastodon works for you. Great. But my points stand and are in no way rebuked by your "it's hypothetical", "wait, it's easy", wait, it's not easy but a HN type should do it.
I wasn't trying to rebuke you. I was just genuinely confused because I haven't ever seen such drama go down at all. I just use mastodon the way I used to use twitter, which is to say, i scroll through it every now and then and see posts by my favorite podcast hosts. Most of them are on mastodon.social and most of the rest have self-hosted instances of their own. Nobody's defederated anybody amongst these instances that I know of, so I wasn't aware it was a big problem on the mainstream instances.
Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.
> Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
You can always run your own instance for yourself. Also in practice I’ve not found it hard to find instances who’s block lists I agree with.
You don't have to self host. That was a suggestion if you couldn't find a single other instance out of the thousands that exist that meet your requirements.
Signal vs noise ratio is too high. My point is that the model of Blocklist from others is not enticing for any individualistisc user who values diversification of ideas and the fact that the default makes it a bad burden for the user who wants to try that, means that communities won't be formed that don't have that blocklist mindset, one way or another.
The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down (having already fragmented the communities unless they self host their instance, again, creating burden on the user for more Accounts)
I get the sense that you’ve not tried it and you’re speaking extremely generally. That’s fine, you don’t have to. I’ll stop here though until you have an informed perspective.
Except that I have, extensively, but hey, calling me ignorant is really a great point instead of refuting anything I say.
I think you forgot this is HN where the standards are a bit higher and you get exposed to arguments that you may dislike. Account of 17 days too, so ironic.
Your description of the fediverse isn’t accurate. You’ve had a few people tell you that and your attack on my supposed inexperience with HN isn’t relevant (and is also ironic). Apologies if you took my assumption as an insult.
In hackernews you're supposed to explain WHY. Some have been constructive points and I've answered. None really countered the problem and some accepted it's part of the paradigm.
You went with an ad hominem and double down on having no arguments.
This isn’t saying anything other than your not a fan. Which as I said is fine.
> My point is that the model of Blocklist from others is not enticing for any individualistisc user who values diversification of ideas and the fact that the default makes it a bad burden for the user who wants to try that, means that communities won't be formed that don't have that blocklist mindset, one way or another. The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down.
This was unspecific/vague and not an accurate description of the fediverse. It’s a very diverse (unfortunately so in some cases) group of communities that interact with each other. Or don’t if they choose.
The value in allowing each instance to handle their own block list is that it scales and allows you to choose a server that shares your perspective. And basically if you disagree that this is the case, you’re free to change that and that’s the point. You have all of the choice.
You're repeating your points without refuting mine. You're endorsing my points with the "you're free to choose your own Blocklist", which:
- you aren't as an individual except through an admin who decides on their instance or the high barrier of running your own.
The choice I have is it to love or leave each instance and pay the price of fragmentation and user registration per instance, plus having to switch.
In any case, you've unwillingly agreed with me by explaining my "choice" after calling me uninformed and now vague.
It's funny how you also see diversity as an unfortunate. Says a lot.
Fundamentally, it's not putting the true power of granularity and easy choice on the user but forming small very narrow minded communities at the whim of an admin, with a high cost of transfer (unlike a sub where you might disagre with a mod decisiom).
Funnily enough, feels less free choice than Reddit in some aspects.
They were always centralized. I can't comprehend how anyone could've thought otherwise. They're paying for the servers, they have executives and boardrooms, they're making deals with advertisers, and had content policies since day 1.
I think it was more that “news” was coming directly from sources of authority rather than traditional news outlets. Why read WSJ, NYT, etc. tech column when I can follow my favorite tech people and get the news I care about + more directly from the people making the news?
Obviously it’s not turned out that way and hopefully federation saves us all, but I don’t know if protocols will ever win over marketing.
All of the current large US social media sites would be perfect if ran similarly to wikipedia, moreso the transparency and openness rather than the non-profit corporate model (but that certainly wouldn't hurt anything).
It can be for-profit but it can’t be publicly traded. The reason we lost Twitter is because they legally had to sell to Elon. The reason we’ll lose Reddit is because they are going public and will legally be required to chase the money.
I think you have that backwards - Elon never wanted Twitter, he just wanted to see his name in some headlines and make people run around pulling their hair for a bit. However he messed up and put himself in a position where he had to buy Twitter for far more then it was worth and he was held to it. All the top people he fired day one were more then happy to parachute away - was the best thing for them. There is no way he will ever make back that 44 billion on Twitter, he’ll be lucky if he can pay the interest payments on it with what Twitter generates. More then likely all the people who went into Twitter with him will get deals on his other ventures and get their money back that way.
I’m not following all that. Someone made an offer, the board legally had to sell as it was in the interest of the owners (the shareholders). What else matters? If it’s deemed to be in the interest of shareholders for Reddit to sell off every sub to a corporate, they’ll do that too.
You’re both kinda right — yes GP’s evaluation was (probably) why the Elon transaction happened, and also it would not have had to happen if the owners were a handful of private individuals who didn’t mind passing up a majorly overvalued offer like that.
Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.
Yea. Owners can say no if and only they really are the owners. Being privately owned does not ensure good stewardship but it allows it. Case and point will be Reddit once it goes public. Every single person in tech should take a corporate law class and it should be required in undergrad.
Agreed, Wikipedia should be the model. A good enough organization with financial independence and a mandate can work. Nothing's perfect but we've become too adverse to creating institutions and expecting them to maintain trust. We can't just engineer our way out of every social problem.
> People get bored fairly quickly, but the rare person never gets bored ever, and you have to be very careful of that person because they might be your best user or they might be a terrible person. And if you give them too much control they could do bad things.
I disagree with his point that HN is being reddit-ized especially given reddit's recent mishegoss. The overall comment quality around here is still quite high.
Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it never quite "gets there" because people still make this complaint all the time.
I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum.
One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4 redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the new design so hard to use.
Assuming that crowd isn't mostly the crowd that's already left over the API and nsfw issues, as well as the general unpleasant attitude the CEO has toward the user base. Lemmy sure has gotten a lot more traffic in the last few weeks.
Yeah, Slashdot's UI refresh definitely killed the site for me. Reddit was a breath of fresh air by comparison. I still remember when a coworker told me about it back in 2012. I literally stopped browsing Slashdot ever since that day.
Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit.
It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of experience.
The sad thing is that having a high quality site seems to be actually worth little to the owners of the site.
If your income is advertising, engagement and users with little impulse control seem to be the thing that brings value. And there seem to be few other ways to monetize a site.
Exactly. The only thing that really makes HN "work" is that YC has a very different incentive structure for what they get out of this site, versus all the other news aggregator/social media sites out there who need to maximize revenue.
Heh. Clearly, Reddit only survived their redesign because they kept the old one around too. All the cranky nerds have still never accepted the new one what, 8 years later?
Tbh I find new Reddit far more usable than old, but perhaps if I had a slow computer or didn’t run JS or something, I could disagree?
The thing about slashdot is they tolerated/encouraged low-quality posts ("first post!") from the start - and it worked... for some people while there were also good quality posts. But I think it had the problem that when some factor causes your good posts to decline, the garbage ratio goes up and then you can't recover. I've seen similar dynamics with smaller forums - tolerating various kind of bullshit can work for a fair while but the end is sudden.
I'd say HN has overall declined in quality over the last years but it's managed to avoid a precipitous decline by having basic standards.
It also allowed you to upvote a comment in different categories. So you could, for example, ignore the upvotes for "funny" comments in favor of "informative" ones if that's what you wanted.
And 'funny' posting didn't earn you post karma, which eventually conferred moderation powers (by lottery, sort of). IIRC there was at least one other way that they nerfed using humor to farm visibility and karma, as well.
Soylent News was a nice spinoff that the refugees founded, and it is still going, but it does suffer from a bit of a dearth of userbase. The codebase is pretty old, but design wise, it's the old Slashdot you remember from decades ago, in red rather than green.
I'm with CmdrTaco. Hacker News from the front page is way way WAY too much. I browse Hacker News through skimfeed.com. Whoever is responsible for that does a really good job combing through Hacker News and surfacing stuff I'm interested in.
On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-obnoxious ads.
The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to need to be paid, eventually.
The funny thing is that while I remember really enjoying a lot of things on the old web, I don't really remember how I found them. My guess is by either following a link and digging or by talking with people and hearing what they liked. I don't think I've had a word of mouth website recommendation in ten years.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadInteresting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the 10 best links every day.
But I don’t recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is much less so these days.
The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.
The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very, very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated.
If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles that probably affect you in some way, you can't beat /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the comments.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/active
No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless.
The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless.
I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in the past handful of days than I ever have.
HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit.
EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it stays (close) to it's original intent.
Clearly it's not. Not sure why I have to repeat myself though. ;-)
The passage you quoted is the following:
> Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.
The statements that could have been interpreted as the subject of your "at the time he was completely wrong" sentence:
1. Hacker News is awesome. 2. It's getting too big. 3. The value of reddit now is on the subreddits, not on the main page. 4. Hacker News is wobbling on that space now. 5 A digest of the 10 best items from Hacker News would be a really good Slashdot.
Hey thanks for following the guidelines despite my "ignorance", but you're basically telling me that if you could, you would be insulting me right now.
I'm not typing all of this to be snarky or to do a "technically..." gotcha. I also didn't know which statement you were actually talking about when I read your comment.
Both are often used as insults where an argument is lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is almost always toxic and bullying.
And no I can't because there's no controversial threads at the moment. But the toxicity between users is awful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco
ps. Hi Rob.
My understanding has always been that it's because slashdot sounds really funny when you say the full URL out loud the way they used to on TV:
h-t-t-p colon slash slash slash dot dot org
the new llm craze should make moderation and metamoderation even easier. i think we will see a resurgence of some slashdot inventions, albeit more automated.
collect votes from power users. extrapolate how they would have voted on stories they havent seen. feed people stories based on similar voting patterns, to test if you predicted their votes correctly. maybe a synthesis of two random voters accurately predicts a power voter.
id like to see something akin to a reverse subreddit. instead of having posts, i add 50 people to a list and turn them into a voting block. then i follow multiple voting blocks. i can follow other peoples voting blocks. my feed tells me which voting block elected to show me a story. let teams of people build voting blocks together, collaboratively. different voting blocks can have different purposes, like populism or expertise. being able to stumble into well made, premade blocks solves discovery and initialization problems, without having to bootstrap a feed from a low number of my own votes.
despite having a lot of blogspam, https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-sitcoms... ranker has a some good reranking ideas (like being able to rerank the list by bbt fan votes.)
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Circa_News?lang=en is another idea that will pop back up. Stories being composed of smaller elements, stitched together, and appended.
https://modo.org and https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news have some promise.
there are so many building blocks of good ideas, of which metamoderation is still one of the best, that it leaves me both exited for a future where somebody picks up the baton, and disheartened that somebody hasnt yet. is it time for a slashslashdotdot?
How can you have actually been there and at all believe this?
I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.
Slashdot's mod system is not complex.
...or for making money?
(edited for typo)
Cheers to you sir.
I think I remember my username, I wonder if it is possible to log in and find what I was posting about in high school... aha
This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms? Twitter and Reddit centralized power in online media, pulling content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that influencers had real power within those platforms was always naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I misunderstood!
Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100% with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange of ideas).
We have keybase, all your base belong to keybase
maybe all the lemmyverse instances share an identity chain, and all the mastadon instances share an identity chain, and they are both cross compatible with any other instance variant that supports the standard.
Judging by your comment though, I think we prefer very different levels of moderation, and I'd agree that culturally Masto trends towards heavier moderation.
I'm talking about the fediverse in general (activity pub protocol) and the paradigm of "basically following a block list" which, after seeing how mono narrative and US centric some online spaces tend to be, I don't find appealing.
In particular my qualms were comparing it to the likes of reddit, which is usually heavily moderated.
I appreciate the suggestion of co-op. Don't think it will solve the "as an individual I don't want to be bound by the majority's Blocklist when people are so prone to behave like mobs" but I do understand the appeal. It works as a small wrbbof trust. För very small communities, it can work. But not much chance to grow and be an interesting compendium of ideas and shared content.
Large instance sizes are definitely a challenge re: accountability and much ink has been spilled on what the optimal instance size should be. There is definitely a sweet spot where one has strong representation but also belongs to a larger community that is capable, among other things, to maintain operations.
I have accounts on 5 separate Mastodon instances, and on none of them is the experience as you describe it. You also seem to believe that if you get on an instance run by a reactionary martinet that you are somehow forced to stay there or stop using the Fediverse. Of course, a lot of people seem to believe this about Twitter.
You're comfortable with whatever you're doing and that's fine but for someone who is looking for my usecase ,which is more akin to Reddit and being able to pick the subs I see for myself, it's absolutely limiting.
I don't care about mastodon or twitter but that's beside the point.
My points stand. If you want to address them make sure you read them again.
Interestingly, it turns out, free speech by far benefits the poor more than the rich.
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-economics-free-speech-benefits...
So I'm willing to accept a few mean comments.
I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendous or not
> and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical.
What a disingenuous comment. You went from "have surveyed the 200k instances" to "it's hypothetical then".
No. It has already happened in a few of the instances recommended on Reddit. It happened in the first 2 I created accounts for.
> Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you?
I was following one that I thought was more open than the initial one I found myself in and suddenly it wasn't and the argument of some users was "of course the admin can defederate at any point for vague reasons"
> Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself.
I'm also capable of hosting my own email and plenty other things but it's unnecessary effort for the value. It really is amazing how after disingenuous takes I get a ridiculous appeal to geekdom or something.
> I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse.
You're puzzled because you're unwilling to read them for what they are and instead produce strawmen in order to deny they are a reality.
Mastodon works for you. Great. But my points stand and are in no way rebuked by your "it's hypothetical", "wait, it's easy", wait, it's not easy but a HN type should do it.
Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.
You can always run your own instance for yourself. Also in practice I’ve not found it hard to find instances who’s block lists I agree with.
The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down (having already fragmented the communities unless they self host their instance, again, creating burden on the user for more Accounts)
I think you forgot this is HN where the standards are a bit higher and you get exposed to arguments that you may dislike. Account of 17 days too, so ironic.
You went with an ad hominem and double down on having no arguments.
This isn’t saying anything other than your not a fan. Which as I said is fine.
> My point is that the model of Blocklist from others is not enticing for any individualistisc user who values diversification of ideas and the fact that the default makes it a bad burden for the user who wants to try that, means that communities won't be formed that don't have that blocklist mindset, one way or another. The model is too focused on closing down networks instead of invidual choice. Utility, since it's not like the internet where traffic is good, seems to be around creating extremely narrow minded pools with little crossover, since any exposure to widened thought can be immediately shut down.
This was unspecific/vague and not an accurate description of the fediverse. It’s a very diverse (unfortunately so in some cases) group of communities that interact with each other. Or don’t if they choose.
The value in allowing each instance to handle their own block list is that it scales and allows you to choose a server that shares your perspective. And basically if you disagree that this is the case, you’re free to change that and that’s the point. You have all of the choice.
The choice I have is it to love or leave each instance and pay the price of fragmentation and user registration per instance, plus having to switch.
In any case, you've unwillingly agreed with me by explaining my "choice" after calling me uninformed and now vague.
It's funny how you also see diversity as an unfortunate. Says a lot.
Fundamentally, it's not putting the true power of granularity and easy choice on the user but forming small very narrow minded communities at the whim of an admin, with a high cost of transfer (unlike a sub where you might disagre with a mod decisiom).
Funnily enough, feels less free choice than Reddit in some aspects.
The problems with centralization were mostly theoretical for twitter and reddit ....
Obviously it’s not turned out that way and hopefully federation saves us all, but I don’t know if protocols will ever win over marketing.
Of course, anyone at all who cares about money would have been a fool not to force him to buy it once he screwed up by bluffing in a way that made him contractually obligated to execute the transaction! So in practice, since even super-rich people love getting more money and non-rich people really want to become rich, good luck in practice spinning a hypothetical where Twitter owners would have said no, especially considering what a dog the company was already in terms of making money.
Is it to much to expect the average user to continue dialing in their scopes? Maybe not.
How about the below average user?
Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 - Aug 2013 (246 comments)
Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it never quite "gets there" because people still make this complaint all the time.
One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4 redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the new design so hard to use.
Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so much about so many things thanks to Reddit.
It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of experience.
If your income is advertising, engagement and users with little impulse control seem to be the thing that brings value. And there seem to be few other ways to monetize a site.
the major exodus from slashdot to digg after a redesign was in 2007
Then the digg exodus to reddit after a resdesign was 2010
Tbh I find new Reddit far more usable than old, but perhaps if I had a slow computer or didn’t run JS or something, I could disagree?
I'd say HN has overall declined in quality over the last years but it's managed to avoid a precipitous decline by having basic standards.
Soylent News was a nice spinoff that the refugees founded, and it is still going, but it does suffer from a bit of a dearth of userbase. The codebase is pretty old, but design wise, it's the old Slashdot you remember from decades ago, in red rather than green.
On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-obnoxious ads.
The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to need to be paid, eventually.