Ask HN: Should we plan for a life after HN?
While reading about the death of Omegle, I came across this comment and it sent a chill down my spine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38201035 ("Omegles come and go, but "[how is it] hacker news?" is here forever.")
Although the comment was not necessarily about the longevity of HN itself, it made me realise that HN, like any other online forum, has a finite lifespan. At some point it will end (although that seems like a distant possibility right now).
Should we plan for this? I.e. building some sort of mirror platform with the same profiles, same data and as much of the algorithm as possible, with the agreement that we meet there should HN unexpectedly meets its demise.
I understand that a huge part of why HN works is dang. I'm unsure how we mirror him though.
74 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI'm not sure it can be replicated. The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. No room for a middle
Maybe a paid platform?
If the thing that makes HN enjoyable is the community, maybe we should see it more as a commons and worry about how it is/can/should be governed. Taking Wikipedia as an example, if the worst that comes out of the money problem is an occasional desperate plea from Jimmy Wales begging for a small donation, I'm perfectly happy.
Would it be possible to foster a similar community using a platform like Mastodon? If, yes — it might already exist... Anyone have a pointer?
What, how? HN is one of the most squeaky clean - corpo - heavily moderated sites with a extreme bubble centered around SV tech.
Its basically the exact opposite of the old internet.
Oh sweet summer child.
GP post is technically incorrect, though, in that during this time, the web didn't exist yet. The tech folks were on Usenet and IRC, not on "websites." (In fact, the creation of the web and "Eternal September" basically coincided: the web was the killer app that got regular people to sign up for Internet service. Despite HTML being designed for scientific-research use-cases, the web that actually formed in practice was "for normals" from the very beginning.)
USENET was not only every bit as bad as the worst of 4chan -- it was worse, because there was no effective moderation.
That said, there was also a large "signal" component in the "old internet" that is now lacking in most of the New Internet. Places like HN remain as lonely outposts of that lost world, where people wrote in entire paragraphs, to convey complex and meaningful ideas for mutual discussion -- rather than just firing punchy little 140 character epithets and 10 second insta-videos off into the void and then forgetting about them, moving on to the next flash in the goldfish attention span pan.
That level of sustained, complex actually seems like it was more common on the "old Internet," even recognizing fully that the "old Internet" was also overflowing with dross and garbage.
What you're describing are two attractor-points in community design space, for communities that don't put any effort into fixing their position elsewhere in the design space.
• Managed-membership communities don't grow by default, because by default they don't advertise / recruit members. So they have strong cultures, but they're "hidden."
• Unmanaged-membership communities start off small and nice, sort of like closed-membership communities; but then they grow "by adsorption" — diluting the original spirit of the community with greater and greater numbers of people who are less and less committed to the premise of the community. Until the community is a generalized nothing, a random sampling of all of humanity.
A managed-membership community that advertises / actively recruits could be nice, but it would have to first also avoid the third natural attractor-pole in community design: becoming a cult-of-personality-driven money-making scheme.
I guess it depends on exactly how picky you are about pattern matching to "the old Internet," but a lot of that stuff feels like a throwback to the early Internet or even BBS era... none of it is mega platforms and most of it isn't really hidden... all of it is pretty cool... HN fills a great niche to be sure
Hold your nose and throw in a few of the better run subreddits until Lemmy takes off...
And WordPress is now paying a guy to work full-time on ActivityPub integration, hold on to your hats ...!
Everything we touch has a finite lifespan, and I don't think that's the important thing to think about.
I would further comment, but the guidelines[0] last point says not to.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Indeed. Nothing is permanent. The only constant is change.
Ironically, that's what Venture Capital is all about. Mostly.
HN will one day go the way of the dodo bird
Whether that is in a month, year, decade, or century is up for realization
But like every other website/service in existence ... it will have its time, and it will fade/die eventually
There is no need to wait for such an event. In my opinion what makes this site unique is how it is run rather than the tech. One could make note(s) of how Daniel manages this site and try their hand at mimicking the patterns on existing sites. People could attempt to replicate something close to his methodology, guidelines and levels of engagement on their own self hosted Postmill, Mastodon, Forums, Chat sites, etc... In my opinion there is no harm in having multiple great sites.
I wonder how close are we to getting an AI to do this kind of work? Pretty far I would guess?
What can be done besides "emotional feedback subjective gut check on how it makes me feel" when we propose to analyze the scenario?
When one person is your linchpin, you have one major, and guaranteed source of failures unless you take steps to mitigate. So it would be interesting to know what kind of succession plan there is, I guess.
Semi-related fun side note: In my former workplace a coworker coined the term "Single point of success" after management said he was being negative by calling things a single point of failure. Such bottlenecks can't be solved by one person. It takes a village.
That's why I suggest everyone here could take notes and at least try to do the same things on their own sites. We can't change the big platforms but those here that tinker offering up their own time and discipline to host small communities could try to make the internet a slightly better place. I've tried my hand at this and burnt out after a decade. That's why I appreciate this site as I can just be a participant.
[Edit] Based on dang's comment there are other moderators and that makes sense given he would have to sleep at some point, otherwise people would be saying "Mods are asleep" and the chaos would ensue.
The issue with the "study this person who does it well, take notes, it takes a village!" approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants who don't actually understand (or care about) the principles behind whatever that person did. They instead engage in endless rules lawyering about technical minutiae. Some do it simply to feel powerful; others genuinely feel that rules lawyering is helpful.
This becomes self-amplifying as those who actually care about the underlying principles and themes, as opposed to petty legalism, tend to leave the project permanently and go elsewhere. Meanwhile, those who care about and prioritize bureaucratic bickering are attracted to the project, eventually attain a larger share of the powerful positions, and build more of the same.
See the evolution of Wikipedia for a great example of this process in action.
Agreed, I see that happen all the time, especially with chat platforms for some reason. That's why I also said discipline. Having run large forums the temptation to make rules and power-trip is human nature. The biggest battle is with ones self and not letting others help moderate unless they share the same discipline. Finding people that share the same values and are not at risk of power-tripping is hard. Assistant mods would have to know up front they would be booted as soon as they exhibit such behavior.
I would suggest people first start up some little just-for-fun thing and learn the hard way what the biggest struggles are before creating something they truly are passionate about.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis
Dang is good at a lot of moderator things, but his best attribute is that he seems to be capable of disentangling his own personal views on a topic from enforcement of objective norms of decency and respect. Less than 1% of people can do that; they prefer to bludgeon people with technicalities in order to enforce their own views -- and most believe that they are doing good when they do it.
I could not have said it better myself. That is a perfect description of what makes this a unique site.
If this isn't already in the works, it should be as a key-man insurance policy.
I'm sure the other moderators would be fine, but they couldn't ever carry that dang weight.
We'd just have to work out the details, I think the underlying software HN runs on is open source, so it wouldnt be too hard to do as a community project.
No. Most things don't end abruptly. There are signs it's ending. People will migrate to something else as they always do.
No offense, but you’ve just distilled the blindspot behind a lot of social startup ideas. Good communities are not a product of technology or data.
Technology and data facilitate different cost and scaling opportunities, but are just the bones upon which a community might be built.
This community is good because of excellent human involvement through dang (and others at YC) and through the luck of having the right, responsible users around so far. There’s no recreating it.
Sometimes, you just have to enjoy things while they exist and then let go of them once they don’t.
Something that meets users needs better.
What's there to plan for, except if you intend to make that new thing to supplant HN?
Why are you so sure of this? The internet is chock full of counterexamples to the idea.
Have you tested the site backups? How do you know that dang's backups work? when's the last time they were tested? An act of god could take out the servers that run this place, and their backups, and the site's history and contents would be gone. you'd go to http://news.ycombinator.com and get an error page that says "we're having trouble serving your request." Or worse - no response at all.
Would the site survive hours or days of downtime? would we come flooding back to an empty site and just start filling it back up again after our threads, our /comments, out /favorites, our /highlights were lost? It would be like a death in the family. We might take off, never to come back instead.
This is not to impugn dang's computer skills. I'm sure there's a good plan in place. But you might want your open copy of the pages you want to keep.
dang possibly has the most prolific and easily accessible structured data on his moderation decisions and replies we can have for modeling the domain specific behavior of a single person... surely we can train classifiers and language models for him
Besides - it runs on a single box last I checked
What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in public, and any dissenting views were censored.
The segment of people who think that applying that sort of leftist ideological purity filter on all public discourse is a good thing are leaving, while another (and ultimately much larger) segment of the public who highly value free speech are joining.
It’s even happened with personal communities. For four straight years, my friends and I primarily stayed in contact and shared pictures of our latest adventures on Livejournal. Or hell, I had an entire long term relationship that largely happened because of Twitter.
As those services disappeared, I changed too. Sometimes I found replacements and other times, I found that I don’t need those particular dopamine hits.
But the one thing I do know is that whenever someone started planning a replacement, the world went off in a different direction. My LJ usage was a great example - there were a lot of conversations about replacing it with something else but none of those conversations predicted that an identity required platform like Facebook would replace it. We actually thought that it would be replaced by something even better for privacy. Whoops!!
He could easily afford an apprentice, though finding a good one would be tough.
I would love to see that happen be dug before the burnout kills him or drives him batty.
One of the hardest but useful lessons in life is to move on (and figuring out when and how to move on).