We need more sites like hackernews.
X /twitter used to be that , but it's now overwhelmed with bots and SEO.
The more boring you make a site (no colors, no images, no links) the better the defense against spammers.
On top of that no sharing/@ing: no notifications for responses (there's probably an addon for that if you want it).
At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.
I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.
Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself.
In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.
It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.
with the experimental spirit of the site, the barebones look is enough for the "mvp". but for most of the web users today, it is not quite as engaging to use.
most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
bots and SEO have really destroyed the internet. and now that we have AI to further streamline the production of BS, I feel like the Internet is just going to become even more of a quality content wasteland.
Goodharth’s Law destroyed the internet. The constant game of chess between Google and SEO marketers has the turned the whole search product to crap.
It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
I fully believe that, especially with the rise of AI models, the future of the internet is going to be small enclaves of a few thousand people on invite only message boards. Anything else is just going to be far and away too much effort for anyone to maintain, especially when advertisers twig that their ads are mostly being shown to bots.
I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
It was and it wasn't. Search engines arose to solve a very real problem, and did so quite well for a long time.
Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale
of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least.
Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
I used to believe this but I don't think so any longer after enough time on the internet.
There's probably not more than 50k meaningfully unique sites with some notable amount of actual desirable information, after excluding all the SEO'ed sites, blogs repeating each other, etc... at least for the English web.
Manual curation is entirely possible since probably there aren't even 50 such sites being created per day on average. This is including every single forum still open to public viewing. There really aren't that many left (<10k).
How long do you expect that will remain the case in the face of such a flood of zero-incremental-cost garbage as we here discuss?
Especially worth mentioning in this connection is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39424688, as of this writing #1 on HN. I mention it here because what it says about moderation, and about centralized platforms being both the highest-value and most poorly managed targets, applies here also.
There aren't, if you exclude all the spam blogs, and include only the ones that are fully accessible without a paywall and have received an update in the last year.
A huge proportion have simply stopped updating, gone offline or moved to a paywall on substack/medium/etc...
The 50k number is all inclusive and probably even still an overestimate.
How did you derive that figure to begin with? And in what realm does only what's been posted in the last year qualify as information worth retaining the ability to retrieve?
It's an estimate based on my own experience? I'm not really sure what your specifically asking for.
And I never mentioned whether something 'qualify as information worth retaining the ability to retrieve'... are you confused about what the comment chain is about?
Well maybe it's just because I'm an unpopular weirdo, but I think "invite only" is cancer. In fact it's another head of the hydra killing the Internet. Whatever alternatives exist to the spam wasteland are strangled in crib being overly walled gardens, e.g. Discord. I also swear to god I think secret private club fetishism crippled piracy.
This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.
Accessibility to the internet to everybody in the world destroyed the hacker haven that the Internet once was.
But I don't think it's bad. Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal. There are a lot of people out there, with their own opinions, ideas and understanding (or lack of) of the world. Internet just converges towards the average human being. If we want a better internet, hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser, rather than blame the SEO and bots...
> Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal.
Sounds quite ideal to me.
> hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser
I'd rather hope for a future made by us and for us instead.
"Average" people just don't care about this stuff like we do. They don't care. I tried to get them to care, they refuse to care about all this stuff that we care about. That's fine, people like what they like and that's that but why should we care about their concerns then? We should not. And I do not.
Truth is I couldn't care less about such an "average" human being. Why is everything always about the "average" person? Why must all technology serve this mythical average human? Where is the technology that serves me? My programmer's computer system and network?
Isn't that why we all come to Hacker News?
People chase these "averages" because there's money in it. The money mostly comes from advertising consumer products to them. That's why advertising destroys everything.
I remember reading on the wikimedia stats post here a few weeks ago that for English at least, the average internet user is a 20 year old from India watching porn
LLMs are only a deathblow, albeit a massive one, to a trend that's been 10 years in the making.
I feel it's time for another small internet for us, with blackjack and dancers. But this time let's agree not to make it friendly and accessible for everyone, alright?
Everyone just bind to some other port than 443 and there you go. The traffic won’t be worth any money so no spammers will show up there. All existing content and functionality will still work, just on a different port. It’s like a www fork.
I swear my girlfriend relishes in reading me the entire, 300 words of SEO bait product listings on Amazon. Babe, I'm begging you please, you can stop at "xl dog bed" I don't need to hear the rest that goes "fluffy for best friend comfort for large dogs pitbull great Dane german Shepard..."
HN requires no javascript and is accessible through Tor without
issues. It feels right for those of us who are usually marginalised by
a wish for better security.
Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and
that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
You can still (basically) create your own HN / Twitter using RSS—my favorite reader is NetNewsWire, but there are others—particularly with the rise of Substack. I have a couple hundred feeds in mine, and it's great.
On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources.
"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.
There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."
The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)
Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.
And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.
------------------------------
It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.
If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.
You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it.
Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.
I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
Yeah, it's not some ten-person forum buried in the annals of the old Internet, HN is popular enough, but does a random person sitting in a Boston cafe know what HN is? Probably not, but they sure know what Twitter is.
Oh, I don't mean that scale is the only factor. Clearly, the structure of Mastodon is way better than the structure of Twitter. But, I'd bet that if Mastodon was as big as Twitter, if it was that juicy of a target, it would have way more spam than it does today.
I both agree and disagree, in that;
- the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network.
And
- Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.
I think a large part of the reason hackernews is good is that operator's incentives are more closely aligned to the desires of users than average. Ycombinator benefits if HN is the best place to discuss the creation of technology/software because it boosts their brand and gives their companies a communication and recruiting advantage; most other platforms are primarily interested in ad revenue and are only incentivized to provide a good experience to users as a factor in that equation.
Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
In a world where AI can impersonate people to virtual perfection, how would one even KNOW who to invite?
I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there.
And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.
so the theory is that now there will be a lot of bots taking over HN and posting stuff that they want to rank up, destroying the value of the site? What's the defense there?
Bit afraid about that. Honestly it is suprising how spam free HN is, so maybe they have some good anti spam system in place. Also i think it would make sense to set all outside links to "nofollow" so google ingores them and therefore it is less interesting for SEO.
I wonder if nofollow actually does anything nowadays. I feel like the rules that used to be enforced have been replaced with hacky 'AI' that have been hacked together by thousands of SWEs trying to improve some metric for their promotion packet.
the "google way" would be to use instead of "nofollow" "ugc" which stands for user generated content.[1] In the same document they state "We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes". However they lied often about their ranking signals ;)
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n...
Did Google really say that? It makes sense to treat it as a different category of link. An organic back link from a blog or website is putting the weight of the website’s name/reputation behind it whilst UGC has users putting their name/reputation on it (as it relates to their relationship with the originating website). The latter is not worthless as the website ultimately allows it, it not as strong as a signal as an organic backlink.
I’m not comfortable with any endorsement being inferred toward any link that is UGC, even from something the website tacitly “allows” by not deleting it. For the majority of websites there’s plenty of absolute trash lurking in all the Les travelled parts where nobody cares or nobody has seen it. But the bots will always see it.
There's definitely a bit of influence / perception manipulation on HN. A few years back I heard a story that a tech company would monitor HN for certain keywords, and if their product or category was ever brought up or mentioned multiple developers would always show up to engage on the topic. This isn't quite spamming or cheating the system, but it's a very effective tactic for shifting public perception.
OTOH that’s kinda the utopian version of open source - a public forum where you can engage with stakeholders on demand, as long as others find your critique/question interesting enough to upvote.
God I love hacker news… their insanely outdated moderation tools are a shame, but I can’t lie, holding a big stick makes for a peaceful forum.
It's a curious division between "old internet" and "new internet" (those on the *chans may have parallel but slightly different terminology for this dichotomy) to see people use BBS-style vs IRC-style emotive expressions.
That's really interesting that they'd disclose their strategy so publicly. On the one hand, I can't see it doing much harm. On the other hand, wouldn't it be somewhat self-defeating or even embarrassing to confess that you're doing that? One could probably reasonably assume that many companies have a social media strategy like that, but to have people know that's the strategy would probably drain away at least some of the goodwill provided by the posts.
I would think it is good if done in a good way and bad if done in a bad way.
bad way - posting stuff to make your company profile go up all the time, if you think you have something that might be of interest to HN sure but not everything you do should get posted. when negative stuff comes up swoop in to defend company and to drag down those saying negative things about company, especially without disclosure but even with disclosure.
Good - something technical about company comes up, developers who worked on technical thing come in and clarify technical aspects for people. Somebody has problem with your product and you come in and ask for clarification and help solve problem.
HR at my last place was very aggressive in reminding us to leave 5-star reviews at Glassdoor. They once even offered Starbucks gift cards to the first 5 of the month. I was very sure to leave an honest, dirty laundry review after I left including a mention of this practice
Once you get enough karma (I can’t remember what the number is) you’ll be able to see dead submissions. If you look at new you’ll see that there are spam posts coming in every couple of minutes or so. They’re just very effectively detected, as you suspected.
You dont recognize the spam because the bad ones are removed. Good marketing targets its audience, and influences people who are not associated to repeat its talking points.
The new way to build communities: SE-anti-O. Trying to rank as low as possible. Things will flip and sites will try to be uncrawlable to Google. I guess it's already happened with Discord.
You just gave me an idea for a fun project (like i need more projects!). I use openresty for my webserver, which has lua already built in. Might be fun to see if i can just hog up a crawler instance indefinitely by generating fake pages and links that just go back to make a new fake page and link and takes the crawler in circles that it thinks are unique
Over the past few weeks I've seen more crypto scam posts than ever. While they quickly become dead, I'm not sure if they are coming in a faster rate than in the past or what.
HN can always change their robot.txt and prevent google from crawling. Many of copy left friends do that to their blog and site to prevent google/bing from indexing them.
Just so you know, that doesn’t stop Google from indexing you anymore. It only stops Googlebot from crawling. In other words it’s strictly a place to deny permission or set limits on a technical level. If you do this they will still have what they already crawled and if there are links to it on the Internet they will keep it in the index.
If you don’t want something to be in Google on a policy level, you now have to add the noindex meta tag on every page.
Votes are (to a greater extent than HN) used to indicate disagreement rather than low quality (which leads to more low quality comments); political content is allowed and encouraged (but only that which aligns with the beliefs of the moderators); many users have been banned without any transparency as to why; significant groupthink about technical topics (separate from the political content).
That aligns well with their line of thought though, which is that there is a specific political view which is desired. They're basically building an echo chamber and it will starve on the long run because it will become so specific, the chance of a new user fitting in that community on day one will become lower and lower.
Being open is hard, very hard, but it's the only long term strategy in my eyes. The rest is an illusion.
Heh, that doesn’t stop spammers. It only takes one spammer getting invited before they start inviting their spammer “friends”. Before you know it, you have thousands of dormant accounts just waiting to spam you. It makes it harder, sure, but that’s not an effective solution by itself. In fact, it leads to a false sense of security.
There is nothing I can share because it is proprietary information and would assist in informing spammers on how spam detection works on the platform I used to work on.
That being said, if there are lots of dormant accounts on lobsters, they are likely spam bots just waiting to be activated once the rules are deeply understood and there is something to gain, or be waiting until there are more than the mods could actively fight against because they lack the tools to do so (see: false sense of security).
Given your refusal to provide any evidence or counterexamples, the cop-out that "there are probably actually lots of spam accounts of Lobsters that haven't activated yet", and the extremely naive nature of your comment that ignores simple modifications that can be made to an invite system to nullify all of the flaws you claim it has, I don't think that you actually have any evidence whatsoever.
It's pretty clear that invite trees provide actual value and the opposite of a "false sense of security".
I mean, I don't work on lobsters, I have no desire to be a member there. So why would I have any evidence to support my claim about a platform I give two shits about?
I'm simply telling you how spammers work on OTHER platforms, quite successfully. Whether lobsters is immune to that or not, I don't know, nor do I care to know. If you think they are immune, then great (see: false sense of security).
I wish I could say more about how spammers work ... but this won't work like you think it will. You are assuming all the spammers are distributed among a single branch in the tree, and you'd only realize it wasn't working when you ban someone popular who obviously isn't a spammer and has the clout to do something about it.
I'm pretty sure they mean ban the invite tree below the branch of the spammer, not the entire tree that spammer is on. The chances of a false positive are much lower in the former case than in the latter.
Users who actually believe in the site and understand how the mechanism works and appreciate the high snr that they've enjoyed, will be understanding for the most part even if they end up on the wrong side of one of these bans, and have to go through an appeal system to rejoin the site on some other trust tree which is much more closely monitored by its members than the one they were on before. Ensuring that future bans will be highly unlikely.
Out of curiousity, how is a scammer that has hundreds of thousands of actual real people under it handled? Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Not even talking about scammers, if someone near the root of the tree has a bad day and decides to take it out on the community (or simply gets hacked), it seems you could lose the entire community.
> Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well?
Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.
If it's that simple cut and dried situation, then you just ban them. Invite trees aren't Merkle trees, you can certainly modify any node arbitrarily without invalidating subordinate relationships.
So, you're saying the root nodes have preferential treatment over leaf nodes... interesting. Yeah, def not interested in joining a nepotic org like that. I had other reasons for not joining, but ... interesting.
Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.
I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially said nearly the opposite. The graph is the shape of a tree due to the patterns of invitation fanning out, but there is no such thing as a branch that has more priority over others in a structural or modeling sense.
The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot.
Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users.
I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score.
After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.
> The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet.
How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever.
And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees.
Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.
You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority.
The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community.
I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.
All that means that I can’t spell it out for you, I don’t know how you can be here and not understand contractual obligations. You have to come to the conclusions yourself. All I can kinda do is act as an oracle and say “yeah that might work” or “that sounds like a false sense of security.” Everyone here thus far has had zero curiosity or willingness to debate things on actual merits despite me dropping a few big hints and would rather either attack me personally for being willing to debate something I can’t go into details about (but could probably talk what-ifs), or tell me it is impossible because of a magic tree and I must not know what I’m talking about.
So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions.
At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.
It's not really "nepotic". The goal was to reduce the number of accounts you need to look at to some manageable number. Ideally you discover some root spammer account and ban the entire tree under the assumption they're all spam accounts. Then you ban the guy who was dumb enough to invite a spammer into the community since they clearly cannot be trusted. If you can't or won't ban them, you take away their invitation privileges.
If the problematic account is too high up in the tree, then they probably have way too many descendants which increases the false positive rate which means you can't conclude that they're bad based on the fact they're invitees of a bad account. Essentially, the spammers diluted themselves inside a huge number of maybe good users so that you can't blanket ban them without collateral damage. In that case you're better off banning the bad account individually and looking for new bad roots further down the tree.
A rationalization of nepotism doesn't make it not nepotism.
Let's look at the definition:
> the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs
Basically, if you are friends with the "right people" (aka, people closer to the root), no matter what they do, you are fine. You aren't getting banned for one of their actions. That is people in power (closer to the root) favoring friends (the people they invited), where "power" is the ability to behave with near impunity without severe repercussions.
Trees are rooted somewhere. The problem is reduced to finding the root account which invited all the spammers and banning that account and its entire invite tree and the guy who invited that root account for good measure. This reduces the number of accounts that must be evaluated, making it much more manageable. Any false positives can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Make accounts and invitations a limited resource. People will think twice before inviting someone who can get them banned. This reduces the problem to one of trust which is the foundation of real security.
It doesn't have to be prohibition which over time would harm HN badly, just slower and delayed approach of earning good access. Or show age and karma of users commenting next to their nick, some scam patterns will become obvious.
Cut off the infected limb and block the site to Google entirely. Or split HN in an active and archived branch with an upvote threshold, the latter is made accessible by Google.
There is already an excellent search site for hn [0], so if appearing in google turns out to cause problems, for many users nothing much will change. (I already use that one over google with "site:.." in the query- it's just a good search experience)
I don’t think most are afraid that people who know to search HN will cause any problems by searching it, rather that with increased public visibility will become popular amongst the types of trolls, scammers, spammers, political wackos, etc that inhabit (insert your least favorite social media or link aggregator site).
I have to admit I agree. I really like the benevolent dictatorship which does not allow that kind of BS, even from me. (The time dang gently reprimanded me for some kind of sarcastic attack, upon reflection, I decided that I liked this high standard, and resolved to do better.) I’d hate for it to change too.
Agreed, I've had a similar experience. So I'd be fine with limited public visibility, and I think my experience won't even change if google loses access. However if it's done with robots.txt, does tha tmean algolias crawler will also lose access? That would be a shame, but even then it might be worth it on balance.
Maybe it’s because HN is well moderated and open to automated scraping, unlike other systems that are being locked down (reddit, Twitter) so the user generated content is now significantly more valuable to search engines.
doesn't chrome track your browsing history? Could be that people spend time on certain sites, affects what google trusts and/or thinks is popular and ieeds into the ranking for searches.
Dear Google, we were only adding ‘site:reddit.com’ or ‘site:news.ycombinator.com’ to search queries so we could get to opinions that weren’t being manipulated by SEO fiddlers. What’s our alternative now?
I've become really skeptical of Reddit comments around products for this reason. Searching "best X site:reddit.com" and going off the top comment recommendation seems really sketchy when that top comment is only 5-10 points.
Maybe I'm just really paranoid these days, but I would bet looking at searches with Reddit in them and creating threads or commenting on old ones and paying for up votes is probably lucrative.
where does this notion come from? google is for them to find out what you think you want so they know what ads to serve you. if it was for finding content, they would show you the results that were actually related to your query.
I don't think Reddit has ever been a clean acquisition - either because they've raised at high valuations many times or because of an undesirable content/moderation problem.
Google acquisitions suck because the thing gets left to rot. The last thing Reddit needed was all of its recent changes towards crypto and engagement-bait nonsense. I think they'd have it in better shape than it is now.
reddit has done a great job of letting itself rot -- for example, the moderation system tends to result in a hostile experience for users who attempt to participate.
On the other hand, if google owned it, getting banned from a subreddit would possibly mean getting locked out of all of your google accounts.
The moderation system is pretty much the same as any forum. You just have to read the sidebar rules first when you're posting on an unfamiliar subreddit, as you would when joining any community.
On most forums there's no automated system that automatically shadowbans users for using a blacklisted IP.
They also don't quietly remove comments in a way that is invisible to a user for triggering some keyword in AutoModerator or a spam filter. And there are usually no minimum karma or account age requirements for posters.
But you can be banned from sub A if you post in sub B because mods from sub A don't like sub B, even if what you posted was something that mods from sub A would like... and AFAIK you won't find out you were banned from sub A until you try to post on sub A. Not that it happened to me, but I've seen plenty of cases.
Some of the moderators ban anyone anyone who makes comments that they do not like, even if comments are reasonable, polite, and within rules.
Moderation of that type usually seems to be secret, but the problematic moderators that I have noticed seem to be trying to protect some political belief or pet disinformation from discussion. It poisons the entire site for me.
Getting OT, but what is the deal with all the completely different moderation guidelines (that amass to like 20-30 weird rules and exceptions) for every subreddit. I find it almost impossible to participate (except just adding a comment here and there).
For example, I wanted to post a funny Risitas youtube vid I made (you know the Spanish comedian with that laugh...), and couldn't find a single usable "funny" subreddit. Some banned youtube content completely. Some banned "video memes", some banned X and some banned Y... all of them had slightly different guidelines and you immediately got an insta-splurge from a bot-mod if you tried posting. Some required you to prefix every post subject with some code word. I had to give up eventually and post it on some super-small subreddit instead that accepted anything.
> what is the deal with all the completely different moderation guidelines ... for every subreddit
My sense is that the bigger the userbase, the more it attracts junk, spam, abuse, etc. So, the rules get tightened to combat it. Also, my impression is that the moderation tools are not great, so crude/heavy-handed methods are sometimes all that is available.
I think you found the corollary already: smaller subreddits have less rules and/or less strict enforcement.
I'm not sure a better solution, given the situation. Though I agree it can be discouraging for well-meaning occasional contributors.
The other problem is the moderators themselves. Each subreddit has its own volunteer moderators. It's a thankless job, so who volunteers to do it? Frequently people who shouldn't have that power. So many subs have terrible mods who abuse their power.
"... It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
No worries. And in fact, sorry if I came out as nitpicky. Not that kind of person usually, but being his fan even before he became internet-famous I felt some urge, strange as it sounds.
I’ve been banned on two separate accounts for posting something the mod of the subreddit didn’t like. When I found out there was no appeal I kinda gave up on Reddit.
I got shadowbanned a TON till I realized you could be shadow banned for leaving to many (on topic) links to other websites or subreddits in the comments.
Sorry I am good at leaving sources to backup what I say I guess?
May be internet needs a refresh from walled gardens and one sided impositions without any accountability. Some class of services need to be protected to the same level as access to basic utilities such as roads or power…
Google hasn’t bought Reddit because it’s literally only downsides. Bad PR, low profit margin, etc…
I mean does anyone actually like Reddit anymore? Front page is almost entirely bots reposing and reusing the same comments that have been used for years.
> I mean does anyone actually like Reddit anymore?
I do like the good parts, deeply hidden, that can often be surfaced with a Google search. Case in point, I had a bug with some installed software yesterday, to which the only viable solution I found was in a Reddit post from a few months back.
But the experience of actively browsing the "leading edge" of the site? Absolutely not. I purposely-deprecated my credentials a year or so back and haven't regretted it.
You’re living in a bubble because Reddit is probably among the top 50 most visited sites in the world. You may not like the experience, hate the spam, hate what it stands for, but a lot of people still visit it and use it daily
I don't think the google graveyard is a concern, because it's obviously a valuable, profitable product they could sell, but if you haven't been horrified by the current enshitification of reddit, you haven't been paying attention.
I was a moderator of some very large subreddits, and due to reddits pigeonholing me into an app vs new mobile layout, I'm leaving those moderator positions (note: I am not complaining about the api issues). I don't want to participate in a community that is catering to the lowest common denominator such that the term "redditquitte" is a joke.
I've thought long and hard about it, and I think companies are intentionally creating Eternal Septembers in their products, because it's just easier to just put big pictures on the homepage to get clicks, when that type of UX only invites the type of people who see the site as something only to consume and not to contribute to.
I've been invited to multiple "moderator feedback" focus groups, that were worse than awful. After they defaulted an "annoying look here" icon in the right corner to try and get us to work more, I said "fuck this, I'm out."
My point here isn't just to bitch and moan, it's to point out that site:reddit.com only works because the community is one that actively values contribution over consumption... that's going away, and the usefulness of site:reddit.com will go away as that culture changes.
Reddit was enshitified circa 2014 or 2015, this is not a new thing. It's been garbage for a long time and I'm surprised it's taken so many this long to notice. In fairness if you kept to subreddits that were eminently unpopular and off the beaten path then it wasn't as obvious.
I guess the mobile app was what really broke the camels back but the quality of the posts had been on a downward trend in a severe way since at least Obama's second term, when I think both political parties recognized it as important and began to manipulate it. This is made easier by the partitioning of the site into subreddits. I hopefully don't have to explain here why that makes automated sockpuppeting much more effective and easier to accomplish. It's a fundamental design flaw (if we were to assume the design of Reddit was intended at all to provide a space for authentic personal takes on real issues and by real humans).
There is a danger of the same thing happening to HackerNews but I hope the lack of financial incentives to allow that sort of thing does some work to mitigate it, along with the lack of partitioning of the community.
It’s still a lot less enshittified than Google or most of the web. You can find actual humans giving actual advice for a lot of categories where Google just gives you (likely AI generated) SEO garbage.
You can easily ignore the vitriol and fake news on Reddit, you can not get around a lot of commercial detritus anywhere else anymore
>This is made easier by the partitioning of the site into subreddits. ... It's a fundamental design flaw (if we were to assume the design of Reddit was intended at all to provide a space for authentic personal takes on real issues and by real humans).
Huh? I don't follow here: having multiple subreddits is exactly what makes the site usable for so many utterly different niche topics. There's probably a subreddit for repairing 1967 Camaros; do you really want to see posts like that every day in your news feed? I don't. Reddit isn't meant to just focus on tech topics like this site; it's meant to be a site with discussion forums for every topic imaginable, and there's no practical way to do that without subreddits.
I've been on Reddit for like 14 years now and politics have never affected me. At all. I stick to subs related to my interests like mechanical keyboards, retro computers, engineering, architecture... and hardly ever I see political stuff. But I don't remember when was the last time I browsed "All" or "Popular", or kept subbed to the large or "default" subs, which, I think, is where you'll find more political stuff. What I mean is that the best thing of Reddit is that you can -still- make of it whatever you want.
People have been claiming that Reddit has been enshittified (not with that exact term) since it was first created. People were already longing for the good old days when I first began using Reddit in ~2010.
Any attempt at pinpointing the enshittification is bound to be extremely subjective. What is clear is that it has been a continuous decline for a long time.
Looking at those video lengths, I'm inclined to believe you.
Any video that is 9 to 11 minutes long, I automatically skip because that's the sweetspot length for maximizing ad revenue. This person's are a bit longer, but looking at the video subjects, I can't see why they need to be that long.
I have posted this criticism before but I encountered Todd's videos and was quite impressed by them. I then watched his review on water purifiers having done my own research beforehand and while he does end up recommending a decent purifier there is so much more to purification than just what he measures (TDS).
In the end his omission of other factors have led to a conclusion that isn't entirely accurate. (That Zerowater is the best because it filters TDS to 0).
What about bacteria? Other filters that faired poorly in the TDS test focus more on that and then there are a few major brands that weren't even featured.
What about clarify of water? He did touch upon this very briefly but did not go further into it. You would think that a TDS of 0 indicates the water is perfectly clean. This is wrong as TDS cannot measure everything that may be in the water.
There is more to water purification but these are just two examples.
All in all, I have been impressed by Todd's reviews but after watching this review where I actually had done some research into the topic before watching, I came away doubting all his other videos.
What did I miss just because I am not a subject expert in the topic?
I guess at the very least his videos likely eliminate the very worst products but I bet you people are buying whatever products he recommends without thinking about them and may be getting burned or not getting the best product for them.
I have noticed the same issue with Todd's approach. He does a good job of establishing an experimental metric that allows apples-to-apples comparison, but he reviews so many categories of product that there is no way he could be capturing the whole story on all of them. There are a lot of products that won't do well in any "who scores the mostest" contest but strike a good balance of qualities.
These are different suggestions based on assumptions of your situation. Assuming you have access to fairly decent tap water (Europe and US) I'd follow Todd's recommendation for Zerowater as thats what I daily drive. I used to rely on Brita but it does not do much...just slightly improve taste and remove the worst heavy metals.
Running tests on my water, there are still traces of some impurities like bacteria and some metals after Zerowater filtering.
I am also about to start testing the Aquatru system that he also recommends.
For Zerowater the filters are quite expensive (15$ per filter) and I have been peeved at how they get used up quickly (I have around 200PPM in my tap water and they last 75-90 days) and still dont filter everything out fully...but subjectively I can't get over how I like the taste and since im not on the west coast im in the more lucky group where Zerowater is good enough. Maybe Todd was also in this situation?
My family does not like it but I love it. It tastes like "flat" water and becomes filled with bubbles if let to sit out for a short time but its worth it because it "feels" so clean.
Sorry if this observation is unscientific but once you have physically removed impurities, you still will have some semblance of subjectivity. I try to target distilled water taste as a point of reference and Zerowater comes close.
I have worked on a system where I first filter out using a Brita filter and then run it through the Zerowater to help improve the results but the problem with this is that my water is not bad enough for the brita's simple activated charcoal to really help reduce so in my case it actually has ended up giving mixed results.
If you lived in the west coast where the water is typically around 400ppm then you'd extend the life of the Zerowater filter quite a bit by doing this trick but for me, well I have to try something else.
But at that point maybe the Aquatru is better which is why I am trying it. For me, the Aquatru is just for curious comparison as this whole journey is reaching nutjob levels for me at this point and im not elon musk levels of rich(these water tests are not cheap)...the Zerowater is good enough for my usage because I live in a suburb away from any industrial places/poorly managed municipality(no major pathogens, just correcting the taste/eliminating any traces of metals and dirt).
In reality, Brita is probably fine but I want that taste of flat water now that I have gotten a craving for it. Every time I drink something else like Brita or bottled water it just tastes weird.
In reality others have told me if one is to spend the dough on Aquatru, you might as well get a under sink reverse osmosis system installed. Takes up less room and is cheaper. I got a good deal on a open box unit so I decided to go that route. Sorry I dont have results yet.
If you are concerned about pathogens that could make you sick, then it becomes tricky. I have traveled to Pakistan and lived in places there where the tap water makes you sick. I have relied on Grayl and based on my testing water and sending it out it seems to filter pathogens but unfortunately it is a massive pain to use. Do not rely on Zerowater/Aquatru for this as it will not help you. I am still in the search for an excellent under sink solution to eliminating pathogens + giving me the taste that I get with Zerowater. My ideal combination would be to have some sort of automatic Grayl + filtered afterwards with Zerowater. Beautiful tasting water but quite expensive. Might as well rely on water bottles at that point. Hope this helps a bit.
I need a `age:1year` or something, almost everytime I search something tech related i generealy dont want some StackOverflow from 2014.
And dont get me started on the changes they made if you search a product or something buyable. its takes like 4 clicks to go to the shop page and none of the open-in-tab methods work
I think that entire "Hidden Gem" update is being spun by Google as a positive "opportunity" to bring in more useful content for users, when it is actually a defensive maneuver against the absolute gaming of their algo that has led to an insane deterioration in their results quality. Even simple queries now routinely return mountains of obvious SE spam.
Combine this with Google now placing only sponsored content on damn near the full first SERP for some terms and it has become less useful by an order of magnitude (I meticulously calculated this figure).
And, this degradation at the same time ChatGPT has come on the scene. I know I personally bypass Google altogether now more and more frequently in favor of ChatGPT. Wonder how many people do the same and whether there is a whiff of desperation at the Big G.
I think the only defense for increased spam is accounts will need to be tied to real people through some other identification.
Sucks, but is there an alternative?
I’m open to the idea of no new accounts if it got bad enough.
I recently switched to more actively using my account that has my name as the username, anticipating the growing problem of spam detection, and trying to make it more clear this account is not spam.
Also, identification is not something that is revocable. If someone steals and abuses your identity (though no fault of your own?), are you now banned from the internet?
I can promise you, if you think those are solvable problems, you're missing something that doesn't create an insurmountable problem for one group or another (not even talking about bad guys in this case)
how about submissions only from accounts that are no longer green (if that's not the case already), and possibly also have a positive comment posting history. although with AI it will be possible to make bots that write seemingly coherent and positive comments, so unfortunately this will continue to be an arms race.
maybe submissions only after reaching a certain number of points. that would reduce the number of people that can submit though.
another alternative would be to clearly identify which submissions come from posters with a high number of points. that would allow anyone to submit but make it easy to give posts by weak accounts a greater scrutiny.
you have to be 'approved' to post a topic, which you get by commenting on existing topics over time. TBH, I've never even bothered opening an account as I find it relaxing to be in 'read only' mode :-)
Huh. I'd heard that mentioned a bunch as a place with great conversational content, but had assumed (based on the crustacean naming and the `.rs` TLD) that it was Rust-focused - and, although I'm fascinated by and trying-to-learn Rust, I'm not yet at the level where I would be able to contribute to (or barely even learn much from) such a place.
But, having checked it out, it seems to in fact just be "Reddit, but more focused and with better moderation". Sounds delightful! Unfortunately I don't have enough of a social circle to be able to get an invite, but I'll enjoy reading in read-only mode. Thanks!
I was part of a HN-style tech site many years back that used an interesting system where new submissions would actually require you to spend your karma points. Points would accumulate based on your standard karma voting for comment history, but a small amount would also accrue for free on each day you logged in.
What's worrying here also is Google's willingness to use a random comment as the source for its snippets.
I understand that the average HN commenter puts more effort into their comments, and their veracity, than the average internet user elsewhere, but still.
(For me, the top "result" for Monaco in italian is the Google Translator widget with Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia and Quora the top 3 links. HN is 4 or 5 links below.)
Oh, and yes, let's hope spammers don't overwhelm dang!
What happens when hn outgrows it's current self? Even now, the front page is pretty fast paced. Things get burried pretty quick. Sometimes I see an interesting post and comments and think to my self I want to come back later when I have more time but it'll be a few pages off the front by then.
I started using this website after downloading brave, and I typed "news" into the search bar and it automatically directed me here. I was instantly fascinated by the diversity of articles and high quality discourse, and so I've stayed for way longer than I thought. But, yes, unfortunately, as with Reddit and Xitter, one day HN with suffer the fate of popular social media, probably not too long from now. Social control is the name of the game, and you can't win without monopolizing. I only hope Dang can hold down the fort for as long as possible; HN will be the Masada of the internet. (Well, I suppose there is still 4chan, but that's not going anywhere. 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website.)
If you're new you may not know this but the meme that HN is turning into Reddit is at least 17 years old, and has been the last entry in the Hacker News Guidelines since forever: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A simple way you could stop the enshitification is if you stopped it from becoming too popular in the first place, and a way you could do that is by throttling the performance of the web site to only be able to handle x amount of requests/minute.
Eh, I remember what it was like back in the day when it was spicy and fun, but ever since moot left and then sold it, it's just not the same.
I haven't really bothered going back, I'd like to say I've grown up since being like 14 and getting pretty accustomed to seeing some pretty terrible stuff on there.
Sadly the broader the topics gets on hacker news the less relevant searching site:news.ycombinator.com becomes.
This isn't a value judgement on the articles a lot of them are very interesting, but more narrow had some value for finding things.
I often find myself searching on HN, then Reddit (via google) and then good old sad google, in that order.
When Google arrived, it had the solution people were desperately waiting for. It was pretty much everything we wanted. And it even "wasn't evil!"
Now it feels like people at Google are just making sure they'll qualify for their annual bonus with total disregard to what happens to the company.
I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. But Google, don't worry, they'll "just be a search company".
* huge asterisk since I pay to use it and feel the need to disclose that upfront.
Kagi is a very strong and viable candidate IMHO. The search is actually useful and I’ve noticed on a few occasions that my search was “too focused” and yielded “no results found” and I had to rethink my query to better find what I was looking for. Google on the other hand would have spared no opportunity to spam my results with ads even if it couldn’t find what I was looking for. Anything to put more ads in my face.
I've always thought it was strange that HN never appeared in search results. I mean content here has a very high SNR and seems to me that it checks all of Google's SEO boxes. So I always assumed not showing up was intentional, as in dang has been delisting it on purpose and blocking bots. Now that it's showing up, I kind of want it to go back the way it was. The only reason I read HN so much is because I have given it a high degree of trust, that even though I don't know most commenters, I can easily reason about content, find the sources, discover amazing tools and read from founders directly. I really, really do not want to worry about whether the front page is now ads.
I suspect this is because when they rolled out their Perspectives \ Discussions tab, Reddit completely dominated the results. One article I read said they appeared in 97.2% of results.
This is karma for us originally starting the fire about typing reddit in our Google searches (I believe it's fair to say this was discovered independently by many technically proficient people over the course of the preceding half decade), but we definitely had a hand in publicizing it.
I'm curious what the end result will be but will be disappointed if the quality of HN decreases to be more in line with Reddit et al.
What makes HackerNews different from Reddit is that people I actually respect frequent here, real players at the game of life and whatnot (whatever that means), and I can't say the same about Reddit. If it gets too popular I can see that being jeopardized.
A comment is the top result for "where was gta made"."
Not for me. Wikipedia is #1. I retrieved 100 results. None of them were HN comments.
"A comment from desdiv is ranking #1 for the question "Monaco in italian""
For me Wikipedia was again #1. HN comment was #2.
"Another article that ranks well for several keywords like "ruined my life" is GRAHAM PANTHER's article, and HN also ranks well for brand-related KW, such as every question about the cost of youtube tv, where Google favours the post from thunderbong."
For the search "cost of youtube tv", NerdWallet ranked #1. HN comment was #10.
It is baffling to me that people, who certainly know that results for the same query can vary according to a number of factors, e.g., geolocation, pretend every computer user performing some Google search query is getting identical results.
Ideally that is how search should work. But Google web search is not ideal. Far from it. It is advertising company search. The goal is not to return results in a consistent, transparent manner according to a relatively simple, well-known algorithm. It is to sell advertising services. The goal is not truth. It's money.
You are right ofcourse, results variey a lot. The results in the post where sourced from a third party tool for the UK and the US so kind of the results you would get in inkognito mode.
"Local search" when using Google is not optional. The user cannot choose a region when searching www.google.com. The advertising company chooses the region. Why. For the user of course. The company is a trillion dollar charity run by volunteers working on users' behalf for "the good of the web". Right.
Does local search benefit sales of advertising services. Proponents of so-called "tech" companies will always try to justify the choices of the so-called "tech" company^1 as being for the benefit of the user. It could be half true.
To use DNS as an analaogy, EDNS0 client subnet (ECS) was another one of Google's magnificient "improvements" to the internet. Google fans would argue that ECS is 100% for the benefit of users. However it just so happens to be useful for advertising.^2 What a fortuitous coincidence.
374 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadHN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience.
- no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger
- no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring
- limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word
- no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans
It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?
I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.
E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.
At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.
Peace and quiet.
In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up.
I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.
most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that:
1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!)
2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger.
3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.
The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not.
https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...
It won’t improve since when Google makes a change, SEO marketers adapt. The websites that actually provide value and don’t really care about SEO suffer as well as the users looking for that exact information.
I just don't see how anything else could be sustainable.
Curation was what search engines replaced, as the scale of information available outgrew human capacity to keep up. We are almost certainly going to have that problem again soon, for a while at least.
Really, what I hope is that the already burgeoning problem of AI-generated garbage gets solved, and that people rediscover the virtues of social interaction that's based in reality, rather than in the optimization of strongly emotive idiocy that adtech-driven social media demands.
There's probably not more than 50k meaningfully unique sites with some notable amount of actual desirable information, after excluding all the SEO'ed sites, blogs repeating each other, etc... at least for the English web.
Manual curation is entirely possible since probably there aren't even 50 such sites being created per day on average. This is including every single forum still open to public viewing. There really aren't that many left (<10k).
Especially worth mentioning in this connection is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39424688, as of this writing #1 on HN. I mention it here because what it says about moderation, and about centralized platforms being both the highest-value and most poorly managed targets, applies here also.
Why would you expect otherwise, that intelligent people will suddenly lose their ability to perceive what's higher quality content?
The issue is that those are now impossible to find.
A huge proportion have simply stopped updating, gone offline or moved to a paywall on substack/medium/etc...
The 50k number is all inclusive and probably even still an overestimate.
And I never mentioned whether something 'qualify as information worth retaining the ability to retrieve'... are you confused about what the comment chain is about?
I'm okay with that. Honestly sounds a lot better than the current state of affairs. The only problem now is getting invited.
This is not how the good years of the Internet grew. I can't think of a single good or popular thing that started out as "invite only" other than I guess Facebook and Gmail. Both of which were actually more marketing gimmicks.
But I don't think it's bad. Hackers/smart people "locked in the basement' or talking only with their friends in their bubble is not ideal. There are a lot of people out there, with their own opinions, ideas and understanding (or lack of) of the world. Internet just converges towards the average human being. If we want a better internet, hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser, rather than blame the SEO and bots...
Sounds quite ideal to me.
> hope some smart people will put some effort to make the "average person" in the world wiser
I'd rather hope for a future made by us and for us instead.
"Average" people just don't care about this stuff like we do. They don't care. I tried to get them to care, they refuse to care about all this stuff that we care about. That's fine, people like what they like and that's that but why should we care about their concerns then? We should not. And I do not.
Truth is I couldn't care less about such an "average" human being. Why is everything always about the "average" person? Why must all technology serve this mythical average human? Where is the technology that serves me? My programmer's computer system and network?
Isn't that why we all come to Hacker News?
People chase these "averages" because there's money in it. The money mostly comes from advertising consumer products to them. That's why advertising destroys everything.
Put it all in perspective
LLMs are only a deathblow, albeit a massive one, to a trend that's been 10 years in the making.
I feel it's time for another small internet for us, with blackjack and dancers. But this time let's agree not to make it friendly and accessible for everyone, alright?
and Slurm, please.
..anyway that's how I ended up with a Great Dane."
Feels well moderated too, by people who care about the place, and that's the core of a sustainable community. Care really matters.
On my own site, I routinely post lists of links to interesting articles. You don't have to rely on Twitter or other highly botted sources.
That most people do is itself revealing.
"More boring" is a defence against spammers, but not the only the one.
There's also: "Take commercial incentives of the running company out of the picture."
The most prominent example of that is Mastodon. It's software is opensourced, and it's most popular server instance: https://mastodon.social is run by a gGmbH non-profit. (It's hosting company runs it as a non-profit charity for the social good)
Since it's developed in the open without financial incentives muddying up the experience, no advertisements are added and there aren't any algorithmic rankings to be gamed.
And since it's also based on open source, it's easy to share content from other server instances (it's all ActivityPub protocol underneath), and it's also easy to block (defederate) server instances with trolls and other problematic users.
------------------------------
It's like how twitter was at the start, but better.
If you want to try it out, you can make an account on any server then follow some developers in your languages/libraries/tooling of your choice.
You'll also see what those maintainers are discussing in the open and get an idea of how your languages/libraries/tools are going to evolve in the next version, or even participate in their evolution.
Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.
I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
HN has 39 million comments after 17 years.
HN is small.
You only see who you follow, and there's no like/karma/upvotes algorithm.
Everything is sorted chronologically, and if anyone tries to "game" that by posting too much, they'd get unfollowed and/or banned.
Mastodon is a nurtured cultivated twitter.
Personally I follow the CSS/JS/TS community (for work), the gamedev community (for fun), and the space community (for passion)
Defense against spammers/bots is a tough problem though. Having great moderators and users who are savvy and intolerant of bad content probably helps but I think it would only go so far on a large site. HN might benefit from the relatively narrow appeal of its content in that regard.
HN is heavily moderated (censored) and people love to complain when that happens on sites like twitter.
I think proof of identity may soon become the only way to keep AI powered bots from trying to manipulate every forum out there.
And for those who cherish the ability to be anonymous, there is probably a market for a trusted middle-man/site that can verify that an account is being created by a biological person, but that doesn't provide the actual identity of that person to the site where he/she is setting up a new account. Kind of like CA providers do for ssl domains.
God I love hacker news… their insanely outdated moderation tools are a shame, but I can’t lie, holding a big stick makes for a peaceful forum.
(hi to those from GitLab watching #hn-mentions on Slack)
That's really interesting that they'd disclose their strategy so publicly. On the one hand, I can't see it doing much harm. On the other hand, wouldn't it be somewhat self-defeating or even embarrassing to confess that you're doing that? One could probably reasonably assume that many companies have a social media strategy like that, but to have people know that's the strategy would probably drain away at least some of the goodwill provided by the posts.
bad way - posting stuff to make your company profile go up all the time, if you think you have something that might be of interest to HN sure but not everything you do should get posted. when negative stuff comes up swoop in to defend company and to drag down those saying negative things about company, especially without disclosure but even with disclosure.
Good - something technical about company comes up, developers who worked on technical thing come in and clarify technical aspects for people. Somebody has problem with your product and you come in and ask for clarification and help solve problem.
Someone should build an AI agent that keeps a list.
If you don’t want something to be in Google on a policy level, you now have to add the noindex meta tag on every page.
A site is spam-proof if it makes it hard enough to get an invitation. The relatively few spammers who slip through can be warned and/or banned.
Unfortunately, we may not be invited.
Being open is hard, very hard, but it's the only long term strategy in my eyes. The rest is an illusion.
As evidence against: Lobsters, which uses an invite tree, has virtually no spam to speak of.
That being said, if there are lots of dormant accounts on lobsters, they are likely spam bots just waiting to be activated once the rules are deeply understood and there is something to gain, or be waiting until there are more than the mods could actively fight against because they lack the tools to do so (see: false sense of security).
It's pretty clear that invite trees provide actual value and the opposite of a "false sense of security".
I'm simply telling you how spammers work on OTHER platforms, quite successfully. Whether lobsters is immune to that or not, I don't know, nor do I care to know. If you think they are immune, then great (see: false sense of security).
Users who actually believe in the site and understand how the mechanism works and appreciate the high snr that they've enjoyed, will be understanding for the most part even if they end up on the wrong side of one of these bans, and have to go through an appeal system to rejoin the site on some other trust tree which is much more closely monitored by its members than the one they were on before. Ensuring that future bans will be highly unlikely.
Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.
Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.
The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot.
Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users.
I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score.
After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.
How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever.
And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees.
Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.
You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority.
The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community.
I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.
So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions.
At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.
If the problematic account is too high up in the tree, then they probably have way too many descendants which increases the false positive rate which means you can't conclude that they're bad based on the fact they're invitees of a bad account. Essentially, the spammers diluted themselves inside a huge number of maybe good users so that you can't blanket ban them without collateral damage. In that case you're better off banning the bad account individually and looking for new bad roots further down the tree.
Let's look at the definition:
> the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs
Basically, if you are friends with the "right people" (aka, people closer to the root), no matter what they do, you are fine. You aren't getting banned for one of their actions. That is people in power (closer to the root) favoring friends (the people they invited), where "power" is the ability to behave with near impunity without severe repercussions.
Make accounts and invitations a limited resource. People will think twice before inviting someone who can get them banned. This reduces the problem to one of trust which is the foundation of real security.
Yeah, but then it's also invisible to search engine users, in which case no one will want to spam the site for SEO anyway.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/
I have to admit I agree. I really like the benevolent dictatorship which does not allow that kind of BS, even from me. (The time dang gently reprimanded me for some kind of sarcastic attack, upon reflection, I decided that I liked this high standard, and resolved to do better.) I’d hate for it to change too.
I really like what lobsters did with invitation tree https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
who knows.
Why Google have not bought reddit, I don't know (beyond moderation issues, but AMZN made it work with twitch).
Maybe I'm just really paranoid these days, but I would bet looking at searches with Reddit in them and creating threads or commenting on old ones and paying for up votes is probably lucrative.
EDIT: https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
where does this notion come from? google is for them to find out what you think you want so they know what ads to serve you. if it was for finding content, they would show you the results that were actually related to your query.
On the other hand, if google owned it, getting banned from a subreddit would possibly mean getting locked out of all of your google accounts.
They also don't quietly remove comments in a way that is invisible to a user for triggering some keyword in AutoModerator or a spam filter. And there are usually no minimum karma or account age requirements for posters.
Any large site does this. Even HN.
Moderation of that type usually seems to be secret, but the problematic moderators that I have noticed seem to be trying to protect some political belief or pet disinformation from discussion. It poisons the entire site for me.
For example, I wanted to post a funny Risitas youtube vid I made (you know the Spanish comedian with that laugh...), and couldn't find a single usable "funny" subreddit. Some banned youtube content completely. Some banned "video memes", some banned X and some banned Y... all of them had slightly different guidelines and you immediately got an insta-splurge from a bot-mod if you tried posting. Some required you to prefix every post subject with some code word. I had to give up eventually and post it on some super-small subreddit instead that accepted anything.
My sense is that the bigger the userbase, the more it attracts junk, spam, abuse, etc. So, the rules get tightened to combat it. Also, my impression is that the moderation tools are not great, so crude/heavy-handed methods are sometimes all that is available.
I think you found the corollary already: smaller subreddits have less rules and/or less strict enforcement.
I'm not sure a better solution, given the situation. Though I agree it can be discouraging for well-meaning occasional contributors.
"... It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
— Douglas Adams
He was Spanish, as in Spaniard, from Spain, Europe.
Your comment has been auto removed for not linking your reddit account with a email.
Sorry I am good at leaving sources to backup what I say I guess?
I mean does anyone actually like Reddit anymore? Front page is almost entirely bots reposing and reusing the same comments that have been used for years.
I do like the good parts, deeply hidden, that can often be surfaced with a Google search. Case in point, I had a bug with some installed software yesterday, to which the only viable solution I found was in a Reddit post from a few months back.
But the experience of actively browsing the "leading edge" of the site? Absolutely not. I purposely-deprecated my credentials a year or so back and haven't regretted it.
Yes, but if there was a better alternative I would switch in an instant … but those network effects.
My guess is that too many people at Google are on Reddit and didn’t want to see it go to the Google graveyard the day after acquisition.
I was a moderator of some very large subreddits, and due to reddits pigeonholing me into an app vs new mobile layout, I'm leaving those moderator positions (note: I am not complaining about the api issues). I don't want to participate in a community that is catering to the lowest common denominator such that the term "redditquitte" is a joke.
I've thought long and hard about it, and I think companies are intentionally creating Eternal Septembers in their products, because it's just easier to just put big pictures on the homepage to get clicks, when that type of UX only invites the type of people who see the site as something only to consume and not to contribute to.
I've been invited to multiple "moderator feedback" focus groups, that were worse than awful. After they defaulted an "annoying look here" icon in the right corner to try and get us to work more, I said "fuck this, I'm out."
My point here isn't just to bitch and moan, it's to point out that site:reddit.com only works because the community is one that actively values contribution over consumption... that's going away, and the usefulness of site:reddit.com will go away as that culture changes.
I guess the mobile app was what really broke the camels back but the quality of the posts had been on a downward trend in a severe way since at least Obama's second term, when I think both political parties recognized it as important and began to manipulate it. This is made easier by the partitioning of the site into subreddits. I hopefully don't have to explain here why that makes automated sockpuppeting much more effective and easier to accomplish. It's a fundamental design flaw (if we were to assume the design of Reddit was intended at all to provide a space for authentic personal takes on real issues and by real humans).
There is a danger of the same thing happening to HackerNews but I hope the lack of financial incentives to allow that sort of thing does some work to mitigate it, along with the lack of partitioning of the community.
You can easily ignore the vitriol and fake news on Reddit, you can not get around a lot of commercial detritus anywhere else anymore
Huh? I don't follow here: having multiple subreddits is exactly what makes the site usable for so many utterly different niche topics. There's probably a subreddit for repairing 1967 Camaros; do you really want to see posts like that every day in your news feed? I don't. Reddit isn't meant to just focus on tech topics like this site; it's meant to be a site with discussion forums for every topic imaginable, and there's no practical way to do that without subreddits.
Any attempt at pinpointing the enshittification is bound to be extremely subjective. What is clear is that it has been a continuous decline for a long time.
I don't know that the Twitch acquisition was smart. What was the strategic reason to acquire?
Amazon announced cutting 35% of Twitch staff (500) in January to stem losses after two rounds of layoffs last year.
Looking at those video lengths, I'm inclined to believe you.
Any video that is 9 to 11 minutes long, I automatically skip because that's the sweetspot length for maximizing ad revenue. This person's are a bit longer, but looking at the video subjects, I can't see why they need to be that long.
I think that may be outdated? 10 minutes was the sweet spot for ad revenue a few years ago, but I think around 8 minutes is the sweet spot now.
In the end his omission of other factors have led to a conclusion that isn't entirely accurate. (That Zerowater is the best because it filters TDS to 0).
What about bacteria? Other filters that faired poorly in the TDS test focus more on that and then there are a few major brands that weren't even featured.
What about clarify of water? He did touch upon this very briefly but did not go further into it. You would think that a TDS of 0 indicates the water is perfectly clean. This is wrong as TDS cannot measure everything that may be in the water.
There is more to water purification but these are just two examples.
All in all, I have been impressed by Todd's reviews but after watching this review where I actually had done some research into the topic before watching, I came away doubting all his other videos.
What did I miss just because I am not a subject expert in the topic?
I guess at the very least his videos likely eliminate the very worst products but I bet you people are buying whatever products he recommends without thinking about them and may be getting burned or not getting the best product for them.
These are different suggestions based on assumptions of your situation. Assuming you have access to fairly decent tap water (Europe and US) I'd follow Todd's recommendation for Zerowater as thats what I daily drive. I used to rely on Brita but it does not do much...just slightly improve taste and remove the worst heavy metals.
Running tests on my water, there are still traces of some impurities like bacteria and some metals after Zerowater filtering.
I am also about to start testing the Aquatru system that he also recommends.
For Zerowater the filters are quite expensive (15$ per filter) and I have been peeved at how they get used up quickly (I have around 200PPM in my tap water and they last 75-90 days) and still dont filter everything out fully...but subjectively I can't get over how I like the taste and since im not on the west coast im in the more lucky group where Zerowater is good enough. Maybe Todd was also in this situation?
My family does not like it but I love it. It tastes like "flat" water and becomes filled with bubbles if let to sit out for a short time but its worth it because it "feels" so clean.
Sorry if this observation is unscientific but once you have physically removed impurities, you still will have some semblance of subjectivity. I try to target distilled water taste as a point of reference and Zerowater comes close.
I have worked on a system where I first filter out using a Brita filter and then run it through the Zerowater to help improve the results but the problem with this is that my water is not bad enough for the brita's simple activated charcoal to really help reduce so in my case it actually has ended up giving mixed results.
If you lived in the west coast where the water is typically around 400ppm then you'd extend the life of the Zerowater filter quite a bit by doing this trick but for me, well I have to try something else.
But at that point maybe the Aquatru is better which is why I am trying it. For me, the Aquatru is just for curious comparison as this whole journey is reaching nutjob levels for me at this point and im not elon musk levels of rich(these water tests are not cheap)...the Zerowater is good enough for my usage because I live in a suburb away from any industrial places/poorly managed municipality(no major pathogens, just correcting the taste/eliminating any traces of metals and dirt).
In reality, Brita is probably fine but I want that taste of flat water now that I have gotten a craving for it. Every time I drink something else like Brita or bottled water it just tastes weird.
In reality others have told me if one is to spend the dough on Aquatru, you might as well get a under sink reverse osmosis system installed. Takes up less room and is cheaper. I got a good deal on a open box unit so I decided to go that route. Sorry I dont have results yet.
If you are concerned about pathogens that could make you sick, then it becomes tricky. I have traveled to Pakistan and lived in places there where the tap water makes you sick. I have relied on Grayl and based on my testing water and sending it out it seems to filter pathogens but unfortunately it is a massive pain to use. Do not rely on Zerowater/Aquatru for this as it will not help you. I am still in the search for an excellent under sink solution to eliminating pathogens + giving me the taste that I get with Zerowater. My ideal combination would be to have some sort of automatic Grayl + filtered afterwards with Zerowater. Beautiful tasting water but quite expensive. Might as well rely on water bottles at that point. Hope this helps a bit.
And dont get me started on the changes they made if you search a product or something buyable. its takes like 4 clicks to go to the shop page and none of the open-in-tab methods work
Combine this with Google now placing only sponsored content on damn near the full first SERP for some terms and it has become less useful by an order of magnitude (I meticulously calculated this figure).
And, this degradation at the same time ChatGPT has come on the scene. I know I personally bypass Google altogether now more and more frequently in favor of ChatGPT. Wonder how many people do the same and whether there is a whiff of desperation at the Big G.
Click the 3 dots (kebab) beside individual search results and see if it was -
"Personalised for you"
This is the most likely answer.
[Edit] "where was gta made" does come back as "Not Personalised" in incognito mode and I see OP is in SEO.
I get a lot of results like this but all OPs examples seem "Not Personalised"
I have noticed an increase in errors here in the past few months though, I wonder if this is the cause.
Sucks, but is there an alternative?
I’m open to the idea of no new accounts if it got bad enough.
I recently switched to more actively using my account that has my name as the username, anticipating the growing problem of spam detection, and trying to make it more clear this account is not spam.
Also, identification is not something that is revocable. If someone steals and abuses your identity (though no fault of your own?), are you now banned from the internet?
there’s no identity system today that I would want HN to use.
maybe submissions only after reaching a certain number of points. that would reduce the number of people that can submit though.
another alternative would be to clearly identify which submissions come from posters with a high number of points. that would allow anyone to submit but make it easy to give posts by weak accounts a greater scrutiny.
you have to be 'approved' to post a topic, which you get by commenting on existing topics over time. TBH, I've never even bothered opening an account as I find it relaxing to be in 'read only' mode :-)
Huh. I'd heard that mentioned a bunch as a place with great conversational content, but had assumed (based on the crustacean naming and the `.rs` TLD) that it was Rust-focused - and, although I'm fascinated by and trying-to-learn Rust, I'm not yet at the level where I would be able to contribute to (or barely even learn much from) such a place.
But, having checked it out, it seems to in fact just be "Reddit, but more focused and with better moderation". Sounds delightful! Unfortunately I don't have enough of a social circle to be able to get an invite, but I'll enjoy reading in read-only mode. Thanks!
I understand that the average HN commenter puts more effort into their comments, and their veracity, than the average internet user elsewhere, but still.
(For me, the top "result" for Monaco in italian is the Google Translator widget with Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia and Quora the top 3 links. HN is 4 or 5 links below.)
Oh, and yes, let's hope spammers don't overwhelm dang!
[1] https://www.kiwop.com/en/blog/parasite-seo-what-is-it-and-ho....
4chan: the roaches of the Internet :)
I haven't really bothered going back, I'd like to say I've grown up since being like 14 and getting pretty accustomed to seeing some pretty terrible stuff on there.
When Google arrived, it had the solution people were desperately waiting for. It was pretty much everything we wanted. And it even "wasn't evil!"
Now it feels like people at Google are just making sure they'll qualify for their annual bonus with total disregard to what happens to the company.
I forecast that in the next 1-3 years, we'll see another company steal the search market, just like Google it back in the day. But Google, don't worry, they'll "just be a search company".
Really? Do you think this company exists today?
Remember that what became Google was Larry's and Sergey's PhD project that no one wanted to buy.
Kagi is a very strong and viable candidate IMHO. The search is actually useful and I’ve noticed on a few occasions that my search was “too focused” and yielded “no results found” and I had to rethink my query to better find what I was looking for. Google on the other hand would have spared no opportunity to spam my results with ads even if it couldn’t find what I was looking for. Anything to put more ads in my face.
I mean just look at the domain name
I'm curious what the end result will be but will be disappointed if the quality of HN decreases to be more in line with Reddit et al.
What makes HackerNews different from Reddit is that people I actually respect frequent here, real players at the game of life and whatnot (whatever that means), and I can't say the same about Reddit. If it gets too popular I can see that being jeopardized.
A comment is the top result for "where was gta made"."
Not for me. Wikipedia is #1. I retrieved 100 results. None of them were HN comments.
"A comment from desdiv is ranking #1 for the question "Monaco in italian""
For me Wikipedia was again #1. HN comment was #2.
"Another article that ranks well for several keywords like "ruined my life" is GRAHAM PANTHER's article, and HN also ranks well for brand-related KW, such as every question about the cost of youtube tv, where Google favours the post from thunderbong."
For the search "cost of youtube tv", NerdWallet ranked #1. HN comment was #10.
It is baffling to me that people, who certainly know that results for the same query can vary according to a number of factors, e.g., geolocation, pretend every computer user performing some Google search query is getting identical results.
Ideally that is how search should work. But Google web search is not ideal. Far from it. It is advertising company search. The goal is not to return results in a consistent, transparent manner according to a relatively simple, well-known algorithm. It is to sell advertising services. The goal is not truth. It's money.
Does local search benefit sales of advertising services. Proponents of so-called "tech" companies will always try to justify the choices of the so-called "tech" company^1 as being for the benefit of the user. It could be half true.
To use DNS as an analaogy, EDNS0 client subnet (ECS) was another one of Google's magnificient "improvements" to the internet. Google fans would argue that ECS is 100% for the benefit of users. However it just so happens to be useful for advertising.^2 What a fortuitous coincidence.
1. The user does not choose. Choice is removed.
2. https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/13993698.json