I've never understood why HN karma can't be a proxy for the kind of behavior one should expect on lobsters. Or, I guess maybe they're actually looking for the kind of folks who will hoop-jump to get on their site
From their about page, it seems they very much do not want to be like HN:
> Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming
>I've never understood why HN karma can't be a proxy for the kind of behavior one should expect on lobsters.
Because karma doesn't actually indicate what it's meant to. People don't just upvote comments for their intellectual quality and civility, nor do they downvote comments just for their rudeness and banality. All karma really measures is interaction over time, and high karma if anything is a sign that someone has nothing more productive to do than hang out here.
Anyone can get karma on HN by submitting links. Some people farm karma by posting links to words on Wikipedia. The bar to obtaining karma is very low in my opinion.
I see you submitted one that affects a number of people and it caught their attention. There are quite a few Googlers here. Most of my submissions get the same 2-5 points, I just do it almost every day as part of a routine and once in a while I find something that affects a large number of people on HN. There came a point where I started ignoring karma using uBlock as it was influencing my interactions.
I'm not implying HN is perfect. I'm hoping OP will indicate how specifically they find it lacking, which would probably inform suggestions I or others might make.
1) Just switching to the new thing because any forum of communication that's been around long enough and becomes big enough becomes corrupted and infiltrated and ruined and HN seems to be at that tipping point.
2) 50-75% of the stuff on HN now is just political/social propaganda (posts about Musk, Boeing, Taxes, Unions, Homelessness, Trump, etc etc etc) and there's no way to filter it out, I just want to read tech stuff.
I'm interested in other Hacker News-like sites. I'd actually just like to leave for something better. I'm increasingly tired of the low brow conversations.
lobste.rs may be the closest, but its referral-based registration leaves you with this odd interleave of being connected to the site potentially by a member you don't actually really know well.
I think they try to discourage that, but I've seen it not work out that way in practice.
Regardless, lobste.rs is a bit too much of a clone.
33 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 71.5 ms ] thread> Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming
Because karma doesn't actually indicate what it's meant to. People don't just upvote comments for their intellectual quality and civility, nor do they downvote comments just for their rudeness and banality. All karma really measures is interaction over time, and high karma if anything is a sign that someone has nothing more productive to do than hang out here.
What do you like about HN?
What do you seek to change / improve?
1) Just switching to the new thing because any forum of communication that's been around long enough and becomes big enough becomes corrupted and infiltrated and ruined and HN seems to be at that tipping point.
2) 50-75% of the stuff on HN now is just political/social propaganda (posts about Musk, Boeing, Taxes, Unions, Homelessness, Trump, etc etc etc) and there's no way to filter it out, I just want to read tech stuff.
I started getting ads for it and haven’t given it a try yet but it seems to be a dev news aggregator.
"Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708
"Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175315
that's it, no "oh, hey, you seem to have followed an outdated URL" just "blogspot is awesome"
Hat tip to the big G for successfully encoding a trailing space into their blog post title, too
(I mean, I say that with a tongue in cheek but it's probably actually a legit answer...)
lobste.rs may be the closest, but its referral-based registration leaves you with this odd interleave of being connected to the site potentially by a member you don't actually really know well.
I think they try to discourage that, but I've seen it not work out that way in practice.
Regardless, lobste.rs is a bit too much of a clone.
but with less news, less programming, stronger intellectual discussions, more AGI, more philosophy