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For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet

40 points by DenisDolya ↗ HN
For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet. It’s not like others. Take Reddit, for example: at first glance it seems better, with tons of subreddits. But for a beginner, there is no real main entrance. With a new account, it’s a challenge - first you wait 5 days, then you need to earn karma just to post or comment in popular subreddits. On Twitter, you have to spend a long time building followers, or buy a checkmark, just to get access to recommendations. On Hacker News, everything feels right even if you are a beginner. Your post appears in the “new” feed, where everyone can see it. Karma is not so limiting here. At the start, you can make one post a day and a few comments, and after reaching just 10 karma, you become almost a full user - free to participate, contribute, and enjoy the platform. Hacker News is a place that survived the revolution of the modern internet and remained true to itself. A place without subscribers, paid boosts, or artificial promotion. The most important thing that keeps this world going is our elders people who preserve this spirit with discipline, guiding others who may have strayed from the path. HN is where the good, clean internet has survived after all these years. And I truly hope it will always stay this way. Thanks, HN.

14 comments

[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] thread
labrador
I agree for the most part but I've been getting bored with HN, mostly because anything controversial is censored by the mods and by ideological fans of certain people, especially Elon Musk whose fans will flag and downvote anything negative about him. This thread is a good example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592827

LaurensBER
In all fairness there's enough Elon Musk spam in the media and on X.

I'm quite happy that HN seems to stay mostly free of Musk (irrespective of positive/negative posts).

bigyabai
It's still a YC property, at the end of the day. HN is more open than a lot of sites, but it has to be. HN's lifeblood is advertising for YC jobs and YC-affiliated startups, without free admission the site would be a self-defeating meritocracy.

Once you land the YC startup job and lurk around here for a few years, it starts to feel like the same links and comments regurgitated over-and-over. It's a valuable resource for brand-new tech workers that want to sharpen their mind a bit, but also a tarpit of backwards thinking once you reach a certain level of seniority.

DenisDolya
It's not true, but nothing is perfect anyway, and in any case, the HN is more beautiful than the others.
throw20251220
It’s too easy to downvote and flag someone. It also became extremely difficult to have a substantial discussion here due to “being off topic” and non-transparent post quotas.

There’s also an astonishingly high number of people who supposed to be smart and educated but are in fact just a bunch of idiots with hurt egos rolling on karma.

Havoc
Yeah definitely still the best.

Lately I’m seeing more comments though that interact with others like a LLM. Curt demands/instructions as in “show me a source” / “explain this aspect”. Makes me wonder about who the site is attracting

fullshark
Hacker news is good for one particular use case: reasonably informed discussion of technology industry news.

I don't view it as a community and every time a topic goes outside that space (e.g. society, culture, economics etc) I'm frequently horrified by some of the comments I see here.

gjvc
pretty low bar
Apreche
There is some good stuff here, which is why I am still here. But if you look at the comments on certain topics you can see there are truly awful human beings here that are not being banned. That keeps it from being the best.
vunderba
I’d say it’s the best large community. My experience is that the best communities that I’ve been part of have always been pretty small with no more than a few dozen people. (usually in IRC or Discord).
labrador
This post disappeared off the front page in record time. I now can't find it on the first 4 pages. I think my point about censorship has been proven correct.
johnea
I agree, HN is the only place I make comments on the WWW.

The only gripe I have is that a certain segment of the community feels compelled to flag comments on topics that don't align with their personal vision of what HN should be.

If there's a topic I'm not interested in, I just ignore it. I don't feel compelled to block other people from having a discussion they are interested in.

_lvbh
For me, it's a nice way to keep up with what's happening without going through the effort of following the right people in the right places. It's a stretch to call it a community though, although perhaps my definition may be a bit old fashioned. Anonymity just doesn't really fit. I do like seeing the diversity of opinion though. It's rare in real life to have people verbalize their disagreements, much less in a well researched manner.
nchagnet
HN has become my main feed for non-news stories and I quite like it, particularly because it has a higher density of small web tech articles and those are my favourite. It doesn't have to be highest quality or most innovative, but reading someone's articulated opinion on their blog is what I go on internet for.

I also generally enjoy the comment section because people here tend to at least argue intelligently, even if I don't always agree with the viewpoints. I will say I find the dissonance between the "hacker" and the "tech startup" ethe to be quite amusing. I may work for a large company in their 'tech' area, but I can never feel fully at home among the more entrepreneurial-minded people. I really struggle to cheer for tech companies' stocks like they are football teams, but to each their own.

Thank you HN for being a unique place on the Internet, it's truly refreshing.