HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot
I never left slashdot. I just stopped going there. HN was a big part of that. I wanted my tech news to be thought provoking, funny and innocent. I had plenty of sources for "real world" news and I wanted tech to be an island away from that.
Slashdot became more about the legal issues surrounding technology than about technology. It had a militant, fanatical vibe that soured the taste of its brilliant gems.
HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out. The topics are certainly important and worth discussing - but the tone takes away from the lightness and fun of technology. It's like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time. The two are good on their own, but they don't go well together.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadHaving said all that, This is the one site that I visit >20 times a day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935190
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081
At the moment I think I would highlight 10 users and killfile 2, and I think both moves would improve my HN experience.
How do you enforce this? I don't know. It seems to be... subtly enforced in person. How do you enforce it on a website?
I think we have a broader problem with politics; There are many people that I have a lot of respect for technically, who have political ideas I can only describe as 'kooky' - I mean, that's okay, but I don't really want to hear about it, you know? I /really/ don't want to get sucked into that discussion.
I am just as susceptible to the siren song of a political discussion as anyone else; I often find myself writing two-page rants, only to save myself at the last minute by hitting the delete button.
But this might be part of how this is enforced in person. In person, well, the level of vitriol that political discussions have is just not acceptable.
It might be nice place to discuss the legal ecosystem for startups, too.
Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.
The thing that made it good was the camaraderie, the general helpfulness, and the quality of posters. You used to be able to find some really intelligent content in the Slashdot comments, since some the smartest people related to that particular topic were probably Slashdot users themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
I still visit it every day just to skim the articles, but only about 20% of them are interesting/something I didn't see posted somewhere else.
Smarter moderation might work here in the short term, but ultimately the only thing that works is quietly sneaking off to a newer forum.
I feel much of those sort of posts would be remedied if people were more interested in the history of the world going back more than just within their own lifetimes + 20 to 30 years. I'm still in my late 20s, but most people I know only have a passing interest in history (even less so when it's not about their country) and saw such courses in school as a burden, rather than useful. I was just lucky to have family that encouraged having an interest in history and how it shaped the world. To me, it's just as important as teaching one's children about Science, Programming and Mathematics.
News and information are also much more widespread now than they were 10 to 20 years ago, so many start to think this is a new phenomenon as it used to be more difficult to stay informed. History is just repeating itself with some additional ingredients mixed in and outrage is not useful when nothing comes of it.
The phrase "Why should I care about history?" never range more true when people express outrage over issues such as the NSA. The "good old days" are not as good as many people like to believe. That does not mean we should roll over and accept everything though.
We have civics at high school (of course not in the Finland sense, sadly), and I somehow fail to see the correlation.
To them, it is. Humanity's progress depends in part on freshly disillusioned young people to overreact to life's shortcomings and fight to correct them.
In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.
If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?
As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.
Do you remember the first dot-com boom? In 1999, it sure seemed like we were going mainstream. Nerds were cool!
Of course, once the money stopped, we were thrown aside like a sticky sock.
- you are speaking of popularizing and monetizing the internet on mobile devices.
In the last dot-com, we were popularizing and monetizing the internet on desktops.
To someone that has lived through both? it looks pretty similar. Lots of dumb ideas that will crater, and a few good ones that will endure. (Of course, it's difficult to tell the difference now... but it will be clear once this business cycle turns downward.)
So yeah. Right now? there's a lot of investment hype (and thus a lot of media hype -- follow the money.) focusing on the folks who write software for the internet (or the internet on cellphones, now.)
Once the money falls back to 'normal' levels? yeah, the media will forget about us. We'll go back to being creepy nerds. After the first dot-com crash, there were a bunch of stories about nerds who became temporarily rich and blew their fortunes on stupid garbage. I think it was a lot like the schadenfreude of focusing on sports stars who ended up blowing their giant gains on fancy houses and cars that forced them into bankruptcy a few years later.
As a youngster? the takeaway should be "I don't know when this will end, but it probably won't last forever."
You need to get good experience while the getting is good. I used the first dot-com to work with some really great people; I still brag about stuff I did when I was 17.
Oh boy, the employment situation after the first dot-com crash? it was terrible. I mean, I was able to fight my way into the top 25% (and was able to exploit some connections) so I stayed employed... but as late as 2004, I was able to hire people I had worked with before; people that weren't worse than I was in 1998, for retail wages. I found one guy I had worked with making sandwiches at a deli. "I can't pay you what you're worth, but I can beat the deli." - this was less than a two hour train ride from silicon valley. And the guy really wasn't bad. Sometime around 2007-2008 he took over one of my (reasonably paying, by silicon valley standards) jobs and did pretty great. He's been fully employed at rates similar to what I would get working for other people since.
It's never different.
I mean, around here, the business cycle seems to oscillate wildly, based on investor mood, more than anything else. But what do you do?
I separate these out because we've already gone through a terrible economic downturn that is sputtering to produce jobs and yet we see an explosion of jobs in the tech sector. That's because of the value add software that is reducing the number of employees, paperwork or steps in a process a business needs in order to operate.
Those types of companies are going to be fine through another economic downturn because their clients have realized how much their saving by using the software. These value add tech businesses may see a slow down, but not a collapse.
The biggest example that is here to stay is E-Commerce. Look at how many companies / businesses are realizing how much easier / cheaper it is to go online than build a brick and mortar store with employees, rent, utilities, taxes, repairs, maintenance, etc.
Even some apps are here to stay. AirBNB, for example, is a personal value add when I'm traveling. I have no problem paying them a couple dollars to reduce my overall travel costs by 15-30%.
What will collapse almost overnight are the apps, websites, etc that are simply fluffy websites, marketing materials, or buggy unusable software.
My thought is stick with the people helping other people make or save money, and you'll be safe through the next one.
It's harder to tell the difference than you think.
For an example, during the first dot-com, how about amazon? selling books online. Hurr hurr. what a great and revolutionary business plan. Hell, after the crash, for a while, I was selling books online, and writing software to automate warehouse operations. It's actually a really interesting space, if you ask me, but in 1997, well, to me it didn't look like a billion-dollar idea.
Turns out? it was one of those ideas (or implementations) that turned out to be a really good idea. It was not obvious that it was a good idea (or good implementation) at all, not until after the crash.
Or ebay. There was a sea of auction sites. A huge number of auction sites. It was not at all clear that ebay would continue on to be the marketplace of choice.
And for every amazon and ebay, there were a thousand imitators.
And what about Yahoo!? It sure looked like curated portals were the way to go. it looked like they would be the gateway to the internet. Nope.
AOL was in the same boat. It looked a lot like real value, but was, in fact, pyrite.
I think the biggest story is that the people who added the value that was most tangible? the telecoms who actually trenched in all the fiber? A huge number of those went bankrupt. And those are the companies, were I playing stocks at the time, I would have bought. Those companies seemed to be the 'real-estate' of the internet, as they owned the fiber in the ground. In a real sense, they owned they physical layer that the internet was built upon.
I frequent HN because it does serve that purpose that Slashdot once did - bringing content to my attention that I otherwise would have missed.
HN still has a share if engaging technical news that is big enough to keep it interesting for me. But another thing that differentiates it from slashdot is that discussion is intelligent and no nonsense.
I think the beowulf comments and the GNAA trolls were actually in a time when the overall quality of the comments were OK. There problem was when all comments started having no content whatsoever, but were just a response-for-the-sake-of-it. It is like if people just needed to write something.
PG is trying, and you have to tip your hat, if the 4-hours-per-day stories are true, but talk about Sisyphean.
(1) "I" or "We"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september
I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.
I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site (the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).
And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there used to be.
Tagging might help, at least at the story submission level.
It was tech+business before it was tech: The site started out as "Startup News" (which is when I personally have my fondest memories of it).
IMO even [strictly tech] [everything else] would work, although I'd prefer a more advanced option to filter out stuff.
Looking forward to subscribing to the best sub-hackernewses.
This is the same difference as between traditional email folders and gmail tags.
[1] Evgeny Morozov's coinage, see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/evgeny-morozo...
http://hubski.com/
It also offers a different perspective.
I can't think of anywhere that I can read a discussion on technology politics that's actually dominated by informed, educated technologists. With the best will in the world, the Guardian Comment Is Free section or /r/news doesn't have the quality of commentary.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hacker News community when Google confirmed that Hacker News market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming close on the heels of a recent Alexa survey which plainly states that Hacker News has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Hacker News is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent web community IQ test.
You don't need to be Paul Graham to predict Hacker News's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Hacker News faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Hacker News because Hacker News is dying. Things are looking very bad for Hacker News. As many of us are already aware, Hacker News continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
HN has always had a small smattering of political stories upvoted and discussed, with a specific focus on those that actually matter to hackers. Recent events have increased the proportion of political stories that get upvotes and discussion, but not across the board: there's a specific focus on NSA/surveillance stories, and in the absence of those I think the political content has not dramatically increased. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that the HN audience has become more political, but rather that HN has a higher threshold for wanting to talk about politics and recent stories pass that threshold far too often for comfort.
Politics on Slashdot has so little impact, because it shows up far too often. Politics on HN tends to focus on the most important issues, filtering out the noise. And the recent NSA stories are by far the most important news in tech politics in years. As long as the political stories remain confined to issues of that level of importance, and leave out the daily sources of new outrage, I wouldn't fear for the future of HN. (It also helps that HN doesn't have Slashdot's blatant editorialization to stir up those types of stories.)
HN may be an island away from real-world news, but that island still carries tsunami warning stories.
I have generally come down on the side of considering complaints about the downward slide of the site as mostly rosy-painted nostalgia, but I do think an article as blatantly off-topic and political as that would have quickly been flagged as recently as 3 or 4 months ago.
I've gained a lot of useful information on HN in my past two years as a user and I hope I've helped a few a long the way as well. I do find myself skipping over a lot more posts, especially during the whole Snowden fiasco. I don't know how it used to be "back in the day" but I wish I could have experienced it.
We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.
My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.
I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.
Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.
The opposite is true.
For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?
No. Just no.
>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...
This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.
As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?
I don't believe I ignored anything, and where I was responding to the poster and the discussion, I quoted him/her so it would be clear what points I was responding to.
If you have something specific to say, spell it out and maybe I can answer it for you.
Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
Exactly. Which is why I referenced the FAQ which states that most political discussion is discouraged and articulated precisely how and why this debate is not one of those times.
> The NSA discussion is way past the point where it's interesting to most people.
I think you meant "to me." Judging from the post rankings, frequency, and comment scores, people in this community are interested and engaged in this topic, -more than most. For now anyway.
>Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
As detailed in the FAQ, this is precisely the place for this to happen. Political posts are allowed, and if you can't see how discussion about surveillance software that taps the communications of the entire globe is on topic here, even with the (completely within-framework) political element, then I don't know what to tell you. The problem isn't HN and the other users though. I think you're just tired of seeing it and will be happier in a few more news cycles when it likely dies down like it always has.
Maybe. You also clearly have a bias towards finding these interesting, so it's a moot point.
Taking rankings at face value is not ideal; there is a feedback loop, political posts are likely to engage an audience that likes and upvotes them, and bring more users with that profile to the site. Taking that to the extreme, you could have porn links take over HN in just a few hours if you let them through. It's a matter of setting directions, not catering to everyone's needs.
And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.
This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
Poor analysis by some of the users (there are a lot of non-technical commenters on here) doesn't negate the higher degree of technical discussion that has indeed been present here. Just because opinion and fallacious arguments are present doesn't mean that good technical discussion isn't. Outside of dedicated infosec communities, I am not sure what online community has had more purely technical discussion on these issues over time. Feel free to list them though, because without sarcasm, I would be happy to know of them.
The amount of horribly bad posts on HN has reached a proportion where they're no longer exceptions, they characterize the site as a whole.
Personally I've noticed my participation drop in the last few months because of this. There are fewer and fewer people interested in engaging in a discussion, and more and more religious zealotry where it's clear poster has zero interest in opposing views, and will stoop consistently to hostility and fundamental indecency when confronted.
During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, I have to say I can recall a thread of people saying, "No, that doesn't make sense, you're trying to disprove a negative", etc.
tl;dr - My point here is that I think the baseline intelligence of Hacker News is higher than we might think it is just by observing the front page, and that there are actually a lot more savvy people gaming the front page who are just driven by a relative few who act as the passionate, vocal majority.
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I like to think there's a lot of under the radar intellectual activity, and people are just being really opportunistic for karma or some such.
As for legal acumen, I agree completely - I don't have nearly as much as, for example, 'rayiner. But that's exactly why we have people with niche expertise or domain knowledge. It's a real problem when people get frenzied and decide they know Constitution without having read it.
I haven't been here as long, but I believe that we have sampling bias from the hugely outspoken minority who know it's trendy to be anti-state.
EDIT: I want to submit my experience about the site being gameable - it's true it's easy to get the top comment for news stories that are heavily politically loaded, but I have to say it's easy to karma farm even if you're not anarchist/cynical/conspiracy mongering. I do not try to game the forum to get high comments, but I can still personally attest to having some top comments in the high 40s during the NSA scandal while being incredibly vocal against the "popular opinion" that Google was directly aiding the government. I probably had the top comment on at least half of those stories, arguing against the tone of the story profusely. I don't have a sockpuppet ring, so those numbers of people who upvoted me are to the best of my knowledge genuine. They may not have been as vocal in their agreement with me as the detractors who replied to my comments, but they certainly exist.
I guess I just want to try to dispel pessimism. I don't think all is lost regarding the political climate of Hacker News :)
The parent comment says X, the one below says the opposite, and then someone says X again. Do people click and write mainly to get karma? Should posting also cost karma?
The longer you write the easier it is to say something that's not true and harder for people to follow it accurately.
(I know I'm guilty of this.)
But...I do agree with you. It becomes harder to sift through facts when a post is very long. I do it because I enjoy writing long prose on topics I'm interested in - I don't think it's particularly correlated with getting high karma. I've seen very high comments that consist of a little paragraph (albeit packed with technical information).
But I think a lot of people do just click and write for karma. As long as there is a karma system, this is somewhat unavoidable. I really wish we could do away with the entire karma system entirely, but your suggestion about posts "costing" karma sounds really neat, I'd definitely test that on a small forum...not sure how you'd deal with throwaways though, and how would new users accrue karma?
I don't know if giving that much more power to older posters is necessarily the answer, although it might help reinforce the perception of the community maintaining a certain tone in discussion, if the same posters are more likely to be heard and heard more often. On the other hand, with that scenario, karma would actually mean something (though that just brings up the possibility of karma-farming posts.)
If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.
Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.
Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.
Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
And you ignored the other half of my comment, about how the NSA story is not news. It is merely new to excitable young people who mistake unfamiliarity for exposé. If I can convice them to take the red pill, they will learn that parts of signals intelligence are profoundly more important than even the astroturf claims, and at the same time more mundane.
With politics, there seems to be no such restraint.
Now it is just about too late. For the next 10-20 years, national infosec policy will be driven by the radicals' memory of their principled stand against the NSA "revelations". "Abuses" will be "curtailed" without regard for legitimate security needs.
The is no elsewhere to reserve this discussion for. If HN is credulous enough to believe staged CNN sound bites, there is no hope for other venues.
I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).
I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.
To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.
Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.
GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.
About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.
Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.
That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp
But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.
This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them has not spent even five minutes researching the subject they're posting on, and yet has somehow arrived at strong opinions on the subject anyway.
Maybe I'm the problem, but I'm not going to change. I just don't have the resources to be 100% right every time I say things online.
Worse is legal case findings which for whatever reason, the media did not pick up. Take the statement that in Swedish law, people who produce or run a webservice can be made liable if the majority of users use the service for illegal purposes? That facts is basically impossible to find using a search, even through it is written plainly as a simple Q&A in the appeal court judgment of the TPB trial. If the case had been that I forgot where I read it, a search query would not have helped me in tracking it down.
What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.
I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."
That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.
Thank you.
From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive?
In this specific case of "direct access", the facts are the few press-release made, the leaked slides, and any contributing leaked report. The rational arguments is mostly around the definition of "direct access". The truth is thus depended on the quality of the facts, and the derived result of discussing the rational arguments.
Is this bad for HN, and if so, what should be done about it?
I agree NSA's slides are not innuendo. Neither were BigCom denials. To me it seems reconciling those is neither a rebuttal nor a retreat, it's advancing the conversation from two disputing sides (NSA lying vs corporate collusion) to a third "this is likely what's meant, as seen in multiple concrete cases from 2006 to today, and makes sense of currently available info."
The 19 July story by Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, disclosing one in flight data capture practice well known to the data center community, was not abstract. The latest xkeyscore reveal fits this model as well.
"Are they or aren't they" isn't the most productive debate to have anyway. If they aren't, they could, and if the end result is the same, what should we do about it?
As you suggest, the discussions in this area I do appreciate at HN are on what honest rational policy should be, and on how technologists can assist in ensuring trust in confidentiality and non-repudiation in the cloud of services HNers are building.
At least HN is a place where (presumably) there are users informed enough to set the record straight, rather than having the theories perpetuate. As someone who frequents Reddit, I appreciate that much.
>The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
I almost hate coming here now, for that reason. Which makes me sad.
I'm going to disagree with the highlighted portion. On pretty much any topic related to law and government, HN in the aggregate is willfully ignorant - people rarely take the time to do research or provide citations, but go about declaring this or that to be illegal or unconstitutional with no evidence and frequently without even fielding an argument. The discussions here are as bad as the comment section at, say, the Huffington Post. A lot of people seem to think that because they're handy with computers they have special insight into every other intellectual topic. This is, sadly, not the case.
I feel that you've highlighted a possible underlying cause of HN's present malaise, which is: many community members here are poorly connected on the Internet. HN is an open website, which means that it is very easy for someone who is new to the Internet to find and browse. If you've been commenting a lot in the recent political threads, I can make the following predictions: you've participated in online fora for less than ten years, and you don't pursue social connections much deeper than reddit user flair.
If you would like to take part in a lot of technical and political discussions regarding surveillance, you should consider joining a newsgroup or mailing list (if there still are any, I know politech and cypherpunks are dead) specifically devoted to this discussion. Usenet requires a modicum of effort (and maybe a subscription fee) to participate, which can help to limit the discussion to serious contribution by serious participants. You may also want to subscribe to and comment on blogs by people who know about these things, so you can get to know people and contribute to a discussion that, in order to be any good, must stretch on far longer than a single comment thread. There are communities devoted to this sort of discussion.
The content-link plus tree-style-comments format of HN is good for day-long free-form discussion on lighthearted issues of interest to technical people. It is not suited for deep, long-term discussion of complex political issues. HN can't be usefully political even if it wants to be, any more than HN can be used to design novel methods of quantum error correction. Some things just aren't suited for the HN style of discussion.
Is there a clear solution to stopping it? No? Do we know the extent of what the NSA's doing? No? Then we haven't discussed it enough.
This is a historically unprecedented issue. In no period in history has any state has anything akin to this power. This issue is more important than your distaste at seeing content you're not interested in.
To me, not as much. The most poignant catalyst, at least in recent times, to me, was Aaron Swartz. It’s just grown from there.
Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links to interesting topics.
Even if the discussion can be a bit asinine at times, the value of the links alone is worth it, and there will be at least one or two interesting discussion threads per link.
Just ignore the crap.
Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.
HN suffers from a more mild case of it with people being compelled to link at least one or two vaguely relevant xkcd comics in nearly every discussion without additional content. I like xkcd, but there's no reason to create noise by linking to it any time a comment or story reminds someone of it.
What you see on both reddit and slashdot is an increasing tendency toward irony as the basic approach to any subject (4chan is the same way too). This overwhelms and actively drives away discussions that are serious and not ironic. This is why the highest quality subreddits (like askscience and askhistorians) enforce very strict rules and actively discourage humor for humor's sake. This is a big reason why stackexchange is so successful as well. And it doesn't mean humor is unwelcome at all these places, just that it needs to be part of something productive or humnorous enough to overcome the strong bias against it.
I profoundly disagree with this, as an early Slashdot user. Slashdot had quite a bit of serious discussion - HN scarily replicates much of the feeling of discussion 1998-2002, just with different topics but all the same ups & downs. HN even has its perpetual flame war of Android vs. iOS that mimics Slashdot's Gnome vs KDE.
Yes, there was quirky trollish humour that was forgiven, but the moderating system, once it settled down in 1999, promoted quite a bit of very in-depth conversation.
Columbine and Jon Katz was the first real "political" side track for Slashdot, but it survived and moved on from there... and basically just wound up dying out due to Taco leaving and Reddit/HN.
"This shows that capitalism is evil." - "This shows that free market will solve everything."
Pretty soon we will have "9/11 was an inside job" posters on the top.
I still think the news themselves are great. I just don't like the discussions anymore.
There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:
* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.
* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, there's nothing new to talk about. I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's really boring.
* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041616 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314
As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable).
Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha) everything politics-related.
Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some help from pg.
Metafilter, as you said, is one example. Another is the Ruby Rogues Parley mailing list (now Discourse site). I can only imagine what a HN with similar filtering-of-the-noise would be like.
this will eventually degrade to more elitism, like (now just people with a big karma)
HN is like a collective mind.. more pop ot gots, more of the average mind it will represent.. its something i fell about facebook too.. with the first open-minded friends, it was a good environment.. than.. the thing get popular, and your news feed look like a toillet flush..
i think whats bother some, its what attract others.. for me particularly i dont mind some political biased posts.. more than i do for the startup mentality stuff..
but then both of them get they fair share of the HN front page.. i think people here at HN do a very good review of things that are important, also for the moment, for the modern times.. live in broaders and bigger communities is this.. the average collective IQ gets lower.. but it make sense to say: "i dont want to grow anymore if thats whats grows means?"
should we kick off the average and make they fell unwelcome?
maybe i am the average, how can i possible know that?
It's possible to have civil political discourse, but it takes a lot of effort, much more than maintaining the entire rest of a site. You can't do it by tweaking things here and there, you need active moderators who can maintain cool heads themselves about topics they are passionate about.
I don't think it's worth HN spending that effort, and what's more important it doesn't look like HN wants to spend that effort.
If you want a swimming pool, you have to maintain it. If you can't, fill it in. HN should either invest a lot more maintenance on political posts, or take a very very heavy ax to them.
Let's not ban politics, let's just drastically lower the amount of noise in political threads.
There is a lot more to discuss about the Snowden/NSA brouhaha. It's just not regurgitation of existing bits of information that have already been posted hundreds of times. We burn out on the repetition and get annoyed.
What is relevant, and in my eyes disappointing, is that there has been little deep discourse on the topic. Every article starts at the basic "OMFG" and doesn't take a broader view of new developments.
There is some incentive that is driving the decline of quality content and interaction on the site. Whether it is attention, karma, or whatever, site members have responded with a focus on shallow quantity.
For example, there hasn't been a deep discussion on why privacy is a right. There've been a few comments, such as Schneier's "What's your salary?" that evoke the fear of having privacy violated, but people who are afraid of negative stimulus will override their fear for a more meaningful or important goal. Why is what the NSA doing bad, from basic philosophical principles, and what will the impact be on business, technology, and society in the coming years?
Solving the problem is not simple or trivial, but I'm sure Paul has given many approaches significant thought. It's difficult to implement them without changing the essential simplicity of the site.
There is the Reddit path of subreddits and the various "this thread moved to IYFCategory" forums. I'm not sure that helps. However, there is a natural clustering of some of these topics. While a "politics" cluster is too broad, some shorter-lived and more specialized clusters, such as Snowden/Angular/whatever grouping, would afford discussion among those interested, encapsulate the babble storm, yet give an indication of activity so that individuals can determine their own level of involvement. "I see you're posting a link to a story about Edward Snowden. I'm adding it to the Snowdenball."
Another approach is to limit karma. The people who post karma-bait will top out very quickly and either lose interest, or focus less on the score they have accumulated. It could just be another exponential function of up votes. 1:1 when getting started, then decrease the karma adjustment of each vote over time. Then one has positive and negative feedback, especially among "newer" accounts, and less of a desire even to look at the number past 2,000 or some arbitrary figure.
It's a tough problem. We can self-regulate by avoiding the xkcd 386 impulse. Stop giving votes to shallow thought. Stop posting one-line replies that are obvious and superficial.