I recently sent them an email about a thing I really find frustrating at HN:
Hi all,
I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error:
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link, wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my account status is available for submitting.
This way I will not submit stories in vain
It looks like you submit a lot of stories, 545 submissions in 320 days and six submissions in the last 24 hours. You submitted the same askubuntu link twice today. Maybe you should try to only submit one thing a day?
I still get mad about this:
2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two.
I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
We all have good days and bad days. On some days I write stuff that is marginal, on others downright nonsense. HN is an excellent critic and I take my lumps. It upset me in the beginning but over time I've come to appreciate the downvotes. On subjects where your view goes against the majority / accepted dogma be prepared to get yourself voted straight into the ground just because the supporters of the dogma outnumber those that are critical of it in some way. Remember HN is young, US centric and rich. If you take a position that is likely to offend young, wealthy Americans then you're likely going to find yourself in negative vote territory. Don't let that stop you from speaking your mind, don't attach too much value to the points.
I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
I've had the same experience where I've been downvoted because my comment goes against the prevailing group-think of the site. This has a chilling effect on contribution of new ideas to comments, which thereby reinforces the group-think. It's a vicious cycle. I'm very hesitant to post comments now for fear that they will be downvoted for no good reason.
I'd be interested in the update - "Why I came back to Hacker News" (given in the 4 years since writing this, Matt has returned, though not as active as I remember).
[EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me, for us.
The people who quit for real usually don't start with a statement. I think making a big deal out of it is a way of telling oneself why one should quit. Contrast this with someone asking the question "Why did you quit?"and replying with why one did quit.
Considering that I quit for almost a year in much the same way I disagree. The best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I never learned anything as an entrepreneur from the people that just left. But I listened very well to those that left and told me why. Of course HN has no direct commercial incentive to retain Matt or me or anybody else, as long as we're contributing it's fine and when we're not there are 100's like us to take our place.
So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less.
And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).
I definitely agree that the best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I also think most, if not all, of the "I quit HN and here's why" posts are from precisely the type of people that makes HN worth reading, and the complaints they have are generally real problems that HN would be better off if it could solve.
With that said, I think there's a difference between quitting HN and unsubscribing from say, a online service. When you unsubscribe from a service there's a clear demarcation. Quitting HN is usually a decision of the form "from now on I won't go to HN", a decision which is very easily reversed. Because it is so easy to reverse one's quitting, it doesn't carry as much weight.
On the other hand, let's say pg stays off HN for a year. Eventually people will ask why he quit HN. If he writes an essay about how he came to quit HN and why (past tense) as a response to that question, it's more likely that he has quit for real, as well as being true reasons for why he actually did quit.
Another example: This is my last cigarette, because smoking is bad for my health vs. I quit smoking 10 years ago when I had kids and realized I wanted to be there for them when they got older. It's true smoking is bad for your health, but that might not be the true reason people actually do quit.
Funny you should mention that. In a way PG has quit. He's passed the mantle to dang who is doing an exemplary job of moderating the forum now. Paul's last post is more than 2 months old. And he did write that essay:
> I'll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.
Splitting hairs here, but I consider that more of a "I'll no longer be the moderator of HN" type of quitting, which is not a very reversible decision. I was hinting at the fact that he might also quit as a user, considering his two month post hiatus. (Personally I'm hoping he's just taking a well-deserved vacation from HN, rather than leaving it completely).
Is there any place better? Twitter maybe? I lurk here occassionally because the comments are more intelligent than reddit. But I'm not in IT, so most of the posts are not relevant for me. I like that you can post anonymously.
This seems like a relevant venue to mention my startup http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info
which dampens HN flagging, re-ranks and merges the top submissions along with those from other tech sites.
Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN
Firefox 11.0 on Ubuntu 12. I finally found that by maneouvering carefully I could find somewhere outside the huge slab and click there. Not easy on my setup. And did I mention that it was annoying?
Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about.
* Domains popping in when your mouse scrolls over something is annoying. Really annoying. My mouse is not my eyes - just because my eyes are on something does not mean my mouse is, and vice versa. And the popin ends up being movement, which is distracting. The same issue I have with the DDG redesign.
* Said domains popping in do not have a fallback without JS.
* Random icons (and in an icon font, none the less, which again, does not exactly fallback gracefully without JS). I much prefer "1 hour ago" than an icon of a clock. (And said icon of a clock doesn't even change given how old an article is! You have to mouse over it for that. And again, see above for things only showing on mouseover.)
* No way (that I can see) to sort/filter. For example, only seeing articles that were heavily penalized on HN.
* Bug: if you mouseover the photo icon to open the image, and put your mouse over the image and out of that submission, the domain never goes away.
* The feedback links... Don't actually allow you to submit feedback. And "I don't believe you" for negative feedback is condescending.
* Popover on first visit is extremely annoying, to the point where I won't visit it again until it is removed. (My browser clears most things on exit, so I'm assuming that it will pop up every time I restart my browser)
Hi, thank you for your time and your excellent feedback.
I agree with you on all points. I laughed when you said Ron Burgundy was condescending - I had not considered that. But again you are probably right.
The pop-over you mentioned at the end only appears if its hard coded into the link. I did this to the link as I believe new users will rather have more rather than less information on their first visit.
Did you post the wrong link? You mentioned it is a tool for HN but I did not see one HN story. I did see a number of trivial links to images of reddit favorites like a duckling waking up from a nap and a cat with no feet going down the stairs.
1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are
disproportionately represented.
2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement
or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because
many people simply cannot see the difference
between the two.
3. The community is full of ideologues to the point
where the comments are most often just predictable
talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum.
4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch
with how the other half lives.
5. It's a time suck.
6. It removes comments from where they should be,
on the destination site.
7. It reduces blogging time.
Food for thought... How can we improve?
Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
> Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two
Does that mean that we better down-vote whenever we see a comment does not add value to the topic?
> 1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented.
Allow downvotes for submissions.
> 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two.
Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.
I heard the Old Ones say that, before my time, there used to be a downvote button, but it went away because the tribalism led to, e.g., non-Apple stories being voted off the front page.
I rarely hit the upvote button because it feels broken to me without a downvote. Maybe a handful of articles a week. Flag maybe once or twice a week. Although I liberally use the upvote buttons in comments.
I found a sentence in his follow up post that pretty much sums up this very common "I quit" rant:
"Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic."
Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract intellectuals.
Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called "intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a lively 24/7 community.
The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side, with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works that way, with it's subreddits.
Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which integrate seamlessly with the core platform.
The reason I sometimes wish to quit HN: There are just to many Apple fanboys, and cliche opinions driven by insane fanboyism that just make me cringe sometimes.
There are Apple fanboys, there are Google fanboys, there are Microsoft fanboys, there are Linux fanboys, there are Haskell fanboys...etc etc.
Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them than without them.
What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-frontpageful of uninteresting articles about (Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was really quite different back when I first got interested in it.
I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.
I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit.
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so it's possible he talked to PG directly.
I agree with the "lack of downvotes" and "disagree downvotes" and am neutral or disagree with the rest.
This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN:
1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here.
2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.
I thought I would take a clue from the submission and provide a response to people who have been silently downvoted.
1. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around for any period.
2. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page. Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.
In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments
for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only
for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned
and well-stated that I disagree with than just another
guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me
square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably
just about any site with voting.
Yet it seems that stating that you wish people would vote on merit puts you in the majority of people who comment on voting systems.
If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.
There's always the fear of unilaterally disarming: "I am going to vote based on skill, not based on Which Side the person is on. . . . Oh, but everyone else is voting based on Which Side! Now I have to help My Side!"
It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed.
I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.
How many 'points' you have is mostly a function of how much time you spent here.
If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!
It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)
I've yet to quit or come back. I find it's much more relaxing just to hang out and bitch about things.
HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here.
Well tbh he has a fair point, and I tend to be true on what I write. I get a lot of down-votes cause I guess I am speaking my mind and I ain't try to write some scientific report for someone to read...
In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see.
I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.
I think the points he made is really valid for any kind of forum type thing, and he should be using Quora to get the experience he wants. They have the downvoting abilities and blogging features, and he can definitely gain more distribution there. Whether he is back or not is never the point, the problems he said seems to be fairly good.
Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much improved over the time, in my opinion at least.
But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion straight from youtube.
HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture, particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.
TSA agents aren't bad, they're "just following orders." Okay not a quote from the article, but it seems to be his attitude. Actually his attitude is worse, that they are somehow the victims.
But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent memory, I like people who are willing to blame the people responsible for doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.
The news consolidation on HN is great, for the most part.
Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in software, or visiting with loved ones.
Adding a downvote seems potentially dangerous to me. Sure a lot of "groupthink" articles rise to the top now, but a downvote means that the same vocal minority could suppress stories that don't fit into their ideology. Definitely a double edged sword
Hacker News used to be brimming with content. I would regularly read 50-60% of the articles.
Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff, lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.
I thought so too, but I think it's just that the "newness" wears off and we start to realize that what we once thought was novel and interesting is seen as less so when the theme stays the same week after week.
That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?
110 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadHi all,
I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error:
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link, wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my account status is available for submitting. This way I will not submit stories in vain
Edand got no answer.
is the answer. That message appears when you're hogging the new page with your submissions, which means you're pushing other submissions out.
I had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got 4 down votes!
I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but heartfelt condolences.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon
[EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me, for us.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 [2] First comment back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690
We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.
So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more people like him, not less.
And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come back (even if not always under their old nick).
With that said, I think there's a difference between quitting HN and unsubscribing from say, a online service. When you unsubscribe from a service there's a clear demarcation. Quitting HN is usually a decision of the form "from now on I won't go to HN", a decision which is very easily reversed. Because it is so easy to reverse one's quitting, it doesn't carry as much weight.
On the other hand, let's say pg stays off HN for a year. Eventually people will ask why he quit HN. If he writes an essay about how he came to quit HN and why (past tense) as a response to that question, it's more likely that he has quit for real, as well as being true reasons for why he actually did quit.
Another example: This is my last cigarette, because smoking is bad for my health vs. I quit smoking 10 years ago when I had kids and realized I wanted to be there for them when they got older. It's true smoking is bad for your health, but that might not be the true reason people actually do quit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856
Splitting hairs here, but I consider that more of a "I'll no longer be the moderator of HN" type of quitting, which is not a very reversible decision. I was hinting at the fact that he might also quit as a user, considering his two month post hiatus. (Personally I'm hoping he's just taking a well-deserved vacation from HN, rather than leaving it completely).
Oh, I believe you. Been there, done that. I figured I'd absolutely never be back here.
> Eventually it got better (in some ways anyway) and I started sniffing around again.
I'm really happy that you're back.
Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN
Personally, I also found the interface too sparse, and rather unclear as to what it was showing me and why. I was not engaged, and after thinking about why for a few minutes, I have no idea. I just don't feel any level of interest for it. My only reason might be that it's an aggregation of other sites, and I can't be bothered to learn more about how to turn off the source sites I know I don't care about.
</braindump >
* Domains popping in when your mouse scrolls over something is annoying. Really annoying. My mouse is not my eyes - just because my eyes are on something does not mean my mouse is, and vice versa. And the popin ends up being movement, which is distracting. The same issue I have with the DDG redesign.
* Said domains popping in do not have a fallback without JS.
* Random icons (and in an icon font, none the less, which again, does not exactly fallback gracefully without JS). I much prefer "1 hour ago" than an icon of a clock. (And said icon of a clock doesn't even change given how old an article is! You have to mouse over it for that. And again, see above for things only showing on mouseover.)
* No way (that I can see) to sort/filter. For example, only seeing articles that were heavily penalized on HN.
* Bug: if you mouseover the photo icon to open the image, and put your mouse over the image and out of that submission, the domain never goes away.
* The feedback links... Don't actually allow you to submit feedback. And "I don't believe you" for negative feedback is condescending.
* Popover on first visit is extremely annoying, to the point where I won't visit it again until it is removed. (My browser clears most things on exit, so I'm assuming that it will pop up every time I restart my browser)
I agree with you on all points. I laughed when you said Ron Burgundy was condescending - I had not considered that. But again you are probably right.
The pop-over you mentioned at the end only appears if its hard coded into the link. I did this to the link as I believe new users will rather have more rather than less information on their first visit.
I will continue working on improving the site.
Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical thinking.
Does that mean that we better down-vote whenever we see a comment does not add value to the topic?
https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521
"The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Allow downvotes for submissions.
> 2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two.
Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.
> 5. It's a time suck.
Make the site faster, it's really slow.
That doesn't avoid procrastinating. Besides, HN is fast, many linked sites are slow and bloated...
(This leads to paranoia about slow-banning or hell-banning.)
I rarely hit the upvote button because it feels broken to me without a downvote. Maybe a handful of articles a week. Flag maybe once or twice a week. Although I liberally use the upvote buttons in comments.
"Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic."
Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract intellectuals.
Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called "intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a lively 24/7 community.
The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side, with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works that way, with it's subreddits.
Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which integrate seamlessly with the core platform.
Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them than without them.
I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at YC??
How?
It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
If I recall correctly PG told me that at a YC event. Damn you PG! :)
So the trick is:
- Change your email address to something like kjghoyvgljhbvljhvkljhbv@mailinator.com.
- If you get a confirmation message to your old address, delete it.
- Change your password to jkhvouyflkjbv7897t^%REjhvljyyf.
- Go to the mailinator address to confirm the change.
- Clear your browser history.
Then you're free of HN forever! ... Or until you make a new account.
This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN:
1. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here.
2. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from scratch.
1. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around for any period.
2. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page. Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.
If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.
It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have been followed.
I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.
If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points enough to have that power!
It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)
HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, some long-form content seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time. Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here.
Did I mention I like complaining?
In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see.
I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a + karma in real life and I need some balance.
Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much improved over the time, in my opinion at least.
But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion straight from youtube.
HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture, particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.
But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent memory, I like people who are willing to blame the people responsible for doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.
Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in software, or visiting with loved ones.
at 3 or 5 downvotes, there is a signal the comment is low value.
Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff, lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.
That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?