Plenty of other WebAssembly ports that are online, another one online is The Curse of Monkey Island: (press escape key as soon as it loads to skip to playing!)
One could argue that this has already happened: social media is the singularity. The evil AI doesn't have to be implemented entirely in silicon. Indeed, that fact that it runs in part on human brains helps it remain stealthy.
One day a swarm of self replicating probes will turn up and start building a Dyson sphere around our sun. The purpose is to power the alien equivalent of Bitcoin mining.
Another storyline I came up with is this: Imagine that an alien civilisation has the ability to send electromagnetic signals faster than light by some mechanism such as a micro wormhole but not ships and such.
They still want to destroy other civilisations before they become a threat. They are able to connect to some unsecured wifi networks and start posting on forums. The username: Satoshi Nakamoto
I use HN Search manually but support that in a browser extension that I use for HN moderation. For example, I have keyboard shortcuts to open an HN search tab for the URL or title of a selected post, another to restrict the search to threads that got comments, another to convert search results into a list on HN itself, another to copy the title/URL of a selected post to the clipboard, and so on. (One of these years I will find a way to share this software with HN users, since it's kind of an HN power-reader, besides the mod functions.)
That lets me find and scan past threads fairly quickly to find the interesting ones. It's still too manual, though; I need to make more steps towards automation. I'm not sure it can be fully automated because you have to do human interventions to either track down relevant past threads or exclude boring ones. The endgame is probably not to fully automate these lists but to have software generate a starter version and then give the community ways to edit it.
The only place that recalling things off the top of my head (or somewhere in the poorly-lit middle of it) plays a role is that often I vaguely remember that there existed a discussion about $X in past years and then tweak the searches till I find it.
An aggregator ala reddit/hackernews/twitter that uses a market mechanism to better incentivise content discovery.
One of the biggest issues with existing aggregators is that:
- how well content performs is dependant on the attention it gets immediately after posting.
- However, readers aren’t incentivised to sift carefully through new content, which is generally of lower quality than "frontpage" content
- This means that how content performs is a lottery. Great content is often missed just by chance
- This in turn means that there’s no platform that encourages unknown authors to create high-effort, thoughtful pieces. Instead it’s far more effective to blogspam.
I'm working on a platform that uses something similar to a prediction/stock market to incentivise people to search for high-quality content. Instead of upvoting, you effectively buy shares in new content, which you can then sell at a later point for a profit if the content proves popular. Equally you can buy "downvote shares", which act like a short and help dampen rampant speculation.
It’s early days still, but I’m hoping this could be a great way to encourage higher quality content creation.
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.
"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
Unrelated story, but in the nineties I worked as a line service tech at the local FBO. Gene Cernan regularly flew his C-421 from Houston to his weekend retreat in the hill country. I got to know him fairly well and eventually got to where I was taking care of his 1980s yellow suburban. I got to be "his guy" and was allowed to drive his truck, fill it with gas and wash it for him. As a 17 year old kid, this was the highest honor imaginable.
I went off to college the next year, but I won't soon forget how well he treated me and his willingness to share all kinds of pilot and astronaut stories with me that were basically in his "private collection" of stories.
He died not long ago, and I wish I could have attended his funeral. What a man.
I think the key flaw in these types of efforts is they ignore the long term success of the democratic process. It feels like once they get a foothold through the existing government bodies, the goal is to largely replace them with their own vision. But how will the people in the community control their own destiny in the long term?
Governance seems to be an afterthought.
You have to give up a little control, but everyone benefits. Alphabet wouldn't exist without the system that gave rise to it, why kill the golden goose?
The community reflects the larger society, which is divided on social issues. Don't forget that users come from many countries and regions. That's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
The biggest factor, though, is that HN is a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), meaning that everyone is in everyone's presence. This is uncommon in internet communities and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
(Edit: I mean internet communities of HN's size and scope, or larger. The problems are different at smaller size or narrower scope, but those aren't the problems we have.)
People on opposite sides of political/ideological/cultural/national divides tend to self-segregate on the internet, exchanging support with like-minded peers. When they get into conflicts with opponents, it's usually in a context where conflict is expected, e.g. a disagreeable tweet that one of their friends has already responded to. The HN community isn't like that—here we're all in the same boat, whether we like it or not. People frequently experience unwelcome shocks when they realize that other HN users—probably a lot of other users, if the topic is divisive—hold views hostile to their own. Suddenly a person whose views on (say) C++ you might enjoy reading and find knowledgeable, turns out to be a foe about something else—something more important.
This shock is in a way traumatic, if one can speak of trauma on the internet. Many readers bond with HN, come here every day and feel like it's 'their' community—their home, almost—and suddenly it turns out that their home has been invaded by hostile forces, spewing rhetoric that they're mostly insulated from in other places in their life. If they try to reply and defend the home front, they get nasty, forceful pushback that can be just as intelligent as the technical discussions, but now it feels like that intelligence is being used for evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but this really is how it feels, and it's a shock. We get emails from users who have been wounded by this and basically want to cry out: why is HN not what I thought it was?
Different internet communities grow from different initial conditions. Each one replicates in self-similar ways as it grows—Reddit factored into subreddits, Twitter and Facebook have their social graphs, and so on. HN's initial condition was to be a single community that is the same for everybody. That has its wonderful side and its horrible side. The horrible side is that there's no escaping each other: when it comes to divisive topics, we're a bunch of scorpions trapped in a single bottle.
This "non-siloed" nature of HN causes a deep misunderstanding. Because of the shock I mentioned—the shock of discovering that your neighbor is an enemy, someone whose views are hostile when you thought you were surrounded by peers—it can feel like HN is a worse community than the others. When I read what people write about HN on other sites, I frequently encounter narration of this experience. It isn't always framed that way, but if you understand the dynamic you will recognize it unmistakeably, and this is one key to understanding what people say about HN. If you read the profile the New Yorker published about HN last year, you'll find the author's own shock experience of HN encoded into that article. It's something of a miracle of openness and intelligence that she was able to get past that—the shock experience is that bad.
But this is a misunderstanding—it misses a more important truth. The remarkable thing about HN, when it comes to social issues, is not that ugly and offensive comments appear here, though they certainly do. Rather, it's that we're all able to stay in one room without destroying it. Because no other site is even trying to do this, HN seems unusually conflictual, when in reality it's unusually coexistent. Every other place broke into fragments long ago and would never dream of putting everyone together [1].
It's easy to miss, but the important thing about HN is that it remains a single community—one which somehow has managed to withstand the forces that blow the rest of the internet apart. I think that is a genuine social achievement. The conflicts are inevitable—they govern the internet. Just look at how people talk about, and to, each other on Twitter: it's vicious and emotionally violent. I spend my days on HN, and when I look into arguments on Twitter I feel sucker-punched and have to remember to breathe. What's not inevitable is people staying in the same room and somehow still managing to relate to each other, however partially. That actually happens on HN—probably because the site is focused on having other interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately this social achievement of the HN community, that we manage to coexist in one room and still function despite vehemently disagreeing, ends up feeling like the opposite. Internet users are so unused to being in one big space together that we don't even notice when we are, and so it feels like the orange site sucks.
I'd like to reflect a more accurate picture of this community back to itself. What's actually happening on HN is the opposite of how it feels: what's happening is a rare opportunity to work out how to coexist despite divisions. Other places on the internet don't offer that opportunity because the silos prevent it. On HN we have no silos, so the only options are to modulate the pressure or explode.
HN, fractious and frustrating as it is, turns out to be an experiment in the practice of peace. The word 'peace' may sound like John Lennon's 'Imagine', but in reality peace is uncomfortable. Peace is managing to coexist despite provocation. It is the ability to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, including on the internet. Peace is not so far from war. Because a non-siloed community brings warring parties together, it gives us an opportunity to become different.
I know it sounds strange and is grandiose to say, but if the above is true, then HN is a step closer to real peace than elsewhere on the internet that I'm aware of—which is the very thing that can make it seem like the opposite. The task facing this community is to move further into coexistence. Becoming conscious of this dynamic is probably a key, which is why I say it's time to reflect a more accurate picture of the HN community back to itself.
[1] Is there another internet community of HN's size (millions of users, 10-20k posts a day), where divisive topics routinely appear, that has managed to stay one whole community instead of ripping itself apart? If so, I'd love to know about it.
https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html