All: if you see a particularly great comment, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully add it. We don't want to be the only ones noticing these!
It's more about optimizing for curiosity [1]. Back-and-forths are fine when people are genuinely interested, but tit-for-tat spats are the worst. The former tend to continue while curiosity lasts, while the latter hopefully peter out after a while; in any case we should not be resuscitating them.
Push notifications are basically a stack-swap op: they push down what you're interested in right now, in favor of something you were interested in a while ago. This is good for engagement, but on HN we're in the sweet spot of not needing to juice engagement. HN is most valuable when it's as good as possible, not when traffic is highest [2], so we try for quality over quantity. (Not that quality is all that high, but that's a different story. [3])
I'm not sure that PG was particularly against notifications because he added this at one point:
I’d contrast to Tildes where I think reply notifications help keep people engaged in discussions and Mastodon where I think people use favorites to close off a discussion.
Tildes is interesting to compare to HN because it is superficially similar but the balance between links and discussions is quite different. That is, I think “Ask HN” is pretty sad and mostly failed (look at how few get a single comment) but linkless discussions on Tildes are pretty lively.
Just like Twitter, just like Reddit, it would encourage me to type the sort of comments that I try not to write on topics I try not to engage in in ways I try to avoid.
Your mileage varies of course and I am glad there is a place where you get what you need.
My typical experience with people talking sports has been very tribal.
But that’s my experience not yours of course.
One of the reasons I am on HN is the diminished role of tribal opinions . It’s not that I don’t have them, I just don’t think mine are particularly interesting.
There are different things I get out of sports socially.
Going to a game (could be any sport because I have a project to do sports photography for every team at my Uni) I relish it when the away team has a big tailgate, when they bring a raucous crowd, when I feel like I have to whoop it up for the home team to compete with them. I think it is is a healthy tribalism as I know in my heart I have no malice towards them in fact I am glad they came.
Soccer games have a different aspect because the crowd that shows up is very diverse: I hear a lot of languages spoken that are not English because foreign students come, a lot of youth soccer players from elementary school to high school come and boy they understand the game well and are following it closely and spectating actively but there are also staffers who themselves played sports (say field hockey) when they were young who brought along children who weren’t so interest in the game and end up leaving at the half.
The feeling I get there is that we are all part of a soccer network that goes all the way down to pickup games and youth leagues and goes up, up, up to MLS and the Premier League and the national teams that go to the world cup so my solidarity is not just to my school but to the whole world of soccer.
Personally I am not so into sports talk about who I think is better or who is going to win except in those cases where one team or player is on a different leve at a particular time. If I want to get into a knock-down drag-out, I’d rather get into a discussion about controversial rule changes or the impact of gambling on sport. Myself my interest in sports has spiked lately thanks to the influence of my RSS reader and my photography so it’s also an area where I have a lot to learn from not just the experts but other fanns.
Photographing high school soccer was my excuse to buy a DSLR…and refereeing youth soccer was how I started understanding people and road tripping for tournament work was how I really got the travel bug.
But there’s no free lunch. I’ve seen sports tribalism used as the excuse for bullying, violence, and bad behavior in general…in myself as well as others.
It’s not that there are not thoughtful conversations to be had around sports, it is that sports has such a low barrier to trolling and reactions are often deeply emotional.
I mean asking for your specific team support would have been the low hanging troll vector.
More importantly trolling would have been within the norms of sports talk when both people aren’t saying roll tide etc.
These days, I usually read the BBC football page every day and watch Premier League on whatever day Arsenal play and have my fix by 2pm Pacific…home games are all done before noon because the gunners play early because of police coverage.
That’s enough for me now. I was in the Orange Bowl when my team beat Nebraska for its first national championship, I went to four World Cup matches, seen Shaq play for the home team, seen Valderama’s home debut, seen Kaka make his home debut, seen seen Consequo play for the home team, seen my childhood team finally win a superbowl, seen my child win two D1 youth soccer state championships and a 7A high school championship.
My fan race is mostly run and I mostly don’t miss the deep emotions that binary sports thinking once caused.
I see "classic" as more of a check to see if HN is seeing substantial drift from what its early cohort's interests are. Largely ... it seems to jibe reasonably well with the main site.
Another interesting variant is to hit Algolia with a blank search and a date-range set. What you'll get are top-voted comments for that period (past day, week, month, year, or custom interval). I occasionally use that to see if I've missed anything particularly good recently, or to filter what I see as excessive cruft.
I hesitate to admit this, since I have a 14 year old account- but this is the first I have ever heard of /lists. I can get to it by appending "/lists" to the url, but I can't see a "lists" link anywhere on the site- is it some kind of hidden page? If so- are there more?
Nice to see Clifford Stoll currently topping the page. I bought The Cuckoo's Egg after reading enough people recommending it on HN and so to see the author referencing the main events in that book as the most recent highlight kinda brings things full circle!
That page has always been a daily amalgam. We've never had "x hours ago" snapshots. Probably the closest to that would be the Internet Archive's copies.
"past" in the top-of-page header, which has a granularity of 1 day.
I've been looking at an archive of past front pages dating to 2007 to see trends, patterns, and statistics concerning front-page stories, since late May of this year. It's interesting, and resolves some common disputes and/or claims.
Just by looking at the first 5-6 comments 'highlighted' I can tell that they're representative of a type of post that many readers of this website value. It's usually some mix of firsthand experience "untold stories" and ultra-specific domain expertise. In other words, information relevant to the topic that's hard or impossible to find elsewhere.
Haha, I was looking for myself on there, getting dejected that I never contributed anything of note, but then I found a comment about one of the silly things I made:
I like this page better when it’s not pre-chewed. It’s nice to read something without a specific expectation or context.
Most of the highlighted comments fall under the heading “I was around when X happened” though. The list could almost be titled “first-hand-experiences”.
All: if you see a particularly great comment, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully add it. We don't want to be the only ones noticing these!