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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
My main issue with Hacker News at the moment is that it is NOT NEWS!
An article from 2010 about quitting hn is not news.
I used to kid myself that I go here "to keep up-to-date" or find out what is happening. I used to think this was a valid news source but it is not. It's got some interesting articles that suck up my time but I've stopped kidding myself that it is news.
The main reasons I sometimes consider quitting are:
1. Too much fiddling with things by the mods (eg, changing post titles and the like). I find this to be more harmful than helpful, and I think we'd be better served with a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach.
2. The overall tone of the site has drifted towards a more collectivist / socialist / left'ish-wing worldview... to much anti-business, anti-capitalist sentiment which I don't enjoy.
3. Too much general news that you could get at cnn.com or msnbc.com or whatever. I liked the site better when there was more of a focus on startups, entrepreneurship, and deep technical topics. Of course, that's not to say that we don't still get some of that stuff, but the weighting towards those topics seems to have lessened, and I - for one - don't consider that a Good Thing.
OTOH, HN is still (mostly) better than Slashdot, and the comments here are mostly of a higher quality than most other "news aggregator" type sites. Just not as much better as they used to be, IMO.
HN has its problems for sure, but I think it's currently the best general tech/interest site on the Internet at the moment. If I find I'm getting jaded with the mindless groupthink here, I just usually take a couple weeks off. Usually by then, whatever hot topic that was irritating me is out of the news cycle and the hive mind has moved on.
At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique, intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything. But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated) debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments here.
I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore (filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here.
Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-killed.
One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened, but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they happened.
I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at different ages and in different circumstances.
I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community.
However, I do find the international discussions here particularly enlightening.
One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the *HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy).
If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be informative in some way.
There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a tragedy).*
Agreed. The Show:HN posts are some of the best and most important posts of all, but they disappear so quickly now... it really is sad.
Actually, one of the big issues with Show HN is that people will tag posts with Show HN for literally anything. I've seen more product announcements tagged Show HN than general hack projects.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with that. In fact, product announcements (especially brand new, first launch products from new startups) are exactly what a Show HN should be in my opinion.
The ability to expose your new thing to a knowledgeable and diverse crowd like this, and get quality feedback on your project, is (or was) a big draw to posting stuff here. But now the "Show HN" posts disappear off the front/new pages so fast, they tend to generate very little actual discussion, more often than not.
> I've seen more product announcements tagged Show HN
I'm okay with that. It used to let me know a bit more about what was going on in the tech space by giving me a direct to source link and some background about the product.
A weird quirk of the way the site works is that the more popular it is the shallower it tends to be, because more users means more story turnover, more flagged stories dropping off the front page in minutes, and so forth.
Interestingly enough, his comments are closed, so I'll have to post my thoughts here :)
I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer.
That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about HN before my blog ended up on the front page).
HA this guy. For years he went on and on and on about my first start-up idea and not in a positive way.
In 2007 I created The Social Alarm Clock (was my 1st idea on the web) and asked for feedback here. This Matt guy, hated the concept and said so in my Ask HN posted in 2007. Yet it didnt end there, he continued his hate for it in many HN posts throughout the years and even blogged about in 2011 or 2012.
HA, it had an impact on him.
Well, we have moved onto to our second idea and unfortunately I don't think http://SpeakerBlast.com (Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo) is going to have the same effect on Matt. Though maybe...
In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article relative to the HN 2010.
1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU upgrade.
2. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise. A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted, then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control.
3. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is organic rather than the effect of a social media team.
In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers.
4. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true.
5. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't changed.
6. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck. A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator. The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high quality comments.
7. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing essays though. That's really what good blog posts are.
HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.
Maybe I'm a sucker for doing it for free but I usually end up defending Google. It's not because I'm particularly fond of them but because the criticism is often unfair and sometimes downright ridiculous.
They developed an open source mobile operating system, yet get pummelled for adding a few proprietary bits in ways that MS and Apple, who develop completely closed systems, never are.
Whenever they make changes that are obviously beneficial for regular users (featuring the most likely result on top of SERP, sorting e-mail into categories, purging web spam), there's a torrent of articles usually critical of the change. And it would be completely understandable if those were power users who genuinely lose out on many of those changes but no. Those are completely unsubstantiated accusations about trying to boost their bottom line.
Microsoft bashing on the other hand is not some conspiracy against SV outsiders but rather a legacy of their fight against open source, including providing funds to SCO.
SCO - the historical one, first licensed and then purchased Xenix from Microsoft - remember that Microsoft sold Unix for many years. The historical SCO purchased Xenix in part with shares in their company giving Microsoft an ownership stake in the historical SCO.
With the historical SCO's asset sale came the asset of contractual relationships with Microsoft. In various lawsuits, Microsoft's actions are dictated by those contracts and the exposure various alternative courses would create.
Bashing Microsoft was the cornerstone of a long running multi-billion dollar ad campaign of a popular investor backed Silicon Valley based company. None of it was related to Open Source or SCO. The chief commercial proponent of Open Source was another investor backed Silicon Valley company now owned by Oracle. The company which drove the anti-trust case against Microsoft was an investor backed Silicon Valley company - sold to the tune of $10 billion to a company which mass mailed low quality drink coasters at the turn of the millennium. One of the thereby enriched founders is a leading Silicon Valley VC [a model SVVC so to speak].
Organic MicroSoft bashing looks like Richard Stallman. Done on principle, Google and Apple don't get to buy indulgences.
I've never noticed abundance of Apple articles, until this morning. Out of 13 top articles over half of them were leading to apple.com. Some feature to filter out unwanted links might be useful here.
On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable score. Perhaps by splitting these into two distinct parts would allow to improve accuracy in scoring. Represent up/down vote with some clear graphics, so as to give that feeling of accomplishment when you press the big red downvote button and hopefully you won't feel the need to seek some smaller "not valuable" link below.
It used to be that every Apple announcement no matter how minor produced links to every Mac related site...for days before the event so that people could speculate. Then the day of the announcement there would be links to live reporting, links to every 'first look' article on every Mac site and the official Apple pages. As a bonus there were always many 'Ask HN:' companion threads.
As personally disinterested in the subject as I am, the current situation is much better, and the number of articles is unusual these days but justified because of the scale of Apple's announcements. While HN exposure is as usual disproportionate to actual relevance within computing, the Apple news is actually big Apple news.
As for comment scores, there's no such thing as accuracy independent of the actual score. Life's not fair and neither is internet commenting. Upvotes and downvotes are multivalent except in so far as they express a user's inclination to upvote or downvote or not vote. We are talking about 'Internet Points' for fuck's sake.
I totally agree. And the ultra-weird "it's awesome if Apple does a thing, but completely evil if anybody else even sniffs at the idea" groupthink that permeated almost every thread on any topic seems to have abated somewhat. It's still there on occasion, but Gruber's impossibly apologist blog posts are generally off the front page and the ultra-apologists seems to have started fading after Steve Job's death.
There was definitely an almost pseudo-religious "newly converted" component to it.
These days if I see Gruber on the front page it's usually because of something genuinely interesting.
But for a couple solid years there, you couldn't say anything that might even be assumed to be critical of an Apple product without getting downvoted. I really wanted a place of smart people who could celebrate Apple's achievements and criticize their failures without descending into religious flamewars, and HN simply wasn't providing this.
Part of the change in attitude on HN is based on four years experiencing substantial shifts in the terms of the relationship between Apple and software developers since the iPad's release. The death of Jobs made criticism of Apple more acceptable of course, but not criticism of him to any significant degree.
The bigger picture is that HN [and YC] have come off the Apple App Store bubble. Mobile apps are now seen as multi-platform programs, and the center of gravity has clearly moved toward open source tool chains and back toward the core idea of Web based software.
Much! I'm surprised to see this very ancient post resurfaced here. But this is definitely one of the way in which it's changed for the better since 2010.
I'm a pure Apple-basher, but most times when they have their big to-do, and especially if they release something as significant to many computer people's future plans as Swift, IMO HN should have a lot of Apple on the front page. I don't miss the Gruber at all, though.
> most times when they have their big to-do [...] HN should have a lot of Apple on the front page
That's certainly what was going on yesterday. Microsoft had even more stories on the front page when they held their big to-do a month or so ago. It's a side-effect of the major tech companies stockpiling their big announcements for annual conference days.
Can't agree more, in fact I'm searching right now on how to close my account here at HN, I mean, totally erasing it, not just changing to a soon-to-be-forgotten password.
I will still occasionally read this site, but will never comment and do anything about it. The silent-downvote is not friendly at all, especially to who that does not know the "rules" well. how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it.
I HAVE to take a break from Hacker News whenever some hot button story like Ed Snowden or Heartbleed is dominating the entire front page. I don't need to see a dozen blogger's opinions on simple news items like that. If I want thorough analysis of those types of important issues, I'm definitely not looking to the Hacker News crowd to source them. Prog blogs are awful. And so is some amateur libertarian paranoid's half-baked, uninformed opinion on complicated issues like NSA surveillance programs.
The author points out that users upvote a comment based on whether they agree with it or not, and not based on how useful it is to the discussion. Did you really expect it to work any other way? You're expecting internet commentators to be impartial? Even supreme court judges have a hard time remaining impartial. Why do you think someone who spends 15 minutes a day reading articles about technology here would give a shit?
Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they realistically reflect?
The problem with linking karma to up/down votes is that it prevents people from posting anything that is contrary to popular opinion and therefore downvoted, even if it may be well thought out or, shock horror, factually accurate too!!
The end result is an ever increasing alignment of 'group-think' where popular opinions are boosted and differing opinions are hidden.
Up/down voters just need to take a second and consider what they're voting for. If it's just because they agree, then don't. If they agree and they've learned something new, then do. If they disagree and but they think the arguments are well presented or they've learned something new, upvote.
Down voting should be reserved only for inappropriate comments, not disagreement.
I don't even see the point of karma. It's like fake internet points that mean noting. I have a karma of 583 on HN. What does that mean exactly? What can I do with 583 that I couldn't do before? To me, it's just a pointless scoreboard for how popular my opinions are. It gives me incentive to post a karma-baiting comment once in a while, so I get a burst of dopamine whenever the number jumps by 10 or more.
But back to my main point: When everything is majority rules, with no checks and balances, society collapses into mob rule. Why would it be any different with upvote/downvote?
We're not going to solve this by asking users to think before they click downvote. We should consider removing the upvote/downvote altogether.
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.
I miss Paul Graham's influence on HN. My impression is that since he "retired", the topics now are more uniformly focused on core hacking/startup stuff and HN lost its "good hackers are interested in anything" approach that I so fell in love with when I first discovered the site.
So I thought about quitting too, but there are still enough gems hidden beneath the avalanche of Haskell vs Lisp vs Erlang threads that keep me wanting to come back.
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
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.