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Goodbye, Hacker News. I'm going back to Reddit.
48 points by jmpeters on Aug 17, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 67 comments
It was worth putting up with the sycophancy of many of the commenters here who seem to participate only to impress PG, their would-be benefactor...for a while. It was worth it while the stories focused on the niche we are all interested in, startups. The change to more general-purpose news, the attempt to re-create the Reddit of old, seemed to be made without first asking the overall community for input (unlike the way that Craig Newmark makes all changes to Craig's List, for example). Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw. Yes, Reddit has been overrun by the unwashed masses. It has become messy in the way that democracy itself is messy. But this site is getting the feeling of an artificially sterile place for tech elites as defined by PG and his minions. So I'm going back to the unwashed masses, even if it means having to read a few more titles about cat pictures. Best of luck, though, PG, and thanks for the great information this site has given me thus far. I will continue to follow your impressive career and your essays with great interest.

PS, Editors, feel free to change my title to "Hacker News Rocks!"



Thing is, Reddit really sucks now. I was just visiting it today and was amazed by the number of ignoranuses (ignoranus = someone who is both stupid and an asshole) on it.

I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit.

The curious thing is - in at least one case (HP fandom, and possibly the C2 wiki), I kept the friendships that I formed in it. Maybe that's the real point of online communities - form offline friendships, and keep those.

Looking forward to the Boston meetup on Sunday...


"I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit."

This is best described as "reversion to the mean". A democratic, non-moderated site like Reddit and News.YC will start off attracting folks on the right end of the bell curve, and over time, gain traction to attract the unwashed masses. Then, someone will get fed up and go start another site, and the cycle begins anew. I'm not being elitist or snobbish; this is what I have observed since the USENET of the 1990s. It always happens.


On the other hand, I've been a member of a loosely-moderated community for close to 7 years and it's still going strong (I think the forum first opened in 1999). There is a lot of what might be considered "trite" to a casual observer, but for those of us who have been reading and posting there for a long time we simply ignore the content we're not interested in. There's always enough good stuff to keep me going back.

It definitely was never overrun with ignoranuses, at least not for any extended period of time.


I still visit proggit regularly. Actually, that's how I found out about the change since I had stopped visiting "Startup News" for the same reasons pg changed it.


Most content on Reddit seems to be generated by about 5 people who either post as much as they can from whatever feeds they're subscribed to or whatever pulls people's strings. At the moment this is usually stories about how the cops are utterly corrupt and how Fox news totally sucks.

Why? It's not like they discuss the story or you actually get prizes for a high karma?

Nowadays I prefer finding a page edited by someone who shares similar interests as me e.g. boingboing or hackaday. Otherwise things just degenerate into "FUNNAY PIC [LOL!]" quickly.

Maybe rather than have a single pool of submitted stories, you could chose whose stories show up on your page.


You can. Go to your preferences, click on 'friends', and add the nicknames of all the posters you like. Then go to friends.reddit.com, and you'll only see submissions from those people. This feature came out about a half a year ago, IIRC.


Hot links are great for discussion as many people will see them. But perhaps not many will interest you.

Personalized links (assuming personalization works well) would come closer to your interests, but there may be few people to discuss them with.

And so one might consider a way to allow users to pick some point between these two extremes that they would be happy with.


"People who complain about the content on reddit and yet never submit a thing, need to keep quiet or contribute something other than complaints to the community."

http://reddit.com/goto?id=2gq14


love the newly coined word and its etymology :)


It's not actually mine. I read it in some newspaper article about neologisms, and it appears in several places on the web (including 17 urbandictionary references).


email Safire stat. Gotta get him on the case.


It's the final straw that we fix typos and abusive punctuation in submission titles? That seems a bit melodramatic.

I'm surprised to think anyone didn't already realize we did this. Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?


As opposed to caring about the specifics like fixing punctuation, I think that critics don't like the authority (and potential for abuse) implied by administrators messing with user submitted text, no matter in how trivial a way.

At some point users have to decide if they're willing to sacrifice a purely democratic community if it means an increase in quality. Is the point of a social news site to make a political statement, or is it find cool stuff to read?

Edit: Maybe the admins should just be 100% transparent about everything they do; document their actions in a FAQ.


Transparency makes this a non-issue. Admin actions like editing titles should automatically show up on a log page.


You're probably right. No one complains when whole submissions are deleted as spams, presumably because you can see them if you want by turning on showdead in your profile. So maybe I'll add something to preserve original submission titles.


"Authority (and potential for abuse) implied"? Well, I guess different things upset different types of people. Why does this have to be "democratic community"? Is the "democratic community" paying the bills for the site? I'm not a PG sycophant, but I come to the defense of the site maintainers. I would rather read a sanitized and on-target news.ycombinator site than a mob-rulz reddit site. But ultimately, they serve two different purposes.


When it comes to online forums I have no hesitation in giving up "full democracy". A benevolent dictator and his helpers is a great solution to maintaining a quality community. The way they go about doing it will simply filter out those who don't like their style. Nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is willing to deal with Linus Torvalds and his helpers either. Transparency here is optional but preferred.


"Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?"

Sure, shatter the illusion why don't ya?

Kidding aside, I don't know why people are flipping out. One should think the editors are carefully chosen to not be power-hungry jackasses out to destroy a story's integrity. It's not even like they're editing comments. Some people are quick to jump on the drama, I suppose. I share in the same sentiment expressed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43650


Why not spell-check the titles?


The number of typical comments for a post determine what kind of people want to/are willing to comment:

0-10 comments: People who want to talk about the post per se

11-50 comments: People who want to have a conversation.

51- comments: People who want to join a mob.

Obviously, ynews is moving from the first to the second, and that changes the types of comments/people commenting/overall community.


I really liked the fact that YCombinator news was a niche site and I often wonder if the future of these sosial news sites is not having every category on a different site to deal with the signal vs noise factor...


usenet?


Wait, what? Dude, a story that's submitted should be titled the same regardless of who submits the story. The only variance in titles should be mere semantics. Any extra information in the title only adds bias or spelling/grammar mistakes. Therefore, editing a title to its correct form is just fine. Relax.

But if you can't relax, goodbye. If this thread title is any indication, you produce great Reddit/Digg titles.

I hope Paul changes "title: " to "suggest a title: " on the submission page so people realize it's not their title. They didn't produce the content, and if they did then the editors aren't retitle it.


I actually think this is sort of a dumb argument to get into in the first place, but you have to admit that not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own the resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent.

Ultimately, though, this sort of user revolt is bound to happen whenever you make major changes to how a community works. I think news.yc'll make it with or without the people who are pissed.


".. not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own their resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent."

I don't see how a user owns a title to content they didn't produce. If they produced it, the editors won't change it.

You get karma for bringing quality content to other people's attention, not for calling the content something it isn't.


Well, I've personally had titles edited, all for stylistic issues (none for bias, innaccuracy, or anything I'd deem worth editing). I don't really care, but I would prefer that unless my submissions were clearly in need of correction that they were not changed. They do show up under "submissions" clicking from my profile, so I think they ought to reflect what I submitted unless it harms the site.


You make a good point. Do we really own the titles? If we don't own it, then who does? The hacker news community, the editors? I guess if we don't then we need to change our mindsets. Is that why we can't delete the submissions we make?


Wha? You can delete your own submissions. Just yesterday I submitted the RMS earthquake story before nickb did, but then deleted it after reading the Reddit comments on the same story and seeing that it was inaccurate.


You can only delete/edit them for one hour after submission.


Why not create www.startupnews.com? If you want the code, google 'reddit clone'. I think the lisp community wrote atleast a dozen reddit clones after reddit switched from lisp to python.

I say this because a lot of people have a problem with the change from a startup focused to a hacker focused site.

Since you already have a community which is united around a common vision, it's probably worth acting now and create another site.

The lisp hackers did a similar thing when reddit moved from lisp to python. For some reason they thought that reddit was only for lisp hackers. BTW, I don't think that worked as most lisp hackers were already active on cll or #lisp


I don't see any reason to choose between ynews and reddit. The level of technical dialogue here is better, no question -- and for awesome lolcats and social interest anecdotes, like http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu, there's reddit.


Ah! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P


A good alternative: http://www.dailyhub.com/ from the owner of http://www.onstartups.com/


Wow, and suddenly I realized how much it must suck to be an editor...


What's the expression? The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low?


A bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see http://www.bikeshed.com/).


YES - this is my favorite new dev meme. So incredibly true it's painful.


"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small" --Henry Kissinger


I have two recommendations:

1. Have patience.

2. Be a part of the solution.


Are you suggesting that, if I'm patient enough, they'll change the focus of this back to startup news? 'Cuz I can get "hacker newz" at reddit/digg/slashdot/a-dozen-other-places...

And what "solution" should I be part of? The one that makes YC more money? Or the "sense of community"? I care squat about the YC community; I used to come here to read the startup articles. I can get arstechnica/lifehacker/etc links elsewhere.


1. "Have patience" means that you should avoid jumping to conclusions about what sort of content you were looking for out of this site, and to let "the dust settle" before leaping to conclusions about whether the new site suits you. If it's really that bad, you'll get bored and won't come anymore.

2. "Be a part of the solution" was really only half of what I intended to say, the other half being "stop being part of the problem." Being a part of the solution means voting up the articles you like, contributing knowledgeable and insightful commentary, and submitting the sort of stories you want to see. Being a part of the problem means throwing a temper tantrum without including any interesting or startup-related material.


It somehow felt a lot better IMO when it was "Startup News"


True. I'm going to miss all those startup submissions. I think he might have ruined the site this time, but we'll see.


What are you guys talking about? Can you list more than 10 sites in the past few months that were that informative. Yes, startup news is important, but we can't have submissions like "how to start your company" every day, because they tend to be the same thing. I enjoy this new take on things, starting the company is the easy part. Having the knowledge at the right time is the hard part. This is also a good way for people to get connected. I possibly need a partner for my startup (based on PG's advice) so maybe I'll find my partner here.


Any idea on how traffic trends for news.yc are since the relaunch? Was traffic dropping before the change? Has it gone up after?


Traffic was climbing slowly before the change, at about the rate it always has. Then there was a huge spike when we changed the focus. It's impossible to predict yet what the real trend looks like.


Thanks for letting us know. Any chance of posting a traffic graph in a few weeks time to see?


Sure.


Is the increased traffic more due to new users, or to existing users becoming more active?


More users.


I was very much hoping for the response to be a more active user base. At least then the community would still be some-what close to providing the wanted dialogue, as most users have been here for a few months already and there is some sort of community agreement on what constitutes a 'good' post. With a greater influx of new users the posting quality will probably go down, if not for the time it takes to grow accustomed to the social agreements on communication on the site. During this time, will we lose valued, long term members of the community? What is a decent solution to the problem of online community degrade?


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479


Also, Reddit doesn't have as much meaningless drama. As of right now, anyway.


Just wait until the next impeachment petition.


I know this isn't the right place to ask this, but why is there no down arrow for submissions/comments? And why when you upmod something does the arrow disappear! Where's the undo?


undo: none available--this is a design choice

downmod: a user must develop a certain amount of karma before the down arrows appear. additionally, you may not downmod direct replies to your own comments or stories.


I think the art would be to stop people joining the site when it reaches an acceptable level of coolness.

Isn't this how Metafilter survives and maintains its excellent quality?


I'm starting to feel like we need a meta.news.ycombinator.com, for all this meta-discussion... I'm sure the politics are fascinating, but they feel the same as those of every online community since the dawn of the Internet... :p

Ah well, I guess I could just not click on them in my RSS.


I think it is a great idea that a human editor is involved, and site content being edited. A similar process happen on a good wiki, and I always enjoy when my prose is translated to English behind my back :-)


Democracy has a weird tendency of favoring idiocy.

Just take a look at this discussion: http://reddit.com/info/2ga89/comments


To be fair to Paul and the moderators, the title of this submission used to be:

Goodbye, HACKER NEWS!!!! I'm going back to Reddit.

I don't think this site was meant for everybody to post whatever they want. There should be respect for other people's resources; while Reddit and Digg want as many users as possible, there is no such leverage here.

I think the mistake is that users start thinking they can do whatever they want just because a social site is free.


BTW nobody is posting porn here .. "whatever" is posted, is somehow related to startups/pragramming most of the times.


Is PG butt kissing the "elephant in the room"?


I am very disappointed at the editing. I understand if the user includes profanity or hate speech but nitpicking? It just seems like censorship when it doesn't need to be.


Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw.

Wow, I was just complaining about something I found annoying; I didn't mean to start a revolt.


eh, I'll always use both. Maybe I'm just that big of a slacker.


talk about sycophancy




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