I found that simply removing 'reddit.com' from 'my reddits' made my front page considerably more valuable.
I do read the comments, as they are generally entertaining. If HN is a student lounge outside the computer lab, Reddit is the local pub ... right before closing time. Two environments that I find valuable :).
I read a lot of the same subreddits, and I think you're missing out by not reading the comments. Sure there can be a lot of noise, but with a little practice you can skim to the gems quite easily.
Metafilter and AskMetafilter. They have a once-only $5 fee and a one-week waiting period before you can make your first post. This filters out the Digg / Yahoo! Answers crowd. They also have a culture of trusting users not to make "yo-mama" comments...which succeeds in keeping discussions cordial and intelligent.
I'm sorry but the top news stories on New Mogul when I checked represent the type of stories that I especially don't want to see on HN. For people who dig that sort of business 'news', it's a good link.
I think they were thinking the same thing, which is why they started their own website and called it a new name and it's hosted on different servers and has a new URL.
Also, the people running it are different. And you need separate accounts. Hmm, looks like they even changed the theme and some graphics!
Wow, it's almost like they run a separate site that isn't HN and has things that doesn't belong on HN!
I assume by HN-like you mean link aggregators, but for content, I like the Mind Your Decisions blog (unfortunately, posts have become infrequent lately): http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/
Well HN (or is it IN ;) ) seems to be the wall hole for me. I noticed some quality issues lately but since yesterday I felt HN again :) . No it's not the name change, I felt this even before that. Now I don't have to worry about asking another "Erlang week".
Very good comment. Most sites have a karma/points system which is not robust against dilution of intelligent comments. E.g., if the Digg-crowd started infiltrating Hacker News, then I doubt the karma system would be able to stop this.
Based upon the fact that hn uses the same system for comments as reddit (only up down voting) and we know how well that worked out there really is no question that once the number of users goes up hn will resemble reddit of today, but the owners wont care because they will have a ton of users and we wont care because we will be somewhere else.
concerns about hn quality going down have been here from day one. it has not degraded substantially in the over two years i've been here, and i don't think it will for awhile.
reddit's goal was to get a lot of users. it's being run as a business. hn's goal is to foster high-quality links and conversation. pg doesn't care how many users the site has, and he's not trying to monetize it.
it's not the karma and voting systems that are being used to maintain quality here. it's the editors. they are serious as a heart attack about curbing bad behavior. certainly not something you can say about reddit.
I also agree with this notion. Also notice the absence of spam here... In addition to human editing by the admins, active users on HN here really care about the quality on the site.
It's as if sites like Digg, Reddit, & Slashdot have set some sort of a precedent, and people now have a better sense of what to avoid, moderate, etc.
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