
I Quit Hacker News (2010) - Qom
http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/
======
dasil003
Hm, this post is almost 3 years old, but Matt has been active recently
([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon)).
Did he get a little account recovery help or was the password change not as
random as he said?

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DigitalSea
I wish you all the best. I've contemplated quitting HN quite a few times as
well, I might do it myself, but the community with all its flaws I still enjoy
at times. There are a few people who think they're better than most, but
that's not just a HN problem, it's a problem everywhere, people on HN are just
better at articulating their point and getting upvotes.

This part I couldn't agree more with:

 _Fluff posts from John Gruber, who rarely says anything at all of value (and
I say this as someone who spends most of my time working on iOS projects) are
extraordinarily popular because it fits within the community’s ideology_

John Gruber could literally publish a blog post with no content and just a
title and it would hit the front-page of Hacker News and people would be
commenting about how they get his metaphor and try connecting it to a new
Apple gadget or sales report... Very overrated.

You missed one other point: the constant homepage submissions about Google Go.
I've used it a couple of times myself and I think it's a great language, but
the amount of posts about it you see on this site hitting the homepage are
ridiculous. How much praise can you sing for something without repeating
yourself? The same thing seems to be happening with Google's AngularJS.

I recently saw a submission for a Sublime Text editor clone someone wrote and
open sourced. The author had disabled the ability to post an issue on the
Github repo and people took the author to school and back in the comments
section about it. The author clearly stated if you want to contribute, send me
a pull request because I don't have time to fix issues. This guy open sourced
some amazing code (written in Go of all languages) and instead of saying thank
you, a few decided to laud the author with negativity.

Hacker News has flaws, I think over time they will work themselves out and the
community will tame itself down (I hope), for the moment I'll hold on and
enjoy the ride. I love nothing more than to take top commenters oozing
negativity to town. Being able to tag and filter submissions would be amazing,
I would immediately remove all Go and AngularJS posts if I could. Maybe
someone should create a Chrome extension that does it? Take it one step
further and add in some basic sentiment analysis to hide any negative comments
on submissions.

~~~
pbowyer
Re Chrome extension, I was thinking the same thing. There's a lot of rubbish
posted here but also some gems - ESP from the older members I think, who have
been sys admins or used Unix since the '90s or earlier. I keep a notebook of
the most useful comments and bookmark others.

So a Chrome extension to filter again (eg tag comment as "technical",
"ideology" and see what others do) could be v interesting.

Unfortunately the most thoughtful, most civil comment threads, seem to
disappear the fastest off the home page - and attract the fewest participants.
This could be a community issue or a chicken and egg situation...

~~~
DigitalSea
There is a similar plugin for Reddit called the Reddit Enhancement Suite, it's
a pretty well made plugin, so maybe a plugin along the lines of HN Enhancement
Suite where it kind of tidies and fixes things up would be somewhat cool.

Definitely agree about the disappearing gems in the comments section. Being
able to follow users would be cool as well, their comments would be moved and
highlighted with a particular follow colour.

I am liking the sound of this.

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DanBC
EDIT: I wrote my post before I realised how old the submitted article is!
Disappointing that the problems listed are probably worse today than they were
three years ago.

> 1\. Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately
> represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about
> the TSA body scanners every time they log in? It doesn’t matter, because as
> long as 10% of them up-vote every story on the topic it’s going to flood the
> top page with them until they move on to something else.

FLAG. You only get limited flags, but FLAG THESE FUCKING SUBMISSIONS.

> Some people will say “they have flags” but flags are not down-votes, and
> even most people like myself who wish there were down-votes don’t use them
> as such. Flagging is for spam, trolling, etc. I may not like what you have
> to say, but I’ll fight for your right to not be flagged for saying it.

Flags act like down votes for submissions. In the absence of down votes flags
are the only tool available for Submissions that do not belong here.

I'd agree that flags should not be used that way for comments.

> The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most
> often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum.

People need to downvote empty idealogagy. People need to down vote a lot more
than they do. Perhaps it's a problem that only ten % of the site can downvote.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if HN reversed the down / up vote privs -
anyone can downvote, but you need 500 karma before you can upvote.

Anyway, sorry to see you go. Have fun, and good luck!

~~~
waxjar
I think the reasoning is that people will actually join the argument instead
of clicking an arrow facing downwards when they disagree with a comment.

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krapp
>Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately
represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about the
TSA body scanners every time they log in?

Clearly some do, if these stories get upvoted. I think a better answer than
downvoting would be a ways to organize and filter content besides the single-
channel model which currently seems to assume either a homogenous community or
content or both. Clearly useless and repetitive content should be flagged, but
judging by the number of "this doesn't belong on HN / yes it does " comments
i've seen, a lot of people have differing ideas of what Hacker News "should"
be showing them.

> 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 believe upvotes and downvotes should only apply to threads themselves, and
comments should be left alone. I'm sure i'm in the minority on this among HN
users, but I think when you can downvote comments, then specious downvoting
becomes inevitable because it's less work than coming up with a cogent or
relevant comment.

~~~
X4
Glad to hear someone else think the same. I believe that it won't change in
here though. Someone said: "If you don't like it, fork it" and this is
probably true in this case. Maybe even a business opportunity.

However, I somehow lost the hope that bringing this topic would do any change.
I even emailed pg, asking to delete my account including all my posts, but got
no response ever. idk..

~~~
krapp
I think I may have heard kogir mention they don't let people delete accounts
and they don't delete posts because it would interfere with the structure of
the existing threads. That does kind of make sense but people can still delete
individual posts even after they've been replied to so I don't know.

And "forking it" would be the (relatively) easy part. The hard part is getting
people to show up and stick around.

~~~
X4
Other social networks solve that "problem", by just filling the old posts with
"deleted content" and replace the username with "Deleted user".

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omnisci
I've been on internet forums for over 14 years now, the complaints the OP has
are the same complaints I've heard everywhere else. I've heard people say the
same stuff (maybe slightly different topics, but the same content) numerous
times. I have no intention of sounding like a dick here, but who cares? He is
going to find the same thing everywhere he goes. People are the driving force
behind his problems...can't fix that unless we end up being owned by skynet.

------
stinos
I haven't really been a longtime user myself, but as far as I can tell (and
yes, this falls under point 2) he is pretty much right on all points made.

Except 4 seems a tad too general, and going from snobbish to looking down on
people is not always a one-to-one realtionship. I consider looking down on
someone one of the worst evils and I am pretty sure I am not alone here (nor
anywhere). At least I hope.

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stared
Semantics of an up-(or down)-vote is an issue (see here
[http://www.debiki.com/forum/-5rjf6-semantics-of-an-
upvote](http://www.debiki.com/forum/-5rjf6-semantics-of-an-upvote) for a short
discussion on that). In short, I would love to have a place where I can easily
filter things containing intellectual value, instead of popularity bar.

~~~
X4
I have the same issue, but I think PG swears that up/down voting is the thing,
just because reddit does it too. Thank you for the link!

------
vacipr
I have been less active since I lost my up voting (my fault,I had a few days
when I up voted everything that hit the frontpage) and flag (no idea here)
capabilities but there's no way I'm leaving hacker news. I find more
interesting content here than on any other site.You can probably configure
reddit to get a similar output but it's not the same thing.

------
wanda
Like those fuckers on forums: "Farewell fellow users, I know you'll all miss
me a lot, /requestsban"

~~~
DanBC
SuicideGirls (NSFW) forums had a ban called "The Zot"; the user would go grey.
But they also had something called "The Uber Zot", where all the user's posts
would be deleted.

Thus, some people would go on a spree of horrific posting in order to earn an
uberzot and "go out in style".

Gently counter productive.

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Theodores
Weird that you should need to say goodbye. Shame you did not leave a
forwarding address for where the nerd is supposed to go for the news that
matters these days. Oh well.

------
X4
@Qom How do you quit?

EDIT: ok, he just changed the password to something random.. :/ Dumb question,
asking someone who left for how he left...oh man.. Sometimes I don't know
where my mind is

@pg Please add a "disable account and delete my posts" button. Almost every
site has that feature. It's disrespectful to assume somebody should not be
ever able to leave. There is no way to disable your account, or delete all
your posts. (I agree that submissions don't need to be deletable btw.)

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scribu
Why was this removed from the front page? That's how I reached it.

~~~
anu_gupta
Probably people flagging it as it's 3 years old.

~~~
scribu
Oh, I thought flagging was for spam and offtopic submissions.

~~~
lelf
It is.

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draugadrotten
One person decides popular internet site isn't for him. News at 11.

