
Discussion of HN at 4chan's /g/ - leftovers
http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/26490724
======
spudlyo
I actually managed to find an insightful comment on that 4chan thread which
I've edited slightly for clarity. I'm reposting it here because I think folks
might find it an interesting perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of
HN. It is also an opinion I happen to agree with.

 _Anyways, the appeal of Hacker News is the occasional interesting technical
story, and the high quality comment threads that accompany it. Here's the
LuaJIT author talking about implementing interpreters in C vs. Assembly:_

<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/75426> _and the
accompanying discussion I remember reading on Hacker News:_
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588696>

_You'll have to take my word for it, but there's a high technical barrier to
appreciating this story, and it's accompanied by high quality discussion. If
you enjoy reading about that kind of thing, it's well worth sifting through
the startup launch pages, endless vim bullshit, reposts and blogspam,
limitless iterations on "women in tech", and "how we scaled dick.ly with node
and mongo" fluff pieces to find that delicious technical meat._

~~~
activepeanut
I've been wondering, is it possible the fluff pieces are paid content?
Especially the "scaling dick.ly" and blogspam types.

~~~
veyron
They aren't paying YC for most of it. I expect those types of pieces rise due
to excitement about the process or the particular technologies used

For example, some posts talk about Puppet or Chef in the title. I didn't
recognize those the first time so I look. Having learned something, even
though others may know all of the embedded content, I up vote. The next time I
may skip over it, having already went through the discovery process, but other
people come across it and derive value. Hence the cycle continues.

------
dictum
The thing about 4chan (all boards) is that, even when an anonymoust poster
makes a good point, it's usually wrapped in hyperbole and meanness. It's not a
requirement of being anonymous, but it's a part of the culture of imageboards:
you're expected to be brash about anything you don't like. If you don't, you
come off as a newbie.

This is why I think anything that happens in 4chan should stay there: because
the very culture of 4chan only makes sense there. When you take it to a site
like HN, where anonymity is less common, you make the discussion unilateral. A
HN user is probably not going to say everything they think about /g/ under an
username that's associated with their real name elsewhere. So we have /g/
telling everything that's wrong with HN (with the usual hyperbole) but not HN
telling everything that/s wrong with /g/, either for fear of reprisal or fear
of a ban.

I don't really frequent /g/, but I suppose that we could point out their flaws
and stereotypes too, like they do to us (that HN is too supportive of Apple,
that we're entrepreneur wannabes, that we take ourselves too seriously, that
we're "design hipsters" (?)) but since we don't have the absolute anonymity
and brazen attitude of 4chan, we'll never make this discussion truly honest.

As for their complaint about our pretentiousness: when you're writing under
your name, or for your company, there's no way of not being a little
pretentious and taking yourself too seriously.

~~~
dnpfwfyuta
So are you admitting the downside of such severe moderation?

It's not really a competition about who can criticize the other the best,
though. They don't even try to be the same: one is a BBS where news is welcome
among other things, the other is a news aggregator. But, in any case,
criticism about 4chan is welcome and more relevant on 4chan (in the very
thread this story links to, if you want) than here. I think it's natural that
Hacker News gets criticized elsewhere: people have high expectations of a news
aggregator (especially with a reputation like this one) - of 4chan, not quite.

~~~
cubicle
Nobody hates 4chan more than 4chan users.

~~~
dnpfwfyuta
Kimmo Alm does.

<http://www.kimmoa.se/The_Internet_cancer/>

------
tinco
The article they refer to wasn't upvoted because the HN community thinks it's
a good insightful article, it's because they (we) agree with it, and obviously
because we care about it.

Upvoting because you agree and downvoting because you don't is still the
biggest problem with ranking posts and comments . If it can be fixed, the fix
would have to somehow remove the emotional aspect of voting.

That said, I don't fully agree that the article didn't deserve to be on the
front page of Hacker News. For me, and possibly other startup workers HN is a
source of inspiration.

Any article related to problems, solutions and technology themes in general
might serve as inspiration to a great startup idea. Wether it's the millionth
article about bitcoin, or a post about Timmy stuck in a well.

~~~
jmduke
Generally speaking, I don't mind the Apple fanboyism in the articles because
it's relatively well-balanced in the comments. (And because at this point I
recognize the Marco/Daring Fireball/etc group of domains well enough to avoid
them)

The one complaint that I definitely have about the HN quo is how it feels like
conversations are trying to be transposed onto the medium; someone posts a
PHP/Apple/Olympics rant and then half the top links are swallowed by thinly
veiled 'responses'. It seems like the wrong approach, splitting multiple
conversations on the some topic.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> someone posts a PHP/Apple/Olympics rant and then half the top links are
swallowed by thinly veiled 'responses'._

Love it or hate it, it's the new self-promotion/branding via blogging. If a
controversial article makes it to the top of a popular or niche internet forum
like HN, and you have something of substance to say about it, it's infinitely
better to post your thoughts on your own blog instead of in the comments of
the social news submission.

The niche forum sees it, and you can claim credit in the comments, associating
your handle with your blog. But more people may see it - potential clients,
employees, funders, cofounders, employees, etc - and it's good way of beating
writer's block and adding content to your professional blog.

~~~
cubicle
Additionally, there's a soft limit to how negative you can be in the comments,
where you can be downvoted. Submissions can only be flagged, not downvoted,
and if you flag more than two submissions a day, your flag button is disabled.
(It looks like it still works, but your flags no longer affect the ranking of
a submission)

------
btilly
I have a mixed opinion about hellbanning.

It works. I see that it works. It helps sustain a community. If you browse
with showdead on, you don't run across a lot of dead content that doesn't
deserve to be dead.

However I've personally been hellbanned by an automated script. (I think the
problem was that I was posting fast enough to be mistaken for being a
spammer.) But it turns out that there are people who browse with showdead on
for kicks. One of them saw that I had been hellbanned, replied to me saying
that I had, and told me to talk to pg about it. I sent pg an email, he
confirmed that I had been hellbanned by accident, and he undid it.

Unintended mistakes happen. I am proof of it. If a mistake happens to you, it
really helps if you are an established member of the community. But the
automated scripts are improved over time, and I suspect that the error rate
goes down over time. And I think that the mechanism on the whole does improve
the site.

~~~
pyre
The nature of hell-banning means you aren't able to mark exactly when you were
hell-banned, therefore the algorithms never improve because there isn't a
"this caused a false-positive, let's fix it" feedback loop. Unless I'm missing
something.

~~~
btilly
All fixes to hellbans go through site administrators (eg pg), and therefore he
is aware of the false positives. He has access to data on when and why it
happens, and is therefore able to track those issues down.

------
jacques_chester
They're making good points.

One thing that sorta bugs me is karma arbitrageurs. Stuff that runs on HN
turns up within a day on TrueReddit et al and vice versa.

If there was a buck in it I'd write a bot to do it.

~~~
feor
They are mostly rehashing old arguments against HN (still valid, just not
particularly insightful): Apple fanaticism, the fact that there are less code-
related news as time passes, the hellbanning system, etc.

I think the real story is that as usual anything that involves 4chan gets
upvoted to the top here, indicating there might be some significant overlap
between the two userbases, as much as they might both dislike it.

Here's a link to the archive in case it 404s:
<http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/26490724>

~~~
kmfrk
Arguably, a community has a problem, when meta-discussion of the site keeps
cropping up.

At this point, criticizing Hacker News is low-hanging fruit - and as a result
gets a lot of karma.

~~~
usingintarwebs
I gotta say, the stuff you can get hellbanned for here is petty beyond belief.
Last time I got hellbanned for saying "heh." in response to a comment bashing
Noam Chomsky in the most knee-jerk and ironic way; I was genuinely left
speechless. Sure, "heh" is not a valid response, I didn't expect anything but
downvotes -- but hellbanning, for that? Really? And don't even get me started
on the whole "pg is the father I never had" stuff, it's nauseating. Sometimes
this site feels more like a cult than anything.

Well, if this comment even shows up, I guess that's it for this account, too.
Oh well. To each their own.

~~~
stcredzero
Perhaps your poor experience here is because of the tone of your posts? From
your own description, your posts seem to involve (a willful?) mental blind
spot around the whole concept of politeness. The implication of your comment
is that cleverness trumps all, and that insightful snark is entitled to some
sort of social leeway. That's not how things work around here.

In short, your HN comment is a bit clueless.

~~~
g8oz
In other words if you dont' have something nice to say, be passive aggressive
about it.

~~~
stcredzero
When in Rome...

------
peterwwillis
They're right about HN taking itself too seriously. Trolling here is child's
play.

~~~
hollerith
>Trolling here is child's play.

If that is the case, you will have no trouble citing 2 successful trolls in HN
comments.

~~~
cubicle
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3659653>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2534649>

~~~
idupree
"We've limited requests for old items. If you're running a crawler, you can
get this data a lot more easily from <http://hnsearch.com/api.>

Google, Archive.org, and my best attempt at HNSearch API (
[http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?id=2534649...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?id=2534649&pretty_print=true)
) didn't tell me what was in <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2534649>
either.

------
kmfrk
Maybe someone should tell pg to shut off sign-ups for the next few days ...

------
swah
4chan sucks all energy from a person. I kinda aggree about the articles that
are voted up those days though. ("Watch the Olympics"). The way to check HN
these days is though Hackerfollow.

I wish everything had less information and traffic to consume.

------
helmut_hed
My favorite quote:

 _What is this board populated with? Unemployed japanophiles and life
failures_

------
Xyzodiac
/g/ is an atrocious community, going there for just 15 minutes makes me ill.

------
sathishmanohar
I sense, a lot of posts are going to be grayed out in this discussion :D

------
k3n
I always find it humorous when one community claims that another community is
"pretentious bullshit" -- don't you sort of have to be pretentious yourself in
order to even make such a claim?

~~~
kmfrk
Not really.

------
p_sherman
So from Reddit nonsense to 4chan. A natural progression I suppsoe.

------
Tichy
Would be cool if they would be discussing this discussion of their discussion,
which we could then discuss. And so on - black hole warning?

------
sakopov
I find it amusing that 90% of 4chan's comments are misunderstanding the term
"hacker" as it is applied to HN & the Startup scene.

~~~
mhurron
No, I find it about right. Everything is hacking and everyone is an engineer
around here. Wake up at 5am now? Hacking your sleep pattern. Move a button to
the right, Layout hacking. Learn what the html tag means, web engineer.
Discovered vi, system engineer. Edit (find?) your .bash_profile on OS X, OS X
hacking system engineer.

I see this all as nothing but the continued dilution of the terms to
nothingness.

~~~
sakopov
Thanks for a down-vote. I don't see where i said i agree with it. I simply
said their definition is simply different from the one floating around in the
startup scene and i found it humorous. Whether it is right or wrong is your
personal opinion.

~~~
mhurron
We could add 'whining about downvotes' to the list of things that are
irritating about this sites community.

Since you're attempting to accuse me of something I didn't do, I didn't
downvote anyone, I commented.

Stop whining.

~~~
sakopov
Oh wow. This attitude is exactly why i don't post much on HN. Have fun being a
dick.

------
yaix
Oh noes, I missed it :(

------
kbronson
Somebody has noticed that we are nothing more than enterprise wannabes and
Apple fanbois, with less to no hacking in sight.

------
franzus
Heh, interesting discussion about the word "hacker" in HN.

~~~
naradaellis
It has become a pretty diluted term.

~~~
philh
I kind of feel like "hacker" used to be a title that you had to earn from
other hackers, and could apply to people of any skillset; and now it's mostly
synonymous with "programmer".

With the size of the internet these days, it was probably inevitable that the
word would get diluted, but... I feel like we no longer have a suitable word
to describe people who build things like "self-balancing unicycle" or "linux
hosted on an x86 emulator in javascript" or "homemade airplane" or "UNIX". And
that makes me a little sad.

~~~
creamyhorror
When I came across Hacker News (recently) I was a bit confused why it appeared
to be about startups and not about actual (security) hacking. Then I
discovered "hacker" had in essence become a general term for "coder" in the
startup community. This usage still doesn't sit well with me, for the reason
you point out: it's not about doing something really cool and unexpected any
more. When I see people advertising for "Ruby hackers", etc. I just feel like
it's almost a parody (except it's not, people are calling themselves that
mostly in seriousness). Oh well, I guess language left me behind.

~~~
franzus
Wait till you learn about the term "Growth Hacker" ...

~~~
seabee
Isn't that a fancy name for a gardener?

------
DiabloD3
d) All of the above.

------
brianfryer
Yo dawg, I heard you like discussing HN posts.

So I made a HN post to discuss 4chan's post discussing HN posts.

