

Techmeme vs Hacker News - guptaneil
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/techmeme-vs-hacker-news.html

======
coderdude
>And not one story about Apple or Facebook in the top 20 right now.

It isn't always that way. Some days we have three stories on the front page
about Facebook (the day before yesterday) and I don't think a single day goes
by where some Apple story doesn't creep its way in. There's an Apple-related
story on the front page right now and two on the second page. It's gotten
better over the last year though. It used to be that 3-4 (or more) articles
about Apple and Facebook were on the front page at any given time.

~~~
guptaneil
Is that necessarily a bad thing though? To be fair, Apple, Facebook, and
Google have had by far the largest impact on consumer technology in the last
decade. Obviously, they're newsworthy and interesting.

To me, a good measure for whether an article should be on HN or not is whether
people can learn something useful from either the article or the discussion
surrounding the article. I think we can all learn from their strategies and
actions, and the conversations surrounding articles about Facebook or Google
are usually filled with insightful comments (maybe not so much with Apple
articles).

~~~
coderdude
Apple, Facebook, and Google are discussed everywhere, all the time, on all
tech news venues ad nauseum. That is why I personally don't care for their
appearances on HN. You are right though, often the commentary is outstanding
compared to what you would find elsewhere.

------
haecib
Hmm, I dunno.

Apples to oranges for me. I look at HN as a place where techies discuss topics
that interest them, vs Techmeme which lists tech stories in the media, sans
discussion.

~~~
martinshen
Excellent comment: apples being techmeme right now and oranges being the
natural hn color

~~~
taylorbuley
Speaking of pedantry, here's my obligatory response where I say Apples and
Oranges can in fact be compared
[http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-...](http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html)

------
slowernet
False dichotomy. They're both aggregators per se, but one top-down curates
breaking news (and reactions to it, which is why a story may take up so much
space), the other uses voting to optimize news of any age to the interest
level of a community.

I don't disagree with Fred's conclusion - that Techmeme is hard to take
sometimes - but that seems more a reflection of the quasi-autistic and
frequently hysterical focus of the tech media these days.

------
tuhin
Two very different entities. Techmeme is about the news and that's it. Hacker
News is about the community and how we as developers and designers think about
the news. Hacker News is more about the community. Like today a random post
about Windows 1.0 to 7's journey led to donations for the guy behind Trumpet
Winsock. Very few communities have such a strong positive energy in them like
HN. I have learnt so many cool things here and I am just 20 days old on HN.

------
phatbyte
I never heard of Techmeme to be honest, but I rely a lot HN for everything
related to geek and technology. So I believe HN is doing a damn good job.
Congrats to everyone of you.

------
edw519
Like many HN posts, I found the comments even more insightful than the
article:

"TM: What has happened. HN: What will happen." - William Mougayar

"Hacker news is great...Huge time-sink liability though." - Liad

"I find the comments more interesting sometimes than the actual article that
is being linked to" - Rick

"Techmeme is a popularity contest, HackerNews is curation. Curation in my
experience wins easily." - Larry M.

"I have really fallen in love with HackerNews lately, finding its eclectic mix
of articles fascinating. I have been participating a lot there because it
doesn't just pull in the same old standard fair I find everywhere else. I also
often find, multiple perspectives, whether in stories or in the comments." -
Elia Freedman

"...the commenters on HN leave a lot to be desired. With a room full of geeks,
you pretty much get what you'd expect -- some insights, but a lot of
pedantry." - davidu

"Hacker News is so great I only let myself go there once a day. And I might
have to cut back on that too..." - Nate Kidwell

"Hacker News looks like a place where you can soak your brain for hours, if
you have the time." - James Harradence

~~~
njohnw
From Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic: "All of our stories that do well on
Hacker News share one thing: they are written. By written, I mean that someone
took the time and effort to examine individual sentences, to think about word
choices, to create transitions between grafs, to describe things precisely.
You know, writing! But a lot of what gets posted in the tech blogosphere
doesn't fit this definition of writing. It's more in the tradition of the wire
services, where speed rules over creativity. That the Hacker News community
both recognizes and rewards pieces that are written makes me love it."

------
bootload
_"... doesn't the fact that Techmeme drives traffic cause the echo chamber -
and how do you change that? ..."_

Spin in any article is like spraying _"Cheez Whiz®"_ on a plate load of
_"Water Crackers"_ then claiming the discovery of the _"new"_ Brie. [0][1] To
the cheese connoisseur, you know something is wrong straight away. Instead of
the soft white gooey cheese melting out the sides of the light chewy rind, we
get an orange blob expertly sprayed on a cracker.

The echo chamber effect is dampened by the HN readers who are connoisseur's of
hacker related information. [2] Spin is detected at both submission and reader
level. A pre-spun article might escape submission, but the average HN taste is
attuned to poor substitutes.

[0] Cheez Whiz® ~ <http://www.kraftbrands.com/CheezWhiz/>

[1] Carr's Crackers ~ <http://www.carrscrackers.com/history.shtml>

[2] Submarine ~ <http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

------
jdp23
Has anybody looked at the correlations between the stories on TechMeme and HN?
My guess is that because of HN's broader scope more of the TechMeme links wind
up on HN than the other way around. But it would be interesting to see data
related to that ... and also see whether one routinely proceeds the other.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I don't know about that but Techmeme clearly takes HN into account. I've
noticed many times where an article makes it to Techmeme without any other
blogs linking to it. Every time that's happened I've found the article on the
top of the HN page.

~~~
jdp23
interesting data point, thanks!

------
michuk
I'd sat Hacker News competes more with Quora than Techmene - especiually the
ASK HN section.

~~~
aik
That's interesting. I was thinking last night whether it would benefit HN to
be structured more like Quora. Naturally in some discussions I would love to
see it, however in others perhaps not. HN places focus on good comments more
than anything, while Quora on good answers with a bit less emphasis on
commenting. A blend somehow I believe to be the future.

------
jdp23
TechMeme's got huge gender biases, and this helps contribute to the echo
chamber effect that Fred's talking about. In September 2010 I wrote about a
case where even though 65% of the articles on a subject were written by women,
TechMeme's version had on 16.5% by women.
<http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1618#comment-88992>

~~~
albedoa
Argh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's
16.5% rate compared to any other sites?

If that's all explained in your article, then I'll just read it later :)

~~~
jdp23
Thanks to jokermatt999 for the cut-and-paste.

Yes, later in that thread there's data from Google and Bing -- both in the
45-50% range.

EDIT: Also, here's the link to the Susan Herring et. al. paper I mentioned
"Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs"
<http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html>

~~~
shasta
Wait, 65% of the stories you linked to were written by women, while only
45%-50% of stories at large were written by women? Have you tried to examine
the roots of your gender bias?

~~~
jdp23
You've misunderstood.

There were 47 stories. 31 (65%) were by women.

TechMeme highlighted 6. 1 was by women, 16%.

Google's front page had 4/9 women. (44%) Bing's front page had 5/10. (50%)

~~~
khafra
If I'm reading joker's summary of your argument correctly, you're saying that
techmeme disproportionately covers blogs about tech news instead of blogs
people write about their own lives or about generalized, uncontroversial
knowledge; which makes it biased against women?

The biasing in this case seems almost an epiphenomenon; TC tries to focus on
certain views of certain subjects and succeeds; whether those views are
disproportionately written by men has little to do with anything.

~~~
jdp23
You are not reading it correctly. I'm saying that there were 47 stories _on
this topic_ , of which 31 were by women. Techmeme featured 6 stories on this
topic, of which only 1 was by women. Whether or not a view was written by a
man strongly is strongly correlated with whether or not Techmeme features it.

~~~
khafra
I didn't see you addressing the actual point I raised, which was that Techmeme
looks for certain topics, covered from a certain stance. Just like
Encyclopaedia Britannica demands articles inhabiting the Classic Stance[1],
Techmeme demands its own stance.

But saying this is a gender problem is like saying that because doctors are
more likely male than nurses are, and get paid more than nurses, we should
have fewer doctors and more nurses.

[1] <http://classicprose.com/csx.html>

~~~
jdp23
The data shows that Techmeme's choices of topics and perspectives result in an
overwhelming majority of stories by guys even in situations when more women
than men are writing about it. Why don't you see that as a gender bias?

I don't know the data on Britannica authors. If there are more guys then
women, then there's gender bias, and Classic Stance may or may not be a
contributor. But in any case, I don't see what that has to do with Techmeme
situation. Ditto with whether or not there's gender bias in the medical
profession.

~~~
albedoa
I understood it exactly as khafra did. I suppose we are confused about this
line (which khafra was referring to):

 _TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising
that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth._

This quote makes it sound like women and children write more personal and
knowledge stuff, which TechMeme naturally overlooks. Further, it straight up
says that this tendency is "unsurprising".

So we are wondering what this has to do with gender bias or why it's
surprising that a technology would miss things that it is designed to miss.

But you said he was not reading the summary correctly, so obviously something
is not clear here.

------
stevefarnworth
I don't visit TM, mainly because I follow a large swathe of tech publications
on Twitter, and that's how I get my breaking tech stories - so have no real
need for aggregation on stories I've already read.

Whereas I've found HN to be much more useful for the smaller, less known
publications, personal blogs and company articles which I wouldn't pick up on
with my traditional web browsing method.

------
PostOnce
I've never actually been to techmeme, so I went there. That's one ugly
website.

This should be taken as constructive criticism: if the first thing that pops
into a new user's head is "wow, that's ugly", it's probably time for a
redesign.

------
greyman
I didn't notice a lack of diversity in Techmeme. I consider the site to be
very useful, and while they push the big companies stories above the fold,
there are still a lot of interesting links to other news or opinions.

~~~
jokermatt999
Yes, but they often cover minutia to death. I unsubscribed when I got 4
stories about rumors of a white iPhone in my feed reader.

------
pramit
The greatest difference b/w HN and Techmeme? It is the great quality of
conversation between all you intelligent people out here.

What does Techmeme have? Just some Tweets?

------
petervandijck
Flagged linkbait.

