
Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News - Libertatea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/07/slashdot-founder-rob-malda-on-why-there-wont-be-another-hacker-news/?tid=rssfeed
======
mgkimsal
"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power
has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of
that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and
you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe."

But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from
them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to
'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up
with the latest hot people on twitter _isn 't_ too much work? Makes no sense.
Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.

~~~
D9u
I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my
thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting...
(as this comment illustrates)

~~~
_delirium
That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an
80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's
extremely simple information. A headline _plus_ a short blurb, like on
Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of
what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting,
and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch
people's eye in 80 characters.

On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first,
but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit
have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions
rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also
contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little
along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.

~~~
sker
It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors
like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the
sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded
in Go and released by Wikileaks.

I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them
later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.

~~~
slacka
I prefer the headlines here over Reddit’s. What worries me is the quality of
the comments. The community and their insightful comments are what keeps me
coming back.

Lately I've seen an increase in memes and trollish comments from new IDs. I
worry that if HN doesn't move to limited account signup period or invite only,
it will end up another Slashdot.

------
mikeurbanski
There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's
time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids
table" actively discourages me from participating.

Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-
promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the
self-promotion to a minimum?

When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem
Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".

Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about
what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to
treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era
[http://planet.gnome.org/](http://planet.gnome.org/) than anywhere else.

There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and
come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.

~~~
daturkel
Wow I just took the time to look up hellban [0] because I always just assumed
it's synonymous with permaban. For those too lazy to click the link, it's a
ban where you're not informed that you're banned and the content you post is
displayed only for you and no one else. That's actually a pretty shitty
moderation tactic mainly because it doesn't teach the poster why they made a
mistake and it does just waste their time when they could be getting back to
being a better user.

Additionally, in the <year time that I've been reading and minimally
contributing to HN, I've definitely been disappointed with a trend towards
politicization that a lot of people have noted. I'm much happier seeing
everyone's static site generators on github than everyone's opinion on Snowden
or some other political issue that's related enough to tech to get posted. It
strikes me as mission creep for HN to start getting so political. My favorite
thing to see on the frontpage is a github repo, not a medium/svbtle article
where someone spends two paragraphs telling an anecdote and then one paragraph
jumping to a massive generalized conclusion based on that one experience
and/or "Lorem Snowden" as you put it. /rant

[0]:
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban)

~~~
DanBC
Hellbans aren't meant to teach people what mistake they made. Downvotes and
comments are supposed to do that.

That's why it's a shame that downvoting is so disapproved of among a group of
HN users, and it's a shame that people "drive-by downvote".

Hell banning is meant to save time of everyone in the community, and it does a
pretty good job of that. There's much less meta commentary about whether
banning a user is or isn't fair; and there's less to and fro about what should
be a bannable offence. The algorithms do all that stuff.

I agree about the political stuff.

~~~
jjindev
I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned
community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've
seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but
just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a
"very positive" environment. Pernicious.

~~~
mattmanser
You can turn on show dead and see the hellbanned comments. Most of the time
it's justified. The only occasions I've ever made the effort to contact
someone and tell them they're hellbanned was after the girls in tech fiasco 6
months back, I thought the comment that banned him was just a bit stupid &
misunderstood. And the rest of his comments really good.

So there are some of us keeping and eye on the 'shaping' and you can too if
you want.

There's actually some amazing comments by a crazy guy who's written an OS
dedicated to god, it's pretty insane and yet incredibly impressive at the same
time.

~~~
jjindev
That's very good that "show dead" shows hellbanned, and all I could ask for.
And it's not like I was worried about HN specifically, more the ability of
smaller, more focused sites to self-AstroTurf by omission.

------
muraiki
I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source
movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what
the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going
to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a
great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was
curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out
about the sorts of things they talked about.

However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September
like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots
of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests.
Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring.
Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting
editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting
was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust
the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate?

When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a
title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general
its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses
his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the
solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on
this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a
single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting
stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This
problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or
Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a
really hard problem.

That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount --
albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!

~~~
joonix
Your reference to Slashdot on 9/11 gave me a bout of nostalgia for all the
time I spent on that site as a teenager, and led me to checkout archive.org's
Slashdot capture from that date. For some reason it doesn't exist, the closest
I can get is 9/14.

"Net taps without warrants"[1] was on the front page (already). Very
interesting to look back and see the commentary and the way this was received
12 years ago(!) in light of all the NSA/Snowden stuff that's been going on
lately.

Some highlights:

"Do we really have any reason to believe that the government is trying to
create a giant evil spy machine to watch their own people as opposed to the
terrorists? I tend to be more or less trusting of the government, but that's
just me."

"This bill is quite limited in its scope, allowing only 48 hours to tap
without approval and only for immediate threats to "National Security." Many
civil liberties are restricted during threats to "National Security." Ever
heard of martial law and curfews?"

"Anything that is truely our __rights __in a constitutional sense will be
protected by the supreme court.

The congress will push, the courts will push back, and life wil lgo on as it
has in the US.

I get the feeling a significant cross section of slashdot just likes to run
around hystericly like the sky is falling."

"What's so hard about getting a warrant? [..] Or maybe you keep federal
courthouses staffed with at least one judge with a security clearance 24x7, if
its so important. "

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.org/yro/01/09/14/211241.shtml)

~~~
nsxwolf
Original 9/11 thread:

[http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-
tower...](http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-
pentagon-attacked)

The subject of one of the very top comments reminds me of why I've never cared
for the Slashdot community: "We had it coming..."

~~~
vacri
What's worse is those people who characterise an entire community by one
poster's comment, which isn't particularly mirrored in the rest of the thread.

------
cperciva
Funny that he says he wants a Hacker News digest with the top 10 stories each
day... my Hacker News Daily is precisely that.

~~~
swanson
Yeah, googling for "top 10 stories from hacker news" returns
[http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)
as the first result.

Maybe he will see this thread and sign up :)

~~~
kylelibra
Is there some way to get this in a daily email?

~~~
gabemart
It would be trivial to set it up as an RSS-to-email campaign in Mailchimp, but
I wouldn't want to without the permission of the site owner.

~~~
cperciva
Go for it. Let me know when it's set up and I'll add a link to the site.

------
sillysaurus
One idea for jumpstarting a new HN-type site is to spider HNSearch, gathering
the first 100,000 stories ever submitted to HN, along with comments. Then set
up your site so that your frontpage is a doppelganger of HN's frontpage circa
2007. I.e. today your frontpage should look how the HN frontpage looked on
August 7th, 2007.

That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of
interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the
comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by
replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new
site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back,
which they should because the frontpage is interesting.

This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the
currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling
their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to
clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of
the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were
a halfway implementation.

Anyway. Just a fun idea.

EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008:
[http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-
news-2008...](http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-
news-2008-04-24.zip)

It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a
snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users.

Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization
or something.

EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old
there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there
were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and
5.9 submissions per user.

~~~
dylangs1030
1\. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one
thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that
there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you
really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you
try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it.
Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users _in their
field_ but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue."
EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining
because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is
packaged with a full implementation of HN.

2\. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot
of content.

3\. This _is_ a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add
content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where
there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing.
It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.

~~~
OGC
The secret sauce is that HN is the news aggregator of a successful start up
combinator. The secret sauce is popularity.

~~~
krapp
The secret sauce is green.

------
incision
_> "Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim
O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary
of what’s happening around the universe."_

I tried to start using Twitter that way maybe 5 years ago and found that there
was just too much noise - jokes, tales of breakfast and banter that I just
don't care to see.

I actually feel like it's the right kind of model though. Aggregating content
streams from people of similar interests. It's the filtering that's lacking
for me.

Every time I think about following someone on a social site I want for the
ability to follow only a specific category of their content and possibly re-
share it in the same focused fashion.

G+, Flipboard and likely a host of others have done things toward this
direction, but I have yet to see anything gel for me.

Ideally, I see all of this categorization and recommendation happening
automatically. If a service could recommend news or articles to me and
categorize those I specify with the same accuracy I perceive from Netflix with
movies, or even the new Gmail inbox I'd be pretty happy.

~~~
mrweasel
I really don't see Twitter providing any value to my life. The structure and
concept doesn't fit my way of discovering and consuming news at all. In my
mind, Twitter is essentially useless. I don't care about people, I don't wish
to be follow anyone, I care about single idea, news and insights.

I would not like a filter in terms of what Google or Netflix imposes on me
either. If I only got the news that some filter thought I would like I would
miss out on ever discovering anything new. Filters only serves to keep you in
your own little bubble, never letting anything controversial enter your life.

I like Hacker News, Slashdot and to some extend Reddit. Most of the stuff on
each site is of little interest, but now I know it exists. There's a bunch of
stuff that I've been introduced to, which initially did't appeal to me, but
later on proved useful. Filters and recommendation engines needs to die, they
are harmful because they limit our exposure to new ideas. Twitter should go
the same way, you follow the people you agree with or the people you want to
hate, never the people who make you stop and rethink your own opinions.

~~~
incision
I think you've misconstrued my point as I'm generally in agreement with you.

------
minimaxir
_I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power
has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of
that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and
you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe._

Odd argument, considering that the content on Hacker News is more about
products than the people making the products. And I can say with confidence
that I've never seen Scoble linked to _anywhere_ on HN.

~~~
Zimahl
Agreed. HN is what it is, it's not an all-encompassing tech news aggregator
like Slashdot was. HN is fairly focused with a few outside stories that creep
in here and there.

I know everyone likes to run the 'back in my day' line every now and then so I
might as well. Slashdot is crap now. _Back in my day_ things were fairly
relevant and, while there was a slight lag, if the story was interesting it
made it to Slashdot quickly. Now stories might not show up for not just hours,
but days! By then it's been discussed elsewhere to death so you only read the
Slashdot comments for snark and not insight. The technology section of Google
News is better than Slashdot (sans comments).

Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. They let the look and feel
get too long in the tooth and people abandoned it for better sites.

~~~
Shivetya
Slashdot died the day it got political and worse when such became entrenched.
By political I mean election oriented material to the point that crossover
polluted seemingly unrelated stories.

Hence why during a discussion here about politics I stated I would prefer a
"hide" flag next to the "flag" link that I could use to remove stories from my
view under the notion that maybe someone wants to get into that stuff here.

~~~
prawn
I think what killed Slashdot was the devolution of commenting to karma-racing
with predictable "funny" responses. So-called obligatory "That's no moon..."
jokes and so on.

The absence of that was certainly what I found so refreshing when I first
discovered Hacker News.

------
dmunoz
> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best
> items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.

There is hckrnews [0]. You can filter by top 10, top 20, top 50%, homepage and
all. I usually start by going through the top 10 and progress outwards if I'm
looking for additional posts.

[0] [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

~~~
Flenser
Or there's
[https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100](https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100)
although it's a poor substitue for hckrnews it's better than the home page if
you can't access hckrnews because "The category of Hacking has been blocked by
your System Administrator".

~~~
Flenser
Why the downvotes? I didn't know about that url till someone else posted it.

------
pessimizer
I find it interesting that the "tech-related topics" that Malda is "most
obsessed with right now" are Bitcoin, Manning, and Snowden/NSA - the ones that
the proclaimers of a decline of quality of HN complain about the most.

------
diminoten
Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't
vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless
'approved', or something similar?

Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many
political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't
"hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean.

I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really
notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well
as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.

~~~
minimaxir
It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things _worse_ , since it
leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is
better.

~~~
TheCraiggers
I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a
few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted
interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great,
while it lasted.

A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something
similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually
ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming
in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads.

I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist
side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may
conflict with closed societies like this.

I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the
people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in
the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky.
Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable
information, not to mention some way of validating it.

~~~
shazow
> while it lasted.

What happened to it? Why did it die?

I've had a similar forum many years ago but haven't been able to replicate the
experience since.

~~~
TheCraiggers
I believe the biggest reason for it dying was that a schism appeared in our
community. A few people had a public argument, sides were taken, words were
spoken, feelings were hurt, etc. We had some people leave, and despite some
attempts here or there, we had no new members to fill the gaps.

Another possibility is this place was created back before sites like Facebook,
twitter, etc. Once social media came to prominence, some of us started
communicating via other methods and we didn't check the forum as much as we
used to. When your userbase is that small, it doesn't take much of a
disruption to kill it.

------
Zimahl
I think his logic toward Twitter is very flawed. Sure, you can get the bulk of
your interesting news there from specific feeds, but where's the discussion?
People use Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Fark, etc., because they could have
conversations about each item.

People want to discuss how a story makes them feel and how it affects them.
People need access to random people, that's why this doesn't work as well on
social sites like Facebook. Finally, it needs to be at least psuedo-anonymous
so people can explore their thoughts without real-life repercussions.

~~~
justincormack
There is discussion in twitter but not if you follow Scoble you need to follow
people who interact and roughly follow and are followed by similar numbers of
people. Its a very social medium if done right...

~~~
Zimahl
Not to say Twitter isn't a fine medium but I personally don't think a real
discussion can be had 140 characters at a time. It's a severe limit that just
doesn't work (wrt discussions).

------
jgon
I enjoyed reading Cmdr Taco's thoughts on the future of "news" (interpret that
broadly) and it made do some reflecting on what I think the future will be.

The biggest thing that jumped out at me was that signal vs. noise is the most
important criteria for a service to be used, but what a lot of analyses miss
is that you have to interpret something before you can decide if it is a
signal or not, and that interpretation is by definition individual. I think
this is what happens a lot of the time when people complain about a site
becoming "too big", idealizing the past when the "riff-raff" hadn't gotten in.
But I think this is mistaken for the same reason that generational rants about
the fecklessness of the youth are mistaken, ie Occam's razor says that we are
probably not all Nietzschean superman vs newcomer's being idiots, but instead
we are probably more or less equal. What is happening instead is that as a
larger group comes to a site, a larger number of interests and opinions come
as well. And what I interpret as noise, what those people interpret as signal.

By this I mean that if a large number of art enthusiasts joined HN and started
posting a bunch of articles on art history, I would probably not be interested
as my interests lie mostly in the tech arena. Let's further posit that these
art enthusiasts are pretty competent in their field and so 90% of what they
post is "worthwhile" in some vague broad sense. This influx might actually
increase the _overall_ signal to noise content on HN, while for me it would
appear as though HN is getting swamped with crap. This is why people talk
about trying to keep things exclusive or invite-only, we are trying to keep
the broader perspectives involved aligned with our own, so as to not get
swamped by noise from perspectives with no overlap to our own.

And this I think is the root of a bunch of the complaints about politics being
posted to HN. While I may shrug off art history posts, politics is another
word for how we organize ourselves to live together and as such as is much
more personal and much more important. And so people's personal reactions to
politics they disagree with, and by extension political stories they disagree
with, is much more aggressive. So even a small amount of political discourse
that you disagree with can seem intolerable.

So what is the solution? Well if I had that, I would be rich, but I do have a
few ideas. The first is that reddit is trying to solve the signal
interpretation issue with subreddits, wherein people can manually opt in to
streams of article that they believe will be signals to them, while blocking
out all streams that they will personally interpret as noise. But this still
relies on manual intervention as well as discovery, along with user moderation
to maintain the signal. And why do we still do things manually when we have
computers!? :)

So one area that I think is really overlooked is that right now every site
interprets "down/up votes" and flagging as me speaking about what I think is
useful for the community. But this is just my interpretation and so aren't I
really expressing my own preferences here? Why aren't sites taking my history
of voting/flagging and running some machine learning on the the contents of
the stories associated with that history to try to tease out patterns in what
I appear to approve and disapprove of?

For myself personally I wouldn't care if I ever read another article on
coffescript or libertarian politics. But if I downvote those things here on HN
I am making a judgement on what I think is best for the rest of the community,
and who am I to make that choice? Why can't the HN front-page see that I'm
logged, look at my voting history, and just remove those stories from my view
of the front page? Ta da, automatic subreddits. I think a lot of work could be
done in interpreting my actions in voting/downvoting on a much more personal
level, rather that looking at them in a democratic fashion.

Of course, the big unanswered question with the above is how do we avoid the
echo-chamber effect, and what about that rare story on coffeescript I might
actually want to see? But for now, I think the above would be a good first
step, with some sort of bail-out possible if I want to "broaden" my
perspective. And anyway, aren't we all trying to create an echo-chamber anyway
by coming to HN (aka hacker focused stories)? So what could it hurt to make
things a bit more personalized for myself?

~~~
DanielRibeiro
The personalization, although helpfull to filter out noise, can have some
unwanted side-effects, as described on the _Beware online "filter bubbles"_[1]

Note that there are already tools that provide some personalization for Hacker
News[2]

[1]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

[2] [https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-
Filter](https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter)

~~~
susi22
Actually the personalization is a great idea. But you'd have to not just apply
filters but develop a complex recommendation system based on what you
upvoted/read in the past. I.e. no more global front page for everybody but an
individual one for each person.

But doing this requires quite some work (Machine learning etc.)

~~~
nileshtrivedi
or simply have something like sub-reddits.

~~~
fantnn
some sub-reddits are by nature very focused and high noise/signal ratio
(/r/netsec is a good example of this), while something like /r/funny will have
multiple posts that won't appeal to everyone. Definitely something that can be
done better.

------
arh68
_> The policy parts, I don’t feel like I have a say in that. I don’t have a
voice there. I know what I want to see happen. But I don’t feel like I have a
say or a voice so I choose to be interested in the technology and think about
where that’s going to take us next._

It just burns to hear Rob Malda say this. I wince at the thought. I've heard
the words before, in the back of my head: solutionism, powerlessness, voter
apathy. I have no good ideas to solve this or even reverse it: no way forward,
no 'edge'.

I'm starting to think these news sites live and die like phoenixes. Emotional
baggage accumulates, pushing "issues" to the surface, clouding understanding.
"Thought-provoking" is the kind of post I like to read, but only when it
provokes curiosity, not frustration.

I wonder what would happen to the HN userbase if the entire site goes dark for
a whole month. I'd come back. I hope the "issues" disappear and we can all
start conversing with clear minds once again.

------
duaneb
People want too much from this site: startup news, code, politics, self help,
tech gossip. This was fine with fewer users because all this could coexist on
the front page, but now a lot of quality content just flies under the radar in
lieu of linkbait stories. Unfortunately this is the way the internet works.

------
david_shaw
A lot of Malda's thesis seems subjective; a more interesting statement was
just a brief mention at the top of the article:

 _> Then, after taking a year off, [Malda] joined WaPo Labs, a technology
incubator owned by the Washington Post Company, the parent company of the
Washington Post. (WaPo Labs is not among the companies being purchased by Jeff
Bezos.)_

I wonder why that is? I don't want to derail the discussion, but I had assumed
(incorrectly) that Bezos was acquiring the full Washington Post collective. It
strikes me as odd that he would neglect one of the elements that made WaPo, in
my mind, somewhat unique.

I'll try to stay away from speculation, but I can't help but wonder if some of
Bezos's other labs might be integrated into WaPo's technology portfolio? Is
that possible, when the purchase was unaffiliated with Amazon?

~~~
_delirium
He didn't buy the actual company, only some of the newspapers: the _Post_
itself, and a number of local papers. The Washington Post Co. itself will
remain independent, but will have to change its name, and will retain Kaplan,
WaPo Labs, _Slate_ , about 10 local TV stations, SocialCode, and some other
things.

~~~
snowwrestler
But what is the point of WaPo Labs without the WaPo? Are they going to rebrand
to some sort of general-purpose tech startup or incubator?

Or are they going to keep doing innovation for WaPo, only now on a contractual
basis? (Creating recurring revenue for the public company.)

~~~
_delirium
I dug a bit and found that some kind of cross-licensing deal is included: WaPo
Labs gets a 5-year content license, in return for 10% of any profits. However
it sounds like they're planning to move towards doing more general tech-for-
media stuff rather than WaPo-tied stuff.

Source: 2nd-to-last question from [http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-
graham-on-the-sale-of-t...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/don-graham-on-
the-sale-of-the-washington-post-jeff-bezos-and-the-pace-of-newsroom-
innovation/)

------
dylangs1030
Slightly misleading, only a paragraph or two were really about Hacker News in
particular. More about why there won't be another "x", of which Hacker News is
one iteration.

I'm glad Malda spoke to the issue of volume. A lot of users on Hacker News
(with varying levels of prominence, seniority and notability) have noted the
issues arising with volume.

The NSA scandal was the most recent example of this. Political discourse on
Hacker News is almost cancerous it's so bad. there is widespread
misinformation and a quick glance at the "New" page shows that the guidelines
are frequently not even regarded for submissions.

I think Malda is on point with his view of Hacker News being at critical mass
right now.

------
fotbr
Strangely enough, "new version of blahblahblah" is much more interesting to me
than anything "tech culture" ever will be.

------
InclinedPlane
I think Malda is circling in the wrong waters. He's following and rubbing
shoulders with the folks with money and influence, but the interesting stuff
is all being done by a bunch of other people who are spending their time
actually doing stuff. Frankly, I don't think Robert Scoble has even the
slightest fragment of a fucking clue as to what the tech landscape is going to
look like in 2023 or who is going to be a big part of it. Just because they
have money, a legacy, and a reputation doesn't mean they are relevant. I think
that might apply to Malda as well as anyone else.

~~~
AsymetricCom
Anyone who frequented slashdot can see this. What a preposterous idea that
there won't be another Slashdot/digg/HN. Its like saying there won't be
another printing press.

------
joshuak
Personally I like the fact that HN has a lot of verity. I can read it like a
newspaper just like I used to do with /. and get exposed to a lot of things I
wouldn't know to look for. I can search if I want to focus on something
specific. So I don't agree with the premise that there _should_ be another HN.

Two things that I hated about /. was the summery, which usually confusingly
buried the link and was generally not helpful. And the fact that you can't
vote and comment in the same article, which means that you trend away from
having expert comments that are highly rated.

 _If you are an expert you can write an informative comment, but then you can
't help vote up other expert comments, if you only vote your expert opinion
goes unheard. HN doesn't have this problem._

I think the reason HN works is mostly simply the name, and not breaking it as
above. It captures the idea of "Why" in the golden circle sense.[0] You could
easily do this with news sites focused on other general (but engaging)
categories, and I think that is already true, we are just more interested in
the hacker type of news so may not notice.

[0]:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...](http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html)

------
D9u
_One thing I learned is don’t spend your entire life playing predictive
defense against attacks that will never happen. Real people are very clever.
If they choose to attack you they’ll attack you in ways you can’t predict._

I wish our government would heed this advice...

I also liked how Rob said that his CMS was an evolved system and not designed.
This has been my experience as well, because I can't think of _everything_ and
am better suited to incremental design.

------
jfb
I wonder about the idea that Twitter will fill the role of something like
Slashdot/HN/&c. At my Peak Twitter, I followed a couple hundred people, but
the stream is so full of noise that the work of picking out the signal began
to drown out any possible benefit. Retweets, for instance, I see as 99.99%
noise. The ads are annoying, but ads are annoying everywhere.

~~~
markkat
[http://hubski.com](http://hubski.com) is in many ways a mashup between HN and
Twitter. I created it from the HN source code. Building feeds built from
following people and tags keeps noise down. People are pretty careful about
what they share (retweets). I know Rob has an inactive account, so he is
vaguely aware of it. He agreed to let me bend his ear about it (I lived nearby
him), but left for the WaPo almost immediately after.

~~~
bluecalm
One thing about tags which I think is worth a try is to make them up/down-
votable. It's one thing to say: "this is interesting" and it's another to say
"this is on topic". Current sites based on tags doesn't allow for much user
input in the latter area.

I dream of a day when I can customize youtube to not display anything video
game related (when searching for highlights from sport events and stuff).
Everything tagged as "sport events" and in fact being video game footage would
be downvoted to death and users posting this wrongly tagged stuff flagged as
spammers so there would be incenvite for them to tag things properly.

~~~
markkat
Our approach is that the author can choose up to two tags, and the community
(excluding newbies) can add a third. The most suggested community tag is the
current tag.

------
duck
_If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best
items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot._

Someone needs to tell Rob, I created a digest just over three years ago -
[http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com)

------
TheCraiggers
It kinda sounds like he's suggesting a massive, public, social media platform
where the 'good stuff' naturally bubbles up to the top. 'Good stuff', in this
case, being what you're interested in and nothing else.

And while that would indeed be awesome, it's also pretty obviously a pipe
dream. Maybe some breakthrough with AI would help with that, but until then I
don't think we have the technology to do that.

So, for now humans are in control, and as we all know, the public is filled
with marketers, trolls, and other forms of bagbiters that tend to ruin such
things when they get big enough. Hakuna matata, I guess.

~~~
omarchowdhury
You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.

~~~
TheCraiggers
>You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I'm not marketing anything because I'm not selling anything for money or
goods.

------
VLM
In the same article he wonders how there can be eternal growth (the graph up
and to the right quote) while limiting the discussion topics to a very small
number, but doesn't see the inherent conflict in the demands.

This is a failure to identify audience. A desire for identical "fundamentalist
clones". Maybe you just don't get those in a tech audience.

He made it very clear he's not interested in a coffeescript release. Obviously
some subculture is... And thats not necessarily a problem.

~~~
binarybits
This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was
that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go
up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech
audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.

------
MattRogish
"If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best
items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot."

I think the Launch Ticker is probably the closest thing to that. They cover
much of the same ground as HN. Of course, you don't get the comments, but that
could be a positive to some people.

[http://launch.co/](http://launch.co/)

------
SkyMarshal
_> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10
best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot._

Ahem: [http://www.hackernewsletter.com/](http://www.hackernewsletter.com/)

Only problem is the lag in receiving it, if you care a great deal about
participating in the comments.

------
tareqak
The TL;DR answer seems to be: because there isn't a good way to get the wisdom
of the crowds without the crowds (yet).

------
yapsody
Really great interview. Its good to know thoughts of Slashdot founder. I think
hacker news is perfect the way it is.

------
initself
For me, the glory days of Slashdot were when I consumed the daily text based
email digest.

------
D9u
Any successor will, by necessity, be named something else, so... Yeah, I
agree, there can never be another "Hacker News."

------
iblaine
He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there
will never be another to replace it.

IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is
better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft &
SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the
need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it
unfortunately didn't evolve.

[edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even
today it's hard/annoying to use.

~~~
pohl
_He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there
will never be another to replace it._

What makes you think so? Why would someone convinced of such things say the
following:

"Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now."
-Rob Malda

(Taken from TFA.)

~~~
iblaine
Read the entire article. In it he praises hackernews then says it needs to
filter to top 10 items, as slashdot did. He says twitter is fundamentally
broken. He says reddit is too big.

~~~
donjigweed
HN just needs a buffer/digest, so you only see posts that spend some time on
the front page.

[http://eplenum.com/news?days=.1](http://eplenum.com/news?days=.1) posts that
have been on the front page in the last 2.5 hours

[http://eplenum.com/news?days=1](http://eplenum.com/news?days=1) posts that
have been on the front page in the last day

....

[http://eplenum.com/news?q=slashdot&sort=lastUpdate,desc](http://eplenum.com/news?q=slashdot&sort=lastUpdate,desc)

------
phusion
I talked to Rob at a LinuxWorld several years ago. I got there kind of late
and he was answering questions to a medium sized group of socially awkward
computer nerds. No one wanted to get on the mic and ask a question for a
Slashdot T-Shirt, so, being the extrovert that I am, stepped up to the plate.

I had recently read an interview with Rob online where someone asked him about
Digg and Reddit and the popularity of user chosen content. His answers seemed
like the question really got under his skin, so I figured I'd fuck with him in
public.

I got on the mic and asked him what he thought about the trend of user
submitted content. He immediately snapped at me that someone had already asked
a similar question and called me a noob. He rambled on about quality vs
quantity and all that, my eyes glazed over and I waited to get my free
T-Shirt. I still have it! That experience more or less cemented my opinion of
'ol Robbie. Just thought I'd mention this story..

~~~
dkuntz2
See, but even in your own words, you seem like more of an ass than he does.

You didn't even listen to his answer after he said someone else asked the same
question. Hell, your entire goal was to just annoy him. I think he probably
figured as much and decided he didn't want to play your game.

