
(Why) I quit Hacker News (2010) - rawland
http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/
======
jacquesm
Only he's back.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7834690)

We all quit HN at some point in time and those who haven't will do it too. And
then we find that there is nothing better. It's a bit like democracy.

~~~
oskarth
The people who quit for real usually don't start with a statement. I think
making a big deal out of it is a way of telling oneself why one _should_ quit.
Contrast this with someone asking the question "Why did you quit?"and replying
with why one _did_ quit.

~~~
jacquesm
Considering that I quit for almost a year in much the same way I disagree. The
best customers are the ones that leave and tell you why. I never learned
anything as an entrepreneur from the people that just left. But I listened
very well to those that left and told me why. Of course HN has no direct
commercial incentive to retain Matt or me or anybody else, as long as we're
contributing it's fine and when we're not there are 100's like us to take our
place.

So forgive me for disagreeing with you but I see it different. Matt was/is an
awesome contributor to HN and I definitely noticed him returning, we need more
people like him, not less.

And quite a few people who 'quit for real' have stayed away, with or without
statements in public. And quite a few 'old timers' have left and have come
back (even if not always under their old nick).

~~~
oskarth
I definitely agree that the best customers are the ones that leave and tell
you why. I also think most, if not all, of the "I quit HN and here's why"
posts are from precisely the type of people that makes HN worth reading, and
the complaints they have are generally real problems that HN would be better
off if it could solve.

With that said, I think there's a difference between quitting HN and
unsubscribing from say, a online service. When you unsubscribe from a service
there's a clear demarcation. Quitting HN is usually a decision of the form
"from now on I won't go to HN", a decision which is very easily reversed.
Because it is so easy to reverse one's quitting, it doesn't carry as much
weight.

On the other hand, let's say pg stays off HN for a year. Eventually people
will ask why he quit HN. If he writes an essay about how he came to quit HN
and why (past tense) as a response to that question, it's more likely that he
has quit for real, as well as being true reasons for why he actually did quit.

Another example: _This is my last cigarette, because smoking is bad for my
health_ vs. _I quit smoking 10 years ago when I had kids and realized I wanted
to be there for them when they got older_. It's true smoking is bad for your
health, but that might not be the true reason people actually do quit.

~~~
jacquesm
Funny you should mention that. In a way PG has quit. He's passed the mantle to
dang who is doing an exemplary job of moderating the forum now. Paul's last
post is more than 2 months old. And he did write that essay:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856)

~~~
oskarth
> I'll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had
> to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.

Splitting hairs here, but I consider that more of a "I'll no longer be the
moderator of HN" type of quitting, which is not a very reversible decision. I
was hinting at the fact that he might also quit _as a user_ , considering his
two month post hiatus. (Personally I'm hoping he's just taking a well-deserved
vacation from HN, rather than leaving it completely).

------
JacobAldridge
I'd be interested in the update - "Why I came back to Hacker News" (given in
the 4 years since writing this, Matt has returned, though not as active as I
remember).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon)

[EDIT] The article was first submitted here 1287 days ago [1] and Matt stayed
away for 181 days [2]. More importantly, I think all of his criticisms remain
valid 4 years later - but there's obviously something here for him, for me,
for us.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367)
[2] First comment back
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578635)

------
rawland
Matt's reasons:

    
    
      1. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are
         disproportionately represented.
    
      2. 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.
    
      3. The community is full of ideologues to the point
         where the comments are most often just predictable
         talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum.
    
      4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch
         with how the other half lives.
    
      5. It's a time suck.
    
      6. It removes comments from where they should be,
         on the destination site.
    
      7. It reduces blogging time.
    

Food for thought... How can we improve?

Disclaimer: I'm a devotee of HN; It's home, but also I'm a devotee of critical
thinking.

~~~
RivieraKid
> 1\. Lack of down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately
> represented.

Allow downvotes for submissions.

> 2\. 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.

Downvoter has to write a short explanation of the downvote. He's warned that
admins can ban people who downvote just because they disagree.

> 5\. It's a time suck.

Make the site faster, it's really slow.

~~~
mkesper
Make the site faster, it's really slow.

That doesn't avoid procrastinating. Besides, HN is fast, many linked sites are
slow and bloated...

~~~
danielweber
Several times a week I find HN takes 10-20 seconds to load.

(This leads to paranoia about slow-banning or hell-banning.)

------
DanielBMarkham
I've yet to quit or come back. I find it's much more relaxing just to hang out
and bitch about things.

HN has a lot of problems, and I'm not one of those who thinks it's all just
the same only more bitching. Flagging of stuff you don't like (as opposed to
stuff that really should be flagged) is top of my list. Then there's the thing
where people vote based on emotional appeal versus actual immediate value to
folks. Or where true long-form content should never be able to make it to the
front page of HN: if it takes more than 30 minutes or so to read, it's already
passed through the new page, things get submitted as soon as they go live, and
you can't do resubmissions. (Yet somehow, someway, _some_ long-form content
seems to do pretty well anyway) I'm also not a fan of turning the site into a
YC PR device, but it's not my site and it's been that way for a long time.
Just sometimes you see the "wires" behind the scenes and it's not pretty. I
also am not crazy about having the same conversations about the same things
over and over again -- one reason why I spend much less time here.

Did I mention I like complaining?

------
debacle
Hacker News used to be brimming with content. I would regularly read 50-60% of
the articles.

Now I read it much more like I would read Time or a newspaper - lots of fluff,
lots of "marketing," and maybe 1-2 stories a day that I actually want to read.

~~~
RankingMember
I thought so too, but I think it's just that the "newness" wears off and we
start to realize that what we once thought was novel and interesting is seen
as less so when the theme stays the same week after week.

That and, well, there's clearly some runoff from Reddit: "Change.org Petition:
Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'" Really?

------
jbeja
The reason I sometimes wish to quit HN: There are just to many Apple fanboys,
and cliche opinions driven by insane fanboyism that just make me cringe
sometimes.

~~~
SeanDav
There are Apple fanboys, there are Google fanboys, there are Microsoft
fanboys, there are Linux fanboys, there are Haskell fanboys...etc etc.

Sometimes it can be annoying, especially when they band together to kill an
otherwise interesting story (for example almost any story about Microsoft
stopping support for XP was flagged to oblivion very quickly). However they
also add to the community and on balance we are probably better off with them
than without them.

~~~
clarry
What do they add to the community, other than flames and at least half-a-
frontpageful of uninteresting articles about
(Apple|Google|Microsoft|otherbigtechcorp) doing this and that? These are the
articles that you'd find in any mainstream tech media anyway. These also tend
to generate too much opinions (it's easy to have one) without so much deep
thought and technical discussion. Maybe my memory is hazy but I think HN was
really quite different back when I first got interested in it.

------
GrinningFool

        In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments 
        for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only
        for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned 
        and well-stated that I disagree with than just another 
        guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me 
        square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably 
        just about any site with voting. 
    

Yet it seems that stating that you wish people would vote on merit puts you in
the majority of people who comment on voting systems.

If fewer people said that they wanted voting to work this way, and instead
actually voted this way... we'd all have the kind of site we wanted.

~~~
danielweber
There's always the fear of unilaterally disarming: "I am going to vote based
on skill, not based on Which Side the person is on. . . . Oh, but everyone
else is voting based on Which Side! Now I have to help My Side!"

It's very common to see the Written Rule be "vote based on skill, not
viewpoint" and the Practiced Rule be the opposite, with occasional weak
exhortations from the mods to follow the Written Rule which may never have
been followed.

I do not know how to fix this or if it is fixable.

------
jebus989
Always relevant in these discussions:
[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye)

I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays
may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how
generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.

------
threepipeproblm
TSA agents aren't bad, they're "just following orders." Okay not a quote from
the article, but it seems to be his attitude. Actually his attitude is worse,
that they are somehow the victims.

But despite the fact I haven't seen an article about TSA handlers in recent
memory, I _like_ people who are willing to blame the people responsible for
doing bad things. So I guess I will like HN better without that dude.

------
etfb
I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't
like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold
turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year
now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in
how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset
of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit.

What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something
unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or
raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the
OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email
to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible
too, I suspect.

~~~
carrotleads
well the OP mentioned changing the password to long unrecoverable string.

How did he manage to come back? did he store pwd somewhere? pull strings at
YC??

How?

~~~
mhartl
I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks
like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so
it's possible he talked to PG directly.

~~~
mattmaroon
There is a password reset feature. It works via typing in the wrong password.
Go to the login page, type in a wrong pwd, and it magically appears.

If I recall correctly PG told me that at a YC event. Damn you PG! :)

~~~
etfb
Aha! So there is. So it's not bad implementation, just bad UI design.

So the trick is:

\- Change your email address to something like
kjghoyvgljhbvljhvkljhbv@mailinator.com.

\- If you get a confirmation message to your old address, delete it.

\- Change your password to jkhvouyflkjbv7897t^%REjhvljyyf.

\- Go to the mailinator address to confirm the change.

\- Clear your browser history.

Then you're free of HN forever! ... Or until you make a new account.

------
iopq
I still can't downvote after more than a year of commenting. I guess not
enough people agreed with my comments so I don't have this power.

~~~
jacquesm
How many 'points' you have is mostly a function of how much time you spent
here.

If you really crave downvoting that much you have to wonder why, it's the
least positive element of a HN presence. Think about it: you want the power to
take points away from others in the same sentence that you want to get points
enough to have that power!

~~~
RankingMember
He who controls the spice...

It's more that those of us without down-vote capability feel neutered to know
that we don't have power that others do. It feels better to have power and not
use it than to simply not have it to begin with. ;)

------
fantomass
Everything is relative ...

Over the years, HN slowly replaced proggit for me. The are subs on reddit I
really like such as r/lisp or r/politics. And those two sections have much
improved over the time, in my opinion at least.

But there are sections in reddit I find hard to accept up to the point that I
feel ashamed visiting the site. And sometimes when I browse through some of
the top level threads, I'm not sure if someone copy-pasted the discussion
straight from youtube.

HN on the other hand has fostered a very civilized discussion culture,
particularity in the last 2 years. Good job guys.

------
patsplat
[http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~klee/misc/slashdot.html)

------
bowlofpetunias
I found a sentence in his follow up post that pretty much sums up this very
common "I quit" rant:

 _" Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic."_

Just think about this sentence for a second. Especially the "nuanced" part in
the context of this statement. And then go a little further and think about
all the radical, fundamentalist movements that time and time again attract
intellectuals.

Basically what imo is consistently being criticized about like HN is normal
human behavior. Without it, there is no community, only cold factual discourse
that attracts no-one, at least not for very long. Not even so-called
"intellectuals". You can have a debate based on those criteria, but not a
lively 24/7 community.

The ideal format may be to have a community and a debate forum side by side,
with the latter being strictly moderated and low volume. Reddit kind of works
that way, with it's subreddits.

Maybe HN could use the same, not in the free-for-all format of Reddit, but a
different form of more narrowly focused, strictly moderated sub-forums which
integrate seamlessly with the core platform.

------
vfxGer
My main issue with Hacker News at the moment is that it is NOT NEWS! An
article from 2010 about quitting hn is not news. I used to kid myself that I
go here "to keep up-to-date" or find out what is happening. I used to think
this was a valid news source but it is not. It's got some interesting articles
that suck up my time but I've stopped kidding myself that it is news.

------
mindcrime
The main reasons I sometimes consider quitting are:

1\. Too much fiddling with things by the mods (eg, changing post titles and
the like). I find this to be more harmful than helpful, and I think we'd be
better served with a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach.

2\. The overall tone of the site has drifted towards a more collectivist /
socialist / left'ish-wing worldview... to much anti-business, anti-capitalist
sentiment which I don't enjoy.

3\. Too much general news that you could get at cnn.com or msnbc.com or
whatever. I liked the site better when there was more of a focus on startups,
entrepreneurship, and deep technical topics. Of course, that's not to say that
we don't still get _some_ of that stuff, but the weighting towards those
topics seems to have lessened, and I - for one - don't consider that a Good
Thing.

OTOH, HN is still (mostly) better than Slashdot, and the comments here are
mostly of a higher quality than most other "news aggregator" type sites. Just
not as much better as they used to be, IMO.

------
bane
HN has its problems for sure, but I think it's currently the best general
tech/interest site on the Internet at the moment. If I find I'm getting jaded
with the mindless groupthink here, I just usually take a couple weeks off.
Usually by then, whatever hot topic that was irritating me is out of the news
cycle and the hive mind has moved on.

At least once a week I find something on the front page that is unique,
intensely interesting, and I haven't seen anyplace else. It's often not a
programmery/businessy/startupy topic. I come back for that more than anything.
But I really enjoy the conversations here, the polite (if sometimes heated)
debates, and the kinds of personal anecdotes that often fill up the comments
here.

I agree that the Apple fanboyism here can be pretty intense. I'm not a huge
Apple fan, but I have a couple Macs and find them to be fine general purpose
computing devices. I'm noticed though that the real hardcore fanboy voice that
used to be very vocal and dominate every thread (even if it wasn't about
Apple) has started to dilute. I don't know if it's because the great
conversion wave of Windows and Linux people to OS X has abated and people are
getting over their honeymoon period, or if the userbase of HN has expanded
outside of SV enough that the Apple echo chamber isn't as loud and annoying as
it used to be. I rarely see a vapid Gruber post on the front page anymore
(filled with comments about how insightful he is). The death of Jobs seems to
have taken a lot of wind out of the Apple lobby here.

Still there's a very pro-Apple bias to the moderation powers here. Many of the
main Android news sources are autokilled on submission here for example. I'm
sure there's some sort of history and reasoning behind it, but it's kind of
annoying whenever Apple changes a power plug to have the front page filled
with submissions about it, but when Microsoft or Google do something honestly
ground breaking to have submissions to all the news sites about it insta-
killed.

One of the biggest changes to this site that I'm glad to see is the removal of
scores. It was super controversial (and still is I imagine) when it happened,
but it seems to have entirely eliminated the rockstar effect, where people
with high global karma scores got hundreds of upvotes simply for writing a
normal, nothing special comment. That, combined with downvote caps on comments
seems to have civilized this place quite a bit and put down mobs before they
happened.

I completely agree with the anti-corporate and out-of-touch nature of much of
the community here. But I don't think that's an evil as much as the nature of
the younger-skewed SV-centric demographic here. When I was 20 or whatever, and
didn't have a family to provide for or a career to manage, I thought it was a
totally sane idea to not even bother with an apartment or car, sleep on a cot
in my office and shower in the gym. Today, at my age, I think it's the sign of
a person with a mental health disorder. People simply think differently at
different ages and in different circumstances.

I am bothered by the weird anti-tech, anti-business vibe that sometimes
percolates up on certain topics, on a site about tech business -- no doubt
typed up on brand new MBPs and right after a comment extolling the virtues of
Tesla's upwardly moving stock price. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that
I find troubling. There's actually a large contingent of the HN community that
seem to be almost impossibly naive ideologues. But again, all this might be
because of the skew towards young people. The college-aged protester is a real
thing, for a wide variety of demographic, experiential and sociological
reasons. It's no doubt just bleeding over into this community.

However, I do find the international discussions here particularly
enlightening.

One thing that I do find a bit sad is the lack of pure tech, pure startup
discussions. There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech
stack discussions etc.) and ShowHN/AskHN posts. But those have either been
overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the
*HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a
tragedy).

If I had to change 1 thing though, it would be to force an explanatory comment
on downvote. And have those comments not necessarily be required to have the
same contribution requirements as normal discussions. In fact, I'd be fine if
they were anonymous and unreply-able. I'm not hit with downvote brigades
often, but when I am, I'm genuinely curious about why, and I'm rarely offered
explanation. When somebody does provide one, I usually find it to be
informative in some way.

~~~
mindcrime
_There really did used to be more tech discussion (code tips, tech stack
discussions etc.) and ShowHN /AskHN posts. But those have either been
overwhelmed by more general topics on the front page, or in the case of the
_HN posts, purposely pushed off quicker than normal posts (which I think is a
tragedy).*

Agreed. The Show:HN posts are some of the best and most important posts of
all, but they disappear so quickly now... it really is sad.

~~~
minimaxir
Actually, one of the big issues with Show HN is that people will tag posts
with Show HN for literally anything. I've seen more product announcements
tagged Show HN than general hack projects.

~~~
bane
> I've seen more product announcements tagged Show HN

I'm okay with that. It used to let me know a bit more about what was going on
in the tech space by giving me a direct to source link and some background
about the product.

------
j2kun
Interestingly enough, his comments are closed, so I'll have to post my
thoughts here :)

I have more than once turned a satisfying HN comment of mine into a high
quality blog post. I like writing HN comments because they give me a chance to
field my thoughts and I force myself to keep them relatively short. It's like
explaining a bug in a program to a rubber ducky in the hopes that getting your
thoughts out of your own head will make things clearer.

That being said I do stick primarily to the subcommunity within HN that
discusses mathematical things. The last thing I want to read about is
Microsoft or Apple. And the type of people who read HN are also coincidentally
the primary audience of my blog (though not by intention; I never knew about
HN before my blog ended up on the front page).

------
websitescenes
Time to find a rock to hide under because these are not just problems with
Hacker news but also life.

------
ryanspahn
HA this guy. For years he went on and on and on about my first start-up idea
and not in a positive way.

In 2007 I created The Social Alarm Clock (was my 1st idea on the web) and
asked for feedback here. This Matt guy, hated the concept and said so in my
Ask HN posted in 2007. Yet it didnt end there, he continued his hate for it in
many HN posts throughout the years and even blogged about in 2011 or 2012.

HA, it had an impact on him.

Well, we have moved onto to our second idea and unfortunately I don't think
[http://SpeakerBlast.com](http://SpeakerBlast.com) (Turn a crowd & their
devices into a huge stereo) is going to have the same effect on Matt. Though
maybe...

Cheers, Matt, Cheers!

------
brudgers
In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article
relative to the HN 2010.

1\. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have
been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But
it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it
feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power.
On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several
days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front
page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU
upgrade.

2\. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise.
A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am
appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial
feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of
readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted,
then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control.

3\. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand
consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for
which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's
Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is
organic rather than the effect of a social media team.

In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to
MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be
as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and
Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the
company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the
richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers.

4\. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than
before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions
lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the
result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's
commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build
a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction
from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true.

5\. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't
changed.

6\. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck.
A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a
high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator.
The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the
otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN
consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and
a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high
quality comments.

7\. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog
doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most
blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing
essays though. That's really what good blog posts are.

HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.

~~~
kruczek
I've never noticed abundance of Apple articles, until this morning. Out of 13
top articles over half of them were leading to apple.com. Some feature to
filter out unwanted links might be useful here.

On the topic of voting, I've been thinking about two parallel scores - one
could be traditional up/down vote, which, alas also traditionally, signifies
agreeing/disagreeing; the second could be valuable/not valuable score. Perhaps
by splitting these into two distinct parts would allow to improve accuracy in
scoring. Represent up/down vote with some clear graphics, so as to give that
feeling of accomplishment when you press the big red downvote button and
hopefully you won't feel the need to seek some smaller "not valuable" link
below.

~~~
brudgers
It used to be that every Apple announcement no matter how minor produced links
to every Mac related site...for days before the event so that people could
speculate. Then the day of the announcement there would be links to live
reporting, links to every 'first look' article on every Mac site and the
official Apple pages. As a bonus there were always many 'Ask HN:' companion
threads.

As personally disinterested in the subject as I am, the current situation is
much better, and the number of articles is unusual these days but justified
because of the scale of Apple's announcements. While HN exposure is as usual
disproportionate to actual relevance within computing, the Apple news is
actually big Apple news.

As for comment scores, there's no such thing as accuracy independent of the
actual score. Life's not fair and neither is internet commenting. Upvotes and
downvotes are multivalent except in so far as they express a user's
inclination to upvote or downvote or not vote. We are talking about 'Internet
Points' for fuck's sake.

~~~
bane
I totally agree. And the ultra-weird "it's awesome if Apple does a thing, but
completely evil if anybody else even sniffs at the idea" groupthink that
permeated almost every thread on any topic seems to have abated somewhat. It's
still there on occasion, but Gruber's impossibly apologist blog posts are
generally off the front page and the ultra-apologists seems to have started
fading after Steve Job's death.

There was definitely an almost pseudo-religious "newly converted" component to
it.

These days if I see Gruber on the front page it's usually because of something
genuinely interesting.

But for a couple solid years there, you couldn't say anything that might even
be assumed to be critical of an Apple product without getting downvoted. I
_really_ wanted a place of smart people who could celebrate Apple's
achievements and criticize their failures without descending into religious
flamewars, and HN simply wasn't providing this.

It's definitely better now.

~~~
brudgers
Part of the change in attitude on HN is based on four years experiencing
substantial shifts in the terms of the relationship between Apple and software
developers since the iPad's release. The death of Jobs made criticism of Apple
more acceptable of course, but not criticism of him to any significant degree.

The bigger picture is that HN [and YC] have come off the Apple App Store
bubble. Mobile apps are now seen as multi-platform programs, and the center of
gravity has clearly moved toward open source tool chains and back toward the
core idea of Web based software.

------
ausjke
Can't agree more, in fact I'm searching right now on how to close my account
here at HN, I mean, totally erasing it, not just changing to a soon-to-be-
forgotten password.

I will still occasionally read this site, but will never comment and do
anything about it. The silent-downvote is not friendly at all, especially to
who that does not know the "rules" well. how did the downvote-jury chosen? why
are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel
they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it.

Just give me a way to cleanly close my account.

------
thathonkey
I HAVE to take a break from Hacker News whenever some hot button story like Ed
Snowden or Heartbleed is dominating the entire front page. I don't need to see
a dozen blogger's opinions on simple news items like that. If I want thorough
analysis of those types of important issues, I'm definitely not looking to the
Hacker News crowd to source them. Prog blogs are awful. And so is some amateur
libertarian paranoid's half-baked, uninformed opinion on complicated issues
like NSA surveillance programs.

------
normloman
The author points out that users upvote a comment based on whether they agree
with it or not, and not based on how useful it is to the discussion. Did you
really expect it to work any other way? You're expecting internet commentators
to be impartial? Even supreme court judges have a hard time remaining
impartial. Why do you think someone who spends 15 minutes a day reading
articles about technology here would give a shit?

Of course votes reflect agreement / disagreement. What else can they
realistically reflect?

~~~
_mulder_
The problem with linking karma to up/down votes is that it prevents people
from posting anything that is contrary to popular opinion and therefore
downvoted, even if it may be well thought out or, shock horror, factually
accurate too!!

The end result is an ever increasing alignment of 'group-think' where popular
opinions are boosted and differing opinions are hidden.

Up/down voters just need to take a second and consider what they're voting
for. If it's just because they agree, then don't. If they agree and they've
learned something new, then do. If they disagree and but they think the
arguments are well presented or they've learned something new, upvote.

Down voting should be reserved only for inappropriate comments, not
disagreement.

~~~
normloman
I don't even see the point of karma. It's like fake internet points that mean
noting. I have a karma of 583 on HN. What does that mean exactly? What can I
do with 583 that I couldn't do before? To me, it's just a pointless scoreboard
for how popular my opinions are. It gives me incentive to post a karma-baiting
comment once in a while, so I get a burst of dopamine whenever the number
jumps by 10 or more.

But back to my main point: When everything is majority rules, with no checks
and balances, society collapses into mob rule. Why would it be any different
with upvote/downvote?

We're not going to solve this by asking users to think before they click
downvote. We should consider removing the upvote/downvote altogether.

------
crusso
The news consolidation on HN is great, for the most part.

Participating in the threads is like gambling in Vegas. It can be a fun way to
spend some time, but you aren't really winning anything in the long run. The
little wins you get here and there are ground away by the House, which always
gets its cut. In the HN case, that cut comes in the form of your time - which
could really be better spent doing your work, trying out a new idea in
software, or visiting with loved ones.

------
MatthiasP
I miss Paul Graham's influence on HN. My impression is that since he
"retired", the topics now are more uniformly focused on core hacking/startup
stuff and HN lost its "good hackers are interested in anything" approach that
I so fell in love with when I first discovered the site.

So I thought about quitting too, but there are still enough gems hidden
beneath the avalanche of Haskell vs Lisp vs Erlang threads that keep me
wanting to come back.

------
ionwake
This seems like a relevant venue to mention my startup
[http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info](http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info)
which dampens HN flagging, re-ranks and merges the top submissions along with
those from other tech sites.

Thought it might be of interest to those fielding similar complaints. Please
note: sageBump is not a replacement, it is a tool for HN

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Thoughts:

* Domains popping in when your mouse scrolls over something is annoying. Really annoying. My mouse is not my eyes - just because my eyes are on something does not mean my mouse is, and vice versa. And the popin ends up being movement, which is distracting. The same issue I have with the DDG redesign.

* Said domains popping in do not have a fallback without JS.

* Random icons (and in an icon font, none the less, which again, does not exactly fallback gracefully without JS). I much prefer "1 hour ago" than an icon of a clock. (And said icon of a clock doesn't even change given how old an article is! You have to mouse over it for that. And again, see above for things only showing on mouseover.)

* No way (that I can see) to sort/filter. For example, only seeing articles that were heavily penalized on HN.

* Bug: if you mouseover the photo icon to open the image, and put your mouse over the image and out of that submission, the domain never goes away.

* The feedback links... Don't actually allow you to submit feedback. And "I don't believe you" for negative feedback is condescending.

* Popover on first visit is _extremely_ annoying, to the point where I won't visit it again until it is removed. (My browser clears most things on exit, so I'm assuming that it will pop up every time I restart my browser)

~~~
ionwake
Hi, thank you for your time and your excellent feedback.

I agree with you on all points. I laughed when you said Ron Burgundy was
condescending - I had not considered that. But again you are probably right.

The pop-over you mentioned at the end only appears if its hard coded into the
link. I did this to the link as I believe new users will rather have more
rather than less information on their first visit.

I will continue working on improving the site.

------
mayeesha
I think the points he made is really valid for any kind of forum type thing,
and he should be using Quora to get the experience he wants. They have the
downvoting abilities and blogging features, and he can definitely gain more
distribution there. Whether he is back or not is never the point, the problems
he said seems to be fairly good.

------
davidcbc
Adding a downvote seems potentially dangerous to me. Sure a lot of
"groupthink" articles rise to the top now, but a downvote means that the same
vocal minority could suppress stories that don't fit into their ideology.
Definitely a double edged sword

~~~
carrotleads
IMO downvotes needs to take effect only after a set number. Say 3 or 5
downvotes or so.

at 3 or 5 downvotes, there is a signal the comment is low value.

------
mp4box
should add 2010 to the title.

~~~
thesz
Have anything changed since then?

~~~
baldfat
I still get mad about this: 2\. 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 had a conversation thread go 7 levels deep talking about my point and I got
4 down votes!

~~~
jacquesm
We all have good days and bad days. On some days I write stuff that is
marginal, on others downright nonsense. HN is an excellent critic and I take
my lumps. It upset me in the beginning but over time I've come to appreciate
the downvotes. On subjects where your view goes against the majority /
accepted dogma be prepared to get yourself voted straight into the ground just
because the supporters of the dogma outnumber those that are critical of it in
some way. Remember HN is young, US centric and rich. If you take a position
that is likely to offend young, wealthy Americans then you're likely going to
find yourself in negative vote territory. Don't let that stop you from
speaking your mind, don't attach too much value to the points.

I just read through your comment history for a bit, my very belated but
heartfelt condolences.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Things haven't changed I see.

------
sphildreth
I wish I knew how to quit you...

~~~
kh_hk

        echo "127.0.0.1    news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts

------
a3voices
If you quit Hacker News, where do you go instead? Is there some magical
fairyland place on the Internet better than here for discussion?

------
hellbreakslose
Well tbh he has a fair point, and I tend to be true on what I write. I get a
lot of down-votes cause I guess I am speaking my mind and I ain't try to write
some scientific report for someone to read...

In the other hand am tired of NSA posts and posts against Google... it has
become a cliche. Yes I want to learn if NSA is spying on me etc etc but not
every time there is a post about it I'd like it to be 1st thing I see.

I guess my opinion is different than others... I hope my comment gets a lot of
Down-Votes cause I tend to keep my karma on - for Hackernews, cause I have a +
karma in real life and I need some balance.

------
ausjke
suddenly this post disappeared from HN first few pages?

~~~
ausjke
why down-vote me? I have a legitimate reason to ask this question, no? HN
better show whoever just down-voted, hate lurking jerks.

------
yiedyie
I recently sent them an email about a thing I really find frustrating at HN:

 _Hi all,

I use a lot HN a lot and too often I receive this error:

You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

The most frustrating part is that I receive it after I submit the link,
wouldn't be elegant to have a status icon or label that would signal that my
account status is available for submitting. This way I will not submit stories
in vain

    
    
      Thanks,

Ed_

and got no answer.

~~~
dfc
It looks like you submit _a lot of stories,_ 545 submissions in 320 days and
six submissions in the last 24 hours. You submitted the same askubuntu link
twice today. Maybe you should try to only submit one thing a day?

------
RivieraKid
I agree with the "lack of downvotes" and "disagree downvotes" and am neutral
or disagree with the rest.

This is an opportunity to say what bugs me about HN:

1\. A very minor and subjective issue is that I dislike the culture. Not sure
how to describe it, but compared to reddir or other sites I visit, it feels
academic, humourless, scripted, robotic. The hillarious trolling that Yishan
Wong does on Quora would feel completely out of place here.

2\. But the #1 problem is the lack of development of the site. There are so
many things that could improve the HN experience. Perhaps it's because it's
written in some obscure dialect of Lisp. If so, they should rewrite it from
scratch.

~~~
dfc
I thought I would take a clue from the submission and provide a response to
people who have been silently downvoted.

1\. Personally (and I imagine that this is true for many HN folks) I find the
lack of "hillarious trolling" to be a feature. You and I just have different
viewpoints, what you see as academic and robotic I find to be mature and well
reasoned discussion. I do not think culture is a minor thing, if you do not
like the culture here I imagine that you will be unhappy if you stick around
for any period.

2\. This is an often repeated complaint. Infact I bet it comes up once a week
in a discussion of one of th top ten or fifteen submissions on the front page.
Personally I don't have any problem with the design. Sure it might be better
if it was a little more fluid on mobile but that is it. Most people are
probably tired of hearing this complaint and or feel that the culture makes up
for whatever minor annoyances they may have with the UI.

