
HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot - uuilly
I never left slashdot. I just stopped going there. HN was a big part of that. I wanted my tech news to be thought provoking, funny and innocent. I had plenty of sources for &quot;real world&quot; news and I wanted tech to be an island away from that.<p>Slashdot became more about the legal issues surrounding technology than about technology. It had a militant, fanatical vibe that soured the taste of its brilliant gems.<p>HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out. The topics are certainly important and worth discussing - but the tone takes away from the lightness and fun of technology. It&#x27;s like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time. The two are good on their own, but they don&#x27;t go well together.
======
aaronbrethorst
I agree completely. I've been on HN for almost six years now (sidenote: wow!),
and I'm in the top 40 users on the site by karma. And, despite the
exhortations to not think that the site is becoming Reddit, the community is
absolutely changing for the worse.

There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:

* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.

* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, _there 's nothing new to talk about._ I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's _really boring_.

* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041616](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041616) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314)

As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will
just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it
can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs
to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this
community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is
totally unacceptable).

Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has
to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha)
everything politics-related.

Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for
the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some
help from pg.

~~~
fossuser
I think it'd be interesting if any account less than a year old had their
comments put into the 'pending' state pg has been talking to.

~~~
danielweber
Sites that don't let in new users are as bad as sites that that themselves go
completely to pot.

It's possible to have civil political discourse, but it takes a _lot_ of
effort, much more than maintaining the entire rest of a site. You can't do it
by tweaking things here and there, you need active moderators who can maintain
cool heads themselves about topics they are passionate about.

I don't think it's worth HN spending that effort, and what's more important it
doesn't look like HN wants to spend that effort.

If you want a swimming pool, you have to maintain it. If you can't, fill it
in. HN should either invest a lot more maintenance on political posts, or take
a very very heavy ax to them.

------
rayiner
As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site.
When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but
quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal
issues have become very prominent.

I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right
now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to
take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues
darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're
in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are
impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are
unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.

I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of
the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the
discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site
(the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog
post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).

And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the
smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened
and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I
think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there
used to be.

~~~
nerfhammer
The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I
can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical,
intelligent tech+business discussion.

~~~
zalew
HN needs tagging or even general categories, so we can filter topics out.

~~~
zanny
Almost like... subreddits!

~~~
cabalamat
Each Reddit post only goes on one subreddit, but if HN allows posts to have
more than one tag, then it could be active in several sub-HNs, one for each
tag.

This is the same difference as between traditional email folders and gmail
tags.

~~~
__david__
Wait, I can put a message in 2 IMAP folders... So how are tags different?

------
pg
I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for
forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that
in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of
particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment
call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it
won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll
continue to.

~~~
tptacek
You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with
the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the
site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources,
and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate
into all the threads.

There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded
sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there
are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the
current quality of the site might be instructive.

~~~
sytelus
It would be good to see some data. For instance, how is the trend of average
upvotes per user per month looks like? It is however clear that HN is
attracting lot of marketers and activists. While I don't know all the efforts
going in to fend this off, the ones I know such as banning specific URLs, dead
stories etc look unorganic/bruteforce as opposed to clean algorithmic
solutions. One clean solution would be to simply enable downvote button and
increase the expressiveness of the community. I however has no idea why HN
does not have downvote button.

~~~
dylangs1030
I disagree with 'tptacek on the number of actual users plaguing Hacker News
like this, but I think it's fairly undeniable the phenomenon is there _and it
's strong._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_i_see_it](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_i_see_it)

You don't need data. I know, that's an unpopular phrase to say on a forum like
Hacker News - but seriously, if you were alive at the keyboard on HN during
the NSA debacle, you shouldn't need to ask for data. Whether there were 100 or
10 people poisoning the discussion with political strife, _they were certainly
the most vocal and noticeable._ Their comments were easily upvoted because
they were full of pathos and emphatic calls to action. As I wrote in my reply
to pg here, I don't think it's enough to do what's being done now with stories
- there should be a user filtering system. Restricting posts somehow could be
good, but I also understand that we don't want to turn the forum into some
sort of elaborate rule system.

I also believe the problem is intimately related to karma farming, and also
intimately related to overpopulation. Hacker News is a fond ideal, but I don't
believe it scales. Not without changes at least. I know that might be an
unpopular opinion, but I think it's true.

------
scythe
I agree. The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal.
This may, honestly, have something to do with the fact that pg himself, and
the moderating team, were concerned enough to allow these topics to be
prominent and widely discussed. Perhaps it was okay for a time, but if the
board is to be politically mobilized on occasion (eg SOPA) it should be _very
infrequent_ and it needs to _end_ at some point.

We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing
more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote
in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse
is long since deceased and partially liquefied.

My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We,
as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have _twice_
now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is
important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed
and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the
board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are
acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-
left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this
second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if
you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.

I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to
technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be
feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system
in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't
happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again.
Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be
important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the
members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But
the important part is _occasional_ and _specific_.

Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the
challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority
should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and
occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.

~~~
deveac
_> We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just
nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now._

The opposite is true.

For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the
majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and
indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline),
there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one
story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and
we're done here?

No. Just no.

 _> I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to
technical content..._

This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: _On-
Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more
than hacking and startups._

While _most_ (read: not _all_ ) political posts are discouraged, the
discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere,
and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element
being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.

~~~
tptacek
That's not true. In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the
technical issues of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to
capriciousness. Witness for example several weeks of intense belief that
Google had allowed NSA logins to its own servers in order to pull information
off of them, the certainty with which people argued that NSA must have been
helping the FBI track pressure cooker searches, the security implications of
hardware random number generators, or, my personal favorite, the belief that
Palantir must have a key role in NSA surveillance because of In-Q-Tel and I
mean just look at their name.

And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.

This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about
surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the
most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of
evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on
commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but
rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.

~~~
deveac
_> In fact, this site has been embarrassingly bad about the technical issues
of surveillance, for reasons ranging from gullibility to capriciousness._

Poor analysis by some of the users (there are a lot of non-technical
commenters on here) doesn't negate the higher degree of technical discussion
that has indeed been present here. Just because opinion and fallacious
arguments are present doesn't mean that good technical discussion isn't.
Outside of dedicated infosec communities, I am not sure what online community
has had more purely technical discussion on these issues over time. Feel free
to list them though, because without sarcasm, I would be happy to know of
them.

~~~
potatolicious
I don't think tptacek is saying that good posts _don 't exist_ on HN, of
course they do. The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low
nowadays that it's hardly worth wading through all the hyper-politicized
vitriol just to get to it.

The _amount_ of horribly bad posts on HN has reached a proportion where
they're no longer exceptions, they characterize the site as a whole.

Personally I've noticed my participation drop in the last few months because
of this. There are fewer and fewer people interested in engaging in a
discussion, and more and more religious zealotry where it's clear poster has
zero interest in opposing views, and will stoop consistently to hostility and
fundamental indecency when confronted.

------
dictum
I can think of 3 possibilities:

1\. HN has an influx of new users who are somewhat interested in technology
and technology businesses, but do not have enough domain expertise to engage
on discussion of technical subjects, or subjects related to startups, such as
design, customer support, finance, laws (as in interpretation of legal code,
not politics), etc. For them, it's easier to engage in political debate.
[EDIT] As a secondary theory: politics is a subject which interests a greater
number of people than an specific technical subject or business practice.

2\. HN's format concentrates debate and attention on articles that get popular
just after being submitted: because more pondered or technical articles take
more time to get popular, they never reach the front page.

3\. With no major shift in the industry in the past year, and with mostly the
same players (all of which were implicated in the NSA leaks, for instance),
legal issues sparked from executive and judiciary actions are getting more
attention, because they make for fresher, more sensational news, and reveal
unanswered questions.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" because more pondered or technical articles take more time to get popular,
they never reach the front page."_

That's a really interesting point. As much as I've generally enjoyed the
quality of front-pagers on HN over the years, I am now wondering about all the
really good stuff that never made it there -- whether because the posters
didn't optimize the timing properly, didn't game the headlines, or simply
posted material that took awhile to digest and sink in.

Overall, there's probably a strong correlation between material that makes the
front page and material that this community considers upworthy. But timing
plays a huge role. I wish there was some way to counterbalance the effect a
tiny bit. I can think of a few -- most of which would, unfortunately, be just
as likely to harm as to help the reading experience.

~~~
ricardobeat
I can remember quite a few recent product/tool launches that received just a
couple upvotes, while I'm sure they would have been in the front page for a
whole day just a year ago.

------
anigbrowl
Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers
have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing
Ever. I base this on the numerous counterfactual statements showing a lack of
historical awareness in discussions on contentious topics.

Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in
schools.

~~~
cpayne
It would be interesting to know who remembers the days when Slashdot was good

~~~
paulhodge
I remember when it was good, but I don't really remember a time that there
wasn't a fanatical vibe to it. The content there has always been strongly pro-
Linux and anti-Microsoft. There was a time where people actually used the
phrase, "Year of the Linux Desktop" without being sarcastic. Oh and writing
"Micro$oft" was popular too. And there was always stuff about open source and
GNU and GPL and etc.

The thing that made it good was the camaraderie, the general helpfulness, and
the quality of posters. You used to be able to find some really intelligent
content in the Slashdot comments, since some the smartest people related to
that particular topic were probably Slashdot users themselves.

~~~
jfb
I always thought "MICROS~1" was funnier.

~~~
brg
I read slashdot from 1998 to about 2005, but I never once encountered
MICROS~1. I wish I would have, I would have used it so often.

------
JoshTriplett
In fairness, at least it isn't becoming 2013 Slashdot.

HN has always had a small smattering of political stories upvoted and
discussed, with a specific focus on those that actually matter to hackers.
Recent events have increased the proportion of political stories that get
upvotes and discussion, but not across the board: there's a specific focus on
NSA/surveillance stories, and in the absence of those I think the political
content has not dramatically increased. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that the HN
audience has become more political, but rather that HN has a higher threshold
for wanting to talk about politics and recent stories pass that threshold far
too often for comfort.

Politics on Slashdot has so little impact, because it shows up far too often.
Politics on HN tends to focus on the most important issues, filtering out the
noise. And the recent NSA stories are by far the most important news in tech
politics in years. As long as the political stories remain confined to issues
of that level of importance, and leave out the daily sources of new outrage, I
wouldn't fear for the future of HN. (It also helps that HN doesn't have
Slashdot's blatant editorialization to stir up those types of stories.)

HN may be an island away from real-world news, but that island still carries
tsunami warning stories.

------
lbrandy
I have a theory that "upvote for visibility" instead of "upvote because it
interests me" is when any up-vote-down-vote arrow community crosses a line
that cannot be easily uncrossed. Every "awful" subreddit is a place where a
bunch of people upvote a story because they want other people to see it, in
some form misguided activism. And this is everything that is "wrong" with
those communities.

The community is boring to people who want interesting things, but interesting
to those who want to advocate some position. And the upvotey-downvotey nature
makes non-activism and contrary opinions go away, since activists tend to be
poor caretakers of the community itself, instead looking to push a particular
position (ie, they downvote everyone else away).

~~~
inthewind
I'm sure the whole gaming of HN has been talked to death. But it's not ever
that clear to me as to what an 'upvote' actually is. In my mind a submission
upvote means 'Interesting', and with comments it's less clear. Does it mean 'I
agree', 'Interesting angle' , or what

------
jdminhbg
Snowden/NSA articles frequently contain impassioned defenses about how
relevant they are to the tech community at large, and I agree, but the problem
with their proliferation is the topic bleed they lead to. Once political
discussions feel normal, you get things like this completely pointless
rehashing of "socialism" vs "Randianism" this afternoon:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156035)

I have generally come down on the side of considering complaints about the
downward slide of the site as mostly rosy-painted nostalgia, but I do think an
article as blatantly off-topic and political as that would have quickly been
flagged as recently as 3 or 4 months ago.

------
Torgo
I agree with you. In my opinion the crappiness of Slashdot accelerated with
the politics-for-politics-sake tone of the whole site roughly about time of
the 2004 US presidential election, which lead to a formalization-
legitimization with the introduction of politics.slashdot.org. Undoubtedly
this was because of the extreme polarization of politics due to the Iraq War,
and political threads were far and away getting the greatest number of posts.
Presumably this led to more ad revenue for slashdot, but it changed the tone
of the site. Gradually, articles with little to no direct connection to tech
or "nerddom" were becoming more numerous. They were provocative and just
turned into giant flame wars.

These posts were typically defended in two ways: "politics affects nerds,
therefore it is a legitimate topic" Bogus in my opinion, because I can go
anywhere to get general politics talk, Slashdot derived value from being
nerd/tech-specific; and second, "the motto is news for nerds, stuff that
matters--politics matter, therefore it is on-topic"\--for crying out loud, it
was joking on the fact that gadget news or who is in the new sci-fi movie is
largely inconsequential. The latter may not apply to here, but the former can,
reframed as "this affects the tech/VC/whatever community, therefore it is
relevant." It might be, but if you let it become the focus of the site, it
will attract posters who would rather generate heat, and they will overwhelm
the posters who generate light and would rather not spend their time arguing.

I don't exempt myself from this, I am a relative latecomer to HN. I catch
myself many times resisting posting because I don't want to help this place to
become another Slashdot. I know I'm doing it right now and I'm sorry :-(

------
guizzy
It is official; Alexa now confirms: Hacker News is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hacker News community
when Google confirmed that Hacker News market share has dropped yet again, now
down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming close on
the heels of a recent Alexa survey which plainly states that Hacker News has
lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all
along. Hacker News is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly
exemplified by failing dead last in the recent web community IQ test.

You don't need to be Paul Graham to predict Hacker News's future. The hand
writing is on the wall: Hacker News faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for Hacker News because Hacker News is dying. Things are
looking very bad for Hacker News. As many of us are already aware, Hacker News
continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Hope you are right, I hope that HN does reduce market share, and head back to
its roots, as a niche site for hackers.

~~~
qntmfred
[http://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying](http://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying)

------
AJ007
Is it the legal stories that are crowding out the technology, or is it the low
quality content factories?

Here is a sampling of the worst of what I can see right now (sliding off the
front page): over 50 points -
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-
are...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are-we-
working-so-hard)

over 50 points - [http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-
reveals-108-year-o...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-
reveals-108-year-old-subway-ride-article-1.1412802)

over 10 points - [http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-kindhearted-
pe...](http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-kindhearted-
people/article4986069.ece)

None of those belong on HN.

In any community, when the law threatens the existence or basic functionality
of that communities interests, the law becomes the primary concern of
everyone. Here, Python developers may not be interested in mobile UX design,
VR hackers may not be interested in 40 year old PC hardware. However, they are
all going to be concerned about legal issues that threaten their ability to
operate and explore ideas -- be it laws that break and censor the internet, or
laws that criminalize reverse engineering.

We have been under siege since the early 1990s. A few legal losses (in the
United States) early on could have resulted in a very different internet than
we have today. The level of education and understanding of the basic
principles of information freedom and autonomy are poorly understand by many.
If the community that builds the digital world turns its back on defending
these principles, what we have will be taken away.

------
InclinedPlane
Slashdot was never very good. One big reason for that was that it actively
courted "humorous" comments. This was a huge monkey wrench in their moderation
scheme, it meant that even if moderation made it possible to cut out the
lowest end of the comment quality spectrum it still did very little to elevate
the other end. More so, the system didn't discourage spam and trolling it just
made it easier to hide, so any comments on the site were always swimming in an
enormous sea of mostly hidden crap, which made it difficult for later comments
to be noticed and moderated up. The moderation system in general did a very
poor job at fostering good discussion. At best you could hope for a few decent
one off comments. Another problem that slashdot has always had was a very
strong leaning toward a mob mentality and exclusion of contrarian viewpoints.
If slashdot talked about Microsoft, for example, it was a flurry of Microsoft
bashing, not a discussion.

HN, for all its faults, does a much better job fostering high quality
discussion. And probably promoting interesting submissions as well, although I
think the system is much more flawed in that regard.

Anyway, I think that a good chunk of "political" stories that have become
popular on HN lately do belong here. Surveillance and freedom and how they
pertain to the online world are big, fundamental issues of serious historical
importance that we need to grapple with today. To remove those from our view
because today it tends to be difficult to have a high quality discussion about
a political topic is, I think, a mistake.

I think the issue is not one of whether or not HN should abandon talking about
political subjects I think the issue is making sure that HN concerns itself
with subjects that are legitimately important and conducts discussions that
are mature, well-reasoned, and intellectually stimulating. And I think those
things are well within the grasp of the HN community.

------
WestCoastJustin
I do not think anyone will disagree with you, but what do we do about it? If
you look through PG's comment history, you will see that it is indeed on his
radar [1, 2], and as recently as a last couple months.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935190)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081)

~~~
lsc
Hacker news has never been 100% technical; part of why I'm here (and involved
in the Hacker Dojo) is to hang out with those skinny-jean wearing hipsters who
have, you know, social and business skills, as well as some technical skill.
Broadens my mind, you know? but the thing is, there is something of a filter
there; you need to be 'this technical' to enter, as it were.

How do you enforce this? I don't know. It seems to be... subtly enforced in
person. How do you enforce it on a website?

I think we have a broader problem with politics; There are many people that I
have a lot of respect for technically, who have political ideas I can only
describe as 'kooky' \- I mean, that's okay, but I don't really want to hear
about it, you know? I /really/ don't want to get sucked into that discussion.

I am just as susceptible to the siren song of a political discussion as anyone
else; I often find myself writing two-page rants, only to save myself at the
last minute by hitting the delete button.

But this might be part of how this is enforced in person. In person, well, the
level of vitriol that political discussions have is just not acceptable.

~~~
yid
First time I've heard of hipsters "broadening" someone's mind.

~~~
lsc
Eh, I mean hanging out with business people who seem like they are at least
partly human (and some of them technically admirable) is a good experience for
me. It helps remove some of my more self-destructive prejudices.

------
taproot
Im tired of sentiment like this. I havent been here long but ive had the same
feelings about multiple communities as they mature. Its part of them growing
up and has a lot to do with the members growing up.

In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the
industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least
ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the
industry changing has more to do with it than the community.

If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of
it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new
career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all
aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you
should become one of these activists you mentioned?

As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and
should continue to be.

~~~
lsc
>Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to
do.

Do you remember the first dot-com boom? In 1999, it sure seemed like we were
going mainstream. Nerds were cool!

Of course, once the money stopped, we were thrown aside like a sticky sock.

~~~
taproot
I was a) too young and b) too sheltered from it we were only just getting
consumer dial up in homes about that time in our country. But as i understand
it yes although that was more like a gold rush in peoples living rooms. Unlike
what we have today, a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples
pockets every minute of the day. Dont gete wrong the desktop isnt going
anywhere soon we just have a new poster child while the old one has mostly
sorted all its teething problems out.

~~~
lsc
>a multibillion dollar industry walking around in peoples pockets every minute
of the day.

\- you are speaking of popularizing and monetizing the internet on mobile
devices.

In the last dot-com, we were popularizing and monetizing the internet on
desktops.

To someone that has lived through both? it looks pretty similar. Lots of dumb
ideas that will crater, and a few good ones that will endure. (Of course, it's
difficult to tell the difference now... but it will be clear once this
business cycle turns downward.)

So yeah. Right now? there's a lot of investment hype (and thus a lot of media
hype -- follow the money.) focusing on the folks who write software for the
internet (or the internet on cellphones, now.)

Once the money falls back to 'normal' levels? yeah, the media will forget
about us. We'll go back to being creepy nerds. After the first dot-com crash,
there were a bunch of stories about nerds who became temporarily rich and blew
their fortunes on stupid garbage. I think it was a lot like the schadenfreude
of focusing on sports stars who ended up blowing their giant gains on fancy
houses and cars that forced them into bankruptcy a few years later.

As a youngster? the takeaway should be "I don't know when this will end, but
it probably won't last forever."

You need to get good experience while the getting is good. I used the first
dot-com to work with some really great people; I still brag about stuff I did
when I was 17.

Oh boy, the employment situation after the first dot-com crash? it was
terrible. I mean, I was able to fight my way into the top 25% (and was able to
exploit some connections) so I stayed employed... but as late as 2004, I was
able to hire people I had worked with before; people that weren't worse than I
was in 1998, for retail wages. I found one guy I had worked with making
sandwiches at a deli. "I can't pay you what you're worth, but I can beat the
deli." \- this was less than a two hour train ride from silicon valley. And
the guy really wasn't bad. Sometime around 2007-2008 he took over one of my
(reasonably paying, by silicon valley standards) jobs and did pretty great.
He's been fully employed at rates similar to what I would get working for
other people since.

~~~
polychrome
While I initially agree with you and can understand your view point based on
your previous experience, I think there are two categories of tech: -Business
Value Add -Hype / Marketing

I separate these out because we've already gone through a terrible economic
downturn that is sputtering to produce jobs and yet we see an explosion of
jobs in the tech sector. That's because of the value add software that is
reducing the number of employees, paperwork or steps in a process a business
needs in order to operate.

Those types of companies are going to be fine through another economic
downturn because their clients have realized how much their saving by using
the software. These value add tech businesses may see a slow down, but not a
collapse.

The biggest example that is here to stay is E-Commerce. Look at how many
companies / businesses are realizing how much easier / cheaper it is to go
online than build a brick and mortar store with employees, rent, utilities,
taxes, repairs, maintenance, etc.

Even some apps are here to stay. AirBNB, for example, is a personal value add
when I'm traveling. I have no problem paying them a couple dollars to reduce
my overall travel costs by 15-30%.

What will collapse almost overnight are the apps, websites, etc that are
simply fluffy websites, marketing materials, or buggy unusable software.

My thought is stick with the people helping other people make or save money,
and you'll be safe through the next one.

~~~
lsc
>I think there are two categories of tech: -Business Value Add -Hype /
Marketing

It's harder to tell the difference than you think.

For an example, during the first dot-com, how about amazon? selling books
online. Hurr hurr. what a great and revolutionary business plan. Hell, after
the crash, for a while, _I_ was selling books online, and writing software to
automate warehouse operations. It's actually a really interesting space, if
you ask me, but in 1997, well, to me it didn't look like a billion-dollar
idea.

Turns out? it was one of those ideas (or implementations) that turned out to
be a really good idea. It was not obvious that it was a good idea (or good
implementation) at all, not until after the crash.

Or ebay. There was a sea of auction sites. A huge number of auction sites. It
was not at all clear that ebay would continue on to be the marketplace of
choice.

And for every amazon and ebay, there were a thousand imitators.

And what about Yahoo!? It sure looked like curated portals were the way to go.
it looked like they would be the gateway to the internet. Nope.

AOL was in the same boat. It looked a lot like real value, but was, in fact,
pyrite.

I think the biggest story is that the people who added the value that was most
tangible? the telecoms who actually trenched in all the fiber? A huge number
of those went bankrupt. And those are the companies, were I playing stocks at
the time, I would have bought. Those companies seemed to be the 'real-estate'
of the internet, as they owned the fiber in the ground. In a real sense, they
owned they physical layer that the internet was built upon.

------
eliben
Unfortunately, I think you're right. I've originally moved from Reddit to HN
because of higher quality, but now r/programming and language/technology-
specific Subreddits have a much higher content/noise ration than HN. I guess
this is mostly because all the folks who think more stories about Snowden are
actually more interesting than programming have moved here.

------
snowwrestler
The thing about political topics is: anyone can talk about them. All politics
requires is a difference of opinion, and we've all got opinions.

On the other hand to really talk about product engineering, software
innovation, business management, etc., you have to have experience and
expertise.

So as technical forums grow, they trend toward political topics.

------
tzs
It used to be worth being an XKCD 386 [1] guy when political discussion came
up here. If someone said something you thought was wrong, you could spend 30
minutes or an hour writing a well researched response citing primary sources,
and good discussion would result.

This is no longer true. Most of the political discussion here is now
indistinguishable from /r/politics and /r/technology, where people are only
interested in things that agree with the existing beliefs.

Lately, even conspiracy theories that are refutable without outside sources
since they are internally inconsistent are getting traction here.

[1] [http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/)

------
Osmium
One suggestion is to reduce the influx of new users. Maybe keep new
registrations closed except for a few days every month or so. It allows older
users time to help the new users adjust to the community, and prevents
opportunistic/anonymous-trollish comments. Just an idea.

~~~
mikeg8
I kind of like this idea although a lot of people will probably disagree with
it. My variation: instead of restricting new users from signing up, maybe just
restrict their ability to comment. An account must be _x_ months old to
contribute to the discussion.

~~~
karlshea
The only reason I would disagree with that idea is that it would prevent the
author from a linked site from joining the discussion if they didn't already
have an account.

~~~
Skalman
It would also prevent throwaway accounts. Sometimes throwaways do provide
insightful comments.

------
mynegation
I left slashdot for exactly the same reason. That and I was tired to sift
through trolling and countless slashdot memes like "imagine a Beowulf cluster
of these".

HN still has a share if engaging technical news that is big enough to keep it
interesting for me. But another thing that differentiates it from slashdot is
that discussion is intelligent and no nonsense.

~~~
xtracto
>I left slashdot for exactly the same reason. That and I was tired to sift
through trolling and countless slashdot memes like "imagine a Beowulf cluster
of these".

I think the beowulf comments and the GNAA trolls were actually in a time when
the overall quality of the comments were OK. There problem was when _all_
comments started having no content whatsoever, but were just a response-for-
the-sake-of-it. It is like if people just _needed_ to write something.

------
joeblau
It's interesting you posted this because I was just thinking about posting an
Ask HN to see what things people would change or want to make better. A lot of
people seem to believe that newer users are ruining the culture. TechCrunch
also had an issue with spammy/trolling behavior in it's comments until they
implemented Facebook comments which sort of provided accountability. Another
method could be an invite system, but I feel like I would have never been able
to become a contributor if I needed an invite.

I've gained a lot of useful information on HN in my past two years as a user
and I hope I've helped a few a long the way as well. I do find myself skipping
over a lot more posts, especially during the whole Snowden fiasco. I don't
know how it used to be "back in the day" but I wish I could have experienced
it.

------
gee_totes
Relevant link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september)

------
shuzchen
I've always been hopeful that lobste.rs would take off, but sadly the steps
they took to ensure good participation has kept it from growing. I mean, it
still gets new articles, and there are a very few items that aren't on HN (or
showed up sooner), but most posts have very little discussion. Looking at the
homepage, and the majority of links have 0 comments.

That said, it's got a few features that people have pitched as the solution
for HN (tags being one of them).

~~~
krapp
lobste.rs is invite only, isn't it? Do you think that's been their main
problem, or are there others?

I ask because a forum project is on the back burner for me and this kind of
thing is relevant to my interests.

~~~
shuzchen
Not only is it invite only but your own membership can be revoked if the
people you invited cause problems (they keep track of the user tree
[https://lobste.rs/u](https://lobste.rs/u), so your actions could also reflect
badly on the person you got an invite from). The true reason could be
something else (or many factors), but I suspect this is one decision that has
kept the pool of users extremely small (1.1k isn't much for a social graph).

~~~
krapp
Huh. So basically it's like the mafia. You vouch for the wrong guy you get
whacked.

I can see how that might stifle discussion.

Although... temporary guest accounts with joint karma might be an interesting
idea.

------
Zigurd
No true HN'er... etc.

I check the new stories in a few topic areas regularly. Many interesting tech
stories I check are not getting upvotes or comments.

But, even if more of those stories made the front page, the NSA story marks an
epoch. Computing and the Internet have changed. It all comes with surveillance
inside. That is unattractive. Creepy. Unfree. Undemocratic. Unhealthy. We let
our industry get poisoned. It will take years for that story to play out. And
it will get discussed here.

~~~
001sky
This comment I think has significant merit. It is not really a per-se
_partisan_ issue, although it is a profoundly political one. With as you point
out pervasive impact, ie on _The 'tools of the trade'_.

------
taspeotis
I still frequent Slashdot (no longer "News for nerds, stuff that matters",
mind you), although it's practically redundant given that I frequent HN and
Ars Technica.

HN and Ars seem to be complementary, HN gets links to things that Ars wouldn't
report on and Ars reports on things that HN wouldn't get links to. There's
overlap but that doesn't detract from going from one site to the other.

HN makes Slashdot somewhat redundant. When I read Slashdot, a good chunk of
the articles are links to things that appeared on HN three days ago.

Also the Slashdot editors can't edit for shit. I guess they're too busy
posting thinly-veiled advertisements for Dice.

If the commentary on Slashdot ever became less informative (although the
signal to "Micro$oft $hill!!!!" ratio is decreasing...), then I'd leave.

~~~
ryandrake
I read HN to find out what Slashdot is going to post three days later :)

------
tptacek
_It 's like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time._

So great.

Couldn't agree more.

------
danso
I think part of the problem is in the mechanics of the editing/modding
process. Too many similar articles (and sometimes, the same URL, but slightly
altered) make it to the front page in a short time span. Even worse, the
desire for advocacy is so strong that people tolerate and upvote blatant
blogspam. Otherwise, I think an interest in current events - i.e. this is the
world we live in -- is not too orthogonal from tech/entrepreneurial topics,
and can often be highly complementary. Also, while there are lots of places to
discuss politics and advocacy, I think HN's quality of comments and a desire
for thinking outside-the-box makes HN's comment section worth visiting for any
topic.

I read Slashdot for years and there were also great comments...but a much
higher number of top-voted/expanded comments that were akin to the
clever/cute/meme-funny comments that plague Reddit today. Also, IIRC,
Slashdot's commenting system required a lot of clicks to expand
discussions...I pretty much never did that...which meant that Slashdot
discussions required _work_ to get past the witty upvoted one-liners...whereas
with HN, it's just a quick flick of the mousewheel to get to more substantial
comments.

------
runn1ng
What I don't like is that more and more, showing radicalism is encouraged and
upvoted and showing restrain and judging words well gets downvoted or ignored.

"This shows that capitalism is evil." \- "This shows that free market will
solve _everything_."

Pretty soon we will have "9/11 was an inside job" posters on the top.

I still think the news themselves are great. I just don't like the discussions
anymore.

------
D9u
Am I the only one who finds this thread to be hypocritical. Instead of posting
this diatribe, as have others, lead by example and post content you'd like to
see here.

~~~
karlshea
That's the same argument that you see on Reddit: "If only people would
downvote things on /r/[x]/new they didn't want to see". But obviously that's
not making much of a difference. There's just not enough voting and submission
activity for the subset of users that really care to influence things that
much.

------
m1k3yboi
Totally agree. HN is kinda like Digg in the early days, but the signal to
noise ratio is on the up and the 'New' section is almost shambolic.

~~~
m1k3yboi
After reading a few comments, just have to clarify that this is not
necessarily a bad thing. HN is the only site that i sit on all day. It used to
be Slashdot, brief flirtation with Digg and Reddit. But now it's HN.

~~~
mikeg8
I just have to point out that your username is only 4 months old. Maybe you
used HN before signing up... but if not, then I'd assume you don't have the
proper context as to why this community considers this a negative change.

~~~
m1k3yboi
I used it for a year before I signed up. Lurking is always a good way to gauge
a community. I have the context. I just despair that the site is leaning more
towards the political and further away from the startup tech. I could be
wrong, but any time i'm looking for frameworks, tech, innovation, HN isn't my
first choice like I would expect.

Having said all that, This is the one site that I visit >20 times a day.

------
ser0
I think this is true for most communities as they mature. Issue-of-the-day
become more prominent as core topics get discussed to death.

For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang
articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being
more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other
programming languages most common experiences have been shared and novel new
ideas become fewer.

I don't really see it as a problem. Most political posts are identifiable by
title. Although the SvN ratio may not be perfect, I doubt it ever could be
without HN implementing something like /.'s customisation options for topics
and the ability for users' to block them.

~~~
lmm
>For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang
articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being
more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other
programming languages most common experiences have been shared and novel new
ideas become fewer.

I don't think that's all there is to it. There are any number of programming
languages at a similar level of maturity and popularity to go, but go gets a
disproportionate number of stories on HN. Something is distorting the voting.

------
HCIdivision17
Off topic (meta): fascinatingly, the top half dozen or so comments have no
child comments, at 99 points. To me, this implies that the top comments are
stand alone. I this many people can be in the running for top comment, then
perhaps the argument isn't one-sided and it really implies a shift in the
opinion of what has happened.

(Normally, meta is discouraged, but since the initial question is meta, an I
think there's a signal to imply there's a real shift, I'm commenting on this.
More is needed, perhaps a dump of topics to determine of politics has really
taken an unusually strong signal here, perhaps using the Bayesian methods
described a week or so ago...)

------
Aqueous
I agree.

If you don't reflexively agree with knee-jerk libertarianism you are persona
non grata here.

A good way to ensure that new facts are not discovered, that new scientific
discoveries don't happen, and that people don't listen to you, is to make
things political.

------
coldcode
Oddly enough the folks complaining here sound like old people remembering the
good old days. Any site which allows people of varying interests to contribute
will eventually outgrow whoever was there before. It's inevitable, the
alternative is stagnation where people talk about the same crap as their
forefathers. You can't keep the little kid little forever unless they are
dead. You could start a new site and try again and yet eventually success will
breed change and you starting sounding old again. I'm old enough to have seen
this a lot of times and it gets old too, which is kind a meta-old.

------
hackula1
There will be something new when it gets bad enough. I still browse slashdot
every few days though, and I imagine hackernews will be the same in the not
too distant future. If you want something hacker-to-the-core there are still
sites like hackaday that focus nearly exclusively on actually building cool
stuff. There is a place for everything I guess. I for one like some diversity
though and banking all my news gathering on one site has been the opposite of
what I have always wanted. In news I try to check in on npr and limbaugh
(differing, but influential perspectives (many that I disagree with, but are
important to understand none the less)). In the tech world, I check out
slashdot for opinions on corpratey sys admin stuff, I check out hackaday for
garage hardware hacking stuff, I check out techcrunch for hipster VC stuff, I
check out hackernews for mostly new web service stuff, and I checkout reddit
for... well, mostly pictures of cute huskies. Each has there own utility, but
when something gets too off base, I check it less and let the cream rise to
the top in my rss reader of choice. At the moment, we are in a bit of a spot
where it is hard to tell where the next solid source of hacking news is, so I
have been spending most of my "check it every time the code compiles time" on
IRC, which is fantastic for the particular communities I happen to be involved
in right now.

------
joelg236
I've had this opinion for a long time now. I think that voting systems slowly
lead towards bad content, over years. It doesn't matter what's special about a
website.

This is because the users that _should_ be upvoting/downvoting (ie.
moderate/reasonable people who have no incentives of 'visibility' or the like)
aren't. They just don't have an urge to upvote the things that should be.

It's exactly why political stories and comments pop up to the top very
quickly. It's an "impulse buy" for a lot of people. They see it and think
"well _everyone_ should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.

I just don't see a site that heavily relies on what people upvote and downvote
forever remaining "pristine" or, in HN's case, hacker-based. Sure, we're all
hackers. But a lot of us care about the politics. And when people care about a
topic, they're much more likely to go out of their way to upvote the things.

I'm guilty of this too. I don't vote often, and I spend a large amount of time
on a lot of vote-driven sites.

The solution? I'm not sure. It's possible that there just isn't a solution. We
might just need to keep moving from site to site, with new ideas on content
aggregation each time. One day, we might find the perfect solution.

Until then, my feeling is that it's our responsibility as users and content
viewers to upvote and downvote appropriately.

~~~
derefr
> They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal
> here.

Indeed; this is commonly called "signal boosting." It's where there's content
you have no _personal_ reason to upvote/retweet/reblog/whatever -- but where
you're affiliated with a group that _would_ be furthered by doing that -- and
so you do it anyway. I do believe a general policy against it could really
help a community, but I don't know exactly how you'd implement that (other
than naming-and-shaming users who do it.)

Also, though, voting systems only lead toward bad content when the website is
also _open-registration_. If you'll notice, the first growth-period of these
sites is usually pretty decent -- even though there's a voting system, the
only people there are "core" members who are all there for the sake of the
website's topic, so they only vote up that kind of content. It's when
secondary and tertiary users flood the site and overwhelm the core audience
that you see the decline. So, the solution _could_ just be... not letting
those users vote.

------
aleprok
I have not been long at HN, but I have noticed how much more in the past year
more general topics like politics have risen here.

Thing is I do not really care that much what are posted into here, people are
pretty much free to post almost anything interesting. What I dislike is that
most of the stuff is resubmitted from another news site pretty often. Though
it is not as bad as one automatic news aggregation website I use to check my
local news. Though the reason why I can live with these things is that my
brain has become my best spam filter.

The only thing I really do not like is how popular HN has become among news
sites on picking stories to their own site. Just few weeks back one blog
article posted into here got their way into a local news site and this news
site was even doing horrible job at quoting the blog article.

The level of journalism has fallen so much and they can use web sites like
hacker news to pick up stories which should bring visitors to their own site.
Hacker News, Reddit and every other news discussion site provides good
statistics for news papers what to put on their site for people who do not
visit these websites we use.

------
antitrust
> HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out.

Activism? The political topics do kind of have a "let's all get along" and "do
the right thing" feeling to them. It reminds me of going to the store to get
junk food, then when I'm there realizing I should be buying the "lite" and
"low salt" versions.

The political dimension to technology has always baffled me. Everyone seems to
want me to think something. And yet, no matter what we do, the same problems
remain. Where do I sign up to vote against politics?

Regarding Slashdot, all internet sites have a finite lifespan, however, and
eventually the cruft builds up. That can be in the code, or the "culture," in
the userbase itself.

I guess what we have in common at HN is liking to do things, so we should talk
about that, and not theorize about what we should think about how we do it.

I come here for the technology news and the personalities, myself.

------
sytelus
A large community often contains many subgroups. When a system allows any
subgroups to take over and represent their sentiments as community's
sentiments, the community starts to breakdown. To avoid this system needs to
allow enough expressiveness. This would mean at least a upvote button as well
as downvote button. By only allowing upvotes, HN steals away expressiveness of
the community. Any jealous subgroup can essentially upvote a story they had
like _others_ to read and get it on top while other members of community have
no recourse but to upvote something else and spread their expression thinly.
We have seen this many times now. I can see marketers and activists coming
over to HN and push a story on top with as little as 100 upvotes while rest of
the community just sits back unable to express their preferences.

------
hdivider
Let's use this opportunity to remind ourselves of an adjacent problem: the
number of helpful, insightful, creative comments _not_ made for fear of
retribution by knee-jerk contrarianism.

I say let's watch out for this, and make an effort to use a friendlier tone in
comments. And smileys, when necessary. =)

------
arunoda
Agree. For JS, I started following
[http://www.echojs.com/](http://www.echojs.com/). Which is not so popular, but
pretty nice.

And [http://sidebar.io/](http://sidebar.io/) for Design links. But we cannot
post or comment there.

------
jjindev
[buried my lede: the front page algorithm]

I'm new, pointed in by the coursera startup engineering course. I have no idea
how large that cohort is, or how uniform it is.

I certainly scan the headlines for startup themes (tech and other practices).
I have found a lot of great things. My humble thanks for all it.

If I'm curious about one thing, it is the idea that people visit many times a
day, and then expect many new high quality threads. If I understand the
purpose, shouldn't visits be less frequent (to sync with startup world) and
the front page less changing? Because if the front page "must" have new items,
it must go further afield. The algorithm, which seems to [be] based on
"velocity" of new items rather than strict rank, may favor the "topical" at
this point.

------
mtowle
Only forums on which there is no point in activism, of either sort(1), can
survive their own prosperity. Forums are conversational; activism is the
antithesis thereof.

PG is trying, and you have to tip your hat, if the 4-hours-per-day stories are
true, but talk about Sisyphean.

(1) "I" or "We"

------
rdtsc
You have the upvote, downvote and flag buttons. You can also do nothing if you
choose.

Unlike Reddit, HN doesn't have subreddits to handle constrained topics.
Whatever is on the front page is whatever users want to read and upvote. You
are also free to start your own technology only clone if you wish.

This has been brought up before many times. The ones who have been around
longer would usually talk about the good old days. Well so do my parents and
everyone else who is older ("Oh the kids these days"). I for one like what HN
has become and think it is a positive development. People do care about legal
issues and health insurance issues and other things not just twiddling bits
and that's good.

------
fiatmoney
If a general technology forum inevitably develops to have a substantial (not a
monoculture, but substantial) portion of its content devoted to the
intersection of technology and law, what does that say about the underlying
salience of these issues?

------
psuter
How much of this would be solved by personalizing the ranking of stories?

This is certainly a departure from the current model, and the mere notion of
front page could be fatally affected, but, after all and just to name two,
Amazon and Spotify are pretty good at anticipating my taste. Simply
correlating voting patterns with other users and weighting their upvotes more,
for instance, could go a long way towards a site where everyone sees more of
what they like.

There are also certainly arguments to be made against such an approach
("filter bubble" etc.). If a strong case has been made before, I'd be curious
to read it.

------
hnriot
Isn't this simply addresses using a basic classifier, it would be easy enough
to build a classifier from the HN API and then write a ux with sliders to
balance the content, so if one group are interested in political posts (or
comments) then so be it, for other they might prefer vc/entrepreneur content,
and then there's the hard core tech content. Some form of SVM or LDA would do
the trick. I'm not sure if stories, or comments should be suppressed. I'd
implement it similar to how eclipse folds "content" (imports for example)

If anyone thinks this is worthwhile, I'll build it.

------
Scryptonite
I agree that there are some way-off-base topics on HN, but I don't mind the
politics that are related to the hacker community. Such involves Aaron,
Snowden, Manning, WikiLeaks, various legal and political talk on Startups,
privacy rights, Big Tech companies, etc.. in the overarching industry. Some
other stuff can also bleed in without disrupting how I feel about the site.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

~~~
brightsize
> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
> gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Bingo. I love HN for this very reason. Each time I visit, which is several
times a day, I can count on finding a batch of postings about stuff I'm
interested in: tech, startups, theoretical and applied science, law,
philosophy, and yes, politics, just to name a few things, and quite often the
intersection of one or more of these. I'm not a HN old timer, so may have
missed-out on the before-the-Fall HN, but I have no regrets about that because
it must have been a duller place.

I was a Slashdot addict before discovering HN. At one point I remember being
really, really impressed by the great variety of people who posted there,
people who had subject matter expertise that was all over the board. I might
see, for example, a posting of an article about research into controlled
fusion, and then browsing the comments I find information and insight posted
by actual researchers in the field. This is what HN gives me today, and it's
fantastic.

Perhaps a bit OT, but another thing that I love about HN is the level of
civility in the comments and the swiftness with which people who break those
unwritten(?) rules of decorum face chastisement. Rudeness is called out.
People often humbly admit when they've made an error and apologize for it.
People who make spelling or grammar errors aren't childishly flamed for it. HN
feels like a big room full of well-mannered, intelligent adults, whereas /.
(now) is a room full of twits and children and trolls and vandals. I have a
hard time imagining HN ever becoming THAT because of the quality of this
audience.

HN seems to have become not just a forum full of hackers, but a forum full of
_intellectuals_ including the non-hacker variety. These intellectuals, hackers
and otherwise, have a diverse range of expertise, interests, curiosities, and
passions. I learn something new every day from HN, usually tech or business-
related, but often not, and I think that HN would be a far less interesting
place if it was narrowly tech/startup focused. For me, HN simply ain't broke.

------
MattyRad
I'm surprised, after reading through this thread. I've been frequenting HN for
a little over a year now, and I enjoy reading the comments because this is the
only forum I've found where users have coherent, interesting, grammatically-
correct ideas. Just look at the comments in this thread. Almost every user
tries to convey a full argument or counter-point. Take a look at Reddit or
YouTube as a comparison. Does HN really seem to be on the decline?

Although I can testify to the click-baiting, sensational, politicized articles
and comments, and may be guilty myself. Duly noted.

------
kylelibra
FWIW, I often look for political stories here just to see this crowd's
comments on the subject. It would be nice if there was some sort of filter
system or a few very broad categories.

------
mncolinlee
I learned about 9/11 from Slashdot. If Slashdot had refused to cover the
events of 9/11 out of some misplaced desire to not cover "real world" news, I
rightly would've been deeply disappointed in them.

I learned about wiretapping from HN. Likewise, if HN refused to cover
wiretapping the entire Internet, I would have a very solid reason to give up
on them as a useful news source.

I do not believe HN is in any serious danger. People are obviously pushing
back against the less relevant stories.

------
6thSigma
HN needs more "Show HNs" and less political diatribe.

~~~
krapp
Having a 'show' category right next to 'ask' in the menu would encourage that.

------
pushkargaikwad
Dilution will always happen with user submission sites as the number of users
grow, specially if there is no moderation.

Digg/Reddit,they all started as some niche tech site and eventually turned
into political/media/news sites (atleast digg was, reddit's savior is its
subreddit feature) once the userbase increased.

The only way to keep HN niche is by introducing categories and let people
subscribe/unsubscribe to those categories or through strict moderation.

------
toble
I was thinking similar a few days ago, but more like a cross between Slashdot
and Reddit. In particular, I saw an item about cannabis legalisation. Got
nothing against it, but it isn't technology in the slightest, it's political
and maybe financial. I checked the news item a few times to see if anyone
pointed that out, but no one did. I decided not to say anything in case it was
some HN insider thing.

------
badman_ting
That is an interesting take on what happened to Slashdot. I guess I just
assumed that the world passed by Slashdot's cohort, that the currents
governing our industry changed but they mostly didn't. The "iPod lame" post
gets harped on, but it's a good illustration of that dynamic, I think. But you
were probably much more familiar with it than I was.

~~~
cothomps
From my perspective, the RSS reader mostly killed Slashdot for me; Slashdot
was great when it was able to surface things I normally wouldn't have seen
otherwise. Once RSS (then Twitter) came along, the sites that were generating
their own content were easier to find/skim directly rather than waiting for
Slashdot to throw them a little publicity.

I frequent HN because it does serve that purpose that Slashdot once did -
bringing content to my attention that I otherwise would have missed.

------
regandersong
After a sudden influx of traffic years back, HN had an Erlang Day where the
only thing upvoted was articles about Erlang. I can't tell you if it helped HN
get better or not, because it caused me to come back after seeing how much the
community cared about the quality of the site. Perhaps it's time to make HN
proud of its boringness again?

------
grandalf
I think it's impossible to compare Slashdot to HN, since nearly every story on
Slashdot gets a mod-created title and mod-created tagline.

In comparison, HN is more emergent, less filtered, and fueled more by dopamine
than by any other kind of motivation.

------
Shorel
The 'upvote funny comments' slashdot's policy did wonders to destroy the
quality of comments there.

I don't want my news to be funny, if it means they will be generally dull and
full of commonly repeated jokes. As it happened in slashdot.

------
maxhowell
Agreed. But good things become popular, and popularity changes good things.
Not always for the worse. But this time, yes for the worse.

------
eyeareque
If hacker news has jumped the shark, where is the new tech/hacker news site
that has taken its place?

------
coherentpony
Yep, it's /r/politics now. I don't check HN nearly as often as I used to.

------
twodayslate
Any alternative sites. It seems there is usually a shift from media sites
every couple years.

------
kyro
Got a source on that claim about the incompatibilities of cheese and orange
juice?

------
CoolGuy420
I know roughly a dozen people who frequent HN. Some of them are friends, some
of them are family, some of them are coworkers. Some are involved in network
security, some are programmers, some are involved in web design, and some are
merely interested in tech news. Some are them male, some of them are female.

Yet, without exception, they have all expressed to me that they think that the
site has substantially lowered in quality since the details of PRISM were
leaked.

I think the fundamental problem is that that story brought in a large influx
of new members at once. This disrupts the 'integration' process that most
older members of this site went through when they first joined. Any post that
was trite or lacked in quality was quickly downvoted, and it become apparent
very quickly that this is a site that encourages thoughtful, mature, calm
comments. On the other hand, during an influx of new users, this process is
disrupted. The new users, especially if they share a similar ideology, will
upvote each other if they agree with the idea of the post, even if it lacks in
quality or is counter-productive to intelligent discourse. They will then look
around the site, and see that similar comments are upvoted across the board,
and think that this is acceptable behaviour.

There is a lot of anger at these new users, but I do not feel it is their
fault, as they are acting as they would on any other forum, and they simply do
not understand that they are hurting the site. I think it is our duty, as
older members of this website, to fix this problem.

So, what is the solution? Well, I think that it is clear at this point that
sitting back and hoping that the situation will resolve itself is not going to
work. I think that there needs to be a concerted effort between the mods and
the users with high karma to discipline new users who do not following proper
posting etiquette. I think that more voting 'power' should be given to the
older users with higher karma. Giving trusted members of this website more
voting power will allow their votes to outweigh the large number of new
members, and will allow the trusted members to teach new users what types of
posts are acceptable and which types of posts are not. One of the problems
that arises is that users will create uncivil posts that are clearly very
partisan in nature, but that will be propped up by people who agree with them.
This is poisonous for the environment of this site and clearly does not
encourage useful discourse. These posts need to be ruthlessly downvoted, and
it must be made very apparent to new users that they must be civil, regardless
of how many people agree with them.

This will allow for a closer adherence to the rules, in particular, "Off-
Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting _new_ phenomenon". I want to hear every new
detail about PRISM because it is clearly a very, very important topic for the
tech industry. However, the vast majority of the recent posts about Snowden or
the NSA or PRISM are completely lacking in any original content, and are
merely repeating the same ideas over and over again, diluting the content of
this site.

~~~
joelg236
Sorry, I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but I have to nitpick.

    
    
        I think it is our duty, as older members of this website, to fix this problem.
    

Is this a throwaway account is 1 hour a very long time?

~~~
unimpressive
>Is this a throwaway account is 1 hour a very long time?

That's what I would assume. The man would have to be insane to try and claim
seniority with an hour old account.

------
fiorix
very true... and besides the activists, everyone here has always a lot to say;
just look at all these long replies - too much drama.

------
bigdogc
i started coming here after reddit changed years ago. I dont know of any other
websites similar to HN... very sad if it changes too.

~~~
mhitza
I came here for the same reason a couple of years ago, but now I spend 90%
time on reddit on the non mainstream subreddits.

------
wil421
Just say NSA this or Snowden that.

------
smegel
I find this doom-mongering a bit over the top. Slashdot basically was a troll
culture at its very core, and while it could be funny at times, it never
really elevated itself to a place for serious discussion.

Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but
relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links
to interesting topics.

Even if the discussion can be a bit asinine at times, the value of the links
alone is worth it, and there will be at least one or two interesting
discussion threads per link.

Just ignore the crap.

~~~
karlshea
I think that's the finer point that's missed when Slashdot (or most of Reddit)
is brought up: "troll culture at its very core".

Even though the quality of discussion on HN might ebb and flow, or there might
be more negative comments than positive at times, the culture here isn't ever
going to tolerate Natalie Portman, hot grits, or image macros.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I pointed out something similar in another comment but it's worth focusing on.
One of the biggest problems of both reddit and slashdot is that they embrace
humor at their core. This may not seem so bad but it's poison for mature
conversation. Humor is cheap. And it doesn't require engagement.

What you see on both reddit and slashdot is an increasing tendency toward
irony as the basic approach to any subject (4chan is the same way too). This
overwhelms and actively drives away discussions that are serious and not
ironic. This is why the highest quality subreddits (like askscience and
askhistorians) enforce very strict rules and actively discourage humor for
humor's sake. This is a big reason why stackexchange is so successful as well.
And it doesn't mean humor is unwelcome at all these places, just that it needs
to be part of something productive or humnorous enough to overcome the strong
bias against it.

------
dschiptsov
That is a consequence of so-called popularity - HN begins as a marginalized
place for geeks and nerds - they even looked at Arc language seriously.)) Now
it is a popular site for general public and visiting it gives one an air of
sophistication, like talking Monads or Clojure among PHP coders.))

------
amerika_blog
The political stuff always becomes the same hive mind: armchair liberalism.

I just wanted to flag this:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
> that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
frozenport
Also easier to be an activist and aficionado then to be a contributor.

