
What I've Learned from Hacker News - sethbannon
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
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greenyoda
(2009)

Original discussion, which may be of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053)

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towaway1138
One of the problems with "karma" sites like these is that everyone sees the
same metric. But the comments _you_ love aren't likely to be the same ones _I_
love.

I'd like to see a system closer to a movie/music suggestion system.
Personalize the crap out of everything, show me the stuff I'll probably love,
and don't even bother showing me trash I'll obviously hate. And for God's
sake, make it trivially easy to permanently killfile other users.

Yes, this is computationally more involved. But the result would be something
that would make everyone happier (except perhaps inveterate trolls).

~~~
AgentME
I actually like knowing that what I see is the same as what other people see.
Among other problems, it's hard for a site to cultivate a consistent culture
if everyone has their own filter bubbles in it. I don't mean to rail against
customizability completely, but I see what's basically "just let everyone make
their own filter bubbles" brought up way too often as a one-size-fits-all
solution for culture problems on websites with the downsides almost never
brought up.

There's been a few times where I was a heavy user of a small filter-bubble of
a site, recommended the site to others, and then later realized most people
associated the site with certain kinds of content or idealogical positions
(that I had avoided in my unique view of the site). That can be uncomfortable.

As a much more minor and kind of silly case: there was a forum I was a very
long-time user of, and it had an old-school visual design that I somewhat
associated with the community. I expected that other users would easily
recognize screenshots of it or even things with a similar color scheme. I
wondered if the old-school design of it influenced the community and had
considered writing something about that if I wrote about site design. Then one
day I visited the forum while logged out. It had a much more modern and
conventional visual design. It turned out that a new theme had been made for
the site many years ago and made default only for new users which now made up
the bulk of the community. I felt uncomfortably solipsistic to learn that
after so much time.

~~~
towaway1138
Valid concerns, to be sure. In my case, I'm trying hard to get away from
"outrage"-type posts, and it would be nice to have a better way to filter
these out. Currently, I pretty much just drop sites entirely once this sort of
thing starts.

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bitxbitxbitcoin
Wow, originally published 10 years ago.

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nottorp
Ouch, please add 2009 to the title...

