
I Quit Hacker News - cwan
http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/
======
amelim
It certainly does seem that HN has become increasingly more political in
recent days. Yes, I can understand a post on body-scanner technology and it's
applications to travel security, but do we really need to see blog posts about
how person n opted out, or how person x experienced an unusual pat-down? Yes,
for Americans (and non-Americans alike), these are important issues, but HN
does not need to become an aggregate site for stories such as these.

There is a strong commitment by the community to prevent the site becoming
like digg, reddit, or slashdot. Losing focus on the topics that brought us
here in the first place (technology, startup culture, and programming) is the
first step on that path in my opinion.

All I can ask is please, try not to submit/vote up stories which are not
particularly related to tech. It's not what I'm interested in discussing in
this particular venue.

Or maybe I'm just in the minority. I guess time will tell.

P.S. Just because you put the word "Hacker" in your article/title, doesn't
mean it belongs here.

~~~
lwhi
It would be completely ridiculous to try to remove political discussion from
HN.

Politics is involved with _everything_ the world has to offer; and more
specifically, politics is fundamentally bound to technology.

The fact that people like making 'cool stuff', will always have a flip-side.
We need to be able to talk about the way that technology is utilised and that
(necessarily) involves political discussion.

Without this kind of discussion, people involved in the tech industry are
destined to become unthinking drones .. consideration of ethics and politics
is essential if technology stands any chance of making the world a better
place.

~~~
Charuru
Any way you slice it, discussion on ways to bypass scanners is not that
relevant to technology. More importantly, there are a large number of sites
where 'politics' can be discussed, don't infest a hacker site with it.

~~~
lwhi
It's entirely relevant to technology.

Whether you like it or not, technology doesn't happen in a vacuum. Technology
relates to people and society in a big way.

When usage of a device (like the millimetre wave scanner) is misguided and
unappreciated by a large number of people, why on earth _shouldn't_ it be
discussed on a tech forum?

It's not enough to take the view that 'I just make the stuff .. other people
can choose whether it's a good idea'.

We all have a responsibility to consider whether what we create is going to
result in anything 'good' and what 'good' actually means.

~~~
Charuru
What you're talking about are your opinions and your personal philosophical
beliefs of only tangential relevance to technology. Discussing them is not
what I signed up here for. You wanna talk about it? I have a reddit account,
you know?

~~~
lwhi
What you're talking about are _your_ opinions and _your_ personal
philosophical beliefs [..] discussing them is _exactly_ what I signed up here
for.

.. or are you claiming you only express facts ;)

------
tptacek
I wrote this as a reply to 'icey and it got unwieldy:

The standards for what's germane to Hacker News have gotten looser. TSA is
only the most recent example. What's especially toxic about this fact is that
you don't notice it until it gets really bad. That's because most of these
stories have nerd-structured narratives, involving tradeoffs and logic and
subtext and affordances for contrarianism, which bait commenters. Having
participated in a TSA discussion (for instance), you become socially committed
to the idea that they're relevant to Hacker News.

Hacker News has become much more self-referential. All due respect to
'lionhearted and 'DanielBMarkham and 'jacquesm, but there have been many
stories voted to the top of the site on content that wouldn't stand had they
been written by an "outsider". There's a clear name-recognition bias. That's
not the author's fault (it's their blog, they should write what they want),
but it does make the site feel insular.

I'll go out on a limb though and assert that insularity is something 'pg
cultivates. My most recent cue on that was his encouraging response to "Offer
HN".

Like it did for Matt, Hacker News has killed any desire I have to write
standalone content. I haven't blogged in over a year. A book idea I was
tossing around has been dead for longer. Hacker News fills the same
psychological place for me that Usenet did in the 1990s, when I also didn't
write a lot of standalone content. Now, for me, this is actually a good thing;
I dove into HN while fleeing the "blogosphere". But I can see it being a
problem for someone else.

Having said all that: I get tremendous value out of HN. I've met tons of
people running startups, I've done business with some of them, I get to carry
on long-running conversations with people like Patrick McKenzie and Colin
Percival, I've hired several awesome people off the site, and I'm still
impressed by the newcomers (for instance, go read 'carbocation's backlog of
comments on biology and medicine).

Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button;
perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win
the race against thoughtless up-voters. And it might be nice if we could take
a break from blog posts by long-time contributors; maybe we can switch to a
"best-of" 'lionhearted mentality, instead of a "today's" 'lionhearted
mentality.

But, while it sucks to lose Matt (he seemed like one of the more no-bullshit
members of the site), I'm not as alarmed as he seems to be about the decline
of HN.

~~~
davidsiems
'Perhaps I'd like to see people a little quicker with the "flag" button;
perhaps I'd like to see the site tuned so that flaggers can more easily win
the race against thoughtless up-voters.'

What happens when the 'thoughtless upvoters' find the flag button as well
though? I don't think flagging posts is the solution to this problem.

People are never going to see eye to eye about what content belongs on the
site and what content doesn't. There's no amount of convincing or flagging you
can do to change this.

This is a tech-centric community, there's enough talent here to come up with a
good tech-centric solution to the problem.

Something as simple as being able to apply a subtractive filter to the main
page could go a long way. I.E. '-TSA -scanner' or something along those lines.

~~~
tptacek
The TSA posts are manifestly off topic:

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic._

The _first_ TSA post was (marginally) germane. The TSA is now on the front
page of CNN. Unfortunately, HN "blessed" the topic by spinning off gigantic
discussion threads on early TSA stories. So, even though this is a current
events topic currently being covered on network TV news, it still finds a
place here.

I bring this up not to further the argument about the TSA on Hacker News, but
rather to demonstrate a pathology that occurs when we accept borderline
stories that end up breeding months-long narratives in dribs-and-drabs. I also
say this as someone who has written many hundreds of words here in comments on
TSA stories.

As for filtering the front page: you might as well suggest "sub-HN's", like
Reddit. Part of the point of the site is that it focuses a lot of interesting
brains on a single spool of stories and discussions.

PS: _For what it's worth, this is actually not a tech-centric community full
of tech-centric ideas for community building problems. HN is a deliberately
simple site curated by a single guy who started it as a demo for his
programming language and liked where it went. Very few of the technical ideas
anyone has proposed for this site have been tried, much less adopted; that's
just not how HN works. This is a community governed by norms more than by
code._

~~~
davidsiems
I'm not arguing that the posts are on topic. What I'm saying is that you have
no control over the so called 'thoughtless upvoters'. If you start flagging.
They will start flagging, even if it's just out of spite.

I'm not taking sides here, and throwing the rulebook at me isn't helping to
solve the problem.

The filtering suggestions was the first example technological approach to
solving the problem that popped into my head. I agree that there's a danger of
fragmenting the community with that sort of change, but filtering out '-TSA'
is hardly the equivalent of having a 'TSA sub-HN'.

Regardless of whether the filtering idea is good or not, I'd like to see more
suggestions on how to fix the problem.

~~~
tptacek
There's a karma threshold to flag stories.

If we're going to "- TSA" filter the site, I'd be happy if 'pg just fired up a
REPL and did that to news.arc.

------
pg
The TSA stories are certainly fluff in the sense of being easy to upvote, even
if the underlying principles are important. Ironically, so are posts saying
that one is tired of TSA stories.

I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger. If there's a road from
hacking to politics, it's probably civil liberties. So already for the past
week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly,
they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty.

There are no TSA stories on the frontpage at this moment. In fact, the
frontpage is a pretty normal HN frontpage now.

~~~
px
Just curious: Was this submission penalized, too? I noticed it dropped on the
front page from #1 to about #25 almost instantly at around 1:50 EST.

~~~
pg
Yes; posts complaining about excessive posts about topic x are effectively
posts about topic x, in their effect on the content of the site.

~~~
paraschopra
Wow, just curious about the implementation. Do you use some sort of heuristics
in determining political posts or excessively complaining posts?

~~~
pg
The main one is number of flags. When anything gets over a certain number of
flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it,
mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing.

------
icey
I've had high hopes for <http://techstartu.ps>, but it doesn't really seem to
be getting much community traction.

HN has become more and more general news and less technical or startup related
over the past couple of years, but the last few months have been especially
bad.

It's got significantly less value for me today than it has previously... it
just sucks that it's still the only game in town. Now it feels like there's a
cult of personality here; that vapid, content-free submissions gather a
surprisingly large number of votes. Comments have mostly stayed good, but the
reddit lulziness is starting to creep in there as well.

I do think that pg has done an excellent job in making adjustments to the site
as it has grown; the rating mechanism on the front page seems especially well
tuned, and trolls get [dead]ed very quickly. I think this might just be a
symptom of community growth & dilution.

~~~
nostrademons
I wonder how much of that is because of the asymmetry in time needed to
produce quality content, vs. the time needed to consume that content.

I remember when I made "Diary of a Failed Startup" public. It shot to the top
of HN, and the top comment was tptackek's "More posts like this, plz." But
that one link was _a year_ of accumulated startup lessons learned,
experiences, and emotional reactions to things along my startup journey. And
it fell off the HN front page in a day and a half. Just by the numbers, posts
like that can only make a small portion of total links submitted.

The same thing when I submitted "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours". Shot to
the top of Reddit and HN, stayed there for maybe a day. Took 3 months to
write. Compare that with the volume of material that can be produced by a
blogger who spends a couple hours on each post.

When a new social news site becomes popular, people immediately start
submitting all the favorite links they remember from years past. But that's
selecting the cream of the crop from the last 15 years of posts. Once the
community reaches a steady-state, all of those posts have already been read
before, and it takes a long time to produce new ones. Instead of becoming a
selection of the best articles published over the last 15 years, it becomes a
selection of the best articles published in the last day. The latter will
naturally have far less quality than the former.

My personal solution has been to care less about consuming content and more
about producing it as I've gotten older. This sorta sucks. Producing
interesting content is a long, hard slog where you investigate lots of ideas
that nobody wants to hear about before finding one that people do. Consuming
it gives you the immediate satisfaction of thinking "Hey, I'm smarter than I
was fifteen minutes ago." But ultimately, I'd rather be part of the solution
than part of the problem.

(And the irony isn't lost among me that this comment is probably part of the
problem, being dashed off in ten minutes or so.)

~~~
dasil003
Why does your solution suck? Producing quality content, even if the attention
is short, is far more admirable than consuming social news. Don't get me
wrong, there's a lot to be learned from reading articles on HN and
participating in the discussion, but if you don't apply it then it's nothing
more than masturbation.

I'm reminded of some of the recent articles about how the corporate
environment needs to adapt to millenials so they can profit from their amazing
technology skills of the new generation. It's great that the kids know how to
use Twitter and Facebook, and yes there are some nice marketing opportunities
there, but let's not kid ourselves: most people are not changing the world
with their mobile phones, they're distracting themselves and killing their
productivity. In Silicon Valley there is this social pressure to stay on top
of technology fads so as not to appear clueless, but a hermit who holes
himself up in a cave for a year to work on an invention is much more likely to
do something truly interesting than people who are so concerned with staying
up to the minute that they're all rehashing the same ideas in rapid cycles
with no downtime.

------
SeanLuke
How social sites devolve.

Many social sites start with a small community of thoughtful, intelligent
people because they were created _by_ those people. Certainly this is how
reddit started, and HackerNews after it. Then as the site becomes more
popular, the masses (and particularly the immature masses) join up. As the
masses join up they start outnumbering the founders, and the center of gravity
of the site moves towards the lowest common denominator. This makes the site
even _more_ interesting to the masses, who join in greater numbers, and so on.

Current sites are on different positions on this timeline right now. At the
far end is HackerNews. Reddit is more devolved -- because it's older and
because of the digg debacle. Then probably comes digg. At the far end of the
sewer of the masses is 4chan. But make no mistake: all these sites are
gravitating towards 4chan-ness. It is unavoidable. Our only hope is that as
sites slip towards oblivion, new ones take their place at the top of the
hierarchy.

I suspect the #1 reason why these sites devolve is because their handles are
anonymous. This gives you leave to be a jackass where you'd never do that in
reality.

I have decided to test this. On reddit or digg or whatnot I have my own name
as a handle for official announcements, and of course I have various anonymous
accounts, including novelty accounts. I'm sure that's the case for everyone
here. But on HN I solely post under my own name, and have no anonymous
accounts at all. Numerous times I'd write some snarky thing on HN only to
delete it at the last minute as I realized that this was going out under my
real name. As a result I think my comment quality has been radically better
and more thoughtful than it has been on, say, reddit.

I still think the flow is unavoidable. But I wonder if HN could at least slow
the inevitable flow towards oblivion by requiring real names.

~~~
DanielStraight
Another idea for preventing decay / devolution:

Membership is by invite only. Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason),
the person who invited them gets banned (recursively).

~~~
dctoedt
> _Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them
> gets banned (recursively)._

If I understand your "(recursively)" part correctly, this could make for a
really _interesting_ mass-shedding of users the first time anyone was banned.
Like watching Filezilla delete a directory structure ...

~~~
DanielStraight
Well it would only go up the tree of invitation, not sideways. The most
members that could be banned at one time would be the depth of the tree. If A
invites B, who invites C, who invites D, and that's as deep as any chain of
invitation goes, then at most 4 people could be banned at one time.

I'm not certain how to deal with the problem of initial members / founders.
Surely the founder would not set up the system so they would be banned the
first time someone was banned. It seems there would need to be a set of
unbannables, including the founder.

I suppose you would need to handle the detached leaves of the tree too. This
brings the unbannables back into play. So if A was an unbannable and had
invited B, B had invited C1 and C2 and C3, C1 had invited D and D got banned,
C1 and B would also be banned, and C2 and C3 would be considered invited by A.

I think this is getting far too complicated to be practical.

~~~
tvorryn
Maybe instead you have to be sponsored by somebody in order to view posts, but
instead of banning people outright, let the sponsor's karma/reputation be
affected by the people he sponsors. That way someone who creates a lot of
value to the community can mentor someone who is not currently providing a lot
of value, and help them understand the community or decide it isn't for them.
Then if the relationship isn't working out the sponsor can stop sponsoring
them and the person will have to look for a new sponsor if they want to do
anything but view the stories and discussion, but the community will be kept
fairly intact, except for the people the system is still trying to figure out
or vice versa.

------
johns
I think they're all good points, though I disagree with #6. It doesn't steal
comments from the source because I would never comment at the source and
there's a lot of value in having conversations with people with whom you share
a history and context. When patio11 comments on something, I know where he's
coming from for the most part already so he can get right to the point without
having to give background information I already have.

~~~
smalter
I agree with this. Follow up question: I've seen sites where HN comments
appear in the source's comments (like trackbacks). Can someone point me how to
do this with Posterous?

~~~
swombat
Disqus allows this... I don't know how to do it on Posterous, but that's how I
got it working on danieltenner.com.

------
novum
> 4\. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half
> lives.

I suspect this is endemic to many (most?) community sites, especially as they
grow. HN is no exception.

> 5\. It’s a time suck. That one’s self-explanatory to anyone who has used the
> site.

So does the rest of the Internet.

> 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

Many sites linked to from Hacker News, like Daring Fireball, do not support
commenting. Others require user registration. Either way, I read the HN
comments on an article _first_ , every time, and I use that discussion to help
me evaluate if I even want to read the source article.

> 7\. It reduces blogging time.

So does the rest of the Internet.

------
DanielBMarkham
I agree with Matt on about 75% of these points. That's why I have severely
started limiting my time here.

Probably the worst part is the time-sink and the predictable nature of the
comments. Most of the time I can tell from the title what all the comments are
going to be like. Anybody that tries to swim against the stream, if only a
little bit, can be mercilessly punished. In fact, it's somewhat of a game to
see how even-handed I can make a thread -- human hacking. Which makes it even
more of a time sink.

HN has changed for me from being a site where I can hang out with fellow
hackers to being a site where people I like hang out and spend too much of
their time. I'm trying very hard not to make the same mistake. Hopefully I
won't be joining Matt. (Lunch is over. Back to work)

~~~
NathanKP
I think that to some extent the karma average score has encouraged too much
homogeneity in the comments. I don't feel like I can disagree for fear of
getting downvoted or not upvoted, which would lower my karma average and make
my votes in turn worthless.

The time sink factor is also obvious. However, I tend to swing back and forth
between very productive and not very productive. When I am in a coding mood I
rarely browse HN or comment and instead I hack like crazy for hours every day.
When I am burned out or feeling like I need a break from chasing some bug I'll
stop by here and read.

So the time sink aspect is doable for me at least. No one can work constantly,
without any breaks, and maintain their sanity.

~~~
anamax
> I don't feel like I can disagree for fear of getting downvoted or not
> upvoted, which would lower my karma average and make my votes in turn
> worthless.

That's too bad, because you can.

Stop worrying about your karma.

~~~
NathanKP
Its easy to say that I don't or won't worry about karma, but the truth is that
karma systems are tied to body's endorphin system. You get a good feeling when
you see that your karma or karma average has risen.

Naturally the reverse is also true and you can't help but not want either
number to fall. In my case at least these feelings are involuntary, despite
the fact that I know these are pretty much worthless numbers. (Except for the
fact that karma average does effect the weight of your votes.)

~~~
jdp23
some people are a lot more susceptible to this than others. if it's at the
point where it's a significant issue for you, then you should treat it as you
would any other kind of chemical dependency: learn ways to control it, or stay
away from environments that trigger it.

------
pshapiro
"The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half
lives. "

I have noticed this and unfortunately have to agree with this observation. I
wonder what principle (teaching) lets hackernews people behave like that.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Most people are like this. People generally don't have a lot of understanding
or empathy to the challenges of people outside their social class.

~~~
mhd
What's the average age of an HN poster? I remember being pretty judgmental and
self-righteous when I was 20…

~~~
GFischer
This poll says 32% are in the 19-24 range, and 35% in the 25-30 range:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923>

------
kevindication
> 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

I think this is the reason Hacker News exists. The comment threads on
destination sites are scattered across the Internet and do not bring any one
community together. They are also often filled with some of the least
desirable commentary possible. Read any of the comments on a Washington Post
article, say, for an example of the rubbish that is exceeded only by Youtube
commentary.

------
ryanwaggoner
Evaporative cooling...sigh. I can sympathize with some of his points here, and
I've starting really limiting my time here as well, but it's disappointing to
see the high-value members start to move on. It's only going to make it harder
to keep quality high.

[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

------
jokermatt999
He complains about lack of downvotes on stories, but then points out how
downvotes on comments are abused. Personally, I'd rather have an unworthy
story be voted up and having to ignore it than miss a good story because it
was unfairly downvoted. Yes, I know that theoretically, poor-quality upvoted
stories can mean good-quality ones are ignored, but I think that's less of a
problem than good ones being prematurely killed by downvotes.

As for the "downvotes to show disagreement" problem, it's no where near as bad
here as it is every single other place I've seen with downvotes. I do see one
sided upvoting fairly frequently, but it usually is because the downvoted side
is not arguing their position well, not _because_ of their position. I'd say
that the reverse is more of a problem, actually (poorly worded arguments that
most HNers agree with being upvoted). Overall though, most downvotes I've seen
have been due to poorly thought out or worded comments and comments that don't
add value rather than disagreements. If you're downvoted here, you should
generally put some thought into _why_. Every single time I've been downvoted,
I've learned something from it.

~~~
boredguy8
There's a substantial difference between downvotes on comments and downvotes
on stories. Upvoting or downvoting a story is a vote for whether you agree or
disagree that the linked story contributes to "hacker news". Upvoting or
downvoting a comment _should_ be a vote for whether or not the comment
constributes substance to the conversation.

I'd be in favor of reversing what can be down-voted: allow submissions to be
downvoted, but only allow comments to be upvoted. Then the comment 'vote' more
easily becomes "is this good?" (or at least removes the "is this something you
disagree with?") and we can maintain a 'flag' on comments for the trolls/spam.

------
pbiggar
RE point 6:

> It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

Each place-of-commenting is its own community. You comment on HN because you
want to talk to other HN folk. Generally, each community online has a
particular focus. On HN you get a startups-and-tech focus, which is very
different from what you get on reddit, or the Guardian, or NYT, etc.

Finally, the quality of each community is different. Contrast HN to reddit to
reddit-when-it-started to techcrunch. Part of that quality comes from the
software, some from the community, part from the moderatorship.

A blog is it's own community. HN is it's own community. There should be
comments on both.

------
lwhi
Why not quit quietly?

~~~
davidw
Perhaps PG will change his mind about allowing political articles (TSA)?

~~~
devmonk
How is the TSA political?

~~~
davidw
Smells like politics to me. It's all over the place here:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/>

If you feel a need to discuss it, perhaps that would be a more appropriate
forum?

Not to mention featuring on sites like cnn.com. It's a pretty big issue that
is certainly not "startups" or "tech". Yeah, there's tech involved, but the
issue is how does society believe it should be used: politics.

~~~
lwhi
So how do you decide if an article is 'political'?

~~~
davidw
Whether you like them or not, you really can't tell? To me it's pretty obvious
what goes where, with a few things that are on the edge, like politics that
are really important for tech and startups, like net neutrality. The TSA
articles aren't tech or startups at all. I think the "pro-politics" people
would still vote them up if there were no scanners and it was only about being
groped by the goons.

------
philwelch
_This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look down on
blue collar workers. I’m sorry but it’s true. A TSA worker..._

Who here actually looks down on truck drivers or plumbers? It's a disingenuous
way of framing the issue.

~~~
arvinjoar
Yes, it's the logical equivalent of saying someone is anti-military for
opposing the occupation of Denmark by the Nazi troops.

------
mquander
I still don't understand why guys like this will complain about quality and
then say that they don't flag anything!

Upvotes move posts up. Flags move posts down, and if you get a ton of them, it
even makes the post disappear. That's all there is to it! What does it matter
whether it's called a flag or a downvote?

~~~
pedalpete
You're missing his point about flagging. Flagging is for trolls, spam, etc. It
isn't a 'downvote'. He wants downvoting to be the opposite of upvoting,
meaning 'I don't like this' or 'I disagree with this'.

As Matt himself says, it is a nuance that is lost on most.

~~~
jdminhbg
Flagging is also for things that are off-topic. If he's sick of 20 TSA stories
every day, I don't think the flag is the wrong option. I personally flag
things I see that are merely political.

------
dminor
I'm surprised people are so reluctant to use the flag as a downvote, since it
has approximately the same effect. I make it a point to visit the 'new' page
and use it liberally on TSA articles, political articles, Gruber articles,
etc., as well as upvote the sorts of articles I'd like to see on HN.

------
BrandonM
In the course of participating in a community or in an activity, it can be
hard to avoid defining yourself in terms of that participation. "I am a Hacker
News member," or "I am a poker player," become not only descriptions of what
you do, but who you are. You become attached to that participation because it
is part of your identity as a person. It's really easy to fall into this trap,
especially if you don't have a strong sense of personal identity. I think that
a lot of people, myself included, lack a real sense of self, of who we are,
and we begin to define ourselves by what we do.

When you find something negative about what you're doing, or it simply
disappoints you, or whatever else it might be, you end up projecting those
feelings onto yourself. When the activity or community begins to frustrate
you, you can either be frustrated with yourself or realize that you've grown
beyond it.

Like Matt, I spent some time making a living at poker, and like Matt I have
been a Hacker News member for over 3-1/2 years (I just realized that there is
only one day separating our join dates). I feel like I have a pretty good idea
where he is coming from. When you find that the quality of your life is being
diminished by something you're doing, and you have the power to remove
yourself from that activity, then it is time to do just that. I commend him
for having the courage to do that.

I know people will complain about him leaving loudly. Personally, I have also
tried to quit poker and Hacker News, and in times when I have a lack of
direction, I find myself wandering back into old habits. Quitting loudly is a
small measure to take to give people the chance to help you stick to your
decision, to hold you accountable.

Good luck, Matt.

------
ig1
I think one of the major problems isn't that bad stuff gets voted up, but that
good stuff doesn't.

The new page is sorted by time, which was fine when there were a hundred posts
a day, but now during busy periods a new link is only on the new page for
maybe 30 minutes.

Most of the votes a link on the new page gets seem to occur when the link is
one of the top 5-10 links. So in practice a link has ten minutes to get votes
or it dies. So it comes down to the handful of people who read the new page in
those ten minutes (I posted a link the other day, it had ten click throughs
while it was on the new page and 3 upvotes; 1 more upvote would have pushed it
to the front page).

I think HN needs to switch the new page to a "rising new" page (like Reddit
uses), where links that have upvotes get to stick around longer on the new
page than links without upvotes.

------
cwisecarver
I like the community. I like the TSA stories. I like the lack of a downvote
button. Maybe the community does too and that's why they're rising to the top.

I honestly can't think of a post from mattmaroon.com linked from hacker news
that's ever taught me anything or made me think. I learned quite a lot reading
the TSA articles and I've been thinking about them and the enforcement of the
policies they describe.

Internet people tend to be somewhat libertarian in my experience. Not left
leaning or right leaning, just protective of their liberties. This
unconstitutional violation of American's civil rights fits nicely into those
views. So people like it.

If you really want to see a community on it's last legs take a look at digg.
It's become a cesspool of political insanity combined with NSFW top ten lists.

------
maukdaddy
I agree with a lot of his points.

 _A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is
feeding his family, he’s an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists
solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the
back of someone’s hand before boarding a plane._

I got eviscerated for suggesting an alternative to berating the front-line TSA
workers. To repeat, they are working hard, in a shitty job, to feed their
families. They are following the rule they're given, and have no input to the
process. Treating them like shit isn't the answer.

 _The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that’s
nothing compared to how anti-government it is._

This seems to be a problem in any tech community. Maybe the larger percentage
of Asperger-like folks?

~~~
tptacek
I'm not sure it's the specific issue of TSO decorum that Matt is trying to
communicate, so much as it is the perceived lack of life experience and
corresponding biases that HN commenters appear to bring to issues like this.
We do, in the large, sound like a bunch of 17 year olds when we talk about the
TSA.

I disagree with Matt about TSOs, but I think that's probably survivable. What
might be less survivable is the fact that a group of people who are
overwhelmingly privileged young male knowledge workers are spending time
talking about politics at all. This is a crappy place to talk about politics.
Discussions seem to invariably devolve to Rand-ian libertarian software
developer vs. WTO protester software developers.

~~~
jdp23
hmm, i haven't seen a lot of WTO protester types here ...

there certainly are a lot of privileged male knowledge workers here. that
doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad place to talk about politics, though. it
depends a lot on your goals.

~~~
tptacek
It bothers me that three people have (as I perceived it) now commented on this
thread suggesting that there's nothing wrong with talking politics on HN.
That's a shift in the norms of the site. We're talking about something that is
_specifically called out in the guidelines as off-topic_.

No wonder there are so many TSA stories on the front page.

------
px
I welcome posts like this one. I don't agree with everything stated, and
frankly it may be easy to take exception to some of the points made.

Nonetheless, I find it incredibly helpful to take a critical look at the
communities I am a part of and the thinking that pervades them.

------
iterationx
He'll be back, hn has its problems but there's nowhere else to go.

~~~
Alex3917
The Well actually has a discourse level that's comparable or even higher than
HN on some subjects, but you need to pay $99 to join. The next discourse level
up would be edge.org, but you're not allowed to contribute unless you're
already a famous scholar.

~~~
mquander
You make it sound like it's $99 up front, but it's just $10 a month, or
something reasonable like that.

------
elblanco
1) Yes

2) Yes, but those appear to be the actual semantics of uv/dv buttons, not the
intended meaning. It's sad but true. This has it's own impact, people tend to
talk about the things that people will agree with in order to get upvotes.

3) Yes a million times. The actual Apple/Google/Microsoft discussions here are
a very tiny signal in a fantastic epic pile of ideological noise. These are
companies we can learn a lot from by looking at their successes and mistakes,
but it's virtually impossible because people have invested far too much time
making their purchase of products these companies make part of their personal
identities.

4) Meh, maybe. That's just the way a community like this might skew.

5) Yeah well. But I find I'm fantastically up-to-date on the technology and
business concepts for this area.

6) I actually find the comments on HN and interesting meta-discussion to most
everything that shows up. I typically don't care to talk with the author of
something. Most of the time, the link target isn't a blog with a comments
section anyways.

7) Oh well. I'm not sure blogging is that great a benefit to humanity anyways.

I'm surprised it's not over the mysterious rules that PG tweaks constantly on
the site, or the slow degradation along the HN->reddit->digg->4chan path.

And common, no alternate site that he's going to?!

------
johnyzee
PG needs to take a more active role and nuke some of the world news / politics
submissions. There's really no justification for having them here.

------
nkurz
I don't agree with Matt's conclusions about the 'damage to the internet', but
his comments about the problems with HN resonate. I can understand why he's
leaving. I think there are solutions, though, even if no other sites have
quite managed to pull it off. I think the key points are:

1) It's OK for different users to see different views of the site. Reddit
moved to predefined subcommunities, but this could also be done dynamically. A
single 'top page' won't cut it unless users have the ability to block and
filter.

2) It's OK to partition the site. While one wants consistency, it's OK to
pretend that some posts were never made. You can't have things disappearing
from the middle of reply-chains, but there's really no difference between a
post that's never made and a post that's not shown to everyone.

3) Not everything functions best as a one-person one-vote democracy. I'm all
for the benevolent dictatorship PG and those whom he delegates his power to.
While transparency is often preferable, sites like this tend to fail due to
lack of use of power rather than from unchecked use.

------
tzs
> It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. When
> you read a blog post, then click back, then comment, you’ve greatly reduced
> your chance of speaking to the author.

Commenting on the blog is close to worthless, for several reasons.

1\. Most blogging software has atrocious handling of comments. Even such a
basic feature as threading within the comment stream is often missing.

2\. There often is not any kind of way to vote on comments so as to make it
easy for people to find the good comments.

3\. Bloggers are often one-hit wonders. They write one good blog post that
makes it to sites like HN and Reddit, and then fade back into their normal
obscurity. This makes it much less likely for a community of regular
commentators to form around any particular blog. On sites like HN, one starts
to recognize the frequent commentators, and see what they think on a variety
of different comments.

There are often times where the comments here or on Reddit are sufficiently
informative that I don't even get around to clicking through to the original
article.

------
scorpion032
What really happened to the downvotes?

Are they removed entirely, or the threshold is increased to beyond what I have
now got (462 karma, at 3.5 average)

------
RKlophaus
The attendees at Hacker News Meetups are some of the smartest, most
interesting, most courteous, and most entertaining people I've met. It's true
that the software running this site may need to adapt a bit, but the community
itself is still thriving.

(Plug for Hacker News DC meetup group: <http://www.meetup.com/JoinHNDC>)

------
samdk

        In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding
        value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting.
    

I agree in general with this point--I'd much rather have comment ranking based
on comment value than how many people agree with it. However, I think a big
part of the problem is that there's really no other way to 'agree' with a
comment. Commenting "I agree" or something similar is (rightly) frowned upon,
but the only real replacement right now is an upvote (or, if they disagree, a
downvote), and people like being able to indicate their support of things.

The obvious (although maybe not best) solution would be to add another axis
for comment voting that doesn't affect post ranking (or, at least, affects it
much less than the current one) that tracks agreement/disagreement. I can see
a couple of downsides to this, the biggest of which is that it adds a large
new element to a very simple commenting system.

------
jonmc12
It seems like Matt is generally not a fan of online communities. In reality
hacker news has not changed a whole lot in the last couple years and as far as
I know is still one of the few sites with a large community and a strong bias
towards intellectualism and knowledge sharing.

Matt points out that HN and other voting related sites have flaws. Frankly,
thats my assumption when I use any tool, or for that matter interact with any
group of people through any medium. I'm a little surprised that the author is
just now reaching his threshold for the flaws in the system - he points out no
new problems.

The important question is not, "what's wrong", as much as "what's better?".
This post would have been much more valuable as a discussion of feasible,
implementable alternatives to the observed problems rather than a post about
the author's choice on how to spend his own time.

------
Steve0
Might not want to know, but there is a password reset function.

------
Tichy
So what is the next big new thing? I'd certainly like a HN that is filtered
_much_ more. Plan to experiment with machine learning, but prospects are
uncertain.

How did those sites work out where news are just filtered by your friends,
rather than everybody?

~~~
steveklabnik
I've been throwing around some ideas, and I know that RiderOfGiraffes has, as
well...

------
manish
Things come and go in HN, but that cannot be a primary reason to quit HN
itself. Today it is TSA, yesterday it was offer hn etc. I have gained more in
knowledge than what I have lost in time on HN, as long as it is that way, I am
staying.

------
aresant
I agree with just about all of Matt's points, but I've gotten (and continue to
get) so much value out of the people here that I'm not ready to walk.

PG's recent inclusion of "average karma" seems to me a shot over the bow
pushing us to recognize the importance of thinking before we speak.

It is shocking to me to see a leader board populated with low karma averages -
only 1/3 of the "top" 100 members by total Kamra average over 5 (including
Matt).

If there's one piece that we desperately need it's the ability to downvote,
tied into average karma which is how I've measured and meter my contribution
(and others) to the community.

------
DjDarkman
> 6\. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

This is very good in my opinion because it gives us more freedom, because the
post's author can't discriminate against possible negative comments. In other
words: this is neutral ground.

> someone who can’t tell the difference between being a freedom fighter and
> being a douche to a guy who makes $12 an hour trying to stop planes from
> getting blown up.

I don't think the TSA's moves are as effective as they are annoying.

> 2\. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather
> than value

I don't think there is an easy solution for this one anywhere else.

------
Ygor
A little offtopic, but:

"The term “evil” (the silliest and most counterproductive word to enter tech
discussions ever) is thrown about haphazardly."

Interesting observation. Haven't seen it here before. Was there some talk
about this on HN?

~~~
grandalf
I have not noticed this phenomenon, other than various paraphrases of "don't
be evil".

~~~
stcredzero
Yes, the use of that term in this context is clearly bad -- bad in the same
sort of way that Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Darth Vader is bad. </irony>

------
ScottBurson
As a newcomer, I don't see the problem. There are so many interesting
submissions on HN that surely no one has time to read them all (I suppose if
you reflexively read them all, _then_ you would have a problem). I appreciate
the TSA-related posts as civil liberties are very important to me, but if you
don't care, skip them! It's not like they're not clearly labelled.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks reading the site, but I don't
regret it at all -- it's been informative and inspiring.

------
sutro
I once quit Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43635>

Looking forward to seeing you back soon under a new account name, Matt.

~~~
gojomo
Is it true that there's a secret spinoff site, called 'Flouncer News', to
which you only receive an invite if your public "I'm quitting HN" post makes
it to the top HN position?

~~~
sutro
Yes. It's spectacular.

------
sp4rki
Is it just me or does his blog post only reason is to reassure himself that
he's above hacker news as a community. If you want to leave because you see no
value in it, then by all means leave. What does it matter if the author thinks
HN sucks? I understand the need for valuation of one's actions, but really
this sort of statements are just boring.

This article belongs in a tweet: "I'm fed up with Hacker News and ergo, I'm
leaving it!". That's the only thing that the author really said, but really,
does it even matter?

------
spudlyo
After reading this I realize that I still vote up comments I agree with rather
than comments that add value to the discussion. Why is it so hard to change
your behavior in this regard?

~~~
phamilton
The cases I see most often after reading a comment:

1) I was going to post the same comment. I'll just upvote him instead.

2) I had never thought of that. It makes sense and I agree. I'll upvote him.

Both cases are "I agree". But for 1) If I was going to post the same comment,
then I clearly see it as something relevant to say in the discussion.
Therefore his post is relevant and should be upvoted. 2) is also a case of
something being relevant.

Should I also be spending my time finding things I disagree with but find
insightful and upvoting them? Insightful generally falls under category 2.

Basically, agreement and value go hand in hand, and as long as you aren't
treating comments like a poll, most if not all of your upvotes should be the
result of you agreeing with the comment.

------
mcgin
Tend to agree with alot of what Matt says. It's why I don't comment often, and
simply use HN as a source of news and posting anything I find myself that I
think is of interest.

------
iampims
Genuine question: when should one refrain from posting a comment on HN? Mine
aren’t exceptional bits of wisdom, or unheard-of in the technology world. I
haven’t invented any programming language nor did I create an app which
gathered 10M+ users in a matter of weeks. Should I just shut up or do we want
to encourage discussion, let people make mistake so they can be taught — when
there is one — the right answer?

------
egometry
189 comments (and counting) on a self-reflective post? The old chestnut about
the media liking nothing more than talking about itself comes to mind.

------
jodrellblank
_The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half
lives. This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look
down on blue collar workers. I’m sorry but it’s true._

Who cares if it's true, is it _useful_? Is it a useful trait for HN to have,
and is it a useful complaint for you (him) to raise?

------
burgerbrain
> _the community has grown more insular and self-referential which is a
> problem in and of itself_

Nail on the head.

------
ronnier
The site is having trouble loading. Can read it here:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://mattmaroon.com/2010/1...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-
hacker-news/)

------
bena
Wow, most of his Categories are some variation of "other people are stupid".

------
devmonk
_I just changed the password to some long random string so I’d never be
tempted to log in again. Lack of password recovery isn’t a bug there, it’s a
feature._

Going to do the same thing. See ya, HN.

------
bartl
To me, lack of upvotes is one of the better traits, as on other social sites,
good stories are often downvoted into oblivion in order to make other stories
look relatively better.

------
seles
A lot of this is true, but HN is a great source of interesting links, where
else would you go to find interesting articles such as this blog about
quitting HN?

------
ced
It's amazing how this post has received 233 upvotes in 4 hours, and it's not
even on the front page. There's something weird with the ranking algorithm.

~~~
mikeklaas
It's been penalized for being offtopic.

------
jbail
I think he's just upset about the TSA articles. That point keeps coming up
over and over again in his post. It weakens what he has to say.

It's clear he supports the TSA to "stop planes from getting blown up." Since
the majority of HN doesn't agree with that sentiment (at least that's how he
paints it), he's sort of being a baby about it and quitting because he can't
handle disagreement. He masks this fact very thinly in a what is definitely a
stereotypical flameout post.

Communities disagree, and they're not all perfect. Nothing new there. If there
was no disagreement on HN, it'd be boring.

~~~
davidw
Some of us are not fond of the TSA situation, but are vehemently opposed to
this site being yet another place on the internet to chat about politics. You
can get that elsewhere, but you can't get tech/startups/basically friendly
attitude anywhere else I've found so far.

~~~
jbail
I'm with you on that. I flag articles that are political. That said, the posts
about the science behind backscatter radiation, and subsequent discussion on
HN, I've enjoyed.

------
masterponomo
Finally, I can align my HNews user name with my "street" nick. Sincerely, Chaz
Wannamaker

------
smarterchild
What if we could tag posts? Identify which ones were political, programming,
etc.

------
barredo
Too much drama.

------
jpa
Can I have your stuff?

------
kungfooguru
Wow... I haven't even noticed TSA posts here. And I thought I checked a lot!

------
oemera
I bet no-one will read this cause here are definitely to much comments but
even so I will give it a try.

Part 1

I'm one of those new guys around here (to be honest I really don't know how I
find out about Hacker News, maybe twitter) and maybe one of those assholes who
are killing this community (if it is even possible) with it's valuable
content. I just read in this blog post what I'm doing wrong here and how I'm
helping those contents which don't belong at Hacker News come to the front
page BUT I never knew and never wanted to do that. I love this community and I
have to say it really opened my mind about functional programming, startups,
making decisions, learning from lessons and so on. But in fact there was no-
one who told me what this is all about, what news belong at Hacker News, how
to comment and react right, that I should up-vote content which are valuable
and not which are cool and exactly what I think about it.

In a place where are no rules people will act like there are no rules. And by
rules I don't mean restrictions I mean telling people what is Hacker News and
what is it about: startups, hackers, fancy geeky things, sharing thoughts ect.
By not telling this to the newer AND older (who maybe forget about it) you are
supporting that Hacker News becoming more and more invaluable. You are also
supporting it if you are just opting out of this community. Come on, is it
this everything you can do? To just leave and not help Hacker News become
better (again)? It's not my style and hopefully it will never become my style.

If you want to give the Hacker News community something back maybe it would be
a article about Hacker News and what it is and what it is for.

Part 2

I really don't understand why people are complaining about a lack of a feature
when they could write it on their own. We are all hackers and pretty good
ones. So grab for example GreaseMonkey and write a freakin' down-vote button
own your own. When you are finish submit it to Hacker News and I bet my balls
it will become a top topic for several days and everyone will use it. There
you have it: the way a real hacker would go, right? Just do it. (No I'm not
working for Nike)

Part 3

Hacker News is time consuming. Yeah thats exactly what it is BUT while it is
time consuming it has a pretty good value cause you read about what people did
wrong and who you can do it better on the next time and which services can
turn to bad even if it was in theory really excellent.

Before I knew Hacker News I hang out on StackOverflow, some Blogs about
Gadgets and so on. Now I'm just hanging out on Hacker News and reading all
those valuable content (I try to focus on the ones which are interesting and
not about TSA and other US-political stuff ect).

I learned so much about programming, software architectures, startups and
wrong technology decisions that I'm glad I 'wasted' my time here and not on
Facebook, Gizmodo, DaringFireball, you name it.

Part 4

Everyone has to do what they love and what they feel to do. If it is hacking
and to exchange your experience: you are welcome. If Hacker News is turning to
a waste of time for you? Drop it.

Last but not least

I hope I could write something which is valuable for all of you.

Note: Sorry for my bad english. I'm from Germany and so my english is sadly
not my primary language. Feel free to correct me.

------
nightlifelover
no u didn't

------
jimmyjazz14
at least its not reddit (yet).

~~~
jimmyjazz14
geez sorry :\

------
swankpot
He seems to have issues with the TSA.

------
antidaily
Some valid points, but you're stilling getting this from me:
<http://imgur.com/F2QBM.jpg>

------
kiba
Extremists?

Let me know when the community is full of libertarian nutcases, rather than
ideologue hating HNers.

------
retube
I guess he's not planning on applying to Y Combinator...

~~~
mikeryan
He's the founder and CEO of a YC Company.

<http://www.bluefroggaming.com/company>

~~~
retube
Really?? Well that's the last time I make a playful quip on HN. Here's to
being really serious all the time.

