As a young person who has often been exposed to reddit and the rest of the internet's political flame wars, HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with, which often leads to better understanding of a topic. Thank you, mods
As an old person that's also seen political debate polarise into either flame wars or ideological echo chambers, I also highly value HN as one of the few remaining places where meaningful political discourse is possible.
Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly, and where I can even ask questions and get useful responses.
> Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly ...
Yes, this.
"one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them."
- a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long):
Sometimes I realise a flaw in my thought process when trying to write a HN comment, something that almost never happens on twitter and reddit. And i think its because the community has decided that curiosity is the prime virtue of HN, I really like that.
My 5 cents on HN's civility is that people want to have an impact with their posts.
On large forums (large subreddits, Twitter) you have to be very loud to be heard. Being outrageous, knee-jerk reactions easily get eyeballs, and don't require much effort or time, hence those who spend effort and time on a post that takes effort and time to understand are outcompeted. Finding content like that becomes a discoverability problem. There is also bandwagoning, adding your vote to the tally doesn't require much effort, but can feel like having an impact by identifying with the collective impact. Apes together strong.
On small forums it is relatively easier to have an impact, so because you are guaranteed to be discovered you want to increase the quality of the impact. On a large forum the opportunity to be seen can make you ignore the risk of being judged, and bandwagoning is risk-free, on a small forum the focus is on how you are being seen.
On HN specifically most people want to be seen as an insightful, constructive individual. Taking different stances is an established norm here, so the risk is not being upvoted (not discovered, or insightful), or being too downvoted (not constructive). Normally downvotes would also discourage you from taking too different stances, but HN made some smart decisions (you have to have a certain number of upvotes to downvote, can't downvote people replying to you, upvotes and downvotes are not publicly visible, your comment is only greyed out if it has too many downvotes) to encourage different stances and constructive behavior.
Even though you shouldn't post/comment for karma, I really enjoy how easy it is to get up voted comments on HN. Makes it feel like people are actually reading your stuff and that it's a community. Reddit lost that ages ago, unless you join niche subreddit. You can comment on the top voted front page post on HN and still get replies.
Regarding the last paragraph: I wonder whether anyone has done any game-theoretic studies about self-moderated online discussions and which voting mechanisms work most effectively.
> HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with
What HN is good at is preventing or limiting discussion so that it doesn't turn into a flame war by any side. Whereas today's reddit and much of social media/tech only allows one side to flamebait.
Reddit and most of the internet 10 years ago was a far better place for discussion. It's why reddit became so much popular than HN. If you genuinely wanted to understand a topic better ( whatever it was and however controversial it was ), you'd get all sides of it. Today, it's just one side. Sure, it was wild, but everyone got their say and you could read up on everyone's position. Now, sadly, most of tech is just corporate/media/establishment propaganda.
As an older person who's been exposed to the web and IRC for several decades, I've seen all kind of places, some of them well-moderated, and others where verbal violence was recurrent or moderation abusive.
The moderation in HN is good, but the success of the site in a increasing problem. As the audience widens, the Guidelines are less respected. Nowadays, I almost never follow a link posted in HN, and rarely glance at the comments. For the past weeks, I hid one third to one half of the frontpage posts, because I thought they are off-topic. Quoting the Guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I expect to find on HN what most non-hacker sites would not include.
I think HN needs to figure out how to expand the moderation team in a transparent way. The risk of course is introducing all the reddit-esque drama around moderator selection, abuse etc. Stackoverflow has had similar issues, though somehow stumbles along better than reddit. Regardless, there have been some huge thread recently that would have benefited from moderation.
>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
That casts a wide net, and something that a segment of HN would find intellectually gratifying and produce good conversation shouldn't be avoided just because traditional media happened to stumble on it too. I try to keep in mind the "probably" modifier, and that other people may be gratified by different content. Generally speaking I only flag clickbait or things that are divisively partisan and probably won't produce any actual conversation.
Then on things like politics... Well, just consider this headline currently on the front page: "Crypto, the Left & Technofeudalism"
Crypto is a massive bit of emerging technology, but it is virtually impossible to separate it from some of the politics and social values involvde. It's pretty much baked to the motivations behind many proponents as well as the people directly working on the tech.
I rarely read the articles, but thoroughly enjoy...even the occasional slightly ott political comments...and certainly all of the others.
Sometimes i feel it's a shame that the USA is so predominantly: choose 1 or 0, there is no nuance; whatever you criticise means you're 100% for the other.
But then again, that's all part of the deal, and I'm grateful for it, not against it.
Lots. And they are as unknown to you as HN is likely to be to the users of them.
I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation.
The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults.
It works.
I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.
This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more about it. I generally despise heavy handed moderation as it changes the feel of a community from "a bunch of people talking about X" to "a group of power-mad narcissists and their groupies". Do you see ways of seeding forums that are effective? What kind of moderation do you have (I noticed that LGSS has moderators) - is it just "remove spam and illegal stuff"? Do you have rules for the forums? How often does a long-running forum suddenly, or not so suddenly, go bad? One of my lifelong "addictions" is tabletop RPGs, but the choice of forums just kinda is poor, mostly because of moderation, and so I always have in the back of my mind starting a new one, but I'm always concerned about the moderation effort, so the concept that you can take a different "moderation-free" path is tantalizing!
>I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.
That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"
Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3).
There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though.
It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads.
However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D
Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody.
Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine).
I feel like places like tigsource have better civility and high signal to noise ratios.
There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences)
But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.
A lot of my early experiences on the web involved being banned from places (forums) until I learned to be civil or at least contribute something interesting.
The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.
It depends how you define "communities". If you treat each of Reddit's subreddits as a separate community then there are a lot of small-to-medium sized ones that qualify.
The lack of a redesign I think is a big part why the community remains (if it ain't broken, don't fix it!), plus HN's heavy moderation -- towards these very guidelines.
Various well-manicured gardens tucked away in Reddit are quite nice. And honestly I don't think HN is as nice as it used to be now that more and more culture war topics are creeping in.
I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma.
It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.)
So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
Culture wars topics have always existed on HN. Today it is landlord/motherboard, a few years ago it was master/main, and who can forget Donglegate?
Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.
That is nice. I’m worried I somehow damaged my phones wifi radio (it sits infinitely looking for SSIDs while never finding any now) and my mobile network is screwy, constantly switching networks between low-bar LTE and 5G. Sometimes HN is the only site that wants to load
This comment made me think of a local online social network that was used predominantly in Umeå, Sweden. I can't speak for what happened in DMs but all the public facing content was very civil. And hardly any noise whatsoever.
But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.
Apberget? It was fairly outstanding in being mostly clean and professionally ran without attempting to go national or sell out much. Until they did get bought.
I feel that people who find HN good, do so for a reason.
They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily.
This makes it a kind of an echo chamber.
All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out.
Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.
That’s fine though. It’s ok to have communities with shared interests and goals. Sometimes that means keeping out people who prefer something different. That’s ok too; they can start a forum for their community and impose whatever conditions they like. HN is just an Internet forum. It’s not a massive social media platform or a country where exclusionary rules can be damaging to large populations.
I wish this was still the case. Talking about politics used to be avoided here, and certainly engaging in reddit-tier partisan arguing was extremely rare. Now there are political posts almost every day that have comment sections full of mud slinging. I'm guilty of it too, even as recently as today, so I'm not taking a holier than thou position, but man those threads are just incredibly strong flamebait.
There has been a noticeable shift in the way HN engages with political topics over the last couple of years, and more recently in particular.
HN isn't more political now than it used to be. Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go all the way back to 2008 at least.
This is a common enough misconception that I put some effort into writing a standard post for it some years ago—maybe we should put it in the FAQ, I don't know:
I think it's simply a reflection of the shift of how educated society engages with political topics. If it affects quality of life of humans, it is political. This has always been true, it's fundamentally the point of politics.
However, the effects on the QoL of many humans is not a concern to those of us who have the privilege to simply look away and not notice a difference to our own quality of life. This privileged demo has drastically shrunk (ie, politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people) today, mostly because the rest of the people have deservedly been given more of a voice. Policy in its present state can mean the difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago, and talking about it is an option for people who were silenced and closeted 10 years ago.
Even those of us who wilfully try to plug their ears and come up a system of rules and restricted topics that are "political" and "to be avoided" will find it incredibly hard to enforce, because someone or other will break the rule, and it's physically impossible for everyone else to keep their peace until a moderator brings the banhammer.
The world is going through shared turmoil right now and politics is naturally a first stop to look for society-level resolutions, or at least adjustments to existing rules to improve QoL.
I disagree, I think it’s a reflection of lack of critical thinking skills when it comes to political topics. People are so polarized now they have lost the ability to discuss nuance, see the other side, or really compromise at all.
Everything is couched in terms of “with us or against us” extremist dichotomies much like the one hiding in the undertone of your post.
Of course everyone thinks their political views are critical to life the same way people think their religion is important. It’s still super rude to bring up religion in an orthogonal topic and it’s still super rude to do the same with politics.
I agree that it's not possible to steer clear of politics. But there is more than one way to discuss politics and political aspects related to hacking and entrepreneurship (such as markets, oligopolies, net neutrality, copyrights, patents, encryption, etc)
One way is to focus on difficult questions, on the inevitable trade-offs and on interesting, perhaps less conventional solutions. These debates are supposed to make people think.
The other is to declare all questions settled and focus on rhetorical tactics to suppress the enemy. Stop thinking, start acting, crush the evil enemy, it's about life and death!
In my opinion, this latter form of politics should be kept off HN. Thinking is not a luxury that we can no longer afford once decisions become important to people's lives. It's a necessity at all times and it needs space.
> politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people today
> difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago
> The world is going through shared turmoil right now
You seem to be implying that the political situation has deteriorated and become more violent. Is that so?
In 1968, several students were killed during protests against the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights movement sparked demonstrations and riots during which many people were killed (eg 34 at the Watts riots). The 1992 Los Angeles riots resulted in 63 deaths.
And that's only in the US. In China, you had TianAnMen in 1989. In Germany, you had the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhoff) terror until 1998 with scores of deaths. The Irish Troubles also lasted until 1998 and killed over 3000 people.
So, I'd say it is not worse now than, say, five decades ago. It could be that we have had one or two particularly peaceful decades, but I wonder how much bias there is in that assessment. How could one quantify it, or otherwise try to capture it objectively?
One can say that the exclusion of politics from HN is itself politics.
Likewise the debate in the comments herein is a manifestation of politics. Is technology entrepreneurship and science better served by having a politics-free zone, like the Olympics? Or is society worse served by having a class of people and an industry operate as if politics is orthogonal to it, as if the whole nature of the enterprise isn't built upon a particular political ethos and system that sustains its current incarnation, possibly at the expense of other classes of people or society as a whole?
Is HN the Galt's Gulch of the social media world, where techies can withdraw from the rest of society because they can?
Political debate on HN has become unavoidable because tech itself has been politicized.
Of course on some level it always was, "everything is political" etc, but a decade ago most participants saw tech as broadly neutral. What was the political valence of Etherpad or Foursquare?
Today, engineers are asked to implement things like the "inclusivity warnings" that just shipped in Google Docs. The scope of "content moderation" has expanded dramatically. Founders are often explicitly partisan in one direction or another.
And the new engagement goes in both directions. The five most valuable companies on earth are all West Coast tech cos now. Political actors of all types are watching and trying to harness or control tech to a much greater extent than last decade.
> most participants saw tech as broadly neutral. ... What was the political valence of Etherpad or Foursquare?
While it's quite probably that most participants _saw_ it as mostly-neutral, I would claim that was obviously a mis-conception. In 2012, the popularity of smartphones was already having significant cultural effects, effects on alienation and isolation vs interaction of people in public spaces, etc. And that's just one of innumerable examples. FOSS vs. commercial software - definitely a political question, already 40 years ago and even earlier. Energy production and conversion technology - lots of geopolitics depends on who needs how much fossil fuel energy. etc. etc. And when a tech issue has significant political ramifications, you also have interest-holders involved in promoting or trying to block it, making an effort to inculcate the public with certain ideological views on the issue etc.
Politics is also more tribal and emotive than it's ever been. I'm terrible at not getting upset and replying emotionally to perceived injustices when someone frames facts with a bent towards the other side.
Tech is a big part of the escalation. It was much harder and weirder to yell at strangers before social media existed.
I honestly don't know how we get back to normal. I hope we do because I prefer being able to have discussions not heated arguments about politics.
It's a consequence of stakeholder capitalism. When companies were publicly okay with just being amoral profit maximizing entities, they only engaged in politics for a near-term, transactional benefit. Now that it's fashionable for them to publicly take positions on political and societal issues, politics must be discussed along side business.
That’s not a very useful frame. One could just as easily claim that everything is philosophical, that everything is scientific, that everything is artistic, or that everything is mathematical.
If you squint hard enough, sure, you can apply the adjective you want to just about anything you want. That doesn’t mean that the adjective has no meaning.
A story about a new IDE is not political. A story about the stand of the US government in the Ukranian war is political. There is some grey area too, but let's not pretend like it is not clear what "political stories" means in this context.
How about "almost everything can be mapped onto a Bell curve" instead? So whereas almost everything can be remotely connected to something else if you look hard enough, there are outliers where the connection is more evident and other outliers where it get's really strained to find a connection. Politics is certainly like that.
But if the politics in everything is all that catches one's attention, then sure. But that doesn't seem all that healthy, and could be one of the reasons young people seem to struggle with more mental health issues nowadays: the demonizing of the other (party) is increasingly venturing into personality traits and identity, instead of focusing on questions of policy.
Being able to plug your ears and call a field apolitical is a matter of your position in society or in your sub community. There's the joke that goes "what are the two sexes? Male and political", and it really does have a grain of truth to it.
It's also just a very strange stance to take, since if you listen to most people working in start ups in technology their pitch is almost always expressly political. Whether it's the libertarian principles of some developing the early web, or talk of "democratizing", there's always some political aspect of changing the world.
There is a school of thought, primarily from critical theorists and their derivatives, that proposes constant agitation, there is no neutral. E.g. Kendi's anti-racist. As this school of thought has taken root in schools and media, political discussion has expanded to encompass more and more of life. It is the intended result. Fair to say they have been wildly successful.
I used think politics in itself should be avoided, unless it is related to Tech. So the best place to start would be to flag any submission that has nothing to do with Tech.
We cant avoid politics that has to do with Tech though, App Store guidelines and regulation, Social Media and Internet, China and Russia usage of Tech.
>We cant avoid politics that has to do with Tech though, App Store guidelines and regulation, Social Media and Internet, China and Russia usage of Tech.
That's everything then. Tech platforms have become the primary channels for the discussion of everything, particularly politics, which makes all political issues tech issues.
I’d argue it really started when Edward Snowden was on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. HN was wall-to-wall with updates and rumors that, frankly, were not particularly interesting, informative or thought-provoking. But the ideological valence of the story was clearly more important.
We got a mini version of this more recently in the Net Neutrality wars.
It’s funny how both of those stories turned out in the long run.
> I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.
> The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power.
The choice isn't often so clear cut. In fact I'll take a side here and say that the idea pushed by this quote is actually one of the most poisonous aspects of American culture at the moment. You are either "red" or "blue" or wasting time with your apathy. No, that's utter BS.
"Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent."
It's sort of hinting at a false dichotomy here. You don't have to be partisan to be engaged. There are many nuanced positions and ideas. Perhaps the author lived in a different time or place that doesn't have two main parties acting the way they do today.
These are the kinds of opinions people use to try and radicalize others. In the end, this only serves to reinforce an 'us vs them' perspective on anything someone loud enough signals as important. The texture of nuance is sanded down until there is only Right and Wrong. Now, whoever doesn't hold each of the same endorsed partisan beliefs is the Enemy.
I think the convention is to use “” to give a general quote; > to quote a comment in thread.
And, on the content, HN isn’t filled with indifferent people. But we need to have places for politics and places to avoid politics. Indifference is different from deference—deference to the context.
As far as hacker politics goes, it applies well to the intellectual
sloth of technological determinism, which Veblem and McLuhan
criticised in different ways, and Postman called the most abject form
of surrender.
I assume that readers here do not fall into such ambivalence, since
the very nature of a hacker is to believe in the ability to
meaningfully create and change technology.
I consider it part of our mission to help others overcome the
shrugging, cargo-cult acceptance of whatever tech falls into our laps
and take the active path to designing and using technology toward a
better future for humans. Inescapably, a part of holding values must
be stopping some people from using tech in disagreeable ways. And
since people are guaranteed to disagree on matters, technology is a
new arena of politics and not something that can exist separately
from it.
There is something to what you’re saying, and things like what the EU is doing as a response to the impact or big American Tech companies is probably what is actually interesting to a lot of us. Because it directly impacts how we’re supposed to build solutions as we need to implement more and more bureaucracy into the way we handle data, often in ways, that we need a corporate lawyer to audit because we’re software engineers. Note that I’m not saying this is good or bad, but I do think it’s interesting because it impacts us.
What I don’t personally think is interesting is American politics. The sort of thing where there are two sides, or anything where anyone might write “liberal”. As a European, where we have multiple parties work together, and where many what Americans consider “liberal” is basically the ultra Christian Right wing, is sort weird and uninteresting. Not that I don’t think things like identity politics and what not aren’t important, but maybe not something to be discussed here on HN.
There is no meaningful political discussion possible here.
In tech, truth matters (a practitioners can share something meaningful). In politics, the truth is essentially irrelevant especially when one side has vastly more resources than any other (the best practitioners are the best liars). Discussions are full of the rehearsal of talking points and astroturfing -- it is boring or give rise to unnecessary emotions.
I suppose you could have an RSS feed of OSS software and libraries and rebroadcast press releases of new versions of software. There are some tech things without politics, but once you get into higher levels such as discussing Uber's business model, politics comes up. Holmes's Theranos trial was as much politics as tech, but still falls in the "tech" space because it impacts future startups.
Yeah. I’d like to avoid a cliché “this forum has changed over time and that is bad!!!” argument - but it definitely does feel like the tone of many discussions is different. I find myself rolling my eyes in frustration and being taken in by it way too often. It’s up for debate if that’s a change in the discussion, or a change in me.
I’ve taken to trying to just immediately click “hide” on any article I see on the homepage that sounds like it might get anywhere near anything controversial - removing the temptation to engage unconstructively completely. And the same with comments to some extent - if there’s a culture-war trigger-phrase in a comment, just hide the tree and move on.
That’s getting harder though - I wouldn’t have expected an article about Netflix subscriber growth to end up with a bunch of top-level comments about “woke politics ruining tech”, for example. It’s often kind for hard to avoid even if you are trying.
And it’s not like “politics” as a subject could be dismissed either. The thing is that articles about Musk buying Twitter or Google making controversial auto-correct suggestions or whatever are inherently both tech and politics. I don’t know how you avoid that - but the atmosphere definitely makes me want to avoid participating all together.
that was short sighted when the forum was started. it's a forum about tech and entrepreneurship, so politics are the main concern. it's as if bloomberg had a policy of talking about finance only and not politics.
I agree and would be in favor of more heavy moderation on this. I strongly suspect HN will descend into a kind off reddit if this is not put a halt to. Curious to hear the views of the HN mods on this, but I expect they won't publicly engage in that discussion.
Almost everything is political. For example, the very existence of large tech monopolies is political. What they do or don't do is political. There are plenty of things related to this we can talk about that are political, but the real problem is being partisan about it.
edit:
If you want to up/down vote in a non-partisan way, up vote comments as to whether they are interesting or likely to lead to interesting discussion rather than just because you agree with them. Reserve downvotes for comments that are uninteresting, diversionary, partisan, etc.
I often post articles that I personally disagree with, but which are interesting and I am interested in what the HN community might have to say about them.
But one person’s irrefutable facts are another person’s politics, so it’s hard to separate the two. Better IMHO to focus on keeping it civil rather than try to ban topics (which itself is another act of politics).
I agree to an extent, but we're also at a point where politics have spilled over into areas where they were a little less common previously. 20+ years ago it was political when Microsoft was in its antitrust fight. Right now, just one example-- social media account bans-- is not only very political, it is extremely partisan and polarizing as well. It is practically impossible to talk about the issue without touching on some aspect of political/social values.
So, it makes sense that politics come up more often because they now intersect more often with technology (or at least much more visibly) than they have previously. Unfortunately a lot of people don't engage constructively in conversations like that, ones where two different viewpoints may come down to core values that are taken as axiomatic. I think HN does a lot better than other venues when discussing these things but I also see a heck of a lot more comments flagged dead with awful, insulting and vile language that are every bit as bad as the worst you'd find anywhere on Reddit.
I have to say I have not experienced this, the opposite actually in that I have posted some articles that were shut down quite quickly because they had a political aspect. I personally am a little upset about it because if you cannot discuss political things it indicates a weakness in the platform, but on the other hand maybe it is necessary to avoid it to keep HN relatively amicable.
Yeah HN of 2012ish timeframe was very different. Even Reddit didn’t seem nearly as popular. I think this goes for everything (not just forums), but the more popular a forum becomes the worse the content seems to get. I would like to say that the mods and community here have been unreasonably good at keeping up a level of quality that would likely have been long gone any place else.
There are many software engineers here. Most large companies or software projects are overtly political regarding the culture wars since at least 2016 and brutally force speech and thought upon their employees (they diligently avoid economic issues in politics of course).
HN provides a way to escape that. The discussion is not always partisan; many people point out hypocrisy and greed of people who pretend to have pure motives. Those are facts if you follow the money, power structures and inaction on real issues that are obscured by beautiful words.
I wish HN had some kind of labels. I want to filter out web development related posts. I am just bored with the usual "one line of css", "visual code", "icons for web" etc.
I'd subscribe to just tech, personal projects, psychology and history if I could.
Sounds like you want subreddits, I don’t. Right now HN is one community and everyone sees the same front page, if you add subreddits the community will fragment and we’ll get a lot less insight.
I believe that feature omission is intentional. There have been dozens of articles - interesting, thought-provoking articles - that were outside my typical interests, but ended up being well worth the read.
> I wish HN had some kind of labels. I want to filter out [...]
I was thinking something similar recently. I’m uninterested in well over half of the posts that appear on the front page, usually because they involve technical topics I don’t care about. Most HN readers must be similar, each with different needs and tastes.
Then I thought that the perfect solution would be an algorithm that would highlight posts and comments similar to those I’ve liked in the past and hide those I don’t like. Soon I would be seeing only what I want to see, and I wouldn’t be bothered by anything else.
Then a shiver went down my spine, and I decided that HN is best as it is.
In addition to avoiding the awfulness that is “The Algorithm”, the lack of filtering/recommendations and infinite scroll means that there are generally only 0-5 items interesting enough for me to waste time on. I find that HN is far more interesting than other sites, but because of that limitation, it’s a far less problematic source for procrastination.
You can do this with a time bound (day, week, month, year). Searches within the past 24 hours should turn up active discussions.
The hack I use is to search comments rather than posts, as the latter afford a larger search surface. You risk turning up some digression thread on a topic, but that's an occupational hazard...
Otherwise:
- Click on the "past" titlebar link to see top-ranked posts from the previous day. You can navigate by day/week/month/year through all of HN history.
- Click on the "past" post link to find earlier discussions of a particular story / link, if any.
- Click on the submitted link domain URL to find other items from that particular site.
- See what specific users are submitting. I occasionally find interesting content navigating HN by user rather than by submissions.
- Look to see what's getting submitted on the "New" queue. Voting or flagging early can influence what shows up on HN for discussion.
- Submit your own material. Odds are low, I'm lucky to have one in ten items see any activity. It's a numbers game. Submissions which relate to other recent submissions (but aren't merely fad-chasing) seem to do reasonably well. I turn up numerous older references through other research, some of which seems to do well on HN.
I'd rather have more CSS posts personally, because they are in a way still tech related, than seeing the site turn into a generic news aggregator, or as I've said other times, a slightly more techy version of Ars Technica.
The guideline that "we should post things hackers [users] would find interesting" was good a decade ago, now we've good a ton of people that post their favourite long form articles and Twitter posts. I don't care for history, commentaries on society or personal philosophy musings with my code.
Honestly, I'm not really complaining, at least the quality of the discussion is still higher than elsewhere on the Internet.
>The guideline that "we should post things hackers [users] would find interesting" was good a decade ago, now we've good a ton of people that post their favourite long form articles and Twitter posts. I don't care for history, commentaries on society or personal philosophy musings with my code.
Do you believe the only thing hackers should find interesting is "code?"
One alternative mechanism used on a site is to allow for filtering _out_ of tags. You still discover stuff but you can totally opt out of anything tagged “rant”. Imagine if you never had to read another substack post about cancel culture ending everything on your tech forum…
I actually kind of like it this way... I already follow some more specialized industry literature like Smashing Magazine or MDN Hacks. I don’t use HN the same way as those. Then when a front-end related news reaches the HN front page it is a cause for celebration.
Surely, if HN had a /web-dev I would stop using it as HN and use it more like I already use the specialized blog pages I already follow.
I still enjoy those posts. When they get enough traction I usually take notice as something I should store in the memory vault, even if it is of no interest to me or my career. I even find myself appending 'hackernews' to google searches when I am really trying to discover more about a tech I am not well versed in, but want to get started on the best path.
It’s a site that gathers people together to post & comment on all the newest tech while at the same time HN itself is host on some of the most basic and boring tech - a flat file based forum.
Seasoned engineers go for simple and effective tech. You can find a good amount of those on here. A few might browse the site from lynx or Emacs.
The other "fancy" tech forum full of new tech and slow as molasses (Reddit) is mostly frequented by the younger, more inexperienced generation of hackers.
No, the only reason HN uses flat files is that the forum is a MVP for Arc Lisp, and pg just wanted to implement everything in Arc. Seasoned engineers understand the drawbacks and benefits of different forms of technology and choose the right tool for the job rather than simply assuming the simplest solution is always the best. I'm not insulting HN here but it is what it is, one person's side project that took off.
Also, Reddit is able to handle millions of users and over a million subreddits while Hacker News nearly collapses if a single thread gets too much traffic. Comparing the two and deciding Reddit was built by less experienced developers with inferior, poorly thought out technology is just ridiculous.
And I am so happy that HN is as simple as it is. Makes browsing it so pleaseant in general. The only feature I am missing for large discusions: a way of tracking which part of the discussion I already have read. Revisiting a large discussion sometimes later currently means a lot of duplicate reading.
Otherwise I prefer the web format of HN a lot against all other similar forums.
Readit News
Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly, and where I can even ask questions and get useful responses.
Yes, this.
"one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them."
- a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long):
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expr...
On large forums (large subreddits, Twitter) you have to be very loud to be heard. Being outrageous, knee-jerk reactions easily get eyeballs, and don't require much effort or time, hence those who spend effort and time on a post that takes effort and time to understand are outcompeted. Finding content like that becomes a discoverability problem. There is also bandwagoning, adding your vote to the tally doesn't require much effort, but can feel like having an impact by identifying with the collective impact. Apes together strong.
On small forums it is relatively easier to have an impact, so because you are guaranteed to be discovered you want to increase the quality of the impact. On a large forum the opportunity to be seen can make you ignore the risk of being judged, and bandwagoning is risk-free, on a small forum the focus is on how you are being seen.
On HN specifically most people want to be seen as an insightful, constructive individual. Taking different stances is an established norm here, so the risk is not being upvoted (not discovered, or insightful), or being too downvoted (not constructive). Normally downvotes would also discourage you from taking too different stances, but HN made some smart decisions (you have to have a certain number of upvotes to downvote, can't downvote people replying to you, upvotes and downvotes are not publicly visible, your comment is only greyed out if it has too many downvotes) to encourage different stances and constructive behavior.
What HN is good at is preventing or limiting discussion so that it doesn't turn into a flame war by any side. Whereas today's reddit and much of social media/tech only allows one side to flamebait.
Reddit and most of the internet 10 years ago was a far better place for discussion. It's why reddit became so much popular than HN. If you genuinely wanted to understand a topic better ( whatever it was and however controversial it was ), you'd get all sides of it. Today, it's just one side. Sure, it was wild, but everyone got their say and you could read up on everyone's position. Now, sadly, most of tech is just corporate/media/establishment propaganda.
The moderation in HN is good, but the success of the site in a increasing problem. As the audience widens, the Guidelines are less respected. Nowadays, I almost never follow a link posted in HN, and rarely glance at the comments. For the past weeks, I hid one third to one half of the frontpage posts, because I thought they are off-topic. Quoting the Guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I expect to find on HN what most non-hacker sites would not include.
>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
That casts a wide net, and something that a segment of HN would find intellectually gratifying and produce good conversation shouldn't be avoided just because traditional media happened to stumble on it too. I try to keep in mind the "probably" modifier, and that other people may be gratified by different content. Generally speaking I only flag clickbait or things that are divisively partisan and probably won't produce any actual conversation.
Then on things like politics... Well, just consider this headline currently on the front page: "Crypto, the Left & Technofeudalism"
Crypto is a massive bit of emerging technology, but it is virtually impossible to separate it from some of the politics and social values involvde. It's pretty much baked to the motivations behind many proponents as well as the people directly working on the tech.
Dead Comment
I can think of some with one or two of those attributes but not many that match it all the way around.
I run a number of forums, the largest yielding 250k monthly visitors. It's not huge... But it's 15 years old, very civil, and more interestingly has near zero moderation.
The ones I operate I do so on a simple basis... This forum is default dead, if you as users run it into the ground I'll turn it off as I make no money from it do not have any incentive to tolerate your bs. Make of this space whatever you want, but if you want it to exist then that's something that you all need to make happen by figuring out how to be adults.
It works.
I kill 10 sites for every one that makes it, and the ones that make it are great.
That's interesting, a sort of Darwinian selection pressure towards actual discussion. Though as I type that out it occurs to me that that could be a decent working definition of "good moderation"
It's a car enthusiasts' website in India.
Their forums section[1] is phenomenal.
Their official new car reviews [2] page is thorough. There are owner-reviews of most cars as well [3] (like for instance there's a dozen owner reviews for the BMW X3).
There's no membership fee. You don't need to be a member to read the content; you have to be a member to post content though.
It does not do advertisements of cars themselves (and openly calls out manufacturers who approach them with rewards for favorable reviews) because they believe it's difficult to be critical of manufacturers after accepting money from them for ads.
However, there are ads for non-car products so you might want to keep your ad-blockers on :D
Their moderators have other proper day-jobs. Like, they're doctors, entrepreneurs/business-people, dentists, teachers, pilots, software engineers (!) and everything else under the sun. The reason I mention this is because this website isn't really a source of income for anybody.
Content is moderated heavily, and people in violation of their guidelines [4] are banned (as long as you're civil, use proper English, don't use swear words etc you'll be fine).
[1] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/
[2] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/official-new-car-reviews/
[3] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/
[4] https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/team-bhp-reviews/announcement...
There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences)
But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.
The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.
(A lot of awful ones too, of course.)
- mobile issues: text too small, up/down vote not usable
- post text almost unreadable, it should not be lighter than comment text
Generally, the less commented upon articles are pretty excellent.
It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.)
So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.
Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.
But I don't think local online communities will ever managed to get established anew again.
Still, your point is a good one.
They are the kind of people who are in majority in HN. They have similar views and when they comment here on HN their views are accepted and prompted more readily.
This makes it a kind of an echo chamber.
All deviants get banned or their comments are greyed out.
Dissenting is not allowed and dealt with severity and finality.
I wish this was still the case. Talking about politics used to be avoided here, and certainly engaging in reddit-tier partisan arguing was extremely rare. Now there are political posts almost every day that have comment sections full of mud slinging. I'm guilty of it too, even as recently as today, so I'm not taking a holier than thou position, but man those threads are just incredibly strong flamebait.
There has been a noticeable shift in the way HN engages with political topics over the last couple of years, and more recently in particular.
This is a common enough misconception that I put some effort into writing a standard post for it some years ago—maybe we should put it in the FAQ, I don't know:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
One has to be careful not to fall prey to whatever bias it is that always makes it feel like things are getting worse.
However, the effects on the QoL of many humans is not a concern to those of us who have the privilege to simply look away and not notice a difference to our own quality of life. This privileged demo has drastically shrunk (ie, politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people) today, mostly because the rest of the people have deservedly been given more of a voice. Policy in its present state can mean the difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago, and talking about it is an option for people who were silenced and closeted 10 years ago.
Even those of us who wilfully try to plug their ears and come up a system of rules and restricted topics that are "political" and "to be avoided" will find it incredibly hard to enforce, because someone or other will break the rule, and it's physically impossible for everyone else to keep their peace until a moderator brings the banhammer.
The world is going through shared turmoil right now and politics is naturally a first stop to look for society-level resolutions, or at least adjustments to existing rules to improve QoL.
Everything is couched in terms of “with us or against us” extremist dichotomies much like the one hiding in the undertone of your post.
Of course everyone thinks their political views are critical to life the same way people think their religion is important. It’s still super rude to bring up religion in an orthogonal topic and it’s still super rude to do the same with politics.
One way is to focus on difficult questions, on the inevitable trade-offs and on interesting, perhaps less conventional solutions. These debates are supposed to make people think.
The other is to declare all questions settled and focus on rhetorical tactics to suppress the enemy. Stop thinking, start acting, crush the evil enemy, it's about life and death!
In my opinion, this latter form of politics should be kept off HN. Thinking is not a luxury that we can no longer afford once decisions become important to people's lives. It's a necessity at all times and it needs space.
> difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago
> The world is going through shared turmoil right now
You seem to be implying that the political situation has deteriorated and become more violent. Is that so?
In 1968, several students were killed during protests against the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights movement sparked demonstrations and riots during which many people were killed (eg 34 at the Watts riots). The 1992 Los Angeles riots resulted in 63 deaths.
And that's only in the US. In China, you had TianAnMen in 1989. In Germany, you had the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhoff) terror until 1998 with scores of deaths. The Irish Troubles also lasted until 1998 and killed over 3000 people.
So, I'd say it is not worse now than, say, five decades ago. It could be that we have had one or two particularly peaceful decades, but I wonder how much bias there is in that assessment. How could one quantify it, or otherwise try to capture it objectively?
Likewise the debate in the comments herein is a manifestation of politics. Is technology entrepreneurship and science better served by having a politics-free zone, like the Olympics? Or is society worse served by having a class of people and an industry operate as if politics is orthogonal to it, as if the whole nature of the enterprise isn't built upon a particular political ethos and system that sustains its current incarnation, possibly at the expense of other classes of people or society as a whole?
Is HN the Galt's Gulch of the social media world, where techies can withdraw from the rest of society because they can?
Of course on some level it always was, "everything is political" etc, but a decade ago most participants saw tech as broadly neutral. What was the political valence of Etherpad or Foursquare?
Today, engineers are asked to implement things like the "inclusivity warnings" that just shipped in Google Docs. The scope of "content moderation" has expanded dramatically. Founders are often explicitly partisan in one direction or another.
And the new engagement goes in both directions. The five most valuable companies on earth are all West Coast tech cos now. Political actors of all types are watching and trying to harness or control tech to a much greater extent than last decade.
While it's quite probably that most participants _saw_ it as mostly-neutral, I would claim that was obviously a mis-conception. In 2012, the popularity of smartphones was already having significant cultural effects, effects on alienation and isolation vs interaction of people in public spaces, etc. And that's just one of innumerable examples. FOSS vs. commercial software - definitely a political question, already 40 years ago and even earlier. Energy production and conversion technology - lots of geopolitics depends on who needs how much fossil fuel energy. etc. etc. And when a tech issue has significant political ramifications, you also have interest-holders involved in promoting or trying to block it, making an effort to inculcate the public with certain ideological views on the issue etc.
Tech is a big part of the escalation. It was much harder and weirder to yell at strangers before social media existed.
I honestly don't know how we get back to normal. I hope we do because I prefer being able to have discussions not heated arguments about politics.
You’re forgetting saudi aramco.
Technology is political. Whether it's the nature of architecture (centralised Vs decentralised), or the nature of transparency (proprietary Vs FOSS).
It's all political, imagining that we can fully pretend it's not would be a challenge.
The key is to keep the debate civil, reasoned, rational, respectful.
If you squint hard enough, sure, you can apply the adjective you want to just about anything you want. That doesn’t mean that the adjective has no meaning.
How about "almost everything can be mapped onto a Bell curve" instead? So whereas almost everything can be remotely connected to something else if you look hard enough, there are outliers where the connection is more evident and other outliers where it get's really strained to find a connection. Politics is certainly like that.
But if the politics in everything is all that catches one's attention, then sure. But that doesn't seem all that healthy, and could be one of the reasons young people seem to struggle with more mental health issues nowadays: the demonizing of the other (party) is increasingly venturing into personality traits and identity, instead of focusing on questions of policy.
Only if you’re a politician. Hammers see nails.
It stated in ~2015.
I used think politics in itself should be avoided, unless it is related to Tech. So the best place to start would be to flag any submission that has nothing to do with Tech.
We cant avoid politics that has to do with Tech though, App Store guidelines and regulation, Social Media and Internet, China and Russia usage of Tech.
That's everything then. Tech platforms have become the primary channels for the discussion of everything, particularly politics, which makes all political issues tech issues.
We got a mini version of this more recently in the Net Neutrality wars.
It’s funny how both of those stories turned out in the long run.
> The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power.
- Antonio Gramsci
It's sort of hinting at a false dichotomy here. You don't have to be partisan to be engaged. There are many nuanced positions and ideas. Perhaps the author lived in a different time or place that doesn't have two main parties acting the way they do today.
And, on the content, HN isn’t filled with indifferent people. But we need to have places for politics and places to avoid politics. Indifference is different from deference—deference to the context.
As far as hacker politics goes, it applies well to the intellectual sloth of technological determinism, which Veblem and McLuhan criticised in different ways, and Postman called the most abject form of surrender.
I assume that readers here do not fall into such ambivalence, since the very nature of a hacker is to believe in the ability to meaningfully create and change technology.
I consider it part of our mission to help others overcome the shrugging, cargo-cult acceptance of whatever tech falls into our laps and take the active path to designing and using technology toward a better future for humans. Inescapably, a part of holding values must be stopping some people from using tech in disagreeable ways. And since people are guaranteed to disagree on matters, technology is a new arena of politics and not something that can exist separately from it.
This includes tech-related politics.
Technology is a crucial development impacting society. Of course discussing tech is political. How could it not be?
What I don’t personally think is interesting is American politics. The sort of thing where there are two sides, or anything where anyone might write “liberal”. As a European, where we have multiple parties work together, and where many what Americans consider “liberal” is basically the ultra Christian Right wing, is sort weird and uninteresting. Not that I don’t think things like identity politics and what not aren’t important, but maybe not something to be discussed here on HN.
0therwise your definition makes everything political, thus is useless
I’ve taken to trying to just immediately click “hide” on any article I see on the homepage that sounds like it might get anywhere near anything controversial - removing the temptation to engage unconstructively completely. And the same with comments to some extent - if there’s a culture-war trigger-phrase in a comment, just hide the tree and move on.
That’s getting harder though - I wouldn’t have expected an article about Netflix subscriber growth to end up with a bunch of top-level comments about “woke politics ruining tech”, for example. It’s often kind for hard to avoid even if you are trying.
And it’s not like “politics” as a subject could be dismissed either. The thing is that articles about Musk buying Twitter or Google making controversial auto-correct suggestions or whatever are inherently both tech and politics. I don’t know how you avoid that - but the atmosphere definitely makes me want to avoid participating all together.
Dead Comment
Off-topic: partisan politics
Almost everything is political. For example, the very existence of large tech monopolies is political. What they do or don't do is political. There are plenty of things related to this we can talk about that are political, but the real problem is being partisan about it.
edit:
If you want to up/down vote in a non-partisan way, up vote comments as to whether they are interesting or likely to lead to interesting discussion rather than just because you agree with them. Reserve downvotes for comments that are uninteresting, diversionary, partisan, etc.
I often post articles that I personally disagree with, but which are interesting and I am interested in what the HN community might have to say about them.
I don't think this is true, take a look at the top posts a decade and so ago:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1325376000&dateRange=custom&...
A few examples:
- Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day (1716 points)
- A new approach to China (1145 points)
- GoDaddy supports SOPA, redditor proposes "Move your Domain Day" (1103 points)
- Enough Is Enough (1019 points)
So, it makes sense that politics come up more often because they now intersect more often with technology (or at least much more visibly) than they have previously. Unfortunately a lot of people don't engage constructively in conversations like that, ones where two different viewpoints may come down to core values that are taken as axiomatic. I think HN does a lot better than other venues when discussing these things but I also see a heck of a lot more comments flagged dead with awful, insulting and vile language that are every bit as bad as the worst you'd find anywhere on Reddit.
HN provides a way to escape that. The discussion is not always partisan; many people point out hypocrisy and greed of people who pretend to have pure motives. Those are facts if you follow the money, power structures and inaction on real issues that are obscured by beautiful words.
Deleted Comment
I'd subscribe to just tech, personal projects, psychology and history if I could.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
I was thinking something similar recently. I’m uninterested in well over half of the posts that appear on the front page, usually because they involve technical topics I don’t care about. Most HN readers must be similar, each with different needs and tastes.
Then I thought that the perfect solution would be an algorithm that would highlight posts and comments similar to those I’ve liked in the past and hide those I don’t like. Soon I would be seeing only what I want to see, and I wouldn’t be bothered by anything else.
Then a shiver went down my spine, and I decided that HN is best as it is.
You can do this with a time bound (day, week, month, year). Searches within the past 24 hours should turn up active discussions.
The hack I use is to search comments rather than posts, as the latter afford a larger search surface. You risk turning up some digression thread on a topic, but that's an occupational hazard...
Otherwise:
- Click on the "past" titlebar link to see top-ranked posts from the previous day. You can navigate by day/week/month/year through all of HN history.
- Click on the "past" post link to find earlier discussions of a particular story / link, if any.
- Click on the submitted link domain URL to find other items from that particular site.
- See what specific users are submitting. I occasionally find interesting content navigating HN by user rather than by submissions.
- Look to see what's getting submitted on the "New" queue. Voting or flagging early can influence what shows up on HN for discussion.
- Submit your own material. Odds are low, I'm lucky to have one in ten items see any activity. It's a numbers game. Submissions which relate to other recent submissions (but aren't merely fad-chasing) seem to do reasonably well. I turn up numerous older references through other research, some of which seems to do well on HN.
The guideline that "we should post things hackers [users] would find interesting" was good a decade ago, now we've good a ton of people that post their favourite long form articles and Twitter posts. I don't care for history, commentaries on society or personal philosophy musings with my code.
Honestly, I'm not really complaining, at least the quality of the discussion is still higher than elsewhere on the Internet.
Do you believe the only thing hackers should find interesting is "code?"
https://www.taggernews.com/tags/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275 (2017)
The tags ended up being pretty interesting. You can even combine them: https://www.laarc.io/l/video|videos
It was neat watching the community figure out which tags to use.
Surely, if HN had a /web-dev I would stop using it as HN and use it more like I already use the specialized blog pages I already follow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/show
https://news.ycombinator.com/ask
https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
In fact, if you title a post with “How to…” the site will automatically crop those words too, leaving e.g. “Do X.”
It’s a site that gathers people together to post & comment on all the newest tech while at the same time HN itself is host on some of the most basic and boring tech - a flat file based forum.
The other "fancy" tech forum full of new tech and slow as molasses (Reddit) is mostly frequented by the younger, more inexperienced generation of hackers.
Also, Reddit is able to handle millions of users and over a million subreddits while Hacker News nearly collapses if a single thread gets too much traffic. Comparing the two and deciding Reddit was built by less experienced developers with inferior, poorly thought out technology is just ridiculous.
Otherwise I prefer the web format of HN a lot against all other similar forums.
And more modern variants are far more reliable.
It's written in a homemade lisp. That's not boring, that's fun.
This is a great point, I should try to remember to do this in general.