HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable. And I know that sometimes that falls into some personalized negativity but it’s useful most of the time.
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
It’s useful for someone to be wrong on the Internet.
I’ve learned a lot from watching constructive disagreements between other people. Regardless of whether they’re “right” or not, healthy disagreements sharpen our perspectives.
It is also another good option but I find HN better in the sense that there are usually more chances of somebody responding to your comment/ ask post in HN in a similar minded way as compared to blogging if you are like me who has interests in lots of things.
Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.
I find downvote-to-oblivion to be more irritating than beneficial.
I particularly dislike it when comment sections erupt into downvote wars on anything that varies from the prevailing opinion in the room, irrespective of whether it makes a logical argument or contributes information or insight to the conversation.
> HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable.
Only true if your general argument is still in line with the HN zeitgeist. You are allowed to disagree so long as you dont disagree on core topics. HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion. While people here don't karma farm (or karma guard) as aggressively it takes almost nothing to end up shadowbanned/instant-flagged/etc for having a disagreeable standpoint.
In other words, as long as you aren't right of center you can disagree all you want. Even a trivially libertarian viewpoint is met with significant ire.
Voting systems in general are a massive problem in social media. They don't stop the truly bad actors but they drive away the exact thing that prevents you from being caught in an echo chamber (of which HN is an example of).
I'm no longer inclined to present a counter view on this site, even with references. It's as close to a polite version of Reddit as it could get without becoming Reddit.
Excellent comment. Disagreeable comments can be sincerely held, supported, but this means little if you do not hold the prevailing opinion with the downvoting/flagging/almost impossible-to-read feint grey text, which is often where the gold is! Weekends are definitely better for more open conversation.
The last libertarian post I saw wasn't getting downvoted and it was by a guy who wanted to set up meetings with cartels to improve the efficiency of their drug dealing business.
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
Just occasionally I do really want to respond with an image because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more complex thing.
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
Linking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of the things I appreciate about it.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
On second thoughts given people are downvoting this as a low quality comment rather than responding on the ways they disagree this audience would descend into the exact same problems on Reddit. My position is thus reversed, it is not something that HN would use properly.
The intellectual level achieved in HN is unparalleled in the history of internet.
The bad parts, except those mentioned other where:
1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop
2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.
> relative lower quality in other fields except technology
As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here.
It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about.
No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.
There were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density.
The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.
As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.
I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless
Does it? Modern Wikipedia is OK, I suppose, but I feel its glory days are far behind it. It's so gated. And any time I try to participate, it's like walking through waist deep mud. I almost feel it forces you to shrink to participate.
Maybe I keep trying to edit long-standing articles, which have custodians that feel ownership over the content? And you're editing articles with less gatekeeping?
I frankly don't even try any more. I've heard the same from others.
One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's minimalism.
I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something
individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
> * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit something that has been submitted in the past few days, it will count it as a vote on the original instead.
Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
> I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
While we're at it - I also would favor a strict subset of markdown, but it would be really nice to have a strict subset of markdown instead of the homebrew thing we have now. The biggest one that regularly catches people out is that
* foo
* bar
formats as
* foo
* bar
instead of a bullet-point list. And on that note, I'd really like ``` to do code blocks instead of needing 2+ space indentation as the way to make a code block.
I would like it if you could filter comments by time after, so you don't need to reread a lot to see what's new. There is latest, but then you completely loose the context of any discussion. This feature could additionally leave the two parents of any new comment for context.
The flagged thing has come up quite a few times in past similar threads. Unfortunately, I guess if the powers that be were going to fix it they would have.
The problem is that the user experience is not "oops, I accidentally flagged an article, I should go unflag it."
The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"
I often din't realize when I accidentally flag something with my big fingers; when I go to my flagged page later I am often surprised to see a few pages I have no memory of and no reason at all for flagging.
I've been PSAs before on the front page with a reminder to check your flagged stories. I and others visited the link and were surprised to see how many stories I had fat-finger flagged. In fact I had never intentionally flagged a story yet the list was at least 10-15 long
I've been using Hacki, the app (yes, I know) on mobile which adds a couple of features like separating the comment, upvote, flag etc. functions into a separate swipe-right menu and, more to your point: dark mode. It's a great experience. I wish I could find out whether the author has a patreon because a comforting app like this should not go unrewarded but they are obscure. One thing it misses is a menu point for the active link.
Readit News
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
I’ve learned a lot from watching constructive disagreements between other people. Regardless of whether they’re “right” or not, healthy disagreements sharpen our perspectives.
Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.
Deleted Comment
The line is closer than you think. Cross it and your words just disappear.
I particularly dislike it when comment sections erupt into downvote wars on anything that varies from the prevailing opinion in the room, irrespective of whether it makes a logical argument or contributes information or insight to the conversation.
Only true if your general argument is still in line with the HN zeitgeist. You are allowed to disagree so long as you dont disagree on core topics. HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion. While people here don't karma farm (or karma guard) as aggressively it takes almost nothing to end up shadowbanned/instant-flagged/etc for having a disagreeable standpoint.
In other words, as long as you aren't right of center you can disagree all you want. Even a trivially libertarian viewpoint is met with significant ire.
Voting systems in general are a massive problem in social media. They don't stop the truly bad actors but they drive away the exact thing that prevents you from being caught in an echo chamber (of which HN is an example of).
The alternative is to be like 4chan, though. I'll begrudgingly admit that there are pros, but the cons definitely outweigh them.
I down vote only things I find that should not be posted like as-persona or something I really know is just wrong.
Of course there is a bit of blur between something being wrong and something we disagree.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop
2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.
As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here.
It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about.
No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.
The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.
As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.
I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
HN actually is a social network.
You upvote stories on Hacker News and Reddit, as opposed to following people
Does it? Modern Wikipedia is OK, I suppose, but I feel its glory days are far behind it. It's so gated. And any time I try to participate, it's like walking through waist deep mud. I almost feel it forces you to shrink to participate.
Maybe I keep trying to edit long-standing articles, which have custodians that feel ownership over the content? And you're editing articles with less gatekeeping?
I frankly don't even try any more. I've heard the same from others.
Facebook was a social network even when the barrier to entry was “must have gotten in to an elite school”.
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Good to know though, thank you!
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc-reader...
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.
- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
While we're at it - I also would favor a strict subset of markdown, but it would be really nice to have a strict subset of markdown instead of the homebrew thing we have now. The biggest one that regularly catches people out is that
formats as* foo * bar
instead of a bullet-point list. And on that note, I'd really like ``` to do code blocks instead of needing 2+ space indentation as the way to make a code block.
https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news
The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"
news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg)) news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white) news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black) news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]
Not my idea, I took it from a comment on HN a few weeks ago.