If I see a meme on Reddit I would probably upvote it, but if I see that exact same meme on here I would downvote and probably report it too. That decision comes from a place of wanting to preserve this space and I'm sure many other folks on here would very much agree.
Oh, I can relate to that one.
That's a relatively new development. The cultural aspects that you're describing were already in place (entrenched) well before Reddit integrated that feature.
More and more topics somehow devolve into emotional political fights instead of intellectual debates.
In the same vein, a few years ago, I made a Firefox extension for users who want a privacy-preserving way to see if pages have associated HN discussion:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-d...
Most other extensions probably hit an external API (such as Algolia) to check submission status, which means they send every page you visit to that API. Instead, my extension uses Bloom filters compiled from every link ever submitted (updated daily from the Hacker News BigQuery dataset) to check the current page's submission status. By using Bloom filters, my extension only hits the API when you click the button to view the discussion.
Source code here:
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button
Feel free to pull the Bloom filters from the "Releases" section of that repo on GitHub to use in other projects if you'd like!
javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)I think you may be overlooking some nuance related to that extension vs my solution though. Extensions like that check every page you visit whereas my approach only checks on click so there is a much greater need for privacy solutions with extensions like that since they would normally be sending out your entire browser history in real time to the api.
Jstriebs solution seems pretty neat though and it's definitely something I'll keep in mind for similar use cases even if I skip using it to minimize my extension usage. I was happy to hear about it and read how it worked.
I'm not overlooking; this extension doesn't do that. That's what's so cool about the Bloom filter approach: all the checks can be done locally, never revealing your interests to a third party. So if the metric is privacy, it's superior to the bookmarklet, even if it checks every page you visit in real time.
(In principle, that is. I haven't reviewed the implementation. :)
One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.
Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
Being able to apply custom interests to all feeds globally has been a wonderful way to run into new stuff online. I was genuinely surprised how great of addition scour was to my rss setup since I'm already a longterm experienced user with a well curated follow list of a several hundred feeds.
Feedback is extremely welcome! Feel free to email ideas to me (in any state of polish) or post them on https://feedback.scour.ing. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!
I thought a lot of good stuff was probably getting buried in the fire hose, but I had no idea how well it would actually work at finding those hidden gems for me.
Great work!
Let me know if you have any other feedback as you use it more!
I actually have a toy project that does the complete opposite - I filter Hacker News to keep only the technical content, then use AI to generate summaries (which get translated into my native language since I'm not a native English speaker).
My friends and I have been using this system to consume a lot more content with significantly less reading overhead. Eventually, I turned the generated content into a maintained online website.
As an European, not working in technology or even with computers, i can relate to. HN comments can sometimes feel out of touch with reality.
I’d say it’s more about the way Americans tend to see the world, where the world ends at the border of the USA and not consider that there are other way of life.
Although despite its flaws, this forum is still one of the brightest side of the internet.
I’m a digg expat from back in the days. HN is the only icon on my phone that is mot an app. It sits on my first page and I keep a tab open until I read the entire article.
But HN content is special to me. I have an ArchiveBox instance to keep all very good content from HN. It’s hooked to a vector database and an AI to quizz me on the many topics so I don’t forget.
At year’s end I close all my unfinished articles, normally around 200-300 on my safari and the cycle repeats.
I don’t much engage with the community but HN is a special place and the only place that can clench my thirst for knowledge and learning.
Thanks for the article and thanks HN
It's the narrower scope of subject matter and the ruthlessly-cultivated culture which create the value proposition of HN. It's for this reason I've continued using the site for years after largely abandoning discussion on other social media sites. Long may it flourish.
Sometimes they make new accounts, of course, especially if we've banned them many times - but even those (what you could call) bad actors are not the bulk of the problem. The bulk of the problem is (what you could call) normal users, who would probably be surprised to find this out, since it's human nature to see such problems as caused by others, not self.
Posting a "hot take" on HN was unheard of for a very long time. Now people do it regularly with no shame.
I've never really understood why people write those, and even less why people read them. It's admitting from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about. Why embarrass yourself? Why waste your own time?
But more seriously, I mentioned the "dotcom boom" to someone today, they didn't know what it was, because they were 2 at the time.
I had to explain it as a combination of the GFC and the current AI boom.
The thing someone pointed out, however, is you get particular bad threads through the process of them being seeded that way rather than things always being bad. I think that's why hn's moderation is often thread-by-thread rather than comment by comment.
And I can find some threads here with quality comments still. So quality is a difficult thing to measure.
Ive noticed this as well.
Very nice. I used FreeBSD on my server until Version 9, I think I left for 2 reasons. The server experience heat death (my fault) and its Laptop support.
I heard v15 became alpha + its Laptop support has improved a lot. I will keep an eye on v15 and give it a try when released.
FWIW, I had to replace the power supply on the server and I forgot to plug in the CPU fan, doh. The machine was over 10 years old at the time.
! Hacker News
! ===========
! Remove AI-related entries (Top: title / url)
news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr)
! Remove AI-related entries (Bottom: stats / comments)
news.ycombinator.com##tr.submission span.titleline > a:has-text(/\b(AI|GPT|MCP|LLMs?|Chatbot|Copilot|Gemini)\b/):upward(tr) + tr
(if someone can suggest a way to merge those 2 CSS selectors into one to avoid repetition, I'd be immensely grateful, as i failed while trying to learn about that arcane syntax)
(I also would love to know if there's a way to consolidate rules.)
dang has previously indicated receptiveness to built-in killlist functionality for sites/users/titles, similar to what this list accomplishes. My offer to build this (for free) stands, if anyone at YC was willing to provide access the HN codebase.
While it can still move around despite the passing of the day, it has been quite a stable way to see what made it to the top and stayed. I am just too lazy to automate it myself.
About the regional bias in the discourse here, I have come to accept it in public, English-based communities at this point. The content does speak for itself, and despite the noise, one comes out better off.
TBH, many articles on the front page are not for everyone, and reading the comments is more fun to figure this out. I don't judge those who comment based on the conversations instead, but it does derail things at times.
While I am ways away from getting to downvote, just lurking without being logged in has been quite effective in staving off distractions.
I always wonder about the scale part -- why do we want a community to grow? Is it to reach more like-minded people, to enrich the collective knowledge, etc? That would be so great, and not dilute the other two aspects. But so often it seems that "growth" is just for its own sake, a bit like cancer -- consuming the host in the end, and at best reducing what was a vibrant community to a barely palatable sludge that appeals to the common denominator just enough to warrant eyeballs-to-dollars conversion.
It's a testament to HN that it has, so far, resisted this (to borrow a term from mr Doctorow) enshittification.
It doesn't.
Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle.
> The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comment threads.
These cardinal rules are routinely violated.
A rational person would just read the linked articles and ignore the comment section. HN is still the best link aggregator, I think. Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.
There are so many times where the top comments are totally full of crap, including and especially from people who work in the industry. It's a large industry with countless subspecialties. What reason do you have to trust a comment over an article? If you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical of both, but be especially skeptical of some cursory dismissal of a work that obviously took significant time, effort, and expertise.
I'd love for these commenters to write their own articles and see what's it like to be commented on.
Ditto. Reading HN through Lynx helps, though. As with a lot of things in life, adding a little bit of friction can make everyone happier.
I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.
At this point I'd agree with GP that HN conversations are only better than large subreddits, a bit worse than most focused medium-sized subreddits, and a lot worse than more focused subreddits. The level of in-depth conversation you'll get about Go on r/golang or Emacs on r/emacs is much, much higher than this site. In fact you can get a decent amount of arbitrage karma bringing links from those subs onto here :)
I think the sweetspot of this site is a technical topic that's a bit out of the mainstream. These threads usually take a couple hours to really develop but because of that they usually avoid the kneejerk negative/contrarian toplevel posts that the community posts on more accessible topics which usually derail conversation quality. As such you usually get thoughtful, well-developed, good-faith takes on these threads. A good example is a Lisp or Forth related thread.
Frankly, I'd say that the article authors are smarter on average than the article commenters and in any case are vastly more careful and informed on average than the article commenters. There are of course exceptions to the averages, but it doesn't balance out, because the worst article commenters are infinitely worse than the worst article authors and wreck the discussions for everyone else.
> The news are just provocation to get them to post their opinions.
That's precisely the problem!
I have learned that a determined laymen can sometimes outperform an average industry professional in all kinds of areas.
HN users, tech people in general, are biased against doctors and medicine. I don't think that can be generalized to technology discussion.
I've seen a few doctors posting here on HN. I'm among them. Medical discussion is useful to me since I can gain perspective on how medical practice works in other countries.
Show dead in settings here also can have a few gems if you feel like digging for them.
You clearly don't have the showdead option enabled. ;-)
> The real juicers are usually buried near the bottom of the page, a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.
Emphasis added.
I wouldn't call the dead comments apathetic and sarcastic. They're typically vile and humorless.
One time I made a negative comment about Lord of the Rings, and I think I lost a thousand points. Does it really make sense that my karma as a complete user drops so much because of one specific comment? Blasphemy, but maybe Reddit's per-subreddit score makes more sense.
I can promise I don't craft my comments for karma, though many people deserve their high 'karma' because they offer genuinely great contributions.
I don't think you should have been downvoted for that post though! It was an interesting comment. (Though perhaps it was more provocative before the edit you mention there.)
I mainly want to get to the downvote threshold so I can also exert an alternative influence (as I'm in the minority I think). It's been many years...
I think it depends.
My observation has been that people on HN value facts and first-hand knowledge, and reward such.
Because of that, I believe that someone who has been on HN for a long time with a lot of karma must know something, or have lots of experience.
Someone who has been on HN for a long time and has low karma makes me think that they don't have much knowledge to contribute and I view them more skeptically.
1) Keep them to myself most of the time. Pick my spots, in other words, and don't just toss off quick replies every time I disagree (who's got that kind of time anyway).
2) Don't make a factual claim without a link to back it up, even (maybe especially) if it's something everyone knows. There seems to be enough respect for the process of researching something and backing up your claims here, that people are less likely to downvote a fact they don't like to hear if you make the effort. (This is one thing that distinguishes HN from Reddit.)
3) Make the case dryly and impersonally. People are less likely to be triggered by disagreement if they don't feel like you're laughing at them or calling them stupid.
4) Include a "to be fair" balancing point if you can do so truthfully. For instance, if you're criticizing the Democrats, point out where the Republicans are also wrong on something.
Of course, none of this would be necessary to keep my karma positive if I were left-leaning, but that's okay. Communities should be allowed to lean whichever way they want, and there's nothing wrong with dissenters having to work harder to fit in.
You can sort of assume that everyone on here has (a) played this game before and (b) already seen the day's talking points on the rest of social media. Re-litigating that here is just a waste of time. Your (2) is absolutely critical here; the bystanders will upvote posts that have links to good sources that tell them things they didn't already know. Which is good! That's what the site is for!
Also remember: you can't convert the person you're arguing with. But it's the (invisible) audience who are handing out the scores.
And I agree that without doing these things, some opinions are more likely to draw down-votes than others. TBH I indeed probably am more likely to down-vote a badly made point if it's one with which I disagree. But really, everyone should be doing these things, regardless of karma concerns.
Oh waits it’s read the article…