> 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.
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.
Just out of curiosity I cheked my list for flagged comments and posts. There are a few comments I flagged, and they've been marked dead, correctly.
But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.
I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:
> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments
The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.
So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.
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 apparently flagged 6 articles and 1 post by accident.
That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.
Wow I checked mine and had about 20. I've never intentionally flagged a submission as far as I can remember and none of these were even close to flag worthy.
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.
It also forces you to make sure you write so that you are understood. This gets rid of a lot of writers block because you are determined to make sure you are understood, almost like a mission. Otherwise, this place doesn’t work. It would be a giant LinkedIn showboat-off.
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
Yes but I feel like HN does have some lore from time to time as well.
I had seen a recent comment where the commenter shares his personal experience with the author and how they helped him in a stackoverflow question and how it led to their startup and saved their asses.
Oh yeah just remembered, it was nadernx (sorry if the name wasn't right), and people in the thread were asking if it saved their asses or what they did and they said that they donated to patreon
Like, its not following exactly per se but it was a discussion outside of the post itself which was about python. And it was great.
I feel like this could be an example for the parent comment as well as how I personally feel like HN is more social networky than say wikipedia but not at twitter or trad social media level I guess.
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
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.
I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.
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?
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.
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
Flagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to [dead]).
Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded.
Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
Even if it takes multiple flags to kill an article, that's still vulnerable to brigading. So it takes 10 flags to censor a topic instead of 1? Fine, me and my 9 sockpuppet accounts will flag the article. Or just 10 like-minded people independently deciding to abuse flag as a mega-downvote.
Two changes to flagging would really improve it, and cause it to not be used casually as a mega-downvote: 1. Flag-powered users should only get like 1-2 flags a week. 2. Flagging should be attributable back to the user who flagged it. If you feel you're doing the site a good service by flagging trash articles, then you should have no problem with publicly linking your name to the flagging action.
A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty quickly, often for much less.
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
I mean honestly if you're new to most sites and your first instinct is to delve into contentious political issues you should probably be shown the exit pretty quick.
Oh! didn't know that bear blog could set up custom CSS but I was wondering about that actually as well!
Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now
I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol.
I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :)
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
> I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product
Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.
There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.
Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet
I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.
Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)
Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
If a submission becomes popular, more people see it. The more people see it the more people are likely to interact by upvoting, commenting, or flagging.
Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.
Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.
HN is to me second to Reddit. I used lobsters for awhile and that was nice. More specific communities tend to be gold. RPGCodex comes to mind.
Downsides of HN:
- Very limited subject matter
- Very limited pool of subject matter experts
- Lack of corrective mechanism when it comes to bad information and disinformation. Fallacious thinking and conclusions spread and remain because of the aforementioned lack of experts
- Signalling, in groups, and guidelines enforced on whim
- Extreme groupthink at times
I want my SNR on these kinds of sites to work like an op amp, not like a transistor whose control circuitry is soldered on so badly it only makes a connection every so often and is floating for most of the time.
Reddit gets talked down all the time but it has far more SMEs across far more subjects that to me, as a hacker and tinkerer and doer, I just find far more useful and informational. Often times I’m in dialogue with founders and makers of the thing I’m asking about. That’s just a fact, it can’t be disagreed with because Reddit is defacto way more diverse and has a far, far larger member base. Even if there are more loud miscreants, there are also way more knowledgeable people than HN attracts. And they give AMAs.
The only good part of HN to me is the simplicity of the layout to get to the news that I care about. But the actual commentary is most often noise and conjecture. Again, someone with hands on knowledge weighting in is a rarity. So I mostly look for articles I’m interested in.
When I want to learn something new and I’m looking for advice and a starting point, I turn to Reddit sometimes. But never to HN.
I’ve been reading HN since 2010 or so. HN has lost a lot of good posters over the years due to a combination of subject matter and the discourse of people here. Some publicly announced their departures, others just left. You can find blog posts of such that are never even posted on here (but why would they be).
> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
There's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
>You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
For real, the downvote access threshold is way too high. If I wanted to get points, I could just join the circle jerk for a while. But actual curiosity is not rewarded.
The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
Whenever one of those rare topics comes up where I consider myself a subject matter expert (or where I have non-public knowledge), very often the top comments and the threads getting the most "action" sound HN-smart, but are totally factually wrong. Extrapolating this, I can only assume that the top comments on other topics are also usually wrong and/or contradict actual experts.
> The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence...
Three thoughts...
1. I really enjoy seeing what the extremely technically accomplished users think about non-technical topics.
2. I like that only my accumulated knowledge of their usernames allows me to easily connect the dots for thought #1.
3. It is fun when you come to appreciate someone's thinking on many non-technical topics then later, on a technical thread, realize that user is the person behind $SOMETHING_BIG. But that fun relies on accumulating #2.
You can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
I miss the old HN,
the bold HN,
straight from the code HN,
real founder soul HN.
I hate the new HN,
the crew HN,
the think alike echo HN,
only talk about LLMs HN.
What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
Not to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout.
Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.
Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
I'm mostly happy with the minimalistic approach that HN takes. Two minor things I'd like to see addressed though:
- 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.
> 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.
Same with hide. Which is about worse since it disappears. I often figure out I've hidden things weeks after the fact.
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.
just unflag it if you flag it?
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 haven’t flagged anything but just checked and yeah. Now unflagging the wrongly flagged.
Just out of curiosity I cheked my list for flagged comments and posts. There are a few comments I flagged, and they've been marked dead, correctly.
But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.
I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:
> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments
The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.
So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.
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 apparently flagged 6 articles and 1 post by accident.
That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.
Wow I checked mine and had about 20. I've never intentionally flagged a submission as far as I can remember and none of these were even close to flag worthy.
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.
Blogging?
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.
It also forces you to make sure you write so that you are understood. This gets rid of a lot of writers block because you are determined to make sure you are understood, almost like a mission. Otherwise, this place doesn’t work. It would be a giant LinkedIn showboat-off.
I write a blog sometimes - iambateman.com/articles - and it’s great. But for daily writing I find it challenging to keep it up.
As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
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
AskHistorians is still pretty great too.
Turns out gatekeeping works
Absolutely. Why wouldn't it? All the useful forums are "gatekept" in some fashion; AskHistorians just has an especially legible set of gates.
What was that weightlifting sub that worshiped "Brodin" and "The Church Of (Something? Maybe Iron?)"
I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with a kinda-social-network-ish-in-the-broadest-possible-definition attached.
HN actually is a social network.
I don’t think its a social network — it’s content-focused, not person-focused
You upvote stories on Hacker News and Reddit, as opposed to following people
Yes but I feel like HN does have some lore from time to time as well. I had seen a recent comment where the commenter shares his personal experience with the author and how they helped him in a stackoverflow question and how it led to their startup and saved their asses. Oh yeah just remembered, it was nadernx (sorry if the name wasn't right), and people in the thread were asking if it saved their asses or what they did and they said that they donated to patreon
Like, its not following exactly per se but it was a discussion outside of the post itself which was about python. And it was great.
I feel like this could be an example for the parent comment as well as how I personally feel like HN is more social networky than say wikipedia but not at twitter or trad social media level I guess.
It's wild to see two people in a row, one that's saying Wikipedia isn't a social network and then that HN/Reddit aren't.
Maybe we should all stop trying to narrowly class what's allowed to be a social network?
I think a more precise definition of social network would be nice, actually, considering how much hubbub is being made about them.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
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
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.
> The ability to save comments
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
> * 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.
To favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click "favourite" just after "flag".
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Wow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern.
Good to know though, thank you!
I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.
* sort by controversial
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 also interested in hiding AI posts. Is anybody doing this with success that can share what they use?
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.
That's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page here.
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've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.
it's basically what digg should've been
careful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the natives
See also: the last paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Lol, thanks! :)
But I wasn't saying it was "turning into reddit", just saying how to explain it to an outsider.
It's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people to post anonymously.
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
Do you have any examples. I don't think I would classify more than a handful posts as political myself
> I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging.
I think your ability to flag should be immediately taken away for this reason.
Flagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to [dead]).
Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded.
Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
Even if it takes multiple flags to kill an article, that's still vulnerable to brigading. So it takes 10 flags to censor a topic instead of 1? Fine, me and my 9 sockpuppet accounts will flag the article. Or just 10 like-minded people independently deciding to abuse flag as a mega-downvote.
Two changes to flagging would really improve it, and cause it to not be used casually as a mega-downvote: 1. Flag-powered users should only get like 1-2 flags a week. 2. Flagging should be attributable back to the user who flagged it. If you feel you're doing the site a good service by flagging trash articles, then you should have no problem with publicly linking your name to the flagging action.
A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty quickly, often for much less.
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
I mean honestly if you're new to most sites and your first instinct is to delve into contentious political issues you should probably be shown the exit pretty quick.
Just want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making this a great virtual space, everyone!
Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.
Oh! didn't know that bear blog could set up custom CSS but I was wondering about that actually as well!
Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now
I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol.
I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :)
[1]: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
> Ycombinator is a business don't forget.
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
> I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product
Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.
There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.
Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet
I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
> I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all
Why do you think they're not at least tied to help eachother?
The board of Ycombinator may not be here moderating but do you think they're independent?
Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.
Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)
Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
If a submission becomes popular, more people see it. The more people see it the more people are likely to interact by upvoting, commenting, or flagging.
Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.
Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.
It’s a fashionable opinion to dunk on HN nowadays, but frankly there is nothing else like it, or even close.
(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
HN is to me second to Reddit. I used lobsters for awhile and that was nice. More specific communities tend to be gold. RPGCodex comes to mind.
Downsides of HN:
- Very limited subject matter
- Very limited pool of subject matter experts
- Lack of corrective mechanism when it comes to bad information and disinformation. Fallacious thinking and conclusions spread and remain because of the aforementioned lack of experts
- Signalling, in groups, and guidelines enforced on whim
- Extreme groupthink at times
I want my SNR on these kinds of sites to work like an op amp, not like a transistor whose control circuitry is soldered on so badly it only makes a connection every so often and is floating for most of the time.
Reddit gets talked down all the time but it has far more SMEs across far more subjects that to me, as a hacker and tinkerer and doer, I just find far more useful and informational. Often times I’m in dialogue with founders and makers of the thing I’m asking about. That’s just a fact, it can’t be disagreed with because Reddit is defacto way more diverse and has a far, far larger member base. Even if there are more loud miscreants, there are also way more knowledgeable people than HN attracts. And they give AMAs.
The only good part of HN to me is the simplicity of the layout to get to the news that I care about. But the actual commentary is most often noise and conjecture. Again, someone with hands on knowledge weighting in is a rarity. So I mostly look for articles I’m interested in.
When I want to learn something new and I’m looking for advice and a starting point, I turn to Reddit sometimes. But never to HN.
I’ve been reading HN since 2010 or so. HN has lost a lot of good posters over the years due to a combination of subject matter and the discourse of people here. Some publicly announced their departures, others just left. You can find blog posts of such that are never even posted on here (but why would they be).
Cool. I don't disagree.
Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
There's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
>You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
Consider making article submissions.
Rather not considering how unfairly I already am treated on this platform.
For real, the downvote access threshold is way too high. If I wanted to get points, I could just join the circle jerk for a while. But actual curiosity is not rewarded.
The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
Whenever one of those rare topics comes up where I consider myself a subject matter expert (or where I have non-public knowledge), very often the top comments and the threads getting the most "action" sound HN-smart, but are totally factually wrong. Extrapolating this, I can only assume that the top comments on other topics are also usually wrong and/or contradict actual experts.
> The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence...
Three thoughts...
1. I really enjoy seeing what the extremely technically accomplished users think about non-technical topics.
2. I like that only my accumulated knowledge of their usernames allows me to easily connect the dots for thought #1.
3. It is fun when you come to appreciate someone's thinking on many non-technical topics then later, on a technical thread, realize that user is the person behind $SOMETHING_BIG. But that fun relies on accumulating #2.
You can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
Things to add to hackernews:
Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
…if you wanted to destroy hackernews
Anything you'd do on Reddit don't do here :). Occasionally a Reddit like humour is allowed though.
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
>All major news stories break here.
No, they don't.
This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
Hah this is gold.
...and there was the A.I. posts.
[dead]
What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
Not to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout.
Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.
Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?