I very much dislike the discord move; no archive.org / publicly available history. So much interesting and valuable stuff is discussed and a year later they close the channel/topic/even server and gone it is. Worthless.
To the point some people created a satire website called n-gate some years before just to laugh at HN. And for sure for every top place popular HN thread right now there will be a lot of people posting the link just to laugh at the comments.
/r/pcmasterrace still has 8 million members and /r/buildapc has 6 million. The viewer counts for these subreddits have only increased even in recent months.
HN still has excellent discussions whether its Ask HN or links
Was there a problem that begged asking the question in the first place?
I thought the post stated it as concisely as possible. 3rd party clients are being shutdown on reddit, Twitter is, well... doing something. HN isn't an "ask forum", or really a forum at all. I have my personal opinions about the subreddits you mentioned but I won't presume to imply anything that the OP wasn't meaning to say.
Sometimes people get lost on the internet when things shift and that appears to be what happened here. OP is just searching for some new outlets. It's a question that will certainly come up again as long as the internet continues to change.
You might even find yourself asking it one day.
To me, Hacker News has the best demographics for such discussions (more mature, less recurring jokes, and more importantly most of people here are in good faith), BUT discussion type threads are very unpopular here compared to news-based thread: you can barely get any replies.
Burn. I should log and get some work done.
Not everybody has time for that and you won't get all the information out there, but for me it's been always very enlightening meeting smart and knowledable people for a beer a talk. Usually such discussions don't end in heated debates where everybody walks away miserable, but switch to other unrelated topics or simply end when everything useful is ssaid.
I've had great success with hackerspaces and other off work meetups. Not all night hackathons anymore but just a few people spending a relaxing evening talking about tech and other stuff. If it's informal enough with no expectation of attendance it also works for people with families and other obligations.
It would be cool to have a place like usenet to discuss these things. I don't want to install a thousand shitware apps, or use 10 different sites, just to talk to people. Was much easier to just cast a post into the ether and wait for replies. Reddit IMO is probably the lowest quality discussion zone and having my posts mined by AI for profit really bothers me.
That said, we can’t really talk about computers all the time. There’s only so much one can say about computers, therefore it becomes inevitable that we pass the time in between computer topics by discussing other subjects, but always from pro-computer type perspectives. Or even anti-computer perspectives, which are still computer related. The one thing we don’t seem to tolerate here is tech illiterates and magical thinking.
This may be a pessimistic take, but computer stuff I believe has lost the allure that it once had, and here is why I think so:
At one point, computer stuff meant being a hacker, having the hacker ethic, which personally to me translated into figuring out how stuff worked and putting it together to do something useful. And, "something useful" to me meant creating something and showing it off to other people. I still remember in high school when I hacked together a paint program in some interpreted language that had built-in primitive graphics. Computer-related stuff meant also doing good things for the world, like transmitting useful information over the internet and discussing things.
Nowadays, "computer stuff" is a lot different. Yeah, computers have gotten way more powerful, but computer stuff is now 99% about commoditizing and big-tech abstracting everything away into a process that is just about selling junk people don't need and manipulating the basic psychological processes of human beings for the sake of their own growth. It's about behemoth, high-level abstractions that take away the basic joy of learning, and the main philosophy that pervades computers today is that they are a tool to supply sugar-level media consumption in return for commercial engagement.
Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and others are the result of a late-stage technological development fuelled only by greed, and it's left the computer landscape soulless, metallic, and empty. Unfortunately, people became aware of just how commercializable computers were and we've milked it dry like a cow that needs to be pumped full of drugs to keep going.
So no thanks. I left computer science as my job this year, and while I still enjoy writing a cool algorithm in Python, I'm much happier for it and don't talk about computers any more.
I know it's a comedy site, but often people and mods get angry because you don't agree to the same "eat the rich" mob mentality.
US politics has ruined the Internet, and I would like that as far away from my software talk. If a place is politicised, I'd rather have good old anarchism which works well with anti-censorship/cryptography discussion and hacker mentality, than anything on both sides of the political spectrum which turn people into mindless followers.
Lots of people have complained about moderation there but I think it's just a case of avoid the designated spam areas, and don't post nothing.
The latter part is how the HN community tends to self-curate comments anyway.
- culture
- rant
- privacy
I think those ones are usually full of people saying the same stuff over and over again.
Edit: got one (two actually), thanks forks!
Edit: sent to hi@
Nowadays, companies exist to increase their stock value so their managers get bigger bonuses. You don't get more stock by being better to your customers: ruthlessly firing people also increases your stock value. Putting users first might make your company look not worthy of investment: the market selects for stockholder-first companies.
Give users control of their data and privacy, moving away from large backend infrastructure, and providing better value to the user. With the bonus of having a more enjoyable development environment and an excited community.
You're quite right, but your subsequent argument can be summed up much more simply: Computing became mainstream.
Mainstream things aren't fun. Mainstream things are mundane.
>Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and others are the result of a late-stage technological development fuelled only by greed,
Besides Google and contemporaries like Amazon, those companies like Microsoft and IBM are the companies who led the way during the Computing == Hacker age that you feel nostalgia for.
Obviously companies can and will change over time, but to mindlessly hand wave them away as "greed" is the epitome of rose-colored glasses.
Mainstream things are mundane in the way that McDonalds is mundane and yet food as a whole is not.
The real problem is that users have been locked out of their own devices and data to such an extent that you can't easily make your own and share it with your friends, and people are disenchanted with years of eating nothing but Big Macs.
What are you doing now, if I may ask?
A lot of this was a consequence of low interest rates. Money didn't come from selling things to customers, it came from selling a story to investors. Now that interest rates are finally above zero it's harder to raise money from investors and businesses will start to remember what it's like to make money from satisfying customers.
And the incumbents who don't realize this may be in for a surprise. What do you do when your business strategy is based on buying up the competition with cheap money and then the cheap money dries up and the competition is willing to sacrifice margins or disavow customer-hostile misfeatures in order to get your market share?
- r/programminglanguages - r/lisp - r/functionalprogramming
Which is why the text of those posts is pre-faded, so the longer they are, the more painful they are to read, and the less likely they are to be engaged with. News posts also get more visibility than text posts.
If you'll be penalized for saying something people disagree with, you won't say it, or you'll say it and I'll be downvoted until it's hidden. This leads to HN threads usually being dominated with a few majority opinions and any real discussion being killed-off or buried.
This is basically the same as Reddit. If you want real discussion you often need to sort by controversial.
At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
I believe you get access to downvotes after 500 karma, and only for up to a day after the comment was made
I've seen this happen with multiple subreddits. HN is also at risk for this, but it's a niche corner of the internet, so it would surprise me if there are ever enough non-assimilated individuals coming in at once to truly endanger the community.
I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
It is annoying that people spread misinformation, but a quick scan of a user's comment history often gives a good indication of their credibility.
finding any reasons to contradict to parent commentor and win the arguments at any costs.
Sure this place looks friendlier now, but it feels empty as most competent people had already left.
Once you get a way to navigate federated things, the navigation becomes the core of the experience.
The crux of the internet experience is that Quantity is a quality in itself. Once the navigation window becomes core, and handles the highest volumes, it’s easier to streamline monetary rewards to a single place.
Federated communities that work better with whatever navigator/window/Tool is created do well, and will have more resources to expand and gain users.
But moderation of a popular forum is a Sisyphean task, and worse, it seems that gravity increases over time in this form of the task, making rolling the ball up the hill increasingly hard and not just endless. That sounds bleak but I think the solution is that eventually all forums must be abandoned, however good they once were, and new places found. I expect this to happen with HN eventually too, even though it's had a pretty good run so far.
Well, I predicted them at the time (and IIRC commented as much), and that's been borne out.
> I have been in many irc channels that were extremely harsh on cluebies, but all the flaming turned into a sport by itself, and drove away from the content. The same goes for usenet, many subreddits, and Twitter.
You can definitely go too far. Kind is better than harsh all else being equal, and you should never reward cruelty for its own sake.
> I think HN is doing amazingly well after such a long time. It would be guesswork to say how it would end up with a less kind moderator. I for one would have left, but perhaps I'm too kind.
For me HN inherited an amazing community that has since gradually declined, and almost all visible moderator interventions have had a negative impact. I certainly think e.g. nudging out Chris Stucchio did more harm than good.