IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places.
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.
Interesting, for me Hacker News is just about being reasonable. Consequently, I find all other online places so far unreasonable. I am on Reddit, but honestly, it’s more of an anthropology thing rather than anything else. Sometimes I see if I can vibe with the subreddits, and I can. The problem is usually I feel awful because a good faith discussion generally can’t be held. To me, vibing in many subreddits just means promoting values that I don’t actually stand behind.
Can definitely understand that... Most of my Reddit use is limited to a few more technical subreddits that are focused on older tech. I can't stomach going anywhere near the political subs, for example.
What's been a learning experience for me is seeing Reddit, HN, Facebook, discords, private slacks, and the mainstream media discuss some thing I went through, and the different faces they all have about it. Reddit was just a barrel of negativity about it. So was half of TikTok. Facebook however was mostly full of positivity and happiness, but obviously my Facebook feed is curated to be my Facebook friends. Maybe it's something about the "anyone can join" aspect that both enhances but also destroys the community?
In reditt, the exact same comment can give you 1K upvotes along with lots of gratz/you-are-the-man/misc-admiration replies or 1K downvotes/you-suck/you-are-a-retard/misc-hate replies along with a moderator/shadow ban, depending on which sub-reditt you are in.
I wonder how much of the difference is just because HN doesn't allow you to post / display images inline like Reddit does, forcing users to engage with the content (written or video) rather than just reflexively upvote low-effort content.
That's a relatively new development. The cultural aspects that you're describing were already in place (entrenched) well before Reddit integrated that feature.
I think that is the bigger difference, I agree, but I think the format and media involved still have an effect on the type of discussion that takes place
I would say that was true until recently (have basically been lurking for a decade), but this year in particular it feels like HN has gone full Reddit.
More and more topics somehow devolve into emotional political fights instead of intellectual debates.
I had some political fights here recently, but I also had some insights and genuine discussion even from viewpoints I find entirely unreasonable, which I think I wouldn't even have in real life.
Yeah, memeing on HN makes about as little sense as trying to have a frank conversation or indulging in a contrarian view on a hive mind subreddit. Not that it can’t be done, but requires so many defensive qualifiers that it takes all the fun out.
The most difficult thing to protect against is the down-voting of posts you disagree with on HN. That’s the culture of Reddit, but it’s here on HN more and more.
This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page.
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:
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.
I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :(
Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
Oh totally I wasn't suggesting that as a direct replacement but more an alternate approach and that privacy factor is important to consider. Apologies if that wasn't clear. Personally I don't check that often so the occasional connection on click isn't serious vs the complexities of adding another extension even if it's a neat one.
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 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.
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. :)
I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts?
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.
Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up.
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!
Hey, was checking out the site and stumbled across a small bug: head to https://scour.ing/browse/feeds/popular while logged out, press the + button on a feed, and it breaks the browser back button. Happens on FF and Chrome.
TBH, _I_ was also genuinely surprised when I made the initial MVP of Scour, pointed it at HN Newest, and right away was finding great posts with only 1-3 points.
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.
Just created an account, added 3 of my interests pertaining to what I am working on right now; instantly found 3-4 articles that gave me actual, actionable insight on what I wanted to do.
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.
> Finally, demographics matter. HN is dominated by American tech professionals. That can tilt discourse toward elitism, rationalism, and a kind of intellectual performance, creating an echo chamber
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 think the main difference between HN and other forums is the moderation. I have been a moderator and I know what difficult and thankless task it can be. Thank you Dang.
Other forums are good and have moderators. But moderators absolutely make a difference, disproportionately to the amount of moderation actually done. Aside from overt actions, a moderator imposes a flexible but noticeable ethos on a group's debate.
Love the article. I’m here to register as a “randomly scroll the front page” kind of user.
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.
For me, HN is distinct and special because (despite its scale) it doesn't reflect the internet. HN, as a discussion forum, has its own distinct norms, "vibe" and specialisations which give it value. Places like Facebook and Reddit are so large that they (kind of) reflect the whole internet, with all of huge variation in expectations and behaviour that represents.
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.
I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that there's been a quantitative difference in their occurence.
I've "felt like hn is declining" many times in the last fifteen years. Notably, when I find a whole page of slanted, snarky bad-faith posts of various sorts.
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.
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
It isn't new users who are making most low-quality comments. It's mostly people who've been here for years and should know better.
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.
HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response.
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?
An unspoken inference from when you've made posts like this is that HN has largely only changed in terms of scale, that the overall community culture has been relatively static. What are the indicators that would catch your attention to indicate a cultural shift, whether they are improving the site or diminishing it?
>the servers that run HN are surprisingly modest: just two machines with quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 CPUs, running FreeBSD
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.
(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.
> a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad
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.
Having RTFA, I am happy to discover the rss feeds options. Sadly, they do not seem to match how I prefer things: checking yesterday’s top posts.
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.
> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide?
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.
I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
> There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect"
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.
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.
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.
Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use.
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.
Only occasionally. I think this was more true 10 years ago when the pool of commenters and topics on the site was smaller.
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.
> I care a lot more what smart people think about the articles than the articles themselves.
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.
Reading the comments on non-tech submissions that a person has some basic knowledge of should make them aware that the vast majority of comments are simply confidently pronounced ignorance. (This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.) Then they should start to notice that, to almost as high a percentage, the comments on tech are just as much confidently pronounced ignorance.
You see, I disagree. In all fairness, I am not in the health care industry but I have had a lot of bad experiences trying to get subtle health problems diagnosed and have done a ton of personal research that has greatly improved my life, despite the healthcare industry not helping me. Hearing about the research that other smart, determined individuals have done is always interesting to me. As a matter of fact, it was a random comment from someone on HN that pointed me in the right direction to help with my problem.
I have learned that a determined laymen can sometimes outperform an average industry professional in all kinds of areas.
> This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.
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.
Absolutely. Anything nutrition or fitness related too. The quackery floodgates open every time! Something about these topics brings all the laymen "dOiNg ThEiR oWn ReSeArCh" out of the woodwork.
this. the HN discussion on subjects outside of computing and startups is awful. When it gets to anything else I know something about it's all overconfident sophomore bullshitters proclaiming and being deep. see especially health, aerospace, and economics
The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. 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.
I don't like the word "karma" because it's often, for better in worse, group affinity (and we are most often trajectories rather than pure insight). I often find minority views and unexplored paths interesting, even when they're obviously wrong.
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.
Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousands of points.
I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 is the comment? Barring some catastrophic bug that we never heard about, those posts wouldn't have subtracted more than a few points from your account karma. Your other posts in the thread also got some downvotes, so they would have added a few more. But it couldn't have been a thousand or even a hundred because there were only a few dozen votes on those posts in total, and many were upvotes.
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.)
Thank you dang! I guess it felt like a thousand lost points cumulatively in the moment, but knowing some people, especially such a thoughtful person as yourself, appreciate diverse posts makes a high karma score wonderfully inconsequential.
My karma gets hit for having views against green energy and conservative leaning economics. There is a problem here with high karma correlating with being in the same echo chamber as everyone else.
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...
There is a problem here with high karma correlating with being in the same echo chamber as everyone else.
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.
I find that following a few rules helps to keep my heterodox views from hurting my karma too much.
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.
Those are great points. As well as backing up facts with references, I would add, don't state an opinion without facts and reasoning to back it up.
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.
The delay timer option for submitting posts on HN's user configuration page is also helpful for that. Sometimes I will find myself making a post but then realize after a couple of minutes that it's not really worthwhile and then delete it before it ever becomes visible to other users.
IMO one of the things that makes HN so special is the "culture" here. Having been on here since 2018, most folks here are acutely aware of the issues that other sites like Reddit have and we all collectively work to preserve this space so it doesn't become like the other places.
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.
Interesting, for me Hacker News is just about being reasonable. Consequently, I find all other online places so far unreasonable. I am on Reddit, but honestly, it’s more of an anthropology thing rather than anything else. Sometimes I see if I can vibe with the subreddits, and I can. The problem is usually I feel awful because a good faith discussion generally can’t be held. To me, vibing in many subreddits just means promoting values that I don’t actually stand behind.
Can definitely understand that... Most of my Reddit use is limited to a few more technical subreddits that are focused on older tech. I can't stomach going anywhere near the political subs, for example.
What's been a learning experience for me is seeing Reddit, HN, Facebook, discords, private slacks, and the mainstream media discuss some thing I went through, and the different faces they all have about it. Reddit was just a barrel of negativity about it. So was half of TikTok. Facebook however was mostly full of positivity and happiness, but obviously my Facebook feed is curated to be my Facebook friends. Maybe it's something about the "anyone can join" aspect that both enhances but also destroys the community?
> Reddit was just a barrel of negativity about it.
Oh, I can relate to that one.
In reditt, the exact same comment can give you 1K upvotes along with lots of gratz/you-are-the-man/misc-admiration replies or 1K downvotes/you-suck/you-are-a-retard/misc-hate replies along with a moderator/shadow ban, depending on which sub-reditt you are in.
I wonder how much of the difference is just because HN doesn't allow you to post / display images inline like Reddit does, forcing users to engage with the content (written or video) rather than just reflexively upvote low-effort content.
> display images inline like Reddit does
That's a relatively new development. The cultural aspects that you're describing were already in place (entrenched) well before Reddit integrated that feature.
It's because of the people who come here. You might post about a project and discover that the person who made the thing is replying to you.
I think that is the bigger difference, I agree, but I think the format and media involved still have an effect on the type of discussion that takes place
Agreed, though the culture doesn't persist by accident. Without ongoing moderation (which has been excellent), I believe it would eventually be lost.
I would say that was true until recently (have basically been lurking for a decade), but this year in particular it feels like HN has gone full Reddit.
More and more topics somehow devolve into emotional political fights instead of intellectual debates.
I had some political fights here recently, but I also had some insights and genuine discussion even from viewpoints I find entirely unreasonable, which I think I wouldn't even have in real life.
The insanity of US politics has more and more real impacts and is impossible to ignore, sadly. It's the forest fires of the tech scene.
Just checked my homepage, and realized that I created an account in May 2008! 17 years of Hacker News. Practically a lifetime. Time flies.
If you really wanna trip, use the HN API and find some of your earliest comments and go read them
Is there a hidden parameter to stop the paging for your comments?
Yeah, memeing on HN makes about as little sense as trying to have a frank conversation or indulging in a contrarian view on a hive mind subreddit. Not that it can’t be done, but requires so many defensive qualifiers that it takes all the fun out.
The most difficult thing to protect against is the down-voting of posts you disagree with on HN. That’s the culture of Reddit, but it’s here on HN more and more.
You just made me look at how long I've been coming here. I'm still internally struggling with whether that is something I needed to know!
Didn't realize it'd been 13 years for me, and I felt like I came into this space relatively late. lol.
This post recommends the Newsit extension to view Hacker News discussion associated with a page.
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!
I use Chrome as my main browser and was going to ask if there was a Chrome version. I was sad to see there's a technical reason you couldn't make it work :(
https://github.com/jstrieb/hackernews-button/issues/1
Probably worth me revisiting! Web tech has changed a bit since I last investigated this in 2021, and I'm also not sure if I considered options like IndexedDB at the time.
Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions:
That sends every page you check to Algolia's API, which is what jstrieb's extension is designed to avoid.
Oh totally I wasn't suggesting that as a direct replacement but more an alternate approach and that privacy factor is important to consider. Apologies if that wasn't clear. Personally I don't check that often so the occasional connection on click isn't serious vs the complexities of adding another extension even if it's a neat one.
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 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.
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. :)
It sounds like both the extension and bookmarklet don't send every page you visit but do send every page you check.
Can't you use https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=DOMAIN and not send to a third-party?
I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts?
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.
Developer of Scour here. Really glad to hear you're enjoying it!
Comments like these are very motivating, so thank you!
Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up.
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.
Hearing this makes my day :)
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!
Hey, was checking out the site and stumbled across a small bug: head to https://scour.ing/browse/feeds/popular while logged out, press the + button on a feed, and it breaks the browser back button. Happens on FF and Chrome.
Thanks for the heads up! I'll get that fixed
TBH, _I_ was also genuinely surprised when I made the initial MVP of Scour, pointed it at HN Newest, and right away was finding great posts with only 1-3 points.
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.
Just created an account, added 3 of my interests pertaining to what I am working on right now; instantly found 3-4 articles that gave me actual, actionable insight on what I wanted to do.
Great work!
That’s excellent to hear!
Let me know if you have any other feedback as you use it more!
This is a really interesting idea.
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.
> Finally, demographics matter. HN is dominated by American tech professionals. That can tilt discourse toward elitism, rationalism, and a kind of intellectual performance, creating an echo chamber
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 think the main difference between HN and other forums is the moderation. I have been a moderator and I know what difficult and thankless task it can be. Thank you Dang.
Other forums are good and have moderators. But moderators absolutely make a difference, disproportionately to the amount of moderation actually done. Aside from overt actions, a moderator imposes a flexible but noticeable ethos on a group's debate.
Love the article. I’m here to register as a “randomly scroll the front page” kind of user.
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
For me, HN is distinct and special because (despite its scale) it doesn't reflect the internet. HN, as a discussion forum, has its own distinct norms, "vibe" and specialisations which give it value. Places like Facebook and Reddit are so large that they (kind of) reflect the whole internet, with all of huge variation in expectations and behaviour that represents.
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.
I think that recently, I've been seeing more snarky and dismissive messages than compared with several months ago. They are always very brief, gotcha-style replies. Is it just me? It sometimes makes me doubt if there isn't a coordinated attempt at destabilizing the otherwise orderly (no doubt after some heroic wrangling by dang & co.) discourse taking place. Those posts get downvoted rather fast, but I feel that there's been a quantitative difference in their occurence.
I've "felt like hn is declining" many times in the last fifteen years. Notably, when I find a whole page of slanted, snarky bad-faith posts of various sorts.
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.
No conspiracy is needed. HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response. This behavior naturally spreads outside of hot button topics to ordinary submissions.
It isn't new users who are making most low-quality comments. It's mostly people who've been here for years and should know better.
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.
HN is attracting more and more new users who enjoy making low quality posts on hot button topics, which also triggers other previously well-behaved users to make low quality posts in response.
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?
I think you guys are succumbing to a nostalgia-filtered view of HN's past.
An unspoken inference from when you've made posts like this is that HN has largely only changed in terms of scale, that the overall community culture has been relatively static. What are the indicators that would catch your attention to indicate a cultural shift, whether they are improving the site or diminishing it?
Rose colored glasses are just a manual version of f.lux
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.
>snarky comments
Ive noticed this as well.
>the servers that run HN are surprisingly modest: just two machines with quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v4 CPUs, running FreeBSD
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.
I wonder what the uptime numbers are on the HN machines.
This is my personal and minimal guide to HN (for whoever might be interested):
to be added as filter in uBlock Origin.(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)
My uBlock Origin rules use almost identical syntax (but there are a lot more of them, since I hide stories from TV news and clickbait sites):
https://pifke.org/hn.txt
(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.
I may need to add this myself... I get flagged at work every time I hit an AI website regardless of if it's a blog article or not.
The best tool I've found for reading HN is this front page summary:
https://hackernews.betacat.io/
So it's like HN but with GDPR popovers and interstitial ads.
Yikes. I've never seen any of those. I guess uBlock is doing the heavy lifting.
> a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad
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.
Having RTFA, I am happy to discover the rss feeds options. Sadly, they do not seem to match how I prefer things: checking yesterday’s top posts.
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.
> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide?
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.
I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.
> There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect"
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.
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.
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.
Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use.
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.
Only occasionally. I think this was more true 10 years ago when the pool of commenters and topics on the site was smaller.
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.
> I care a lot more what smart people think about the articles than the articles themselves.
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!
Reading the comments on non-tech submissions that a person has some basic knowledge of should make them aware that the vast majority of comments are simply confidently pronounced ignorance. (This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.) Then they should start to notice that, to almost as high a percentage, the comments on tech are just as much confidently pronounced ignorance.
You see, I disagree. In all fairness, I am not in the health care industry but I have had a lot of bad experiences trying to get subtle health problems diagnosed and have done a ton of personal research that has greatly improved my life, despite the healthcare industry not helping me. Hearing about the research that other smart, determined individuals have done is always interesting to me. As a matter of fact, it was a random comment from someone on HN that pointed me in the right direction to help with my problem.
I have learned that a determined laymen can sometimes outperform an average industry professional in all kinds of areas.
> This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.
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.
Absolutely. Anything nutrition or fitness related too. The quackery floodgates open every time! Something about these topics brings all the laymen "dOiNg ThEiR oWn ReSeArCh" out of the woodwork.
He users and tech people are biased against doctors? Wha? That doesn’t sound right
Here's an example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32534550
this. the HN discussion on subjects outside of computing and startups is awful. When it gets to anything else I know something about it's all overconfident sophomore bullshitters proclaiming and being deep. see especially health, aerospace, and economics
The best comments are at the bottom. I’ve been twaddling here long enough to know what the most upvoted take will be, so unless it’s a personal anecdote it’s not worth reading. 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.
This comment ironically at the top
Not anymore haha
I imagine the author of the parent comment despairing of being upvoted.
There is also a place to find posts which are down-weighted, admin putting their finger on the scale in one way or another.
Show dead in settings here also can have a few gems if you feel like digging for them.
> The best comments are at the bottom.
You clearly don't have the showdead option enabled. ;-)
That was my first reaction but they did address it in their comment.
> 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.
> a few comments above where the apathy and sarcasm start bleeding into grey.
I wouldn't call the dead comments apathetic and sarcastic. They're typically vile and humorless.
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I don't like the word "karma" because it's often, for better in worse, group affinity (and we are most often trajectories rather than pure insight). I often find minority views and unexplored paths interesting, even when they're obviously wrong.
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 thought HN caps negative score at -4?
It does, and has for many years.
Maybe they do now, but I remember losing a lot more than that for that comment. I recall it was just after I made a comment that received a lot of upvotes, which were more than wiped out by having a critical view of the ultimate morality of LoTR. Then again, my "karma" currently at 1066 after 12 years goes up and down by points at a time, so a few points lost will be felt more than for people who have tens of thousands of points.
I assume https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17247823 is the comment? Barring some catastrophic bug that we never heard about, those posts wouldn't have subtracted more than a few points from your account karma. Your other posts in the thread also got some downvotes, so they would have added a few more. But it couldn't have been a thousand or even a hundred because there were only a few dozen votes on those posts in total, and many were upvotes.
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.)
Thank you dang! I guess it felt like a thousand lost points cumulatively in the moment, but knowing some people, especially such a thoughtful person as yourself, appreciate diverse posts makes a high karma score wonderfully inconsequential.
My karma gets hit for having views against green energy and conservative leaning economics. There is a problem here with high karma correlating with being in the same echo chamber as everyone else.
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...
There is a problem here with high karma correlating with being in the same echo chamber as everyone else.
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.
I find that following a few rules helps to keep my heterodox views from hurting my karma too much.
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.
I would add that oblique approaches work better.
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.
This is exactly how I try to operate, and amazingly, it doesn't just work on hacker news, it works in real life!
Those are great points. As well as backing up facts with references, I would add, don't state an opinion without facts and reasoning to back it up.
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.
The delay timer option for submitting posts on HN's user configuration page is also helpful for that. Sometimes I will find myself making a post but then realize after a couple of minutes that it's not really worthwhile and then delete it before it ever becomes visible to other users.
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Rfta? Request for tenancy application?
Oh waits it’s read the article…