[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?
I follow posts from Hacker News using RSS, specifically
https://hnrss.github.io/. It's great to consume posts at my own
pace, but often a discussion is already dead when I participate.
It's an acceptable trade-off to me. But I wonder if others would
also be interested in longer term discussions, and if there could
be a way to have them. I thought about old forums, where old
threads get bumped even if they were created years ago, and
wondered if an hybrid model could be of interest to HN users. Just
a thought, I'm glad to have this site as is. Enjoy your Sunday
everyone!
Author : pnt12
Score : 136 points
Date : 2023-02-05 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
| LunarAurora wrote:
| IMO The best way to encourage this is through better (default)
| notifications. Or, this solution, for a platform with (tens) of
| thousands of users like HN, seems to automatically bring the
| specter of flame war (and intrusion and what else ?)
|
| Is there a middle ground? I don't know. Edit : Daily/Weeky email
| (=slower) updates ?
|
| As for old threads getting bumped, I think this is here
| equivalent to reposting the link (or re-asking). The old thread
| is almost "dead", but this is how it works "in real life
| discussions". So maybe that is not so bad. This is (as a call it)
| a (fast) stream model, where there is no (direct) accumulation :
| it is more twitter than Stack Overflow, more blogs than Wikis.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| More chat than forum, with the exception that the comments stay
| on the Web instead of being hidden in the logs.
|
| Forums and chats do have a solution to too big size : they can
| just split into others (or subforums) once the linear
| discussion becomes unmanageable.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| Yeah. More chat than forum, in the sense that people rarely
| venture to reply on what is older than a day (apart from
| Ask/Show HN; both hang a little longer)
|
| I don't get your solution. It seems to me that HN threads are
| already tree-like.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yes, but they are a bit _too_ easy to split, which means
| that a good chunk of comments end up getting ignored.
|
| I sometimes read the new ones by first reading all of them,
| and later manually scanning every comment newer than X
| hours, but it's tedious.
|
| I guess a system that would automatically hid old comments
| (except their immediate parent) might work ?
| staindk wrote:
| Took me a while to realise there are no "your comment has been
| replied to!" type notifications on HN. Seemed weird to me.
|
| I know there are a couple third-party services that you can
| sign up on to monitor that for you (they email you when someone
| replies to you, AFAIK), but I opted to just go with the flow
| and hit my "threads" link every now and then to see if someone
| has replied to something.
|
| Agreed - built-in, opt-in HN notifs (or easy-to-opt-out) would
| be good to help with what OP is asking about, IMO.
| ww520 wrote:
| The thread discussion ends often because of two things - new
| popular posts pushing old ones off the front page and the lack of
| constant notification. Both are by design and what make HN great.
|
| To encourage longer term discussion without changing the existing
| design, one idea is to add longer term notification to keep the
| engagement on a thread discussion, e.g. a daily summary of the
| responses to my comments coming as a notification. One is not
| constantly bombarded with instant notifications but still have a
| chance to catch up on the responses.
|
| I remember Usenet newsgroups were sync'ed daily via uucp, which
| forced a delayed notification of new responses.
| [deleted]
| digitallyfree wrote:
| This is a Reddit problem as well, even with notifications. In a
| regular forum posts that are replied to are automatically
| "bumped" to the top, thus a thread can go on for years. Whereas
| here even a popular discussion gets buried to the bottom after a
| day or two - for better or for worse.
| ergonaught wrote:
| As a general rule, for me, the barrier-to-entry for online
| commentary is too low for genuinely worthwhile "longer term"
| discussions to occur. The vast majority of responses are
| "automatic" rather than reasoned and thoughtful, even in the
| limited cases where the commenter is otherwise "sufficiently
| competent" to contribute meaningfully.
|
| Shallow, reflexive engagement (especially from a "large" number
| of participants) has no actual value except to platforms needing
| eyeballs for ad revenue, which isn't the HN model. So.
|
| Brought to you by the letters I, M, and O.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I refuse to even add comments to my new projects.
|
| I can't imagine running HN. If I had to run HN and also had to
| deal with 1-n week long flame wars I would delete the database,
| backups, and repo.
|
| The worst part of the modern internet is how often we have to
| come into contact with commenters and moderators. No, I don't
| want to click on a monkey emoji to declare your Discord's
| constitution legally binding.
| ilyt wrote:
| ...yet here you are
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Your point? My point is that HN is fine the way it is.
|
| Plus, it has far fewer people posting one line non-comments
| than other places...
| xyzelement wrote:
| The idea resonates. I remember in the good old days of BBS, there
| was a smaller community of folks having longer range
| conversations on a smaller set of topics.
|
| IIRC the BBS software surfaced threads based on recent replies
| rather than novelty so interesting threads stayed current for
| longer.
|
| It would be hard to replicate and I am not sure how one would
| start but I miss it :)
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| thadt wrote:
| I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet
| for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN
| discussion from years ago and wish I could ask a question, or
| make a comment in that conversation today.
|
| However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a
| fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion
| valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus
| of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that
| concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous
| interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made
| in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet,
| and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational
| for why he made that decision at the time.
|
| Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past
| diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer
| term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us
| less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> you don 't get those spontaneous interactions where someone
| makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of
| software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote
| said software responds with the rational for why he made that
| decision at the time._
|
| Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a
| recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1]
| where someone asks "Any of her descendants here on HN? She had
| 11 and it's been more than half a century now...". Minutes
| later...
|
| _> Hi! I'm her great-great granddaughter. I actually met the
| thru-hiker mentioned in the comment above, Dixie, in October 21
| and we still keep in touch!_
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321521
| dang wrote:
| Yeah, that was great and I added it to the highlights list at
| the time. That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool
| comments - we used to publish them periodically (https://hn.a
| lgolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but it
| was too much work.
|
| Anyone who wants to can see the list:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful
| and tons more are out there, so if anyone finds a post that
| belongs on it, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com. I
| figure this'll be useful for something someday.
| ayewo wrote:
| Would you please add
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/lists so it's easy to find in
| future?
|
| Thank you for all you do, dang.
| Agraillo wrote:
| Your comment inspired... HN is a pool of ideas of "above
| average" quality fighting for the attention of readers in
| evolutionary sense. As in the life they born and die, the
| lifespan is very short, but the "DNA" of the best fitted lives
| somehow through the users passing them to other users.
| mancerayder wrote:
| When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some
| of them exist already in Reddit.
|
| Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that
| Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies
| that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-
| wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight
| modification).
|
| There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overall
| it has a culture of people who _write well_ but their reasoning
| stinks. They have strong opinions and make assertions
| speculatively. I can 't read any real estate investment, market
| or nerdy thread on Reddit without encountering armchair
| bullshitisms from people who happen to write well but don't
| research anything, and respond with hostility when questioned.
|
| So maybe this is my way of saying, don't change HN too much.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| There's a videogame subreddit that frequently downvotes
| comments from top tier players. It has gotten to the point
| where most good players will no longer engage with reddit
| because of the extreme hostility and incompetence.
|
| Top tier players aren't always going to be right about
| everything, but the things for which they often get downvotes
| are absurd.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Just name the subreddit, otherwise we can't do much with your
| comment.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Well, in this case I'm referring to the Heroes of the Storm
| subreddit, but I'm sure it's applicable to other games as
| well.
| [deleted]
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| This perfectly captures my frustration with Reddit. I can't
| stand it these days. It's been eye opening to read about
| technical subjects on Reddit that I personally know a lot about
| only to see heaps of confidently spewed misinformation in the
| comments. Makes me question the validity of everything I read
| where I'm not very knowledgeable. I'm very grateful HN is a lot
| more thoughtful and open to questioning.
| ilyt wrote:
| What's worse the well-written bullshit gets upvoted while the
| actual true answer gets downvoted because "It doesn't sound
| right" to the average visitor. Not that it is any different
| for any other social network tho.
| [deleted]
| JakeAl wrote:
| This has been a challenge in online communities for quite
| sometime. Some approaches I wanted to mention are what
| Metafilter does, which is require people pay to sign up and
| comment, and when they sign up they have to wait 30 days to
| comment. This cuts down a lot of noise and reactionary Twitter
| type trolling. Another I think is worth mentioning is
| r/NeutralPolitics on reddit. They have a pretty strict
| moderation policy that makes for some string signal to noise
| but due to it's heavy handedness I feel like it does not get
| enough different perspectives because the least thought out or
| explored do not get enough attention.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| This year one of my resolutions was to finally give up Reddit
| because I kept recognizing the site frustrating, annoying, or
| disappointing me. Whether intentional or not that seems to be
| the type of content generated there.
| mentos wrote:
| I'd love to see AI that automatically curates the comments so
| that all the 'witty' takes can be collapsed under one
| category. But I think I'm with you in that it's probably just
| time to move on. I've found a lot of my discussions have
| migrated to Discord for better or worse
| testmasterflex wrote:
| Download Apollo and unsubscribe from all mainstream
| subreddits + remove all and popular, is the key.
| z3c0 wrote:
| I did this myself, but it only kicked the can on my
| eventual leaving. Sure, niche subreddits are generally
| better in their content and discussions, but I still
| noticed that the same behaviors end up being rewarded. It's
| the format that's the problem, not the content, and that's
| the one thing shared by all subreddits.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Most subreddits I visit are low volume and haven't
| noticed much difference in behaviour other than
| acceptability of short funny replies. What do you mean
| about the format, isn't it the same as HN (OP link/text
| and comments)?
|
| I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN
| comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so
| there may be something to that _(though I 'd chalk it up
| to becoming more popular/mainstream)_.
| z3c0 wrote:
| HN only works because of supplemental rules and heavy
| moderation, which both look very different on Reddit.
| Even if a subreddit reaches a good set of rules,
| enforcement is usually poor, due both to mods being
| volunteers and a generally negative view towards
| moderation (can you imagine "Mods are gay" flying on HN?)
|
| Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly
| result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds
| value to one's life, and that can make the whole website
| hard to give up. However, after a decade of redditing, I
| never saw one subreddit maintain that momentum once the
| larger audience poured in, which always came as a result
| of the perfect balance. Members of /r/subredditA will
| hear that /r/subredditB is similar but with better
| discourse, and then the wave of rufugees from
| /r/subredditA will pour in, ruining /r/subredditB (eg
| /r/Gaming and /r/Games.)
|
| On HN, if you don't like the rules, you go find a
| different website.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly
| result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds
| value to one's life, and that can make the whole website
| hard to give up.
|
| I would mention /r/credibledefense as a counter example.
| It was a niche subreddit before the Russian invasion of
| Ukraine, in the aftermath got popular, but still managed
| to keep its quality.
|
| But I agree with your general point, it's not a huge
| problem for me, though. Some subreddits get popular and
| thus bad, some new subreddits get created. Reddit's
| relative anarchy is its saving grace, communities can
| split/fork, but still stay within reddit platform.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Isn't "reddit format" essentially exactly the same as the
| "hacker news format"?
|
| Format certainly influences the quality of interactions,
| but there are some other strong factors as well.
| Tycho wrote:
| I use the word _Reddit_ as a pejorative.
|
| "I stopped watching after the second season. The writing had
| become so reddit."
|
| "The steak itself was good but this sauce is a bit reddit."
|
| "Rose Street is a good night out but Raeburn Place is
| completely reddit."
| mynegation wrote:
| I read each of these three examples several times and I still
| have no idea what you meant, outside of general displeasure.
| Maybe this is the point. So in a strange twist of meta your
| examples are way too reddit for me.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex)
|
| I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find
| some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable
| responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general
| vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent
| topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The
| general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes
| are default good, and "rationalists" are the only ones who see
| the world for how it really is. The contrarian superiority is
| becoming vaguely reminiscent of conspiracy theorist circles.
| Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes
| it _feel_ extra truthy, despite being recycled content from
| other domains.
|
| I finally unsubscribed after a series of posts where posters
| wrote at length about their frustrations with dating, blaming
| their failures on women and women's behaviors as if women were
| a foreign species. The straw that broke the camel's back was
| when someone complained about taking women out on dates and not
| receiving sex in return for their effort, which I _assumed_
| would have been readily downvoted and dismissed. Instead, it
| was upvoted (100+ votes) and most of the upvoted comments
| agreed with the OP 's take. When weird incel ideology becomes
| front and center accepted in a community, I'm out.
| mancerayder wrote:
| >Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that
| makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content
| from other domains.
|
| I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly
| oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations.
|
| To your point here - that's one of the points I was making
| above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit
| of looking in the mirror here) that _good writing_ can cover
| up shoddy thinking. I 've made a concerted effort to
| sometimes pause when I'm replying to something, and look
| things up to make sure what what I just said is true is
| actually true. Probably because I ran into smart people who
| questioned things here on HN.
|
| One time I was replying to some sort of big article/thread in
| a real estate sub which touched upon housing affordability,
| the number of unregulated versus unregulated units in my
| city. I replied with a pretty neutral tone and linked the
| city's yearly datasheet in a PDF format which backed up what
| I said in terms of the breakdown of housing types in the
| city. There was a pie graph in the PDF document.
|
| Well, I got downvoted to grey/invisible and there were a ton
| of replies in the style of "How arrogant that you think
| you're going to make us read THAT." I thought it was
| incredible how the people reacted.
| mixedCase wrote:
| I do not know what kind of comment you wrote, so I in the
| interest of curiosity I'll ask:
|
| Could it be that instead of stating in the comment both the
| relevant, precise figures and a conclusion derived from
| them, you merely linked out to the PDF in a way that only
| by reading the PDF could your point be fully seen?
|
| By and large, on forums and social media it is heavily
| frowned upon to rely on outlinks and open ended reasoning.
| As in the line of thought: "if you will not state your
| point clearly for everyone to see at a glance and _then_
| back it up with sources, why should I bother? ".
|
| It may seem unreasonable or even anti-intellectual at first
| until you draw parallels with in-person discussion: imagine
| someone describing their point in detail for 10 minutes
| only for the other person to hand over a whole book and say
| "you're ignorant, go read this and learn why you're so
| wrong".
|
| I will repeat again: I do not know what you actually said
| in that comment, but I've seen this play out a few times
| and my gut tells me that unless the point was extremely
| controversial, a deluge of downvotes is likely explained by
| this scenario.
| wrs wrote:
| > _good writing_ can cover up shoddy thinking
|
| I'm afraid this is the primary value proposition for
| ChatGPT. It's a power tool for writers like that. So the
| signal to noise ratio is about to get much worse.
| yeahbu777 wrote:
| [dead]
| edgyquant wrote:
| I stopped using Reddit over a year ago and found a couple of
| traditional forums to replace it with. Sure I don't have enough
| discussion to soak up hours of my day but in turn I've just
| started reading more books. My mental health has greatly
| improved.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| This wasn't always the case. I've used Reddit since the Digg
| days and in the earlier days it was long form comments with
| sources and the vote system was actually used as a "this is
| true" signal instead of an "I don't agree with this". The thing
| that killed it in my opinion was the layout change to embed
| media directly in Facebook style. Sure there's always
| old.reddit.com , but the problem is that because of the default
| interface change it drives a certain type of ecosystem for
| submissions and discussions that's not as enjoyable.
|
| Tl,Dr when it was primarily a text based website the
| discussions were better. The gifs, video, meme layout is like
| junk food.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I was thinking that HN shows only the writer what the 'value'
| of the post is (number of upvotes). In Reddit, most subs seem
| to show that number to the whole world.
|
| So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20,
| you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the
| minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game
| votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good
| comment. Because your brain will process "100" before reading
| a paragraph of words.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| HN used to have points! It was a long time ago though, and
| hiding them was probably the right decision.
| akomtu wrote:
| Reddit caters to the young audience, it's mostly them who go on
| emotional crusades as they have little experience to back up
| their words. In real life, you wouldn't engage in a serious
| argument about real estate market with 10 year olds, but on
| Reddit you can and do.
| buildbot wrote:
| It's not really different here... Just recently, with the
| ballon stuff, sooooo many commenters were super confident how
| hard it would be to get up there and shoot down a ballon, how a
| missile would not work, etc. Like, unless you are all in the
| air force, you have no clue. I did not, and that's okay, and I
| just didn't say anything.
| 1983054105 wrote:
| Rant: I was banned from Reddit once again yesterday (for the
| 100th time) because of my harassing behavior. The comment that
| caused this was about "daily Scrum meetings that were way too
| long in most companies." I'm dumbfounded about who would have
| reported this, and who confirmed that this was harassment.
|
| Reddit may be fine for very specific subs, but overall it's a
| real mess where power hungry mods have fun without any kind of
| accountability.
|
| HN does not have this kind of behavior and I don't really miss
| the lengthy conversations that can be found in other forums.
| mancerayder wrote:
| >daily Scrum meetings that were way too long in most
| companies.
|
| I've said far more hostile things out loud about Agile at my
| workplace to senior management.
| gojomo wrote:
| ...and this tiny fragment from the self-report of one
| aggrieved party is quite possibly far less hostile than
| whatever full comments/history actually triggered a "100th
| time" subreddit ban.
| avemg wrote:
| As Raylan Givens once said: If you ran into an asshole in the
| morning, well, you ran into an asshole. Keep running into
| assholes all day, you're the asshole.
|
| I've been on reddit since before subreddits existed and I've
| never been banned. Now I'm sure you've had your run-ins with
| some unhinged mods now and then but to be banned 100 times,
| you should probably take an honest look at your own behavior.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| The "100 times" aside, some subs actually have rules about
| posting facts and will bann you for it. For example
| antiwork will bann anyone talking slightly positive about
| companies, which includes correcting false information. If
| you're into politics (90% of /r/all nowadays), it doesn't
| require a lot in some subs.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| One really has to wonder about the mindset of people who
| would enforce such a rule.
|
| Do they really think they are a force for positive
| change?
|
| Isn't every other fictional story some parable about how
| the means don't justify the ends? It feels weird to me
| that people don't absorb that idea at some point.
| Idk__Throwaway wrote:
| I believe they feel that their ideology is the ultimate
| force for positive change, and they become so lost in it
| that they are willing to do objectively wrong things
| under the rationalization that they're nuetralizing a
| threat to the idealogy.
|
| Again, that's just what _I_ think makes sense and
| personally believe. It 's certainly possible I'm
| incorrect.
| kefka_p wrote:
| Trash mods really do hurt that place. I reported a physical
| assault, some punk kid with an airsoft taking potshots at
| pedestrians, to my local sub to warn others. Turned out the
| guy had been at it for weeks all over town.
|
| Three months later, somebody didn't like a political comment
| I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post,
| and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned
| people about a criminal's behavior. Heh.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Rant: I was banned from Reddit once again yesterday (for
| the 100th time) because of my harassing behavior.
|
| Did a moderator ban you from a subreddit?
|
| Or did _Reddit_ ban your account?
|
| Some subreddits have trigger-happy mods that will ban people
| for everything from the wrong tone to simply holding the
| wrong opinion. Subreddits like the Lex Fridman sub are famous
| for banning anyone who posts comments that aren't in total
| glowing agreement with Lex Fridman, for example.
|
| But getting banned from _Reddit_ , the platform, is a rare
| occurrence. If you're getting repeatedly banned from _Reddit_
| (not just individual subreddits) then you really should step
| back and take a look at how you 're writing your comments.
| bhaak wrote:
| Banned from Reddit alltogether, banned from a subreddit, or
| banned by Reddit because you were previously banned on this
| subreddit and were ban evading?
|
| There are so many possible reasons for being banned in a
| subreddit.
|
| Mods on Reddit are pretty free to do what they want. There
| are guidelines by Reddit but they are nothing more than
| suggestions and unless the mods of a subreddit are racists,
| they won't do anything. Sometimes not even then look how long
| it took for /r/TheDonald to being banned.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "The comment that caused this was about "daily Scrum meetings
| that were way too long in most companies.""
|
| Ok, but what was your comment?
|
| And next question, would you have phrased that comment around
| here in the same way?
| samsquire wrote:
| Maybe someone could create a website that resurfaces old HN
| topics and allows users to comment on them and reply to comments
| as if they were the article themselves.
|
| It would be similar to a forum.
| eastbound wrote:
| One part of HN's success is the addictivity. Having to be-here-
| now-or-don't-participate is certainly part of it, it makes people
| open HN many times a day. The drawback is that participants are
| often dopamine-high people, not the wise CEOs with developed
| opinions that we had 10 years ago.
|
| A long-form HN would involve another audience than the dopamine-
| high people.
| cristoperb wrote:
| If hn had reply notifications it would go a long way toward
| keeping discussions relevant for later readers.
|
| In lieu of a built-in solution I've been using
| https://www.hnreplies.com/ which seems to work well.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Yes, I would be interested
| O__________O wrote:
| To me, feels like more pressing issue would be to increase the
| ease of tagging, grouping, filtering, ranking, etc. Specifically,
| if you see existing coverage of a topic, it's easy enough to
| revive it if you're aware of how HN handles duplicate detection,
| but there's no way to enforce users having to vote on comments
| with fresh eyes, hide comments that don't have significant new
| sub-comments, discover significant new sub-comments, etc. Not to
| mention need for comment notifications and user responsiveness
| indicators. (Insert yet feature to support various user sub-use
| cases.)
|
| All and all, reliving prior content and/or having a complex
| multifunctional interface would take away from the centrality and
| freshness of the home page experience.
|
| I have wondered if dang would be open to allowing community to
| contribute to various approved feature additions; for example,
| better search, night mode, duplicate detection, etc.
| cientifico wrote:
| For me hn.algolia.com solved some of the needs you mention.
| O__________O wrote:
| While I haven't documented specific issues it has, Google
| frequently finds items I recall, but unable to find using YC
| enterprise search engine service.
|
| For clarity, this is how you search HN using Google:
|
| https://google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com
| lolinder wrote:
| YC and dang's approach to HN seems to be more or less this:
| "Somehow we stumbled upon a system that really works. We don't
| know why it does, but it does, and so we don't want to change
| things too much too fast lest we break it."
|
| And honestly, I love that approach. In my time on HN features
| have rolled out slowly, and you can tell that they were
| selected very carefully as being important quality of life
| improvements that don't fundamentally change the interactions.
|
| Most features that people propose that HN needs are likely to
| substantially or subtly alter the dynamics, with potentially
| catastrophic results over the long haul.
| O__________O wrote:
| My impression is dang makes a lot of behind the scenes
| changes, but few public changes. As such, they're hard to
| notice and really become a topic. There a lot of features HN
| has that most users don't know about and/or use too.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Two years ago was the last thread I remember talking about
| night-mode:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24472535
| O__________O wrote:
| Yes, aware of the thread, honestly not super important
| feature to me, but aware dang agreed it was okay. Also not
| saying dang need to do anything, he's obviously in the best
| position to decide what's best. Just pointing out the obvious
| that people would likely be more than happy to help him save
| time and amplify value HN provides.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Very good question, HN is a bit of a waste of time because of
| it... what forums do people frequent with discussion of similar
| topics ?
| californiadreem wrote:
| What is the age of a Hacker News post before discussion dies on
| average? It seems like having a feed for any new comments on
| posts posts older than that age would allow anyone interested in
| longer-term discussion to opt-in without requiring any additional
| features.
| binarymax wrote:
| From my anecdotal observations after using this site for over a
| decade, it's about a day, sometimes two, and very rarely longer
| than that.
| ilyt wrote:
| The whole design very much discourages longer discussion.
| Even if you want it digging to nth page of your comments just
| to check whether you got answers gets annoying real quick.
| yakubin wrote:
| There is a timeout after which you can't respond to a comment.
| So old threads don't die only because people lose interest, but
| also because HN doesn't allow them to continue the discussions
| anymore.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Find a local LessWrong group! These kinds of conversations are
| much more productive in person.
| lizknope wrote:
| I miss Usenet in the 1990's where threads would go on for months
| or even years.
|
| I used "slrn" to read news and it was great. It would only show
| me new posts. I could kill a thread to filter it so I didn't have
| to see it. I could just hit one button to go to the next post on
| the thread or to the next thread.
|
| In many ways it was superior to modern web based forums.
| tgv wrote:
| The group was so much smaller, and also more more homogeneous,
| and there we so few alternatives, it's incomparable.
| ilyt wrote:
| Even now it happens, eevblog.com (electronic engineering
| things) forums have plenty.
| wwarner wrote:
| i'm finding mastodon very reminiscent of the early usenet, in
| tone and quality, tho haven't yet seen a years long thread.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I stopped at having to decide on a server and the specific
| content of them. Is there a recommendation for HN-like
| people? i.e. mixes of tech, economics, small doses of
| politics, etc. in response to articles?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| SDF at least ostensibly overlaps with hacker folks, though
| they ended up on a list of Mastodon servers to join so
| there are a lot of randoms.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I think you're overthinking it. You can follow people on
| other servers, so the actual server you're on is... not
| hugely important to the experience.
|
| I'd say, pick any server that's close enough and just play
| with it for a while. That way you can get a feel for what
| it's like, and you can also see if you end up repeatedly
| following people from a specific server. If you do, you can
| move over to that server if you want.
|
| I started on hachyderm.io and it seems vaguely like what
| you describe, though I also follow a few people from
| infosec.exchange
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| The server you join only effects what website you go to
| interact with Mastodon, who stores your data, and what
| you're allowed to say. But from any mastodon instance, you
| can read content which is hosted on any other mastodon
| instance.
| sampo wrote:
| > The server you join only effects
|
| The server you join effects who are the people who can
| ban you. Lately, mstdn.science has been banning
| scientists who have discussed the coronavirus lab leak
| theory.
| [deleted]
| wwarner wrote:
| fosstodon.org?
| jk_i_am_a_robot wrote:
| I share this frustration; sometimes communities move so fast that
| you cannot participate.
| [deleted]
| bovermyer wrote:
| I would adore an old-school forum (phpBB, anyone?) that had the
| HN crowd on it.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| The medium is the message though, so even if you got the
| crowd...
| ISL wrote:
| For ages that was Slashdot.
| oblak wrote:
| Kind of the same crowd but how was/is /. anything like a old
| school forum? Format is pretty much what HN has emulated, no?
| Forums are different mainly because you can shit post without
| the stigma.
|
| Not that I am complaining but this place often elevates
| pretentious, "high brow" shit posting as opposed to the
| vanilla thing practiced the us commoners. As if rich tech
| bro's trolling is better. Gotta say, this place really like
| smelling its own farts.
|
| However, there's a lot of good stuff, too, and the moderation
| is better than /. where the majority of visible posts are
| made by the same 10 guys. Been like that for past 20 years.
|
| Sorry. Got carried away. That beer had 7% alcohol in it. How
| is this place anything like the phpbb (now, xenforo) style
| forums?
| Y_Y wrote:
| Often enough I find myself wishing hn had the "semantic
| moderation" of Slashdot, where posts are tagged as e.g.
| Informative, Funny, Flamebait. That and the pleasure of
| finding out that you had mod points that day.
| amelius wrote:
| The articles could have a tag too, I believe.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think the posts on HN are often good, and it's typical to find
| at least a couple insightful or informed top-level comments about
| them. But after that, replies to those comments, and then the
| replies to those replies, typically don't add much value. I have
| my theories about why that happens, but in any case I doubt the
| site would benefit from leaning in to one of its weaker aspects.
|
| I think you might respond that improving the site's discussion
| features would improve the quality of the discussion. But I am
| skeptical that would happen: it feels like an engineering
| approach rather than a community approach. The best discussion
| sites on the internet have worked consistently because of the
| crowd they attract, and the pressure moderators apply, not
| because they had a certain feature set.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > old forums, where old threads get bumped
|
| HN has something kind of like this with /newcomments.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Something that seems kinda unique to this community and the
| moderation is allowing and encouraging things to be posted again.
|
| A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions
| the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to
| the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term
| topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion,
| with links to the past discussions if folks are curious to dig
| deeper into the history.
|
| IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and
| such are handled right now is great.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and
| such are handled right now is great.
|
| This is where I am at. The notion that HN posts die off
| relatively quickly (i.e. within ~48h) is potentially a very
| important part of what gives them the quality they have today.
|
| If every post was eternal and duplicates were always closed,
| you'd wind up with effectively perma-stickied comments in these
| god threads that become the law for that topic until the end of
| time.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Not if you sort them upside down, newest first. Old comments
| increasingly pushed away to deeper pages, becoming an
| archive.
|
| You could have an AI to summarize the last N comments, giving
| an overview on the most recent opinion.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Exactly, it's a huge chore to keep those kind of mega threads
| up to date and relevant too. And you get a lot of
| bikeshedding on other topics with people complaing that this
| should be in the mega thread, etc.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks, that's helpful. The one missing piece is a good way of
| threading the beads together.
|
| I do this informally: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&pag
| e=0&prefix=true&que..., but that's all just prep for one day
| fitting it nicely into the software.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This would be nice. Sometimes people have interesting
| conversations but they go dead after a few days. It would be nice
| to be able to have long running conversations on interesting
| topics.
| gus_massa wrote:
| For me the main problem would be thread drift. In most short
| discussions (10 comments) usually the comments are on topic. In
| long discussions (100 comments) usually the topic has drifted to
| one of the usual attractors.
|
| (For example in a new proposed rocket technology, after 100 or
| 200 comments there will be a huge discussion about how to use it
| to get FTL travel like in a popular sci-fi movie.)
| gtirloni wrote:
| I usually collapse those comments that drift too much because
| everything below it doesn't matter much. Sometimes I have to
| collapse all top-level comments, which is sad.
| ufmace wrote:
| I always thought it'd be nice to have a "slow" discussion forum.
| Something a lot like current forums, but where it's normal to
| take a day or two to respond to somebody. I think I make calmer
| and higher-quality responses if I wait a little longer than
| usual, especially for topics that tend to generate a lot of heat.
| eslaught wrote:
| A few practical suggestions:
|
| Many people here have contact info in their profiles. If you find
| a good (dead) comment thread, you can contact the people involved
| directly. I suspect many of the people here would be willing to
| continue the conversation.
|
| The other way to restart discussion is to repost (if the topic is
| more than a year old). That's a pretty common theme on HN. You
| can link the past discussion in the comment section for context.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Yes, I've often thought about this and wished there were some way
| to comment or revive an older discussion (although even the
| ability to comment on an >30 day discussion would hold little
| value inside HN-- so it would need to be on some other
| site/forum).
| tyingq wrote:
| Managing spam would probably be challenging with every
| discussion open for comments.
| mromanuk wrote:
| Once I "designed" (on paper) a site to hold the meta discussion
| that happens on HN (and the internet) Many times there is a
| post about some piece of tech that reaches the top, followed up
| by tools, counter-ideas and new ideas building on the OP. Would
| be cool to trace those arcs across time and sites. As a user
| you could subscribe to the topic and make your comment
| johnbellone wrote:
| Sweet idea. Would love to contribute.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I suspect that one thing that contributes to make HN a high
| quality forum is that it discourages longer discussions.
| dpcan wrote:
| I agree that even old conversations need updates, but I think it
| should come in the form of a repost. Ask or post about the same
| thing again and let it get to the front page.
|
| Every year or two the same thing needs opened for conversation -
| in some cases.
|
| You can always reference the old post.
| holler wrote:
| Creator of Sqwok here, you can have long-lived real-time
| conversations that will get bumped even if they're older, while
| also having notifications, @mentions, embeds, following, search,
| themes (including "hacker" https://imgur.com/a/qHkopKO), etc. The
| ranking algo is based off live conversation activity.
|
| I did a Show HN back in April and have been quietly continuing to
| develop the site. Open to ideas/suggestions as well.
|
| https://sqwok.im
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I alternate between hacker news and Metafilter. Metafilter often
| has discussions that run for a month (at which point comments
| close), or longer by making a series of posts to continue
| discussion, usually for longer events/topics like elections or
| the Ukraine war. It's a very different site culture, but has been
| my primary home on the Internet for twenty years...
| ajdude wrote:
| I also follow HN via RSS. Even if something was posted to 10
| hours ago, I do still tend to reply to someone's message, and
| sometimes the discussion continues after that somehow!
| adamckay wrote:
| I'd assume then we'd also need notifications of replies. Not a
| lot of good in replying to someone to get their (later) thoughts
| on something if they never see it.
| college_physics wrote:
| This points to a more general problem with all online discussion
| forums: The signal to noise varies (and may on occasionally be
| zero) but in the end _all_ the signal is lost / buried deep into
| some archive (like tears in rain if you want to be melodramatic
| about it).
|
| Think about those millions of people, interacting for billions of
| hours online over almost two decades now. What is there to show
| for it at the end of the day? If even 1% of that exchange its
| somehow "valuable", it means there is a lost opportunity. And it
| will be kept thrown away in the future.
|
| Wouldn't it be useful if we somehow could use technology to
| persist the "better" bits across this ever growing digital ocean?
| Something like wikipedia but autogenerated from diverse sources,
| with no claim to "truth", but rather a concise, searchable
| repository of whatever people are interested and are discussing
| online.
| beckingz wrote:
| People use technology to manually curate the better bits into
| things called books, and sometimes implement them on physical
| biodegradable materials to serve as offline backup and as a low
| bandwidth distribution method.
| college_physics wrote:
| A book is probably near the other end of the spectrum in
| terms of signal to noise and requires very serious investment
| of time. It is also not yet very typical to continuously
| update them to reflect new information
| gus_massa wrote:
| I used to post a link to the previous thread and sometimes copy
| a short version of the best[1] comment if I remember it debunk
| or enhance the article.
|
| Lately [2] I had no enough time to look up, and usually dang
| post a link before I see the repost.
|
| [1] Best in my opinion. Usually the top one, but sometimes the
| second one, or a mix of a comment and a reply.
|
| [2] In the last few years...
| prox wrote:
| The thing is, the curator of any topic X, also needs to be at
| an expert level of topic X. On HN I often gain more insights,
| so I add to the signal, not noise (I hope)
|
| But it's sometimes hard to gauge who is an expert if it's a
| topic you are unfamiliar with. It helps if someone mentions ("I
| have been doing this for the last 5 years") or wrote a literal
| book on the subject.
| meken wrote:
| I find communities on discord and slack are good for this. I'm in
| a slack group where we have threads that last days. Occasionally
| I think of a related thing to a thread and post a new message
| there
| moremetadata wrote:
| > But I wonder if others would also be interested in longer term
| discussions,
|
| Bots already pretty much dominate platforms like Twitter and
| Reddit, although I would point out the structured nature of
| Reddit makes it an ideal public resource AI training dataset.
| Saying that, I like your idea because these new LLM's like
| ChatGPT v3 need to be able to debate which is something that has
| largely been shutdown online including here, under a variety of
| guises. A debatable AI some would argue is the next logical step
| in some area's of AI evolution.
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