[HN Gopher] Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won't be ano...
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Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won't be another Hacker
News (2013)
Author : teleforce
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-06-25 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| 23B1 wrote:
| I disagree with his point that HN is being reddit-ized especially
| given reddit's recent mishegoss. The overall comment quality
| around here is still quite high.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The last line of the HN guidelines,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, addresses
| this pretty brilliantly in my opinion.
|
| Point being, people have been complaining about HN "turning
| into" reddit for at least the past decade - yet I guess it
| never quite "gets there" because people still make this
| complaint all the time.
| skilled wrote:
| > Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed
| right now. But it's getting too big. They've crossed the line
| that reddit crossed a long time ago. The value on reddit now is
| on the subreddits, not on the main page. Hacker News is wobbling
| on that space now. If I could just find someone who made a Hacker
| News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would
| be a really good Slashdot.
|
| Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
|
| He also seems to have had the weird notion that HN was rotating
| front page posts every five minutes so he would need to see the
| 10 best links every day.
|
| But I don't recall that ever being the case, and it certainly is
| much less so these days.
|
| The only thing that has changed is that yes, many places
| (including HN itself) now aggregate popular stories into various
| formats but fundamentally, HN is exactly the same as it ever was.
| nullindividual wrote:
| > Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
|
| Within the past few months, I've started to see more low effort
| comment posting, submissions way outside of what many thing HN
| on-topic to be, and I've flagged more submissions/comments in
| the past handful of days than I ever have.
|
| HN is becoming something like a proto-popular reddit.
|
| EDIT: Since the above sounds like doom-and-gloom for HN, I want
| to say it's great that more people can enjoy HN. I hope it
| stays (close) to it's original intent.
| ezekg wrote:
| That was likely due to the Reddit blackout. I'd imagine a lot
| of those users will go back to Reddit since HN generally
| doesn't appreciate shitposting.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| HN has had a huge influx in users since December, probably a
| result of the Twitter ownership transition and the Reddit
| blackout. I tend to agree that a lot of the worse elements of
| those posting cultures are starting to leak through here and
| HN is starting to feel more like a generic tech subreddit but
| I'm not sure whether that'll be sustained or not.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I feel like I've heard people saying that about HN every
| month for the past 8 years and I've never observed any real
| pattern. Think there's just some observation bias going on: a
| website always seems like it's recently been worse than you
| remember, at any point in time, because you remember recent
| bad things but not further back ones.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I thought that was a odd comment too. I think it is just fine.
| Maybe people with that concern can join ##hntop on liberachat
| to get a better feed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We kind of already have a "Top HN stories" list, and it's the
| hidden /active URL[1] which sorts by number of comments [made
| within N hours?]. Not everyone agrees with this. dang himself
| doesn't, and has said he thinks /active tends to end up with
| the threads that devolved into flamewars or got otherwise
| "too overheated." Fine, that's probably also true, but what
| News actually _matters_? Some package I 've never heard of
| being ported to Rust? or some controversial event that
| broadly impacts the tech industry or computing, which yes
| happened to get a lot of "spirited" discussion?
|
| The main page tends to get some cool, oddball articles that
| you wouldn't otherwise see, but also gets clogged with very,
| very niche stuff that you're statistically unlikely to care
| about. Also, articles rise and fall from the main page too
| fast IMO, especially the ones that get overheated.
|
| If you visit HN once a day, and want to see the 10 articles
| that _probably_ affect you in some way, you can 't beat
| /active. Just put on your fireproof suit before visiting the
| comments.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/active
| bolasanibk wrote:
| I use /front. It's a day old, but good enough for me.
| Kiro wrote:
| How was he wrong?
| skilled wrote:
| > Hacker News is wobbling on that space now.
|
| Clearly it's not. Not sure why I have to repeat myself
| though. ;-)
| teolandon wrote:
| Because you quoted a passage with about 5 statements that
| he could have been "wrong" about, and didn't specify which
| one you were talking about. (insert snarky emoticon here)
| [deleted]
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Interesting that even at the time he was completely wrong.
|
| No, I agree with Malda in general that people don't scale. A
| population larger that Dunbar's Number[1] acquires too much
| management scaffolding to retain Edenic charm.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
| layer8 wrote:
| Didn't Edenic charm already prove to fail at three (counting
| the snake)? ;)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think the problem is that when a user base is small it
| tends to attract specialists who have sought out that
| content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting
| to others. If the site becomes successful and more
| mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-
| specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on
| everything and expertise on nothing.
|
| I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over
| there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor
| not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the
| comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become
| entirely useless.
|
| The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning -
| it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as
| ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is
| useless.
|
| I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was
| before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that
| timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent
| crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You can look at older HN threads since they're all still
| up. There's definitely been a "mean reversion" here as
| well, but it seems to vary per topic. I think the threads
| that have suffered the most are the ones about
| #dramaoftheweek which as you say tends to attract folks
| with opinions on everything and experience in nothing.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I don't consume HN via RSS, so I am just speculating, but
| perhaps the RSS feed has a lot of turnover. HN on the web is
| nice because links stay on the front page for a while, but a
| chronological delivery such as RSS might be messier.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| The "messy" nature of RSS feeds is an advantage when dealing
| with sites like HN since you're not affected by any type of
| ranking mechanism, i.e. you get to see those posts which for
| some reason or another are quickly moved off the front page.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I've been here a while and I think the truth is somewhere in
| between. HN has grown and shifted somewhat in the process, but
| ultimately dodged the bullet of cancerous growth. My take is
| that because HN started as a side-project of a successful
| technologist and investor who made his money elsewhere, there
| was never the financial pressure that hits most online
| services. Couple that with shared interests, strong culture,
| and a healthy dose of even-handed and principled moderation
| (thank you Dang!), and HN ended up with way-above average
| sustainability.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| HN is such a great example for studies of social-capitalism.
| [deleted]
| nunez wrote:
| I'm with CmdrTaco. Hacker News from the front page is way way WAY
| too much. I browse Hacker News through skimfeed.com. Whoever is
| responsible for that does a really good job combing through
| Hacker News and surfacing stuff I'm interested in.
|
| On the whole, it really sucks that the Internet these days is
| basically what cable TV was 20 years ago. Lots and lots and LOTS
| of emotionally-manipulative video broken up by increasingly-
| obnoxious ads.
|
| The primarily text-based Internet that I really enjoyed using
| seems to be getting smaller and smaller (or harder and harder to
| find). Can't say I'm surprised, though. The bill was going to
| need to be paid, eventually.
| debatem1 wrote:
| The funny thing is that while I remember really enjoying a lot
| of things on the old web, I don't really remember how I found
| them. My guess is by either following a link and digging or by
| talking with people and hearing what they liked. I don't think
| I've had a word of mouth website recommendation in ten years.
| bhouston wrote:
| Have you seen https://programming.dev? There could be...
| anderspitman wrote:
| > People get bored fairly quickly, but the rare person never gets
| bored ever, and you have to be very careful of that person
| because they might be your best user or they might be a terrible
| person. And if you give them too much control they could do bad
| things.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| doublerabbit wrote:
| [flagged]
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Can you provide some examples of what the aforementioned "incel
| culture" looks like?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You don't know what flaming is?
|
| And no I can't because there's no controversial threads at
| the moment. But the toxicity between users is awful.
| unmole wrote:
| So, how does that tie into _incel culture_?
| mellosouls wrote:
| I've no idea what the intent here is but I've noticed the
| term having moved from its original use of describing a sad
| subculture of poorly-socialized and sometimes disturbing
| young men to a more general lazy male-shaming term, often
| used to intimidate traditional masculine voices in a similar
| way "slut" is used to shut down women who don't apologise for
| being women.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And by "traditional" you mean "sexist".
| mellosouls wrote:
| I don't but its a different matter to use a term like
| "sexist" compared to "incel".
|
| Both are often used as insults where an argument is
| lacking but while the former is possibly wrong but in
| some contexts a legitimate challenge, the latter is
| almost always toxic and bullying.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I thought this was a good interview, and interesting to see what
| has changed in the past 13 years. IMO HN still has by far the
| best commentary compared to any aggregator. I think there is a
| lot shittier commentary than there used to be, but that still
| tends to get downvoted to the bottom or flagged, and dang somehow
| manages to keep the flame wars to a minimum.
|
| One glaring omission in this interview, though, was how Slashdot
| died. As a former heavy Slashdot user, it wasn't that it got "too
| big", it was a useless redesign that did it. The redesign that
| finally killed it for me wasn't as bad as the infamous Digg V4
| redesign, but it was still pretty awful. Could tell that some
| designers who didn't understand how users actually used the site
| got control: the redesign was perhaps "prettier", but it made it
| impossible for me to use. LOADS of unnecessary whitespace made it
| hard to skim threads, and I don't remember all the details but
| they royally f'd up the sorting, so it became near impossible to
| find high quality comments bubbling to the top. I was a frequent
| daily user who basically stopped overnight because I found the
| new design so hard to use.
| UberFly wrote:
| When old.reddit goes it will have the same effect for many
| browser users I'm sure.
| nunez wrote:
| Yeah, Slashdot's UI refresh definitely killed the site for me.
| Reddit was a breath of fresh air by comparison. I still
| remember when a coworker told me about it back in 2012. I
| literally stopped browsing Slashdot ever since that day.
|
| Reddit had a lot of the same energy that /. did, but in areas
| other than tech, which I found fascinating. I've learned so
| much about so many things thanks to Reddit.
|
| It's a real shame that their management seems to be interested
| in making it yet another "social media, but different" kind of
| experience.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The sad thing is that having a high quality site seems to be
| actually worth little to the owners of the site.
|
| If your income is advertising, engagement and users with
| little impulse control seem to be the thing that brings
| value. And there seem to be few other ways to monetize a
| site.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Exactly. The only thing that really makes HN "work" is that
| YC has a very different incentive structure for what they
| get out of this site, versus all the other news
| aggregator/social media sites out there who need to
| maximize revenue.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about slashdot is they tolerated/encouraged low-
| quality posts ("first post!") from the start - and it worked...
| for some people while there were also good quality posts. But I
| think it had the problem that when some factor causes your good
| posts to decline, the garbage ratio goes up and then you can't
| recover. I've seen similar dynamics with smaller forums -
| tolerating various kind of bullshit can work for a fair while
| but the end is sudden.
|
| I'd say HN has overall declined in quality over the last years
| but it's managed to avoid a precipitous decline by having basic
| standards.
| jacquesm wrote:
| He's still a user:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco
| cmdrtaco wrote:
| Hi.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Some of the crazy fan fiction zero point trolling posted in
| /. still makes me laugh. I joined circa 1999 (pre 9/11!).
|
| I think I remember my username, I wonder if it is possible to
| log in and find what I was posting about in high school...
| aha
| unixhero wrote:
| You've contributed so much to the Internet. Thank you.
| cmdrtaco wrote:
| Thanks!
| Angostura wrote:
| The moderation and meta-moderation system was a thing of
| elegant beauty.
| mixmax wrote:
| I'm till flabbergasted that noone stole it, it worked so
| well.
| [deleted]
| DANmode wrote:
| Did it work well for retaining good discussion and a
| community?
|
| ...or for making money?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I wonder if it would work for HN.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| It would work, the mods just don't like it
| sltkr wrote:
| Any source on that?
|
| I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot
| moderation system is too hard to implement. It also
| requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how
| many moderation points to dole out to users based on
| their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers
| seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might
| reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too
| complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in
| principle.
| pantulis wrote:
| Hi! I first knew about Slashdot, I think from the classic
| Afterstep mailing list!
| dpeck wrote:
| Im going to join the mini-appreciate session here and add
| that there's still lines from Geeks in Space that give me a
| smile and chuckle when they pop into my mind well on 20 years
| later.
|
| Cheers to you sir.
| brightball wrote:
| The legend. Thank you for all the work you put in over the
| years there.
| themagician wrote:
| Slashdot still has the best comment system. Respect.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Thanks, Rob.
| jstanley wrote:
| I got banned from Slashdot and mentioned it in my job
| interview at Netcraft. I got the job.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I had my voting privileges revoked, but never mentioned it
| in a job interview. Being a teenager on the early internet
| was a heady experience.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hi as well! One day we should do a get together of the people
| that made the top 100 web sites work prior to 1998 or so. I'm
| sure there would be lots of interesting stories.
| cmdrtaco wrote:
| Has-beenternet
| basch wrote:
| still-ahead-of-its-time.
|
| the new llm craze should make moderation and
| metamoderation even easier. i think we will see a
| resurgence of some slashdot inventions, albeit more
| automated.
|
| collect votes from power users. extrapolate how they
| would have voted on stories they havent seen. feed people
| stories based on similar voting patterns, to test if you
| predicted their votes correctly. maybe a synthesis of two
| random voters accurately predicts a power voter.
|
| id like to see something akin to a reverse subreddit.
| instead of having posts, i add 50 people to a list and
| turn them into a voting block. then i follow multiple
| voting blocks. i can follow other peoples voting blocks.
| my feed tells me which voting block elected to show me a
| story. let teams of people build voting blocks together,
| collaboratively. different voting blocks can have
| different purposes, like populism or expertise. being
| able to stumble into well made, premade blocks solves
| discovery and initialization problems, without having to
| bootstrap a feed from a low number of my own votes.
|
| despite having a lot of blogspam,
| https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-
| sitcoms... ranker has a some good reranking ideas (like
| being able to rerank the list by bbt fan votes.)
|
| https://wikiless.org/wiki/Circa_News?lang=en is another
| idea that will pop back up. Stories being composed of
| smaller elements, stitched together, and appended.
|
| https://modo.org and https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-
| balanced-news have some promise.
|
| there are so many building blocks of good ideas, of which
| metamoderation is still one of the best, that it leaves
| me both exited for a future where somebody picks up the
| baton, and disheartened that somebody hasnt yet. is it
| time for a slashslashdotdot?
| morelisp wrote:
| > the new llm craze should make moderation and
| metamoderation even easier.
|
| How can you have actually been there and at all believe
| this?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hehe, yes, definitely. The ratio of interesting
| content:junk would be nice to visualize. In the early
| days of the web I hardly ever ran into a website that
| wasn't interesting. /. (why not ./ by the way?) was a
| nice way to discover new stuff when that ratio first
| started to decrease.
| floren wrote:
| > (why not ./ by the way?)
|
| My understanding has always been that it's because
| slashdot sounds really funny when you say the full URL
| out loud the way they used to on TV:
|
| h-t-t-p colon slash slash slash dot dot org
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Seriously, what are your latest thoughts about tacos?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I miss suck.com too!
| jedberg wrote:
| I refuse to be called a has-been yet! :P
|
| ps. Hi Rob.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Give it some time ;)
| midasuni wrote:
| You must be new here
| monkeytrickster wrote:
| Thanks for old slashdot, was one of my favorite sites and got
| me into linux and cool open technology back then. btw the
| thing you are looking for in the article (10 best stories
| from hackernews) has already been built (not by me), check
| out: https://brutalist.report/topic/tech?limit=10
|
| (edited for typo)
| skilled wrote:
| https://archive.is/Y5P61
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on
| Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can
| follow Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get
| a pretty good summary of what's happening around the universe.
|
| This part was confusing, because it seemed like he was immediate
| contradicting himself: decentralizing by moving to platforms?
| Twitter and Reddit _centralized_ power in online media, pulling
| content from the edges onto their platforms, and keeping people
| there. People abandoned their own websites and blogs because
| everyone just went to Twitter anyway. People abandoned their
| forums because people just went to Reddit. And the idea that
| Twitter and Reddit were decentralized in the sense that
| influencers had real power within those platforms was always
| naive, and of course has been put to the test and proven false
| many times since then (cf. people being banned on Twitter, or the
| current tempest involving moderators on Reddit). Maybe I
| misunderstood!
| ideamotor wrote:
| Twitter and Reddit used to be open platforms, and were not
| thought of as centralized. Which is an ongoing massive rug
| pull.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| They were always centralized. I can't comprehend how anyone
| could've thought otherwise. They're paying for the servers,
| they have executives and boardrooms, they're making deals
| with advertisers, and had content policies since day 1.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| For the same reason a benevolent king and a cruel despot
| are not both considered tyrants.
|
| The problems with centralization were mostly theoretical
| for twitter and reddit ....
| jonhohle wrote:
| I think it was more that "news" was coming directly from
| sources of authority rather than traditional news
| outlets. Why read WSJ, NYT, etc. tech column when I can
| follow my favorite tech people and get the news I care
| about + more directly from the people making the news?
|
| Obviously it's not turned out that way and hopefully
| federation saves us all, but I don't know if protocols
| will ever win over marketing.
| d-cc wrote:
| All of the current large US social media sites would be
| perfect if ran similarly to wikipedia, moreso the
| transparency and openness rather than the non-profit
| corporate model (but that certainly wouldn't hurt anything).
| ideamotor wrote:
| It can be for-profit but it can't be publicly traded. The
| reason we lost Twitter is because they legally had to sell
| to Elon. The reason we'll lose Reddit is because they are
| going public and will legally be required to chase the
| money.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I think you have that backwards - Elon never wanted
| Twitter, he just wanted to see his name in some headlines
| and make people run around pulling their hair for a bit.
| However he messed up and put himself in a position where
| he had to buy Twitter for far more then it was worth and
| he was held to it. All the top people he fired day one
| were more then happy to parachute away - was the best
| thing for them. There is no way he will ever make back
| that 44 billion on Twitter, he'll be lucky if he can pay
| the interest payments on it with what Twitter generates.
| More then likely all the people who went into Twitter
| with him will get deals on his other ventures and get
| their money back that way.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Agreed, Wikipedia should be the model. A good enough
| organization with financial independence and a mandate can
| work. Nothing's perfect but we've become too adverse to
| creating institutions and expecting them to maintain trust.
| We can't just engineer our way out of every social problem.
| sctb wrote:
| I would read that as editorial/curatorial power being
| decentralized.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| The sad fact is that the fediverse has the worse of both
| worlds where, in the end, it still seems like following a
| block list of an admin who is accountable to no one (instead
| of a popular person with some specific track record) and the
| fragmentation means the discoverability and interaction is
| minimal.
|
| Until there's a way where one user can decide what instances
| to see, it will be a crap experience unless you agree 100%
| with the whims of an admin, who made you jump through hoops
| only to defederate at the slightest disagreement.
|
| Such a think skinned way to approach online interactions, one
| of zero tolerance for dissent (and terrible for the exchange
| of ideas).
| jszymborski wrote:
| Join a member-owned co-op instance :) If set-up correctly
| the admins/mods are legally bound to be responsible to the
| members of the co-op.
|
| Judging by your comment though, I think we prefer very
| different levels of moderation, and I'd agree that
| culturally Masto trends towards heavier moderation.
| basch wrote:
| having each persons identity tied to the instance makes the
| whole thing way too unstable and centralized. identity
| needs to exist outside the bounds of instances.
| d-cc wrote:
| This is why we have keyservers.
| morelisp wrote:
| We don't have keyservers.
| [deleted]
| d-cc wrote:
| As I discovered when considering this problem a few
| months ago :)
|
| We have keybase, all your base belong to keybase
| yborg wrote:
| It's impressive that you have evaluated 20k+ instances to
| summarize the Fediverse.
|
| I have accounts on 5 separate Mastodon instances, and on
| none of them is the experience as you describe it. You also
| seem to believe that if you get on an instance run by a
| reactionary martinet that you are somehow forced to stay
| there or stop using the Fediverse. Of course, a lot of
| people seem to believe this about Twitter.
| cmdrtaco wrote:
| I was probably thinking about about decentralizing curatorial
| control than I was the platform itself. I dunno, the article
| was paywalled :)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won't be another Hacker
| News_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173920 - Aug 2013
| (246 comments)
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