Comment by zoogeny
5 months ago
Hacker News is a perfect example of the "Worse is better" mantra applied to social engineering. I mean, slashdot had more features and functionality in the late 1990s.
What makes HN work is the tight focus and heavy moderation.
Finally a Lisp system wins the worse-is-better crown!
For context, "worse is better" refers to Gabriel's observation that products with simple implementations and complicated interfaces tend to achieve adoption faster than products with complex implementations and elegant interfaces.
One of the original motivating examples were Unix-like systems (simple implementation, few correctness guarantees in interfaces) vs. Lisp-based systems (often well specified interfaces, but with complicated implementations as the cost.)
Now the 'God wrote in lisp' song makes even more sense.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54
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I think Richard Gabriel attributes it to Jamie Zawinski?
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oh man... this comment is just so, so incredibly apt.
It's also by the guy who mods here.
"Incidentally, very few people grasp the amount of effort Daniel Gackle expends running HN now, and what an amazing job he does." -Paul Graham, https://x.com/paulg/status/1282055086433284103
My comment definitely has more points than the two above it, but it's lower, even though that pattern isn't true with my other comments. Probably because Daniel manually demoted it as part of his manual/automatic hybrid moderation tooling, and probably for the sake of being humble about the amount of work he does for HN. Which I think is an interesting example of my other comment's point about how dang probably moderates HN. I'd be curious whether I'm very far off with this Daniel.
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Well, Facebook is PHP so...
Any idea of how much of their code is still primarily PHP? Curious myself.
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Is it still? I thought it has been ported
Yay
You're the outlier and for good reason.
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HN may have less features, but do we even need them? I do not think it makes it worse because of that. You could call it minimalistic, which puts it into a more positive light. :)
Edit: or as someone else who has phrased it better: "less is more".
I liked the "friends" and "foes" system that Slashdot had, though I would say generally the "foes" here just get banned which is convenient.
I also thought Slashdot's moderation system was kind of fun. I am not sure it was useful but I enjoyed the annotations (+5 Funny when serious, +5 Insightful when inciteful, etc.) Meta-moderation was also neat?
In practice, the Slashdot moderation system was ridiculously easy to game. You could adjust your viewpoints to subtly praise Linux and denigrate Windows and be assured of a higher rating.
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I'm a little too young to remember Slashdot. It would be interesting to see an informal ethnography of those older discussion sites/Usenet/etc. from people who remember that stuff. Online communities deserve more study.
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Score 5 funnies absolutely ruined /dots discussions
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I think that the classical phrasing is "less is more".
At least, that's how my bash pager has it in the manpage.
You are right!
I'd like some markdown support:
Two spaces to mono space is somewhat offensive
The single most annoying thing is the inability to somehow use a single line break to start a new line. It makes it very tedious to copy/paste things (that are not code) when quoting them.
Textile is the syntax of a Jedi Developer.
Not as clumsy or random as a Markdown; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
The "tech progressive" mindset cannot comprehend the idea that something cannot be improved or shouldn't be "enhanced". It is too close to the abyss.
Also, don't want to overlook the fact that people have to justify their jobs. If you are employed as a designer, and you were to tell your employer that The app is in good shape and doesn't need any design work, you are putting yourself out of a job. Now scale that up to an entire team of designers, or even a department with a chief designer, and you have a bunch of people. Primary incentive is to continually change things. I don't think it's a coincidence that bigger apps from companies that are big enough to hire Full-Time designers are constantly churning their UI.
I don't mean this against designer specifically. I've seen plenty of software engineers that do the same thing. Hell, I've caught myself doing the same thing. It's just part of being human, but recognizing our human nature and not doing dumb things because of it is an ideal to shoot for in my opinion.
Hmm, I have an idea for HN on the next April 1st.
Dark mode. Sure, Dark Reader exists but many mobile browsers don't support it.
Annoyingly enough it's been talked about for years but it never gets implemented, despite only three colors really needing a swap: background to dark sepia or just dark gray, and text to white and off-white.
You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS. You need to store the setting. You need to consider people without accounts. You need to put a bit on thought into the color scheme, as this website is after all known for its color. In the end, many people will complain, regardless of how well you do.
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If only colour swap is required, can you use a Greasemonkey script?
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> Dark mode.
The idea of "Dark mode" as a "feature" annoys me more than it probably should. Because it highlights how proper separation of content and presentation has been ruined by the so-called modern web, by modern web devs that don't get it.
The website is supposed to provide content, not presentation. Presentation is a user-agent feature. If you want to read a site with bright yellow font on a purple background, that should be your decision and yours alone. Configure your user agent with that color scheme and done.
By hardcoding presentation into the content, the "modern" (regressed) web removes functionality from the user. So now the user is relegated to begging the developers to implement particular color schemes like "dark mode", which doesn't make any sense.
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I want a pickup truck that is designed like HN. The slate may be the answer
A minimalist pickup truck could be a bicycle. Depends on whether you really need a truck at all.
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Dark Mode. And Follow User would be two feature I have been using for years with other tools.
Follow user is antithetical to the idea of HN -- content should be upvoted because of what it says, not who said it.
But I agree dark mode would be nice.
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https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...
These go in your ublock origin "my filters" section. Enables Dark Mode through CSS, and another filter restricts the width of comments.
A 'Block User' feature would be nice. We don't have that feature do we? HN is full of trolls who fly just below the radar of what level of rudeness it takes to get kicked off.
Also the lack of needing to make money helps a lot.
I'd say that's the main thing. People hate ads, HN uses unobtrusive text ads. The moderation isn't that a competitive advantage, IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't. It's just a plain old up/down system with the added filip of a "super down" button, for those who are really committed to banning their opponents. I read with showdead turned on because perfectly reasonable comments are so often greyed out or dead. That used to happen much less on Slashdot because there were far fewer people with moderation rights and the bad ones got filtered out via metamod.
Maybe now it's been ported to Common Lisp it'll be easier to add features.
"HN uses unobtrusive text ads"
HN has ads? I've been on some 2011 and I have never seen them...
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> "super down" button
The flag button?
> IMO. Slashdot's was better, mostly because it had measures to stop moderation abuse whereas HN seemingly doesn't.
Really? IIRC, Slashdot's moderation was garbage, remember penis-bird, GNAA, goatse?
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Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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your comment assumes that features and functionality are a good thing. "worse is better" does not apply here.
"worse is better" is people putting up with footguns like this in python, because it's percieved easier to find a python job:
HN is very much "less is better", not "worse is better".
I'm not sure what you mean? The literal quote from the Wikipedia article on "worse is better" is:
> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.
For that reason, I think I am applying the term precisely as it was defined.
The irony of my comment, which dang picked up, is that the original idea was a criticism against Lisp, suggesting that the bloat of features was a part of the reason its adoption had lagged behind languages like C.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
You're both saying the same thing: fewer features = higher quality.
Swiss army knives are not as good at being screwdrivers as screwdrivers are.
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huh. til i actually thought "worse is better" is more recent than that but it stems from an era where feature count was the measure of quality. how times have changed!! thanks!
I've written Python for 14 years and have never seen code like that. It certainly isn't a perfect language, but this doesn't look like a common concern.
People write a lot of Python, because the language is easy to get into for a lot of non computer-science folks (e.g., engineers and scientists) and the ecosystem is massive with libraries for so many important things. It isn't as conceptually pure as lisp, but most probably don't care.
> I've written Python for 14 years and have never seen code like that.
Exactly because it's a footgun that everybody hits very early. I think the Python linters even flag this.
The fact that default arguments in Python get set to "None" is precisely because of this.
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It's a common need to have an empty array be the default value to an argument. In any programming language, really. I don't know what to make of the fact that you've never seen that in the wild.
Maybe you were blessed with colleagues, for the past 14 years, that all know about how dangerous it is to do it in Python so they use workarounds? That doesn't negate the fact that it's a concern, though, does it?
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I ran into this particular problem specifically because I wrote a ton of Racket that had this exact pattern and didn't see why Python should be any different. It really is a head scratcher in many ways the first time you run into it, IMO. I'm not sure I would immediately catch exactly what was going on even a decade later after I first discovered it.
Python made a choice to have default values instead of default expressions and it comes with positive and negative trade-offs. In languages like Ruby with default expressions you get the footgun the other way where calling a function with a default parameter can trigger side effects. This kind of function is fine in Python because it's unidiomatic to mutate your parameters, you do obj.mutate() not mutate(obj).
So while it's a footgun you will be writing some weird code to actually trigger it.
>In languages like Ruby with default expressions you get the footgun the other way where calling a function with a default parameter can trigger side effects.
Seems fine to me. If the default expression causes side effects, then that's what I would expect.
>This kind of function is fine in Python because it's unidiomatic to mutate your parameters, you do obj.mutate() not mutate(obj).
I first wrote Python over 10 years ago and I never learned this.
How would you idiomatically write a function/method which mutates >1 parameter?
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Ah yes, the ol' default empty list Python gotcha, it bit me I think about 10 years ago, and ever since, sadly I've written code like this so many times it's not funny:
The ugliness scares most people away, or at least it doesn't accidentally lure them in.
Some of us genuinely like the way it looks.
indeed. I love it. no frills, just contents.
HN is like 4chan, but house-broken.
A lot of people claim that but I've never seen evidence of the existence of a vast number of people who would be using Hacker News if only it had more bells and whistles. Craigslist is "ugly" too, and plenty of people use it.
I think it's more likely that most people (even most tech-adjacent people) simply don't know this place exists, or don't care, since no one is sharing links to Hacker News on mainstream social media and nothing goes viral here outside of already established HN-adjacent circles.
I like Hackernews. I like the simplicity. I don't bother with better AI. I prefer it that way and I acknowledge that the look and feel of Hackernews does not suite everyone.
But I don't value the look and feel of Hackernews, because it drives people away -- as if these people are of lesser value. That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality.
The people I don't want to drive away are younger cohorts who would be a great fit for the community but who may be put off by the ancient form factor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101473
There is absolutely nothing wrong with gatekeeping. There are people who you definitely want to keep away.
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> That is just elitist and gatekeeper mentality.
This sounds good in theory until you realize just who it is that is being "gatekept".
Peruse through any sufficiently large Discord server or the comments on a YouTube Shorts / Instagram Reels video to see what our fellow "valued internet compatriots" are up to.
I, for one, have had enough of dealing with neuron-fried dopamine addicts and literal children from those aforementioned circles to last me a lifetime, I'd prefer HN doesn't become (more) like that.
There's always Reddit for those who prefer a community with the front gates blasted wide open.
I find aesthetically pleasing, tbh.
HN's aesthetic has grown on me honestly!
The heavy, thick irony of these people running their own platform on as little technology as possible and depending heavily on human input.
It's like they know somewhere deep inside that "mo tech" is not helping anyone.
There's a less cynical interpretation of that which is not so far from the case.
There's a few levels going on here:
- technologists and startup wannabes feeling like HN is "underground" because of the stripped down aesthetic and weird tech stack
- out of touch VCs who are successful because of money and connections but want to cosplay as technical
- the end users of the startups, who are fed the enshittified products funded by the VCs and created by the technologists
It's not ironic whatsoever.
I think HN has some pretty sophisticated automated and human-in-the-loop moderation features that few other sites possess, or throw as much resources at. Because HN is not ad-supported it does not fall victim to tragedy of the commons.
Honestly it's not "worse"
But I think HN built on what Reddit got right (at least old reddit) and also on a context of more online/faster interactions as opposed to Slashdot that brought some of the old forums structure and on a context of slower and more meaningful (ahem, for the most part) interactions. Hence why moderation was more precise, upvotes had color and you still had things like user signatures
In a way, users and posts on HN are "cattle", not pets ;)
Maybe this was tongue-in-cheek in a way that eludes me, but in case any innocent and curious bystanders are as confused as me by your comment, I'm not sure "Worse Is Better" refers to what you think it does. It isn't about "features and functionality", it's about how ease of implementation beats everything else. I can't see how that applies here, or what your comment means in that light.
Here's the original essay -- https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
This is a good little overview entitled "Worse is Better Considered Harmful" -- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-... -- in which the authors argue for "Growable Is Better".
In summary - it's about ease of implementation trumping all else. C and Unix are memorably labelled "the ultimate computer viruses".
The genius of Slashdot's moderation system is that it forced you to be fastidious with how your limited mod points were allocated, only using them on posts that really deserved them.
As opposed to tearing through a thread and downvoting any and everything you disagree with.
Slashdot encouraged more positive moderation, unless you were obviously trolling.
The meta-moderators kept any moderation abuse in check.
It's sad to see we have devolved from this model, and conversations have become far more toxic and polarized as a direct result of it. (Dissenting opinions are quickly hidden, and those that reinforce existing norms bubble to the top.)
I believe HN papers over these problems by relying on a lot of manual hand-moderation and curation which sounds very labor intensive, whereas Slashdot was deliberately hands-off and left the power to the people.
I miss slashdot when it was at its peak decades back
unsure why precisely it descended so much
not crazy about HN's approach but the quality of the discourse here is so high through whatever mechanism, I don't much care
I remember slashdot being full of "M$ is teh evill111!!" and other childish nonsense. At the end of the day what matters is the results, and i much prefer the discusions on hn than /.
For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.
Slashdot is struggling a bit these days. The lower the comment count, the worse the moderation, so it's a bit of a snowball effect. The UI could use some help; there are many who don't want it to change at all, but it would be nice if an alternate UI were available, hitting the same API.
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HN is the same with Big Tech and ads.
On HN Meta is one step away from going bankrupt and being sued into oblivion. Meta’s Earnings Reports tell a very different story.
I feel like HN fits the same shape in tech as Slashdot did and I’m not happy about it.
How are you determining the causative relationship?
I don't think that was what made HN prevail against similar sites that were popular in the past. In my opinion, it is the fact that it is tied to Y Combinator and lots of startups/founders that made it stick. Something that is not technical at all.
Not me! For a number of years, I was like "what's with that domain, never heard of ycombinator, oh well, can't be bothered reading up on it right now, anyway, great content here, and nice minimal interface, I'll keep coming back".
A lot of people on HN do infact hate YC and pretty much everything VC
I'm still missing being able to read only +5 insightful comments after 20 years.
I'd expect Slashdot's point systems and meta moderation to make a comeback in the LLM slop world we live in currently, but nobody knows about it anymore. Steam kinda rediscovered it in their reviews, perhaps even was inspired by it (I hope...)
Dutch tech news website Tweakers.net basically has this. Comments are moderated on a scale from -1 to +3, and then you can choose to expand only +2 and up.
I have it set to 2 by default which helps but can also be annoying on fresh posts as unmoderated posts are also hidden. And then if there is a +2 post it totally only makes sense in the context of the tree so now I’m manually unfolding the parent comments.
All of this to say that one feature brings in a whole set of additional complications. Less is more.
Can you explain how that works? I visited the site but don't understand their language.
https://m.xkcd.com/810/
https://m.xkcd.com/1019/
https://m.xkcd.com/2159/
HN's dry text-only design is what repels most of the problems. Mods only polish it a bit.
> and heavy moderation.
I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It’s primarily user-driven, aside from obvious abusive behavior. The downvote and flagging mechanisms do the heavy lifting.
The heuristics that detect a high ratio of arguments to upvotes (as far as I can tell) can be frustrating at times, but they also do a good job of driving ragebait off the front page quickly.
The moderators are also very good at rescuing overlooked stories and putting them in the second chance pool for users to consider again, which feels infinitely better than moderators forcing things to the front page.
It also seems that some times moderators will undo some of the actions that push a story off the front page if it’s relevant. I’ve seen flagged stories come back from the dead or flame war comment sections get a section chance at the front page with a moderator note at the top.
Back in the Slashdot days I remember people rotating through multiple accounts for no reason other than to increase their chances of having one of them with randomly granted moderation points so they could use them as weapons in arguments. Felt like a different era.
> I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense.
It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.
> (mostly by dang but he has more help now)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671 for those who missed it
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I'm pretty much decided on making the Show HN clone even if nobody uses it. Because I know it's a good idea and I believe in it:
* For every N=round(10) years software experience, you can click submit N10 times.
* You must* provide a link and year proving your earliest project or employoment.
* Max 256 submissions per day for everyone total.
Should be a fun experiment. Email me if you want an early invite.
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HN is heavily moderated by humans. They've discussed it before. They're machine-assisted, but heavily involved day-to-day.
Maybe it's an effect of not having to compete with other outlets.
Το λακωνίζειν εστί φιλοσοφείν
To be spartan is to philosophize.
I'm curious why λακωνίζειν needs to be nominalized and φιλοσοφείν doesn't.
λακωνίζειν gets nominalized when you want to discuss the concept itself (to act like a Spartan/speak laconically)
φιλοσοφείν often remains as an infinitive because it's describing an activity someone does or wants to do (to philosophize)
Slashdot sold out to Conde Nast. That killed it. It was very well designed.
"Worst and First beats Perfect and Last"
The exception to that rule was Google. Which coincidentally might have been one of the best VC investments of all time.
Google was just the right idea at the right time. Ranking pages based on how many other pages link to it wasn't a brilliant idea, it was just the most obvious thing to do next. It was an algo that you could basically implement in a weekend. Tons of tech companies are just this. Something done at the right time, that was super easy to implement, by people capable of getting others to try it.
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What makes HN work is being popular. Nothing more. Stop praising mediocrity.