HN is Becoming 2005 Slashdot

As far as I can tell, this is the third major shift in the tone of the site. When it first started out there was a lot more technology discussion, but quickly the whole VC/fundraising aspect became very prominent. Recently, legal issues have become very prominent.

I think this reflects a real-world trend in what's relevant to "hackers" right now. The financial aspect of the whole technology industry really seemed to take off after the Wall Street meltdown, after other financial avenues darkened (remember all those articles a couple of years ago about "why we're in a bubble/are we in a bubble?"). Right now, a number of legal issues are impacting technology (software patents, NSA spying, etc) and hackers are unsurprisingly interested in discussing them.

I don't think these are necessarily bad trends. I think you're seeing a bit of the maturing of tech industry and you're seeing that reflected in the discussion. But there is still a lot of great technical discussion on the site (the front page right now has a great story on a scanner bug, a compilers blog post, a theorem-prover as programming language article, etc).

And at the end, what happened to Slashdot is that reddit happened and all the smart people left, and what happened to reddit is that Hacker News happened and all the smart people left. Until there is a credible alternative to HN, I think you'll still see a lot of signal, even if there is more noise than there used to be.

I agree completely. I've been on HN for almost six years now (sidenote: wow!), and I'm in the top 40 users on the site by karma. And, despite the exhortations to not think that the site is becoming Reddit, the community is absolutely changing for the worse.

There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:

* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.

* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, there's nothing new to talk about. I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's really boring.

* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314

As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable).

Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha) everything politics-related.

Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some help from pg.

I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll continue to.

I agree. The content on HN became quite politicized after the NSA scandal. This may, honestly, have something to do with the fact that pg himself, and the moderating team, were concerned enough to allow these topics to be prominent and widely discussed. Perhaps it was okay for a time, but if the board is to be politically mobilized on occasion (eg SOPA) it should be very infrequent and it needs to end at some point.

We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.

My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.

I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.

Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.

I can think of 3 possibilities:

1. HN has an influx of new users who are somewhat interested in technology and technology businesses, but do not have enough domain expertise to engage on discussion of technical subjects, or subjects related to startups, such as design, customer support, finance, laws (as in interpretation of legal code, not politics), etc. For them, it's easier to engage in political debate. [EDIT] As a secondary theory: politics is a subject which interests a greater number of people than an specific technical subject or business practice.

2. HN's format concentrates debate and attention on articles that get popular just after being submitted: because more pondered or technical articles take more time to get popular, they never reach the front page.

3. With no major shift in the industry in the past year, and with mostly the same players (all of which were implicated in the NSA leaks, for instance), legal issues sparked from executive and judiciary actions are getting more attention, because they make for fresher, more sensational news, and reveal unanswered questions.

Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing Ever. I base this on the numerous counterfactual statements showing a lack of historical awareness in discussions on contentious topics.

Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.

In fairness, at least it isn't becoming 2013 Slashdot.

HN has always had a small smattering of political stories upvoted and discussed, with a specific focus on those that actually matter to hackers. Recent events have increased the proportion of political stories that get upvotes and discussion, but not across the board: there's a specific focus on NSA/surveillance stories, and in the absence of those I think the political content has not dramatically increased. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that the HN audience has become more political, but rather that HN has a higher threshold for wanting to talk about politics and recent stories pass that threshold far too often for comfort.

Politics on Slashdot has so little impact, because it shows up far too often. Politics on HN tends to focus on the most important issues, filtering out the noise. And the recent NSA stories are by far the most important news in tech politics in years. As long as the political stories remain confined to issues of that level of importance, and leave out the daily sources of new outrage, I wouldn't fear for the future of HN. (It also helps that HN doesn't have Slashdot's blatant editorialization to stir up those types of stories.)

HN may be an island away from real-world news, but that island still carries tsunami warning stories.

I have a theory that "upvote for visibility" instead of "upvote because it interests me" is when any up-vote-down-vote arrow community crosses a line that cannot be easily uncrossed. Every "awful" subreddit is a place where a bunch of people upvote a story because they want other people to see it, in some form misguided activism. And this is everything that is "wrong" with those communities.

The community is boring to people who want interesting things, but interesting to those who want to advocate some position. And the upvotey-downvotey nature makes non-activism and contrary opinions go away, since activists tend to be poor caretakers of the community itself, instead looking to push a particular position (ie, they downvote everyone else away).

Snowden/NSA articles frequently contain impassioned defenses about how relevant they are to the tech community at large, and I agree, but the problem with their proliferation is the topic bleed they lead to. Once political discussions feel normal, you get things like this completely pointless rehashing of "socialism" vs "Randianism" this afternoon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156035

I have generally come down on the side of considering complaints about the downward slide of the site as mostly rosy-painted nostalgia, but I do think an article as blatantly off-topic and political as that would have quickly been flagged as recently as 3 or 4 months ago.

I agree with you. In my opinion the crappiness of Slashdot accelerated with the politics-for-politics-sake tone of the whole site roughly about time of the 2004 US presidential election, which lead to a formalization-legitimization with the introduction of politics.slashdot.org. Undoubtedly this was because of the extreme polarization of politics due to the Iraq War, and political threads were far and away getting the greatest number of posts. Presumably this led to more ad revenue for slashdot, but it changed the tone of the site. Gradually, articles with little to no direct connection to tech or "nerddom" were becoming more numerous. They were provocative and just turned into giant flame wars.

These posts were typically defended in two ways: "politics affects nerds, therefore it is a legitimate topic" Bogus in my opinion, because I can go anywhere to get general politics talk, Slashdot derived value from being nerd/tech-specific; and second, "the motto is news for nerds, stuff that matters--politics matter, therefore it is on-topic"--for crying out loud, it was joking on the fact that gadget news or who is in the new sci-fi movie is largely inconsequential. The latter may not apply to here, but the former can, reframed as "this affects the tech/VC/whatever community, therefore it is relevant." It might be, but if you let it become the focus of the site, it will attract posters who would rather generate heat, and they will overwhelm the posters who generate light and would rather not spend their time arguing.

I don't exempt myself from this, I am a relative latecomer to HN. I catch myself many times resisting posting because I don't want to help this place to become another Slashdot. I know I'm doing it right now and I'm sorry :-(

It is official; Alexa now confirms: Hacker News is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hacker News community when Google confirmed that Hacker News market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming close on the heels of a recent Alexa survey which plainly states that Hacker News has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Hacker News is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent web community IQ test.

You don't need to be Paul Graham to predict Hacker News's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Hacker News faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Hacker News because Hacker News is dying. Things are looking very bad for Hacker News. As many of us are already aware, Hacker News continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Is it the legal stories that are crowding out the technology, or is it the low quality content factories?

Here is a sampling of the worst of what I can see right now (sliding off the front page): over 50 points - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/why-are...

over 50 points - http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-reveals-108-year-o...

over 10 points - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-kindhearted-pe...

None of those belong on HN.

In any community, when the law threatens the existence or basic functionality of that communities interests, the law becomes the primary concern of everyone. Here, Python developers may not be interested in mobile UX design, VR hackers may not be interested in 40 year old PC hardware. However, they are all going to be concerned about legal issues that threaten their ability to operate and explore ideas -- be it laws that break and censor the internet, or laws that criminalize reverse engineering.

We have been under siege since the early 1990s. A few legal losses (in the United States) early on could have resulted in a very different internet than we have today. The level of education and understanding of the basic principles of information freedom and autonomy are poorly understand by many. If the community that builds the digital world turns its back on defending these principles, what we have will be taken away.

Slashdot was never very good. One big reason for that was that it actively courted "humorous" comments. This was a huge monkey wrench in their moderation scheme, it meant that even if moderation made it possible to cut out the lowest end of the comment quality spectrum it still did very little to elevate the other end. More so, the system didn't discourage spam and trolling it just made it easier to hide, so any comments on the site were always swimming in an enormous sea of mostly hidden crap, which made it difficult for later comments to be noticed and moderated up. The moderation system in general did a very poor job at fostering good discussion. At best you could hope for a few decent one off comments. Another problem that slashdot has always had was a very strong leaning toward a mob mentality and exclusion of contrarian viewpoints. If slashdot talked about Microsoft, for example, it was a flurry of Microsoft bashing, not a discussion.

HN, for all its faults, does a much better job fostering high quality discussion. And probably promoting interesting submissions as well, although I think the system is much more flawed in that regard.

Anyway, I think that a good chunk of "political" stories that have become popular on HN lately do belong here. Surveillance and freedom and how they pertain to the online world are big, fundamental issues of serious historical importance that we need to grapple with today. To remove those from our view because today it tends to be difficult to have a high quality discussion about a political topic is, I think, a mistake.

I think the issue is not one of whether or not HN should abandon talking about political subjects I think the issue is making sure that HN concerns itself with subjects that are legitimately important and conducts discussions that are mature, well-reasoned, and intellectually stimulating. And I think those things are well within the grasp of the HN community.

I do not think anyone will disagree with you, but what do we do about it? If you look through PG's comment history, you will see that it is indeed on his radar [1, 2], and as recently as a last couple months.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081

Im tired of sentiment like this. I havent been here long but ive had the same feelings about multiple communities as they mature. Its part of them growing up and has a lot to do with the members growing up.

In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.

If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?

As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.

Unfortunately, I think you're right. I've originally moved from Reddit to HN because of higher quality, but now r/programming and language/technology-specific Subreddits have a much higher content/noise ration than HN. I guess this is mostly because all the folks who think more stories about Snowden are actually more interesting than programming have moved here.

The thing about political topics is: anyone can talk about them. All politics requires is a difference of opinion, and we've all got opinions.

On the other hand to really talk about product engineering, software innovation, business management, etc., you have to have experience and expertise.

So as technical forums grow, they trend toward political topics.

It used to be worth being an XKCD 386 [1] guy when political discussion came up here. If someone said something you thought was wrong, you could spend 30 minutes or an hour writing a well researched response citing primary sources, and good discussion would result.

This is no longer true. Most of the political discussion here is now indistinguishable from /r/politics and /r/technology, where people are only interested in things that agree with the existing beliefs.

Lately, even conspiracy theories that are refutable without outside sources since they are internally inconsistent are getting traction here.

[1] http://xkcd.com/386/

One suggestion is to reduce the influx of new users. Maybe keep new registrations closed except for a few days every month or so. It allows older users time to help the new users adjust to the community, and prevents opportunistic/anonymous-trollish comments. Just an idea.

I left slashdot for exactly the same reason. That and I was tired to sift through trolling and countless slashdot memes like "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these".

HN still has a share if engaging technical news that is big enough to keep it interesting for me. But another thing that differentiates it from slashdot is that discussion is intelligent and no nonsense.

It's interesting you posted this because I was just thinking about posting an Ask HN to see what things people would change or want to make better. A lot of people seem to believe that newer users are ruining the culture. TechCrunch also had an issue with spammy/trolling behavior in it's comments until they implemented Facebook comments which sort of provided accountability. Another method could be an invite system, but I feel like I would have never been able to become a contributor if I needed an invite.

I've gained a lot of useful information on HN in my past two years as a user and I hope I've helped a few a long the way as well. I do find myself skipping over a lot more posts, especially during the whole Snowden fiasco. I don't know how it used to be "back in the day" but I wish I could have experienced it.

Relevant link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september

I've always been hopeful that lobste.rs would take off, but sadly the steps they took to ensure good participation has kept it from growing. I mean, it still gets new articles, and there are a very few items that aren't on HN (or showed up sooner), but most posts have very little discussion. Looking at the homepage, and the majority of links have 0 comments.

That said, it's got a few features that people have pitched as the solution for HN (tags being one of them).

No true HN'er... etc.

I check the new stories in a few topic areas regularly. Many interesting tech stories I check are not getting upvotes or comments.

But, even if more of those stories made the front page, the NSA story marks an epoch. Computing and the Internet have changed. It all comes with surveillance inside. That is unattractive. Creepy. Unfree. Undemocratic. Unhealthy. We let our industry get poisoned. It will take years for that story to play out. And it will get discussed here.

I still frequent Slashdot (no longer "News for nerds, stuff that matters", mind you), although it's practically redundant given that I frequent HN and Ars Technica.

HN and Ars seem to be complementary, HN gets links to things that Ars wouldn't report on and Ars reports on things that HN wouldn't get links to. There's overlap but that doesn't detract from going from one site to the other.

HN makes Slashdot somewhat redundant. When I read Slashdot, a good chunk of the articles are links to things that appeared on HN three days ago.

Also the Slashdot editors can't edit for shit. I guess they're too busy posting thinly-veiled advertisements for Dice.

If the commentary on Slashdot ever became less informative (although the signal to "Micro$oft $hill!!!!" ratio is decreasing...), then I'd leave.

It's like eating cheese and drinking orange juice at the same time.

So great.

Couldn't agree more.

I think part of the problem is in the mechanics of the editing/modding process. Too many similar articles (and sometimes, the same URL, but slightly altered) make it to the front page in a short time span. Even worse, the desire for advocacy is so strong that people tolerate and upvote blatant blogspam. Otherwise, I think an interest in current events - i.e. this is the world we live in -- is not too orthogonal from tech/entrepreneurial topics, and can often be highly complementary. Also, while there are lots of places to discuss politics and advocacy, I think HN's quality of comments and a desire for thinking outside-the-box makes HN's comment section worth visiting for any topic.

I read Slashdot for years and there were also great comments...but a much higher number of top-voted/expanded comments that were akin to the clever/cute/meme-funny comments that plague Reddit today. Also, IIRC, Slashdot's commenting system required a lot of clicks to expand discussions...I pretty much never did that...which meant that Slashdot discussions required work to get past the witty upvoted one-liners...whereas with HN, it's just a quick flick of the mousewheel to get to more substantial comments.

What I don't like is that more and more, showing radicalism is encouraged and upvoted and showing restrain and judging words well gets downvoted or ignored.

"This shows that capitalism is evil." - "This shows that free market will solve everything."

Pretty soon we will have "9/11 was an inside job" posters on the top.

I still think the news themselves are great. I just don't like the discussions anymore.

Am I the only one who finds this thread to be hypocritical. Instead of posting this diatribe, as have others, lead by example and post content you'd like to see here.

Totally agree. HN is kinda like Digg in the early days, but the signal to noise ratio is on the up and the 'New' section is almost shambolic.

I think this is true for most communities as they mature. Issue-of-the-day become more prominent as core topics get discussed to death.

For example, I notice a few people pointing out the higher number of Golang articles that get to the front page, however, this is more due to there being more development and discussion as v1.1 was just released. For other programming languages most common experiences have been shared and novel new ideas become fewer.

I don't really see it as a problem. Most political posts are identifiable by title. Although the SvN ratio may not be perfect, I doubt it ever could be without HN implementing something like /.'s customisation options for topics and the ability for users' to block them.

Off topic (meta): fascinatingly, the top half dozen or so comments have no child comments, at 99 points. To me, this implies that the top comments are stand alone. I this many people can be in the running for top comment, then perhaps the argument isn't one-sided and it really implies a shift in the opinion of what has happened.

(Normally, meta is discouraged, but since the initial question is meta, an I think there's a signal to imply there's a real shift, I'm commenting on this. More is needed, perhaps a dump of topics to determine of politics has really taken an unusually strong signal here, perhaps using the Bayesian methods described a week or so ago...)

I agree.

If you don't reflexively agree with knee-jerk libertarianism you are persona non grata here.

A good way to ensure that new facts are not discovered, that new scientific discoveries don't happen, and that people don't listen to you, is to make things political.

Oddly enough the folks complaining here sound like old people remembering the good old days. Any site which allows people of varying interests to contribute will eventually outgrow whoever was there before. It's inevitable, the alternative is stagnation where people talk about the same crap as their forefathers. You can't keep the little kid little forever unless they are dead. You could start a new site and try again and yet eventually success will breed change and you starting sounding old again. I'm old enough to have seen this a lot of times and it gets old too, which is kind a meta-old.

There will be something new when it gets bad enough. I still browse slashdot every few days though, and I imagine hackernews will be the same in the not too distant future. If you want something hacker-to-the-core there are still sites like hackaday that focus nearly exclusively on actually building cool stuff. There is a place for everything I guess. I for one like some diversity though and banking all my news gathering on one site has been the opposite of what I have always wanted. In news I try to check in on npr and limbaugh (differing, but influential perspectives (many that I disagree with, but are important to understand none the less)). In the tech world, I check out slashdot for opinions on corpratey sys admin stuff, I check out hackaday for garage hardware hacking stuff, I check out techcrunch for hipster VC stuff, I check out hackernews for mostly new web service stuff, and I checkout reddit for... well, mostly pictures of cute huskies. Each has there own utility, but when something gets too off base, I check it less and let the cream rise to the top in my rss reader of choice. At the moment, we are in a bit of a spot where it is hard to tell where the next solid source of hacking news is, so I have been spending most of my "check it every time the code compiles time" on IRC, which is fantastic for the particular communities I happen to be involved in right now.

I've had this opinion for a long time now. I think that voting systems slowly lead towards bad content, over years. It doesn't matter what's special about a website.

This is because the users that should be upvoting/downvoting (ie. moderate/reasonable people who have no incentives of 'visibility' or the like) aren't. They just don't have an urge to upvote the things that should be.

It's exactly why political stories and comments pop up to the top very quickly. It's an "impulse buy" for a lot of people. They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.

I just don't see a site that heavily relies on what people upvote and downvote forever remaining "pristine" or, in HN's case, hacker-based. Sure, we're all hackers. But a lot of us care about the politics. And when people care about a topic, they're much more likely to go out of their way to upvote the things.

I'm guilty of this too. I don't vote often, and I spend a large amount of time on a lot of vote-driven sites.

The solution? I'm not sure. It's possible that there just isn't a solution. We might just need to keep moving from site to site, with new ideas on content aggregation each time. One day, we might find the perfect solution.

Until then, my feeling is that it's our responsibility as users and content viewers to upvote and downvote appropriately.

I have not been long at HN, but I have noticed how much more in the past year more general topics like politics have risen here.

Thing is I do not really care that much what are posted into here, people are pretty much free to post almost anything interesting. What I dislike is that most of the stuff is resubmitted from another news site pretty often. Though it is not as bad as one automatic news aggregation website I use to check my local news. Though the reason why I can live with these things is that my brain has become my best spam filter.

The only thing I really do not like is how popular HN has become among news sites on picking stories to their own site. Just few weeks back one blog article posted into here got their way into a local news site and this news site was even doing horrible job at quoting the blog article.

The level of journalism has fallen so much and they can use web sites like hacker news to pick up stories which should bring visitors to their own site. Hacker News, Reddit and every other news discussion site provides good statistics for news papers what to put on their site for people who do not visit these websites we use.

> HN is starting to feel like a place where activists hang out.

Activism? The political topics do kind of have a "let's all get along" and "do the right thing" feeling to them. It reminds me of going to the store to get junk food, then when I'm there realizing I should be buying the "lite" and "low salt" versions.

The political dimension to technology has always baffled me. Everyone seems to want me to think something. And yet, no matter what we do, the same problems remain. Where do I sign up to vote against politics?

Regarding Slashdot, all internet sites have a finite lifespan, however, and eventually the cruft builds up. That can be in the code, or the "culture," in the userbase itself.

I guess what we have in common at HN is liking to do things, so we should talk about that, and not theorize about what we should think about how we do it.

I come here for the technology news and the personalities, myself.

A large community often contains many subgroups. When a system allows any subgroups to take over and represent their sentiments as community's sentiments, the community starts to breakdown. To avoid this system needs to allow enough expressiveness. This would mean at least a upvote button as well as downvote button. By only allowing upvotes, HN steals away expressiveness of the community. Any jealous subgroup can essentially upvote a story they had like others to read and get it on top while other members of community have no recourse but to upvote something else and spread their expression thinly. We have seen this many times now. I can see marketers and activists coming over to HN and push a story on top with as little as 100 upvotes while rest of the community just sits back unable to express their preferences.

Let's use this opportunity to remind ourselves of an adjacent problem: the number of helpful, insightful, creative comments not made for fear of retribution by knee-jerk contrarianism.

I say let's watch out for this, and make an effort to use a friendlier tone in comments. And smileys, when necessary. =)

Agree. For JS, I started following http://www.echojs.com/. Which is not so popular, but pretty nice.

And http://sidebar.io/ for Design links. But we cannot post or comment there.

[buried my lede: the front page algorithm]

I'm new, pointed in by the coursera startup engineering course. I have no idea how large that cohort is, or how uniform it is.

I certainly scan the headlines for startup themes (tech and other practices). I have found a lot of great things. My humble thanks for all it.

If I'm curious about one thing, it is the idea that people visit many times a day, and then expect many new high quality threads. If I understand the purpose, shouldn't visits be less frequent (to sync with startup world) and the front page less changing? Because if the front page "must" have new items, it must go further afield. The algorithm, which seems to [be] based on "velocity" of new items rather than strict rank, may favor the "topical" at this point.

Only forums on which there is no point in activism, of either sort(1), can survive their own prosperity. Forums are conversational; activism is the antithesis thereof.

PG is trying, and you have to tip your hat, if the 4-hours-per-day stories are true, but talk about Sisyphean.

(1) "I" or "We"

You have the upvote, downvote and flag buttons. You can also do nothing if you choose.

Unlike Reddit, HN doesn't have subreddits to handle constrained topics. Whatever is on the front page is whatever users want to read and upvote. You are also free to start your own technology only clone if you wish.

This has been brought up before many times. The ones who have been around longer would usually talk about the good old days. Well so do my parents and everyone else who is older ("Oh the kids these days"). I for one like what HN has become and think it is a positive development. People do care about legal issues and health insurance issues and other things not just twiddling bits and that's good.

If a general technology forum inevitably develops to have a substantial (not a monoculture, but substantial) portion of its content devoted to the intersection of technology and law, what does that say about the underlying salience of these issues?

How much of this would be solved by personalizing the ranking of stories?

This is certainly a departure from the current model, and the mere notion of front page could be fatally affected, but, after all and just to name two, Amazon and Spotify are pretty good at anticipating my taste. Simply correlating voting patterns with other users and weighting their upvotes more, for instance, could go a long way towards a site where everyone sees more of what they like.

There are also certainly arguments to be made against such an approach ("filter bubble" etc.). If a strong case has been made before, I'd be curious to read it.

Isn't this simply addresses using a basic classifier, it would be easy enough to build a classifier from the HN API and then write a ux with sliders to balance the content, so if one group are interested in political posts (or comments) then so be it, for other they might prefer vc/entrepreneur content, and then there's the hard core tech content. Some form of SVM or LDA would do the trick. I'm not sure if stories, or comments should be suppressed. I'd implement it similar to how eclipse folds "content" (imports for example)

If anyone thinks this is worthwhile, I'll build it.

I agree that there are some way-off-base topics on HN, but I don't mind the politics that are related to the hacker community. Such involves Aaron, Snowden, Manning, WikiLeaks, various legal and political talk on Startups, privacy rights, Big Tech companies, etc.. in the overarching industry. Some other stuff can also bleed in without disrupting how I feel about the site.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'm surprised, after reading through this thread. I've been frequenting HN for a little over a year now, and I enjoy reading the comments because this is the only forum I've found where users have coherent, interesting, grammatically-correct ideas. Just look at the comments in this thread. Almost every user tries to convey a full argument or counter-point. Take a look at Reddit or YouTube as a comparison. Does HN really seem to be on the decline?

Although I can testify to the click-baiting, sensational, politicized articles and comments, and may be guilty myself. Duly noted.

FWIW, I often look for political stories here just to see this crowd's comments on the subject. It would be nice if there was some sort of filter system or a few very broad categories.

I learned about 9/11 from Slashdot. If Slashdot had refused to cover the events of 9/11 out of some misplaced desire to not cover "real world" news, I rightly would've been deeply disappointed in them.

I learned about wiretapping from HN. Likewise, if HN refused to cover wiretapping the entire Internet, I would have a very solid reason to give up on them as a useful news source.

I do not believe HN is in any serious danger. People are obviously pushing back against the less relevant stories.

HN needs more "Show HNs" and less political diatribe.

Dilution will always happen with user submission sites as the number of users grow, specially if there is no moderation.

Digg/Reddit,they all started as some niche tech site and eventually turned into political/media/news sites (atleast digg was, reddit's savior is its subreddit feature) once the userbase increased.

The only way to keep HN niche is by introducing categories and let people subscribe/unsubscribe to those categories or through strict moderation.

I was thinking similar a few days ago, but more like a cross between Slashdot and Reddit. In particular, I saw an item about cannabis legalisation. Got nothing against it, but it isn't technology in the slightest, it's political and maybe financial. I checked the news item a few times to see if anyone pointed that out, but no one did. I decided not to say anything in case it was some HN insider thing.

That is an interesting take on what happened to Slashdot. I guess I just assumed that the world passed by Slashdot's cohort, that the currents governing our industry changed but they mostly didn't. The "iPod lame" post gets harped on, but it's a good illustration of that dynamic, I think. But you were probably much more familiar with it than I was.

After a sudden influx of traffic years back, HN had an Erlang Day where the only thing upvoted was articles about Erlang. I can't tell you if it helped HN get better or not, because it caused me to come back after seeing how much the community cared about the quality of the site. Perhaps it's time to make HN proud of its boringness again?

I think it's impossible to compare Slashdot to HN, since nearly every story on Slashdot gets a mod-created title and mod-created tagline.

In comparison, HN is more emergent, less filtered, and fueled more by dopamine than by any other kind of motivation.

The 'upvote funny comments' slashdot's policy did wonders to destroy the quality of comments there.

I don't want my news to be funny, if it means they will be generally dull and full of commonly repeated jokes. As it happened in slashdot.

Also easier to be an activist and aficionado then to be a contributor.

Agreed. But good things become popular, and popularity changes good things. Not always for the worse. But this time, yes for the worse.

If hacker news has jumped the shark, where is the new tech/hacker news site that has taken its place?

Yep, it's /r/politics now. I don't check HN nearly as often as I used to.

Any alternative sites. It seems there is usually a shift from media sites every couple years.

Got a source on that claim about the incompatibilities of cheese and orange juice?

I know roughly a dozen people who frequent HN. Some of them are friends, some of them are family, some of them are coworkers. Some are involved in network security, some are programmers, some are involved in web design, and some are merely interested in tech news. Some are them male, some of them are female.

Yet, without exception, they have all expressed to me that they think that the site has substantially lowered in quality since the details of PRISM were leaked.

I think the fundamental problem is that that story brought in a large influx of new members at once. This disrupts the 'integration' process that most older members of this site went through when they first joined. Any post that was trite or lacked in quality was quickly downvoted, and it become apparent very quickly that this is a site that encourages thoughtful, mature, calm comments. On the other hand, during an influx of new users, this process is disrupted. The new users, especially if they share a similar ideology, will upvote each other if they agree with the idea of the post, even if it lacks in quality or is counter-productive to intelligent discourse. They will then look around the site, and see that similar comments are upvoted across the board, and think that this is acceptable behaviour.

There is a lot of anger at these new users, but I do not feel it is their fault, as they are acting as they would on any other forum, and they simply do not understand that they are hurting the site. I think it is our duty, as older members of this website, to fix this problem.

So, what is the solution? Well, I think that it is clear at this point that sitting back and hoping that the situation will resolve itself is not going to work. I think that there needs to be a concerted effort between the mods and the users with high karma to discipline new users who do not following proper posting etiquette. I think that more voting 'power' should be given to the older users with higher karma. Giving trusted members of this website more voting power will allow their votes to outweigh the large number of new members, and will allow the trusted members to teach new users what types of posts are acceptable and which types of posts are not. One of the problems that arises is that users will create uncivil posts that are clearly very partisan in nature, but that will be propped up by people who agree with them. This is poisonous for the environment of this site and clearly does not encourage useful discourse. These posts need to be ruthlessly downvoted, and it must be made very apparent to new users that they must be civil, regardless of how many people agree with them.

This will allow for a closer adherence to the rules, in particular, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". I want to hear every new detail about PRISM because it is clearly a very, very important topic for the tech industry. However, the vast majority of the recent posts about Snowden or the NSA or PRISM are completely lacking in any original content, and are merely repeating the same ideas over and over again, diluting the content of this site.

very true... and besides the activists, everyone here has always a lot to say; just look at all these long replies - too much drama.

i started coming here after reddit changed years ago. I dont know of any other websites similar to HN... very sad if it changes too.

Just say NSA this or Snowden that.

I find this doom-mongering a bit over the top. Slashdot basically was a troll culture at its very core, and while it could be funny at times, it never really elevated itself to a place for serious discussion.

Just look at the front page of HN today - 3-4 stories somewhat about law (but relevant computer related law), the other 26 a hugely diverse array of links to interesting topics.

Even if the discussion can be a bit asinine at times, the value of the links alone is worth it, and there will be at least one or two interesting discussion threads per link.

Just ignore the crap.

That is a consequence of so-called popularity - HN begins as a marginalized place for geeks and nerds - they even looked at Arc language seriously.)) Now it is a popular site for general public and visiting it gives one an air of sophistication, like talking Monads or Clojure among PHP coders.))

There will be something new when it gets bad enough. I still browse slashdot every few days though, and I imagine hackernews will be the same in the not too distant future. If you want something hacker-to-the-core there are still sites like hackaday that focus nearly exclusively on actually building cool stuff. There is a place for everything I guess. I for one like some diversity though and banking all my news gathering on one site has been the opposite of what I have always wanted. In news I try to check in on npr and limbaugh (differing, but influential perspectives (many that I disagree with, but are important to understand none the less)). In the tech world, I check out slashdot for opinions on corpratey sys admin stuff, I check out hackaday for garage hardware hacking stuff, I check out techcrunch for hipster VC stuff, I check out hackernews for mostly new web service stuff, and I checkout reddit for... well, mostly pictures of cute huskies. Each has there own utility, but when something gets too off base, I check it less and let the cream rise to the top in my rss reader of choice. At the moment, we are in a bit of a spot where it is hard to tell where the next solid source of hacking news is, so I have been spending most of my "check it every time the code compiles time" on IRC, which is fantastic for the particular communities I happen to be involved in right now.

The political stuff always becomes the same hive mind: armchair liberalism.

I just wanted to flag this:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html