We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
I didn't live long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN, but it's definitely part of the old web in my book. Its functionality is the same it's always been, it's rock solid, lightweight and simple. No personalization or engagement maximizing, no modern-style ads. Being spun off from something as big as Y Combinator meant they can run this site almost indefinitely.
HN is a good example of how little a website actually needs once you remove the requirement to constantly squeeze more engagement out of it. Though to be fair, its audience is unusually self-selecting :)
I don't know much about how HN is run but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here, and I assume that is a lot of work.
A message forum is simple, old technology. Keeping it usable and useful for humans is not.
I don't think the parent meant that it doesn't need moderation, but we've always had that in IRC/boards etc.
But there's nothing akin to personalised algorithms, resharing posts, multimedia content etc. I mean even text formatting is very lean :)
that's absolutely true, it's also the fastest website i use daily, by a large margin
> I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the need for human moderation here
Bingo. As anyone that’s tried to run a Mastodon instance for more than just family and friends will tell you.
Even family can be challenging ...
Agreed… yet I meant "needs" in terms of product features, not maintenance or moderation
The only thing not "old" about it is upvoting, which is one of those YMMV features.
I have fond memories of Slashdot in 1998. It was the spiritual forerunner to HN, and had upvoting, and in a more complex form as there were categories of votes. I got lots of +5 Funny comments. Hard to imagine, isn't it.
I've only seen the ./ category moderation style in one other place and it's really a shame as I think it has great value if it can be linked up with filters besides raw thresholds, of course balanced against how it would be used in reality by a large group of people. Voting incentivizes populism, and that means a lot of topics degrade into "everyone's a comedian" or virtue signalling whatever is acceptable in that particular forum, mostly retreading old ground instead of moving the discussion forwards.
Same but, I think "funny" killed /.
It gradually became a comedy website and at that point I stopped visiting it.
Ya, sorry, I never read Slashdot back in the day (even though I'm well old enough to have had), so I'm very wrong here. I'm just generally annoyed how every forum now a days has it. But of course one of the reasons I dislike it is because I fall victim to its dopamine effects.
Upvoted your post. Muhahaha!
It has the entire web 2.0 neophillia. Discussions stay for a day or so in focus, then they are gone.
This one is almost gone already.
Were you even here?
I made my account here in 2011, I don't know how it was before.
But I understand the OP was talking about how HN is today.
(Score:3, Insightful)
I love how great this "takedown" is, but also how it'll only be apparent to people over 35 or so.
Naw, it's my bad, I'm 45 but never spent any time on Slashdot as I didn't really care about tech at large back then. None of the forums I spent my time on back then had voting systems and now all the ones I use do and I'm not the biggest fan.
I've really soured on votes in recent years. They promised a sort of crowdsourced moderation and I appreciated the cleverness of the idea back around the time reddit first came out.
But now I think that downvotes have just kinda become a sort of digital tomato for people to throw, a means of burying a post without putting any thought into an argument as to why the post is illegitimate.
And that's the best case. In the worst case it's a really easy system for bots to game. You don't even need AI. All it takes is a bunch of accounts "legitimate" enough to not get flagged by whatever botting heuristics the site implemented and you can produce a false consensus.
> I didn't live long enough to see...
Whoa, careful with your verb tenses! You just wrote a ghost story :)
Have seen. Too late to edit it now...
havent lived. “I didnt live long enough” means your life ended! past tense. hasn’t means its still going “have not (yet)”. I don’t know the formal rules behind it all though.
its interesting because it sounds more correct to use have not yet because your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state. So you could say its not right, but the sentence sounds/feels more right to preserve that your life is still going on.
We like that you are still here with us.
> your life is still going on but its going on in the forward direction, not backwards in time to overlap an earlier HN state
Wouldn't the proper tense be "I won't have lived long enough to see the entire lifetime of HN" then?
> We like that you are still here with us.
Same here, and it feels like a very "old web" kind of feeling, as we're expressing this empathy towards an anonymous stranger with a very deemphasized username.
I find it surprising how much empathy has seemingly been on a decline as the Web went from anonymity to pseudonymity to everyone's full name and face being attached to their online presence.
"I won't have lived long enough" implies you will be missing out on the tail end of HN, "I haven't lived long enough" implies you have missed the start (head end?) of HN (as I understand it).
The tail end of HN hearkens to the good old days of the Sun as it aimlessly courses the void in a pod metaphorical to itself. He'll be fine.
Try "I am not old enough to have seen"
Isn't there a vested interest here for bots though to communicate here though?
HN is a certainly a smaller but more targeted market but there's no reason to assume we're communicating with other humans here necessarily especially given HN demographics.
Does it matter? A 3rd world getting paid to post content, the bot that replaces the shill, and a first world office worker that's been indoctrinated by and is parroting either of the former are functionally equivalent as far as the next user cares because the text they put bore that next user's eyes is the same.
Talking with other humans actually has real world effects.
HN these days is like the tech chat-rooms of old internet.
This is the way! The old web never went away. It is still there for the people who care to look. If you are curious, good places to start is here, gopher/gemini, mailinglists, usenet, irc, webrings/blogs, mastodon/pleroma instance etc.
Basically every area that is either forgotten by the mainstream, or completely unknown, and make sure the author is a person and not a company and you'll be on your way to way more interesting discussions, texts, content and interaction, that the B.S. of facebook, twitter and commercial web sites.
what would be amazing would be a resurgence of the old style forums, but where users could choose to see a flat or tree view of a discussion (and even customize those views, e.g. the tree could be reddit style without subject lines, or slashdot style with them)
SwedeSpeed has this. It is a forum, posts have threads. It isn’t always nice because the threading/three view also breaks the sense of time and makes it harder to see new posts.
I actually prefer a linear view with posts that quote what they want to reply to. This also allows a single post to reply and combine multiple remarks. So it allows more for convergence instead of divergence as with a tree.
right, i agree with you - there's no one size fits all. that's why the best thing would be to let the reader toggle views on any given post/thread. one could even experiment with fancier views like a flat layout but with a git tree like sidebar that shows the perhaps multiple parents for any post and support for clicking on a post and popping up a mini thread with just the posts it's replying to.
A simple website controlled by VCs, lol
agreed
[dead]