The Evolution of Hacker News (2013)
techcrunch.comI can't believe I've been a HN user for 14 years. Things come and go but HN was one of the very very few web sites that I visited pretty much every day for this whole time. Except for rare hiking trip days.
It's also amazing how the spirit and the quality stay more or less the same here. I guess not all Eternal September effects are alike.
Same here, although you and the commenter have me beat by a couple of months.
Unlike some, I have never sworn off HN and left in a huff.
HN is where I learned about the drawbacks of where internet tech was going. Many of us started with a desire to build sticky sites and apps, but as some startups mastered this, it became obvious that this was two-edged sword.
I miss PG being on, but I completely understand why he left. It got to the point where he couldn't say something as simple as "The sky is blue" without a dozen negative and nitpicking replies. No fun.
> I miss PG being on, but I completely understand why he left.
pg isn't shy of (seemingly) speaking his mind on twitter though.
I am happy for that.
pg is one of an extremely small number of high-follower folks I follow on Twitter. It's mostly because I miss his input here.
I love watching smart people discuss stuff (not pointlessly argue) so when I started here, I would post any kind of question that I thought would be interesting to see like-minded (tech) folks discuss. Things like "Is there a God?" I'd also engage with folks who had differing views in order to try to learn from them.
I remember one time I asked some kind of question that set folks off. PG came on and said something like "Why don't you guys find out more about why he's asking that question instead of trashing him so much?" (My paraphrasing and poor memory)
I think he was still asking that question when he finally left. I don't think he ever got a good answer.
pg and I probably disagree on a ton of things, but he seems interested in sharing and learning, not playing the emotional manipulation game. That's why I follow him there.
Nice try “DanielBMarkham”. I know a pen name for pg when I see one ;)
This was posted yesterday ;
HN homepage on the day it launched (Oct 9, 2006)
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-9
I've been a power lurker for years and had a few accounts. I can't imagine my life without HN. I'm here almost everyday, at least once a day. What I'm getting at is this ; picture coming here and finding literally 0 submissions [0] ... This was a somewhat surreal and shocking experience, like seeing the completely deserted downtown at the beginning of the pandemic. If the site just went away it wouldn't be as bad as this. Picture showing up to the bar, work, or whatever and no one else is there. Like they're all dead or something. I don't usually feel lonely, but I would on that day. I could quite possibly cry or have a panic attack or something.
I came to realize HN is my third place [1] and it has become possibly even more important to me during this goddamn pandemic. Thank you all for coming here. I love you guys.
I can't believe I've been a HN user for 14 years. Things come and go but HN was one of the very very few web sites that I visited pretty much every day for this whole time.
Pretty much the same here, except you have me by almost exactly a year. But yeah, HN has been the one constant site that I visit more than any other. And probably the site I'm most "active" on other than Facebook.
It's also amazing how the spirit and the quality stay more or less the same here. I guess not all Eternal September effects are alike.
True. That said, I definitely feel like I recognize some changes in the prevailing zeitgeist here. For example, there seems to be less startup ecosystem oriented discussion, and when there is, it often has a more negative tone. Actually, I feel like there's more negativity in general, than in the days of yore. And while others argue the exact opposite of what I'm about to say, I really feel like the overall spirit of the site has drifted from away from a libertarian / pro-business / be-suspicious-of-the-government vibe, to more anti-business / pro-government one. It's subjective to be sure, but it sure feels that way to me. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is, I suppose, relative to one's pre-existing biases and viewpoints...
Still, regardless of any of that, the S/N ratio of the conversations here remains fairly high most of the time, and I still learn a lot from participating in these conversations. So here's hoping for another 13 years of this crazy orange and tan website...
I lurked for a long time, but I find myself here more as Reddit has become less useful over the last decade.
Completely agree. I think this is the website I have been a consistent user of the longest (aside from facebook).
Love it here. It does seem like the discussion here has become quite a bit less technical, but I think that is really just due to a de-emphasis on the important of low-level tech understanding in the startup space.
It is less and less technical for every year. Probably because it's not just developers among the users now, you can encounter chemists, engineers, lawyers etc. It's usually some of those curious professions that acquire interest for programming and like to follow tech news.
I’ve been here since 2012. I feel there has been a shift from startup and programming discussions to more general interests. Definitely a lot more political debates here. Now Indiehackers forum feels more like the old HN.
I disagree. Semi-early HN (I've only been here since 2010) was a lot more political and a lot more technical. When the current heavy moderation regime was added, political topics were intentionally (and for a period openly and explicitly) pushed out. It was after a period with a lot of threads about black people's experiences in tech.
I thought the moderation would chase me away, especially with the reduction in technical content (after a long period of X in javascript threads overwhelming the site.) I was wrong, it's still nice, it's just more mainstream. It's the same stories that are trending on google news, just debated and discussed by smart people with grammar and civility fetishes. That's not actually bad.
Could it be due to an influx of Reddit refugees that have left the platform due to its serious decline of quality in the past couple of years?
I'm not the newest user here, but this is what I think on that specific subject....
Every time I think about comparing HN to Reddit, I am jarred back to reality by comments that start with "I work in [extremely specific field relevant to article]" or "I did [X project] with [Y person at center of discussion]." People show a different face depending on the group culture, and HN just draws a different humor out of people than Reddit does. The same person could be very serious on HN, and then turn around and write looney jokes on Reddit.
There are certain areas of Reddit that are informative and moderated to maintain a high degree of quality. I think they often deal with a shared hobby, profession, or pursuit.
Reddit has been ruining HN every year since 2007. You'll find links to comments to that effect in the last item under Guidelines in the site footer:
unalone on Nov 6, 2009 in "Ask HN: Is it just me, or are HN comments becoming..."
I'm at a year and a half. Hacker News is turning into Reddit. It's following the exact same path, albeit thankfully slower, and the causes behind that path—influx of users, need for attention, karma lust—aren't causes that Paul is looking to fix.
Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed there.
The earliest linked:
_csoo on Apr 17, 2007 - Since when is Startup News synonymous with reddit?
That Guideline with the links suggests "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
Yes, this definitely contributes. You see these changes in the language used and in the voting habits as well.
> It's also amazing how the spirit and the quality stay more or less the same here.
Thanks Dang
I can go weeks without reading HN. It’s a real pain to then have to go back and catch up on all the stories I missed ;).
Thanks pg and dang!
Same, most days for almost 13 years, and mostly lurking.
I think "the medium is the message" applies here. The minimalist design is a huge part of HN's success. That and the excellent moderation.
I'm in the same boat and have you beat by a week. Time flies.
10 years for me. I still check it every day.
13 years for me!
pg left
Here's what the HN homepage looked like on the day it launched (Ocb 9, 2006)
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
(Funny timing, I just discovered this feature yesterday.)
I love going back and reading predictions. Wired: The Desktop is Dead (2006) caught my eye: operating systems and processors will become irrelevant, it's all about network services and network storage now (according to Eric Schmidt anyway).
The lesson from this type of articles is usually that you can make linear extrapolations and look cool as an author, but not everything is linearly extrapolatable in a positive way. Trends continue linearly for a while, but so do problems that eventually require a major shake up. It's seeing the growing problems that's difficult.
Who would have thought before 2006 that the world doesn't need any more powerful and bulkier computers in their homes but instead, we'd need lightweight pocket computers that would put new requirements on energy efficiency of software for example? That operating systems won't go away but instead will take a whole new direction towards managed environments and more performant programming languages. Etc. etc.
I've been reading some old (olde?) tech references, forecasts, and futurist works of late, and am noting a few trends.
Among them are Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which turned 50 last year, read for the first time, Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (22 years), a re-read, and Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution, also for the first time.
All have hits and misses. Some of them are more slanted one way than the other.
Toffler has aged surprisingly well, in my view, despite some weaknesses. Lessig, at least in his introduction and first chapter, similarly. Shapiro is rapidly shaping up to be an excellent Really Bad Example. (Lessig references Shapiro early in Code, hence my looking into it.)
I've been toying with a notion of an ontology of technological mechanisms, which looks not at fields of technology, but rather how they achieve their effects. I've come up with nine basic categories: materials, fuels, process knowledge (what's generally meant by "technology"), causal knowlege (roughly, "science"), power transmission and transformation (ask if you're curious), networks, systems, information (accessing, storage/retrieval, processing, disseminating), and a final category I've tended to call hygiene functions -- dealing with unwanted or unintended consequences.
It's that last aspect which seems to dominate considerations ultimately, because all technologies can be thought of as interventions in some system to an intended effect, but having several dimensions, including:
- Benefit / harm
- Near term / long term
- Clearly evident / non-evident
Generally, we tend to choose technologies with clearly evident near-term benefit, and strictly avoid those with clearly evident near-term harm. In cases where a mixed set of benefits and harms of varying evidence or perceptibility, and of differing timeframes is present ... things get more complicated.
And as interventions in systems become more complex, the odds of a negative interaction tend to increase.
The upshot is that cautions are often more significant than ethusiasms, and in the case most especially of Toffler, the concerns he raises, most especially of psychological and sociological impacts of increasing information flows and rates of change, do seem to have been reasonably prophetic. Sections dealing with specific technologies and their presumed social benefits are the weakest. In some cases the promised benefits have come to pass, occasionally to such a degree that it's hard to even see them from the present vantage point --- they've very much become part of our world in a way that is like water to a fish: so ubiquitous it's easy to forget it exists at all. In particular, the developers or advocates of a specific technique (or occasionally, scientific advance) seem to be exceedingly poor at conceiving of, or at least sharing any conceptions of, downsides. There's an extraordinarily strong positivity bias. Not universally, but as a general rule.
Lessig is similarly concerned with harms, and (at least in its introduction) seems to focus accurately on the right problem areas and dynamics.
Shapiro has read to me through the first part of his book as, charitably, remarkably oracular in the sense of "this is a prophecy which might be read two ways", as in "if King Croesus crosses the Halys River, a great empire will be destroyed." (Spoiler: one was. It wasn't the one Croesus had in mind.) For the most part, Shapiro reads to me as childishly naive, credulous, fatuistic, uninsightful, concerned with the trivial, self-parodying, and often foreshadowing but apparently with absolutely no self-awareness in doing so. It is remarkable how many of the specific actors and situations what are front-of-mind today are mentioned or alluded to in the text. But the references don't seem aware of their own significance.
In his defence, Shapiro occasionally evidences some degree of awareness or perception, though these feel like brief moments of lucidity in a once sound mind. And it's possible that the latter parts of the book refute the naivete of the first chapters, though I'm skeptical (and reviews I've read suggest otherwise). It's very much a case of The Author To Whom I Must Constantly Scream as I read the text though.
But yeah: be very skeptical of self-involved proponents of technological or other initiatives. Whatever expertise they may have is strongly moderated by deliberate or unconscious self-serving bias.
Interesting thoughts, thanks.
> - Benefit / harm > - Near term / long term > - Clearly evident / non-evident
I still think that in addition to these things it's the growth function, the linear segments of it, then sudden non-linearity that we fundamentally always get wrong in our predictions.
Think of the 1960-1970s that was considered the era of space exploration or the beginning of it, and how people wrongly extrapolated it up to the year 2000 (A Space Odyssey, yep).
Or when we try to predict non-linearities, we get it wrong too. Taleb predicted the end of Google in 2007, also made fun of e-scooters back then. But if I'm not mistaken he also praised segways. Well, everybody did.
In other words, we are wrong most of the time and we are wrong about the non-linearities in the growth functions. So much so that you could probably even say: if a prediction is a linear extrapolation then it's definitely wrong. If it's a prediction of a breakage then the chances of it being correct are purely random.
Look at all the predictions of the next market crash made in the past 10 years. It's as if the market is listening and doing the opposite!
So, the question of exponential growth gets into the specifics of different technological mechanisms, and specifically, that seems most associated with network effects, where (at least early-stage) growth approximates n^2. (The bigger story is more complex, as it is with biological systems. Exponential growth is rarely sustained very long.)
Anything that functions as a network, and this includes information itself, can see periods of exponential growth. Which itself doesn't mean "very fast", but as we all (re-)learned last year, "imperceptibly slowly at first, then very suddenly".
The other elements tend to have other sorts of interactions, and a key reason for splitting up the mechanisms as I did was around not only the technical operations, but the economic implications. In particular, hygiene factors, unlike (but also intrinsically tied to) network mechanisms, behave very differently. That's explored somewhat in this post (principally in comments): https://joindiaspora.com/posts/e045d2304aec0139cee5002590d8e...
(That's very preliminary, I'm developing thoughts, and need to do a proper write-up. The fact that I was thinking along those lines spurred a draft version after one line of responses in the thread.)
And you could add all kinds of other elements. So long as you're discussing nonlinearity, there are chaotic systems which can suddenly transition between states, or collapse entirely. There are long-latent potentials waiting for a trigger or opportunity which suddenly spread forth. There are interactions effects. There are subtle accidents of space and time. (Historians and anthropologists tend to haet haet haet heavily on geological determination, but to ignore it entirely strikes me as a peculiar fetish.)
Prediction is hard, especially about the future. But there do seem to be some trends which emerge. And the role of negative unintended consequences does seem to me a significant one.
Markets and financial systems ... that's a whole 'nother game.
Yes. That was your submission from yesterday and that's how I found out about it ! See my other comment ^ in which I reposted about it. Thanks for that. Did you know about this ;
That's pretty cool too and I just found out about it this week ( this account is young but my soul is old ... )
I believe that link just renders old data with the current style. We should go look in archive.org or something. I suspect your point still stands, though.
Yes, there are no comment scores for one thing.
For comparison, the original Reddit homepage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
Didn't know such feature.
Interesting day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-10-09 Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile the same day Librem 5 was funded.
How about this on day 2 ;
Google Acquires YouTube For $1.6B
with : 12 points - 0 comments ...
Think about that when in the early days of a new project.
So, was that pg and his [fake] alt accounts?
I remember many years ago I discovered this site and my first thought was that quality of discussions was good and that couldn't possibly last. Usually web forums have a particular birth, flourishing and demise periods. HN seems to be an outlier, maybe because it isn't a typical forum discussion platform, I'm still nostalgic for all the lost web forums of the past.
It would be interesting to see an update on this article, especially how the conversation has evolved, and its quality preserved, with moderation from @dang and others since 2014.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
I'm a youngster compared with most people's tenure on HN, but I've noticed a change in the place since the planet went into lockdown.
I'm not going to get into the changes I observe because I don't want to start a long, off-topic thread. But I think if you pay close enough attention, you can see changes in HN over short periods of time.
Even between weekdays and weekends, HN changes.
Also a fairly new account, but I would say that the changes on the site seem to be mostly based on topics rather than community. The pandemic has changed the makeup of the front page and thus the average conversation of the site as a whole.
> Even between weekdays and weekends, HN changes.
There's American and European wave during the 24 hour span, maybe even Asian/Aussie wave, but that's still not as noticeable.
Interesting to see how stable the design of Hacker News has been. Here’s the earliest I c Ould find in the Wayback Machine – from 21st February, 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...
Some changes – most notably the name – but you could easily mistake it for the current design at a glance.
Which is interesting, considering it's so bad on mobile.
I use it 95% on mobile and rarely curse the UI.
I like that it renders quickly, shows lots of articles, and shows lots of comments.
It takes concentration to vote and hide links, but I think it’s optimized for reading and commenting. Better than any other forum, I think.
The performance is awesome, but the UX is rather bad.
Everything is tiny.
Everything is tiny, but it doesn't pointlessly restrict pinch to zoom. Thus interacting is more of a 2-finger process, but so what? It's refreshing for a site to optimize for reading instead of chasing maximum engagement.
I really do think the mobile site is fine. Voting buttons are a tad small.
all buttons and links are very small.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730229
I've been on HN as a lurker since 2014, and am still surprised by how few people in hacker communities I am a part of are aware of the its existence. I think part of what makes the site great is the small size and structured nature of it, allowing regulars to promote its values and prevent the discussion from diluting with bad comments. There's even a 'classic' version of Hacker News where the front-page consists solely of posts upvoted by accounts created before February 2008:
I've been here since the beginning, though lurked for a while before actually creating an account. I was also at the original Startup School session or whatever it was called on a Saturday, I think shortly before this site launched?
I have been lurking much longer than I have been commenting, somehow it feels that it always will be the case.
I’m glad to be part of the HackerNews Community. I have gained immense amount of knowledge from this community.
I wish i had joined this community earlier
Been a user for 8 years on this username; +1 on the old username I lost the password to. Pretty incredible that it's still something I check every day, more than even reddit. A credit to @dang and of course @pg it remains as relevant and educational as ever.
Love to know more about the HW and SW stacks that service HN.
From my understanding, it's written in Arc, a Lisp variant created by PG. The Wikipedia article on arc [0] lists some tutorials for creating a forum similar to HN.
[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)]
The current version of Arc can be found at arclanguage.org, forum included, but HN itself runs a lot of proprietary code so the base version of the language and forum won't have feature parity with HN.
There is also Anarki[0], which is the public fork of Arc and the forum, which is very much not in feature parity with HN. Anyone who wants to contribute is welcome to.
there was a quote that said the site runs off of 1 core, which is a feat in scaling....
need moarr details!
Does PG still spend much time working on HN? Worrying about HN?
No, and hopefully no. Dan Gackle ('dang) runs the place now,
Yes but that fact alone doesn't tell us how much involvement PG has with this place.
Very little, as I understand it, and, from my experience before and after Paul Graham officially relinquished control, from all the evidence.
Do you think all the evidence is available to us?
I know you can safely state the fact that he is a weenis now without getting shadowbanned, which places an upper bound on his involvement.
Yes, I do.
God I love this site.
downvote abuse has gotten particularly bad and I don't think there's any algorithm to stop downvote spam. It is a long standing issue on HN
I'm not convinced there's an actual problem with downvotes on HN. It mostly seems that way when you take a snapshot of a page, but waiting an hour (if the comment section is active and the topic is not controversial), grey comments have a tendency to become un-grey over time unless they fall into a few categories. Maybe someone doing NLP research and sentiment analysis could put together a more thorough analysis, but from what I've seen:
Comments that tend to become and remain grey:
- Complaints about downvoting (generic complaints like yours, or specific complaints about an instance of downvoting)
- Complaints about paywalls
- Complaints about the article based only on the first couple of paragraphs
- Complaints about article titles
- Other, generally off-topic, ranting comments
(NB: Many of the above fall under the broader category of "boring and off-topic")
Comments that tend to become and remain dead:
- Bigoted comments (rare here, but happen, see a discussion earlier where someone suggested non-white people should be gassed)
- Highly political comments
- Comments consisting mostly of personal insults directed at the previous commenter or article author
Discussion topics where, to the extent that it does occur, "downvote abuse" is most apparent:
- Anything political
- Anything dealing with race/ethnicity/national heritage
- Many dealing with US immigration policies (which hits both of the above)
- Many on economics, especially where there's no "one true answer" and opinion rules the day (same issue political discussions often have)
im okay with those but what i dislike is how some people are so jaded that they spam downvotes on all your comments.
basically I'm learning there's no algorithm protection against this so I guess I'm not going to play nice either anymore.
It's time to dust off all the aged HN accounts I've accumulated over the past few years and it's open season now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm openly declaring my intent to abuse the downvote feature with multiple nicks if Dang isn't going to fix it. The algorithm clearly isn't working to protect against it so I will keep going until they fix it.
If you have an issue with a specific user, take it up with dang. Ultimately, it's not "the algorithm" that makes HN what it is, but the people. Software can enforce minimal rules, but it takes more than that to make a community.