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Where have all the hackers gone?
15 points by raganwald on Feb 7, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
I've enjoyed reading the comments for "Turtles all the way down, please" here on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110541

Thanks! Meanwhile, over on programming.reddit.com, this is what people have to say:

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/comments/




I think the problem is when people start commenting for the sake of commenting... And the more polluted your user base the more likely that is to happen. I mean, i'm not going to lie, i know very little about programming but i do find interest in reading the stories and comments regardless of my own inability to code. I knew that i had nothing to bring to the table to that conversation, so i minded my own business and tried to be a good observer. Once the user-base becomes to crowded people get a false sense of entitlement, not necessarily because they feel like the have the right to comment, but that they need to comment. I feel that if a social news site is going to succeed they have to find a way to curb that need as the community grows.


> I think the problem is when people start commenting for the sake of commenting...

Commenting is hard, let's go shopping!

http://reddit.com/user/consultant_barbie


Sadly I am kind of amused at that consistent record.

People pick strange things to excel at, and I'm pretty sure that guy is unique.


It was amusing for me the first few times I saw it, then irritating, then amusing again when he(?) actually quoted some Haskell.

However, what I found interesting is not so much whether there are novelty comments like that, but rather the ratio of novelty comments to on-topic comments. It seemed rather extreme at the time I posted this: AFAICT, none of the reddit comments were on-topic, they were all attempts to make jokes.

Just an observation really, who am I to tell people whether my own posts provoke any sort of technical discussion?


IT seems like there is a cycle that social news sites go through.

First they cater to an elite

Then they grow

Then the masses swarm in and make youtube comments look like they were written by Einstein.

The only site that I know of that has seemed to steer clear of this is slashdot. The secret is in the voting algorithm, and it needs to be adjusted when the site starts to grow.

I heard that there is a pretty smart guy who has written this site in a pretty smart language, and I am confident that he has both the intent and ability to keep it in line.


Funny that you mentioned Slashdot as a paragon of intelligent community. I recently stopped going to /. all together because the signal-to-noise ratio got too low. You can't talk about anything there without getting past a bunch of 'first post' and GNAA comments, and once you find a decent thread of discussion, it is inevitably hijacked by some amateur Grammar Nazi pointing out the difference between its and it's (since the person who misused it obviously did it on purpose... definitely couldn't be a typo).

You could say "just browse at 4 and higher," but then you miss a lot of good stuff that was downmodded for political reasons, or was too far down the page to ever get upmodded to begin with. This gives more weight to early comments than later ones, and hence everything must be hastily done, and hence there will be a typo which will bring out the Grammar Nazis, etc.

Slashdot has a lot of problems. The only reason it hasn't become a Digg or Reddit is because human moderators actually screen the stuff that gets posted, rather than rely on the (lack of) wisdom of the crowds. Content-wise, Digg and Reddit tread a lot of the same territory as Fark nowdays, only on Fark the main point is writing a funny headline or photoshopping a funny image, not the story itself.

I think YC News works because it is small, and I think it stays small because it is focused. So thank you all for keeping it focused.


I've been reading /. for ages and ages. For me the key to avoiding the frippery that can consume the site is to turn off .sigs, and to use the new-style commenting to adjust my comment thresholds. I have threads which are not highly-modded show up as just a "X comments here" note. Generally even if something is downmodded for being unpopular it will still get a lot of replies, so you can use the to keep an eye out for downmodded but still worthwhile posts. The Slashdotter Firefox extension is helpful too.

I don't really have an answer to the 'early posts are more important' problem though. That's been bugging me too.


how long is recently? these things that you describe have been unnoticed for ages (not gone, but quickly down-modded)


I stopped reading /. in November. You're right, these problems have been around forever, but until lately I had no alternative. I have always been mostly interested in the stories they ran on software and renewable energy stuff, but have found several blogs and YC News (and now the Arc Forums) to be much more satisfying of my software reading needs. As for renewable energy, most of the /. stories just got so outlandish and pie in the sky that it just wasn't worth reading about.

The problems I have described above were those that made me want to leave /. to begin with, but I couldn't really get out until I found an alternative of some sort. And like I said, I didn't read at a certain threshold, so I got to see the stuff even if it was downmodded (and got to see some good stuff too that was downmodded).


If I could vote you up twice for this comment, I would. :)


I'll lend a hand and upmod it.


I wouldn't say that Slashdot's secret is in the voting algorithm...it's in the voting allocation.

Not every Joe Douchebag gets a vote on Slashdot. You need to have been around a while, and you need to have a reasonably good reputation to get mod points. IMO, the downfall of Digg, Reddit et al. is that they let everyone express their opinion by voting. I think it's a bad model.


How about using "early" votes just to cater for individual taste, not for article points/karma/whatever? By "early" I mean before a user has acquired enough karma, or gravitas, or pompousness to actually be known to make a positive contribution.


Slashdot has had its ups and downs, I think its quite reasonable now. You often get really informative and in depth commentary there.


PG does a lot to maintain news.yc, but it's probably his reputation that does most of the work. My sense is that the people responsible for turning reddit from what it was into what it is see him as "elitist," and don't want to be associated with him.

Which is fine with me...


Paul is chill ;)

I doubt YC becomes like reddit, main reason being that the community here is extremely good at downmodding arbitrary posts.

Is it the goal of YC to become enormous or to provide a news sharing area for serious programmers?


The Reddit comments aren't so bad. At least they're civil. I feared far worse before I followed the link.


They left reddit and came here


Ssshhhh... don't attract their attention.


Yeah. I'm not really spreading the news about Hacker News so much. I like it smaller and more manageable.


I had a similar experience; I submitted a Putnam problem here and there were several excellent proofs and a good discussion.

At programming.reddit I got "try homework.reddit.com"


I think it's a human thing, not an algorithm thing. Without someone to kind of play cop, these things sort of degrade with time. Maybe it's not even that, maybe past a certain number of people it just degrades. It's a frustrating pattern though.


Reddit's comments are on a similar level as digg's comments... a step above YouTube's comments. None of the comments are even close to /.'s comments, however.

/. might not be as big as reddit/digg but at least the community is focused and that probably matters more to a community than size. Not when you're selling the site though ;).


maybe we should make everyone take some type of programming quiz before they're allowed to comment or submit links?


I suggested that at reddit about 6 months ago. Right around the time of the digg exodus. and I was called a Nazi/elitist/asshole. But I was right.

http://reddit.com/goto?id=2c2ux


Are we Elitists if we really are better?

You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.


No, you could still be an elitist, even if you (we?) really are better. Elitism is thinking that being better counts for something.


It does, by definition.


That would be a problem for those of us that don't code but hopefully still have something to contribute.

Maybe an IQ test? Or better a recommendation from a user with a certain karma before you can start posting.


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110541

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/comments/


Maybe people just didn't like the article.


At the moment I checked, 101 people liked it and 30 did not:

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/details

AFAICT, none of the six comments I've seen on reddit are critical, but on the other hand they don't praise it either.


At least 30 people (the ones who voted) didn't like your article. A lot of your articles have shown up on Reddit, in part due to your strong branding of yourself. Maybe some people are tired of seeing them. Who knows? Apparently it is enough to get you whining about the site that made you popular.


Who's wining? My article made the top ten on programming.reddit.com. That is very positive from my perspective. I was pointing out a difference in character between the two sites.

I get the feeling that perhaps _you_ are tired of my writing. That's a completely reasonable feeling to have, and if you feel strongly about it, I have good news for you:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751

Cheerio.




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