Do whatever you can't stop thinking about

Re:Do whatever you can't stop thinking about by chrisco255 on Sunday March 08, 2020 @12:35PM (#22518934)

That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then. One problem on HN is how quickly a discussion item will fade or disappear due to excessive downvotes.

And for example, unlike Reddit, you can't downvote items on the main page, just comments.

I'd be curious to hear an updated discussion on this, but I've seen salient points being downvoted into obscurity simply because it accrued a lot of downvotes, and I'll find myself upvoting posts I disagree with just to keep the post alive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Do whatever you can't stop thinking about by EpicEng on Sunday March 08, 2020 @12:56PM (#22519056)

>That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then.

Yes, pg doesn't make a point of reiterating it every year. Is the community really different? I've been around for some time and I haven't noticed. dang is a mod/admin. Here he is repeating it again a year and a half ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

So we have a community manager repeatedly saying "yes, this is intended", and a random user saying it's not. The downvote button on articles is a completely separate issue.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Do whatever you can't stop thinking about by chrisco255 on Sunday March 08, 2020 @03:55PM (#22520153)

Those are interesting points, but I think despite the official position by dang and pg, most HN users don't downvote points they disagree with as a convention. I think this is due to the fact that a comment's karma score is not shown, which is another thing that differs from Reddit. There's no real reward or feedback for downvoting a post, and you can't know for sure if that post has -2 karma or +27 karma, so you don't really know what difference it makes. I think that's a good feature of HN, by the way.

I do think HN is much bigger now. There's less discussion on philosophy of startups in general. PG himself rarely blogs about it any more. It also seems like political topics get more frequently introduced on the front page. Also there's frequent toxicity and negativity about certain technologies which do warrant intellectual discussion, but get dog piled by naysayers. Maybe that's always been there and it's my imagination but it does seem like some of the "hacker ethos" has faded.

[ Parent | on HN ]