News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Reddits by annexrichmond on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:06PM (#39781325)
A bit of a rant, but I find it hard to believe pg goes on reddit much if this is how he feels.

I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and critical.

People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing where people would read the comment section before the article because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed.

But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions. Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that their communities are better than those sites. And well, they used to be, but now they're just as bad.

Re:The Reddits by unethical_ban on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:56PM (#39782062)
I use RES to tag users that fit certain profiles of spamming divisive content or are just karma farming. In the past few months of lurking reddit an hour a day (sadly) I have accumulated more than 200 accounts that I took the time to identify, and many get banned. My count is only that low because I filter subs when I find they're total trash.

Much of reddit is, as they say, a cesspool. I have filtered over 200 subs from /r/all on my browser due to being nothing but spam, or being hatefully divisive on race or identity, or being a political echo chamber. If it burned down, little would be lost, and it would simply be replaced by another spam content farm.

Example spam submission:

https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckImOld/comments/1bk3ovp/what_els...

Example user submitting spam:

https://old.reddit.com/user/NaturallyFlashy

Notice account age compared with post history.

Re:The Reddits by slingnow on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:15PM (#39781485)
And it's very clear to me that HN is next to suffer this fate
Re:The Reddits by diggan on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:18PM (#39781529)
Luckily, we have the golden rule that will surely prevent this fate:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re:The Reddits by dang on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:34PM (#39781764)
People have been saying that since before Hacker News was called Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852

Whatever the poison is, to quote Voltaire, "it must be very slow".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721

Re:The Reddits by Phiwise_ on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:32PM (#39781740)
Fun fact: Half of all HN posts/ comments were made in the last five years. I'm brand-new to here instead of reddit (no subs grrr), but look old as the hills from this perspective.
Re:The Reddits by sdflhasjd on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:29PM (#39781706)
HN has got worse in some places - I think size is the enemy of any community - but HN has comfortably sat behind the curve because it doesn't try to leave its niche. It is mostly outside forces that have changed HN (I.e growth of the general Internet population and big tech), whereas Reddit, etc try to change themselves (by changing their format and gamifying engagement)
Re:The Reddits by _pi on Thursday March 21, 2024 @07:05PM (#39785518)
HN's worst times was at peak free money tech optimism.

Plenty of pretending that running a "successful" startup wasn't 90% scamming. The actual tech and programming didn't matter, all that mattered was that your `hello world.proj` was a money pump from users to shareholders or from shareholders to founders.

Just find all the old posts that say Uber/WeWork/Theranos/Tesla/SpaceX/etc will all make bajillions in 10 years and their tech is amazing and the problems are actually not that hard.

Re:The Reddits by huimang on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:39PM (#39781826)
Let's not kid ourselves. HN already has the problem of commentors not reading the article, we're just not allowed to discuss it as per the rules.
Re:The Reddits by theGnuMe on Thursday March 21, 2024 @01:22PM (#39781582)
Not next, it already does... but hacker news is also very hard to kill.
Re:The Reddits by hsjsbeebue on Thursday March 21, 2024 @06:00PM (#39784929)
Non mainstream Reddit is still great. city specific subs for example and some programming subs.